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Tag: "nukes"

Saudi Nukes?

[ 8 ] December 13, 2011 | Robert Farley

Is Saudi Arabia laying the groundwork to go nuclear? The idea that an Iranian nuclear test would force Saudi Arabia and other regional powers to develop their own nuclear programs was one of the most common objections to my argument that an Iranian nuke won’t have much of an impact of Middle East politics. The reasons for skepticism are fairly clear; Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have all faced situations in which neighbors have gone nuclear (Turkey twice), and all three have developed means of dealing with the situation that don’t involve building nuclear weapons. Moreover, concern that Iran is building a weapon has existed for some time, and none of the three have thus far taken much in the way of visible steps to developing their own programs. I agree that Saudi Arabia is the most likely proliferant, but it must be noted that the Kingdom is almost uniquely vulnerable to the kinds of sanctions that have been imposed on Iran. It’s possible that the United States would act to protect the Saudis from international opprobrium, but pretty much any scenario in which the Kingdom decides to build a nuke also involves tension between the US and SA, to the extent that the Saudis don’t feel they can rely on US protection. Recall that Israel built a bomb prior to the development of a close security relationship with the United States; all of the more recent proliferants have had serious concerns about the trustworthiness of their great power patrons. In the Saudi case, this means that the cost of developing nukes would be exceedingly high. Guzansky suggests that the Saudis might buy a device off the shelf from Pakistan, which is possible but certainly without precedent.

For the time being, I suspect that Saudi Arabia will keep up a steady stream of hints about a nuclear program while continuing to work on its conventional deterrent capabilities. As with Israel, the political authorities would prefer that the United States simply make the problem go away. If Iran does get a nuke, however, I doubt that the Saudis will dive into a program anytime soon. To the extent that Saudi behavior will change, it’ll probably be in the direction of closer ties with the United States.

Where is the Nuclear Taboo?

[ 49 ] December 3, 2011 | Robert Farley

Apparently wide swaths of the US public approve of the use of nuclear weapons in non-retaliatory circumstances.

Randomly selected groups of survey respondents were told that the nuclear and conventional attacks would either be equally effective or that the nuclear attack had a greater chance of success. Everything else was held constant. When both options are equally effective, only a relatively small proportion of respondents prefers nuclear weapons, presumably to “send a message.” Yet, when nuclear weapons are portrayed as having a 90% success rate while conventional weapons hit the target with only 70% of the time, a (small) majority of Americans prefers nuclear weapons to conventional ones. This effect is even greater when the discrepancy in success rates widens further. Moreover, among the people that still prefer conventional weapons, most say that they do so not out of moral aversion but because they are concerned that first usage sets a dangerous precedent.

There’s obviously an elite-popular divide, because virtually no one in either party in DC has talked seriously about the use of nuclear weapons in a preventive war against Iran. Such was not the case fifty years ago, when preventive nuclear war was seen as a good options by some policymakers, but that simply illustrates how taboos develop over time. I’ve also never seen any evidence that anyone ever seriously discussed using tactical nuclear weapons in 1991, even against Iraqi military forces or suspected missile sites/chemical warfare facilities. Bush was fairly cagey about whether the United States would respond to an Iraqi chemical attack with nukes, but nobody ever seems to have proposed “let’s blow up this Iraqi tank column with a 30kt bomb.” Recall that the US military expected significant casualties (~10000) in the course of destroying the Iraqi Army, so nukes could genuinely have been expected to reduce direct military costs. The elite level taboo, presumably, is why no one thought in these terms. The reason for the divide is unclear; we don’t normally think of the US foreign policy elite as being more pacifistic than the population as a whole, but perhaps the answer lies in exposure to transnational norms.

I’d certainly like to see comparative data from the other nuclear states. My way out guess would be that you’d find similar or higher levels of support for non-retaliatory use of nukes in Russia (Russia still publicly talks about using nuclear weapons while at a disadvantage at conventional levels of escalation), relatively high support in Pakistan, China, India, and maybe Israel, and very low support in Britain and France. But that’s just guesswork.

All Iran, All the Time

[ 11 ] November 17, 2011 | Robert Farley

My final entry into the Yale Journal Iran nuclear debate is up:

Ackerman and Cohen accept many of these lies at face value. Ackerman apparently believes that the autocrats in Bahrain would not have suppressed demonstrators, but for the specter of Iran. Dead protestors in dozens of states not threatened by Iran might wonder whether the Bahraini government is telling the truth about its motivations. He and Cohen believe that the Israelis will act irrationally, mostly because the Israelis insist that they will act irrationally. To my mind, the Israeli response to the Iranian nuclear program has been quite rational; they have pursued low cost, relatively low impact ways of disrupting the Iranian nuclear program, all while repeatedly insisting to their patron state that they are extremely concerned, and will very soon be launching a disruptive attack that could destabilize the whole region, and wouldn’t it be better if the Americans solved the problem? There is nothing even mildly irrational about this strategy, and there is no reason whatsoever to suspect that the Israelis will become more irrational, or the Bahrainis less autocratic, after an Iranian nuclear test.

Also see Michael’s excellent, long comment defending his perspective.

On last night’s Alyona, I discussed the same issue:

How Alarmed Should We Be About Iran?

[ 50 ] November 10, 2011 | Robert Farley

Last Sunday I found myself in a twitter brawl after declaring that a nuclear armed Iran, while hardly ideal, would have no significant effect on the Middle East balance of power. Yale Journal of International Affairs asked me to write a longer piece on that argument:

The following facts about Iran are largely beyond dispute. It is outspent militarily by three of its closest neighbors, including Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Its only friends in the Middle East are a few terrorist groups and Syria, a nation beset with domestic furor. It has extraordinarily hostile relations with the United States, and only relatively polite relations with Russia and China. Iran’s existing conventional military forces are obsolete by regional standards. The country suffers from substantial domestic discontent and has undergone serial crises of governance structure since at least the late 1980s. Iran is heavily dependent on resource exports, inextricably and directly linking its economy to the international market and inviting all of the problems normally associated with the “resource curse.”

These things are true today. They will remain true the day after Iran tests its first nuclear weapon.

Bomb Beijing! Er… Tehran!

[ 35 ] November 1, 2011 | Robert Farley

Hey now, it’s not as if knowing whether China has nuclear weapons is at all relevant to the practice of American foreign policy:

I do view China as a potential military threat to the United States… we already have superiority in terms of our military capability, and I plan to get away from making cutting our defense a priority and make investing in our military capability a priority, going back to my statement: peace through strength and clarity. So yes they’re a military threat. They’ve indicated that they’re trying to develop nuclear capability and they want to develop more aircraft carriers like we have. So yes, we have to consider them a military threat.

In the interest of balance and of due fairness to Herman Cain, the argument against the Chinese nuclear program is startlingly similar to the case against the Iranian, although I don’t believe that Iran is buidling aircraft carriers…

On a related note, the thought that Avigdor Lieberman was the only remaining obstacle to an Israeli-Iranian war is… alarming. At times like this, I take some solace in the fact that the world exploding is Good for Rob. If the long nightmare of peace and prosperity that prevailed under Bill Clinton still held, I might not even have job…

Pu Transfer?

[ 8 ] September 22, 2011 | Robert Farley

Now this is fascinating. Jeffrey Lewis discusses a startling claim by AQ Khan:

Simon Henderson and I disagreed on an issue related to the broader question of whether North Korean officials really showed AQ Khan three nuclear weapons. I said North Korea didn’t have enough fissile material, while Henderson referred me to one of his articles stating that North Korea “is already sitting on a stockpile of highly enriched uranium courtesy of Stalin, the Soviet leader.”

I didn’t find that statement credible and asked about its provenance. “Is this yet another of Khan’s assertions in these documents?” I wrote. “If so, this further undermines his credibility and demonstrates the need to place these documents in the public record to allow others to examine their contents.”

So, now we have the actual sentence from Khan’s statement: North Korea “had also manufactured a few weapons as, according to Gen. Kang’s boss, they had received Kg 200 plutonium and weapon designs from the Russians in the mid-fifties after the Korean War.”

Lewis has some exceedingly compelling reasons why we shouldn’t take this claim seriously. There’s no evidence of the transfer in the Soviet archives, it would have represented a huge Soviet investment, etc. Lewis theorizes that Khan is trying to absolve himself of responsibility for helping North Korea develop a weapon, which seems entirely reasonable to me. Nevertheless, an interesting read.

Nuclear Terrorism

[ 37 ] September 15, 2011 | Robert Farley

Thomas Schelling, via Erik Voeten:

In 1982 I published an article that began, “Sometime in the 1980’s an organization that is not a national government may acquire a few nuclear weapons. If not in the 1980’s, then in the 1990’s.”

I hedged about the 80’s but sounded pretty firm about the 90’s. It’s now the 2010’s, twenty-nine years later, and there has been no nuclear terrorism nor any acquisition of such weapons by any terrorist organization that we know of; and I think we’d know by now. I don’t know of anyone—and I knew many colleagues knowledgeable on the subject—who thought my expectations outlandish. Something needs to be explained!

Schelling then goes through what amounts to the Mueller treatment, detailing all of the steps that would have to take place for terrorists to acquire fissile material and develop a nuclear weapon, which goes some distance to explaining why terrorists have not yet done so.

However, I think that the epistemology of the claim is more interesting than the claim itself. What Schelling doesn’t explain is why none of the knowledgeable people in 1982 could have come up with the same set of difficulties that we can understand with relative clarity today. The claim seems plausible on its face; if I were a nuclear weapons expert in 1982, I can’t imagine that it would have surprised me, whatever quibbling there might have been with the timing. There’s a certain similarity with claims about the imminence of the nuclear weapons development of Iraq/Iran/Burma et al, but without the same degree of institutional interest that we find in, say, the Israeli intelligence services. As the timing for an Iranian nuclear test keeps getting pushed back, we begin to reexamine our assumptions about the interest that Iran has in nukes and its capability to produce them, questions that should have occurred to us at the beginning but didn’t. In the latter case the timeline has been developed in a deliberately misleading way in order to suggest a much greater threat than actually exists; I don’t really see that in the case of Schelling’s terrorism claim, however.

It would be nice to think that there was some kind of “democratization of expertise” phenomenon happening, in which a closed group of “experts” had been replaced with a much broader social network community, but I’m not sure that’s the case, either. Again, the single best account of why terrorists haven’t acquired nuclear weapons comes from John Mueller, who by most accounts was, in fact, alive and conscious in 1982.

Does Jesus Love Nukes, or Does He Merely Tolerate Them?

[ 76 ] August 16, 2011 | Robert Farley

As a mild-mannered atheist and a harsh critic of the Air Force, you might expect me to be up in arms regarding the use of Christian just war theory in a USAF PowerPoint presentation to missile jocks. Really, though… not so much.

If you reject the idea that the United States Air Force should prepare young men and women to fire nukes at China and Russia, then the religious versus secular content of missile training is largely irrelevant. There are a fair number of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and atheists who hold to the position that preparing to destroy a city full of people, much less actually pushing the button, is wrong in an absolute sense. This is an entirely reasonable belief, and is completely compatible with a wide variety of interpretation of major religious and non-religious doctrines. However, people who hold to the belief that firing nuclear weapons is always going to be wrong, regardless of how sensible that belief may be, probably shouldn’t seek secular careers in which the firing of nuclear weapons is a significant part of the job description. There’s an obvious parallel to pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or Plan “B”; if you want to be a pharmacist licensed by the state, your secular role requires you to set aside certain religious beliefs.

Understood in these terms, I think that what the Air Force presentation is really doing is putting forth an interpretation of Christianity that makes it possible for missile jocks to set aside their religious beliefs in favor of doing their secular job. The presentation is pretty clearly NOT arguing that there is a Christian or Jewish duty to launch nukes at the Russians or the Chinese. Rather, it’s arguing that launching nukes is compatible with Christian religious belief. These two claims are very different, and I don’t think that from a secular point of view the latter is objectionable. I also think that the case for nuclear weapons in the cause of Christian just war is a good deal more complicated than is discussed here. While on the whole I’m inclined to agree that Christians should abhor nuclear weapons, the body of just war theology is immense and complex, and plausible-ish arguments for at least the preparation for defensive or retaliatory use of nukes can be made.

Another objection to the presentation is that it does focus very heavily on Christian and Jewish moral principles, to the exclusion of Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, etc. On this point, I’m inclined to bow to the needs of practical necessity. If the Air Force had lots of Muslims or atheists who were sketchy on the prospect of wasting Moscow, then the PowerPoint might have a few more slides. I’m also genuinely curious as to the content of similar presentations in Russia and China. I don’t doubt that a certain wariness about incinerating millions of people is a problem common to nuclear armed military organizations, but I do doubt that a Soviet course on the morality of nukes focused on Russian Orthodox just war theory.

Heritage Lost… This Time

[ 21 ] December 23, 2010 | Robert Farley

While I would like to believe the argument made here by Max Bergman, I’m afraid I’m a good deal less optimistic regarding the influence of Heritage:

The hard right Heritage Foundation, one of the pillars of the conservative movement, made defeating START one of its top institutional priorities. Yet 13 Republican Senators ended up bucking Heritage and voted to ratify the START treaty. Heritage ended up so far to the right that it was unable to convince any significant number of Republicans to follow its nonsensical substantive attack on START that the treaty would lead to massive nuclear proliferation and eventually to a nuclear war…

Yet despite all this effort, a quarter of the Republican caucus bucked Heritage’s advocacy campaign and its lobbying efforts to support the treaty. As the facts came out and it became increasingly clear that none of their anti-treaty arguments held any water, Republicans increasingly relied on process complaints to oppose the treaty, rather than substance. In the end, few Senators, with the exception of Jim DeMint, really embraced the Heritage line. The pressure they exerted on Republican members was in the end outdone by the coalition of progressive groups that pressed to ratify the treaty.

There are two issues worth revisiting. The first is that conservative Republican opposition to arms control isn’t something particularly new or unusual. Right wing Republicans denounced Reagan, after all, for pursuing arms control with the Soviet Union. The split within the Reagan administration is very similar to the split in the contemporary GOP, except that opponents of arms control have probably grown stronger since the 1980s. A notional President McCain may have pushed for New START, and if he had pushed would probably have gotten more than 71 votes, but “we need to deny Obama a victory” isn’t the only motivation for Republicans on this issue.

The second is that the arms control opponents appear to be winning the battle within the GOP. The New START debate over the last month has been held largely under the assumption that the treaty would die if it wasn’t ratified during the lame duck session. I suspect that this assumption is accurate. Moreover, the two most important potential GOP presidential candidates have “authored” op-eds that are essentially collections of Heritage Foundation talking points. Finally, the GOPsters who supported the treaty are mostly (although not all) old and outside of the GOP mainstream.

I’m afraid that I have to concur with Mary Beth Sheridan’s account; Heritage failed, but demonstrated its strength within the GOP caucus. The anti-arms control faction of the GOP was much more careful and serious about developing a network of institutional support than the pro-arms control faction, and at this point the latter is on life support.

Grass Greener, etc.

[ 22 ] December 21, 2010 | Robert Farley

I just want to draw everyone’s attention to the comment thread of this post. The post itself isn’t particularly interesting, but the comment thread is fascinating in that it reads almost as a direct mirror image of dozens of comment threads that you’d find on progressives blogs decrying the latest “surrender” by Democratic office holders. I find it fascinating because beliefs in the incompetence of the Democratic party, and a set of related beliefs about the political ruthlessness of the GOP, simply aren’t shared by movement conservatives; they believe that the GOP is full of weak-kneed traitors kneeling before Reid/Pelosi/Obama and willing to surrender its most cherished principles etc. etc. etc.

To be sure, I’m not surprised by this; the GOP faithful have demonstrated an admirable (?) willingness to destroy any politician who wanders, however briefly, into “moderate” territory. What’s interesting is that the subjective interpretations of both progressives and movement conservatives regarding their Congressional delegations are almost identical. Moreover, New START isn’t even really an issue where we would expect that oligarchic centrist village corporate duopoly etc. etc. to have a strong set of opinions.

…I should note that if you read this post and think that I’m assigning any kind of moral equivalence to progressives and movement conservatives, ur doing it wrong. What I’m interested in are the structural/psychological dynamics of blame; who it’s assigned to, and what the character of that assignment is. In this case, I find it fascinating that both progressives and conservatives assign key blame for failure on their own party, and that the character of that assignment is dispositional rather than situational (weak, spineless Rep/Dems, etc.).

The Symbolic Power of Unilateral Disarmament

[ 3 ] December 16, 2010 | Robert Farley

Now this is very interesting:

US concern about the future of Trident had first surfaced a few weeks earlier, before Brown’s speech to the UN, when British media carried unattributed political briefings which suggested the Labour government intended to defer crucial Trident replacement decisions.

The nuclear-armed French, like the Americans, initially believed this news was significant, with one French official telling the US: “The UK is starting to seem really convinced that disarmament is possible, since it may abandon its Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile programme.”

The French were so upset they protested to US diplomats that Labour ministers were acting like “demagogues”. Brown’s stance that nuclear weapons in general were immoral was, by implication, threatening “an essential part of French strategic identity”, they complained. British civil servants said the hints of disarmament were confined to the Cabinet Office.

The context is a Wikileaks cable indicating that the Labour government was serious about maintaining the UK’s nuclear deterrent, public statements notwithstanding. The French reaction is very interesting indeed; the French appear to have understood a decision to reduce or eliminate the UK’s nuclear force as a danger to France’s own nuclear capabilities. Presumably, the threat would come from activists and political actors within France, who would leverage British de-nuclearization in arguments against the maintenance of France’s own deterrent.

This suggests that France and the UK, even prior to their recent defense agreement, understood their nuclear deterrents to be symbiotic rather than competitive, even in a symbolic sense. The British and French nuclear arsenals have never threatened each other in anything other than a symbolic sense; the sole possession of nuclear weapons could conceivably suggest military and political leadership of Europe. I had long believed that the persistence of the French nuclear arsenal was the most important reason that Britain would not de-nuclearize, but I had assumed that this was because giving up Britain’s nukes might be perceived as a concession of French military and political predominance. What I didn’t expect was that the French would put direct (if discreet) diplomatic pressure on the United Kingdom out of fear that they might lose the rationale for their own arsenal.

This suggests that British nuclear disarmament might indeed send a powerful diplomatic message. Of course, France and the UK are the most similar of the nuclear powers, and it would be a reach to suggest that India, China, etc. would feel the same pressure to disarm as France. Nevertheless, that the French take the symbolic power of the message so seriously is very interesting indeed.

Libyan Uranium

[ 8 ] November 27, 2010 | Robert Farley

One lesson I take from this is the US-Russian cooperation on nuclear non-proliferation is altogether a good thing:

In November 2009, six years after the government of Libya first agreed to disarm its nuclear weapons program, Libyan nuclear workers wheeled the last of their country’s highly enriched uranium out in front of the Tajoura nuclear facility, just east of Tripoli. U.S. and Russian officials overseeing Libya’s disarmament began preparations to ship this final batch of weapons-grade nuclear material to Russia, where it would be treated and destroyed.

The plan was to load the uranium onto a massive Russian cargo plane, one of the few in the world specially equipped to fly nuclear materials. On November 20, the day before the plane was to leave for a nuclear facility in Russia, Libyan officials unexpectedly halted the shipment. Without explanation, they declared that the uranium would not be permitted to leave Libya. They left the seven five-ton casks out in the open and under light guard, vulnerable to theft by the al-Qaeda factions that still operate in the region or by any rogue government that learned of their presence.

For one month and one day, U.S. and Russian diplomats negotiated with Libya for the uranium to be released and flown out of the country. At the same time, engineers from both countries worked to secure the nuclear material from theft or leakage, two serious dangers that became more likely the longer the casks sat exposed. On December 21, Libya finally allowed a Russian plane to remove the casks, ending Libya’s nuclear weapons program and with it the low-grade game of nuclear blackmail they had been playing.

Read the rest. The downside of letting the hacks at the Heritage Foundation call the tune on GOP nuclear policy is that relatively small, little known moments like this become precarious. Pretending that we can dictate to Russia, and that Moscow’s preferences matter for naught, is extraordinarily dangerous.