Nuclear Weapons

Uphill Battle

The new arms control treaty with Russia was initially envisioned as a speed bump on President Obama’s nuclear agenda, a modest reduction in nuclear forces that would enable him to tackle much harder issues on the way to his dream of eventually eliminating nuclear weapons altogether.

 It turned out to be a mountain. And while Mr. Obama savored a major foreign policy victory in winning approval of the New Start treaty, the next steps on Mr. Obama’s nuclear agenda now appear harder than ever.

While Mr. Obama overwhelmed Republican opponents of the treaty, it will be a much heavier lift to get the incoming Senate to approve a long-languishing treaty to ban all nuclear tests. The world’s newest nuclear powers — led by Pakistan, an ostensibly close American ally — have been maneuvering to kill Mr. Obama’s plan to stop production of more fissile material, the building blocks needed by nuclear aspirants like Iran. And the next treaty with Russia on how to deal with its small, tactical nuclear weapons promises to be a bigger fight.

None of that takes away from the historic nature of Mr. Obama’s victory on the New Start treaty. Democratic presidents have a terrible history of getting nuclear arms control agreements approved, especially with Russia or its predecessor, the Soviet Union. That was largely accomplished by presidents with names like Nixon, Reagan and Bush. Republicans, it turned out, would vote for such treaties only if they were negotiated by other Republicans.

So Mr. Obama’s accomplishment stands in contrast to President Jimmy Carter’s failure to win passage of the SALT II treaty, which was negotiated in 1979 but never ratified after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Two decades later, the Senate rejected President Bill Clinton’s treaty to ban all underground nuclear testing, in a 51-to-48 vote.

Mr. Obama came to office vowing that the United States would finally join that accord, called the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, soon after New Start passed. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. repeated that pledge in 2010.

The Nuclear Posture Review

President Obama's new strategy, known as the Nuclear Posture Review, declares that "the fundamental role" of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attacks on the United States, allies or partners, a narrower presumption than the past. It also 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.

While Mr. Obama ended financing in 2009 for a new nuclear warhead sought by the Bush administration, the new strategy goes further. It commits Mr. Obama to developing no new nuclear weapons, including a low-yield, deeply-burrowing nuclear warhead that the Pentagon sought to strike buried targets, like the nuclear facilities in North Korea and Iran. Mr. Obama, officials said, has determined he could not stop other countries from seeking new weapons if the United States was doing the same.

Mr. Obama's reliance on new, non-nuclear "Prompt Global Strike" weapons is bound to be contentious. As described by advocates within the Pentagon and in the military, the new weapons could achieve the effects of a nuclear weapon, without turning a conventional war into a nuclear one. As a result, the administration believes it could create a new form of deterrence - a way to contain countries that possess or hope to develop nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, without resorting to a nuclear option.

At the center of the new strategy is a renewed focus on arms control and nonproliferation agreements, which were largely dismissed by the Bush administration. That includes an effort to win passage of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was defeated during the Clinton administration and faces huge hurdles in the Senate, and revisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to close loopholes that critics say have been exploited by Iran and North Korea.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty

Tactical nuclear weapons were developed during the cold war as generally lower-yield, shorter-range explosives that could be used on the battlefield. The United States and its NATO allies relied on them as a deterrent to any invasion of Western Europe by what were presumed to be superior Soviet and Warsaw Pact land forces. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia has come to view tactical nuclear weapons as a bulwark against American conventional supremacy.

Washington and Moscow emerged from the cold war determined to reduce tactical nuclear arms, and both sides announced unilateral cuts in 1991. As a result, 17,000 tactical nuclear weapons were withdrawn from service, but no treaty ever imposed legally binding limits. President George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin of Russia signed the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as Start II, which called for the elimination of almost three-quarters of the nuclear warheads and all the multiple-warhead land-based missiles held by the United States and the former Soviet republics.

That treaty expired in late 2009, while Russian and American negotiators were hammering out the last details of what became known as the New Start treaty, signed by Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev in April 2010. Under the treaty, if ratified, each side within seven years would be barred from deploying more than 1,550 strategic warheads or 700 launchers. Because of counting rules and past reductions, neither side would have to eliminate large numbers of weapons to meet the new limits. But the treaty re-establishes an inspection regime that lapsed in December 2009 and could serve as a foundation for deeper reductions later.

The New Start treaty hit a snag in August 2010, when Mr. Obama struggled to assemble a bipartisan coalition in the Senate and a vote on the treaty was delayed. Democrats were able to win over enough Republicans to ensure committee approval the next month by negotiating an accompanying resolution addressing conservative concerns about missile defense and modernization of the nuclear arsenal.

The resolution would not alter the treaty itself, but would set out the Senate’s understanding of what the pact means, a common way for lawmakers to put their stamp on a treaty without reopening negotiations. Among other things, it reaffirmed that the treaty imposes no limitations on missile defense beyond a clause barring the United States from using old intercontinental missile silos or submarine launchers for antimissile interceptors. It also made clear that the treaty would not prevent the United States from developing systems to use long-range missiles with conventional rather than nuclear warheads.

But dissenting Republicans contended that the treaty would undercut national security by giving Russia a tool to fight against American plans to build a missile defense system in Europe. They argued that Russia has skirted the requirements of other treaties in the past and could not be trusted, and they contended that the treaty would potentially limit new conventional missile programs.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or NPT, entered into force in 1970. It was claimed at the time as one of the most effective tools in curbing the spread of nuclear weapons and sought to codify the right of nations to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

There are five declared nuclear states - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China. Three states with nuclear weapons have refused to sign the NPT - India, Pakistan and Israel - and North Korea renounced the treaty in 2003. Iran remains a signatory, but the United Nations Security Council has repeatedly found it in violation of its obligations, because it has hidden nuclear plants and refused to answer questions about evidence it was working on a warhead.

The White House Summit

Some countries arrived for the April 12-13 summit with what Gary Samore, Mr. Obama's nuclear adviser, called "house gifts" that the United States had encouraged as signs of sincerity. For example, Canada, Mexico and Ukraine committed to eliminating their surplus weapons-grade materials or giving them to the United States. Russia closed a plutonium reactor it had used to make weapons-grade fuel. Other nations agreed to convert research reactors to fuel that could not be used for weapons.

But much of what was completed over the two days amounted to reviving, or putting in effect, long-dormant agreements. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton held a signing ceremony with her Russian counterpart over the disposal of an amount of plutonium that could make 17,000 weapons. The first agreement on this issue was announced by her husband, Bill Clinton, when he was president, and signed with fanfare by Vice President Al Gore 10 years ago. The accord has never been acted upon, and by the White House's own accounting could take at least six years to complete.

Outside experts were optimistic. Sam Nunn, the former senator who tutored Mr. Obama on proliferation issues, said he thought "we are now closer to cooperation than catastrophe." Graham Allison, a Harvard expert on nuclear terrorism, made the case that if countries "lock down all nuclear weapons and bomb-usable material as securely as gold in Fort Knox, they can reduce the likelihood of a nuclear 9/11 to nearly zero."

But overcoming bureaucratic inertia, while important, leaves Mr. Obama far short of his broader goals. Now he must take on several far more delicate tasks: persuading Pakistan, India and China to halt the manufacture of more bomb fuel; coaxing North Korea to give up the small arsenal of 8 to 12 weapons it built over the past decade; and stopping Iran from becoming capable of making nuclear weapons.

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