Nuclear Threat Initiative VIII: Election of Joe Biden and the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Twentieth Anniversary
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.
In the election of 2020—in a surprise to me—Joe Biden, a long-time Senator from Delaware who had been Barack Obama’s Vice President, was elected President. He defeated Donald Trump, the incumbent, who was running for his second term. Trump wouldn’t admit he’d lost. He got many of his followers to believe, or at least to say, that the election had been “rigged” and “stolen.” It hadn’t been.
Would Joe Biden’s election be helpful to the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s cause and the commitment President Obama had made in a speech in Prague in 2009 to seek “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”?
During the campaign we had been reminded that as a Senator, President-elect Biden had voted for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, among some other votes I would call sketchy. Lots of us had gotten carried away after the attacks on 9/11 who now were seeing how, well, stupid our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had been. And how costly in blood and treasure.
We all make mistakes, especially when we are afraid and in stirred up crowds. Groupthink is powerful stuff. What’s important is whether afterwards we recognize mistakes we have made and learn from them. We’d just have to see what President Biden had learned along the way.
Sometimes, of course, we just double down and go in the wrong direction even worse.
When it came to nuclear weapons, President Biden made a good start. In February 2021, the month after his inauguration, he and Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, agreed to extend the New START treaty Presidents Obama and Medvedev had signed in 2010, for another five years, to 2026.
Ted Turner had founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative back in 2001 with the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons in ten years. That made the year of President Biden’s inauguration, 2021, the twentieth anniversary of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. A good time for NTI to take stock, right? Their staff thought so.
NTI’s offices were now, in 2021, like those of almost all think tank/policy institutes, in Washington, D.C., at 1776 Eye Street NW, Suite 600, not at all far from the White House. But, as NTI’s Annual Report for 2021 said, it had from its beginning wanted to distinguish itself from the ordinary “think-tanks” by an emphasis not just on “policy” but on action.
In twenty years, NTI had grown in size, no doubt about that. In the Annual Report for 2021, this testimonial appears from Caressa Williams, who had been with NTI since early on.
It’s amazing for me to witness the growth of NTI over 20 years. We almost have a staff of 60 now, and that is very different from when I started. Programs have more staff, and we have more programs. NTI is more visible and definitely well-known now. Our website is 100% improved. When NTI first started, our logo was a drawing that Charlie Curtis drew on a piece of paper!
A “staff” of 60, with almost as many “experts” also being claimed in the Report.
NTI had not only more staff and experts on the payroll but, as Ms. Williams said, “more programs.” And more missions. In 2001, it had had the one—the elimination of nuclear weapons. It had quickly embraced the project of co-director Sam Nunn’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program—to locate and secure the supplies of fissile fuel, not just in Russia and the United States by that time but in the other countries that now had supplies of fissile fuel. The new mission made sense as part of the main mission. If you could locate and secure the large stores of fissile fuel now here and there on our earth, you wouldn’t have eliminated nuclear weapons, but you would have made it harder for nations, or terrorists, not in possession of fissile fuel to make nuclear weapons.
Without the fissile fuel, the highly enriched uranium or the plutonium, it is impossible to make a nuclear weapon. Neither exists in nature. Both must be manufactured. That’s not easy to do. It’s the hardest part about making a nuclear weapon. link tk
In 2012, NTI had developed a Nuclear Security Index to measure how well different countries were doing at achieving this kind of security. Less well in the last few years, the 2021 Index said. That was too bad. Was that because Trump had been in office? Anyway, things were going in the wrong direction.
In NTI’s first decade, 2001-2011, the mission of locating and securing fissile fuel had not been supported by President Bush. But in NTI’s second decade, President Obama had supported and advanced the mission by sponsoring those four Global Nuclear Security Summits which had the goal not just of locating and securing the existing fissile fuel but of developing cooperative relations among countries that could support progress in other areas. President Trump had ignored the project again. In 2021, we hadn’t yet been able to see what President Biden would be doing along these lines.
NTI’s 2021 Annual Report announced that the Cooperative Threat Reduction program Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar had gotten going thirty years earlier had become “Cooperative Risk Management and Reduction: A New Framework for Nuclear Materials Security.” I couldn’t tell exactly how this was to be an improvement on what NTI and Obama had achieved so far. Except that now they would be broadening their view, looking not just at technical measures but at cultural issues and “norms” that were a part of the picture. Widening the view to include such factors seemed like a good idea to me.
But I was a little troubled by the fact that in the new formulation “Threat Reduction” had become “Risk Management.” Was that a virtual throwing up of hands—accepting a state of affairs in which we no longer are committed to eliminating the risk—which could be done only by eliminating the weapons—and instead recognizing that all we’ll ever be able to do is “manage” it? Or try to?
In 2014, during the Obama administration, working with Obama’s State Department, NTI had also gotten going an International Partnership for Disarmament Verification. Verification would have to be a piece of any program to eliminate nuclear weapons, right? Remember that dictum by President Reagan that people like to quote, “Trust but verify’?
Well, yes. But isn’t there a self-contradiction in that famous dictum? “Verification” is something you think you need to do precisely because you don’t trust someone. Meaning you aren’t starting with “trust” but with the lack of it. If you are always first of all “verifying,” will you ever get to trust? Wouldn’t a more honest way of putting it be “Don’t trust. Verify.”
Not that in trusting relationships you don’t sometimes want to ask for verification. But is the relationship starting from trust or from the verifying? Have we been first of all “verifying” with the United Kingdom and France all these years?
Perhaps the really basic problem here is not in developing techniques and means of verification but in changing the nature of the relation.
Those two programs in NTI—the Nuclear Security Index and the Partnership for Verification—were certainly consistent with NTI’s original goal of elimination, even if in some ways they might fall short of recognizing the problem behind the problem.
Ted Turner was still co-chair of NTI. I don’t think he ever would have characterized himself as a nuclear expert but he seems to have grasped something fundamentally important here. In NTI’s 2021 AR, he is quoted as saying “The bottom line is that we’ve got to start acting globally, like civilized, educated, decent, kind-hearted human beings, and we have to trust each other. We have no choice. We can’t live in a world where nobody trusts anybody because then we’ll never make progress with these weapons or with anything else.”
Ernest Hemingway also said something in his trenchant way that seems pertinent: “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
If we are ever to get there, a leap of some kind may be required.
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries, check out the Archive.
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In the 2022 Annual Report for NTI, the President and Chief Operating Officer Joan Rohlfing is quoted as saying: “One of the criticisms we frequently hear is that ‘A world without nuclear weapons simply is not possible. We could never verify that others are not cheating.’ I think that suffers from a complete failure of imagination.”
Is that what’s missing? Is that what’s keeping elimination from actually being the goal? A failure of imagination? A failure of what?]