Author: Spencer Ackerman

Nuclear Posture Review stuff kept me from blogging this when the release went out during Secretary Gates’ press conference, but an initial report from the NATO command in Afghanistan describes an extraordinary effort in the northwestern Afghan province of Baghdis. Apparently about 50 insurgents ambushed a joint patrol of Afghan commandos and U.S. Special Operations Forces. A massive 12-hour battle ensued, leading to the deaths of what the NATO release calls “dozens of insurgents,” one Afghan commando and, reportedly, no Americans or Afghan civilians.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen every day:

In an effort to avoid civilian casualties, the combined team began clearing buildings and compounds the insurgents were firing from. During the clearing process, an intricate system of tunnels was discovered in addition to several large stockpiles of weapons,bomb-making materials and other equipment normally associated with terrorist activities.

While the partnered force provided medical treatment and transported wounded personnel from the area, an overwhelming number of insurgents continued to fire from cave entrances, various locations within the village and from high ground surrounding the area.

The release claims that the SOF troops got approval from local government sources, during combat, to call in airstrikes on insurgent positions. Allegedly no civilian casualties occurred.

First reports can often be wrong. And it was just this weekend that the NATO command in Afghanistan revealed that SOF elements were involved in the deaths of five Afghan civilians, including three women, after an initial official report claimed they had only killed insurgents. But this sounds so epic that we’ll surely find out soon if anything is incorrect.

The day that the Obama administration unveiled the so-called New START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia to cut the nuclear stockpiles of the two largest nuclear-armed countries by 30 percent, Joe Cirincione, a longtime nonproliferation wonk, offered some friendly advice to the negotiating teams. “Enjoy the victory of the moment,” Joe told me, “get some R&R and come back for another tour of duty.” What, more cuts? Well, sure — this is a vision-of-a-nuke-free-world we’re talking about, something at the heart of the Obama agenda, and while you won’t get there overnight, you also won’t get there at all if you leave office with the U.S. possessing 1,550 warheads under New START.

It didn’t take two weeks for Cirincione’s urging to become part of the brand-new Nuclear Posture Review. From page eleven:

The President has directed a review of post-New START arms control objectives, to consider future reductions in nuclear weapons. Several factors will influence the magnitude and pace of future reductions in U.S. nuclear forces below New START levels. …

Conduct follow-on analysis to set goals for future nuclear reductions below the levels expected in New START, while strengthening deterrence of potential regional adversaries, strategic stability vis-à-vis Russia and China, and assurance of our allies and partners.

Address non-strategic nuclear weapons, together with the non-deployed nuclear weapons of both sides, in any post-New START negotiations with Russia.

At a briefing for reporters at the Pentagon, Ellen Tauscher, the undersecretary of state for arms control who played a crucial role in negotiating New START, said that in her dealings with the Russians, she took note of a “Russian willingness” to “talk about new things, … a new effort” for arms reductions after New START is ratified.

All this is laid out before Presidents Obama and Medvedev even sign New START in Prague on Thursday, let alone Senate ratification, which is far from a forgone conclusion. How’s that for ambition?

At the Pentagon press briefing to roll out the Nuclear Posture Review — read the entire document, all of it unclassified, here — Defense Secretary Robert Gates didn’t address any discrepancies between today’s document and his 2008 views on nuclear strategy. But he did provide context for an important way the NPR supports President Obama’s ultimate vision of a nuclear-free world.

The document “remove[s] some of the calculated ambiguity” of previous U.S. nuclear strategy, Gates said, referring to its explicit rejection of a nuclear reprisal for a non-nuclear assault. But there are important exceptions. “We essentially carve out states that are not in compliance” with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Gates continued, stating explicitly that such a carve-out sends “a very strong message to Iran and North Korea.” That is: “If you’re not going to play by the rules, if you’re going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table” should such an international actor attack the United States in any form.

Linking U.S. nuclear doctrine to the so-called NPT is an “important step to reinvigorate” the treaty, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton added. Next week, over 40 heads of state will visit Washington for a two-day conference on mutual steps for nuclear security. That in turn tees up a May conference in New York City on strengthening the NPT. Administration officials say they want the treaty to have greater steps for ensuring verification and compliance, as well as more potent penalties for noncompliance or abrogation. Part of getting there, the administration believes, is creating a greater inducement to universal compliance. Eligibility for a U.S. nuclear response should a noncompliant party attack the U.S. is now part of that framework.

Last night I posted a link to investigative actions taken by the U.S. military command in Iraq in 2007 after U.S. forces in Baghdad fired upon individuals who do not appear to have been posing a threat, ultimately including two Reuters employees. I’ll be honest: We’re having formatting problems opening the documents that the military disclosed. So consider this post preliminary.

But I’ve been able to open one of the documents, and it’s an important one: the approval of ultimate recommendations to the chain of command after an investigation into the incident. It’s dated July 21, 2007 and signed by Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, then one of the deputy commanding generals of Multinational Division-Baghdad, the designation for the command responsible for security in Iraq’s capitol. It reads:

I ratify the appointment of the investigating officer, MAJ [illegible, but apparently a major was responsible for investigating the incident]

The recommendation that:

(10a) Members of the press be encouraged or required to wear identifying vests or distinctive body armor within the MND-B AOR [the Multinational Division-Baghdad’s Area of Responsibility] is passed to PAO [Public Affairs Office] for coordination through CPIC [the Coalition Press Information Center, then the locus of Baghdad press efforts]

(10b) Coalition Forces be notified when members of the press are operating in their AORs is passed to PAO for coordination with CPIC

(10c) Condolence payments be made to families of the two children wounded in this engagement is [approved and] passed to BCT [Brigade Combat Team, presumably whichever BCT was operating in the section of Baghdad where the incident occurred]

More as I’m (hopefully) able to open more of these documents. I do not yet know if, when and/or how these recommendations were acted upon. And without additional context from the other documents, I’m reluctant to analyze the presumptions or supporting evidence that led to the investigating officer’s judgments and Brooks’ approval.

At noon in the Pentagon briefing room, flanked by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Adm. Mike Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert Gates will unveil a Nuclear Posture Review that rejects U.S. nuclear retaliation for a non-nuclear strike. It’s a consensus administration document. Which means Gates may have to explain whether or how his thinking changed from an October 2008 speech he gave to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about what he called “realistic” nuclear policy.

Gates gave the speech back when he figured he was retiring from government service and felt that he should outline a series of policy measures his successors might find fruitful. In a couple of months, of course, he’d be asked to join an administration that saw eye to eye with him on most issues and valued his insights in areas of disagreement. Nuclear strategy falls into the latter category.

For instance, here’s Gates on the value nuclear weapons pose in deterring a chemical or biological attack:

As long as other states have or seek nuclear weapons – and potentially can threaten us, our allies, and friends – then we must have a deterrent capacity that makes it clear that challenging the United States in the nuclear arena – or with other weapons of mass destruction – could result in an overwhelming, catastrophic response. …

Our nuclear arsenal also helps deter enemies from using chemical and biological weapons. In the first Gulf War, we made it very clear that if Saddam used chemical or biological weapons, then the United States would keep all options on the table. We later learned that this veiled threat had the intended deterrent effect as Iraq considered its options.

He also urged policymakers to consider the changing parameters of attacks that might prompt a nuclear reprisal. While not giving an answer, Gates pointed to the emerging threat of cyberattack as something to consider. “Similarly, future administrations will have to consider new declaratory policies about what level of cyber-attack might be considered an act of war – and what type of military response is appropriate,” he said. The Obama administration has now given its answer, and it’s that a non-nuclear response will be appropriate.

A good chunk of the speech is about the virtues of the Reliable Replacement Warhead, a program that others in the Obama administration view as skirting too close to building new nukes. Josh Rogin reports that the NPR will “thread the needle” on modernizing the nuclear stockpile (which is how Gates views the RRW) without committing to the program.

It’s no secret that Gates is on the rightward edge of the nuclear strategy debate in the administration. But there are areas in Gates’ 2008 speech where disagreement with the 2010 NPR is really just a matter of emphasis. Gates’ defense of conventional forces from 2008, for instance, will be largely codified by today’s document:

A conventional strike force means that more targets are vulnerable without our having to resort to nuclear weapons. And missile defenses reinforce deterrence and minimize the benefits of rogue nations investing heavily in ballistic missiles:  They won’t know if their missiles will be effective, thus other nations will feel less threatened. And let’s not forget the deterrent value of other parts of our conventional military forces.

Gates speaks at noon. It’ll be instructive to hear how he describes his current thinking on nuclear strategy, and whether he addresses his older comments about it.

Watch this become another conservative meme against ratifying the nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday that Russia reserves the right to withdraw from its new arms-control treaty with the U.S. if it decides the planned U.S. missile-defense shield threatens its security, the Associated Press reported. Mr. Lavrov said Russia will issue a statement outlining the terms for such a withdrawal after Messrs. Obama and Medvedev sign the treaty, AP reported.

“Russia will have the right to opt out of the treaty if qualitative and quantitative parameters of the U.S. strategic missile defense begin to significantly effect the efficiency of Russian strategic nuclear forces,” Mr. Lavrov told the AP.

While the text of New START hasn’t been released — the treaty must first be signed on Thursday in Prague by Presidents Obama and Medvedev — administration officials have been declarative that nothing in New START limits U.S. missile defense plans. Since the Russians consider missile defense to be aimed at them despite the administration’s assurance it’s for missile threats like the one emanating from Iran, that’s naturally going to provoke the Russians to tell their publics that missile defense can ultimately be a dealbreaker for them. They have their hawks and demagogues as well.

Whoa, what’s all this stuff on cable news about President Obama’s forthcoming revision to U.S. nuclear-weapons strategy? You’re not surprised. You knew all about the substance of the Nuclear Posture Review on Friday. Well, except for one aspect of it.

Obama gathered some reporters at the White House yesterday to unveil a big change in nuclear strategy, contained in the document that the administration will release at noon. As The New York Times puts it, the Nuclear Posture Review will explicitly forswear the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear attacks:

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.

That’s something arms-controllers have wanted to see for a long time, especially since it recognizes a truth that is key to maintaining a credible non-nuclear deterrent: it’s inconceivable that the U.S. will actually use nuclear weapons unless it’s been struck by them.

What’s more, it appears the document’s abandonment of nuclear retaliation for non-nuclear assault is a clarification, teasing out the implication of one of its central aspects: declaring that the principle nuclear threat to the U.S. is from proliferation — that is, not just from a nuclear-armed enemy, but from the existence of the weapons themselves. Maybe this quote in a Friday piece from the Arms Control Association’s Daryl Kimball will clarify things:

“What will be a transformative shift is to say that the purpose of U.S. nuclear forces is to deter nuclear use against us and our allies,” Kimball said. “That would implicitly eliminate from the roles and missions [any] potential use of nuclear weapons to fight a conflict that begins as conventional or to counter chemical or biological forces.”

Apparently the document will make that explicit.

After much of the day’s news was dominated by Wikileaks’ distribution of a graphic video purporting to show U.S. military personnel in Iraq in 2007 firing from a helicopter on Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, the U.S. military command in Iraq has released the following statement. It doesn’t deny the veracity of the video, but doesn’t confirm it, either, and instead offers up source material about what happened at the attack in question:

We are aware that several media outlets are airing footage depicting gunfire from a U.S. helicopter and claiming that this footage was recorded during an incident in 2007 in which two Reuters reporters were killed. At this time, we are working to verify the source of the video, its veracity, and when or where it was recorded. The incident presumably associated with this video was investigated in 2007, and the releasable portions of that investigation are available [here].

The link will take you to a U.S. Central Command webpage containing a plethora of internal inquiries in response to the apparent incident. I’m not at a place where I can go through them all immediately but will update as soon as possible.

More than halfway through a coy interview with Josh Rogin about whether or not Afghan President Hamid Karzai really walked back his inflammatory Thursday speech in a Friday phone call with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has this to say about Karzai’s subsequent I’ll-join-the-Taliban-if-I-can’t-control-an-election-watchdog comments:

Crowley declined to directly address Karzai’s latest comments in his Tuesday press [conference], but did issue this warning.

“His comments do have an impact in the United States and he should be aware of that,” said Crowley.

Tom Ricks gets an interview with Gen. David Petraeus that mostly featured Petraeus attempting to avoid making news. But this was funny:

[Ricks]: You keep on saying you are not running for president. Why do you think people seem to believe you are?

[Petraeus]: Beats me. I’ve been as categorical as one could be.

For my own part a couple years ago, sorry about that.

Via Marcy Wheeler and Rachel Maddow, this video obtained by Wikileaks shows what the classified information repository Website claims is an “unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers” by a U.S. helicopter in Baghdad in 2007. “Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.” The military claimed it was targeting insurgents, and the U.S. personnel in the video do not seem to be deliberately targeting civilians. Gregg Carlstrom has a judicious and balanced response.

Tomorrow is (probably) going to be Nuke Day in Washington, as the Obama administration releases its long-awaited Nuclear Posture Review. That’ll tee up Thursday’s big nuke event: the Prague signing by presidents Obama and Medvedev of the U.S.-Russia New START accord on nuclear arms reductions and limitations. If you’re interested in a post explaining what the treaty really says — that is, until its text is released — and what it all means, check out Jeffrey Lewis at Arms Control Wonk, getting technical about why you shouldn’t be so alarmed about possible bomber-borne bomb undercounts. Let’s get wonky!

Overall, the Prague Treaty [what’s he’s calling New START] actually moves the United States and Russia much closer to an actual accounting of warheads, rather than the attribution rules under START — at least for ICBMs and SLBMs. That, however, is the subject of a later post, on verification.

Bombers remain difficult to count, since their warheads are in storage and the aircraft are usually training for, or deploying on, conventional missions. Bomber rules are always weird. Kingston Rief makes all the right arguments about why we shouldn’t be too worked up about that fact.

Fundamentally, I think of bomber loadings as a secondary concern. The main goal is to get stabilizing limits on ICBMs and SLBMs, then use the bomber force to make the math work. It’s not pretty, but if you watched health care reform unfold, you don’t care about the niceties.

Remember, you can always call up a bomber pilot and tell him to turn around before he drops a nuclear bomb. You can’t recall a payload on an intercontinental ballistic missile or launched from a submarine. But since getting the New START/Prague Treaty through the Senate is going to entail driving through lots of political roadblocks, watch for the bomber count question to recur on the way to ratification.

As you’ve probably read this morning, the Pakistani Taliban executed a complex attack — using suicide car bombers and gunmen — on the American consulate in Peshawar. The Taliban didn’t get past a consulate checkpoint. Nor did their team manage to kill any Americans. But they did bring their cameras.

The New York Times’s Robert Mackey has footage of the attack aired by Pakistan’s Geo TV. You see a really big boom, right above a Pepsi billboard, and billowing mushroom clouds of smoke. It’s easy to believe that the Taliban penetrated the compound, which is surely why the video exists.

Contrast that with the December attack on a CIA headquarters in eastern Afghanistan that left at least seven CIA operatives and a Blackwater contractor dead, all at the hands of an al-Qaeda double agent. That was perhaps the single greatest loss of life in CIA history. (It also appears to have sparked a retaliatory up-tempo in drone strike operations.) But it wasn’t filmed, for the obvious reason that the attacker had no intention of making it out alive.

Khost was a big terrorist success. Peshawar was a negligible one, and perhaps now a wake-up call to the consulate and other diplomatic presences in Pakistan. But as a media event, all the Taliban may have been after is projecting strength, rather than demonstrating it.

Update, 11:03 a.m.: I should say that between this attack and another complex one elsewhere in Pakistan, the Taliban have killed at least 3 dozen Pakistani civilians and security forces today. I did not mean to imply that U.S. assets are the only “real” targets the Taliban seeks in Pakistan, only that as a U.S.-vs-extremists event, the attack on the consulate was in fact negligible.

Last month, Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, gave an interview to The Washington Post bragging about the impact the CIA’s drone strikes have had on al-Qaeda and Taliban operations in Pakistan. Not having sufficient information to independently evaluate it, I sort of marked Panetta’s comments As Read. But today’s New York Times has some anecdotal information from North Waziristan — a very rare and valuable commodity — supporting Panetta.

The informants provided by the Times relate that the drone strikes are intense enough to defy previous patterns employed by residents to evade them. (Apparently, that’s retaliation for al-Qaeda double agent Abu Dujaanah al-Khorasani’s successful attack on a CIA headquarters in Khost province in December.) They just appear relentless, targeting a lower level of militant than before. More surprising is this bit of information suggesting at least some locals blame al-Qaeda’s Arab recruits for the presence of the drones and not actually the U.S. itself:

Two of the government supporters said they knew of civilians, including friends, who had been killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, they said, they are prepared to sacrifice the civilians if it means North Waziristan will be rid of the militants, in particular the Arabs.

“On balance, the drones may have killed 100, 200, 500 civilians,” said one of the men. “If you look at the other guys, the Arabs and the kidnappings and the targeted killings, I would go for the drones.”

It’s important not to generalize from this case. But if it turns out this sentiment is fairly widespread — and the Times piece asserts that it is more than it demonstrates that it is — then al-Qaeda is in danger of losing its most important redoubt on the planet. That’s been predicted many, many times in the past, so, again, it’s important to withhold any judgment until more information is available.

In February, U.S. Special Operations Forces raided a house in Gardez, in the eastern district of Paktia, searching for Taliban militants. They killed two men they believed to be insurgents. A NATO statement at the time said that soldiers also “found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed.”

But last night, Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s command announced the results of an investigation into the raid that calls the initial account into question. From an official statement:

A thorough joint investigation into the events that occurred in the Gardez district of Paktiya province Feb. 12, has determined that international forces were responsible for the deaths of three women who were in the same compound where two men were killed by the joint Afghan-international patrol searching for a Taliban insurgent.

The two men, who were later determined not to be insurgents, were shot and killed by the joint patrol after they showed what appeared to be hostile intent by being armed. While investigators could not conclusively determine how or when the women died, due to lack of forensic evidence, they concluded that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men.

The statement has a vague explanation for the February report about the women being bound and gagged: “this
information was taken from an initial report by the international members of the joint force who were not familiar with Islamic burial customs.” Presumably that means the women were shrouded, but that’s hard to square with U.S. forces being responsible for the actual killing. Additionally, The New York Times further reports that the “lack of forensic evidence” about those dead women civilians may be attributable to Special Operations Forces digging “bullets out of the bodies of the women to hide the nature of their deaths.”

Last month, McChrystal, himself a former Special Operations commander, took greater control over the Special Operations chain of command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s move was an attempt to end a semi-autonomous war effort that can too often place a giant asterisk on his strategy of prosecuting the war through protecting the civilian population. One area he apparently left untouched is detention operations. Will there be further clarifications in the future about ultimately-untrue statements about the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan?

Continuing with the newest Afghanistan metric, President Hamid Karzai’s whining has intensified, this time to the point where he follows up an attempt to walk back Thursday’s anti-western rant with a statement to a group of parliamentarians declaring that he’ll join the Taliban if he’s forced to be a U.S. puppet. One can only imagine Amb. Karl Eikenberry chuckling to himself about killing two birds with one stone.

More substantively, what Karzai wants is the ability to control an independent election-fraud monitor. It’s one thing to play up nationalist bona fides, particularly after stealing your own re-election. But look to see if Karzai develops this line of argument in order to win the U.S.’s acquiescence for his scheme:

Despite his displeasure with the U.S. government, Karzai made the trip to Kandahar to build public support for a top U.S. and NATO goal of combating the insurgency with a major military push this summer into the districts around Kandahar.

He asked attendees whether they are happy about the upcoming operation. A loud murmur echoed across the vast meeting room.

“Listen to me carefully: Until you’re happy and satisfied, we will not conduct this operation,” he said to loud applause.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal has publicly stated that he wants buy-in from local Kandahar notables before he sends NATO forces into the city and its surrounding areas. It’s a position firmly in line with the counterinsurgency principle of seeking local partnership, with the Afghanistan-centric tweak of seeking that partnership at very local levels, something that has the effect of circumventing Karzai. For all Karzai’s reliance on U.S. money and security, Karzai could force a revision in U.S. planning if he decides to become an obstacle to the Kandahar offensive later this spring. How far is he willing to take this?

King of Thieves? (photo via World Economic Forum)

Is it fair to conclude yet that Hamid Karzai has given up caring about the way he’s viewed in NATO capitols? On Thursday, frustrated with parliament’s reluctance to bless his brazen bid to control an independent elections watchdog, he delivers a paranoid and undignified harangue about the West’s secret machinations to control a country that it could care less about if there aren’t Soviets or terrorists involved. On Friday, he tries to walk it back to Secretary Clinton. And on Saturday?

President Hamid Karzai lashed out at his Western backers for the second time in three days on Saturday, accusing the U.S. of interfering in Afghan affairs and saying the Taliban insurgency would become a legitimate resistance movement if the meddling doesn’t stop. [snip]

At one point, Mr. Karzai suggested that he himself would be compelled to join the Taliban if the Parliament didn’t back his controversial attempt to take control of the country’s electoral watchdog from the United Nations, according to two of those who attended the meeting. The people included a close ally of the president.

On the presumption that Karzai is being accurately quoted — something his spokesman denies — this is starting to fall into some I-wish-a-motherfucker-would territory. A failed attempt at a power-grab calling the integrity of the next government into question leads Karzai to bandwagon with the Taliban? That’s like the guy at the Burger King angrily swearing that if he accepts my expired coupon he’ll be left with no choice but to give me unlimited refills. Let the Omar-Karzai negotiations begin! Can we throw in Ahmed Wali Karzai and a couple draft picks?

The governance effort in the south is about strengthening sub-national governance and creating credible, deliverable reachback to the ministries. Whether by design or by default, the effect is that it balances/reduces Karzai’s influence while bolstering the stuff he was supposed to be doing anyway in terms of making a material impact on Afghan lives. Obviously it’s a strategy that has its limits: Karzai still governs the country, appoints ministers, etc. (To say nothing of what sub-national governance means in an area, for instance, in which people self-identify as Taliban.)

He successfully stole an election — that should be a decisive verdict on his interest in a well-run Afghanistan. To the extent the U.S. has no choice but to stick with him, the current strategy of caring more about sub-national governance than Kabul governance for immediate-to-medium-term impact has its merits. It wouldn’t be such a terrible thing to dial down tensions, but if Karzai is just going to brazenly walk back his walkbacks, then it’s sort of pointless.

Does it bolster or undermine Mike’s point in his excellent post if I report that next week’s Nuclear Posture Review will be released in its entirety, without any annexes withheld for nebulous reasons of national security? How about if I add that I can’t disclose my very reliable source for that information?

Marc Theissen, get set to attack your next target — Michael Sulick, head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.

Via Jeff Stein, Sulick, a longtime CIA operative, told a gathering at his alma mater that the loss of torture techniques hasn’t hindered intelligence work:

When asked if the Obama administration’s ban on waterboarding has had serious consequences on the war against terror, Sulick answered in general terms.

“I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint,” he said, “but I don’t want to talk about [it from] a legal, moral or ethical standpoint.”

For the record, it was the Bush administration that actually banned waterboarding after using it to horrific effect, a fact that has caused no end of cognitive dissonance in conservative torture advocates.

President Obama discusses nuclear safety and sanctions against Iran on Tuesday. (Pete Marovich/ZUMApress.com)

Set for release early next week, the Obama administration’s long-awaited statement on the future of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile won’t provide a roadmap for their elimination, according to administration officials. But it will chip away at the strategic justification for the stockpile and shift the country’s defense away from nuclear weapons, beginning a gradual process pointing to their elimination over decades and setting the tone for months’ worth of diplomatic work to strengthen cooperation on nuclear security — a top priority for President Obama.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

The administration will publish the Nuclear Posture Review, a document outlining the role of nuclear weapons in overall U.S. defense planning, barely a week after the United States and Russia agreed to wide-ranging cuts in their nuclear arsenal. Months of arduous closed-door interagency negotiations over the document have led arms control enthusiasts on the left to worry that the document won’t go far enough to wean the U.S. off nuclear weapons and led nuclear hawks on the right to fear it will compromise national security.

Expect the left to be more disappointed than the right. “Don’t look for any time frame to go to zero” nuclear weapons, said a senior administration official who, like the others interviewed for this story, would not speak for the record before the so-called NPR is released. The document will reaffirm the need for the “nuclear triad” of delivery systems for nuclear weapons: intercontinental ballistic missiles, heavy bombers and submarine-launched missiles. Nor will the NPR call for the prompt withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons from Europe or for taking deployed weapons off of hair-trigger alert, high priorities for a coalition of arms-control experts who wrote to Obama on Feb. 1. Perhaps most importantly, it will offer vague language — the product of interagency compromises — on whether the U.S. will renounce the doctrinal right to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict.

But according to officials involved in crafting the NPR, the document will break from its predecessors in reorienting nuclear strategy away from deterring or winning a nuclear conflict with an adversary and embrace the concept that the principal nuclear threat to the U.S. is nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation itself — a change that proponents view as undercutting the rationale for keeping the U.S. nuclear stockpile over time.

“That by itself is transformational,” said Joe Cirincione, a longtime Washington nuclear expert and president of the anti-proliferation Ploughshares Fund. “No previous Nuclear Posture Review has looked at the problem that way. This could be night and day compared to the Bush posture.”
Accordingly, the NPR will emphasize a reduced U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons and a greater one on conventional forces, a position officials believe to be a more credible deterrent of conflict, particularly toward rogue states like North Korea and Iran and stateless adversaries like al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Several officials said the “reduced-reliance” portions of the NPR are crafted to reassure allies that the U.S. deterrent umbrella extends beyond a nuclear attack on friendly forces. Similarly, the NPR will entrench the administration’s commitment to the Iran-focused missile defense the U.S. is constructing this decade in Eastern Europe.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an influential player in the NPR process, hinted at that approach last week during the unveiling of the “New START” arms reduction treaty with Russia. The treaty “protects our ability to develop a conventional global strike capability,” Mullen said, “should that be required.”

The administration is also coalescing around a push in the Senate for ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, an international accord rejected by the Senate in the late 1990s to prevent nuclear testing. While the NPR will commit the administration to maintaining the nuclear stockpile — and to foreswear the construction of new nuclear weapons — it is expected to “talk about the effectiveness of the arsenal without testing it,” Cirincione said. “The treaty you want to get to is CTBT. That’s a legacy item.”

In a February speech, Vice President Joe Biden appeared to offer a preview of how the NPR might reconcile stockpile maintenance with a rejection of testing: a renewed investment in the country’s national nuclear laboratories. “Our labs know more about our arsenal today than when we used to explode our weapons on a regular basis,” Biden said at the National Defense University.
Administration officials for the past week have described the release of the NPR as effectively the opening bell in a flurry of diplomatic activity on nuclear weapons. On Thursday, Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev will sign the New START treaty in Prague, the site of last year’s big speech by Obama about an eventual nuke-free world. The following week, Obama will host the leaders of 44 nations for a summit on nuclear security, with a focus on preventing nuclear material from falling into the hands of terrorists. Obama “wants to make sure that at his level, the head of state level, that there’s agreement on the threats, and on the concerns, on everyone’s commitments,” Ellen Tauscher, the undersecretary of state for arms control, told reporters Monday.

That summit will cue up two other important arms control events: the adoption of a resolution by the United Nations Security Council placing economic sanctions on Iran for illicit uranium enrichment activity, and a May conference in New York on strengthening the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Officials want to see greater penalties for violating the treaty’s provisions or pulling out of it altogether, a step taken with minimal reprisal by North Korea in 2003.

Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association and a signatory of the Feb. 1 letter, said the NPR’s shift in emphasizing that the main nuclear danger to the U.S. comes from proliferation and not from nuclear war was an “extremely important premise” that “changes the logic considerably” of the role, mission and size of U.S. nuclear forces. He urged the Obama administration to adopt the full implication of that premise in the NPR.

“What will be a transformative shift is to say that the purpose of U.S. nuclear forces is to deter nuclear use against us and our allies,” Kimball said. “That would implicitly eliminate from the roles and missions [any] potential use of nuclear weapons to fight a conflict that begins as conventional or to counter chemical or biological forces.”