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"Though we have acheived progress, our work is not over. That is why I support the mission of the Arms Control Association. It is, quite simply, the most effective and important organization working in the field today." 

– Larry Weiler
Former U.S.-Russian arms control negotiator
August 7, 2018
United States

New Approaches Needed to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe


April 2022
By Daryl G. Kimball

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a massive assault on independent, democratic, non-nuclear Ukraine has unleashed a war that has killed thousands, displaced millions, and raised the risk of nuclear conflict.

At an emergency session of the UNGA March 2,141 member states voted in favor of a resolution deploring "in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine” and “condemning the decision of the Russian Federation to increase the readiness of its nuclear forces."Instead of reverting to destabilizing Cold War-era behaviors, leaders and concerned citizens in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere need to embrace new thinking and strategies about nuclear weapons and disarmament that move the world from the shadow of nuclear catastrophe.

Putin and other Russian officials have made implied nuclear threats and put their strategic nuclear forces on a heightened state of readiness to ward off a direct U.S. or NATO military intervention in Ukraine. It is not a new or uniquely Russian idea. U.S. officials also claim that U.S. strategic nuclear forces create “maneuver space” to “project conventional military power.”

Nuclear threats and alerts were not uncommon and were no less dangerous during the Cold War. Such rhetoric and orders to raise the operational readiness of nuclear forces can be misinterpreted in ways that lead to nuclear countermoves, escalation, and a nuclear attack.

Biden wisely has not matched Putin’s nuclear taunts, but the risk of escalation is real. A close encounter between NATO and Russian warplanes, which could result if NATO imposed a no-fly zone in Ukraine, could lead to a wider conflict. Because Russian and U.S. military strategies reserve the option to use nuclear weapons first against non-nuclear threats, fighting could quickly go nuclear.

Russian nuclear doctrine states that nuclear weapons can be used in response to an attack with weapons of mass destruction or if a conventional war threatens the “very existence of the state.” Right now, these conditions do not exist. But if the Kremlin believes a serious attack is underway, it might use short-range, tactical nuclear weapons to tip the military balance in its favor.

Unfortunately, U.S. President Joe Biden’s new Nuclear Posture Review states that the “fundamental role” of the U.S. arsenal will be to deter nuclear attacks while still leaving open the option for nuclear first use in “extreme circumstances” to counter conventional, biological, chemical, and possibly cyberattacks.

There is no plausible military scenario, and no legally justifiable basis for threatening or using nuclear weapons first, if at all. Once nuclear weapons are used between nuclear-armed states, there is no guarantee it will not lead to an all-out nuclear exchange.

New thinking is needed. The adoption of policies prohibiting the first use of nuclear weapons would increase stability. But even that would not eliminate the dangers of nuclear deterrence strategies and arsenals, which depend on maintaining the credible threat of prompt retaliation in response to a nuclear attack.

U.S. and European citizens need to mobilize and press their leaders to pursue even bolder initiatives to steer the nuclear possessor states away from nuclear confrontation and arms racing.

For example, UN General Assembly members, particularly those who negotiated the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, should consider a “uniting for peace” resolution in response to the immediate threat of nuclear use. Such resolutions have been used in rare cases when the UN Security Council, lacking unanimity among its five permanent, nuclear-armed members, fails to act to maintain international peace and security.

Such a resolution could build on the March 2 vote in the General Assembly condemning Russia’s invasion and Putin’s decision to increase the readiness of his nuclear forces and would recall the assembly’s declaration of November 1961 that said that “any state using nuclear…weapons is to be considered as violating the Charter of the UN, as acting contrary to the laws of humanity and as committing a crime against mankind and civilization.”

An updated resolution could declare that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is contrary to international law and mandate negotiations on legally binding security guarantees against unprovoked attacks from states possessing nuclear weapons.

The resolution could mandate that any state that initiates a nuclear attack shall be stripped of its voting privileges at the United Nations and recommend collective measures to restore the peace under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Such an initiative would reinforce the nuclear weapons taboo at a critical juncture.

Responsible states must also come together on a meaningful disarmament plan at the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference in August. Although Putin’s war has derailed U.S.-Russian talks for now on further cuts in their bloated strategic arsenals and new agreements to limit short- and intermediate-range nuclear weapons systems, they are still bound by their disarmament obligations under Article VI of the NPT.

The last remaining U.S.-Russian arms reduction agreement, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, expires in 2026. Without commonsense arms control guardrails, the dangers of unconstrained global nuclear arms racing will only grow.

Putin’s war on Ukraine is a sobering reminder that outdated nuclear deterrence policies create unacceptable risks. The only way to eliminate the danger is to reinforce the norm against nuclear use and pursue more sustainable path toward their elimination.

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a massive assault on independent, democratic, non-nuclear Ukraine has unleashed a war that has killed thousands, displaced millions, and raised the risk of nuclear conflict.

Arms Control Must Remain the Goal


April 2022
By Andrei Zagorski

Less than four years ago, experts would acknowledge the possibility that Ukraine could eventually become an arena for Russian-NATO confrontation and predict that “any significant reescalation of military hostilities in Ukraine, pushing NATO, Russia or both to intervene directly or indirectly, may quickly grow into a direct military engagement in the most sensitive areas along their shared border,” as suggested by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) network of think tanks and academic institutions. Such a development would also bear the danger of potential nuclear escalation of the conflict.1

Russian President Vladimir Putin during his address to the nation at the Kremlin on February 21, three days before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After failing to secure a quick victory over Kyiv, Putin has raised fears that he may use chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons in the war. (Photo by Alexey Nikolsky/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)Although this scenario appeared remote at the time, Russia is weeks into its war in Ukraine; and the possibility of a nuclear escalation involving Russia, NATO, and the United States has reached levels not seen since the end of the Cold War. Since the beginning of the war in late February, Russia and the United States have played the nuclear deterrence card to communicate what they would see as redlines, the crossing of which could trigger World War III. As the hostilities evolved, however, these redlines seemed to blur, opening grey areas and thus increasing the ambiguity as to what developments could lead to inadvertent nuclear escalation. This highlights the need for a more robust mechanism, including relevant arms control measures, to appropriately address this inherent danger.

Mutual Signaling

From the beginning of the conflict, the United States and NATO repeatedly conveyed the message that they would not send troops to defend Ukraine, although they were prepared to arm the government in Kyiv and raise the costs of the intervention for Russia. Still, while launching the military operation, Russian President Vladimir Putin explicitly warned the West not to think of intervening militarily, implicitly threatening that this could lead to a nuclear war. “I would now like to say something very important for those who may be tempted to interfere in these developments from the outside,” Putin said on February 24. “No matter who tries to stand in our way or, all the more so, create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready. All the necessary decisions in this regard have been taken. I hope that my words will be heard.”2

At the same time, U.S. President Joe Biden also signaled that the United States would not shy away from entering a world war that, by default, would become nuclear should the Russian military operation be extended beyond the borders of Ukraine and spill over onto the territory of any NATO member states. “If they move once—granted, if we respond, it is World War III, but we have a sacred obligation on NATO territory,”3 Biden said on March 11. Yet, the devil is in the details. In the course of the hostilities, many questions have arisen and more may arise in the future as to whether a particular action could be seen by one or another side as an escalation that could lead to direct engagement.

Although the politically controversial option of establishing a no-fly zone in Ukraine was rejected by the United States and NATO because it might lead to direct engagement between Russian and NATO combat aircraft, the consequences of other options were less obvious. Could the continuous supply of weapons to Ukraine from NATO member states amid the hostilities be interpreted as direct interference by the Western alliance in the war? Although Moscow would not take it that far, the Kremlin has made it clear that “any cargo moving into Ukrainian territory, which we would believe is carrying weapons, would be fair game.”4 It seems that this proposition is tacitly accepted in the West. Yet, if the Ukrainian air force launches from airfields on the territory of neighboring NATO member states, such as Romania and Poland—an option considered for a while during the early weeks of the war—would that provoke Russian strikes against such facilities, thus extending the military operation beyond the borders of Ukraine, and would NATO consider it a casus belli?

Such questions suggest how developments on the ground and decisions made by top leaders could further blur the redlines established by nuclear deterrence postures on both sides and set in motion an inadvertent escalation of the war. So far, Russia and the United States have exercised restraint in order to avoid such unintended escalation. One example was the U.S. decision to postpone a scheduled Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile flight test.5 Nevertheless, uncertainties persist and grow as the war continues.

A Wake-Up Call?

What lessons will be learned about the long-standing Russian and U.S. nuclear deterrence postures when the war in Ukraine is over? Will the war serve as a wake-up call similar to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and lead to cooperative measures to reduce the risk of a nuclear war, not least by means of arms control agreements that could keep the escalatory dynamic from spinning out of control? Will this conflict lead to a new conventional and nuclear arms race extended to new domains, such as cyberwarfare? The answers to these questions are not obvious, but the world is more dangerous now than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.

At the moment, there is no way to know how the war in Ukraine might end. It seems that, for the time being, Kyiv is ready to negotiate with Moscow and may be prepared to abandon the goal of NATO membership for Ukraine, pending approval by a constitutional majority of the Ukrainian parliament or by a referendum. The issue of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the status of Crimea and the Donbas will poison relations between Moscow and Kyiv and Moscow and the West over the long term. So far, all options remain open, including Ukraine being pulled back into the Russian orbit; retaining room for maneuvering between Russia and the West as a nonaligned country like Finland, Yugoslavia, or Austria did during the Cold War; or even continuing to pursue its European option without aspiring for NATO membership.

Whatever the outcome, with Russia drawing its redlines on the ground unilaterally, the current dividing line in Europe will deepen. There will be no easy way to return to the discussion of a wider European security agenda, as anticipated in talks preceding the war, including on the concept of indivisible security, a concept that was at the heart of Russian proposals for years.6 An OSCE summit to address these issues, as proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron, is off the agenda for the time being. Nevertheless, the war has highlighted the enduring need to continue addressing relevant issues of strategic stability in order to minimize the risk of an unintentional stumble into the danger of nuclear escalation in a crisis.

As argued in 1958 by Alfred Wohlstetter, the existence of nuclear weapons does not automatically prevent a nuclear war but increases the danger of accidental wars particularly during a crisis, although this risk can be mitigated by arms control measures.7 This finding, which at the time seemed mostly intellectual, was reinforced by practical experience as Moscow and Washington engaged in crisis management when decisions had to be made under severe emotional stress, time pressure, and insufficient and contradictory information. The need for nuclear arms control was one of the most important lessons learned from this experience so that, in the end, it was not nuclear arms but nuclear arms control that has prevented a nuclear World War III.8

It is the evidence of the grey zone, in which the redlines of mutual nuclear deterrence tend to blur in the ongoing war in Ukraine, that suggests that nuclear arms control must be strengthened and not further dismembered despite the current collapse of Russian-Western relations.

Toward this end, several steps need to be addressed urgently. In the first instance, these must include the resumption of the Russian-U.S. strategic stability dialogue so that the two sides do not lose transparency into each other’s nuclear force structure and the predictability of their strategic postures with the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and its verification regime four years from now.

It is also in the security interests of both sides to agree on measures of restraint and cooperation with respect to dangerous military incidents and their deescalation so that eventual incidents do not ratchet up tensions even more. In this regard, reopening the lines of communication between the Russian and NATO defense establishments is essential.

Finally, at a later stage, NATO and Russia should open discussions once again on where and how their conventional forces should be configured in areas where the two sides come into close geographic contact. A formal agreement with appropriate transparency and verification should be the goal even if it takes a long time to get there.

 

ENDNOTES

1. OSCE Network of Think Tanks and Academic Institutions, “Reducing the Risks of Conventional Deterrence in Europe: Arms Control in the NATO-Russia Contact Zones,” December 2018, pp. 8, 12, 14, https://osce-network.net/file-OSCE-Network/Publications/RISK_SP.pdf.

2. “Address by the President of the Russian Federation,” February 24, 2022, President of Russia, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67843.

3. Josh Wingrove, “Biden Says He’d Fight World War III for NATO but Not for Ukraine,” Bloomberg, March 11, 2022.

4. Embassy of the Russian Federation in New Zealand, “Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's Interview With RT TV, 18 March 2022,” March 19, 2022, https://newzealand.mid.ru/en/press_center/news/foreign_minister_sergey_lavrov_s_interview_with_rt_tv_18_march_2022/.

5. Daryl G. Kimball, “How to Avoid Nuclear Catastrophe—and a Costly New Arms Race,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 11, 2022, https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/how-to-avoid-nuclear-catastrophe-and-a-costly-new-arms-race/.

6. See Rachel Ellehuus and Andrei Zagorski, “Restoring the European Security Order,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 2019, pp. 2–3, https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/190313_EllehuusandZagorski_RestoringEuropeanOrder.pdf; Jeremy Shapiro et al., “Regional Security Architecture,” in A Consensus Proposal for a Revised Regional Order in Post-Soviet Europe and Eurasia, ed. Samuel Charap et al. (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corp., 2019), pp. 9–31, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF400/CF410/RAND_CF410.pdf.

7. Alfred Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” P-1472, RAND Corp., 1958, https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P1472.html.

8. Alexey Arbatov, “Escalating the Nuclear Rhetoric,” in Preventing the Crisis of Nuclear Arms Control and Catastrophic Terrorism (Moscow: National Institute of Corporate Reform, 2016), p. 15, http://www.luxembourgforum.org/media/documents/Washington_eng-PREVIEW_FINAL_PRINT_VERSION.pdf.


Andrei Zagorski leads the Department for Disarmament and Conflict Resolution Studies at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Russian Academy of Sciences and is a member on the trilateral Deep Cuts Commission.

 

New hostilities between Russia and the West highlight the need for a more robust mechanism, including arms control measures, to address the danger.

An Optimist Admits That It Is Difficult to See a Path Forward


April 2022
By George Perkovich

Optimism is a virtue when working in the nuclear policy field. Given the stakes of the subject matter, it helps to be hopeful, to believe something can and should be done, even when the prospects of success are slim. In this sense, I have always tried to be positive, looking for ways to improve a bad political situation—after the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in 1998, the march to war in Iraq in 2003, the collapse of EU nuclear diplomacy with Iran in 2005, the first North Korean nuclear test in 2006, and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016.

Today, however, the world is watching what may be the defining security crisis of a generation unfold, one that risks catastrophic nuclear escalation. Yet, it is extremely difficult to see a path forward for arms control and cooperative security measures between the United States and Russia, the United States and China, India and China, India and Pakistan, or anyone else.

In 2001, President George W. Bush (R) announced the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as Secretary of State Colin Powell (C) and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, looked on at the White House. Bush and his administration wanted to pursue a missile defense system. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)There is no shortage of ideas to improve this dismal environment. Nuclear policy experts can all recite concrete proposals for confidence-building and risk-reduction measures, crisis management hotlines, and verification experiments, all of which could reduce insecurity among conflicting states. One underexplored area of potential cooperation is the establishment of standards for activities in and toward objects in outer space, especially low earth orbits, to prevent the creation of more debris and ensure that orbital and spectrum capacity are distributed and preserved for the benefit of all humanity.

None of these objectives will be realized as long as the United States, Russia, China and, regarding some issues, India and Pakistan, are internally dysfunctional (omitting North Korea because I do not know its internal dynamics). This dysfunction, whatever the causes, has reduced the capacity of diplomats and other knowledgeable officials to effectively manage or reduce competition and conflict. Everything is hostage to political leaders who often lack the expertise, interest, and temperament required to break impasses and make wise compromises. Indeed, in the five countries referenced here, compromise has become either unthinkable or, in the case of the United States, politically suicidal, especially for Democratic presidents. That is a fact, not a partisan comment.

U.S. Dysfunction

It has long been difficult to muster the two-thirds majority needed in the Senate to ratify treaties. The U.S. Constitution’s allocation of two Senate seats per state regardless of population has allowed relatively unpopulated, internationally isolated states to block the ratification of treaties that a large majority of the population would support. It took 40 years to ratify the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The 1994 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea remains unratified, as does the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, although the United States abides by both. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was ratified in 2010 only because President Barack Obama promised in return a massive infusion of funds to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

In the current U.S. context, it is easier and more profitable politically to pursue short-term, even xenophobic, obstructionism than invest in long-term policy goals. Today, almost all Republican senators would reject any treaty to which Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran would agree, even if many of those senators could not pass a basic quiz on the treaty’s contents.1 Beyond treaties, Republican opposition led by Senators Ted Cruz (Texas), Josh Hawley (Mo.), and others is blocking the confirmation of unprecedented numbers of presidential nominees for important national security positions, undermining the government’s ability to do its job.2

Rather than ratify new arms control treaties, Republican administrations have become more inclined to withdraw from old ones. Unsurprisingly, these short-sighted decisions have significant consequences that leave the United States less secure than if they had remained committed to the original agreement. Abrogating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (President George W. Bush in 2001) stimulated Russia to design alarming new delivery systems that could be immune to U.S. defenses, which are little more effective than would have been the case under the treaty.3 The withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Trump in 2018) has enabled Iran to increase its nuclear know-how and production of fissile material, while delivering no benefits for the United States and its regional partners. This predilection to withdraw from treaties reinforces the view in Moscow, Beijing, and elsewhere that there is no point negotiating with the United States, and it erodes Washington’s diplomatic capital to engage on other crucial U.S. interests abroad.

The old saying about politics stopping at the water’s edge means that, in engaging other countries, especially competitors and adversaries, U.S. politicians would display unity. That notion and practice have become increasingly laughable since the 1994 “Gingrich Revolution.”

The Cold War was infamous and internally destructive for the red-baiting and politically forced narrowness of policy debates. There are lots of negative examples, particularly Vietnam policy in the Johnson administration, but perhaps most telling was the Cuban missile crisis, when President John F. Kennedy kept secret his accommodating decision to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev needed a quid pro quo to agree to withdraw the nuclear-armed missiles from Cuba, and Kennedy gave it to him, even though the Soviets initiated the crisis. Would such a move be kept secret today? If not, would a similar existential crisis be resolvable? Political discourse toward China is starting to chill thinking and debate in recognizable ways, making it difficult politically to advocate win-win approaches to problems with China, in which both sides would need to compromise.

Problems With Russia and China

Russia and China are dysfunctional in their own ways. Autocracy per se is not the problem; autocrats may find it easier to compromise and control news of it than leaders who compete for election. Autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, however, tend to become gods in their own minds, and gods generally do not bend.

Beyond Putin’s murderousness, the incompetence displayed in his aggression against Ukraine is staggering. Moreover, the violent nature of Russian domestic politics and Putin’s repressive hold on his country mean there are no effective checks on his power and no reliable airing of alternative perspectives on important policy issues. Even if Russia defeats Ukraine, however that is defined, disaster for the peoples of both countries is already assured.

Xi has created a similar bubble. His centralization of policymaking and power means that many smart, knowledgeable, industrious, and otherwise productive Chinese officials, businesspeople, and foreign policy experts are becoming more guarded and risk averse. Why risk the trouble that could result from crossing lines that are not clearly drawn or could change tomorrow? This dysfunction appears to extend to nuclear policy and strategic diplomacy. The authority to engage on these issues lies solely with Xi, and because he does not know much about them, there is no indication he has directed his underlings to pursue dialogue with the United States and others.

Even when the United States was marginally more functional, for instance, in the Obama administration, efforts to engage China in strategic dialogue and confidence-building measures were self-centered and inept. Intentions may have been good, and the people conducting the outreach may have been expert; but, as Brad Roberts, a former senior U.S. defense official, said on a recent panel, U.S. officials spent a lot of time articulating why it was in the country’s interest to engage China in strategic stability dialogue or Russia in arms control. They spent much less effort devising proposals that would persuade China that such a dialogue is in its interest. Self-interest is natural, but the current U.S. strain stems from fears of political attack. Administrations too often worry they will lose power, and officials worry they will jeopardize their careers if policy initiatives are not perceived as clear wins for the United States and, implicitly if not explicitly, a loss for the other side.

Roberts told a story about his efforts to persuade Russian officials to adopt security and confidence-building measures that could alleviate Russian concerns about U.S. missile defenses in Europe and U.S. concerns about theater-based Russian nuclear weapons. Russia eventually rejected the U.S. proposals and then, more surprisingly, withdrew its own proposals. A few years later, at a Track 1.5 dialogue meeting, Roberts met one of those officials, now retired, and asked him to explain Russia’s rejection of even its own confidence- and security-building measures. The Russian responded, “It’s simple. You Americans already have too much of both.”4 No government wants to cede relative advantage to others, but when it is domestically impossible to make mutual accommodations, the result will be arms racing, instability, and conflict of varying types.

It is often said arms control with Russia is worthless because the Russians cheat. That judgment will be repeated even more vigorously in the future. The point has merit on the surface, but there is a need to dig a little deeper. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, from which Trump withdrew in 2019, is the most recent example of this challenge. The treaty substantially favored the United States; Richard Perle, a Defense Department hawk, proposed it assuming Moscow would reject it. At that time, however, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisers were thinking of a transformed relationship with the West, as were Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev. So, they agreed to the treaty and implemented it. Early in Putin’s presidency, however, Russian officials started complaining that the treaty put Russia at a disadvantage in balancing U.S. offensive and defensive systems and in balancing China. They wanted adjustments. This did not happen. Eventually, Russia cheated.

I had a conversation along these lines two years ago during a small group meeting with a long-standing senior Republican nuclear policymaker. The lesson of the story, I suggested, was that "treaties must be fair if you want them to last." He smiled and said, "George is absolutely right. [The INF Treaty] was unfair. That's why it was such a good treaty. Arms control should be cost-imposing on our adversaries."

So long as that is the dominant perspective in the United States or any other nuclear-armed state, there is little future for durable arms control agreements, let alone treaties. If powerful countries are not willing to negotiate arrangements that satisfy each other’s interests in some balanced way, either agreements will not be made, or they will be made and then cheated on. In other words, a willingness to compromise is crucial, but that willingness is politically unsupported by today’s Republican Party and arguably by the governments in Russia and China.

 

ENDNOTES

1.  Patricia Zengerle, “U.S. Republican Senators Say They Will Not Back New Iran Nuclear Deal,” Reuters, March 14, 2022.

2.  Michael Crowley, “Empty Desks at the State Department, Courtesy of Ted Cruz,” The New York Times, October 14, 2021.

3.  Michael Krepon, “The Belated Consequences of Killing the ABM Treaty,” Arms Control Wonk, March 7, 2018, https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1204843/the-belated-consequences-of-killing-the-abm-treaty/.

4.  Brad Roberts, Informal remarks at “Nuclear Deterrence and Strategic Stability: What Have We Learned?” University of Virginia, March 16–18, 2022.


George Perkovich is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

There is no hope of dealing constructively with the defining security crisis of a generation if Russia and the West are not willing to compromise.

Nuclear Threats and Alerts: Looking at the Cold War Background


April 2022
By William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball

Implicit or explicit nuclear threats have been the default position of states possessing nuclear weapons for decades. Such threats are the essence of deterrence: if you attack, we will destroy your society or your most vital military assets. All the same, making a nuclear threat is unusual and alarming. For that reason, explicit threats and the raising of nuclear alert levels have become rare since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

A photograph of a ballistic missile base in Cuba was used as evidence with which U.S. President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis October 24, 1962. (Photo by Getty Images)Chinese nuclear threats against Japan and U.S. President Donald Trump’s “fire and fury” threats to North Korea were shocking. The implied nuclear threats that Russian President Vladimir Putin made to the United States and NATO in March as he pressed his full-scale invasion of Ukraine were also startling. Putin said that anyone who stood in the way of the assault would face consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history.” A few days later, he put Russian strategic forces on “special combat readiness.” That nuclear threats can be made today is a shock to those who thought the end of the Cold War had made them historical curiosities.

The recent brandishing of nuclear threats evokes the Cold War days of the 1950s and early 1960s, when such threats, were the modus operandi of superpower conduct during international crises. Such threats became generally irrelevant during the later years of the Cold War and after. How did that come about?

During the Cold War, the possession of nuclear weapons emboldened some national leaders to make threats that they thought would advance their positions in a crisis by coercing or deterring their adversaries. During the Korean War, as a signal to China and the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman authorized the deployment of nuclear weapons components to Guam, although he otherwise saw military use of nuclear weapons as virtually “taboo.” Rejecting the idea of proscribed weapons, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration considered nuclear options as integral to crisis diplomacy and military planning.1

One political narrative that acquired near-legendary status was the claim that the Eisenhower administration had broken the Korean War diplomatic logjam by using nuclear threats against China. Although Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sent messages to Moscow and New Delhi in the hope that they would reach Beijing, his threats were vaguely general in nature: the United States could take stronger military action and “extend [the] area [of] conflict.” To this day, it is unclear whether those messages reached Beijing or were understood as nuclear threats. More decisive factors in ending the war were the death of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, the eventual flexibility of Communist negotiators, and the conventional bombing of North Korea by the United States. Nevertheless, Eisenhower and Dulles believed their implicit nuclear threats had made a difference. Vice President Richard Nixon agreed.2

Such threats became more explicit later. During the 1954–1955 crisis in the Taiwan Strait, China bombarded the nearby offshore islands, and the United States came incorrectly to fear that Beijing was planning to attack Taiwan. Mao Zedong and the Chinese leadership miscalculated by not anticipating that the United States would bring nuclear-armed aircraft carriers into the area or that Eisenhower would declare publicly that nuclear weapons could be “used as a bullet or anything else” if war broke out with China. The crisis eventually simmered down, but the Chinese decided they needed their own nuclear weapons for deterrence, while Eisenhower and his associates concluded that threats and deterrence had succeeded.3

The Soviet leadership made its threats explicit during the 1956 Suez crisis when the British, French, and Israelis invaded Egypt in response to the latter’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. The Eisenhower administration opposed the invasion and put the British under enough financial pressure to compel them to back down. The United States also raised the alert level of strategic nuclear and naval forces out of concern that the Soviets might intervene to support Egypt.4 The Soviets responded with crude atomic blackmail. The Communist Party’s first secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, sent a letter to UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden asking “what situation would Britain find itself in, if she were attacked by stronger states possessing all types of modern destructive weapons?” The threat had no impact, however, because London was already calling off the invasion. Yet, Khrushchev came away from the crisis convinced that nuclear threats were effective.5

There were more nuclear alerts in 1958, although threatening language was avoided. A political crisis in Lebanon prompted the United States to send the Marines to stabilize the situation. The U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) placed nuclear forces in the United States and at overseas bases on alert to deter possible Soviet intervention. Later that summer, another Taiwan Strait crisis erupted, with Beijing again shelling the offshore islands. Although Washington did not stage a SAC alert in that event, it initiated a major show of force with the deployment of nuclear-armed aircraft carriers.6

The Taiwan Strait crisis possessed dangerous potential, and Eisenhower was determined to avoid using nuclear weapons. He instructed the U.S. military that if a conflict broke out, they could only use conventional weapons first. Eisenhower had moved away from casual references about the use of nuclear weapons and was now viewing them as virtually taboo. He told UK Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd that nuclear weapons could only be used for the “big thing” (general war) because when “you use [them] you cross a completely different line.”7

In 1959 the Pentagon devised the Defense Condition (DEFCON) system as a way to raise military alert levels on a systematic, coordinated basis. In the wake of the crisis over the 1960 U-2 downing, when Khrushchev walked out of the Paris summit in protest, top U.S. officials were concerned the Soviets might move against the United States or its European allies. Thus, Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates raised the DEFCON position from 4 to 3, a higher state of readiness, as a “prudent” move.8

Cuban Missile Crisis

The October 1962 Cuban missile crisis involved the most well-known and dangerous Cold War nuclear alerts and threats. By secretly deploying nuclear-armed intermediate- and medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev sought to improve the Soviet strategic position and to use nuclear threats to shield Cuba from another U.S. invasion. After the United States discovered the missiles, the Kennedy administration blockaded Cuba and put U.S. strategic forces on a DEFCON 2 alert, one step away from a general war posture. The Soviets also raised their nuclear alert levels, but not as high as the United States. Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev wanted war, but miscalculations and accidents could have realized their worst fears, motivating both to reach a settlement, lest the situation spin out of control. The U.S. DEFCON status symbolized the risks of further confrontation.9

U.S. President John F. Kennedy speaks about the Cuban missile crisis during a televised speech to the nation on October 24, 1962 when the world was closer to a nuclear conflict than most people understood at the time. (Photo by Getty Images)Neither side ever raised their nuclear alert systems to such high levels again. The grave dangers of a nuclear crisis made Moscow and Washington more cautious, leading to a period of détente that unfolded in the following years. Nixon, elected president in 1968, pursued détente as an element of Cold War strategy, but threat-making was an important thread in his diplomatic approach. Influenced by his experience during the Eisenhower years and by his observations of Khrushchev, Nixon developed what came to be known as the “Madman Theory,” the notion that threatening excessive or extraordinary force could bring diplomatic gains. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger later explained that the "president’s strategy has been to ‘push so many chips into the pot’ that the other side will think we might be ‘crazy’ and might really go much further.”10

During Nixon’s first year in office, as he tried to settle his biggest political problem, the Vietnam War, he made various low-level threats and feints to warn of the risks of escalation in an effort to coerce North Vietnam to be more yielding in the peace talks. As tough-minded as Nixon thought he was, he saw nuclear weapons as militarily unusable in the Vietnam context. What he especially wanted from threats was to prompt the Soviet Union to motivate its North Vietnamese clients to be more cooperative. He and Kissinger deeply overestimated Moscow’s clout with Hanoi, and none of the threats worked, making Nixon angry. To force Hanoi to make concessions, Nixon had plans to escalate the war in October 1969, but called them off because of the risks that escalation would spark U.S. domestic upheaval.11

In an attempt to make the Soviets worried enough to help Washington negotiate with the North Vietnamese, Nixon secretly instructed the Pentagon in early October 1969 to raise the alert levels of nuclear forces. During the following weeks, as part of what was called the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, SAC put its bomber forces on higher alert. The Navy raised the readiness levels of its forces while aircraft carriers and other ships conducted unusual maneuvers to get Moscow’s attention. At the close of the alert, SAC flew sorties of nuclear-armed bombers over northern Alaska on 18-hour stretches. Likely as a sign of Nixon’s concern about Moscow’s support for Hanoi, the U.S. Navy shadowed Soviet merchant ships on their way to Hanoi. It was all low-key; Washington wanted the alert to jar Moscow, not to alarm. Even if they understood Nixon’s underlying purpose, however, the Soviets did not help with Vietnam War diplomacy. In any event, because there was no crisis in its relationship with Washington, Moscow may have seen the U.S. alert actions as pointless or not credible.12

Nixon did not abandon madman threats or alerts. During the September 1970 crisis in Jordan, Nixon expanded the U.S. naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean. During a supposedly off-the-record press briefing, he threatened intervention against Soviet-client Syria, suggesting it was not a bad thing if Moscow thought he was capable of “irrational or unpredictable action.”13 Several years later, Kissinger used Nixon’s tactics during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. On October 24, 1973, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev informed Washington that Moscow might intervene unilaterally to enforce an agreed cease-fire by sending peacekeepers to help separate Egypt’s beleaguered Third Army from the Israelis. The statement was a bluff, but Kissinger and the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) overreacted by ordering U.S. strategic forces to go on DEFCON 3 as a warning. The Soviets were disconcerted, but did not react. Nixon did not participate in the decision because, reeling from Watergate developments, he was inebriated.14

DEFCON 3 was a higher state of readiness than the usual DEFCON 4, but it was not as threatening as the Cuban missile crisis DEFCON 2. With the Soviets having reached strategic parity with the United States, nuclear threats and confrontations had become too dangerous to consider or endure. This was the last major DEFCON until September 11, 2001. Nevertheless, unexpected incidents, such as false warnings of missile attacks or misunderstandings over military exercises (Able Archer ’83), illuminated the continued perils of the superpower nuclear competition.

The history of nuclear threats and crises demonstrates that U.S. leaders found it easier to try to overawe the Soviets or the Chinese during the 1950s when the retaliatory capability of these adversaries was small or nonexistent. By the 1960s, confrontations were all too dangerous, as Kennedy learned, not least during a September 1963 NSC meeting when he was told how much devastation the Soviets could inflict on the United States.15 Thus, in the context of mutual assured destruction, threats to use nuclear weapons have low credibility because of their suicidal nature. Yet, threat language, including Putin’s recent outbursts, must be assessed carefully. The terrible carnage in Ukraine raises the question as to whether Putin would break international norms by using nuclear weapons. Just as troubling is the prospect that if Putin raised alert levels during this crisis, the attendant dangers of accidents, incidents, or miscalculations could produce the escalation that nobody wants.

 

ENDNOTES
 

1. Matthew Jones, After Hiroshima: The United States, Race, and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 68. For U.S. presidents and the nuclear taboo, see Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

2. Jones, After Hiroshima, pp. 158–159; U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Memorandum of meeting with the president, Washington, D.C., February 17, 1965, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb517-Nixon-Kissinger-and-the-Madman-Strategy-during-Vietnam-War/doc%201A%20DDE%20and%20LBJ%201965.pdf; Benjamin H. Read to Dean Rusk, memorandum, March 4, 1965, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb517-Nixon-Kissinger-and-the-Madman-Strategy-during-Vietnam-War/Doc%201B%20Read%20to%20Dean%20Rusk,%204%20March%201965.pdf.

3. Gordon H. Chang and He Di, “The Absence of War in the U.S.-China Confrontation Over Quemoy and Matsu in 1954–1955: Contingency, Luck, Deterrence?” The American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 5 (December 1993): 1500–1524.

4. Center for Naval Analyses, “Suez Crisis, 1956 (U),” CRC 262, April 1974, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515408/doc-5-cna-suez-1956.pdf; U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC), “Monthly History: 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing,” October-December 1956, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515409/doc-6-1956-55-srw-oct-dec-56.pdf.

5. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), pp. 359–360.

6. See George S. Dragnich, “The Lebanon Operation of 1958: A Study of the Crisis Role of the Sixth Fleet (U),” Center for Naval Analysis, September 1970, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515410/doc-7-cna-lebanon-1958.pdf; Headquarters Second Air Force, “Second Air Force Historical Data (Unclassified Title) From 1 July to 31 December 1958,” May 1959, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515411/doc-8-2nd-af-history-1958.pdf; SAC, “Sixteenth Air Force, 1 July-31 December 1958 (Unclassified Title),” n.d., https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515412/doc-9-16th-af-1958.pdf; Jacob Van Staaveren, “Air Operations in the Taiwan Crisis of 1958 (U),” USAF Historical Division Liaison Office, November 1962, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515413/doc-10-taiwan-1958.pdf; M.H. Halperin, “The 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis: An Analysis (U),” RAND Corp., RM-4803-ISA, January 1966, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20791449/halperin-summary-of-study.pdf. See also Gordon H. Chang, Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–1972 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 86–201.

7. UK Mission to the United Nations, Telegram to UK Foreign Office, No. 1071, September 21, 1958, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/4316143/Document-05-United-Kingdom-Mission-to-the-United.pdf.

8. See U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Unclassified memorandum on uniform readiness conditions, 3M-833-59, January 3, 1961, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515420/doc-17-1961-1-3-sm-833-59-remove-blue-mark-on-p-1.pdf; U.S. Commander in Chief Europe to U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Communication, May 16, 1960, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515421/doc-18-5-16-60-from-cincerur.pdf; U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to U.S. Commander in Chief Europe, Communication, May 15, 1960, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515422/doc-19-5-16-60-jcs-from-douglas.pdf; U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to U.S. Commander in Chief Europe, Communication, May 16, 1960, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515423/doc-20-5-16-60-re-press.pdf; U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to U.S. Army Attache Ottawa, Communication, May 16, 1960, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515424/doc-21-5-16-60-to-ottawa.pdf.

9. Among the estimable accounts of U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s missile crisis decision-making, see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 529–577; Sheldon M. Stern, Averting “the Final Failure”: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). For DEFCON 2, see SAC, “Strategic Air Command Operations in the Cuban Crisis of 1962,” Historical Study, Vol. 1, n.d., https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20591109/08-us-strategic-air-command-history-and-research-division-historical-study-no-90-vol-i-strategic-air-command-operations-during-the-cuban-crisis-of-1962-circa-1963-top-secret-excised-copy.pdf; M.V. Forrestal to MacGeorge Bundy, Memorandum, October 24, 1962, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20589957/09.pdf; Col. L.J. Legere, Memorandum on daily White House staff meeting, October 24, 1962, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20589958/10.pdf.

10. William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball, Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015), pp. 50–65. For “chips into the pot,” see “Kissinger,” n.d., https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb517-Nixon-Kissinger-and-the-Madman-Strategy-during-Vietnam-War/doc%2022%208-10-72%20Kissinger%20conv%20with%20G.%20Tucker.pdf.

11. Burr and Kimball, Nixon’s Nuclear Specter, ch. 3–7.

12. Ibid., pp. 265–309. See also Thomas Schwartz, Henry Kissinger and American Power (New York:
Hill & Wang, 2020), pp. 83–84.

13. Burr and Kimball, Nixon’s Nuclear Specter, p. 329.

14. Schwartz, Henry Kissinger and American Power, pp. 239–242; Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations From Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994), pp. 420–428. See also Martin Indyk, Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 2021), pp. 178–183. For DEFCON 3, see U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Status of Actions Report, Operations Planners Group (OPG),” October 1973, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20589944/22.pdf; SAC, “History of Strategic Air Command FY 1974,” Historical Study, No. 142, January 28, 1974, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20589945/23.pdf; SAC, “Chronology: Middle East Crisis (U),” Historical Study, No. 139, December 12, 1973, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20589946/24.pdf; SAC, “Second Air Force Chronology of Middle East Contingency, 6 October-9 November 1973,” n.d., https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20589947/25.pdf.

15. Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, “Summary Record of the 517th Meeting of the National Security Council, September 12, 1963,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume VIII, National Security Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), doc. 141.


William Burr, a senior analyst with the National Security Archive at George Washington University, directs the Archive's nuclear security documentation project. Jeffrey Kimball is an American historian and emeritus professor at Miami University who has argued that threats to use nuclear weapons have not been effective at advancing the U.S. foreign policy goals. They are coauthors of Nixon's Nuclear Specter.

The recent brandishing of nuclear threats evokes the early days of the Cold War when such threats were the modus operandi of superpower conduct.

Biden Policy Allows First Use of Nuclear Weapons


April 2022
By Daryl G. Kimball

President Joe Biden has signed off on a months-long, Pentagon-led review of U.S. defense strategy and nuclear weapons policy. On March 28, the White House announced that it had transmitted to Congress the classified version of the National Defense Strategy (NDS). Senior administration officials told Arms Control Today that this document includes the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and the Missile Defense Review (MDR)
as annexes.

The guided-missile destroyer USS Chafee (DDG 90) launches a Block V Tomahawk, the weapon’s newest variant, during a missile exercise. President Joe Biden has reversed his predecessor’s policy and cancelled plans for a nuclear version of the sea-launched cruise missile. (U.S. Navy photo by LTJG Sean Ianno)Senior U.S. officials said that Biden has decided not to follow through on his 2020 pledge to declare that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack against the United States or its allies. Instead, he approved a version of a policy from the Obama administration that leaves open the option to use nuclear weapons not only in retaliation to a nuclear attack, but also to respond to non-nuclear threats.

Biden’s policy declares that the “fundamental role” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is to deter a nuclear attack, but will still leave open the option that nuclear weapons could be used in “extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners,” officials told ACT. According to a March 25 report by The Wall Street Journal, this might include nuclear use to deter enemy conventional, biological, chemical, and possibly cyberattacks.

During the presidential campaign, Biden wrote in the March 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs, “I believe that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and, if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack. As president, I will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with the U.S. military and U.S. allies.”

A senior administration official who spoke with Arms Control Today on March 29 emphasized that under Biden, the United States would maintain a “very high bar for considering nuclear weapons employment.”

“The NPR also underscores our commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons and reestablishing U.S. leadership in arms control, and it emphasizes the administration’s commitment to stability, avoiding costly arms races, and facilitating risk reduction and arms control arrangements where possible,” a senior U.S. official told ACT.

The results of the NPR were briefed to NATO allies when Biden joined other leaders in Brussels on March 24 for a summit focused on the alliance’s response to the Russian war against Ukraine. The classified version of the NPR was briefed to select congressional members on March 28, and the unclassified version will be released in April.

Since the end of the Cold War, successive presidents have updated U.S. nuclear weapons and risk reduction policy through comprehensive nuclear posture reviews, which produce a strategy document that outlines the role of these weapons in U.S. strategy, the plans for maintaining and upgrading nuclear forces, and the overall U.S. approach to nuclear arms control and nonproliferation.

Each previous post-Cold War NPR, including those by President Bill Clinton in 1996, President George W. Bush in 2002, President Barack Obama in 2010, and President Donald Trump in 2018, has made adjustments that reflect the foreign and military policies of each administration, overall reflecting more continuity than change. The number of targets in the nuclear war plans has been reduced since the mid-1990s, but the United States and Russia maintain their strategic forces on a “launch under attack” posture, and U.S. presidents have all refused to rule out the potential use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear threats.

The Russian nuclear weapons use policy is similar to the U.S. policy. It states that Russia “reserves the right to use nuclear weapons,” including when Moscow is acting “in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies, as well as in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.” (See ACT, July/August 2020.)

According to press reports, Biden’s NPR will cancel development of a new nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile proposed by the Trump administration and a Cold War-era high-yield gravity bomb, the B-83. But it will green-light other nuclear weapons modernization and sustainment programs, including a new fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles, a new strategic bomber, new air-launched cruise missiles, and the new Columbia-class strategic submarines.

Biden’s decision to revive the Obama-era approach on nuclear weapons use policy was very likely influenced by the views of allies at a time of heightened concern about Russian aggression. The allies want to maintain continuity and cohesion in response to President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale attack on Ukraine, which has been considered a U.S. “strategic partner” since 2008.

Biden’s decision not to adopt a sole-purpose nuclear declaratory policy not only runs counter to his previous public statements, but it also ignores the advice of many in his own party. In July 2021, for instance, Democratic lawmakers from the House and Senate met with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan about the review, which had just been launched. Among other recommendations, they urged Biden to follow through on his pledge to adopt a sole-purpose policy. In their meeting, Sullivan told the lawmakers the president still supported that approach, according to sources who spoke with Arms Control Today.

The President has abandoned his 2020 sole purpose pledge.

Arms Trade Rising in Europe, Other Regions


April 2022
By Jeff Abramson

The United States continues to account for an increasingly larger share of major conventional weapons exports at a time when European countries are acquiring more weaponry, according to the latest annual arms transfer survey by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Tensions with Russia and China are driving growing weapons imports by countries in Europe and elsewhere, trends expected to continue and likely be exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

An F-35A Lightning II jet fighter, conducting joint operations from Kadena Air Base, Japan, approaches a tanker aircraft for refueling. The F-35 is a main driver of current and future U.S. arms sales in Europe, according to an annual report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Yosselin Perla)The United States accounted for 39 percent of all major arms exports from 2017 to 2021, more than twice Russia’s 19 percent and greater than the 32 percent U.S. share from 2012 to 2016.

Europe posted the fastest increase in arms imports of all regions, acquiring 19 percent more major arms in 2017–2021 as compared to the earlier five-year period. The United States provided more than half of the transfers into the region, with orders for the U.S. F-35 combat aircraft at the heart of current and future expected increases, the report said. SIPRI wrote that the regional increase “was at least partly driven by deterioration in relations between most European states and Russia.”

That relationship has declined further since the end of 2021, with widespread European condemnation of Russian aggression in Ukraine, decisions by more than a dozen European countries to send arms to Kyiv in February and March, and Russia’s removal from the Council of Europe in March. Germany’s decisions to stop opposing its own provision of lethal aid to Ukraine and to begin investing far more heavily in its own military, as announced in February by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, are other indicators of a now-expected military buildup within Europe.

Shifts in India’s arms imports also are under scrutiny. The world’s largest arms importer received less than half its weapons from Russia in the most recent five years, down from nearly 70 percent in 2012–2016. France now provides 27 percent and the United States 12 percent of India’s major weapons imports, according to SIPRI.

But India does not appear ready to distance itself more fully from Russia. In March, India abstained on a critical UN General Assembly vote condemning Russia for the war in Ukraine, despite pushes from its so-called Quad partners, Australia, Japan, and the United States. A still-pending decision by the Biden administration on whether to apply sanctions under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act against India for procuring Russian S-400 air defense systems may indicate how much the administration wishes to try to force a wedge between New Delhi and Moscow. (See ACT, April 2021.)

Although the report found that the global value of arms transfers was down nearly 5 percent over the past five years, it noted that, within Asia and Oceania “a growing perception of China as a threat is the main driver of arms imports,” with weapons from the United States contributing to certain national and subregional increases. Australia’s imports rose by 62 percent, driven by U.S. combat- and anti-submarine aircraft. F-35 fighter jets and air defense systems underpinned South Korean and Japanese import increases of 71 percent and 152 percent, respectively. Taiwan is expected to significantly increase its imports following recent orders of U.S. arms offered by the Trump and Biden administrations.

In the Middle East, the United States accounted for more than half the exports to the region and for 82 percent of major weapons imports by Saudi Arabia, the world second-largest arms importer and one whose imports rose by 27 percent over the past five years. The administration has said that it would stop transferring “offensive” weapons that the Saudis could use in the war in Yemen, but it has notified Congress of more than $1 billion in weapons and services it wishes to sell to Riyadh, with $650 million in air-to-air missiles surviving a Senate vote that sought to block them. (See ACT, January/February 2022.)

As with Saudi Arabia, the administration has been critical and supportive of arms transfers to Egypt. After withholding $130 million in support in 2021, it notified Congress in January of potential transfers to Egypt under the Foreign Military Sales program of 12 C-130J Super Hercules aircraft totaling $2.2 billion and three air defense radars totaling $355 million. In March, a Senate resolution of disapproval to block the sale led by Rand Paul (R-Ky.) received fewer than 20 votes. (See ACT, November 2021.) At a Senate hearing later in the month, Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said Washington would provide F-15 fighter jets to Cairo. Congress has yet to be officially notified of the sale.

According to SIPRI, the United States accounted for less than 7 percent of Egypt’s weapons imports over the past five years, with Russia providing 41 percent, followed by France, Italy, and Germany, each providing between 11 and 21 percent.

The United States accounted for 92 percent of Israel’s major arms imports over the past five years even as the relationship has faced greater scrutiny in Congress. In the omnibus appropriations legislation that became law on March 15, Congress provided $1 billion for Iron Dome supplies to Israel that had been held up by Paul over a disagreement concerning the source of such funding. (See ACT, November 2021.)

The United States accounts for an increasing share of major conventional weapons exports, according to a new report.

Biden Approves $29 Billion Increase in Defense Budget


April 2022
By Shannon Bugos

President Joe Biden has signed off on a $29 billion spending increase to his requested fiscal year 2022 national defense budget, a massive expansion that was approved alongside another $13.6 billion in emergency military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine as Russia’s deadly war on that country continues.

A Ukrainian serviceman aims a FGM-148 Javelin, a U.S.-made portable anti-tank missile, at a checkpoint near Kharkiv in March 2022. President Joe Biden is proposing billions more dollars in U.S. defense spending to meet the military and humanitarian needs of Ukraine as it tries to defend against a Russian onslaught. (Photo by Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images)“We will make sure Ukraine has weapons to defend against an invading Russian force,” Biden said on March 11 before signing the legislation four days later. “We will send money and food and aid to save the Ukrainian people.”

The national defense total in the 2022 omnibus spending bill is $782 billion, a 3.9 percent increase over the administration’s request for 2022 and a 5.6 percent increase over the 2021 appropriations. (See ACT, January/February 2022; July/August 2021.) This total does not include the assistance for Ukraine, of which $6.5 billion is headed to the Pentagon for funding U.S. troop deployments to eastern Europe and restocking weapons that have been or will be sent to Ukraine.

“The escalating crisis President [Vladimir] Putin has inflicted on Europe poses the greatest threat to democracy and national sovereignty in a generation,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on March 10. “The American people overwhelmingly support the people of Ukraine.”

“We are becoming witness to one of the worst humanitarian crises we have seen in generations, which is why this bill provides $13.6 billion in humanitarian assistance, defense support, and economic aid to help the Ukrainian people in their most desperate hour of need,” House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said on March 9 in a floor speech.

Nearly six months after the start of fiscal year 2022, the House on March 9 passed the 12 appropriations bills needed to fund the government, including for defense, and energy and water, and the supplementary aid package for Ukraine, followed by the Senate on March 10. Congress approved and Biden signed the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in December. (See ACT, January/ February 2022.) The NDAA authorized funding in the amount of $768 billion, while the appropriations bills stipulate actual spending levels.

Since the start of the fiscal year in October, Congress has passed multiple short-term continuing resolutions, which funded most programs and activities at the previous year’s spending level to keep the government open and prevent a shutdown.

The defense appropriations bill allocates $5.1 billion for the construction and continued research and development of what will ultimately be a fleet of 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. This is an increase of about $7 million above the authorized amount and $145 million above Biden’s budget request.

The appropriations bill, like the NDAA, fully funds the requests of $5.2 million and $10 million by the Defense and Energy departments, respectively, for the development of a new submarine-launched cruise missile (SLCM) and its associated low-yield nuclear warhead. The House Appropriations Committee zeroed out this funding in its version of the spending bills in an attempt to halt the controversial program kick-started by the Trump administration, but the final bills reinstated it.

In addition, the defense appropriations bill fully approved the Air Force’s request of $3 billion for the B-21 Raider strategic bomber program, including $108 million for initial procurement, as well as $2.6 billion for continued R&D plus initial missile procurement for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program. The service plans to buy more than 650 new GBSD missiles to replace the current fleet of 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) beginning in 2029.

The Air Force saw a slight decrease in its budget for the long-range standoff (LRSO) weapons program to replace the existing air-launched cruise missile. The final LRSO appropriation came to $599 million, which is a 2 percent decrease from both the administration’s request and the NDAA but a 56 percent increase from the 2021 authorization.

The Army, meanwhile, received its complete request of $286 million for the development of a conventional, ground-launched, midrange mobile missile capability, just as in the NDAA.

Despite the drive shared by defense officials and members of Congress to speed ahead with the development and deployment of conventional hypersonic weapons, the appropriations law ultimately canceled one program for an entirely new hypersonic capability and cut initial procurement for another capability.

The Air Force requested $161 million to purchase the first 12 Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) hypersonic missiles during 2022, but the law halved the amount and redistributed the remaining funds to the ARRW program’s R&D budget, for an appropriation of $319 million. The ARRW system, a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle, was slated to achieve an initial operating capability this fiscal year, but failed three flight booster tests in 2021. In its explanatory statement accompanying the legislation, Congress ascribed its decision “to recent failures and delays in testing that have extended the ARRW program schedule and put a first production lot contract at risk for award in fiscal year 2022.”

Breaking with the general consensus, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall recently has gone on the record with his skepticism of the ARRW program, which, he said on March 9, “still has to prove itself.”

Heidi Shyu, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, also admitted to Bloomberg on March 7 that although she is supportive of the ARRW program, the 2022 “operational capability date is a very aggressive schedule.” Shyu held another meeting with hypersonics industry executives in early March following a previous meeting, attended by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a month earlier. (See ACT, March 2022.)

The spending bill also cut $10 million from the requested and authorized amounts for the Air Force’s new Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile program, bringing its appropriated budget to $190 million.

As for the Navy, the spending bill slightly downsized the budget for the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) program, which features the hypersonic glide body that is shared with the Army’s hypersonic program, to $1.3 billion, a $48 million decrease from Biden’s request and a $174 million decrease from the NDAA.

The service aims to add the CPS system to Zumwalt-class destroyers starting in fiscal year 2025 and to Virginia-class submarines in fiscal year 2028. Congress subtracted some funding as it assessed that, for both the integration of the CPS system onto Virginia-class submarines and the expansion of the industrial base, the dollars requested were “early to need.”

The budget for the Navy’s new hypersonic program, the Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare Increment II, was slashed entirely due to a “lack of program justification.” The Pentagon had requested $57 million, and Congress had authorized $34 million.

The Army’s hypersonic capability, the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) system, received the full request for $111 million for procurement of additional LRHW batteries and a $14 million bump from the request and authorization for its R&D budget, to $315 million.

The spending bill also appropriated $194 million for the hypersonic programs overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an 11 percent increase from the request and a 24 percent decrease from the authorization. These programs include the Glide Breaker, Operation Fires, Tactical Boost Glide, and Hypersonic Air-Breathing Weapon Concept programs. Congress increased the appropriated amount for the purposes of “hypersonics risk reduction.”

Meanwhile, the energy and water appropriations bill followed the NDAA’s lead by providing the requested funds for the B61-12 gravity bomb, the W87-1 ICBM warhead, and the W80-4 ALCM warhead upgrade at $772 million, $691 million, and $1.1 billion, respectively. The law also approved full funding for other controversial programs proposed by the Trump administration and continued by the Biden administration, including $134 million for the new high-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead, the W93, and its associated aeroshell and $98.5 million for the megaton-class B83-1 gravity bomb.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency of the Energy Department that maintains and modernizes the nuclear warhead stockpile, also received the requested $1.6 billion to increase the production rate of plutonium pits for nuclear warheads to at least 80 per year at two production sites.

Even so, Adm. Charles Richard, chief of U.S. Strategic Command, acknowledged on March 8 that “we now know we will not get 80 pits per year by 2030, as is statutorily required, and even unlimited money at this point will not buy that back.”

The appropriations law also funded the NDAA’s $105 million increase over the Biden request for the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, bringing the total to $345 million. This program is aimed at reducing threats from weapons of mass destruction and related challenges, including the spread of dangerous pathogens such as the coronavirus.

The increase to the requested fiscal year 2022 national defense budget is massive.

Congress Cuts Funds for Layered Defense System


April 2022
By John Bedard

Congress has shot down the Pentagon’s request for funding in the fiscal year 2022 defense appropriations bill to develop a layered homeland missile defense system.

MDA has hit a milestone for integrating the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, shown, with the Patriot air and missile defense system, firing an advanced Patriot missile from THAAD. (Photo by Lockheed Martin via Getty Images)The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) aims to adapt the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Aegis missile defense systems, both designed to defeat short- and intermediate-range missiles, in order to bolster the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system. The GMD system, based in California and Alaska, is designed to respond to intercontinental ballistic missile threats.

But in the appropriations bill signed into law by President Joe Biden in March, funding for this new layered system was axed due to a “lack of requirement,” lawmakers wrote in an explanatory statement. The appropriations bill matched the authorization bill passed in December in subtracting both the $99 million MDA request for adapting Aegis missiles to the GMD system and the $65 million request to demonstrate the THAAD system’s ability to take out long-range threats. The GMD program’s research and development budget for this effort also was decreased by $10 million. (See ACT, January/February 2022.)

In addition, the appropriations bill deleted $42 million from the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) program, reducing it to $884 million. The Pentagon plans to supplement the existing 44 GMD interceptors with 20 NGI missiles beginning no later than 2028, bringing the fleet total to 64.

Although the R&D budget for the THAAD program was decreased by 23 percent to $213 million, the law boosted THAAD procurement funds by $129 million, for a total price tag of $381 million, in order to purchase an additional 14 interceptors for the system. The R&D cut in the THAAD program was related specifically to the layered homeland defense system; the boost in procurement will underwrite the use of THAAD missiles in other circumstances.

Two weeks before the signing of the spending bill, the MDA test-fired its most sophisticated version of the Patriot missile from a THAAD system in New Mexico. The launch of the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement on Feb. 24 marked the final step toward integrating two battle systems that can provide “critical multi-tier missile defense capability,” according to Lockheed Martin in a statement to Defense News.

Overall, Congress gave the MDA $1.4 billion more than requested for fiscal year 2022, bringing its budget to $10.3 billion.

Meanwhile, the MDA’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program received an appropriation of $269 million, including $110 million for launching two satellites in 2023. At the same time, the law boosted the development budget of the Space Development Agency (SDA) by $550 million in order to speed plans for the National Defense Space Architecture Tracking Layer, which means the launch of satellites in low-earth orbit capable of identifying and tracking threats such as hypersonic weapons will take place in 2025 instead of 2027.

In the explanatory statement accompanying the legislation, lawmakers acknowledged that the space sensor system launch strategy is “inconsistent” with previous MDA plans of launching such payloads into orbit aboard SDA satellites.

Congress criticized the MDA and SDA for “a lack of coordination and cooperation” and wasting taxpayer dollars by each launching their own satellites.

Congress rejected the Pentagon’s request for funding in the 2022 defense appropriations bill.

Biden’s Reported Decision to Retain Option to Use Nuclear Weapons Against Non-Nuclear Threats Is Disappointing, Illogical, and Dangerous

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For Immediate Release: March 25, 2022

Media Contacts: Daryl Kimball, executive director (202-463-8270 x107); Shannon Bugos, senior policy analyst (202-463-8270 x113)

(Washington, D.C.)— President Joseph R. Biden has stepped back from a campaign vow and approved an old Obama-era policy that allows for a potential nuclear response to deter conventional and other non-nuclear dangers in addition to nuclear ones, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal Thursday.

Biden’s policy will reportedly declare that the “fundamental role” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal will be to deter nuclear attacks. Such a policy, the officials said, will leave open the possibility that nuclear weapons could also be used in “extreme circumstances” to deter conventional, biological, chemical, and possibly cyberattacks by adversaries.

“If the report is correct, President Biden will have failed to follow through on his explicit 2020 campaign promise to adopt a much clearer and narrower policy regarding nuclear weapons use, and he will have missed a crucial opportunity to move the world back from the nuclear brink,” charged Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.

Biden wrote in Foreign Affairs: “As I said in 2017, I believe that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and, if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack. As president, I will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with the U.S. military and U.S. allies.”

“Putin’s deadly war against Ukraine, his nuclear saber-rattling, and Russia’s policy that reserves the option to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict with NATO underscore even more clearly how extremely dangerous it is for nuclear-armed states to threaten the use of nuclear weapons in response to non-nuclear threats—and it reinforces why it is necessary to move rapidly away from dangerous Cold War-era thinking about nuclear weapons,” Kimball said.

“Biden has apparently failed to seize his opportunity to meaningfully narrow the role of nuclear weapons and failed, through his NPR, to distinguish U.S. nuclear policy from Russia’s dangerous nuclear doctrine that threatens nuclear first use against non-nuclear threats,” he added.

“There is no plausible military scenario, no morally defensible reason, nor legally justifiable basis for threatening or using nuclear weapons first—if at all. As Presidents Reagan, Biden, Gorbachev, and even Putin have all said, a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” Kimball said. “Once nuclear weapons are used in a conflict between nuclear-armed states, there is no guarantee it will not result in nuclear retaliation and escalation to an all-out nuclear exchange.”

“We also strongly urge the administration to explain how Biden’s nuclear weapons declaratory policy will differ from Russia’s dangerous nuclear doctrine and under what circumstances the United States might believe it would make sense to initiate the use of nuclear weapons for the first time since 1945,” he said.

Shannon Bugos, a senior policy analyst at the Arms Control Association, added, “The final Biden NPR should also reiterate the longstanding U.S. commitment to actively pursue further verifiable reductions in the still bloated nuclear stockpiles of the United States and Russia, and to seek to engage China and other nuclear-armed states in the disarmament enterprise.”

“The sobering reality is that it would take just a few hundred U.S. or Russian strategic nuclear weapons to destroy each other’s military capacity, kill hundreds of millions of innocent people, and produce a planetary climate catastrophe,” she noted.

“Maintaining ambiguity about using nuclear weapons first is dangerous, illogical, and unnecessary," said Bugos.

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Biden has apparently failed to seize his opportunity to meaningfully narrow the role of nuclear weapons and failed through his Nuclear Posture Review.

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The Final Push for U.S. Chemical Weapons Demilitarization

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Volume 14, Issue 4, March 14, 2022

For more than a century, chemical weapons have been recognized as one of the most horrific, inhumane, and militarily dubious instruments of war. These realities led to nearly universal support for the ratification and entry into force of the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (CWC), including support from Russia and the United States—which were at that time the possessors of the world’s two largest chemical weapon arsenals.

Negotiated at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, the CWC prohibits all signatories from developing, producing, acquiring, stockpiling, or retaining chemical weapons. It also bans the direct or indirect transfer of chemical weapons, and the assisting, encouraging, or inducing of other states to engage in CWC-prohibited activity. Since its ratification, the main mission of the CWC has been the verified and irreversible destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles.

Photographed on Nov. 23, 2021, palletized 105mm projectiles at the Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant await eventual destruction outside of the explosive containment room in the Enhanced Reconfiguration Building. (Photo credit: PEO ACWA)When the United States ratified the CWC on April 25th, 1997, it accepted the treaty mandate to eliminate its chemical weapons stockpile and related facilities completely and verifiably by April 29, 2007, with the possibility of a five-year extension until 2012.

But both the 2007 and 2012 deadlines proved to be severe underestimates of the time and effort needed to safely demilitarize all nine declared U.S. chemical weapons stockpiles. The United States requested and received two additional deadline extensions from the international chemical weapons watchdog, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

Now, the United States is pushing hard to finish destroying the last vestiges of its once-massive Cold War-era chemical weapons stockpile by Sept. 30, 2023.1

Current Status of the U.S. Chemical Demilitarization Effort

Despite the delays in its campaign to eliminate chemical weapons, the United States has achieved tremendous progress toward the destruction of its massive and highly toxic chemical weapons arsenal. According to the OPCW’s annual report for 2022, the OPCW confirmed that the United States has verifiably destroyed a total of 26,606.252 metric tons of priority Category 1 chemical weapons, which is 95.81% of the total U.S. declared stockpile.2 The United States has destroyed all of its Category 2 chemical weapons, such as phosgene, and Category 3 weapons, including unfilled munitions, devices, and equipment designed specifically to employ chemical weapons.

As of March 2022, 418.4 metric tons of mustard agent remain at the Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant in Colorado and just under 300 metric tons of VX nerve agent are left to be destroyed at the Blue Grass Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant in Kentucky.3

With only a year and a half left to finish its chemical weapons demilitarization mission - an effort started nearly 40 years ago – the United States government must commit the necessary resources and funding to ensure it meets its treaty-mandated deadline of Sept. 30, 2023.

Congressional authorization of sufficient funding for chemical agents and munitions destruction this year will help ensure the work is done on time and according to stringent safety and environmental standards. Congress and the Biden administration must prioritize finally finishing destruction activities to maintain our standing as a dependable and influential member of the international disarmament community.

The Fiscal Year 2022 Department of Defense Appropriations Act, introduced to the House in July 2021, set aside $1,094,352,000 for the Army to make the final push in the chemical agents and munitions destruction mission.4 Of the total amount proposed, $995,011,000 is designated for the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives (ACWA) program, the Army organization that oversees operations at the last two U.S. chemical weapons destruction facilities in Colorado and Kentucky. The remaining sum is distributed amongst operations/maintenance and the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP).

By the end of this fiscal year, the United States will have spent more than $41.7 billion (adjusted for inflation) since 1986 on chemical weapons stockpile elimination efforts.5

Why It Is Vital to Meet the 2023 Deadline

As a leader in upholding the norm against the possession and use of chemical weapons, the United States owes it to our international partners, and our local communities, to demonstrate our commitment to ridding the world of these inhumane weapons once and for all by meeting the 2023 stockpile elimination deadline.

U.S. credibility and leadership are on the line. Countries such as Russia and Iran have attempted to use the United States missed chemical weapons destruction deadlines to discredit U.S. commitment to the CWC, at a critical time in which the United States seeks to have a leadership role in holding countries like Syria and Russia accountable for their failure to comply with the CWC.

During a June 30, 2021, public meeting of the Colorado Citizens’ Advisory Commission, U.S. National Authority for the Chemical Weapons Convention and acting Deputy Secretary Assistant at the State Department, Laura Gross, emphasized the diplomatic importance of completing stockpile elimination.

“From our perspective at the State Department, we want to be able to […] demonstrate the commitment that the United States has against the use of chemical weapons,” Gross said. “That’s why it’s so important to be able to maintain that commitment to the timeline […] because we have adversaries in Russia, China, Iran, and Syria, who are using or developing chemical weapons for potential use, and we really want to be working at the OPCW to deter them.”

“We don’t want these countries to have the opportunity to use potential delays against us,” Gross added later in the meeting.

Domestically, the U.S. government owes it to the communities surrounding chemical weapons stockpiles and destruction facilities to finally finish eliminating these dangerous weapons. For well over 50 years, at least 9 states have had to deal with the health and environmental risks that come with the storage and destruction of chemical munitions and agents.

While U.S. President Joe Biden has not publicly commented on the importance of meeting the 2023 deadline, other government officials including Dr. Brandi Vann, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense, and the newly appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Threat Reduction and Arms Control, Kingston Reif, have reiterated the United States’ commitment to meeting the deadline.6

History of the U.S. Chemical Weapons Demilitarization

Throughout the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union amassed enormous stockpiles of these dangerous weapons: by 1990, the United States had 31,500 U.S. tons (63,000,000 pounds) of chemical agents, and the Soviet Union had 39,967 metric tons (88,112,152 pounds).7 Highly toxic nerve agents, such as sarin, are lethal at as little as 100 mg.

The United States’ effort to eliminate its massive chemical weapons arsenal began before the end of the Cold War and well before the entry into force of the CWC in 1997. In 1986, Congress passed Public Law 99-145, which called for the safe destruction of the United States’ stockpile of nonbinary lethal chemical agents and related facilities by Sept. 30, 1994.8

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Russia and the United States held several rounds of talks on chemical weapons disarmament and signed the 1990 Bilateral Destruction Agreement. However, faced with internal funding issues, Russia did not begin stockpile destruction efforts until 2000.9 The 1986 Congressional decision to begin stockpile destruction without reciprocal action by Russia demonstrated early on the United States’ commitment to chemical weapons disarmament.

Under this new congressional mandate, the U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC) (which was later renamed Chemical Materials Agency (CMA) in 1992) began construction of the Johnston Atoll prototype high-temperature incineration facility in 1988. Originally, the Army planned to build three centralized incinerators at 3 chemical weapons stockpile depots – one on Johnston Atoll, one in Utah, and one in either Alabama or Arkansas – and transport chemical weapons from the other 6 stockpile locations for destruction.10

However, the transport of these dangerous weapons was highly contentious and was later outright banned by Congress (50 U.S. Code 1512a, 1994). Instead of three centralized incinerators, the Army announced in 1988 that it would build 8 disposal facilities at each of the 8 chemical munition storage sites on the continental United States.11,12 In September of that same year, Congress extended the deadline to eliminate the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile to April 30, 1997, as the new approach was going to take far more time, planning, and resources.13

After multiple mechanical problems and several rounds of testing, the Johnston Atoll facility began burning agents in 1990 that had been previously stored by the U.S. military in Okinawa and Germany. These chemical munitions had been secretly relocated to Johnston Atoll in the 70s and 90s respectively.14 Construction for the second incineration facility began in Tooele, Utah in 1989.

As the U.S. chemical weapons demilitarization process got underway, civil society organizations including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Chemical Weapons Working Group, Physicians for Social Responsibility, as well as Native American communities and local grassroots organizations, were actively researching and raising serious concerns about the impact of incineration of chemical warfare agents on the environment and the health of local communities.

The U.S. Army released a draft environmental impact statement in 1990 that concluded the incineration process would have a minimal environmental impact, and the commander of the U.S. demilitarization program, Colonel Walter Busbee, said that fears about pollution were overblown.15

Despite the promises from the Army, sites for incineration facilities were beset by litigation and protests over environmental and public health concerns regarding the danger of potential leakages and emissions during incineration. The Environmental Protection Agency fined the Army for a nerve agent stack release in March 1994, a group of civil society organizations sued the Army in June 2000 over the potential release of MC-1 Sarin nerve gas during the processing of a bomb, and the Pine Bluff citizens’ group filed an appeal with the Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission in September 2000 over whether future emissions would constitute as “pollution” under Arkansas law.

Throughout the 1990s, citizen activists and non-governmental research organizations continued to press the government to investigate and pursue alternatives to incineration. Preceding the construction of each U.S. incineration destruction facility were lengthy public hearings and environmental impact reports.

As early as June 1990, the U.S. Army confirmed that it expected to miss the 1997 deadline set by Congress. A GAO report attributed the expected delay to “(a) stringent environmental regulation of the operation of the first U.S. continental incineration plant, (b) program budget cuts, and (c) operational delays in testing the first disposal plant on Johnston Atoll.”16

By 1991, Congress pushed back the deadline for U.S. chemical weapons stockpile elimination further. During a December 1991 testimony in front of the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense, Assistant Secretary of the Army, Susan Livingstone, said, “I wish to state candidly that schedule will not be a primary driver for this program. We have always stated that safety is the paramount consideration in making decisions for this program.”17 Construction of additional incineration facilities began in Anniston, Alabama in 1991, Umatilla, Oregon in 1996, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 2002.

The concerns of communities surrounding chemical weapons destruction sites were echoed by key members of Congress. As part of the Senate resolution on advice and consent for ratification of the CWC, policymakers included a set of conditions, including a mandate that the president and the Army explore alternative, non-incineration technologies for the destruction of the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile “to ensure that the United States has the safest, most effective and environmentally sound plans for programs for meeting its obligations under the Convention for the destruction of chemical weapons.”18

Per the Congressional conditions, the U.S. Army’s Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment (ACWA) program was established to investigate and test alternative methods to baseline incineration to dispose of chemical weapons. In 2001, the Army announced that six alternative technologies for chemical weapons destruction had been identified and tested, with neutralization/biotreatment and neutralization/supercritical water oxidation (SCWO) progressing to the engineer design phase.19

The CWC required the United States to destroy its remaining 27,200 metric tons of chemical warfare agents within 10 years.20 However, due to delays attributed to the search for environmentally preferred alternatives to incineration, the treaty-mandated destruction deadline was pushed back from April 29, 2007, to April 29, 2012, with the approval of the other CWC States Parties.

While asking for the United States’ first deadline extension request, former U.S. permanent representative to the OPCW, Ambassador Eric Javits, explained that the U.S. would be unable to meet the 2007 deadline due to setbacks and delays caused by difficulties in constructing facilities, obtaining permits, and addressing safety and environmental concerns. He candidly noted that the United States was asking for the April 2012 deadline “as our extended deadline because that is the latest date the treaty allows us to ask for,” but that “based on our current projections, we do not expect to be able to meet that deadline.”21

In addition to the five incineration facilities, the U.S. Army CMA constructed and operated two neutralization facilities in Edgewood, Maryland and Newport, Indiana. Those two sites finished operations in 2007 and 2010 respectively. The Maryland bulk mustard agent storage site, located outdoors with limited protection, was expedited primarily due to security concerns after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

While the U.S. Army CMA was responsible for the first seven stockpile destruction facilities, the last two remaining chemical weapons destruction facilities, located in Pueblo, Colorado, and Blue Grass, Kentucky, are overseen by the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives (ACWA). Both sites feature alternative destruction processes to incineration.

At the Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant (PCAPP), most of the mustard projectiles stored there are being destroyed in a two-step process: neutralization followed by biotreatment. Three Static Detonation Chambers (SDCs) are also being employed to destroy “problematic munitions,” including the stockpile of 4.2-inch mortar rounds.

At the Blue Grass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant (BGCAPP), the majority of the nerve agents (including GB/Sarin and VX) are being destroyed through neutralization. Like the PCAPP process, several “problematic” munitions, mainly 155mm mustard projectiles, were destroyed by SDCs. The site’s remaining M55 rockets are also slated to be destroyed by the SDCs.

The Final Push to Eliminate What Remains

As of March 4, 2022, the United States has 418.4 metric tons of mustard in 105mm projectiles and mustard 4.2-inch mortar rounds left at the Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant in Colorado. There are 296.6 metric tons of VX nerve agent in M55 rockets and GB nerve agent in M55 rockets left to destroy at the Blue Grass Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant in Kentucky.

Walton Levi, site manager for the Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant, confirmed that the facility is still on target to meet the September 2023 deadline in a recent interview with KUNC.22

Crews at the two remaining facilities have continued to work diligently throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and their dedication to helping the United States meet its treaty mandated deadline in such uncertain circumstances is truly commendable.

Following a public comment and testing period, the Pueblo, Colorado facility was granted an environmental permit to use Static Detonation Chambers to finish eliminating the remaining mustard munitions. 23

CWC Outlier States

The completion of the long campaign to eliminate the U.S. chemical weapons arsenal will also put more pressure on the remaining CWC hold-out states to join and meet their commitments.

Four countries remain outside the CWC: Egypt, Israel, North Korea, and South Sudan. North Korea is estimated to possess a stockpile of approximately 5,000 metric tons of agent. The status of Taiwan, prohibited from joining all multilateral treaties by China, must also be resolved, especially given its large chemical industry. Syria, which joined the CWC in 2013 under intense international pressure and agreed to the elimination of the bulk of its former stockpile of some 1,300 metric tons of prohibited chemical agents, has failed to provide a full accounting of its stockpiles to the OPCW.24

Russia—which once possessed the world’s largest chemical weapons stockpile consisting of approximately 40,000 metric tons of chemical agent, including VX, sarin, soman, mustard, lewisite, mustard-lewisite mixtures, and phosgene—officially completed the destruction of its chemical weapons arsenal in 2017.

Like the United States, Russia received an extension of the original chemical weapons destruction deadline when it was unable to complete the task by the 2012 deadline set by the CWC. Russia’s destruction program benefited from technical assistance and funding through the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. Finally, the OPCW announced Sept. 27, 2017 that Russia completed the destruction of its declared chemical weapons stockpile.

However, Russia still retains some chemical weapons capacity. In March 2018, Russia used the advanced chemical agent Novichok to assassinate a former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, in the UK. In a 2021 State Department report on compliance with the CWC, the United States accused Russia of non-compliance with the CWC for its alleged use of Novichok. The report also noted that “The United States cannot certify that Russia has met its obligations" under the Convention and asserted that Russia had not made a complete declaration of its stockpile.

Conclusion

As we enter the final year and a half of demilitarization efforts, the United States government must recommit to prioritizing its chemical weapons stockpile elimination efforts, while, at the same time, continuing to protect the security and safety of local communities. The active involvement of local communities, state regulators and authorities, environmental and public health experts and activities, and other interested stakeholders has been an excellent example of democratic and transparent decision-making.

Leaders in Washington, D.C. must provide the leadership and support necessary to meet international treaty commitments and maintain the United States’ standing as a responsible and influential leader in the global disarmament community.

When the United States does eliminate the last of its deadly chemical weapons, it will be a critical step in strengthening the taboo against chemical weapons and a strong boost for the CWC and the OPCW at a critical juncture in the long fight against these inhumane weapons.—LEANNE QUINN, Chemical Weapons Coalition Program Assistant

ENDNOTES

1. The 8 nations that have declared chemical weapons stockpiles to the OPCW are Albania, India, Iraq, Libya, Russia, South Korea, Syria, and the United States.

2. Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, “Report of the OPCW on the Implementation of the Convention in 2020,” 1 Dec. 2021, https://www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/2021/12/c2603%28e%29.pdf

3. ‘US Chemical Weapons Stockpile Destruction Progress,” Program Executive Office, Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives, 4 March 2022, https://www.peoacwa.army.mil/destruction-progress/

4. “H.R.4432 - Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2022,” Congress.gov, 15 July 2021, https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4432/text

5. This number was calculated by finding the sum of all congressional appropriations under the section “Chemical Agents and Munitions Destruction” since 1986. Each number was adjusted for inflation in relation to 2021. We have submitted a FOIA request for an official estimate and will update this issue brief when we receive a response.

6. See: Recording of “US Chemical Weapons Stockpile Elimination: Progress Update” webinar at https://www.cwccoalition.org/us_cw_demilitarization_webinar/

7. Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), “Report of the OPCW on the Implementation of the Convention in 2017,” 19 Nov. 2018, https://www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/2018/11/c2304%28e%29.pdf

8. “Public Law 99-145-Nov. 8, 1985,” GovInfo.gov, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-99/pdf/STATUTE-99-Pg583.pdf, see: Sec. 1412 Destruction of Existing Stockpile of Lethal Chemical Agents and Munitions

9. Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), “Report of the OPCW on the Implementation of the Convention in 2000,” 17 May 2001, https://www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/CSP/C-VI/en/C-VI_5-EN.pdf, page 10

10. Paul Walker, “Three Decades of Chemical Weapons Elimination: More Challenges Ahead,” Arms Control Association, December 2019, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-12/features/three-decades-chemical-weapons-elimination-more-challenges-ahead

11. “50 U.S. Code § 1512a – Transportation of chemical munitions,” Cornell Law School, n.d., https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1512a

12. CMA also oversaw stockpile destruction activities of the chemical weapons stored at Deseret Chemical Depot, Utah; Umatilla Chemical Depot, Oregon; Anniston Chemical Activity, Alabama; Pine Bluff Chemical Activity, Arkansas; Newport Chemical Depot, Indiana; Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland; and Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Basin.[12][12]

13. “Public Law 100-456-Sept. 29, 1988,” US Code House, n.d., https://uscode.house.gov/statviewer.htm?volume=102&page=1934

14. “CMA Milestones in U.S. Chemical Weapons History,” U.S. Army Chemical Materials Activity, n.d., https://www.cma.army.mil/wp-content/uploads/2021_02_05_CMA_FS_CMA-MILESTONES.pdf

15. Arms Control Reporter: A Chronicle of Treaties, Negotiations, Proposals, Weapons & Policy, 1990. Chalmers Hardenbergh (Brookline, MA: Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies, 1990), page 704.E-1.

16. Arms Control Reporter: A Chronicle of Treaties, Negotiations, Proposals, Weapons & Policy, 1990, Chalmers Hardenbergh (Brookline, MA: Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies, 1990), page 704.E-1.5.

17. Arms Control Reporter: A Chronicle of Treaties, Negotiations, Proposals, Weapons & Policy, 1991, Chalmers Hardenbergh (Brookline, MA: Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies, 1991), page 704.E-1.18.

18. “U.S. Senate’s Conditions to Ratification of the CWC,” United States Chemical Weapons Convention Web Site, 24 April 1997, https://www.cwc.gov/cwc_authority_ratification_text.html

19. Arms Control Reporter: A Chronicle of Treaties, Negotiations, Proposals, Weapons & Policy 2001, John Clearwater (Brookline, MA: Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies, 1991), page 704.E-1.1

20. “Closing U.S. Chemical Warfare Agent Disposal Facilities,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d., https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/demil/closing_facilities.htm

21. “Statement Concerning Request to Extend the United States’ Destruction Deadline Under the Chemical Weapons Convention,” U.S. Department of States Archive, 20 April 2006, https://2001-2009.state.gov/t/isn/rls/rm/64878.htm

22. Michael de Yoanna, “Static detonation chambers likely to be used to destroy Colorado’s final chemical weapons,” NPR for Northern Colorado, 18 Jan. 2022, https://www.kunc.org/news/2022-01-18/static-detonation-chambers-likely-to-be-used-to-destroy-colorados-final-chemical-weapons

23. Michael de Yoanna, “Static detonation chambers likely to be used to destroy Colorado’s final chemical weapons,” NPR for Northern Colorado, 18 Jan. 2022, https://www.kunc.org/news/2022-01-18/static-detonation-chambers-likely-to-be-used-to-destroy-colorados-final-chemical-weapons

24. “Syria’s Declaration of Compliance with Chemical Weapons Convention Still Inaccurate Due to Persisting Gaps, Inconsistencies, Top Disarmament Official Tells Security Council,” United Nations: Meetings Coverage and Press Releases, 5 January 2022, https://www.un.org/press/en/2022/sc14760.doc.htm

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When the United States ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, it accepted the treaty mandate to eliminate its chemical weapons within a decade. But several extensions have come and gone, and the government is pushing hard to finish destroying the last vestiges of its once-massive Cold War-era stockpile by 2023.

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