Weapons Systems
Ratify the Treaty
August 1, 2010
A NY Times Editorial
The New Start treaty, the first arms control agreement signed with the Russians in nearly a decade, calls for modest nuclear reductions, from 2,200 deployed warheads to 1,550. It will make the world safer, guaranteeing each country continued insight into the other’s strategic arsenals, with data exchanges and regular inspections.
The treaty has been endorsed by nearly every luminary in the Democratic and Republican foreign policy establishments — including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker, Sam Nunn, William Perry and James Schlesinger — as well as all three heads of the nation’s nuclear laboratories and seven former commanders of the nuclear forces.
That should make Senate ratification certain. But some Republican members — including Jon Kyl, James Inhofe and Jim DeMint — are still balking. Cold war habits and specious arguments die hard.
The critics’ biggest objection is that the treaty will somehow constrain American efforts to build missile defenses. They point to a line in the nonbinding preamble about the “interrelationship” between offensive and defensive strategic arms and a provision in the treaty that bans the use of missile silos or submarine launch tubes to house missile defense interceptors. Never mind that American commanders have no interest in using either that way.
We are no big fans of national missile defense — the technology has yet to show that it can work. But the Obama administration is moving ahead with a limited program. And Defense Secretary Robert Gates has testified that the New Start treaty will impose “no limits on us.”
Critics also charge that the Russians can’t be trusted, pointing to a recent State Department report that acknowledged several unspecified compliance disputes related to the Start I treaty. But it also said Russia lived up to the treaty’s “central limits.”
What the critics don’t mention is that Start I expired last December. If the Senate fails to ratify New Start there will be no inspections and no data exchanged.
Finally, critics claim that the Obama administration isn’t doing enough to “modernize” the weapons it retains. If we have any complaint, it is that President Obama has gone too far to appease the nuclear lab directors and Republican critics on this point. He has promised $80 billion over the next 10 years to sustain and modernize the nuclear weapons complex and $100 billion to refurbish nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
At a time of huge deficits and two costly wars, that is far too much to spend. The United States already has a robust and costly program to ensure the safety and security of its existing nuclear weapons for years to come. President Obama certainly must continue to resist pressure to build an unnecessary new weapon.
The political motivation of the anti-Start crowd is all too clear. One leader is former Gov. Mitt Romney, a once and maybe future presidential candidate who is firing up potential supporters with a charge that the treaty could be Mr. Obama’s “worst foreign policy mistake yet.”
John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has set a committee vote for Wednesday. He has made clear that he and Richard Lugar — the ranking member and the Senate’s most respected expert on arms control issues — are still searching for enough Republican backing to get the required two-thirds vote.
Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States and Russia still have more than 20,000 nuclear weapons. That is absurd. The Senate needs to pass New Start now.
War’s Brave New World
by David Isenberg
March 1st, 2010
From the Partnership for a Secure America
It’s a brave new world out there, but I don’t think it is the one Aldous Huxley had in mind when he wrote his famed book in 1932.
What Huxley gave us was a frightening vision of the future. And in one sense, though not the one Huxley was writing about, that vision is becoming reality. I refer to the expanding role of robots in war.
The most visible aspect of this is the use of aerial drones such as targeting Al Qaeda militants with Predator drone strikes. Predictably, some places, such as the Weekly Standard, think this fine and dandy, and worry only that we do not use them more for which they criticize President Obama. That is ironic as the President has authorized more drone attacks in the first year of his term in office than Bush did in his entire presidency.
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Watch What They Spend, Not What They Say (Missile Defense)
The Obama administration says missile defense isn't as important as it used to be. Its budget says otherwise.
By Fred Kaplan
From Slate.com
Thursday, Feb. 4, 2010
When Defense Secretary Robert Gates laid out his $708.2 billion budget proposal this week, he also submitted a 48-page document called the "Ballistic Missile Defense Review." Reading this review, you might think that Gates was slashing the missile-defense program. You'd be wrong.
Gates writes of "a new course for spending" that is responsive to "budgetary constraints." He says he won't deploy any system until it passes realistic tests. (In more than a decade of development, no BMD system has been subject to any realistic tests, and none has passed more than half of the rigged ones.) And he's moving away from exotic technologies based on "unrealistic concepts of operation" and designed for threats that won't exist for a long, long time, if ever. Gates says that the program will deal with threats as they evolve. But, he adds, this does not require us to push ahead with missile defenses "at the same accelerated rate" as we have "in recent years."
There's a mismatch, however, between Gates' words and his actions. His proposed missile defense budget for fiscal year 2011 amounts to a staggering $10.4 billion. This is $2 billion less than George W. Bush requested (and received) for missile defense—his most cherished military program—in his last year as president. But it's $700 million more than Gates himself received in FY 2010.
The program is getting more expensive and, in some respects, more exotic—not less.
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Can space weapons protect U.S. satellites?
By Yousaf Butt | 22 July 2008
From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Article Highlights
- While offensively potent, space weapons don't offer any defensive capabilities that could protect U.S. satellites.
-In fact, there are many other smarter, more cost-efficient means in which to safeguard Washington's enormously important space assets.
-Whether intended for defensive purposes or not, a U.S. push for space weapons could signal to its adversaries that they, too, need to strengthen their space capabilities, potentially igniting another arms race.
Both presumptive presidential nominees--Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain and Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama--have called for strengthening and/or increasing the number of international treaties and institutions to combat proliferation should they be elected president. An important new pact for them to consider is an agreement that restricts the weaponization of space. Not only are space weapons expensive and provocative, they're also useless: They simply cannot protect us.
Over the years, many voices in Washington have called for green-lighting space weapons as a way of neutralizing the threat to U.S. satellites. For instance, the 2001 U.S. Space Commission report warned against a "Space Pearl Harbor" and advocated that, "The [United States] must develop the means both to deter and to defend against hostile acts in and from space." It went further to suggest that the Defense Department "vigorously pursue the capabilities . . . to ensure that the president will have the options to deploy weapons in space."
Throughout this debate, it's almost taken as an article of faith that space weapons can be defensively useful. Yet, there's little technical basis to support this belief: While certainly offensively potent, space weapons are defensively ineffective.
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