This research paper has been commissioned by the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, but reflects the views of the author and should not be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Commission
The Skeptic’s View (1): Stockpile stewardship as fundamentally problematic; undermines the national interest
Download 91.89 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- The Qualified Supporter’s View (1): Stockpile stewardship as essentially sound, requires redirection towards new designs, modernization.
- The Qualified Supporter’s View (2): Stockpile stewardship as essentially sound; requires redirection away from new designs, modernization.
- The Skeptic’s View (2): Stockpile stewardship as fundamentally problematic; undermines international non-proliferation and disarmament efforts.
- Stockpile stewardship and current prospects for CTBT ratification
- Final observations
The Skeptic’s View (1): Stockpile stewardship as fundamentally problematic; undermines the national interest. As noted in the introduction, the debate surrounding the stockpile stewardship program, within the US, has evolved since its inception. More specifically, the view that the goals of the SSP are inherently flawed – i.e. that both testing and modernization of the deterrent should instead be resumed (or that the right to do so should be reserved) for the sake of the national interest – has become more nuanced over the years, although this is not to argue that opposition to the program, in principle, no longer exists. This development has tended to accompany the development of the initiative on RRW, which would see modernization of the deterrent ostensibly without testing, and which will be discussed shortly. The belief that the goals of stockpile stewardship are simply antithetical to US national security interests is one that was perhaps most publicly expressed during the Senate debate over CTBT ratification, in 1999. The division between those who questioned the goals of the SSP (and, for that matter, the value of the CTBT) and those who supported them tended to be along party lines: unsurprising, since the stockpile stewardship program itself was, as noted earlier, developed under the Clinton administration and was associated with that administration’s broader nuclear weapons policies, and particularly its support for the CTBT.29 According to this viewpoint, the stockpile stewardship approach was unable to single-handedly ensure the reliability of the nuclear explosives package and thus the weapon itself. Or, as the FY2000 Foster Panel report put it: existing assessment tools and the current level of scientific understanding are inadequate to provide sufficient confidence in either a future aged stockpile or a newly manufactured replacement, without nuclear testing.30 During the hearings on the CTBT before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, several witness provided testimony regarding what they viewed as one of the intrinsic problems of the SSP: a stockpile stewardship program, however useful it might be for increasing the knowledge base of the labs, could not provide dependable results. One letter to the Committee (a letter signed by, among others, future Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and future Vice President Dick Cheney) stated: “we will never know if we can trust stockpile stewardship if we cannot conduct nuclear tests to calibrate the unproven new techniques.”31 According to this view, the SSP contains an internal contradiction: its goal is to use a variety of tools and techniques to increase the reliability – and confidence in the reliability – of the nuclear stockpile without testing, yet without nuclear testing it is unclear how one can say with any certainty that stockpile surveillance and life extension efforts have worked. Such concerns have been raised32 in spite of the fact that confidence in nuclear tests had, even in the pre-moratorium days, only ever made up a small part of the American testing program and were not, in any case, frequent enough to be statistically significant as regarded reliability of the stockpile as a whole.33 The underlying concern, however, is that in foregoing nuclear testing, the SSP thereby foregoes the most visible demonstration of the reliability of the nuclear stockpile, thus eroding confidence in it (particularly, it may be assumed, outside the scientific community). Further, skeptics argue that a cessation of testing would thwart the development of new U.S. nuclear weapons – a situation that is undesirable to those who tend to be more hawkish on military and foreign policy matters. This, in turn, constrains behavior and, potentially, the ability to act in the national interest. Maintaining the military effectiveness of the nuclear deterrent requires, as one commentator put it, “an unfettered modernization program.”34 An unfettered modernization program – one that involves the design and development of completely new types of nuclear weapons – necessarily requires testing. The stockpile stewardship program thus impedes the ability of the state to maintain a modern (and therefore credible and effective) deterrent. The Qualified Supporter’s View (1): Stockpile stewardship as essentially sound, requires redirection towards new designs, modernization. Following the rejection of the CTBT, the election of a new US administration in 2000, and – just as importantly – the events of 9/11, the political approach to stockpile stewardship evolved. There remains some measure of opposition in principle towards the program on the basis outlined above. However, the emphasis since the Nuclear Posture Review of 2001, certainly within the then-presiding administration, has focused on the need to redirect the SSP in a way that would involve the modification and modernization of the existing deterrent. While ostensibly rejecting neither the stockpile stewardship program, nor its goal of maintaining a deterrent without resorting to testing, such a policy incorporated a more utilitarian approach to the question of nuclear tests, seeking to “upgrade” the deterrent without testing, but against the backdrop of reduced test-readiness should circumstances be deemed to require it. In practice, then, the mandate and much of the work of stockpile stewardship would be preserved, but certain aspects of it altered, particularly the life extension program (LEP). Instead of the LEP in its current form, the Advanced Concepts Initiative (endorsed by the Nuclear Posture Review) determined that the existing deterrent needed a clear set of objectives. It should move from the large-yield Cold War stockpile to a smaller, modern arsenal more appropriate to 21st century threats, including those from non-state actors. The first step in this direction, away from “simple” stewardship of the existing arsenal, came in the form of renewed attention to the development of an earth penetrating nuclear weapon – the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP).35 The RNEP sought to provide an answer to deeply buried targets – for instance in tunnel facilities – such as chemical, biological, or nuclear capabilities. In the past, such efforts had raised concerns that any work towards a low-yield weapon blurred the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. This concern had, in fact, been the raison d’être behind a 1994 law prohibiting research and development to this end. The RNEP, as envisioned in this latest iteration, would have a higher yield than five kilotons and therefore would not violate the 1994 law. In the context of the SSP, this also meant that research on the RNEP would focus on modifications to existing weapons, thereby permitting their eventual deployment without testing. While funding for the RNEP was zeroed out by the US Congress for FY 2006, another more substantial reorientation of the SSP had already arrived in the form of the Reliable Replacement Warhead, which was part of the SSP’s directed stockpile work.36 The RRW was devised as a direct answer to concerns within the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and from within the labs regarding the reliability and long-term effectiveness of the life extension program and, in essence, the next iteration thereof.37 As described in one report, the RRW was “a different approach to stockpile maintenance that makes use of the experimental apparatus of the Stockpile Stewardship Program.”38 This involved the redesign of an existing, tested warhead design, with the aim of increasing the predictability and reliability of the weapon itself. It was also argued that new features could be incorporated into the design that would increase safety and security, particularly those that would prevent its detonation by, for instance, anyone who had somehow obtained unauthorized access to it. As with the RNEP, limitations on the design of the RRW were put in place, as a House Appropriations Committee determined that its qualified endorsement of the initiative was based on the assumption that a replacement weapon will be designed only as a re-engineered and remanufactured warhead for an existing weapon system in the stockpile…[and not] as the beginning of a new production program intended to produce new warhead designs or produce new weapons for any military mission beyond the current deterrent requirements.39 In spite of this, there were disputes and confusion regarding whether the RRW program involved “new weapons” in the sense of a brand new warhead design or in the sense of being only physically new – modernized weapons based on a redesign (i.e. within existing design parameters). An RRW design was nonetheless produced, within the parameters set by the House Appropriations Committee, in 2007. A year later, funds for proceeding further were denied and the 2009 Department of Energy budget ended funding for the initiative. This new approach to stockpile stewardship differed from the more skeptical approach to the SSP in its willingness to acknowledge the benefits of and seek to continue the work of the SSP in increasing the understanding of nuclear weapons, their aging process, and other associated aspects. In spite of the limitations placed on the initiative in 2005, there were concerns that the RRW work might be moving in the direction of new warhead designs, thus setting the stage for the eventual abandonment of the original rationale for the Stockpile Stewardship Program – permitting a moratorium on nuclear testing while maintaining a safe and reliable deterrent. To this end, it was argued that “it takes an extraordinary flight of imagination to postulate a modern new arsenal composed of such untested designs that would be more reliable, safe, and effective than the current U.S. arsenal based on more than 1,000 tests since 1945.”40 The Qualified Supporter’s View (2): Stockpile stewardship as essentially sound; requires redirection away from new designs, modernization. Also contained within the spectrum of opinion on the SSP is another version of qualified support for the program, one which is also frequently given public voice by think-tanks, academia, and other non-governmental organizations who work on questions of nuclear non-proliferation. While favoring nuclear disarmament, this viewpoint sees the Stockpile Stewardship Program as necessary in the interim, as was the political bargain that created it. The program itself is considered to have had significant benefits. The most crucial of these, under this assessment, is simply the success in certifying the reliability and safety of the stockpile such that the testing moratorium could be undertaken and can continue. The importance placed on the vital role of the SSP in maintaining the moratorium contrasts sharply with the previous two assessments of the program, the first of which openly desires a return to testing (or test-readiness), the second of which is, at best, agnostic on the issue. In the meantime, however, the support for the SSP is tested by the sums of money put into the large-scale experimental work. A fifteen-year review of the program by the Federation of American Scientists, for instance, stated that “the current approach to stockpile stewardship, careful surveillance and monitoring along with judicious replacement of parts, has maintained a nuclear stockpile that is safe and reliable.”41 The report expressed criticism of the costs of the program, and in particular the large experimental projects under the SSP’s umbrella, noting (in 2007) that the “the three major components of SSP [the NIF, DAHRT, and ASCI] are over budget and seriously behind schedule.”42 There have This approach reserves still greater skepticism – financially and philosophically – for the proposed redirection of the program in favor of, as was undertaken recently, a Reliable Replacement Warhead. The SSP, it was observed, has been able to certify the stockpile year after year and, as such, its budget “should not be savaged in order to go pushing ahead” with the RRW program.43 As long as the SSP is achieving its goals of maintaining the safety of the existing arsenal, the RRW initiative is unnecessary. In fact, it was argued, “if new RRW designs introduce new, untested concepts, it could increase doubts about the reliability, not decrease doubts about the reliability, of the enduring nuclear stockpile.”44 More symbolically, such a program will tend to have a negative effect in the nuclear non-proliferation regime as a whole, and will undermine efforts to strengthen it, as a result of the perceived loss of US credibility and good faith. The Skeptic’s View (2): Stockpile stewardship as fundamentally problematic; undermines international non-proliferation and disarmament efforts. The fact that a stockpile stewardship program, by its very nature, perpetuates the existence of a nuclear stockpile has also given rise to another perspective that rejects the program outright. This viewpoint has been expressed particularly (although by no means exclusively) by those involved in activist and advocacy work related to nuclear disarmament. While the SSP promised and has permitted an end to testing, the continuation of the program may confirm suspicions among many that the SSP has always been a fig leaf behind which the indefinite and expensive preservation – and even improvement – of the nuclear deterrent proceeds. This perspective considers that stockpile stewardship is simply a means by which the nuclear weapons architecture within the U.S. is propped up, and through which the U.S. intends “to maintain nuclear superiority indefinitely, with or without underground testing.”45 Moreover, while SSP might have nominal goal of stewardship of the deterrent without testing, skeptics of the program have not forgotten that its introduction in 1995 came with the codicil (politically expedient though it might have been) that testing would and could resume if circumstances or new information required it. As such, the SSP itself represents the continuing institutionalization and modernization of the nuclear arsenal or, as it has also been described, is simply “nuclear weapons research and production for the 21st century.”46 Stockpile stewardship and current prospects for CTBT ratification The new US administration is apparently ready to take up the question of the CTBT once again and to “immediately and aggressively” pursue ratification of the Treaty.47 As a consequence, and as in 1999, the SSP is likely to come to come under close scrutiny during the political debate that ensues. This is not least because some of the results of the past ten years worth of work have direct implications for the likelihood of CTBT ratification. In 2003, as already noted, the ability to produce plutonium pits was reestablished, allowing for the remanufacturing of the plutonium core of the existing stockpile. This option had not been available since 1989, when the pit facility in Colorado was shut down. The remanufacturing ability supports the argument that the stockpile surveillance and life extension programs will, as maintained by its supporters, be able to ensure the continued reliability and safety of the deterrent. More importantly, the understanding of the way that plutonium decays has recently changed. During the Senate hearings in 1999, it was noted that “we lack experience predicting the effects of such aging on the safety and reliability of the weapons.”48 In 2006, however, studies by the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories (and supported by an independent assessment from the JASON group) indicated that the plutonium core did not decay in the manner that was once thought, but that the damaged crystal structure reasserted itself.49 As a result, it has now been stated that “most primary types have credible minimum lifetimes in excess of 100 years as regards aging of plutonium.”50 However, technical concerns regarding the CTBT (which, in the past, also included concerns as to its verifiability) have always been irrevocably entwined with political and national security concerns. These are most often focused the Treaty’s scope (i.e. the fact that it does not prohibit research on nuclear weapons), as well as its ability to meaningfully augment the nuclear non-proliferation regime or whether, instead, the U.S. would “risk strategic surprise from a sophisticated violator conducting small-scale weapons tests in ways designed to evade detection.”51 Other longstanding concerns are raised by the inevitable loss of expertise on weapons design and testing that will occur as time passes. Regardless of the technical reassurance that the SSP’s work should provide, these and other objections to the CTBT that existed in 1999 are likely to be argued again. Therefore, (and leaving aside concomitant progress that has also been on the Treaty’s verifiability) the fact that many of the technical objections to the ratification of the CTBT have been assuaged by the work of the program is necessary, but not sufficient. Even assuming that the technical arguments that have been made are convincing, there is no reason to assume that, therefore, they will translate into political support for the Treaty among those who, in the past, were unconvinced. Obtaining this support will require not only an active role by the U.S. President, but will necessitate that increased attention be paid to convincing arguments for the non-proliferation and disarmament advantages created by the CTBT, both for the regime and for the United States. This is potentially a more difficult task than in 1999, with such a debate occurring against the backdrop of concerns regarding the nuclear programs of Iran and Syria, and the nuclear test conducted by the DPRK – all of which have taken place despite the U.S. testing moratorium. On the other hand, some of those who opposed the CTBT in 1999 have since come out in support of its ratification.52 These voices may serve as credible sources of persuasion, particularly for others such as Senator John McCain, who opposed the Treaty in 1999 but who has since expressed a willingness to keep an open mind on the subject. Final observations The expression “nuclear taboo” is generally used to refer to the taboo against the actual use of a nuclear weapon, which has sprung up in the sixty-four years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As more time passes since any of the states with nuclear test moratoria have conducted a test (i.e. all acknowledged nuclear weapons states except the DPRK), a similar nuclear taboo has been created. Or, perhaps, the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons has begun to extend to the testing of nuclear weapons, in spite of the fact that the CTBT has yet to enter into force. As the tests by the DPRK in October 2006 demonstrated, this taboo is fragile. In those states that have declared a moratorium, however, it has become extremely politically difficult to identify circumstances that justify a return to nuclear testing particularly if circumstances have not justified it since the last French and Chinese tests in the mid-1990s. The future of the political debate on the Stockpile Stewardship Program is, of course, closely tied up in this. All of the various perspectives on the program described earlier have adherents, and, in spite of their differences, certain common themes have emerged. The first is the question of the ultimate objective of the Stockpile Stewardship Program, which has tended to be ill-defined. One of the more tangible concerns arising from this question – and, inevitably, a source of future deliberations – will be the financial cost of the program. If the future course of the SSP is unclear, as it seems to be now that the RRW program is off the table, finding political (and therefore budgetary) support for the program may prove difficult. This is, in part, because stockpile stewardship, in its present form, has self-evidently postponed any decision about modernization and new nuclear weapons. The current arsenal will last longer, perhaps a great deal longer. It will not, of course, last forever, and at some point a decision on its future will have to be taken. While the RRW program has been sidelined, there is no reason to assume it will not be revisited, although its eventual success is by no means assured, particularly if there continues to be a lack of precision regarding what the RRW concept entails and what is, and is not “new” about it, in terms of weapons and the warhead designs. Currently, its resuscitation seems to depend solely on which way the political wind blows. Those in favor of this work are likely to remain in favor of it, so long as the life extension programs are viewed as buying time before an “inevitable” need to modernize the arsenal. If, in other words, the possession of a nuclear deterrent is considered and accepted as being an indefinite requirement, then modernization of the arsenal would need to occur, at some point. Pressure to undertake such modernization sooner rather than later, given the perceived need to update the Cold War arsenal, is therefore to be expected. Conversely, if the life extension and stockpile surveillance programs were expressly understood as something else – as, for instance, a necessary step on a long road towards disarmament – then the pressing need to modernize the arsenal eases (except, of course, among those who do not consider eventual disarmament to be, ipso facto, possible or preferable). The debate over the course and shape of stockpile stewardship is, in essence, a debate over the future of the US deterrent. In turn, a debate about the future of the US deterrent (and whether or not it has one) may also be credibly understood as a window into the US intentions regarding nuclear disarmament. The results of these discussions will inevitably be held up by other actors for comparison against US rhetoric on this issue. The Stockpile Stewardship Program, it is worth noting, is not incompatible with the act of disarming. To the contrary, it has facilitated significant reductions in the stockpile from Cold War highs (something that is often overlooked in the criticism of US nuclear policy). Nonetheless, it is self-evidently incompatible with the existential state of disarmament, given that the “stockpile” in stockpile stewardship refers to a stockpile of nuclear weapons. Finally, as the debate over the CTBT has already shown, although the technical achievements and efforts of the SSP have facilitated the acceptance of a political decision (the moratorium) can not be relied upon to trump political considerations. The upcoming debate over the Treaty, ten years later, is likely to demonstrate that this is still the case. A more careful effort in convincing the undecided may prove the tipping point in favor of the Treaty’s ratification. 
1 Center on International Cooperation, New York University 2 The complete list of the thirteen practical steps towards nuclear disarmament are contained in the Final Document of the 2000 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Volume I, Part I (Review of the operation of the Treaty, taking into account the decisions and the resolution adopted by the 1995 Review and Extension Conference, p. 14. Accessed at: http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N00/453/64/PDF/N0045364.pdf?OpenElement. Directory: Documents Documents -> Concept stage Documents -> Concept stage Documents -> The great global switch-off Documents -> Nonprofit grant application Documents -> The Truth about the Rwandan Genocide Documents -> Annual InStructional unit plan Documents -> Chaos equipment included Download 91.89 Kb. Share with your friends:
|