by Cheryl Rofer
Ah, the obligatory 100 days post!
But I’ve got a WhirledView/ Michael Tanji twist to put on that. Those of us who contributed to Mike’s Threats in the Age of Obama (which you can buy from Nimble Books or Amazon) are trying to answer the questions
* what did you get right in THREATS?So far, I see that ZenPundit has posted his evaluation.
* what did you get wrong?
* what was a surprise?
Update (5/3/09): Other authors' posts now up:
Tanji
Shane Deichman
Dan at TDAXP
ubiwar
Sam Liles
Mark Curtis
Adam Elkus
Decreases in nuclear arsenals are always going to come slowly, as the result of negotiations to keep things balanced, so that nobody panics to give us a worse situation than we started with. Sam Nunn likened moving toward zero to climbing a mountain in the clouds. You know the summit is there, but you can’t see it or the entire route from here.
So Molly Cernicek and I didn’t expect a lot to happen in the first hundred days. We were right that not much has changed with respect to the threats. North Korea has produced one of its periodic uproars, which seem to be part of its negotiating strategy. Iran is still enriching uranium, and President Barack Obama is offering some indications of good will to get talks started. Iran has not yet responded definitively, but that is most likely because they have elections coming up in June. So I wouldn’t say we’ve gotten anything wrong either.
The surprise was that the President came out so strongly for zero nuclear weapons as his long-term goal in his speech in Prague on April 5. The speech was obviously timed to coincide with, and reinforce, the Carnegie International Conference on Nonproliferation. What he proposed in that speech was what he had been saying as a candidate, so in that sense it was no surprise.
There was much to like in that speech, and I’ve pulled out some of it here. But one thing that particularly appealed to me was the President’s pointing out that things we take for granted, like the Soviet Union, can change more quickly than we might ever imagine. This was particularly apt in a place like Prague, where the end of Soviet influence was so real. Likewise, he was saying, we may take nuclear weapons for granted now, but we can eliminate them.
The START I treaty, which is the only means we have for verifying the decreases of the Moscow Treaty, expires on December 9. The Russians have been aware of this and have been pressing for negotiation of a new treaty for the past couple of years. Negotiations, particularly of a new treaty, can take that long. START I can simply be extended, but both the US and Russia agree that some of its provisions are more tedious than is necessary.
In that April 5 speech, Obama said that a new treaty would be negotiated. At the Carnegie Conference, Rose Gottemoeller, Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance and chief negotiator for START, and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak agreed and disagreed about the talks, but they clearly were in favor of getting that new treaty before the old one expires.
Talk in the halls at Carnegie was that the new treaty would also move the numbers down from the Moscow Treaty’s 1700-2200 range to 1500. That’s not a big change, but if it can be negotiated by July, which is now the target date from both sides, it will be a big achievement.
Gottemoeller has already met with her counterpart, Anatoly Antonov, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's security and disarmament department, in Rome. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will meet with Hillary Clinton next week to map out where the talks have to go. The talks themselves will be held May 18-20 in Moscow.
Obama’s nonproliferation team isn’t fully in place yet. He’s making some unexpected appointments. Gottemoeller’s was predictable, but Ellen Tauscher for Undersecretary for Arms Control was not. John Holdren and Gary Samore in the White House have excellent backgrounds in nonproliferation and related issues. But none are not at all what I would consider the sameold sameold. So they probably count as surprises too.