Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
7/31/2015
LA VISTA, Neb.— A senior NATO official on Wednesday here urged allies to steer the Western debate on nuclear arms away from its culture of “self-accusation,” which he said has weakened foreign confidence in U.S. extended deterrence and which he claimed was brought on, partly, by nuclear abolitionists who “hijacked” President Barack Obama’s 2009 Prague speech in their push for global nuclear disarmament.
“The abolitionists’ narrative, in my personal view, has produced a lot of collateral damage,” Michael Ruehle, head of the Energy Security Section in NATO’s Emerging Security Challenges Division, said during the 2015 U.S. Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium. “It raised doubts about U.S. extended deterrence, particularly in Asia, and it emboldened anti-nuclear activists who now hijacked President Obama’s Prague speech to confirm, as they said, their cause for immediate abolition.”
During the April 2009 address in Prague, Obama laid out his vision for a world without nuclear weapons, and said the U.S. would reduce the role of nuclear weapons in its national security strategy to help end Cold War thinking.
“I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama said. “I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now, we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, ‘Yes, we can.’”
Several disarmament and arms control activists have consistently voiced concerns that current U.S. nuclear modernization plans don’t mesh with the spirit of Obama’s statement.
Obama has been conservative in reducing the size of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, a policy that diverges from many people’s expectations following the Prague speech, Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), said during an interview with NS&D Monitor last year.
“What we can see quite clearly is the rate of reductions is clearly declining,” he said. “The trend quite clearly is it’s leveling out. That is a different message or a different picture than most people expected when they heard the Prague speech.”
In April 2014, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller said the U.S. had 4,804 deployed and nondeployed nuclear weapons in its active stockpile as of September 2013, having trimmed 309 weapons from the last time it declassified the size of its entire nuclear arsenal in 2010.
Kristensen noted that reductions under the Obama administration are dramatically fewer than those during the Clinton and Bush administrations, despite Obama’s stated goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons.
But Ruehle appealed to the West, and apparently U.S. senior officials present at the conference, to unapologetically provide nuclear deterrence and reassurance to provide stability and deter potential aggression by actors such as Russia.
“In my view, it remains an essential pillar of the global order, and this is true not just for Asia, but also for Europe,” he said. “The United States is still Europe’s American pacifier.”
FAS estimates there are approximately 180 B61 bombs deployed in Europe at six bases in five NATO countries: Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium, Buchel Air Base in Germany, Aviano and Ghedi Air Bases in Italy, Volkel Air Base in The Netherlands, and Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.
During a later Wednesday panel discussion at the STRATCOM conference, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy Elaine Bunn said the U.S. government believes that dual-capable aircraft and B61s aren’t “nearly as important” as conventional capabilities in Europe, but added that strategic forces complement integral non-nuclear NATO operations. She cited allied air policing over the Baltic states, persistent troop rotations, and Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s recent announcement of the repositioning of war equipment in Europe.
“We will debate how much of which mix of capabilities we need to move forward on,” she said.
Yet Bunn also joined Ruehle in pushing back against assertions that current U.S. nuclear policy breaks from Obama’s Prague message. She referenced an unidentified media report that she said urged Obama to rein in the Pentagon’s nuclear “modernization scheme,” countering that the president remains firmly in control of U.S. strategic forces.
“I just want to make clear right now who sets U.S. nuclear policy. It’s the president. DoD and DOE are carrying out and implementing … the president’s modernization plan,” she said. “I think a lot of times, different people focus on different parts of that speech. President Obama admitted to the United States seeking the peace and stability of a world without nuclear weapons.”
Bunn pointed out that Obama during his Prague speech said the U.S. would maintain a safe, secure, and effective arsenal as long as nuclear weapons exist. Since then, she said, Obama has tried to ensure this by committing the U.S. to modernizing its aging nuclear triad “at the lowest possible numbers.” She acknowledged that the timing of this modernization is “unfortunate” given current budget constraints, but said the investment is crucial.
“We have to maintain our nuclear forces in support of effective deterrence, extended deterrence, as long as nuclear weapons exist in the world,” Bunn said. “It’s pretty clear, I think, from the discussions we’ve had all day that nuclear weapons are likely to exist for quite a while. As we look around the world, as we have done today, we don’t have enough evidence to suggest otherwise.”
Joining Bunn’s panel, Tom Nichols, a national security affairs professor at the U.S. Naval War College, rejected the idea that U.S. nuclear modernization is consistent with deployed strategic warhead reductions dictated by New START. He lambasted the administration for what he called its lack of a foreign policy, which he linked to a shaky policy foundation for any nuclear strategy.
“[A]s we talk about modernization, I think there’s a danger when we fall into the trap of talking about nuclear weapons as though they deter merely by existing, and they don’t,” Nichols said. “They deter when they’re meshed with a national strategy, and with current inattention to foreign policy, I think that it’s particularly a malady of the current administration, and their lack of attention to nuclear issues goes back through problems with bureaucratic institutional inertia, stretching back 25 years, and that’s not going to be solved one way or another with modernization, but specifically to begin the question of whether modernization is inconsistent with reduction, of course it is.”
Furthermore, Nichols said the strategy behind the U.S. modernization discussion “jumps over a lot of steps” to set up a largely irrelevant gaming scenario that officials use as a basis to advance recapitalization plans. He said new nukes would be extraneous if the administration remains distracted from more immediate potential threats.
“[E]ven weapons and personnel aren’t going to deter if we keep pivoting to Asia, and ignoring our allies,” he said.
Nichols said a thin and disorganized conventional posture in Europe would be more likely to materialize into a nuclear crisis than any disparity between countries’ nuclear capabilities. “I think no modernization program for us is going to help us if the Russians have concluded that we won’t fire even one bullet for the sake of NATO, and modernization simply can’t take the place of convincing our opponent that we’re going to do it,” he said.
Bunn defended the administration’s foreign policy. In addition to noting DoD’s commitment to deploying strong conventional capabilities in Europe, she asserted that the U.S. is watching Russia closely. “I think we have been looking at why Russia is doing what it’s doing,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of discussion about that today. I don’t think it’s something we’re ignoring at this conference or in the larger community.”
Nichols accused some modernization supporters of espousing all-or-nothing “straw man” logic, categorizing people as either for 100-percent nuclear modernization or as “nuclear freeze-niks” without recognizing any positions in between.
Bunn fired back with a “straw man” accusation of her own, calling out Nichols’ claim that the U.S. was substituting nuclear modernization for conventional strategy. She said that just because her position doesn’t engage as frequently with NATO on conventional matters as other DoD peers, does not mean that conventional posture and strategy is not being discussed.
“I’m going to agree with you, on the conventional forces, that we do need to re-look at it, and I think NATO is starting to look at it,” Bunn said. “I think it may be under the radar screen, because we don’t talk about it a lot. You’re complaining about a straw man, and you’re talking about a straw man, too.”
Bunn also defended the administration’s compliance with New START, noting that U.S. arsenal modernization plans fall within its bounds. The treaty requires the U.S. and Russia to reduce their strategic deployed nuclear arsenals to 1,550 warheads each by 2018.
Bilateral relations remain tense as Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly touted the destructive capability of his country’s nuclear forces, and has signaled willingness to put the weapons on alert during situations such as last year’s occupation of Crimea.
Ruehle said Russia’s recent behavior, including its “irresponsible rhetoric,” could reignite dormant global thinking on nuclear deterrence.
“It should finally help us snap out of some illusions,” including the possibility for complete global disarmament, he said. “It’s an American soliloquy. I think other nations watch with bewilderment or outright amusement how the West is busy delegitimizing its own deterrence policies, and if Western politicians, perhaps, cannot do without at least the token reference to a nuclear-free world, then for heaven’s sake, focus on the present conditions, because when you focus on conditions, then you focus on the disease rather than the symptoms, and then when you focus on the condition, then it becomes clear to almost everyone that the conditions for a nuclear-free world don’t exist for the simple future.”
