Nuclear Threat Initiative IV - How It Went During Obama's Administration: Part Two
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, see the Archive.
In the Spring of 2010, President Obama acted on commitment he had made in Prague in 2009. He had committed America to seek “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” On April 8, 2010, back in Prague, he signed a new arms reduction treaty with the then president of Russia, Dimitri Medvedev. Called New START, the treaty had taken eight rounds of negotiations to achieve. It called for cutting the number of deployed strategic warheads to 1550, 10% less than had been agreed to in the SORT treaty signed by President George W. Bush in 2003, 66% less that what had been agreed to by President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 in the first-ever Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, START I.
In New START, the number of launchers would be cut to 800 and of deployed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear weapons limited to 700. New START did provide for verification, unlike SORT—eighteen on-site inspections along with remote monitoring.
Did this treaty bring us any closer to NTI’s and Obama’s goal of eliminating nuclear weapons? I don’t know. From what I could see, the thinking and negotiation here had stopped at “reduction” in the numbers of the weapons. The numbers that were left were still enough to kill the world. But it could be the beginning of something. Plus “reduction” is better than nothing, you have to think. Better than an increase in numbers for sure.
Three days later, on April 12, 2010, President Obama convened in Washington, D. C. the first of the Nuclear Security Summits he said in Prague he was going to convene. Leaders from forty-seven nations and three international organizations attended. The purpose of these summits was to develop cooperation among countries worldwide in doing what Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar’s Cooperative Threat Reduction effort had been working on since the end of the Cold War—securing nuclear weapons and stocks of fissile materials. At the summit, the “cooperation” part of CRT was emphasized from the get-go.
Speaking of “cooperation,” back in May 1995, a Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty had taken place in New York City. The NPT, ratified in 1970, was an international treaty with many countries as parties, most but not all countries. It called for Review Conferences every five years to decide whether to extend the treaty. You probably know that Article VI of the NPT requires the five nations that then had nuclear weapons and were being allowed to retain them—we were one of them—to begin “good faith” negotiations on nuclear disarmament “immediately.” In all this time, since 1970, good faith negotiations on “disarmament,” if by that you mean “elimination,” hadn’t happened. Not “immediately,” not at any time.
Reductions, yes. Disarmament, no.
Still, at the NPT Review Conference that took place in May 1995, it had been decided to extend the NPT indefinitely. In May 2010, an NPT Review Conference was held at UN headquarters in New York City. The previous Review Conference, in 2005, had been fractious. This one was a lot more successful, everyone agreed. The many participants from the many different countries even achieved a consensus statement at the end of it. “Consensus” is where everyone, not just a majority, agrees. President Obama’s actions were given a lot of credit for this.
One of the tricky issues that always comes up when it comes to nuclear proliferation is how countries that don’t have nuclear weapons and don’t want them, at the moment anyway, but do want nuclear power, can get the low-enriched fuel that is used in the power reactors without building enrichment facilities themselves. The same enrichment facilities that can produce low-enriched fuel for reactors can also produce highly-enriched fuel for nuclear weapons. Sam Nunn had reminded us of this in Nuclear Tipping Point.
NTI had a hand in what looked to me, and not only me, like a good move here. The members of the International Atomic Energy Commission, which was in charge of administering the NPT, voted in December 2010 to establish a fuel bank for low-enriched uranium so states who wanted to have nuclear power reactors could get the necessary fuel for them without having to enrich it themselves. The nuclear fuel bank project had been spurred by a $50 million contribution from Warren Buffett in 2006, conditioned on other nations contributing $100 million in matching funds within two years. The matching funds ended up being contributed by the European Union, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Norway, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. Some surprises in there, maybe?
Eventually it was decided to place the fuel bank in Kazakhstan—which happens to be the country believed to have the largest deposits of uranium ore. It would take a while but in August 2017, the fuel bank would be opened for business.
This fuel bank wasn’t the first. Russia had established a fuel bank in Siberia a few years before the one in Kazakhstan launched, but theirs was only for the countries who had joined them in their project.
It may interest you to know that the idea of such a fuel bank had been proposed all the way back in 1946 by a committee chaired by Robert Oppenheimer. It was part of a plan in what came to be known as the Acheson-Lilienthal report as a way of achieving international control of atomic energy. And preventing a deeply dangerous nuclear arms race.
At the time, the United States was the only nation to have any nuclear weapons at all. Having them and being the only ones who did was a point of pride for many of us, though scientists like Oppenheimer said this wouldn’t last long. If we didn’t find a way to do something like what the Acheson-Lilienthal plan proposed. Instead, a nuclear arms race got going.
The Soviet Union said the United States would have to give up its weapons before they could agree to something like the Acheson-Lilienthal plan. Our leaders refused to do that. They thought the world would be better off with us having them. Just us.
What followed was the nuclear arms race. First with the Soviet Union, which successfully tested its first atomic bomb in 1949. And more “proliferation,” that is, other countries getting nuclear weapons. The nine countries that have them today are the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel, which doesn’t admit it has them. Most if not all of these countries have thermonuclear weapons, the biggest kind. Tens, hundreds of times more powerful than the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima that destroyed that entire city and killed maybe 100,000 of its people.
Obviously it will now be much harder to eliminate nuclear weapons than it would have been to find a means of controlling them when only the United States had them. And when thermonuclear weapons hadn’t been invented yet. Or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles capable of delivering them to targets ten thousand miles away in thirty minutes.
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, see the Archive.