Acknowledging Failure

Part III of my analysis of the growing nuclear dangers and the collapsing arms control regime.

If you regularly read this newsletter, you’ve seen that this week I am serializing a long paper that I wrote for the International Policy Journal on Trump’s nuclear weapons plans, the collapse of the arms control regime and what we might do about it.

The paper grew out of discussions with a philanthropist who wanted to increase public awareness of the nuclear dangers. They were concerned that current efforts were woefully inadequate. They are not alone. I have spoken with a number of donors, activists and experts about their shared concern about rising dangers, Biden’s failure to reform out-dated nuclear policies and the inability of existing efforts to prevent the new nuclear arms race.

The paper is my attempt to put in one place (1) a summary of the strategic moment we are in; (2) why arms control is collapsing (hint: it’s not because it doesn’t work); (3) why current efforts are ineffective; and, finally, (4) what strategies might work. I have gotten a very good response to the paper from donors and some fellow experts, but at 5200 words, it’s a lot to read. So I have broken it into sections for this newsletter.

Here is Part IV. You can read the full paper at the Policy Journal, a publication of the Center for International Policy.

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The Decline of the Arms Control Movement

Secretary Kerry Straightens Papers at Hotel in Austria After Signing Documents to Lift Sanctions Following Implementation of Plan Controlling Iran’s Nuclear Program. (State Department)

One might imagine that as the crisis in arms control worsens, groups promoting arms control would flourish. But the opposite is happening.

Last year, one of the largest organizations in the field, Global Zero, collapsed. The year before, one of the veterans of the 1980s, Women’s Action for New Direction, closed its doors. Others will follow. It is difficult to find any American arms control organization that is growing. Most are small and contracting. It is difficult to point to any success that even the largest have achieved in over a decade. The field is in a death spiral.

The reasons are threefold: lack of funding, lack of public support, and the failure of the organizations to sustain a change in nuclear policy.

Last year, the MacArthur Foundation withdrew from the field, cutting in half the foundation funding available to limit and eliminate nuclear weapons. Philanthropies provided a meager $23 million in grants for the entire field in 2023, according to the Peace and Security Funders Group which tracks such giving. This is a fraction of the estimated $8 to 12 billion donated in 2022 to address the climate crisis.

Donors appear skeptical that non-government organizations can motivate meaningful change in nuclear postures. Why give money to groups that cannot show any impact?

Indeed, in this century, there have been only three successful campaigns that significantly impacted nuclear policy. They are the coalition effort that encouraged the successful negotiation and adoption of the New Start treaty in 2010; a similar coalition that supported the agreement rolling back and freezing Iran’s nuclear program in 2014; and, the global effort that produced the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017.

The first of these agreements, as noted, is on life-support. The Iran Deal is dead after President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018. The nuclear weapons ban treaty, while signed by 93 nations, has been ignored and vilified by most of the nine nuclear-armed states.

These failures are not for lack of trying. The nuclear field has some of the brightest, hardest-working experts, advocates and communicators in the business. For decades, they have worked to reverse the arms race, often recruiting nuclear weapons advocates to the cause.

The Reagan nuclear build-up, for example, was guided by the relentless advocacy of a network of nuclear hawks organized into The Committee on the Present Danger. Founded in 1976, these experts preached that the opening of a “window of vulnerability” would soon allow the Soviet Union to launch a devastating first strike on the United States that would eliminate our ability to respond. The answer, they said, was a massive new nuclear build up.

The Nuclear Freeze movement was born in response to this nuclear hysteria. Mass movements, expert analysis and congressional opposition to new nuclear weapons programs combined to convince President Reagan to reverse course. Arms control worked so well that by 1994, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the founding members of the Committee, Paul Nitze, advocated the step-by-step elimination of the weapons he once championed. “The idea that the future peace and well being of the world should rest upon the threat of nuclear annihilation of large numbers of noncombatants is, in the long run, unacceptable,” he wrote.

As arsenals continued to decline, it became possible to see this vision as a practical path. In January 2007, George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn wrote the first of several op-eds calling for “a world free of nuclear weapons.” Former Committee on a Present Danger leader Max Kampleman joined the effort, forcefully arguing for “zero nuclear weapons” in talks around the world.

Two major NGO efforts were launched to help realize this goal. The first, built around the work of the four statesmen and their op-ed, was the Nuclear Threat Initiative begun by former Senator Sam Nunn and CNN founder Ted Turner. The second was Global Zero, a U.S.-based group led by former Minuteman control officer Bruce Blair, that convened hundreds of former officials and experts in high-level summits around the world.

Both produced detailed reports, had dozens of experts testify before government bodies, convened scores of impactful conferences and workshops and generated hundreds of articles, videos and even films, such as Countdown to Zero. President Barack Obama and his 2008 opponent Senator John McCain, both embraced the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. Indeed, the first global security speech Obama gave as president was devoted to articulating this vision and a practical path to realize it.

Both efforts failed. There has never been an “after action” report analyzing why they failed. But the failure is clear. In hindsight, we can mark the Senate approval of the New START treaty in December 2010 as the high water mark of the nuclear abolition movements. There have not been any negotiated reductions in global arsenals since. The 2016 election of President Trump brought open nuclear hawks back in control of U.S. policy. President Joe Biden did nothing to change these policies.

Twilight Struggle

An illustration of the LGM-35A Sentinel ICBM launch silo, the Air Force’s newest weapon system known as the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent. (USAF)

While in office, Biden fully funded all the new nuclear weapons programs. Almost all are now severely behind schedule and over-budget. He leaves office with no new agreements in sight. No official has paid any cost for these demonstrable failures.

At best, we have a glimmer of hope that, before he leaves, President Biden could use his executive power to end the Cold War practice of “sole authority.” Biden could prevent Donald Trump or any future president from starting a nuclear war “without other senior officials being directly involved in a decision to use America’s most powerful weapons,” as Jon Wolfsthal, former National Security Council senior director for arms control under President Barack Obama, urged in The Washington Post last December. This would bring attention to the threat inherent in the existence of these weapons (and potentially prevent a crazed president from unilaterally destroying human civilization.)

Ploughshares Fund Executive Director Liz Warner summarizes the components of this new nuclear crisis in a video prepared by her foundation:

At the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons stockpiles were quickly declining after a high point of 70,000 nuclear warheads…This was the result of treaties that greatly reduced global nuclear arsenals…This new trend showed the promise of a new day. A future free of nuclear weapons seemed like a real possibility. We enjoy decades of a world where it felt like the wheel of progress was turning. Today, all of this progress is under threat.

•Russia has walked away from negotiating new treaties as the last one is about to expire. This, after the country used the threat of nuclear weapons in their invasion of Ukraine.
•After years of maintaining a modest nuclear force, China is now significantly expanding its arsenal, possibly to as many as 1500 warheads by 2035.
•Tensions in the Middle East continue to boil over with the looming threat of nuclear weapons lurking in the background. Israel already possesses nuclear weapons if the conflict expands. Having seen the collapse of the Iran nuclear deal, Tehran may make a strategic decision to develop them.
•North Korea, once the new kid on the nuclear block, has now been a nuclear armed state for nearly 20 years. Its unconstrained program continues to advance, aided by regular and highly public missile tests.
•In the West, distressing numbers of elected officials are embracing a new proliferation of nuclear weapons as an inevitability.
•We are in a new nuclear arms race. Our planet is on the wrong trajectory.

Might President Trump reverse this slide towards disaster? It is possible that Trump, who has pledged to slash government spending, may look for savings by slowing down or eliminating some of these weapon programs.

He would have support from many in Congress. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) this year requested a study from the Congressional Budget Office detailing alternatives to the massively expensive nuclear programs, citing fears “about the effects of a buildup on both arms-race and crisis stability and counseling for more efforts at preserving or reestablishing arms control.”

It is also possible that Trump could negotiate new arms limitation agreements. He came close to a break-through deal with North Korea, but at the last minute foolishly listened to John Bolton’s advice at the 2019 Hanoi summit instead of negotiator Steve Biegun. Trump scuttled the step-by-step reduction plan worked out by Biegun, in favor of Bolton’s demand that North Korea give up all its weapons in exchange for vague US promises. North Korea (aware of how that kind of deal worked out for Libya) walked away and has now built up its arsenal and forged closer ties with Russia.

Still, Trump might work out some arrangement with Iran or agree with Putin that after the death of New START, both sides could increase their deployed forces but stay within some informal limit of, say, 2500 weapons each, up from the current 1550 limit in New START.

The more likely scenario is that nuclear hawks and large corporations will continue to dominate policy making in the Defense Department, pushing for more weapon programs. The military budget, now at about $870 billion, is likely to break the $1 trillion barrier for the first time in American history. As long as the pie is growing, defense leaders are likely to divide the spoils so that each grouping, including the Strategic Command, gets a large slice. Annual spending for nuclear weapons and related programs will likely soar past the $100 billion mark.

End of Part III

Next: New Strategies to Reverse the Nuclear Arms Race

For Part I, please click here

For Part II, please click here

For the complete article, please visit the International Policy Journal at the Center for International Policy.

Bonus: A new article in Gizmodo by Matthew Gault features extensive comments from me and the great Sharon Squassoni on all these themes.