zenpundit.com

Please see the introductory post here.

Blogfriend Dave Schuler lost no time in taking up Cheryl Rofer’s challenge. An excerpt from his post at The Glittering Eye:

“Nuclear Weapons Policy in the 21st Century”

“Let’s begin this discussion with a premise and some facts. First, the premise. Nations work actively and rationally to extend their power and influence and to avoid losing power or influence. That’s consistent with Napoleon’s dictum cited above: the two great levers are fear of loss and hope of gain. Now the facts.

Worldwide there are approximately 32,000 nuclear weapons (source: Nuclear Threat Initiative). Of these more than 30,000, roughly 95%, are in the possession of either the United States (roughly 10,000) or Russia (roughly 20,000). For the United States if all nuclear weapons everywhere were to magically vanish from the face of the earth very little would change. The U. S. would continue to be the wealthiest country in the world. It would continue to have the biggest GDP in the world. It would continue to have the strongest military in the world. It would continue to wield great social influence. It would continue to be the world’s sole superpower.

The situation is different for Russia. Without nuclear weapons Russia would continue to be an enormous, sprawling country with a populous heartland and a remote sparsely populated hinterland, not unlike Canada in that respect. It would have a GDP roughly that of Canada’s, too, although with a significantly larger population it would be a good deal poorer than Canada. It would have no warm water ports which substantially limits its ability to project ports.

Although its role as a regional power is inescapeable it would not be a world power.

Russia will never relinquish its nuclear arsenal. To do so would relegate it to third class status. “

Read the rest here.

Please see the introductory post here:

An excerpt from Michael van der Galien’s post at  PoliGazette:

“US Nuclear Policy”

“Although the question seems difficult, I am sure, to me, it’s actually a very easy one: the US should improve its nuclear arsenal, other major powers should be allowed to keep their nuclear weapons, but the international community has to make sure that countries that don’t have nuclear weapons at this point in time, won’t develop them in the future either. Especially enemies of the West should be prevented, against all cost, from developing them.

….All too often people pretend that nuclear weapons are horrible per sé. This is not true. Nuclear weapons are horrible and pose a threat to the world when they’re in the wrong hands. When the US, however, has nuclear weapons, they’re not only not posing a threat to the world, they’re actually bringing stability and safety to it.”

Read the rest here.

Cheryl Rofer, one of the trio of bloggers at the respected diplo oriented blog Whirledview and a field expert on nuclear arms issues, has called for a “Blog-Tank” discussion of American nuclear policy, or more to the point, the current difficulty the Bush administration is having updating nuclear policy to match the strategic environment of 2007.  In fairness to the bureaucrats and semi-official wonks, at no time has nuclear policy seemed less clear except when the Truman administration initially wrestled with what to do with America’s brief atomic monopoly. Today we sit poised upon the brink of the other end of the proliferation spectrum and, as in 1945, crafting nuclear policy means identifying our assumptions about the world and making strategic choices against an uncertain future.

Rofer was kind enough to invite me to participate as well as Cernig, guiding spirit of the feisty and fast-paced Liberal-Left blog, The NewsHoggers. Everyone though, is welcome and I will be linking to those who participate in the discussion.

Like Cernig, I’ll let Cheryl lay out the ground rules and background material, many excellent links, by presenting her post in full:

 “The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy“

by CKR

The other day, Cernig reminded me of something I’ve let drop. Back in August, Cernig, ZenPundit and I were having a conversation on nuclear policy and were agreeing on quite a few points. This seemed to me to be a hopeful sign, since we inhabit different points on the political spectrum.

It was also a hopeful sign because others seem to be having so much trouble with nuclear policy. United States nuclear policy is stuck in the Cold War. For the decade of the nineties, we wanted to be cautious that Russia wouldn’t fall back into a Soviet foreign policy. It hasn’t, so it’s time to think about a nuclear policy for a world in which the big nuclear problem is proliferation, not a single enormous nuclear arsenal on the other side of the world.

Among those having a hard time are the Departments of State, Defense and Energy. Back in July, after Congress told the administration that it wanted to see a nuclear policy before it would consider funding the Reliable Replacement Warhead, those three departments quickly got out a statement saying that they would indeed work up a nuclear policy. Jeffrey Lewis now reports a rumor that Secretary of Defense Gates is holding up the full white paper because it is so amateurishly done. Sorry, Jeffrey, I can’t confirm your rumor, but it tends to support my suspicion that such a thing will be very difficult indeed for those agencies.

The presidential candidates are mostly trying not to think about it. Some of the Republicans haven’t even bothered to address the issue, and the Democrats are not too far from continuing the sameold Cold War stuff.

And the Very Special People who do foreign policy for a living at the think tanks and universities haven’t said much. These are the folks who the blogosphere found, a few months back, aren’t necessarily any more insightful or intelligent than bloggers. Because they do foreign policy for a living, their views can be swayed by what sells their product. All too often, that is war. They also tend to get very specialized, and most have little science background, which they may think is necessary to discuss nuclear policy. It helps, but the issues are more political than technical. Occasionally the technical clamps limits on the possible.

So I’d like to pick up that thread again, because The Bloggers^TM seem to be willing to try to figure it out. I propose what we might call a blog-tank approach. Here’s how I suggest we do it:

Each blogger writes a post on what the US’s nuclear policy should be on her/his own blog. Then please notify me by e-mail or a comment on this post. I have e-mailed some folks I would like to have participate, but everyone is welcome to join. Invite your blogfriends. I would like to have participants who represent a range of political opinion.

Commenters are encouraged to contribute as well, both here and on other participating blogs.

On Friday, 12/28, I will summarize the arguments, emphasizing novel ideas and points of agreement and disagreement.

Bloggers will then write another round of posts, trying to move to consensus positions.

I will then summarize again on Friday, 1/4. At that point, I think we’re going to be close to agreement on most of the big points.

I’ve linked above to some of my posts and here, here, here, here, and here are several more.

A range of political opinion is represented by four gentlemen who wrote an op-ed on US nuclear weapons policy in the January 4 Wall Street Journal. The Foreign Secretary of the UK built on those ideas, and the UK is actually doing something about them. Recently, two Americans have responded to the gang of four’s op-ed, although they seem to agree as much as they disagree. And here’s my review of a report from another group of dissenters.

Recently, Joe Cirincione, William Langewiesche, Richard Rhodes and Jonathan Schell (excerpt) have published books on the subject that are useful background for policy. They are exceptions to the Very Special People rule.

The two big treaties:
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization

I apologize, sort of, for doing this over the holiday season. We’re starting just before the solstice and should finish up around Orthodox Christmas. I hope everyone will find some time to contribute. After all, this is the time of year to think about peace on earth”

Thank you Cheryl for being the prime mover on this important topic. I look forward to the discussion.

The release of the conclusions in the recent NIE  (PDF) on Iran’s nuclear program has provoked widespread commentary in the blogosphere. The pure politics of the release is best dealt with elsewhere but here are a few words from some folks with more than nimble typing fingers to back up their analysis:

Haft of the Spear:

“The declassified key judgments of the latest NIE on Iran are yet another opportunity to get a glimpse of the inner-workings of the highest levels of the intelligence community. The picture isn’t pretty. The key judgments are notable for many reasons, not the least of which is how they contrast with the last NIE on this same topic. In 2005, with access to an Iranian source’s laptop, the community was confident that Iran was determined to build a nuclear weapon “despite its international obligations and international pressure.” Today it is equally confident that Iran halted its weapons program in 2003 and that it remained suspended for several years”

Whirledview:

“I will note that the supposedly secret uranium enrichment program that the administration accused North Korea of, and broke up the Agreed Framework for, was disavowed by the intelligence community earlier this year in much the same way that this NIE disavows the 2005 NIE on Iran. I’ll also note that proving a negative is difficult, and one of the favorite tactics of the right: we say that you’ve got a secret program. Prove to us you don’t.”

ArmsControlWonk:

“ Dafna Linzer reports in the Washington Post that a crucial bit of information was an intercepted communication by a senior Iranian military official “complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered.”The intercept – which Linzer notes was one of 1,000 footnotes in a 150 page document – was the final piece in the puzzle, and Linzer reports that the intercepts were briefed to the Bush Administration “beginning in July.”So, that timing would be consistent with Mike McConnell’s reference to “new information collected in late spring that caused a reconsideration of some elements of the assessment.”

Swedish Meatballs Confidential:

“The ‘new’ NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program [9-page pdf] — which has been [minor tweaks aside] in the can for nearly a year now — was released this afternoon. It is clear why the Cheney Cabal didn’t want this estimate to see the light of day.”

Counterterrorism Blog:

“ While the NIE clearly shifts the assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it acknowledges the regime continues to engage in dangerous behavior and comes down firmly on the side of political and economic pressure as an effective means of changing Iranian behavior. According to the NIE, Iran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program on the fall of 2003 was “in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.” (It was around this time that the U.S. and other governments exposed the A.Q. Kahn network and its international nuclear weapons material black market). The key judgments conclude that “our assessment that the [nuclear weapons] program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue that we judged previously.”

Sic Semper Tyrannis:

” The chimera of Iran as deadly menace is a product of Israeli paranoia and debilitating fear of the “other.”  This fear saturates Israeli strategic thinking making impossible for them a rational contemplation of the odds against Iranian suicide attacks against Israel.  Israel rejects the concept of deterrence of nuclear attack through creation of MAD (mutual assured destruction).  I have described their reasoning elsewhere in these pages. Given the awful nature of Jewish history, such overwhelming fear of the return of the final “gollum,” or perhaps Azrael himself is comprehensible.”

Thomas P.M. Barnett:

“ Iran’s choice is reasonably smart: talk big like Libya, stop short of weapons like Japan, but signal willingness to aggressively defend like Israel. I told you these guys are not stupid.”

I recall, as a lowly grad student, that many of the documents I would have loved to have had my hands on – NIE’s and PDD/NSDD’s referred to in secondary literature – were locked up tight, despite having been issued sometimes decades earlier. It’s rather surreal, from a historian’s perspective, seeing even partial declassification of a just issued NIE. Until recently at least, the USG had still classified documents going back to 1917 ( most likely covering cryptological sources and methods)!

The devil is in the details, to which we are not privy. Traditionally, the NIC process constructing a NIE would have a NIO as point man and emerge as a consensus, with the CIA  often being the heavyweight in the interagency wrangling. Supposedly, procedures have changed since the pre-Iraq War days to clarify the degree of certainty in an inherently uncertain scenario. Given the general unwillingness of IC bureaucracies to reconsider even information-sharing habits, how robust were the changes in the analytical methodology ?

I was surfing over at the always engaging, Left of center blog, The Newshoggers, when I saw a post by Cernig discussing a NYT op-ed by Martin Walker giving the lion’s share of the credit for the end of the Cold War to Mikhail Gorbachev, a position Cernig strongly endorsed, expounding upon the” Reagan won Mythtique”.  A key section from the Walker op-ed:

“According to both Schell and Rhodes, the cold war ended not because Reagan stood firm at Reykjavik but because Gorbachev and his supporters had already decided to stop waging it, or as Gorbachev’s adviser Giorgy Arbatov once put it to this reviewer in Moscow, “to take your enemy away.” Gorbachev understood that the arms race was ruining his country. And then he learned that the radiation fallout from Chernobyl was the equivalent of a single 12-megaton bomb.It was a wondrous accident of history that saw Gorbachev, the determined reformer of a sclerotic Soviet system, coincide with Reagan, the anti-Communist conservative who nonetheless dreamed of a world without nuclear weapons. After Reagan came the first president Bush, whose initial caution about Gorbachev gave way to such enthusiasm that he unilaterally scrapped America’s vast arsenal of land- and sea-based tactical nuclear weapons. Between them, the three men put an end to the first nuclear age.”

The first paragraph begs the question of “Why?” – particularly when Gorbachev’s recent predecessor as General-Secretary and longtime political godfather, Yuri Andropov, had such a drastically different reaction to nearly identical circumstances, despite being perhaps the best informed Soviet leader to ever rule the Kremlin. Walker ( leaning heavily on the writings of Jonathan Schell and Richard Rhodes) credits the Chernobyl disaster causing a Paul on the road to Damascus political conversion in the highest reaches of the Soviet nomenklatura. I find that such a thesis strains credulity, to put it mildly.

Walker would have us believe that a totalitarian system that weathered: approximately 20 to 25 million war dead in WWII, plus; another 20 to 30 million Soviet citizens who vanished into the Gulag under Stalin; that went to the brink of nuclear war with the U.S. under Khrushchev and with China under Brezhnev; that was, at the time, accepting tens of thousands of casualties annually in Afghanistan under Gorbachev; was suddenly undone morally and spiritually by a comparative handful of dead in an industrial accident at a nuclear plant and subsequent bad Western P.R. This is not history but wishful fantasy of an adolescent kind.

Let us be clear, Mikhail Gorbachev deserves significant credit for his share in bringing the Cold War to a sane and relatively soft landing.  He exercised intelligent restraint at a number of critical junctures where an ideologue would have provoked a civil war – something the coup plotters who toppled Gorbachev almost did. Gorbachev also understood that the Soviet system was fundamentally incompatible with the emergence of a globalized and highly technological information economy and that if his country did not adapt quickly, it would be left behind. At no time in power, however, did Gorbachev intend to destroy the Soviet Union or abandon “socialism” ( though what socialism was to be in the future, became increasingly vague in Gorbachev’s pronouncements) – these were the unintended consequences of trying to square a circle and make the USSR into a “normal” state via perestroika. A herculean task that exceeded even Gorbachev’s considerable political talents.

The facts are that Gorbachev and the USSR lost the Cold War and then sued for peace out of necessity, not from moral superiority or anti-nuclear altruism. It is a further truth that Ronald Reagan was substantially more correct than most of his contemporaries, Left and Right, on the proper American stance toward the Soviets; and that without his tough but flexible policies, the USSR might have limped along on life support for some time longer, as has North Korea.  Possibly, without the challenge of Reagan in the first place, the Soviet politburo might have opted for yet another ailing octogenarian to warm Lenin’s seat after Chernenko died and the “youthful” Gorbachev might have idled as a second tier leader for another decade.

No, Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War by himself but he contributed to that victory and all attempts to spin Mikhail Gorbachev, a tough-minded and daring apparatchik who wanted to save the Soviet Union, into the grand savior of humanity are just that – empty spin.