The Wrongologist

The Hill has reported that President
Obama is about to sign off on a new review of US nuclear weapons strategy that will reduce our nuke arsenal by
one-third, resulting in billions in savings to the Pentagon and Energy
Department.

The
recommended reductions were included in a classified directive compiled by defense
and national security officials inside the White House, according to a report
by the Center for Public Integrity issued Friday. 

The
agreement opens the door to billions in military savings that could help ease
the federal deficit and possibly improve prospects for an additional arms deal with
Russia. The position is supported by the State Department, the Defense
Department, the National Security Council, and the intelligence community, the
US Strategic Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Vice President Joseph
Biden.

The
smaller ballistic missile arsenal will also be targeted at a limited number of
emergent threats, including North Korea and Iran. 

Russia remains
the sole US target that still requires potential use of a large number of
nuclear warheads to achieve damage that military planners deem adequate. The
Pentagon says all of this can be accomplished by 1000-1100 warheads, instead of
the 1,550 allowed under the New START treaty that was ratified in December, 2010.

From a declassified
version of a Secret report
to Congress in December:

Why? Because
it cannot destroy US missile-carrying Ohio-class submarines at sea.

According
to Hans Kristensen, a nuclear arms expert at The Federation of American Scientists (FAS), Russian
arms reductions make US targeting revisions feasible now. A decade ago, the US military was targeting 660 Russian
missile silos with multiple warheads. Now, the number of such silos is
less than half that, and in a decade, it is unlikely to exceed 230.

The New
START Treaty

The New START
treaty divides nuclear weapons into “strategic”
and “tactical”. It limits each side to deploying no more than 1,550 strategic
nuclear weapons by 2018, but uses a counting rule that pretends strategic
bombers carry only a single warhead, instead of up to 20. So the actual
arsenals after the treaty takes effect are likely to be closer to 1,900, a
number that Obama’s advisers now think is too high.

Below is a
good summary of the New START Treaty:

New START
imposes no limits on “tactical” nuclear weapons in each country, those that are
held in storage or considered for short-range use, a number estimated by
independent experts as roughly 2,500 in the United States and 3,500 in Russia.

Under a new nuke deal envisioned by the
administration,
Russia and the United States would agree not only to cut deployed strategic warhead
levels below 1,550 to around 1,100 or fewer, but also, for the first time, begin
to reduce the size of the tactical inventories.

New
Obama Team buys the Strategy:

Key
members of Obama’s new national security team are on board with the reduction
strategy. John Kerry on Jan. 24th at his confirmation hearing:

Secretary
of Defense Nominee Chuck Hagel drew fire from Republicans at his Jan. 31 confirmation
hearing for signing the Global
Zero
report that said current stockpiles:

The report
indicates that an appropriately sized force would consist of just 900 total
strategic weapons on each side, not 5,000.  But Hagel told the hearing that the report
simply provided illustrative scenarios, not recommendations. He affirmed the
report’s conclusion that “we have to look at” the value and cost of continuing
to keep land-based missiles and he made no promise to build all 12 new
missile-carrying submarines sought by the Navy.

When Hagel
is confirmed, the White House will sign the directive and send it to the
Pentagon for action. It will give the department the green light to begin
cutting down the nuclear force. 

Additional cuts will save
billions of dollars

The
financial savings from reduction could be substantial. To comply with New START,
the Pentagon has been pulling warheads from land-based missiles and making
plans to decommission some of the missiles themselves; it is also planning to
reduce the number of missile tubes aboard its Trident submarines.

By pushing
the arsenal size even lower, it could close perhaps two of its three land-based
missile wings and cut at least two of the 12 new strategic submarines it now
plans to build, saving up to $8 billion for each one. Eliminating a single wing
of 150 missiles would save roughly $360 million a year, or more than $3 billion
over a decade.

And the cuts are on
the military side of the budget, contributing to a partial fulfillment of that
part of the Sequester.

Good
News or Bad News?

This
proposed change will draw fire from congressional Republicans. They oppose
cutting the US arsenal out of concern that it could diminish America’s standing
in the world. 

Last year,
House Republicans wanted more nukes: They added a measure to the 2013 Defense
Authorization Act calling for a new
ballistic missile shield for the Eastern Seaboard. House members
argued the shield was necessary to deter potential nuclear attacks from North
Korea and Iran. 

Republican
concern is understandable.
We’re only spending about $600 billion a year on defense, roughly 6 times what
the Chinese plan to spend next year.

It’s
clear we’re on the verge of collapse.

But reduction is the
right thing to do, practically and strategically. If Mr. Putin reciprocates
with Mr. Obama, they can walk down arms reductions to the point at which they
can involve China, UK, and France and possibly, India and Pakistan.  

Israel and North
Korea would remain special and difficult cases.

The reduction could make
negotiation with Iran slightly easier and might, if US domestic politics concurs,
allow Mr. Obama to walk back the Iranian nuclear crisis. The chart below is
from the Ploughshares Fund:

An FAS
report, Trimming Nuclear Excess: Options for Further Reductions of U.S. and
Russian Nuclear Forces, says that even with these reductions over the next
decade, the United States and Russia
will continue to possess nuclear stockpiles that are many times greater than
the rest of the world’s nuclear forces combined.

There is no way to make sure
nuclear weapons are never used. Hoping, praying, and trusting human nature is
insufficient.

We need to
make sure there is no way for anyone else to win. This is the doctrine of Mutually
Assured Destruction (MAD). Even with reduced warheads, MAD would still be in place with:

• China
• Russia
• North
  Korea
• Iran
• Pakistan

Which
enemy have we forgotten? For all of our chicken Hawk friends out there: What is
the problem with implementing this directive?