Christopher Ford: Bush Administration Makes Arms Control Thinking Obsolete

by Cheryl Rofer

Christopher Ford unloads on the arms control community in their very own flagship publication, which must suggest that the Arms Control Association deserves an award for encouraging open expression or therapy for clinical masochism.

The article itself deserves an award for creative use of retro-Soviet rhetoric. Ford labels arms controllers as determined to uphold tranditional and often outmoded ways of thinking, reflexively pursuing older agendas, fearful of missile defenses, monomaniacal, anachronistic, unable to take “yes” for an answer, possessed of a fetishistic attachment to “formal instruments” (treaties?), reflexively alarmed at the taboo issue of developing “new” nuclear weapons, attached to vain hopes, famously idealistic (and not in a good way), and possessed of shopworn assumptions.

In contrast, Ford finds the Bush administration to be innovative, skeptical about tradition, both unilateral and multilateral (both good), insightful, moving into the twenty-first century…Well, you get the idea.

The entire article is a case study in framing.

For only one example,

One of the reasons that Bush administration strategic and arms control policy proved so controversial with arms controllers was precisely the mismatch between traditional assumptions prioritizing the management of competitive U.S.-Russian dynamics and the administration’s movement into a new paradigm. The administration, for instance, was keen to develop improved ballistic missile defenses; articulated a general use-of-force doctrine against WMD threats that left open the option of pre-emption; deflected calls for negative security assurances and regional nuclear-weapon-free-zone protocols out of concern for the ways in which they might, if in fact believed or followed, undercut U.S. deterrence of WMD use by rogue regimes; pursued the development of a non-nuclear payload for submarine-launched ballistic missiles in order to provide a rapid global strike capability against fleeting or time-sensitive targets, such as mobile missiles or terrorist cell meetings; and at one point considered the development of nuclear weapons optimized for defeating deep underground facilities of the sort beloved by proliferators worried about U.S. precision-guided conventional munitions. Such efforts made good sense from a thoroughly post-Cold War perspective of prioritizing proliferation threats, but they were poorly explained to the public, Congress, and foreign governments; set teeth on edge in the arms control community; and alarmed those who still saw strategic policy through the prism of competitive dynamics vis-à-vis Russia.

Let’s unpack a couple of those great strides forward.

articulated a general use-of-force doctrine against WMD threats that left open the option of pre-emption

also known by the benighted arms control community and others of us as first use of nuclear weapons, an outgrowth of the now-discredited Bushian doctrine of preventive war.

deflected calls for negative security assurances and regional nuclear-weapon-free-zone protocols out of concern for the ways in which they might, if in fact believed or followed, undercut U.S. deterrence of WMD use by rogue regimes

and, rather than encourage other nations in regional agreements to ban nuclear weapons, we felt it more important to be able to store those potential first-use nuclear weapons on their soil.

There’s more, but, once again, you get the idea.

Although Ford trumpets the great leap forward by the Bush administration into 21st century nonproliferation, he fails to present an overarching philosophy. The main motivator, as in so many cases, seems to be the negative desire to do things differently than others. This reactiveness, combined with a tactical, rather than strategic approach, is what his article summarizes.

Ford admits that the administration has made mistakes, that the 123 nuclear trade deal with India may not have been the best of all possible choices and that the Iraq war may just have damaged US credibility.

Once one gets through the rhetoric, there are points in the article that probably deserve substantive discussion. But the rhetoric was so over-the-top, I thought it deserved a post of its own.