How Bush’s Proliferation Strategy Still Sucks
This has been lost in the wake of the National Intelligence Estimate, but Jeffrey Lewis’ WaPo piece “Five Myths About the Bomb and Us” is a devastating look at Bush’s equal parts revolutionary and misguided proliferation strategy. Since the end of the Cold War, and even going back to Truman, nuclear stockpile reduction and the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons have been the two long term goals of our nuclear and proliferation strategies. The Bush administration has largely abandoned both of them, slowing down stockpile reductions and not even paying lip service to arms control. The administration instead is maintaining large stockpiles based on future projections that China’s 50 weapon stockpile could one day match ours. So we’re abandoning decades of policy for the sake of threats which don’t even exist yet and are unlikely to.
And while one may say “what’s the big deal about having 5,000 war heads as opposed to 1,000,” there needs to be a positive justification for every warhead above the minimum necessary to maintain a credible, second-strike capable deterrent. And as the flying of six nuclear warheads over the US a few months ago shows, accidents can indeed happen, and the risk of those accidents are lower with every less warhead we have.
More concretely, the President’s abandonment of arm control is both a departure from established, bipartisan policy and reducing our nuclear security in real terms.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) requires each party to provide the other side with information about its strategic forces, open some facilities to inspection and refrain from interfering with satellites and other means of verifying compliance. The Bush administration has complained that the verification process requires “cumbersome” paperwork. But the inconvenience of complying with START would be dwarfed by the task of collecting the information about Russia’s arsenal without active Russian cooperation.
The “benefit” we get from not signing to START is that our nuclear forces are “flexible” – meaning that we could deploy them against some threat we can’t predict now. But this ignores the benefits of START, namely that it could help us neutralize the current nuclear threat — an accidental or unintentional Russian launch. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration is pessimistic about any deal that would involve any burdens on the US, such as complementary inspections of our nuclear infrastructure, even if we can derive real benefits from them. Non-Proliferation policy up until the Bush administration has been based on a rather straightforward deal. Only five countries get to have nuclear weapons and the rest can not. In exchange for this disparity, the non-nuclear states get civilian energy and the nuclear states agree to reduce their arsenals with the eventual goal of total disarmament. The Bush administration, on the other hand, has abandoned stockpile reduction, bilateral arms control and instead thinks the best way to control proliferation is to invade countries (Iraq) that have no nuclear program.
