Tauscher Says No to Reliable Replacement Warhead
The Obama administration’s stated desire to get the world on track to eventual total worldwide nuclear disarmament starts in practice at the only place it really could start—the quest for a new bilateral U.S.-Russia treaty on bilateral weapons reductions. The Russians want such a treaty because in the short-term maintaining the U.S.-Russia nuclear equilibrium at a high level is a bigger burden on (relatively poor) Russia’s budget than on our budget. But the high equilibrium is a waste of our dollars as well, and it’s strongly in America’s interest to reduce nuclear proliferation as a general matter. But a lot of members of congress are queasy about the idea of a new treaty, basically because they’d rather listen to crazy people like Charles Krauthammer than see the basic logic of a win-win deal.
Josh Rogin reports on some of the negotiations with congress:
Senate Republicans are not completely unwilling to get behind a new nuclear reduction treaty, but they intend to bargain for concessions before supporting ratification. One key concession they will not get, though, is a revival of the Bush administration’s plan to build a new class of nuclear warheads known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead, according to the State Department’s top arms control official.
“I think there are a lot of people that still hope for the return of RRW and they are going to be sadly disappointed,” Ellen O. Tauscher, the newly minted under secretary of state for arms control and international secretary told The Cable in her first interview after taking up her post.
The RRW concept has some benefits if looked at very narrowly, but it’s by no means necessary to American security and would undermine the larger nuclear strategy toward which the administration is trying to move. Reviving the multilateral nuclear non-proliferation regime requires the United States to regain the confidence of non-nuclear states by demonstrating our own commitment to play by the rules. That means not developing new generations of nuclear weapons and instead moving forward on bilateral talks with the Russians. Press reports have repeatedly indicated that the Obama administration is divided on the RWW issue (with Robert Gates, in particular, being a fan) so it’s good to see a clear statement that they intend to stay on the right side of this.
8 Responses to “Tauscher Says No to Reliable Replacement Warhead”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
September 16th, 2009 at 11:23 am
I don’t get it; how are these things enforceable? Why wouldn’t the US sign the treaty and give its scout’s honor not to produce certain weapons, and then produce them anyway? Is Russia’s surveillance of our missile arsenal really advanced enough that they would discover our violations?
September 16th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Such treaties always include controls. Those Russians in the Nato facilities are there for a reason. But in general nuclear disarmement is much harder than cooperation in any other area because theres no repetition. So you cant just take a risk and be justb be uncooperative if the other side is not in the next if the other side is uncooperative this time.
Theres a huge amounth of hypocraciy involved in a proposal by the US at this point of maximum non nuclear supriority. So no realistic hope for a step forward as long as the US does not cut the conventional budget by 90%. Its still a huge step forward from the naiv Bush atempt to build nuclear hegemony with that missle defense system. Had it been realistic, i would have understood it. But realisticly there was no chance for this to ever work. Just anoy the Russians like hell an cost a lot of money.
September 16th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
It’s crucial if you want to maintain any type of reliable nuclear arsenal over the coming decades. The existing warheads are all decades old, and won’t last forever.
Why, because that just worked so well in the case of North Korea and the like, right?
Besides, I’m not opposed to the spread of nuclear weapons, as long as they’re in the hands of responsible states (from a “moral” point of view – from a realist point of view I oppose it because it threatens the relative advantage the US gets from nukes). Better nukes than biological weaponry, which is the “poor man’s deterrent” (and probably more dangerous if unleashed).
You know, I honestly don’t understand the tunnel vision some people seem to have on the nuclear disarmament issue. Do they just have amnesia when it comes to history? Why do they want to go back to an era when conventional military superiority decided conflicts, and the lack of weaponry like nukes made Great Power conflict ubiquitous rather than virtually non-existent?
Not to mention the role nukes played in allowing the US to re-attain some semblance of normal society and conventional disarmament after World War II without leaving Western Europe to the Soviets. What do you think the cost of a US conventional military guarantee to protect the western Europeans from the Soviets would have been? I guarantee it would have been much more severe than it was in real life due to the presence of the US’s nuclear arsenal.
September 16th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Where did you get the idea that nukes are better than biological weaponry, Brett?
September 16th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
But in general nuclear disarmement is much harder than cooperation in any other area because theres no repetition. So you cant just take a risk and be justb be uncooperative if the other side is not in the next if the other side is uncooperative this time.
If you are talking about absolute zero for nukes, verification is problematical. On the other hand, keeping a large nuclear strike force requires a big industrial base and a lot of infrastructure. Getting all the factions down to down to where they can only wipe out human civilization four or five times over, from the current ten or twenty, is not that difficult.
September 16th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Why do they want to go back to an era when conventional military superiority decided conflicts, and the lack of weaponry like nukes made Great Power conflict ubiquitous rather than virtually non-existent?
Because the combined armies of Imperial Caesar, the Great Khan, the Grand Mogul and the Manchu emperor put together could war on each other for ten lifetimes and still not wipe out humanity. We aren’t talking about big firecrackers, here, we are talking about deleting a few thousand cities and a billion people from the map, changing world climate, and leaving vast areas poisoned by fallout for several thousand years.
September 16th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
The Soviet Union’s weapons were in responsible hands. Then the Soviet Union fell. The U.S. helped them pull their arsenal together, but the tactical weapons could not be completely held to account because only strategic weapons were addressed in the SALT talks. The next treaty should count ALL nuclear weapons, and all fissile materials.
It seems that having nuclear weapons was only a deterrent for the USSR and the US in the Cold War. When other nations want their “deterrent” too, nuclear weapons are no longer a deterrent. There is a strange psychology behind using mass destruction as a threat for peaceful purposes.
September 17th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Nuclear winter is a myth, and fallout’s only a problem if you ground-burst the nukes. If you air-burst them (like most city-targeting nukes would have been), then the radiation problem disappears relatively quickly.
Ah, so it’s better that potentially millions of lives get lost in conflict after conflict because the Great Powers can look at each other and decide that certain wars are worth the costs (or simply get into them from stupidity, without the Fear of God and Nukes to keep them in line).
Nukes take a lot of money, time, and infrastructure to build and use (meaning they tend to be limited to states), and in any case they’re a one-time thing – at worst, you fire off a nuke, destroy a city, it’s over (unless you ground-burst the sucker over a river, when it’s not).
Biological weapons, particularly the engineered kind, are not so nice. Pretty much anyone with a medical degree and the right kind of laboratory (and it isn’t expensive) can make them, and carry them almost anywhere. That’s only going to get worse, by the way, as medical technology develops.
Think about it – would you prefer that a country have ten nuclear ICBMs, or that it have an engineered flu virus that is highly contagious, stays dormant for a day or two (long enough to spread and infect as many people as possible), and then kills 90% of the infected in a particularly unpleasant way? The latter, by the way, is far easier to smuggle – it takes certain technology and the same infrastructure issues just to get nukes down to about suit-case size.