Arms Control Wonk

President George H.W. Bush bemoaned his lack of “the vision thing.” In contrast, George W. Bush was a bold visionary. By acting on his ambitious rhetoric to extend freedom, fight terrorism and wage preventive war, Bush 43 became America’s least admired wartime President since Harry S Truman. (Read it and wince: Bush’s second inaugural address and his September 2002 National Security Strategy.) Truman rebounded from terrible poll numbers after he left office because his accomplishments — the Berlin airlift, the policy of containment, the Marshall Plan, the founding of NATO and the United Nations, among others — outweighed the morass of the Korean War. George W. Bush’s war-time presidency will not be so readily rehabilitated.

Getting the vision thing right is hard. The ability to deliver a stirring speech enunciating idealistic goals is a start, but without successful follow up, the vision seems hollow. On nuclear issues, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama certainly met the rhetorical standard – Kennedy at American University in June 1963 and Obama at Prague in May 2009. Expressing idealistic long-term goals doesn’t help make them happen, however. Presidents who succeed at the vision thing manage to secure way stations along the path to overly ambitious objectives. In this regard, President Obama still has a long way to go to match President Kennedy.

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It’s BBBBBAAAAACCCCCCKKKKK! After a test-and-paper filled odyssey, FYRP has returned!

38 North | Several authors have created an image of life at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear facility.

All Things Nuclear | The House Armed Services Committee marked up the Defense authorization bill several days ago.  It contains 14 Ground-Based Interceptors, and a substantial East Coast missile defense site.  But guess what? The Pentagon doesn’t want another site. More from Michaela Dodge and Colin Clark.

CS Monitor | Scott Peterson, following Iran’s presidential final debate, finds Iranian nuclear diplomacy to be just as contentious inside the country as it is internationally. Also: Louis Charbonneau of Reuters probes the Supreme Leader’s role in nuclear talks.

The Bulletin | Kingston Reif declares that nuclear spending cuts are (gasp) a good idea!

SIPRI Yearbook | Unlike the DoD Iran Report, you can read this Yearbook. Go ahead, skip to chapters six (world nuclear forces) and seven (nuclear arms control and non-proliferation). I won’t tell.

CS Monitor (again) | Instead of sitting back and waiting, Matthew Bunn says, President Obama can make like Kennedy and ease sanctions on Iran in attempt to build trust. Similar idea from Ryan Costello.

Foreign Policy | John Arquilla says that cyber warfare follows the same rules as conventional conflicts. (Zachary Fryer-Biggs finds some touchiness around offensive measures.  Michael Joseph Gross reports that casualties are already piling up.)

Ynet News | The United States successfully tested a bunker-buster bomb that can destroy the Fordow Nuclear Facility.  But some say, so what?

BBC | I hope the Flemish don’t take the nukes we put in their country.  Otherwise, they might come back for New York.

Flickr | Inside the IAEA’s Safeguards Analytical Laboratory.  No pressure. 

We hope you enjoyed this edition of FYRP.

Sorry about not blogging for the past few weeks.  I haven’t submitted a Foreign Policy column, either.  As some of you may know, things have been pretty tough on both personal and professional fronts for a while now.  Am modestly optimistic that things will start sucking less over the next few weeks.

Anyway,  this little story cheered me up.

A couple of weeks back, I posted a little essay at Foreign Policy on the whole threat inflation industry related to the threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack (The EMPire Strikes Back, 23 May 2013). Although the physical phenomenon of electromagnetic pulse is real, I argued, the severity of an attack is often presented in nearly apocalyptic terms that are simply not supported by the available data.

The commenters broke out the tinfoil hats!  My favorite was one Vance Frickey.  He was not very nice in the comments, arguing (among other things) that I had no idea what I was talking about because he saw an episode of Future Weapons in which an EMP simulator killed a car:

The host of the TV series FutureWeapons dramatically demonstrated how vulnerable modern automobiles are to EMP by driving a late-model American sedan near the Kirtland Air Force Base TRESTLE EMP simulator when it generated an EMP – the pulse was silent, unheralded by sparks, glow or anything – but the immediate loss of power in the car, which drifted to a stop and could not be restarted.  The Kirtland TRESTLE is the standard simulator for nuclear EMP effects for the US Air Force;  it can be regarded as a faithful simulation of nuclear EMP.  Now, imagine most of the cars and trucks in Canada and the United States drifting to a stop in mid-traffic.  That would, of course, include most emergency response vehicles in both countries, everything but military vehicles – which we hope are EMP-hardened.   With no police response, no EMTs available to go to the scene of innumerable accidents, no tow trucks to clear wrecks, North America’s roads would be chaos.

You can imagine where this is going, right?  Frickey accuses me of “ignorance, prejudice and crass stupidity.” Let’s have a little referendum on that, shall we?

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Anatoly Dobrynin was the Soviet Union’s Ambassador to the United States for a mere twenty-four years. He arrived in Washington the year of the Cuban missile crisis and left after Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan managed to steer US-Soviet relations away from nuclear danger. Before this major course correction could occur, Washington and Moscow passed through another year of living dangerously in 1983.

The hair-raising events of 1983 included Reagan’s surprise announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the deployment of US cruise and ballistic missiles in Europe that the Kremlin viewed as pre-emptive strike weapons, the Soviet walk-out from nuclear negotiations, the shoot-down of a Korean airliner, games of chicken by U.S. submarines and maritime patrol aircraft, heated rhetoric by President Reagan, and a NATO command-post exercise nicknamed Able Archer that paranoid Kremlin officials viewed as a dress rehearsal for the real thing.

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When the IAEA’s 35 governors arrived at the VIC last Monday for their quarterly June meeting, the stack of documents they picked up outside Boardroom C included the 2012 version of the Safeguards Implementation Report (SIR).

The distribution to the board of the annual SIR happens every mid-year. This report–like every other document distributed by the IAEA secretariat for the occasion–is classified “for official use only” and, during the ensuing meeting, it is routinely taken note of by board members and is then tucked away for posterity and for use by nuclear materials accountants as a reference.

Last week things were a little different.  Within a day after the board meeting began, the SIR was leaked to wire reporters at the IAEA and two accounts of its contents then appeared from Bloomberg and Reuters, on June 5 and June 7, respectively.

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March 10, 2013, marked the 35th anniversary of entry into force of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978, Public Law 95-242.  Warren H. Donnelly was a Senior Specialist in the Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Policy division of the Congressional Research Service (CRS).  During his tenure he produced some of the most concise, thoughtful and well-regarded reports on the nonproliferation debates of the 1970s.  Of particular note is a report he wrote in October 1978 called “The Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978, Public Law 95-242:  An Explanation.”  Worthy of reproduction are these paragraphs on “The Ideal Use of Nuclear Energy”:

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Pakistan’s national security decisions are usually choreographed between senior active duty military officers in Rawalpindi and government officials in Islamabad. If military leaders feel strongly about a particular policy or initiative, they can usually count on the consent of politicians. Conversely, if political leaders do not have military support, their favored initiatives are likely to fail. There is usually little daylight between Rawalpindi and Islamabad with respect to Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent.

Pakistan’s nuclear program is a rare success story and a great source of national pride. Those who have been instrumental in this record of accomplishment have been given broad leeway to pursue requirements as they see fit. These requirements are set by very few individuals, almost all with military backgrounds.

Every nation’s nuclear weapon-related programs have elevated a few individuals into positions of extraordinary authority. Some have remained in the shadows, a few have become national embarrassments, and others have gained public renown. The “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy, Admiral Hyman Rickover, had such a high profile and was deemed to be so essential by his supporters on Capitol Hill that his retirement from active duty was postponed until the ripe old age of 81.

Pakistan’s closest approximation to Admiral Rickover is Lt. General (ret.) Khalid Kidwai, who presently is in his thirteenth year as the Director-General of the Strategic Plans Division at Joint Staff Headquarters. The SPD oversees strategy, doctrine, research, development, production and protection of Pakistan’s nuclear assets.

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For some odd reason, all comments have closed on my post on the ROK 123 agreement extension.  Since I happen to firmly believe in debate and discourse, please see my colleague Ted Jones’ comments below (italics) on the the matter and in reaction to a talk I gave on May 17.  You can see and read what I think thanks to Elaine Grossman’s piece.  I know some folks don’t agree with Ted and some folks don’t agree with me:

It is a valid point that South Korea’s commitments stand in the way of its enrichment and reprocessing (E&R) activities, though it is doubtful that South Korea considers the 1992 Joint Declaration the major impediment. In any case, I would take issue with the description of South Korea as a “gold standard state.”

Clarity and consistency about what the “gold standard” means is important for understanding its limits as a policy and its consequences for U.S. interests. The term is generally taken to mean a state’s renunciation of E&R technologies on its soil, and its acceptance of other commitments – within the context of a U.S. nuclear cooperation agreement. By this common understanding, the UAE remains the only gold standard country. The United States has never asked South Korea to accept the gold standard because it is an advanced nuclear country and a close strategic ally. It is highly unlikely that South Korea would have agreed to renounce its E&R rights, if the United States had asked.

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In a previous post, I asked the question whether the use of drones for targeted killings could be become habit forming. President Obama’s speech on U.S. counter-terrorism policy at the National Defense University  constituted a good-faith effort to answer this question. I appreciate that he avoids bumper-sticker answers to hard problems. So please bear with me for an overlong post.

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The other day, I posted an entry at 38North outlining three scenarios for North Korea — that North Korea would eventually test a Musudan, that China has stayed Kim Jong Un’s hand for the moment and that North Korean politics have aligned against a test.

Two readers — Markus Schiller and Anon O’Moose — wrote in to observe that the piece would have been stronger had I considered a fourth scenario: what if the Musudan is not real at all?

I happent to think the Musudan is real for reasons I will explain, but I admit the piece would have been stronger had I considered the alternative possibility.  Consider this compensation for that oversight.

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