2022: Putin Invades Ukraine and Biden's Nuclear Posture Review Comes Out
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries, check out the Archive.
On February 24, 2022—less than two months after Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, signed a statement with the leaders of the four other original Nuclear Weapon States that declared that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought—Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Four days into the invasion, according to the Arms Control Association, he placed Russia’s nuclear forces on a heightened state of alert.
Everyone seemed to assume that Vladimir Putin was thinking about the use only of “tactical” nuclear weapons, the smaller ones, probably not larger than the Hiroshima bomb, supposedly only for use on a battlefield. It would have to be a large battlefield, wouldn’t it?
Do you suppose he thought that if he started using these “tactical” nuclear weapons, what was happening would stop there and not escalate to the use of the big “strategic” weapons? The ones called “city-busters”? That we all knew now could end up being world-busters?
You might have heard reference made to the “nuclear taboo.” That’s the notion that over the years a kind of curse against any use of any kind of nuclear weapon has come to be widely recognized, perhaps because violating the taboo could be expected to lead to utter catastrophe. Widely but perhaps not universally recognized.
In any case, once “tactical” nuclear weapons were used, how much would you think Vladimir Putin, and we, should count on things not escalating to utter catastrophe?
It was clear now, though, that Vladimir Putin, unlike Michael Gorbachev, was not someone who could be expected to join in an effort to eliminate nuclear weapons.
What clues might we be getting about our new President Biden’s plans for our nuclear weapons?
Before long, he was going to have to release something called a Nuclear Posture Review. After Bill Clinton was elected in 1994, Congress had started to require an NPR of our newly elected Presidents. The NPR was supposed to tell Congress about the state of our nuclear weapons and our plans and policies for using them. That kind of thing. That’s what “posture” means here.
What the Congress was pretty clearly interested in was whether we were all set and ready to use our nuclear weapons, not whether we were making any progress toward elimination.
In October 2022, more than a year after he took office, eight months after Russia invaded Ukraine, President Biden released his Nuclear Posture Review. Given the fact that he had been President Obama’s Vice-President, some of us had had high hopes for his NPR. Leaks had brought the hopes down some. Now it turned out that President Biden’s NPR adopted neither a “no-first-use” policy (which declared we’d not ever be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict, as China had declared, for example) nor the “sole purpose” policy Obama had declared at the beginning of his administration (the “sole purpose” being “deterrence”).
Let alone did President Biden’s NPR reaffirm the commitment President Obama had made in his speech in Prague to “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
Had Ernest Moniz, Joan Rohlfing and the “experts” at Nuclear Threat Initiative had input into Biden’s NPR? I don’t know.
After the NPR was finally released in October 2022, NTI did post a review of it. NTI’s review “applauds” the NPRs commitment to use “diplomacy” and to do the “fail-safe review” NTI had been urging that would “strengthen safeguards against false warnings, blunders, mistakes or unintentional use of nuclear weapons, especially when it came to ‘cyber-threats.’”
Nothing about elimination there.
The review goes on to quote Ernest Moniz as saying,
The NPR sets the right course by emphasizing dialogue and diplomacy, aiming to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in national security strategy, and committing to the goal of nuclear disarmament, while ensuring a safe and reliable deterrent as long as nuclear weapons exist. Especially at this time of heightened risk, U.S. leadership is essential to reassure allies, reinforce the taboo against nuclear use, move the world away from reliance on nuclear weapons, and build new guardrails against nuclear competition, proliferation, and the risk of nuclear conflict.
Except for the addition of the new “cyber-threats,” that sounds an awful lot like what we’d been hearing from the nuclear priesthood for decades now, doesn’t it? Did Ernest Moniz think it represented an improvement on the status quo, I wonder? Or was he just trying not to be pushy, trying to keep the channels of communication open, or something?
Following the release of the NPR, the Nuclear Threat Initiative posted a five-minute video on YouTube they called an “explainer.” Its specific subject was the “cyber-nuclear” threat. The video was narrated by Richard A. Clarke. Mr. Clarke had been a long-time counterterrorism advisor in several administrations who had, among other things, strongly criticized the George W. Bush administration for ignoring warnings about possible attacks by Osama bin Laden.
The video was only five minutes long and very fast-paced and dramatic. It quickly got over a million views. “The video is just one element,” the NTI website said, “of our broadening scope of work to reach new audiences and build the political will to address today’s evolving and escalating threat.”
The video is not about eliminating nuclear weapons. It is about how we need to do a better job with our cyber defense, defending against those who might want to “hack” into our nuclear command and control system. It does a good job of giving us a sense of the “cyber-threat” that Clarke says is underappreciated.
Near the end of it, though, Richard Clarke says “Ultimately, the only way we can insure that these weapons are never used is to negotiate verifiable arms control agreements and perhaps even eliminate nuclear weapons entirely one day.” Mr. Clarke had, in my opinion, a well-deserved reputation for speaking truth to power. But come on, Mr. Clarke. The only way to insure nuclear weapons are “never used” is to eliminate them. Not “ultimately.” Not “perhaps.” That’s the only way.
Mr. Clarke says that making any progress here depends on “people like you”—meaning us—pushing our “elected representatives” to do the right thing. At the very end, he says that “future generations are counting on us.”
He may be right about it being up to us, but who is that exactly? “Us” includes, among others, the very large number of industrialists, stockholders, and members of the military-industrial complex who may have another way of looking at this matter and their own well-funded ways of “pushing” elected representatives with lobbying and campaign contributions .
As for future generations counting on us, no they’re not. They don’t exist yet, and may never exist.
It’s important not to get sentimental about this business.
Next: Elimination—What’s Holding Things Up?
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see the titles of other entries, check out the Archive.