Arms Control Wonk

Trend lines in the subcontinent are poor and will not improve until there is substantive dialogue between India and Pakistan. Hopes that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would pull a “Nixon goes to China” maneuver with Pakistan have been dashed, at least for now. Modi either has no Pakistan policy or has a policy not to engage with Pakistan. It’s worth recalling, however, that President Richard Nixon didn’t pursue his China gambit early on. And that General Pervez Musharraf introduced himself to India with a land grab and ended his presidential run trying to reach a settlement over Kashmir. It’s never a good idea to type cast or pigeonhole ambitious leaders. Rather, it’s usually a good idea to look for openings to improve testy relations between states that possess nuclear weapons.

For now, however, relations are most definitely sour and are likely to remain that way until Modi shifts gears from a one-topic agenda item for talks, focused on terrorism. This stance, like Islamabad’s renewed embrace of the Kashmir issue and the compilation of dossiers of Indian trouble making in Baluchistan and elsewhere, serve as placeholders until Modi is ready for serious, sustained engagement. Pakistan hasn’t won a favorable UN resolution on Kashmir since 1957, but old chestnuts keep being thrown into the fire.

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Over the weekend many residents in Xinjiang Province posted pictures on Chinese social media sites of a mysterious event in the sky. Rather quickly online commentators began to speculate that this event was a missile defense test from the Korla Missile Test Complex.

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Note to ACW readers: This week, guest contributor Hannah Haegeland continues a series of posts on the morality of nuclear deterrence. Strategic modernization programs, which are proceeding on a significant scale in the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, and India, are grounded in concepts of nuclear deterrence that are alien to all religious traditions. Periodic reminders appear warranted. Hannah is a Research Associate at the Stimson Center and a Scoville Fellow. — MK

What does the Catholic Church have to say about the Bomb? It is important to distinguish between the Church’s support of specific policies and her guidance on matters of faith. The Church speaks with authority on issues of faith and personal morality, while offering suggestions and advice on public policy. The Church does not tell Catholics how to vote.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the “legitimate defense by military force” requires that action taken be a last resort, in response to “lasting, grave, and certain” damage by an aggressor with “serious prospects of success.” Even so, the use of force must not “produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.” While the Catechism does not go into specifics on the morality of nuclear weapons, pastoral letters and statements by popes have.

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There have been two Russian cruise missiles in the news lately.  One is a ground-launched cruise missile that apparently violates the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the other is a sea-launched cruise missile that Russia recently fired against targets in Syria.

Both of these cruise missiles are made by the same firm, Novator.  I have a sneaking suspicion that they are closely related.  In fact, I bet they look exactly alike.  Here is my best effort at a hypothesis.  It is speculation, since the United States is not releasing any information about the missile that violates the INF treaty.  But I think we can make an educated guess or two.

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[See the previous post. -Ed.]

Yes, every kind of weapon, if used against noncombatants, can violate the humanitarian laws of warfare. But nuclear detonations add a whole new scale to this problem. A single mushroom cloud, except under highly particular circumstances, will violate the humanitarian laws of warfare. And, if a single detonation triggers more detonations and all Hell breaks loose, even singular use cannot be justified. So, what are we to do with the approximately 16,000 nuclear weapons that currently exist?

The endgame of abolition provides only a placeholder answer to this question. Abolition is a long way off, and the pursuit of abolition is fundamentally a function of international and major-power relations. Only enlightened leadership and political accommodation allows for a process of nuclear subtraction to be realized.

We cannot predict when political conditions among states that possess the Bomb will be suitable to reach the point where they would be willing to divest their stockpiles completely. In the meantime, there is hard work to be done to achieve grudging reductions. Nuclear enclaves, regardless of nationality, hold tightly to weapons whose use will likely have catastrophic consequences. Nonetheless, these enclaves confer upon nuclear weapons powers of leverage that are illusory before detonations and irretrievable afterwards.

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In 1868, the Imperial Cabinet of Russia convened an International Commission to issue a Declaration on the laws of war. In its Preamble, the St. Petersburg Declaration stated,

The only legitimate object which states should endeavor to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy.

The League of Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross returned to this topic in 1920, after the carnage of the First World War. The character of warfare, the President of the ICRC told the League, “should be a struggle between armies and not between populations.”

The Second World War was far more brutal to noncombatants than the First, including the use of fire bombing and two nuclear detonations against cities, after which it was discovered that radiation posed a severe threat to the survivors. Under the nuclear shadow, combat evolved from large-scale conventional campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq to low-intensity, unconventional and limited conventional wars.

These wars have placed a heavy toll on noncombatants, who are taking a horrific beating in Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, eastern Ukraine, Gaza, and wherever ISIL rears its hydra-heads. In the last decade alone, cluster bombs have reportedly been used against civilians by Syria, Israel, Hezbollah, Sudan, Russia, Ukraine, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand. All violence directed against noncombatants is local, but the demise of borders and governance has growing international ramifications. Displaced humanity and refugee flows have doubled in the last two decades.

Paradoxically, concerns over the humanitarian consequences of using nuclear weapons have grown alongside the carnage of unconventional and limited conventional warfare. There are several reasons for this paradox. Nuclear disarmament campaigns fill vacuums and counter strategic modernization programs. The snail-like pace of U.S. and Russian strategic arms reductions, the absence of negotiations on deeper cuts, and growing Chinese, Pakistani, Indian, and North Korean stockpiles warrant rejoinders.

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The IAEA has completed its managed access to Iran’s Parchin site, which reportedly included the taking of samples and images. The process by which the samples were taken and questions about how the IAEA would authenticate the samples has led to a recurring debate about whether Iran is “inspecting itself.’ Jeffrey is joined by Cheryl Rofer, a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory and founder of Nuclear Diner, a blog about nuclear policy stuff.

Sampling At Parchin | Nuclear Diner

How the AP Got the Iran Inspections Story Wrong

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During his first term, President Obama set about to extricate the United States from the wars he inherited from George W. Bush. Not surprisingly, getting out has proved to be harder than getting in. His second term’s agenda has been spent seizing opportunities while seeking to avoid making new messes for his own successor to clean up. Having negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran, Obama is now pushing hard on trade and climate agreements. He has tried his best to resist the undertow of Afghanistan and Iraq, and keep on the periphery of the hellhole that is Syria.

Obama’s stubborn “fidelity to international order” – the term he used in his address before the UN General Assembly – and commitment to progressive idealism in U.S. foreign and national security policy have not ebbed, despite the woes of the world. At the UN, Obama told the assembled dignitaries,

Our nations are more secure when we uphold basic laws and basic norms, and pursue a path of cooperation over conflict. And strong nations, above all, have a responsibility to uphold this international order.

This message, while noble, has a dissonant ring given Russia’s actions in Ukraine and China’s in the South China Sea. International order has also given way to chaos and predation in the Middle East, where Obama is deeply reluctant to deploy more U.S. troops to counter violent Islamic extremism.

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Earlier this year Bruce Blair kindly loaned us a copy of an important body of work in the field, C3: Nuclear Command, Control, Cooperation, by Valery E. Yarynich. We digitized it (thanks to two graduate research assistants) and have put the book in its entirety up on Scribd. It’s even OCR’ed!

The book is available here. [Updated] For a bit of background on Valery Yarynich, start with this article by David Hoffman written after Yarynich’s death in 2012.

Much to my dismay, I find that I’m still catching up on reading from the summer.  In August, Hui Zhang published a new report on China’s uranium enrichment capacity, and he makes a wonderful identification of a new civilian centrifuge facility associated with Plant 814 in Sichuan province. While on the subject of Plant 814, this report’s publication gives me the perfect opportunity to say a few words about the somewhat mysterious gaseous diffusion facility also associated with Plant 814.

The Plant 814 gaseous diffusion facility—commonly referred to as the Heping GDP because of it its proximity to the Heping Yizu (和平彝族), a third-level administrative township of the Yi minority—is also known as the Jinkouhe GDP as it is located near Jinkouhe (金口河), in the Leshan City prefecture of Sichuan province. It is the second of China’s gaseous diffusion plants (the first is in Lanzhou).

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