LITMIR.BIZ

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path to eliminating tactical nuclear weapons entirely. Rivals such as Russia and China already maintain large numbers of these weapons and have no incentive to dismantle them if the United States does not have a similar capability to trade away in negotiations. Critics of low-yield nuclear weapons who are serious about eliminating their escalatory potential should support U.S. nuclear modernization as a first step toward bringing adversaries to the bargaining table.

      The United States cannot abide a world in which adversaries such as Russia and China have low-yield weapons, while the United States does not. As our adversaries engage in increasingly threatening behavior toward U.S. allies, the United States needs a nuclear arsenal that will ensure deterrence—not just on good days, but also on the worst days.

       NO

       Joseph Cirincione

      President, Ploughshares Fund

      Written for CQ Researcher, February 2020

      We refuse to learn from history. Almost 40 years ago, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote: “It is inconceivable to me, as it has been to others who have studied the matter, that ‘limited’ nuclear wars would remain limited—any decision to use nuclear weapons would imply a high probability of the same cataclysmic consequences as a total nuclear exchange.” McNamara concluded, along with his British colleagues, that “under no circumstances” would they have recommended “that NATO initiate the use of nuclear weapons.”

      But that is precisely what a new generation of Dr. Strangeloves recommends today. They have embraced the Cold War theory of “escalation dominance” and favor new, more usable nuclear weapons to fight even conventional conflicts. They argue that if the United States has greater military force on every rung of the “escalatory ladder,” it can convince an enemy to surrender early in a conflict.

      But that attractive theoretical concept has little relationship to any conceivable conflict scenario, in which even a militarily inferior adversary has multiple ways of escalating a conflict. For example, the United States is militarily superior to Iran, but with a few mines and speedy patrol boats, Tehran could close the Strait of Hormuz, crippling oil flows and plunging the world economy into recession.

      Yet, Iran is precisely where some in Washington favor using nuclear weapons. A 2017 Pentagon war game used U.S.-based bombers to drop a low-yield nuclear weapon on Iran. But because it would take a 10-hour flight to deliver this weapon, the Trump administration has just deployed—with congressional approval—a low-yield nuclear warhead that can be launched from submarines off Iran’s coast. This Hiroshima-sized bomb could explode within 15 minutes of launch.

      Supporters justify this scenario by arguing it offers “multiple options” and “maximum flexibility,” providing military solutions to even the most difficult political problems. Most serious analysts recognized long ago that this strategy leads to disaster.

      “A nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon,” warned former Secretary of State George Shultz. “You use a small one, then you go to a bigger one.”

      Iran does not have nuclear weapons, but Russia and China do. The first use of nuclear weapons against those countries would not be the last. Commanders can have no confidence that they can control or contain a limited nuclear war. Rather than being a strategy for victory, it guarantees defeat for all sides.

      “We will take action, as we do in these situations,” O’Brien said. “If Kim Jong Un takes that approach, we will be extraordinarily disappointed, and we will demonstrate that disappointment.” He declined to provide any specifics but said the administration has many “tools in its tool kit” to respond to any such tests.⁶⁴

      Other White House officials say Trump is not looking for another confrontation with Kim in an election year. If the tests resume, they say, Trump is likely to press the United Nations to tighten sanctions against North Korea—a strategy that previous administrations have used to little effect.

      Nuclear weapons experts say in the year and a half since the Singapore summit, Kim has built up his missile stores and produced enough bomb-grade nuclear fuel for about 38 warheads—double an earlier estimate issued by U.S. intelligence analysts.

      Pressure for New START

      Meanwhile, lawmakers are stepping up pressure on the Trump administration to extend New START, introducing bipartisan legislation in both chambers that would strengthen a requirement to assess the costs and implications of allowing the treaty to expire next February.

      With Trump still unwilling to commit to the pact’s extension in order to explore including China, the House and Senate bills would require the administration to provide intelligence estimates on how much Russian and Chinese nuclear forces could expand if New START expires. Lawmakers also want to know how much it would cost for U.S. intelligence to ascertain such developments without an extension of New START’s verification provisions.

      The bills echo a provision in the new fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, which requires the administration to estimate how large Russia’s tactical nuclear arsenal and China’s nuclear modernization program will grow if New START is allowed to lapse.⁶⁵

      Congressional aides say the legislation reflects serious concerns on Capitol Hill that the administration has not sufficiently analyzed the strategic implications of allowing New START to expire. Moreover, lawmakers from both parties and arms control experts say they are unaware of any concerted administration effort to formulate a negotiating strategy for China.

      Countryman, the former assistant secretary of State for international security and nonproliferation, notes that while Trump announced his plan for a tripartite arms control treaty last May, the State Department only invited China to begin what it called a bilateral “strategic security dialogue” in December. “After saying they wanted to negotiate with China, it took them nine months to officially communicate that,” he says.

      State Department officials will not say whether China has responded to its invitation, but Beijing repeatedly has said it has no interest in three-way nuclear arms reduction talks, because the Russian and U.S. arsenals are already 20 times the size of China’s.

      In February 2020, national security adviser Robert O’Brien said the Trump administration would soon open nuclear arms control negotiations with Russia. His remarks came 10 months after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told lawmakers the administration was at the “very beginning of conversations about renewing” New START, indicating it had made no serious diplomatic efforts in the interim.⁶⁶

      With the administration struggling to deal with North Korea and Iran, some arms control experts suggest it may not have the bandwidth to focus on Trump’s trilateral treaty proposal. The State Department’s Office of Strategic Stability and Deterrence Affairs, responsible for negotiating arms control treaties, reportedly has gone from having 14 staffers when Trump took office in 2017 to four. The State Department’s top two arms control officials were among those who left, says Bell, the former State Department arms control adviser, and neither has been replaced. The State Department has not commented on the report.

      “We simply don’t have enough people doing this,” says Bell, now the senior policy director at the Council for a Livable World, a Washington-based organization that advocates for nuclear disarmament. “To create these kinds of agreements, you need patience and high-level, disciplined attention paid to those goals. It’s hard to see that forthcoming from this administration.”

      And without the robust verification procedures allowed by New START, it would cost billions of dollars to create new intelligence programs to determine the disposition of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, with no guarantees that such programs would succeed, say former arms control officials. The treaty’s expiration also would remove any restrictions on the numbers of new hypersonic nuclear weapons Russia could deploy, experts say.

      “It is hard to overstate, from my perspective as a senior military leader, how much we benefit from the knowledge and predictability the treaty provides about Russia’s

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