But, such is redundancy’s aura of near-invincibility that few are willing to entertain the notion that it may actually compound rather than reduce risk in some situations.

Back in 2004 noted nuclear-security expert Scott Sagan (recently engaged in a spirited debate in Survival magazine on first use of nuclear weapons) wrote an award-winning article for the publication Risk Analysis. Its enigmatic title: The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Why More Nuclear Security Forces May Produce Less Nuclear Security.

First, let’s get the problem with the problems in the title out of the way. Presumably the duplication of the word is a humorous attempt (however stiff) to highlight the concept of redundancy. Sagan begins his piece by recalling that post-9/11 fears of attacks on U.S. nuclear facilities induced officials to authorize an increase in security personnel to protect them.

But first he explains how technological redundancy can lead to what’s called “catastrophic common-mode error” — the failure of all the components in a system.

[Many] serious accidents with hazardous technologies. . . are caused by redundant safety devices. … The October 1966 near-meltdown accident at the Fermi reactor near Monroe, MI, for example, was caused by an emergency safety device, a piece of zirconium plate [which] broke off, however, and blocked a pipe, stopping the flow of coolants into the reactor core.

Meanwhile, Sagan maintains, another potential contributing factor to catastrophic common-mode failure is adding manpower to guard critical sites. Huh? Apparently, despite the supposed success of the “Surge” in Iraq, a reflexive precaution such as adding reinforcements comes complete with a hole through which you could drive a truck bomb, I mean truck. To wit: an insider threat. Who, Sagan asks, “should guard the guardians?”

He’s skeptical of reassurances by the nuclear power industry — and even its regulators — that security personnel are ” thoroughly vetted through intense background checks, random drug and alcohol tests, and security management programs, like the Continuous Behavior Observation Program, which ensures that supervisors and colleagues will report on any suspicious behavior.” Overlooking the obvious reservations about that last course of action (C-BOP?) for the moment, why is Sagan suspicious?

Because “the criteria used to assess suspicious behavior are suspicious.” Here we go again with the redundancy. What Sagan means is that the criteria have failed to filter out what may charitably be called undesirable elements. “For example,” he writes, “security personnel of at least one nuclear weapons facility were known to have ties with members of anti-government right-wing militia groups.”

Just as long as it’s not al Qaeda. Compared to 9/11, Oklahoma City was only a blip on the terrorist-attack radar, right?

Moving on, Sagan writes, “The second way in which redundancy can backfire is when diffusion of responsibility leads to ’social shirking.’” We may not be familiar with this term, but we know all too well what it means. It’s a “common phenomenon — in which individuals or groups reduce their reliability in the belief that others will take up the slack.” Yet it’s “rarely examined.” Why?

“. . . because of a ‘translation problem’ that exists when transferring redundancy theory from purely mechanical systems to complex organizations. [It seems that in] mechanical engineering, the redundant units are usually inanimate objects, unaware of each other’s existence. In organizations, however, we are usually analyzing redundant individuals, groups, or agencies, backup systems that are aware of one another. [Emphasis added.]

True, this sounds like something out of a Malcolm Gladwell book, or the genre he spawned. Yet here’s another “outlier” (or something like that) — overcompensation, which occurs when. . .

. . . the addition of extra components encourages individuals or organizations to. … engage in inherently risky behavior — driving faster, flying higher, producing more nuclear energy, etc.

Think about the old argument: If boxers wear helmets, do they then suffer fewer qualms about inserting their heads into the action and risking cranial injury? In fact, Sagan writes:

Research demonstrates. . . that the increased use of ski helmets has not led to decreases in head injuries in accidents on the slopes because many skiers with helmets just go faster down more treacherous terrain.

Something similar seems to have triggered the January 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion. Sagan again:

A strong consensus [emerged that] the unprecedented cold temperature at the Kennedy Space Center at the time of launch caused the failure of two critical O-rings [in the shuttle's] rocket booster [which were] listed as redundant safety components. [The secondary O-ring was intended to] seal even if the first leaked. [The] decision makers falsely believed that redundant safety devices allowed them to operate in more dangerous conditions [the unusual cold -- RW] without increasing the risk of a catastrophe.

As for the optimal number of guards at U.S. nuclear facilities, Sagan writes:

. . . overcompensation should remind nuclear security analysts [that] increases in nuclear security forces should not be used as a justification [for maintaining] insecure facilities or increasing the numbers of nuclear power plants, storage sites, or weapons facilities.

It appears then that it would be wise to refrain from carrying redundancy over from other systems to one as critical as a nuclear power or weapons facility. At the same time, besides helping prevent a terrorist attack, unmasking the problems that redundancy can lead to in the nuclear realm might help shine a light on the difficulties that redundancy presents in other systems.

First posted at the Faster Times.

In one of the most controversial articles of his career, Seymour Hersh sums up this issue for Pakistan:

Nuclear-security experts have war-gamed. . . and concluded that [nuclear] triggers and other elements are most exposed when they are being moved and reassembled — at those moments there would be fewer barriers between an outside group and the bomb.

Before continuing with Pakistan, let’s examine what might seem to some like the least likely locale for such a theft — the United States. In a 2008 Nonproliferation Review article, William Potter, director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, wrote:

A good-sized component of the global stockpile of HEU rarely if ever is moved. … However, a portion of the stocks is more difficult to safeguard because it is sometimes in transit.

Where to, pray tell?

. . . within and between facilities, en route to fabrication into fuel pellets, delivery to different reactor locations, removal to spent fuel storage, reprocessing, or blending.

The life of enriched uranium can be a busy one. Like a prominent business executive vulnerable to kidnapping. . .

Not only is such material in motion more vulnerable to diversion, during normal industrial operations it also generates ‘”Material Unaccounted For” (MUF). … For example, in one famous case in the mid-1960s involving a U.S. nuclear fuel facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania, it was rumored that a huge amount of MUF concealed the diversion of HEU [weapon-enriched uranium] to Israel for its nuclear weapons program.

Next, Potter provides an example of how. . .

. . . this bookkeeping device [MUF] provides potential cover for would-be thieves and terrorists. Indeed, the perpetrator of the first confirmed case of diversion of fissile material from a Russian nuclear facility in 1992 relied upon his insider knowledge of
the established MUF figure. . . to divert small quantities of HEU.

While trans-national transport of HEU has declined, it still occurs, such as when of Soviet-era HEU is shipped to Russia for reduction from nuclear-weapons fuel to nuclear-power plant fuel. Meanwhile, outside of Russia’s loose nukes, no nuclear material is more coveted than Pakistan’s “crown jewels,” as its nuclear weapons are sometimes described.

Britain’s Shaun Gregory is one of the foremost experts on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in the world. In the Sentinel, the West Point Counter Terrorism Center’s authoritative publication, he writes that. . .

. . . Pakistan’s usual separation of nuclear weapons components is compromised to a degree by the need to assemble weapons. . . and refurbishment cycle at civilian sites, and by the requirement for co-location of the separate components at military sites so that they can be mated quickly.

The words that are emphasized mean that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons can be flushed out. As I reported in an Asia Times Online piece early this year:

[The same professor] Gregory writes, to facilitate maximum anticipation of an attack on its nuclear weapon sites (as well as to foil a quick ground strike) by India, Pakistan has located them in its west. “The unanticipated consequence,” he explains, is that the nuclear weapons are “either within or close to the more volatile tribal regions of Pakistan to the west and northwest of Islamabad”.  …

The London Independent’s Johann Hari quotes Scott Sagan, a nuclear security expert: “If Pakistan fears they may be attacked [by India or presumably jihadis], they have an incentive to take [the weapons] out of the [more secure] bunkers and put them out in the countryside.” Where, of course, there’s that much greater a chance they’ll be apprehended by jihadis. 

In fact, the [New York Times's David] Sanger reports that a top George W. Bush administration official expressed his fears to him that “some groups could try to provoke a confrontation between Pakistan and India in the hope that the Pakistani military would transport tactical nuclear weapons closer to the front lines, where they would be more vulnerable to seizure. Indeed, when the deadly terror attacks occurred in Mumbai [other] officials told [Sanger] they feared that one of the attackers’ motives might have been to trigger exactly that series of events.” [Emphasis added.]

Bet you never heard that before.

Furthermore, as Professor Gregory writes in the Sentinel:

Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda have proved that they have good intelligence about the movement of security personnel, including army, ISI and police forces, all of whom have been routinely targeted.

The irony is that nuclear weapons in Pakistan are moved and most vulnerable to apprehension at exactly the moment when they’re best left in place.

First posted at the Faster Times.

“We have reached the point where the senior military generals responsible for nuclear forces are advocating, more vocally, more vehemently, than our politicians, to get down to lower and lower weapons.”
– General Eugene Habiger (Ret.), former head of U.S. nuclear forces, in 2000

Not exactly the kind of talk we’re used to hearing from a high-ranking member of the military, is it? Nor was this, four years earlier, by Gen. Charles Horner, who commanded the aerial forces of the United States and its allies during the first Gulf War:

I came to the realization that nuclear weapons had very little utility during the Gulf War, when I realized that even if Saddam Hussein used a nuclear weapon on us, we would have to retaliate on a conventional basis. And then later, when I became the owner, so to speak, of the land-based ICBM force, and I saw the vast amount of money and resource that was involved in maintaining the large Cold War level of nuclear weapons, I said there’s got to be a better way.

Then, in June of last year, renowned national security analyst and one-time assistant secretary of defense Lawrence Korb echoed the comments of Generals Habiger and Horner in an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and expanded on them:

From its creation as a separate service at the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force was first among equals amid the nation’s. . . four armed services. [It's] dominance was due primarily to its leading role in developing and deploying strategic nuclear weapons, which were deemed key to the country’s survival.

But after the collapse of the Soviet Union:

Strategic nuclear deterrence was no longer seen as central to U.S. security and the attention and resources of the policy makers in general and the air force in particular began to shift. … toward traditional air missions. Rather than the Bomber Barons, the air force in the post-Cold War era was led by the Fighter Mafia. … Only when current Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposed stopping production of the F-22 at 182 planes did the air force roll out its propaganda machine [to object].

Still, it’s not as if the air force and the military are actually lobbying for an end to nuclear weapons. I’ve yet to be able to find more instances of contemporary military brass venting about nuclear weapons as a white elephant they’re stuck with.

In fact, at Wired’s Danger Room, Nathan Hodge recently wrote:Speaking Tuesday on Capitol Hill, Gen. Kevin Chilton, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, said: “When looking into the future a basic question is … will we still need nuclear weapons 40 years from now? I believe the answer to that question is yes.”

Interviewed by Melanie Kirkpatrick in the Wall Street Journal, the general said that nuclear weapons were, “designed for about a 15- to 20-year life” which worked fine when “we had a very robust infrastructure . . . that replenished those families of weapons at regular intervals.” But now, “they’re all older than 20 years . . . . The analogy would be trying to extend the life of your ‘57 Chevrolet into the 21st century.”

Travis Sharp works on defense spending, among other things, for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. We asked him for his reaction.

Gen. Chilton has repeatedly made comments that blur the line between responsible execution of the nuclear mission and questionable advocacy on behalf of nuclear modernization. I wouldn’t take Gen. Chilton’s statements as being representative of the Air Force’s or U.S. military’s broader attitudes toward nuclear weapons. After all, Gen. Chilton’s role at STRATCOM gives him a strong bureaucratic interest in maintaining, or even enhancing, the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’s Nuclear Information Project, responded as well.

There’s a difference between the belief in nuclear weapons at the top level and the management level; the first tends to say they’re really important while the second group is less interested because nuclear weapons are useless for the kind of operations the military are involved in on a day-by-day basis. The second group might accept that nukes are needed for now, but they tend to see them as competition for funding and personnel and not very relevant to their priorities.

He then points out the irony in Gen. Chilton’s 40-year timeframe:

Chilton’s remark is interesting because he used to say, just one year ago, that we needed nuclear weapons throughout this century. By that standard he has come considerably closer to president Obama’s message.

Steve Hynd of Newshoggers adds:

No branch of the services ever cared about costs or ease of use. The true war is the one between departments and agencies for budget share and bureaucratic power. Control of the nuke arsenal is an essential part of the Air Force’s “clout” in that war.

Independent nuclear scholar Ward Wilson pointed out to us that it’s been decades since the likes of Gen. Curtis LeMay openly advocated advocated nuclear war.

Starting in the Johnson Administration, there just are no examples of military men who are so gung ho for nukes that it makes your hair stand on end.

When Reagan wanted to get rid of all the nuclear weapons in Iceland. . . it wasn’t military men that prevented the deal from going through. There weren’t members of the Joint Chiefs stepping forward saying, “Mr. President, this is an essential weapon and you can’t think of getting rid of it.” The voices of caution come from Weinberger and Shultz.

It’s the Sherlock Holmes thing about the dog that didn’t bark in the night.

As well, Gen. Chilton seems oblivious to the likelihood that, in an interim as lengthy as the 40 years to which he referred, nuclear weapons would most likely have been used in an act of war or detonated by accident. The latter, like Chernobyl, might have kick-started disarmament; the former may have blasted the political landscape — not to mention the earth’s — into something unrecognizable.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Meanwhile, at Foreign Policy in Focus, under the category of Watch Out What You Wish For, Frida Berrigan writes (emphasis added):

Congress gave $68 million to the Boeing Corporation to accelerate the purchase and development of 10-12 “massive ordnance penetrators [MOPs].” … These 30,000 pound bombs carry 6,000 pounds of high explosives.

The MOP. … replaces a nuclear weapon that Congress was unwilling to fund over the past few years — the robust nuclear earth penetrator [intended] to burrow deep into enemy lairs and deliver a nuclear wallop. [In other words, who needs] nuclear weapons to deliver massive destruction. … As we begin to reduce our nuclear capabilities, watch out for a lot of pressure to ramp up conventional weapons procurement.

If you’ve ever watched Antiques Roadshow, you know that collectible toys which remain packed in their boxes greatly surpass in value those that have been removed and used for play. Like those toys, nuclear weapons sit, neatly wrapped, on a shelf. Some generals cast covetous eyes at them; others just want toys that they can play with.

First posted at the Faster Times.

A controversial Scottish brewery has launched what it described as the world’s strongest beer — with a 32% alcohol content. Tactical Nuclear Penguin has been unveiled by BrewDog of Fraserburgh.

At its website, BrewDog boasts that its “‘Tactical Nuclear Penguin’ beats the previous record of 31% held by German beer brand Schorschbraer.”

Intended for battlefield use, tactical nuclear weapons pack a significantly lower yield than the heavyweight nukes, which, of course, are known as strategic. (How the phrase “strategic” was appropriated for nuclear weapons is a subject for future post.) Despite a size intended to facilitate their utilization, tactical nukes are still judged too hot to handle by those nuclear powers that have developed them (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France).

If BrewDog’s new beer was called “Strategic Nuclear,” the wary drinker might fear the high alcohol content would lay waste to him, her, or the whole bar. “Tactical” suggests that, if the beer is used judiciously, its effects are manageable. (The word “penguin” in its brand name signifies the amount of time the beer has spent exposed to extreme cold, which apparently boosts the alcohol content.)

The BBC report also mentions that “BrewDog was previously branded irresponsible for an 18.2% beer called Tokyo” — after the World War II bombing? — “which it then followed with a low alcohol beer called” — drum roll, please — “Nanny State.”

Clearly this is a company with a sense of humor. But, too, it’s a company with a plan. BrewDog is soliciting 10,000 investors online through a program called Equity for Punks.

The BBC also reports quotes a representative of a group Called Alcohol Focus Scotland named Jack Law, who said: “We want to know why a brewer would produce a beer almost as strong as whisky.”

Yeah, and we disarmament advocates want to know why the national defense establishment would produce weapons as strong as nuclear.

One can’t help but wonder: Will Schorschbraer seek to redress the brewery balance of power by breaking BrewDog’s record for alcohol content with the aforementioned Strategic Nuclear beer. Instead of using cold brewing, it will exponentially increase the alcoholic content with extreme heat — thermonuclear, in fact.

Eventually, the breweries will realize that their high-yield beers are only good for deterrence. Nobody will be able to drink them without killing themselves.

First posted at the Faster Times.

But terrorists, according to conventional thinking, are immune to deterrence. If they ever obtained nuclear weapons, they’d suffer few qualms about using them. First, they’re secure in the knowledge that they’re ostensibly stateless. It’s unlikely that the state which they’ve attacked with nuclear weapons, such as the United States, would retaliate against the state which served as their command center for the attack. (Can’t speak for another possible target, Israel, though.)

Second, not only don’t they fear retaliation, were it to occur they’d welcome it. To terrorists, runs this line of thinking, an apocalypse is just an expressway to heaven for their martyred souls. Thus, according to these scenarios, turning their back on deterrence and mounting a nuclear attack is a win-win proposition for terrorists.

More likely, if terrorists were to obtain nuclear weapons, they would be as domesticated by their acquisition as states are that develop them. The better part of the power of nuclear weapons lies in their potential, not their kinetic energy. Intact, they can be used to bargain for goods, respect, and security.

For instance, Islamic terrorists might offer to turn over their nuclear weapons if Israel turned over its half of Jerusalem. Of course, when they’re inevitably denied, they’ll find themselves painted into a corner as sure as the United States and the Soviet Union did during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We in the West think of terrorists, especially Islamic, as a homogeneous mass. But as with any such group, there are those on the margins of, say, al Qaeda or maybe Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Mumbai attackers), who are almost as crucial to their operations as those on the inside. Among them are individuals who provide transport and shelter; nuclear scientists and technicians, should their services be sought, fall under the same category. Since any ideological motivations on the part of the outsiders may be secondary to the financial, they may be more vulnerable to deterrence that threatens their families and people.

In fact, some believe, a deterrent to the command structures of terrorist groups does exist — and it’s self-imposed. . .

For terrorist organizations that would want to take credit for a nuclear event, failure, not discovery, is likely to be the main deterrent. … Present evidence shows that [they] prefer to carry out actions where the odds of success are high even if those actions are less destructive than they might prefer. [Emphasis added.]

That’s from Nuclear Forensics: Role, State of the Art, and Program Needs, an undated (most likely 2007 or 2008) report by the Joint Working Group of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Wait, what does forensics have to do with a nuclear attack? Setting off a nuclear weapon isn’t like stabbing a stranger in an alley. Isn’t the perp even more self-evident than a criminal who has an ongoing beef with someone who turns up dead?

While that’s true of a state, what makes a nuclear attack by terrorists unique is not that we wouldn’t know who pulled it off or why. Chances are they’d be willing to be the bearer of both those glad tidings. Instead, the question becomes: “Who supplied them with the weapon?”

CSI: Ground Zero

Nuclear differs from criminal forensics in not only its emphasis on the chemical, but in that it’s working for much higher stakes: attempting to prevent or solve the greatest mass murder in history. Specifically, according to the Joint Working Group paper, it determines questions such as:

Was the event really a nuclear explosion? What was the yield. … Were [substances] present, which would denote the presence of [shudder -- RW] thermonuclear reactions? … What can be inferred about provenance and history? … What was the most probable device design?

Much of this, the paper explains, depends on the creation of a “comprehensive international database of nuclear material fingerprints.” Even better would be an international program for making “the nuclear materials more easily identifiable by tagging them with distinctive markers.”

It’s not easy to convince states that are understandably “hesitant to internationalize the most sensitive parts of their nuclear infrastructure” to take part in these programs. But those that don’t would be the first towards which suspicious eyes were cast in the event of an incident.

An alternative means of encouraging reluctant states to cooperate could be the implementation of a “negligence” doctrine. In another work on the subject, “Nuclear Attribution as Deterrence” (not online) in the March 2007 Nonproliferation Review, Michael Miller reports on a writer named Anders Corr. He argues that the U.S. Cooperative Threat (Nunn-Lugar) program, which helps secure loose nukes in Russia, as well as dismantle designated Soviet era nuclear weapons, is a double-edged sword.

Some of its funding, Corr believes, is siphoned off for corruption. Thus, lest the flow dry up, Miller writes:

. . . there is very little incentive within [Russia] to actually secure material. [Corr advocates] a harsh form of deterrence where those who permit nuclear theft, especially the leaders of the state, would be held completely accountable. … A negligence doctrine dealing with nuclear weapons material is necessary for deterrence [lest] a negligent state. . . think that it will pay only a small price for 50 kg of lost HEU.

But, with a ploy straight out of a spy thriller, nuclear forensics could conceivably be thwarted. Here’s the Joint Working Group on what it refers to as “spoof,” though the term hardly does justice to its gravity:

States or terrorist organizations, for reasons that might range from protecting secrets to preventing attribution, may attempt to spoof any later investigation by mixing material from different sources.

Also, as Steve Hynd of Newshoggers points out, a spoof could conceivably by used by one state, such as Pakistan, to frame another, such as India (or vice versa), in order to invite retaliation against its enemy. Miller again:

How easily could [nuclear] signatures be falsified? It would be relatively simple for an expert nuclear weapons designer to create a weapon that looked improvised or that was made of reactor fuel instead of an alloy designed for weapons. The tradeoff would be settling for a larger chance of failure and a smaller yield.

Finally, to improve the odds that “the perpetrators of a nuclear terrorist act will fail and be apprehended and prosecuted,” the Joint Working Group writes, credible forensic capability must be “demonstrated by successful attribution of intercepted materials.” [Emphasis added.]

In other words, proving the provenance of interdicted nuclear materials can serve as a trial run that demonstrates how nuclear forensics might succeed in the event of a nuclear explosion. It’s true that nuclear forensics suffers from staffing and funding problems. But the greatest obstacle to its effectiveness deterring states that are either careless about their nuclear materials and know-how or that are willing to trade them with terrorist groups may be a simple lack of publicity. Miller writes:

While recent academic treatments have begun to explore the technology, few government documents describe any of the specifics of post-explosion attribution. This may be intentional, to make the attribution more difficult to spoof, but it can also give the impression that the technology is less-than-ready. [But attribution capabilities] are probably good enough to publicize the technology with the aim of deterring state leaders.

Besides, “More important than technology [is its] perception. … Thus, rather than worry that the technology will not be successful, the United States should fear that it has not been demonstrated well enough.”

In the long run, in tandem with international cooperation and spelling out exactly what retribution awaits the offending state, nothing is more critical than advertising the capabilities of nuclear forensics to determine the origins of a nuclear bomb.

The emergence of a sophisticated form of deterrence that doesn’t rely on that most blunt of all forces — “mutual assured destruction” — is a hopeful development for the future of humankind. But, however encouraging nuclear forensics is, the sheer bulk of the infrastructure and apparatus dedicated to deterring or determining a perpetrator has come to resemble those surrounding domestic crime, which costs the United States over $100 billion a year.

Some day we may learn that it’s a lot cheaper to make humankind economically and, thus, psychically secure. Perhaps then we’ll stop looking for security in all the wrong places — such as in weapon systems poised to blow up in our faces at a moment’s notice.

First posted at the Faster Times.

Nor is disarmament any more creative. At one end of the spectrum, we hear guileless pleas to “ban the bomb” or “go to zero.” At the other end, realists, ever willing to sell the farm out from under disarmament, haggle. A recent example: “To procure a test ban treaty, we need to put off advocating a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons.”

Much of this kind of thinking is the product of think tanks. Ostensibly engaged in research and advocacy, many not only publicize just what pleases their donors but lobby for them too. Still, policy institutes with integrity do exist and, a year ago, one was inaugurated that has the potential to break new ground.

The Madrona Institute is based in New Mexico and the state of Washington (common to both of which is the bonsai-like tree that is its namesake ). Its origins aren’t in research, but in the hands-on experience that one of its founders, Merle Lefkoff, a long-time international mediator, has with “back-channel” diplomacy, including in conflict zones.

Her co-founders are Ron Zee and Roger Morris (the well-known historian whose books have chronicled the careers of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, among others). As they explain on their website, traditional diplomacy “often reinforces the fiction that people are entirely rational, that outcomes of deliberation can be controlled in order to reach pre-determined goals.”

Worse, “fixed agendas are specified ahead of time, and the discussions generally proceed in incremental steps toward a fixed ‘objective.’ When suddenly the group appears to move ‘backwards,’ people often give up.”

But Madrona believes that “in problem solving groups, human beings do not move in incremental, linear steps. When people sit down together to tackle a big problem, the deliberations are organic, non-linear. . . and feedback changes the thinking at the negotiating table.” Also, “Our experience is that a combination of seclusion and candor, under the radar screen of outside scrutiny or media attention, offers the best chance for cutting edge and often-unprecedented discussion of the problem at hand.”

Besides back-channel diplomacy, Madrona’s method derives from the study of complex systems as pioneered at the Santa Fe Institute — the standard-bearer for break-the-mold think tanks. Those unfamiliar with complexity science may be intimidated by its name. But it helps to think of it as, in its own words, “a multi-disciplinary collaboration in pursuit of understanding the common themes that arise in natural, artificial, and social systems.” For example, the fundamental principles of organization, once learned, can be equally applied to biology, physics, or economics.

Thus does Madrona seek to unite, as its website observes, “a diverse body of whole systems and complexity thinkers. [Complexity science] has rarely, if ever, been invited to converge, converse, and contribute to peacemaking and conflict resolution.” In hopes of expediting a breakthrough, Madrona seeds its dialogues, which it has just begun hosting, with not only individuals who are expert in the subject of that particular dialogue, but hail from a variety of disciplines. Among the criteria that Madrona uses to select participants is “their demonstrated ability to think creatively outside the orthodoxy that permeates traditional diplomacy and peacemaking initiatives.”

Not only aren’t the discussions linear, but the individuals who run the meetings “work to build trusting relationships [and] encourage a ‘leaderless process,’ granting all participants equal power and authority.” Nor is Madrona “attached to a particular goal. . . we seek only an outcome perceived by the participants to be useful — whatever that outcome may be.”

Also integral to the process is scenario building. “Out of the co-creation of a shared story comes the possibility for movement. … Several meetings of the group are anticipated as a way to continue to refine strategic direction [and] deepen relationships [to facilitate the] joint action that informs top-level peacemaking.”

As suggested above, disarmament cries out for this approach. In fact, it was the subject of the inaugural dialogue held in October by Madrona, which described it thusly:

The seeming intractability of the disarmament issue, as evidenced by the glacial pace of progress, argues for innovative ways of framing that issue. … The purpose of this policy dialogue is to apply complexity thinking to the nuclear chessboard to uncover promising new policy paths toward a nuclear-weapon-free planet.

The dialogue was broken out into four groups that imagined the future under different circumstances and within varying timeframes. For example, the group of which this author was part envisioned a nuclear terrorist attack and how the world responds over the ensuing five years.

The worst-case scenario — despite destruction of the global economy, mass proliferation — is all too well-known. We presented instead a vision of the United States, as well as the world, seizing the opportunity created by the crisis to not only halt proliferation, but use that success to join in other multinational initiatives. In subsequent posts, summaries of those scenarios will be presented.

First posted at the Faster Times.

An example of a group that approaches disarmament head-on is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. In his most recent letter, its worthy president David Krieger writes:

The starting point for ending the omnicidal threat of nuclear weapons is the recognition that the threat is real and pervasive, and requires action. … We are called upon to end our complacency and respond to this threat by demanding that our leaders develop a clear pathway to the total elimination of nuclear weapons.

This straightforward faction seems to predicate its actions on the notion that not only is it speaking truth to power but on behalf of a sizeable segment of the public. As for the other two, the inlying group comprises realists, who, because many have worked in the government, military, or nuclear labs, operate on the assumption that they’re capable of influencing policy. Before we examine its m.o., let’s first review that of its opposite — activists such as the Berrigan brothers, who in 1980 penetrated a nuclear weapons base and damaged warheads as well as pouring blood on documents and files.

For those who think that incident was of a time, it might surprise you to learn that the Berrigans’ group, Plowshares Nuclear Resistance — however long in the tooth its leading members are — still pull off actions. In fact, though it garnered scant attention in the media, the most recent was November 2 at the Trident submarine base called Kitsap-Bangor near Seattle, Washington.

The base houses over 2,000 nuclear warheads — more “than China, France, Israel, India, North Korea and Pakistan combined,” reads the group’s news release, which continues:

Bill “Bix” Bischel, S.J., 81, of Tacoma, Washington; Susan Crane, 65, of Baltimore MD;  Lynne Greenwald, 60, of Bremerton, Washington; Steve Kelly, S.J., 60, of Oakland, CA.; Anne Montgomery RSCJ, 83, of New York, New York. … entered the Base in the early morning hours of November 2, 2009, All Souls Day, with the intention of calling attention to the illegality and immorality of the existence of the Trident weapons system. They entered thru the perimeter fence, made their way to the Strategic Weapons Facility. . . cut through the first chainlink fence [and] the next double layered fence. . . onto the grounds of [the facility, leaving] a trail of blood [not their own -- RW] and hammered on the roadways [and] fences [and] scattered sunflower seeds throughout the base. [All symbolic acts, they explained -- RW] They were then thrown to the ground face down, handcuffed and  hooded, and held there for 4 hours on the wet, cold ground. [Bear in mind their ages. -- RW] They were. . . cited as of now, for trespass and destruction of government  property, given a ban-and-bar letter and released.

Another excerpt gives us a glimpse into their mentality:

We walk into the heart of darkness. [The nuclear weapons] are sheathed in stainless steel and metal coverings that conceal the evil incarnate lying within. They are filled with death-dealing agents that tear apart humans and leave survivors scarred for life.

As you can see, to those using this approach, nuclear weapons teem with evil. Tolerating the possession of even a handful, whether for deterrence or out of political considerations such as reassuring our allies in Europe, is playing a devil’s game.

For an example of how the mind of a nuclear realist works, watch one tackle the subject of whether or not the United States should continue to insist it has the right to nuclear first-use (a preventive or preemptive strike, that is). Turns out it’s an even hotter topic than I knew when when writing about it last week.

The U.K. publication Survival: Global Politics and Strategy featured an article (subscription only) on the subject in its June-July 2009 issue by noted nuclear writer Scott Sagan. An excerpt from its summary reads:

Is the threat of the first use of US nuclear weapons still necessary to deter the use of non-nuclear WMD [as well as a] large-scale conventional military force? Or can Washington move toward a policy of no-first-use, limiting the role of nuclear weapons to deter the use of other states’ nuclear weapons? … previous government and academic analyses have both exaggerated [its] potential military and diplomatic costs [as well as] underestimated its potential benefits.

The mind of the disarmament realist in question is the renowned Morton Halperin, who responded to Sagan’s article with a letter (which is online) in the October-November issue of Survival. He notes the “serious domestic political storm a president [seeking a no-first-use policy] would confront.”

Why? Because “Opponents of no first use. . . believe that. . . a no-first-use promise will increase the political cost of using nuclear weapons only for the United States, undermining the credibility of the US deterrent,” for not only the United States, but Europe, too. Also, “There is no doubt that some allies” — again, in Europe — “would be nervous if the United States made a no-first-use pledge.”

But isn’t no-first-use integral to disarmament? To Halperin’s way of thinking, “there are other proposals to pursue this objective which would be [as] effective as a. . . no-first-use policy and which might produce less controversy.” He continues:

In his Prague speech. . . Obama committed himself in the short run to four other measures which. . . advance the same objectives as the no-first-use proposal: reducing the role of nuclear weapons in US national security. . . negotiating a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia. . . pursuing US ratification of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), and starting negotiations to end the production of fissionable material [plutonium and enriched uranium] for weapons purposes. …

Seeking three treaties on nuclear arms control in his first term will not be easy. … Under the circumstances, no first use can and should be put off for another day.

How Can an Assurance Be Negative?

Instead, according to Halperin, the United States:

. . . should update and simplify the so-called negative security assurance. . . that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance issued in 1978. [It would read] ‘The United States reaffirms that it will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon [states that have signed and are in compliance with] the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons’. … This would preserve the president’s right to threaten or use nuclear weapons first against any state with nuclear weapons [and] also highlight the importance the United States attaches to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Halperin sums up: “. . . universal no-first-use. … is a good idea whose time has not yet come.”

While those in the other two camps might think that Halperin is turning no-first-use into a sacrificial offering for hawks, his desire to expedite disarmament can’t be questioned. While one is tempted to assert that all three approaches constitute synergy, it’s more likely that the realists and the blood-sowers cancel each other out. Meanwhile, the question of whether the disarmament race will go to the tortoise or the hare — or end up clutched in the talons of the hawk — remains open.

First posted at the Faster Times.

Among reasons to hope that Iran relents is a fact of which many who proclaim Iran has a right to a nuclear program seem ignorant. Turns out that transubstantiating the fuel used for nuclear energy into nuclear-weapon fuel, far from a miracle, is all too commonplace.

The Hudson Institute’s Christopher Ford explains (sorry, misplaced the link).

Reactor fuel production is worrisome enough all by itself, because in enriching uranium to LEU [low-enriched uranium] reactor fuel levels the Iranians would have already done most of the work necessary to enrich to weapons-usable HEU [highly-enriched uranium].

At Huffington Post, Bruno Pellaud, former deputy director general of the International Atomic Agency, adds some seasoning to Ford’s remarks:

. . . [LEU] (some 4% enriched) is already a long way towards the weapon-relevant [HEU] (some 90%), much more than these two figures seem to indicate. In the physics of enrichment, it’s like a pre-cooked cake, so well pre-cooked that a few minutes in the micro-oven suffices to bring it to the table.

Ford again (emphasis added):

. . . it takes a certain number of [Sleep-Inducing Technical Term, or SITT -- RW] to enrich uranium all the way to weapons-usable levels, but by the time one gets to [LEU] most of that work has already been accomplished. It takes fewer [SITT] to finish the job than to get to [LEU] in the first place, so possessing a supply of uranium that is already LEU makes it much easier to enrich to HEU levels [but] at a secret additional facility.

This is nothing new, Ford explains in a previous paper. Describing the early U.S. nuclear years, he writes: “Thinkers of the period were painfully aware of what we might today call the problem of the ‘latent’ or ‘virtual’ nuclear weapons programs [which can be ramped up in case of a threat -- RW] afforded by possession of nuclear fuel-making capabilities. As U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, the true ‘measure of atomic armament’. . . was to be found less in what [a country] actually had ‘put into a bomb’” than in the sum-total of its fissionable material.

Therefore, writes Pellaud:

For the time being, this shipment to Russia. . . eliminates the [risk of a nuclear weapons breakout]. Some would argue that Iran would only send to Russia part of its LEU stockpile and keep hidden any past clandestine production of LEU. Not so easy. The IAEA would indeed detect such dissimulation, [like it] kept track [of the] 350 tonnes of raw uranium that Iran had purchased from Namibia in the seventies.

Besides, wrote Andreas Persbo in March at Verification, Implementation, and Compliance, winner of the award for Highest-Traffic-Generating Blog Title three years running (not):

A break-out at this stage would be very risky for the Iranian government. The amassed low-enriched material is about right for one uranium-based weapon, but in order to get that processed into weapons-grade, Iran would need to reconfigure the cascade and run the material through the facility again. Then, the weapons grade material would need to [go through a Tedious Technical Process, or TTP -- RW].

How long will that process take?

… a minimum of two months. Add another four to five months to [endure yet another TTP] and we’re up to half a year. Even if the Iranians have done their weaponization homework, they’ll have to move from theory to practice for the first time. [What's more] they only have enough material for one weapon. It is literally a one-shot deal. …

If Iran really wants to acquire a nuclear weapon, the best strategy would be to bypass safeguards altogether and to build a clandestine enrichment facility.

Which, of course, it since did — the Fordo facility near Iranian holy city Qom, from which an International Atomic Energy Agency inspection team just returned. “We had a good trip,” said the mission head.

First posted at the Faster Times.

Like missile defense, Dead Hand, as the Russians call their Doomsday Device, exists to this day. Except theirs actually works.

If Russia clings to a Cold War mentality in other ways as well, who can blame it? The era combined the best of both worlds:
1. Stability, for those who believed in the illusion of deterrence, and. . .
2. Life on the edge, for those who knew the true extent to which the United States and the Soviet Union were actually at each other’s throats during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan administrations.

Recently discussions were held in Moscow between Russian foreign ministry officials and representatives of Global Zero, the disarmament group that comprises former heads of state, foreign ministers, defense ministers, national security advisors, and military commanders. But it turns out Russia’s not ready for a new round of disarmament talks (at least not with those out of power).

The AP reports:

[Ground Zero member Richard] Burt said Russian officials appear to be concerned that steep cuts in their nuclear arsenal will leave them vulnerable to military threats.

“There is I think a feeling in certain circles in the Russian defense establishment that their conventional forces are rundown and as a result they’re going to have to rely more on their nuclear forces,” Burt said.

Hasn’t that rationale informed many of Russia’s defense policies — as well as those of the United States at times — since the dawn of the nuclear age? According to a 2003 Nonproliferation Review article by Harold Feiveson and Ernst Jan Hogendoorn:

For Russia, the end of the Cold War did impact the country’s no-first-use policy — but in an unexpected direction. In 1993 — facing a precipitous drop in conventional military strength — Russia renounced the 1982 policy of no first use, and changed its declaratory policy to maintaining the option to use nuclear weapons against any nuclear armed aggressor, including non-nuclear states allied with a nuclear weapons state.

Today, not only is Russia dragging its feet on disarmament, but, as Simon Saradzhyan reports for Zurich’s International Relations and Security Network: [Russia's] 2000 Military Doctrine asserts that Russia “reserves the right” to use nuclear weapons first “in response to large-scale aggression using conventional weapons in situations [such as] regional war.”

Not only is Russia dragging its feet on disarmament by continuing to retain the right to first use — in a regional war, no less — but, “Changes in the [follow-up] to the 2000 document include [allowing] use of nuclear weapons when repelling an aggression [in] even a local war.” Bear in mind that Russia’s “pledge to use nuclear weapons to defend itself and its allies failed to deter Russia’s foes” in the regional conflicts that it’s faced thus far in Chechnya and South Ossetia (not to mention Georgia). [Emphasis added.]

In fact, Saradzhyan quotes a retired Russian general who “argued that the new doctrine looks ‘detached from reality’.” Worst of all, he writes, “The planned expansion of the use of nuclear weapons will raise a lot of questions on how it conforms with” President Medvedev’s May 2009 commitment to Global Zero, which, five months later, looks like a passing fancy on his part.

First Strike Culpability

If you believe that nuclear weapons provide a sound deterrent, it’s likely you assume that first-strike capability is the backbone of deterrence. A policy of no-first-use would remove a weight from your pan of the scale that monitors nuclear balance and deposit it in that of your designated enemy’s. In other words, if the United States declared no-first-use, its foe might jump to the conclusion that, should push come to shove, a red carpet has been laid out for it to strike first. Since U.S. nuclear installations are prime targets, the ability of the United States to retaliate would be severely compromised.

As Feiveson and Hogendoorn explain in their Nonproliferation Review article, it was the Eisenhower administration that first adopted first-use as national security policy. One of its directives read: “In the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be available for use as other munitions.” [Emphasis added.]

Here we have as clear a depiction as one could want of how the military views nuclear weapons: There’s no qualitative difference between them and conventional weapons. To the military, nuclear weapons don’t constitute a fundamental break in the weapons continuum nor do they invoke visions of the apocalypse and evoke elemental ethical questions. They’re just an inevitable development in the history of bombs. Of course, in recent years, because of the constraints on their use, the Pentagon has grown less enamored of nuclear weapons.

Forty years later, not much had changed. Of the Bush administration, the authors write: “. . . the United States was diplomatically disavowing the use of nuclear weapons except in certain extreme circumstances, and yet at the same time, hedging the disavowal to allow the greatest possible latitude for the use of nuclear weapons.”

Despite what many think, hedging doesn’t imply straddling two domains. Just the opposite in fact, it’s defined as planting a barrier to protect your own. Either way, it’s effect is to muddy the waters.

For example, does a state’s first-use policy apply only to other nuclear states, or to non-nuclear states as well? What could possibly drive a nuclear state to attack a non-nuclear state with nuclear weapons?

The nuclear state might feel that the non-nuclear state is acting with impunity because it’s protected by another nuclear state. More likely the nuclear state is operating under the assumption that the non-nuclear state is about to launch an attack with either the B or the C team of weapons of mass destruction — Biological and Chemical weapons. Never mind that, a policy of first use against WMD runs the risk of watering down the concept of deterrence by diverting it into streams other than the nuclear.

Meanwhile, above the fray — though not exactly occupying the moral high ground because it’s got nuclear weapons, too — stands China. Feiveson and Hogendoorn write:

China. . . remains the only declared nuclear weapons state that has maintained a largely unhedged no-first-use policy, and in 1995 reiterated its commitment that “China undertakes not to be the first to use nuclear weapons at any time or under any circumstances.”

During the U.N. Security Council meeting on disarmament that President Obama convened in September, as the Guardian reported. . .

China pushed to have a clause included in today’s resolution calling on weapons states to emulate its own “no first use” policy, but the US has long resisted such an undertaking, reserving the right to carry out a pre-emptive strike. But Obama is pressing the Pentagon to consider radical changes to US doctrine to downgrade the role of nuclear weapons.

One would hope that our next nuclear posture review disavows first use of nuclear weapons. Unless nuclear states can shed the Cold War mentality once and for all, it’s hard to be optimistic about the long-terms prospects for disarmament.

First posted at the Faster Times.

If you start a war, we may die but the rockets will fly automatically.

Thus spake the man who was profiled in William Taubman’s masterwork Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. The Russian premier was addressing U.S. diplomat Averell Harriman, who sought to prepare the way for the Russian premier to make his contentious 1959 visit to the United States. What exactly did Khrushchev mean by “automatically”? After all, computers were still in their infancy.

Ever hear of the Doomsday Machine? The godfather of nuclear strategy, Herman Kahn, provided an example of one in his book On Thermonuclear War:

The device is. . . connected to a computer which is in turn connected. . . to hundreds of sensory devices all over the United States. The computer would then be programmed so that if, say, five nuclear bombs exploded over the United States, the device would be triggered [by the sensory devices] and the earth destroyed. [It] would seem to be the “ideal” Type I Deterrent.

By adding quotes to “ideal,” at least Kahn acknowledged the absurdity of what he suggested. “If Khrushchev should order an attack,” he added, “both Khrushchev and the Soviet population would be automatically and efficiently annihilated.”

Furthermore, “Even though [the Doomsday Machine] is the ultimate in Type I Deterrence [it] is most improbable that either the Soviet or U.S. governments would ever authorize procuring such a machine. The project is expensive enough so it would be subject to a searching. . . scrutiny which would raise questions it could never survive.”

Turns out Kahn gave the Soviets more benefit of the doubt than they deserved. In a wild Wired magazine story, Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine, Nicholas Thompson details Russia’s development of such a weapon 25 years ago. Though past his term in power, Khrushchev might well have been aware of the program if it were in its planning stages then.

Thompson elaborates on how it works:

Even if the US. … blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. … sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched. … Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. [If it determined the generals were dead] it would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker. … maybe a 25-year-old junior officer fresh out of military academy.

What about the United States? Did it then descend to the next circle of hell — the 666th — after the 664th, where those who developed and deployed the atomic bomb reside, and the 665th, home to the wunderkinds behind the thermonuclear bomb?

Thompson writes: “The US did build versions of these technologies [but] never combined it all into a system of zombie retaliation. It feared accidents and the one mistake that could end it all.”

But, as Daniel Ellsburg explains in his new online book, U.S. Nuclear War Planning for a Hundred Holocausts, that he’s doling out free on his website, chapter by juicy chapter, the United States devised a system equally as devious.

. . . one of the most sensitive secrets [was] that to forestall the possibility that our retaliatory response might be paralyzed either by a Soviet attack. . . or by presidential incapacity, President Eisenhower had. . . secretly delegated to theater commanders the authority to launch nuclear operations. … I had further learned that [the commander of the Pacific command] had likewise delegated that authority downward in his command. … That put many fingers on the button.

Meanwhile, what prompted the Soviets to develop Doomsday Machine? According to Thompson, President Ronald Reagan’s faith in Star Wars, also, of course, known as missile defense.

As we’ve discussed in previous Deproliferators, most nuclear strategists soon understood that missile defense throws the nuclear balance between states out of whack, thus undermining deterrence. In other words, even though the fine points of nuclear strategy were often lost on the Soviet Union, it was nevertheless immediately clear to Moscow that a successful missile defense system permitted the United States to launch a nuclear first strike. Theoretically, anyway, the United States would be protected by Reagan’s celestial shield from a crushing counterattack.

While some hawks grasped this concept, others couldn’t — or wouldn’t. This passage from a review of a book celebrating Saint Reagan describes its authors: “The Andersons share Reagan’s puzzlement that [at Reyjkavik] Gorbachev and his team proved unwilling to accept the president’s peace-loving protestations at face value and instead treated SDI as a grave escalation of the nuclear arms race.”

Perhaps they can be forgiven though. Nuclear strategy gets byzantine pretty fast and at first I too had trouble understanding why missile defense is actually an offensive weapon. Odds are that nobody has ever explained it as clearly as Thompson (emphasis added):

To Moscow [missile defense] confirmed that the US was planning an attack. It would be impossible for the system to stop thousands of incoming Soviet missiles at once, so missile defense made sense only as a way of mopping up after an initial US strike. … Some Soviet weapons would survive for a retaliatory launch, but Reagan’s shield could block many of those. Thus, Star Wars would nullify the long-standing doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the principle that neither side would ever start a nuclear war since neither could survive a counterattack.

Once again, we’re left to contemplate two terrible ironies. The same fears that impelled one of our most anti-nuclear presidents to cling to his teddy bear — missile defense — spurred him to pull the rug out from under the fabled Reykjavík summit when the total abolition of nuclear weapons was actually on the table. Worse, it precipitated the development of Russia’s nightmarish technology, which, to this day, stands ready and willing to carry out its mission.

First posted at the Faster Times.

A Personal ‘Nuclear Posture Review’

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — When viewed on film, a nuclear weapons test might strike the discerning eye as a rip in the very fabric of existence. While one might view a supernova in the same light, not only doesn’t the explosion of a star occur within the confines of a planet, but in an entire galaxy. Furthermore, a supernova is ultimately a creative force that leads to the formation of new stars.

By contrast, a nuclear explosion is a “destroyer of worlds,” as Robert Oppenheimer famously described the first test, Trinity. He prefaced that expression with the words “I am become Death,” from the Bhagavad Gita. In fact, viewing a nuclear explosion can induce a variety of religious experience (apologies to William James). We’re engulfed by the sight of the mushroom cloud unfurling and billowing in slow, majestic motion. An inner peace obtains. Never mind that it’s as insidious as being aroused by a snuff film.

Besides a break in the space-time continuum, nuclear weapons were a leap forward in the weapons-development continuum. But it wasn’t long before they could be filed under the category of watch out what you wish for. Once the Pentagon and policy makers began coming to their senses, they realized that the larger, strategic weapons were, to understate the case, impractical. Even smaller, tactical weapons intended for battlefield use remained on the shelf because they failed to prove immune to the atomic and, especially, the hydrogen bomb’s point-of-no-return taint.

Hawks, however, seem oblivious to how far nuclear weapons have fallen — from the ultimate weapon to cold storage. Deterrence may make it all worthwhile to hawks, but, in fact, it reduces a nuclear-weapons program to a shotgun behind our national-security door. Not that much of the American public has a problem with deterrence. After all, what’s behind the door in many American households is an assault rifle. Not only are we accustomed to overkill, we like our retaliation massive (our actual nuclear policy for a brief period in the 50s).

In fact, the quantum leap in weaponry that the development of nuclear weapons represents is an opportunity for those of us opposed to them to examine the very nature of war itself. After all, what are nuclear weapons if not war writ large? But, as with other weapons remarkable for their brutality, such as land mines and cluster bombs, an obstacle to comprehending their meaning is just as inherent in them as the opportunity. In other words, the immediacy of the threat makes stop-gap measures imperative. These not only mitigate against reflection, but make it seem like impotent musing.

Yet one can’t help but wonder if those who favor proliferation, deterrence, or even an attenuated disarmament understand a key characteristic of humans. Not only aren’t most of us equipped to survive in a post-apocalypse world, we’re incapable of imagining it. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has become less bullish about nuclear weapons, if only out of frustration with how hamstrung their use is by constraints. But the military is traditionally buoyed by its reflexive belief that the country with the most powerful weapons will prevail, as well as a professed willingness to die for its country.

Policy makers too may feel some insulation from the consequences of their decisions. They could swear they heard somewhere about an atomic shelter for the federal government. Unfortunately for them, while it existed — in West Virginia — it closed in 1995. Also, their sites set on the big picture, their own vulnerability eludes them, as do national doubts about starting the human project over after a nuclear holocaust. More to the point, though, inadequately informed about nuclear weapons, they’ve become complacent about their risk since the end of the Cold War.

Those of us opposed to nuclear weapons need to take care lest hawks and self-described realists consign us to ideological exile, where we’d be neither seen nor heard. Usually it’s a mistake to allow members of the latter two groups to dictate the terms of the debate. But, in this case, it might prove advantageous to try seeing things from their point of view.

First, we need to stop acting horrified by nuclear weapons’ capacity for destruction. While, in truth, assimilating nuclear weapons into a national defense strategy may have been making a deal with the devil, to the military, they were a tool devoid of moral implications. Conservative civilians, however, have fewer qualms about viewing nuclear weapons as not only not immoral, but moral, because, to them, the loss of American lives is tolerable if it’s in the service of our national freedom myth.

Unfortunately, refraining from making value judgments can only take us so far because the two arguments currently most popular with nuclear weapons advocates are tough to defeat by reason. First, there’s that old standby, deterrence, in response to which one might argue, “What about that one accident?”

As Mohamed ElBaradei can attest, “the mere existence of nuclear weapons exponentially increased the risk that they’d end up being used either intentionally or unintentionally.” Even Robert McNamara said, “It can be confidently predicted that the combination of human fallibility and nuclear arms will inevitably lead to nuclear destruction.” Apparently, to conservatives, our good fortune in eluding disaster thus far is sufficient indicator that our luck will hold.

If it’s not broke, don’t fix it is the conservative default position, immune to reason. But, their second argument has logic on its side. It runs something like this: If the world goes to zero nukes, that leaves the United States at the mercy of a sole state, or non-state actor, that manages to rustle up just one bomb. Even if the weapons are retained but disassembled, in the time required to assemble them, the aggressor, armed and ready, can launch or detonate a nuclear weapon.

In the process of trying to win arguments like these, we may come to doubt ourselves. Our argument of last resort becomes, well, nuclear weapons just feel like an offense against nature. Perhaps responding to them with our gut is inevitable because ultimately it’s a nation’s emotional state that determines whether it’s moving toward or away from proliferation. On the one hand, the national egos of Pakistan and India were swollen with pride after their first nuclear tests. On the other, a movie, The Day After, helped to pave the way for the Nuclear Freeze movement in the 80s, as well as crystallize Ronald Reagan’s opposition to nuclear weapons.

Thus does disarmament also depend on the kindness of presidents, such as the present one. In fact, Barack Obama would do us all a service if he framed disarmament as honoring the sainted Reagan’s legacy and realizing his dream of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Weapons Hold a Mirror up to War

Earlier I suggested that the urgency of nonroliferation distracts us from the broader subject to which nuclear weapons defer: war itself. Once we discover just how protracted the struggle is, though, we realize that reflecting on the nature of war is no longer a luxury, but a necessity if humanity wishes to avoid remaining boxed into a corner with weapons of mass destruction.

Sometimes it seems as if what characterizes those who believe war is inevitable, as opposed to those who don’t, is what can either be described as an insensitivity to, or the maturity to accept, the loss of life in large numbers. After all, to the public, one of the most critical functions of a leader is to bear the consequences of agreed-upon policies on their consciences for the sake of all of us. In fact, the unconscious reason that much of the public exhibits a distinct lack of enthusiasm for prosecuting George Bush and Dick Cheney is because they shouldered that burden (and because we, in bestowing upon them that awesome responsibility, are complicit).

Speaking for myself, I keep tripping over the corpse of a citizen of Hiroshima, who, after the bombing, blinded and skin peeling, stumbles towards the river before collapsing. Those of us who can’t get past that one death are, perforce, disqualified from a seat at the policy table. Why not just use this as more incentive to examine the origins of war instead?

Meanwhile, rooting out the causes of war is really one for the behavioral sciences. However obvious, it bears repeating that those who instigate war or terrorist acts are taking out on others the indignities perpetrated on them by their families and societies. The Swiss psychotherapist and author Alice Miller writes: “The total neglect or trivialization of the childhood factor operative in the context of violence. . . sometimes leads to explanations that are not only unconvincing and abortive but actively deflect attention away from the genuine roots of violence.”

Meanwhile, Lloyd deMause, one of the founders of psychohistory, has written that psychological, as well as anthropological, research has shown that “the more traumatic one’s childhood, the more one is likely to be in favor of military solutions to social problems.” In fact, he writes, “A childhood more or less free from [violence and sexual abuse] is in fact a very late historical achievement, limited to a few fortunate children in a few modern nations.”

Those “few fortunate children” need to compound the “late historical achievement” by enlightening others if, as another psychohistorian, Jerrold Atlas, writes, they wish to end the “race between too slowly improving childrearing and too fast evolving destructive technology.”

Chances are, the fewer citizens whose childhoods are marked by abuse in any form, the fewer policy makers and military commanders to whom strategies that put enormous numbers of individuals in harm’s way make sense. Also, it’s true that the American public is altogether too complacent about U.S. intervention in other states. But the significance of the lack of tolerance for large numbers of casualties — even if only our own — that has emerged on our part since the Vietnam War is a development that can’t be underestimated.

Slowly but surely, not only the United States, but much of the world, seems to be walking back the number of deaths it accepts in the interest of national defense. This is paralleled by what’s become a decided trend — however subject to derailment — toward disarmament among the more developed countries. But to actually go to zero, as that ungainly phrase would have it, presents the most Gordian of knots.

I dream of another planet where one of its enduring global sagas is the fate of one individual shrouded in the mists of time. It seems that a couple of millenniums earlier, a human on this planet was murdered. Lacking redemption, it’s not their version of the Christ story.

Now imagine nuclear war breaking out on earth. For eons hence, should humans survive, they would puzzle over how mankind allowed it to happen. In the same vein, the imaginary planet has spent much of its recorded history trying to figure out how one man could possibly have killed another. That’s my idea of going to zero.

First posted at the Faster Times.