Reply: As far as I can see, there is overwhelming evidence that it does not require additional underground testing of deployed warheads to verify their reliability. The science-based stockpile stewardship program has been able to verify the reliability of the weapons in the stockpile for the past 15 years without underground testing (meaning nuclear detonations) and there’s no reason to believe such maintenance will not be able to do so for the next several decades.

It would be interesting to see your evidence that the government has “tolerated neglect” of the W76, but to me the ongoing W76 life-extension program with its numerous hydro-dynamic experiments, simulations, and component refurbishment that goes along with it demonstrate an extensive effort to ensure the continued reliability of the warhead. Granted, as in all complex engineering programs, there are bound to be challenges, but I don’t see indications that they add up to a degree that requires nuclear testing.

More important than aging is whether the custodians of the stockpile can avoid the temptation to use life-extension programs to change the tested design by modifying components or adding new features. That, in my assessment, represents a greater risk that somewhere down the line someone will conclude that the modified warhead needs to be tested. HK

However, according to the UN one of my prognostications has come true; North Korea has made the leap from nth nuclear power to active proliferator of nuclear weapons technology (to at least three countries, Iran, Myanmar and Syria)

It hardly required a crystal ball; like its one time partner in nuclear crime and supplier/customer Pakistan, North Korea has lots of nuclear weapons know-how and little cash, and is motivated to try and turn one into the other. It’s highly probable that the DPRK have conducted still other transactions with other countries and are continuing to do so at the present, if only because they need the money.

The next logical pattern to emerge will be nuclear cooperation between Iran and Venezuela; Venezuela has everything (or can buy it) BUT nuclear weapons. Iran has a growing nuclear weapons-capable research and fabrication sector, and needs cash. Or the North Koreans could hopscotch Iran and provide the materiel or weapons directly, or some combination of deals could be worked out. The Second Bolivarian Revolution would be much more credible with nuclear clout.

Our nation’s progressive nuclear disarmament policy (retiring the nuclear Tomahawk cruise missile system and the Peacekeeper ICBM) has effectively retracted the US’s “nuclear umbrella” to the point where Japan, now embroiled in a vitrolic dispute with China over ownership of the Senkaku Islands, MUST now consider whether to use at least part of her massive reserves of plutonium generated by their nuclear power industry to defend herself.

South Korea has actually done some separation of plutonium, albeit publicly on a small scale, but an economic powerhouse such as Seoul can scarcely be less able to develop nuclear weapons in secret than their impoverished northern cousins can. The time will come when the US Eighth Army will no longer suffice to guard the famously thin line between North and South Korea, and the South Koreans must decide then and there whether to submit to nuclear blackmail from the North, or to develop their own nuclear deterrent.

The two cases above are actually protoypes of how nuclear proliferation is an inevitable consequence of the worldwide availability of fissile material and the force-multiplying capacity of nuclear arms.

China has not idly or casually diverted so much of its wealth in copying, then exceeding the capacity of the United States of America to produce not only nuclear weapons, but ones of an advanced nature that use what we considered to be our own proprietary technology (such as oblate spheroid conformation of the primary, a Livermore concept which a Chinese researcher casually announced they had been working with for years at a conference in the 1990s).

The Chinese’s clear intent is to provide nuclear deterrent cover for progressive military annexation of much of the China Sea, clear out to what they call the “third Island chain” somewhere around Palawan in the Phillippines. They’ve already set up a county government in the Spratly Islands, which are clearly territory claimed by at least nine of their neighbors. I’ve already covered what they are now attempting with Japan with respect to the Senkaku Islands.

As this energetic expansionism of China proceeds, the “small dragons” of the ASEAN countries have to decide how best to proceed – to accept Chinese hegemony of an extent we have only just begun to visualize, or to acquire their own nuclear deterrents in order to defend their national sovereignty and self – determination.

Malaysia clearly was involved in setting up production facilities in their own territory for plutonium separation devices in cooperation with A.Q. Khan’s group of free-booting nuclear proliferators. It’s naive to suppose that this happened without consent somewhere in the maze of high government officialdom in Pakistan, so that the drive to create the Islamic Bomb sets up a third clear prototype case for more nuclear proliferation which dovetails nicely with the first two (the threats posed by a specific nuclear-armed neighbor, and by a regional nuclear-armed hegemon which desires to expand massively through territory it has long claimed).

Three strong motives now exist for the relatively rapid expansion of the “nuclear club” at least some of those countries which goliath has mentioned. While the existing world supply of fissile material is now controllable to some extent, Japan owns all the plutonium they will ever need to match Beijing missile for missile, warhead for warhead.

And while Australia at present opposes nuclear proliferation into the South Pacific, who can tell what their attitude will be when confronted with Chinese moves into, say, Palawan and Indonesia, or even Papua New Guinea, which are clearly in their sphere of influence.

The Australians have huge reserves of uranium, a growing uranium mining industry and their work on laser separation of U-235 gives them a potential supply of a fissile which is better than plutonium for some uses. Economic pressures alone may cause Australia to quietly export fissiles to her ASEAN neighbors, especially if this serves to build a counterbalance to Chinese expansionism that the US cannot contain (and we cannot do so indefinitely with our current state of military and naval readiness and our current nuclear arsenal).

Unfortunately for the hopes of the optimists among the nonproliferation community, Australian Labor Party is hanging on by its teeth, with a fragile coalition that could implode at any time. Then the National Party will take over and Australian policies in a number of areas could change – including nuclear nonproliferation. The Australians have to live in part of the world we do not; their territory is directly in the path of the Chinese territorial expansion.

If seems ridiculous to posit a wave of nuclear proliferation driven by fights over island chains in the Pacific, contemplate the Falklands War for a few minutes. Then consider what future governments of Islamic states in the region may do either from religious zeal to pursue Islam or practical worry about losing territory or even national sovereignty to Beijing.

The “unfriendly nuclear neighbor” scenario is metastasizing in places like Myanmar and Syria; it might be slowed by surgical military raids on nuclear facilities or economic pressure, but again, nuclear devices have such a mystique about them for multiplying military force that dissuading all small but reasonably solvent states from getting them is hopeless.

If nothing else, the case of A.Q.Khan shows how an economically desperate but nuclearly literate nation can fill its coffers by quietly proliferating even partial nuclear weapons capability and delivery systems. This lesson has not been lost on the Pakistanis’ partners in missile and nuclear proliferation work, the North Koreans; nor to their former customers, Iran.

My point is that the 21st century will possess not a bi-or tri-polar nuclear world, but one with a multiplicity of nuclear tripwires strung across the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea, the Bering Straits, possibly even the Mediterannean (who can say what Moammar Qaddafi will try to buy on the nuclear black market now that he is solvent and a reputable trading partner to the entire world?) and even the Caribbean – since Brazil has both a competent nuclear industry and may have a willing financier for its expansion in militant, prickly Venezuela.

When the Treaty of Tlateloco was signed, only two Latin American governments had even modest nuclear ambitions. Now Colombia is confronted with a next-door neighbor who can buy anything he wants in the way of nuclear-capable delivery systems from the Russians and considerable contempt for Colombian territorial integrity. They have the money and the will to maintain national self-determination to follow Japan and South Korea into the market for at least a modest nuclear deterrent.

And if Brazil becomes not only a nuclear weapons power but a proliferator, will Argentina sit still?

My point is that nuclear proliferation beyond the original signatory Nuclear States of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is a fait accompli. It’s out there, the Nuclear Club is growing. The United States can’t rationally pretend that the nuclear threat to its citizens and allies is contracting or can be contained. It just can’t.

Disassembling or allowing our national nuclear infrastructure to decay from neglect is not a rational option for America – we need to continue making nuclear weapons and improving them, hopefully to achieve better military results with less collateral damage to nonmilitary targets. So I respectfully disagree with the sentiments of Messrs Kristensen and Oelrich, and some of the other commenters in this thread. Further nuclear disarmament of the United States imperils our common defense and our national welfare.

Reply: Your comment is certainly up high on the list of worst-case outlook. But other than a presumption that everything that can go bad will go bad, I don’t see much that substantiates why the prediction of the 1960s (of rampant nuclear proliferation and Soviet (substituted with Chinese) expansion) that didn’t happen then will now happen after all. Granted, if and if, but the tripwires you mention were also there during the Cold War and your bottom line argument seems to be that the only thing that prevented it from happening then was a robust U.S. nuclear arsenal. Now, so the logic goes, that arsenal has been reduced and might be reduced further in the future and so therefore proliferation and Chinese expansion will automatically follow.

My take on it is that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is being reduced because its principle driver – the Soviet nuclear threat – is no more and that its current size is still in excess of what is required for the remaining threats. The other challenges you mention are best addressed by other aspects of national power, an effort that is in full swing. Even the latest Nuclear Posture Review, despite its conclusion to maintain a large nuclear posture on high alert, elevated non-proliferation, arms control, and non-nuclear capabilities to the same level of importance as the nuclear arsenal as means of national power in the 21st century precisely because nuclear weapons are seen as less useful in forwarding and promoting U.S. national and international security goals. The U.S. is not “disassembling or allowing our national nuclear infrastructure to decay from neglect,” but is gradually reducing its Cold War nuclear posture and restructuring its nuclear infrastructure to match this reduced requirement. If the $100 billion plus weapons modernization and the $180 billion plus infrastructure modernization planned for the next two decades is not enough to counter the threats you fear, then it’s hard to imagine – at least for me- the nuclear capabilities that would. HK

Oligarchies like China say a lot of things. What they do (such as massing several hundred nuclear-capable missiles across the Formosa Straits from Taiwan, adding significantly to the total every year) is more significant. My point was that the strategic deterrence mission of the United States requires nuclear weapons to be maintained in an objectively usable and potent state. This is something which the actions advocated by Messrs. Oelrich and Kristensen won’t allow to happen.

Nuclear weapons can’t be un-invented. We have to plan for a world in which the number of nuclear-armed states is increasing, not decreasing, and in which the aggregate nuclear threat to the citizens of the United States is not diminishing. Soon enough, non-state actors will have nuclear weapons, and Al-Qaeda or one of their allies could be one of them.

Moving on, I understand that somewhere in 2002, Pres. Putin promised Pres. Jiang his Pacific Fleet would help deny USN access to Taiwan in the event of conflict there. From this, I infer that any military initiative against China almost necessarily implies preemptive action against Russia — something Russia must realize.

The militaries of both countries have made bald, public threats to strike the US homeland and our allies with nuclear weapons and not been admonished for it by their civilian leadership. This is a very clear indication that our present nuclear arsenal is not over-large for the deterrence mission we confront through no fault of our own.

In fact, our own nuclear stockpile’s reliability is questionable at best in some cases owing to possible neutron damage to weapon components and build-up of activation products in their primaries. This is not a secret from either Russia or China – they rely on Congress to do much of their work for them, causing our deterrent posture to gradually fade away just as both Russia and China are buidling their own nuclear arsenals up.

“Newsweek: How do you respond to those who say the United States should take the lead against nuclear proliferation by drastically reducing its own arsenal?

Gates: The reality is that there are probably two dozen, perhaps 30, countries out there that would seriously consider their own nuclear deterrent if they couldn’t rely on ours. And this is something that I think a lot of people overlook in terms of the importance of keeping our own nuclear deterrent modern, keeping it reliable, keeping it safe.”

Reply: Gates is setting up a strawman. The “extended deterrence” he refers to is often used intermittently by opponents of nuclear disarmament as either the big “boogieman” or the big “nonproliferator,” depending on the circumstances. The “perhaps 30″ countries he’s referring to are:

NATO (24): Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey.
ANZUS (2): Australia, New Zealand.
Northeast Asia (2): Japan, South Korea, Taiwan (?).

Gates’s mistake is that he leaves out that many of these countries actually have policies that favor total nuclear disarmament. They have been waiting for decades for the United States, Russia, France, China, and the United Kingdom to live up to their pledge under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to disarm.

His suggestion that all of these countries would “seriously consider their own nuclear deterrent” if we didn’t provide one is a stretch even under the most extreme realistic circumstances. Denmark? Iceland? Lithuania? Luxembourg? Portugal? New Zealand? Seriously! Only a few of the 30 are normally considered potential nuclear weapon proliferators: Germany, Japan, and perhaps South Korea. Gates should at least have mentioned that. And even in those countries there would be strong political and cultural constraints working against going nuclear.

Besides, the theory that those countries might go nuclear assumes they’re threatened by nuclear weapons. But no one is seriously advocating the United States disarms alone but in tandem with the other nuclear weapon states as part of an effort to remove nuclear threats.

Oh, and Gates could probably also have mentioned that two NATO countries – France and the United Kingdom – actually decided years ago to go nuclear even though the United States had thousands of nuclear weapons deployed to defend NATO. The virtues of extended deterrence are a little more nuanced than Gates and others suggest. HK

Reply: I normally delete comments that are more ideology than debate, but decided to respond to your comment because I think it represents an approach to debating nuclear policy that is both wrong and counterproductive. It’s not about who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy but what the policy is.

It is precisely because of Mr. Gates’s experience in these issues that his speech was disappointing, but also why it was not irrelevant. His “realism” – or parts of it – is shared by many insiders (although fewer than before) who will weigh in heavily on the nuclear policy Barack Obama – if elected – will attempt to implement.

That policy may seem very different from that of the Bush administration, but it is also similar to that of the Clinton administration: “keep our commitment under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty;” try to persuade the Senate to ratify the CTBT (not that Clinton tried to do that); try to get Russian agreement to “take U.S. and Russian ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert” and “extend essential monitoring and verification provisions of START I;” and “lead a global effort to negotiate a verifiable treaty ending the production of fissile materials for weapons purposes….” Barack Obama’s pledge to “immediately stand down all nuclear forces to be reduced under the Moscow Treaty” sounds good but rings hollow because that is scheduled to happen in 2010 anyway.

Obama has pledged to reinstate nuclear disarmament as a long-term goal for U.S. policy, something most administrations before George W. Bush have shared. But Obama has also clearly stated that his administration “will not pursue unilateral disarmament. As long as nuclear weapons exist, we’ll retain a strong nuclear deterrent.” Although there are many cuts and changes that could and should be made unilaterally to jump-start the process, the second part of the pledge tends to mean a nuclear posture second to none that perpetuates the importance of nuclear weapons and endless modernization. How to break that cycle?

On nuclear warhead production, Obama has stated that he does “not support a premature decision to produce the RRW,” a vague pledge that leaves the door open to RRW-like production. He has also stated that he “will not authorize the development of new nuclear weapons and related capabilities,” a better formulation, but one that would continue the wrangling over what constitutes “new.” Under this policy, the United States could resume industrial-scale production of RRW-like warheads as long as they are not entirely “new” warheads with entirely “new” capabilities and provided the production does not increase the size of the arsenal.

On the question of the role of nuclear weapons, Obama has not said anything about how he sees the role of nuclear weapons toward Russia or China even thought those two countries are likely the two most important drivers for U.S. nuclear policy. The Bush administration said Russia was not an enemy and removed the country as an immediate contingency for nuclear planning. How does Obama plan to move that ball forward, especially considering Russia’s recent nuclear chest-beating? On China, the Clinton administration ordered the military to broaden the list of facilities to be targeted with nuclear weapons, and the Bush administration followed up by deploying the Trident II SLBM in the Pacific, shifting the focus of the SSBN fleet to the Pacific, and forward-deploying B-2 and B-52 bombers to Guam. Does Obama plan to continue that trend or what is his vision for nuclear relations with China?

On Iran, Obama has wisely said that diplomacy and sanctions should be the primary means to prevent that country from building nuclear weapons, but also repeated that “we should take no option, including military action, off the table….” The formulation “no option” also leaves the option open to use nuclear weapons against Iran, an option that is politically impossible and militarily unnecessary, and which he therefore should and could take off the table with no loss to U.S. national security or ability to act. Whether it is indeed necessary to maintain nuclear strike options against regional states that cannot threaten the existence of the United States is an important question that Obama will have to tackle if he wishes to reduce the role of nuclear weapons and move the world toward disarmament.

Granted, we’re in an election campaign, and what candidates promise and end up doing as presidents are not necessarily the same. Many people are focused on how low Obama might reduce the number of nuclear weapons; I’m more interested in what the role of the remaining weapons will be. HK

Besides being false, this amounts to nuclear blackmail: he’s saying that we can only get CTBT if we buy RRW! Wrong — the more sensible path is to ratify the CTBT and forget about RRW. I think we need to be wary of this false linkage.

In any case, before they start talking of the reliability of the warheads, perhaps the USG ought to get more reliable duct tape for the stockpile: story.