Damage to Nuclear Nonproliferation by the Bush Tax: Bush Administration

by Cheryl Rofer

I want to look at four papers and reports in the light of the Bush Tax, two from the administration and two critical of its nonproliferation policies. In this post, I’ll consider how the Bush Tax has damaged the Bush administration’s efforts in nonproliferation. Then I’ll consider how the arms control community has suffered, and what nuclear nonproliferation might look like under a Bush Tax rebate.

Congress requested the administration to provide a policy of nuclear weapons use in order to justify the development of the Reliable Replacement Warhead. Arms Control Today asked Christopher Ford and Joe Cirincione to summarize the Bush administration’s achievements in nonproliferation. And George Perkovich offers advice to the next president. These four cover a range of opinion and approach and so illustrate some of what the Bush Tax has levied on US national security.

Besides the Bush Tax, these documents suffer from another problem (Perkovich’s the least): there is too much we still don’t know about the objectives of Bush foreign policy. Perhaps the objectives are from the Project for the New American Century, to maintain American power and prevent competitors from arising. But President Bush has not enunciated that policy, and actions in the second Bush term, like negotiating with North Korea, are counter to PNAC precepts. We still don’t know why George Bush focused on attacking Iraq in 2002, although justifications by the administration and inferences by others abound. Obsessive secrecy has also obscured our understanding.

The prime result of the Bush tax is that without a clear strategy, it is not possible to judge success or failure. This may be a feature, rather than a bug, but we will have to see more of the documents now in locked files before we can know for sure.

National Security and Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century

This DoD-DOE document* was supposed to present strategy and objectives, but it is fundamentally passive: others hold nuclear weapons and we don’t know what the future will bring, so it is advisable to continue to hold nuclear weapons, although perhaps we could do with fewer of them. And the RRW will be much better than the ones we have now. We don’t know what classified material may be left out; reticence about numbers of nuclear weapons is obvious, but we don’t know how much better the classified argument is, which could make use of specifics. My guess is not much better.

This report contains no real threat assessment, so it has no way of estimating what is needed to meet the threat. No analysis of the current situation, no objectives. It identifies concerns:

Some governments have demonstrated a willingness to transfer advanced weapons or sensitive weapon technologies to other states, or to support terrorist groups. China, a rapidly growing economic power and the only recognized nuclear weapons state under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) that is both modernizing and expanding its nuclear force, is also a potential concern. Concerns exist regarding Russia’s modernization of its large nuclear force (including the world’s largest non-strategic nuclear arsenal). Concerns also exist with respect to recent bellicose statements from Russian leaders directed at both the United States and its allies and friends.

Ah, concerns exist. But concerns are not threats.

The treatment of deterrence is uncritical, even though questions have been raised about what deterrence means in a multi-player world where some of the players may not have allegiance to a state.

The policies of successive U.S. administrations have shown a marked continuity in the purposes assigned to nuclear forces. U.S. nuclear forces have served, and continue to serve, to: 1) deter acts of aggression involving nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction; 2) help deter, in concert with general-purpose forces, major conventional attacks; and 3) support deterrence by holding at risk key targets that cannot be threatened effectively by non-nuclear weapons. Because of their immense destructive power, nuclear weapons, as recognized in the 2006 National
Security Strategy, deter in a way that simply cannot be duplicated by other weapons.

That quote could be based on classified analyses, and that is undoubtedly the excuse that would be given by its writers. But until we can see such analyses, those statements about deterrence are faith-based; they are the old Cold War doctrines.

There’s plenty more to criticize about the report. For example that continuity that successive US administrations have shown is precisely what no longer makes sense, almost two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s not a justification for those policies, it’s why Congress demanded this report. But I want to stay with the flaws in analysis, the workings of the Bush Tax.

Christopher Ford’s New Paradigm
About a week ago, I highlighted Christopher Ford’s use of language, his vilifying of the arms control community. This is a side effect of the Bush Tax: if you can’t use analysis to criticize ideas, you can attack.

But there are more substantive criticisms to be made of Ford’s article. Like the DoD-DOE report, it lacks strategy and direction. That lack, and the resorting to personal attack, imply that the Bush administration wanted its nonproliferation policy to be different from what went before. This contradicts the reliance by the DoD and DOE on continuity with previous administrations, one of the dangers of not having a strategy.

The Ford article is basically a list of things that happened under the Bush administration, some by design and some perhaps not. The former include the Proliferation Security Initiative, about which we still don’t know enough, and which may well conflict with US obligations under the NPT. The latter include the decision by Libya to give up its nuclear weapons program, which Ford attributes solely to the Bush administration’s “subtle and secret trilateral diplomacy.” As in the Dod-DOE document, secrecy prevents a full discussion of a number of points, these two among them. The administration will argue that the PSI contributed to the Libyan development. The objective seems to have been to prevent additional states from acquiring nuclear weapons. But none of this is clearly stated. One thing happens, then another.

The continuing coyness about numbers of nuclear weapons seems to undercut some of those objectives. There are different ways to count: deployed, reserve, refurbishing, total, which are frequently not made clear. The total number is the bottom line; the others are more of a shell game. The Moscow Treaty (also known as SORT) provided for 1700-2200 deployednuclear weapons each for the United States and Russia by 2012. The range itself is a distortion, an artifact of the insufficient negotiations that were more even than George Bush wanted; the upper number is the one that will be observed. Reserve and refurbishment can be expected to require perhaps twice the number of deployed weapons, so the total is 5000-6000 nuclear weapons each. Here is how Ford puts it, not too different from the words in the DoD-DOE report:

In addition to Moscow Treaty cuts in deployed warheads and to delivery system reductions prescribed by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) signed by President George H.W. Bush, the Bush administration moved rapidly ahead with further unilateral reductions in the U.S. arsenal. Many tons of fissile material have been removed from U.S. weapons programs, and the United States has been implementing a program of actual warhead dismantlement that has in fact been greatly accelerated since President George W. Bush’s decision in 2004 to cut the size of the overall U.S. stockpile nearly in half by 2012. [2] Indeed, with the United States having met this milestone remarkably early in only 2007, Bush decided to reduce warhead numbers still further, by an additional 15 percent from what had been planned for 2012. When these additional dismantlements have been completed, the U.S. nuclear arsenal will be less than one-quarter of its size at the end of the Cold War and at its smallest size since the Eisenhower administration.

This reads like one of those nasty high-school algebra problems, but it doesn’t contain enough “facts,” as my algebra teacher called them, to work out an equation. Footnote 2 adds a bit, still not enough:

For fiscal year 2007, for instance, the administration set a target of increasing the dismantlement rate by 49 percent, but in fact achieved a remarkable 146 percent increase.

Um, yeah. And what is happening to those dismantled pits (removed from the explosives and other appurtenances of a full-up nuclear weapon), and how many of them are there? They don’t have to be counted under the Moscow Treaty and are probably in addition to those 5000-6000 I’ve calculated.

The coyness about numbers is a side effect of the Bush Tax. Why must these numbers be kept secret? At the height of the Cold War, the numbers were kept secret because they related to the number of targets in the opponent’s country and the overkill (additional numbers of missiles and weapons in case the first ones didn’t get through) available. But that strategy was obsolete even before the Soviet Union dissolved, and, in any case, each side had a pretty good idea of what the other side held. We have an even better idea now.

Making those numbers available, particularly if they are as admirably low as Ford would have us believe, would have a number of good effects: challenging others (mainly Russia) to decrease their numbers accordingly, reassurance that we have enough weapons to protect our allies while showing our restraint and perhaps compliance with the NPT’s Article VI. But the numbers always have been secret, and the DOE bureaucracy intends that they always should be.

Once again, there are many details in this paper that I don’t want to address now. Ford allows that the Iraq war has damaged US credibility and that the US-India 123 nuclear trade deal may not have been the optimal strategy to gain India as a balancing ally in Asia. But he does not put these downsides into a larger context. What are the nonproliferation goals that these Bush administration actions damage?

Some of Ford’s criticism of the arms control community, it seems to me, are close to the mark, if we ignore his gratuitous personal attacks. I will argue that that group has been subject to the Bush Tax as well in my next post, when I consider Cirincione’s and Perkovich’s papers.

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*State was supposed to participate, but dropped out somewhere along the way; it would be interesting to know why.