Strategic Policy

In the past several months, President Barack Obama and his leading cabinet members and advisers, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and national security adviser Jim Jones, have set an ambitious arms control agenda focusing on the need to extend START, prevent proliferation in Iran and North Korea, and secure loose nuclear weapons and fissile material from theft or unauthorized use. (Continue

The Cold War ended nearly two decades ago, but U.S. and Russian leaders have missed opportunities to implement agreements that would have achieved deeper, irreversible cuts in their nuclear and missile stockpiles. As a result, their nuclear weapons doctrines and capabilities remain largely unchanged, and mutual suspicions linger.

Beginning with their inaugural meeting April 1, Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev have the opportunity to reset the U.S.-Russian relationship with the negotiation of a new and far-reaching nuclear arms reduction treaty before the year’s end. If a new treaty is not concluded and the 1991 START is allowed to expire as scheduled on Dec. 5, there will effectively be no limits on the two country’s still bloated nuclear stockpiles. (Continue)

The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) as envisioned by the Bush administration is effectively dead. This past fall, for the second year in a row, the Democratic Congress zeroed out funding for the RRW program despite Bush administration claims that extending the life of the current warhead types in the U.S. nuclear stockpile would, at some distant point in the future, lead to a sharp uptick in aging-related defects. (Continue)

Challenging conventional thinking is rarely popular, even or perhaps especially when it is most needed. So it has been with the Bush administration’s approach to arms control and nonproliferation issues. Determined to develop new approaches in arms control, nonproliferation, and strategic policy to deal with the new realities of a post-Cold War era, the administration found itself under fire from those determined to uphold traditional and often outmoded ways of thinking about these matters. Many of its critics doubtless now look forward to the Bush administration’s departure. (Continue)