A statistic that can be laid substantially at the feet of Congressman David Hobson (D, OH) for bottling up funds which would have otherwise built the necessary facilities for processing nuclear warheads over a number of years.

Reply: The number of nuclear weapons was only one of the factors that determined their importance during the Cold War. Policies and limited conventional capabilities were others. All of those factors have change considerably during the past 20 years, but not to the point that I see nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future “no longer be a dominant force to be reckoned with” in international relations.

For sure, nuclear weapons are likely to play a very different and much diminished role compared with the Cold War. But the Cold War was a very different era and is, I believe, increasingly inappropriate to compare with when analyzing the role of nuclear weapons today. Diplomats from the nuclear weapons love to compare with the Cold War when fending off criticism that they’re are doing too little for nuclear disarmament. “Oh, we only have x percent of the nuclear weapons left compared with the Cold War, and their role is much reduced.”

Well, that’s the least one should expect. But 20 years after the Cold War ended, such a comparison is no longer relevant. What is relevant now is what the role of nuclear weapons will be in the future. That role (or those roles) will be determined by today’s and tomorrow’s security environment. And all of the nuclear weapon states are busy defining that role and modernizing their remaining forces to fulfill it. All of the nuclear weapon states continue to insist that nuclear weapons are essential to their national security interests. None of nuclear weapon states have presented any plans for relinquishing nuclear weapons nor are they pushing for multilateral steps to accomplish that. At best, they may say they support the idea, but all diplomats are quick to add that that of course is a future goal and not very realistic today.

So the challenges are to ensure that a post-Cold War role for nuclear weapons is not allowed to mature – to settle in the long haul, that nuclear forces continue to be cut back, that modernization is limited, and that the international pressure on the nuclear weapon states to curtail the salience of nuclear weapons continues.

But if this process moves forward, a perhaps even more daunting challenge looms on the horizon: what should be the role of nonnuclear forces in international relations? Is is realistic to have national security strategies that are based on threatening potential adversaries and then expect them to give up nuclear weapons? HK

Reply: That’s an interesting thought, but the ~800 number is more than double the number deployed in Europe.

I think the 800 is an additional reduction that the administration sliced from a number of different reserve warhead types in order to be able to announce implementation of the 2004 decision by the end of 2007. Some of the warheads affected by the 2004 decision are still in the process of being retired, so they will go a little later as expressed by the extra 15% by 2012.

The reason for making this announcement now probably is to sweeten the nuclear weapons Complex Transformation plan (which was released at the same time as the White House statement on the cuts). Another motivation might be an attempt on the part of the administration to improve its position in lieu of Congress’ demand for a new nuclear posture review. HK

Do you think that we could have at the end of this year an official confirmation of the total denuclearization of the Ramstein base ?

Indeed by looking at your tables of the U.S. Nuclear Stockpile Today and Tomorrow, we can see that the standard bombs B61-3, -7, and -11 are strongly decreasing. [edited]

Reply: No, the announcement does not affect the several hundred nuclear weapons deployed in Europe. The stockpile reduction deals with inactive weapons that have been offloaded from delivery platform, but does not affect deployed weapons.

As for Ramstein Air Base, I don’t excpect anyone official comments about the situation. In fact, even the Air Force document that revealed the change has now been updated and the relevant information deleted. HK

What is also being left unsaid is that the administration continues to resist some pretty sensible Russian proposals to replace START I (which expires at the end of 2009) with a new treaty that would reduce U.S. and Russian stockpiles to levels below the Moscow Treaty of 2002 (1700-2200 strategic deployed warheads) and put them under agreed counting and verification rules. At present the two sides cannot agree to basic terms on a follow on agreement.

Reply: Good points. I am struck by the administration’s apparent lack of efforts to use reductions as incentives to engage the other nuclear powers. It is as if our posture planning and nonproliferation policy run on two different tracks. HK