Saturday, August 8, 2015

Obama’s proliferation problem

By Sarah Wheaton


Despite the Iran deal, the president’s nuclear agenda is faltering in Russia, Asia and at home.

When President Barack Obama this week repeated John F. Kennedy’s 1963 call for a “more practical, more attainable peace” in his pitch for the Iran nuclear agreement, absent was any mention of the broader mission both presidents proclaimed: “global disarmament.”
In 2009, Obama electrified much of the global nonproliferation movement by promising to work toward a “world without nuclear weapons.” That April, in Prague, Obama’s soaring language and concrete goals proved so convincing that the Nobel Committee “attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for” a nuclear-free globe when it awarded him the Peace Prize less than a year after his election. Now, as Obama looks toward the end of his presidency with the aim of checking off agenda items, curbing nuclear proliferation is one goal that remains out of reach, despite some promising work earlier in his term.
In fact, even as Obama touts the nuclear agreement his administration negotiated with Iran as a step toward a more peaceful world, the dangers posed by nuclear weapons are growing worse in Russia, North Korea, India, Pakistan and other parts of the world.
“The public came to recognize that that was a campaign line,” said Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a top Defense Department official on nuclear issues in the Reagan and Clinton administrations. “Easy to say but hard to do.’’
The disappointment is especially acute in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where this week survivors are marking the 70th anniversary of the U.S. atomic attacks in 1945. Obama had given them hope they would see a path to nonproliferation in their lifetimes, but given the “very slow” progress, said Tatsujiro Suzuki of the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University, “that expectation is getting lower and lower.”
Obama can point to significant achievements, especially early in his administration. In 2010, after a review of U.S. nuclear policies, he announced that the U.S. would stop developing new nuclear weapons, and pledged that the U.S. would not conduct a nuclear strike against non-nuclear states that are living up to international nonproliferation obligations. Those changes were aimed at restoring American credibility on nuclear issues and reassuring countries without weapons programs that they’d be better off without them.
Obama also made securing nuclear material around the world a priority, calling in Prague to eliminate “all vulnerable” stockpiles within four years. He didn’t meet that goal, but he has had considerable success: From the end of the Cold War in 1992 to Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the number of countries with highly enriched uranium dropped from 52 to 38. Under Obama, a nearly equal number of countries have surrendered their material in just a fraction of the time: just 25 countries have enough uranium to build a bomb today.
Obama organized the first of three high-level Nuclear Security Summits in 2010, and those, along with the U.S.’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative begun in 2004, “significantly boosted efforts to secure nuclear material around the world,” said a report out in May from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a bipartisan group of former lawmakers and officials who promote arms control.
The 13 countries who gave up their stockpiles since his Prague speech include Libya, Taiwan and Turkey. Ukraine, which gave up enough material to build about a dozen nuclear weapons in 2010, is the top trophy, especially now that it’s in the throes of Russia-fueled instability.
“There’s just no reason to think that would’ve happened” without Obama’s efforts, Allison said of Ukraine’s 2012 move.
Negotiations to renew the U.S.-Russia nuclear accord also started in 2010, and were completed the following year, while former President Dmitry Medvedev was still in office in Russia. Foreign policy experts have called the bilateral weapons reductions modest but significant.
But some arms control experts say Obama’s efforts seem to have lost steam since then.
“After that initial flurry in the first couple of years of Obama’s presidency, the larger non-Iran piece of the nuclear nonproliferation agenda has stalled, and has lost momentum,” said Kingston Reif of the Arms Control Association.
The White House bristles at this what-have-you-done-for-me-lately-ism.
There’s a tendency to dismiss the 2010 accomplishments as “so five years ago,” said Jon Wolfsthal, senior director for nonproliferation on Obama’s National Security Council. “Well, these are things that continue to affect us today.”
The Obama administration points to the verification regime in New START, for example, as providing a key safeguard as the West’s relationship with Russia has deteriorated. But at the same time, Wolfsthal acknowledges that further progress with the U.S.’s top nuclear rival will be impossible as long as Vladimir Putin is an uncooperative partner.
It’s not just Putin’s increasing bellicosity and incursions into areas like Crimea. Russia, Wolfsthal said, “seems to be increasing the value that it places on nuclear weapons, so as the United States says we want to go to lower numbers of nuclear weapons, Russia views that as a threat. If we say we want to increase our reliance on nuclear weapons, they would view it as a threat.”
As far as North Korea, the White House has all but given up, convinced that the country is determined to maintain its nuclear program. Since Kim Jong Un’s government reneged on a limited 2012 agreement, the Obama administration has shown little interest in returning to the table. Its focus is limited to keeping those weapons in the country and talking down anxious neighbors like Japan and South Korea who may be tempted to build up their own atomic arms in response.
“Nobody wants to take initiative right now,” Suzuki said. “Somebody should stand up.”
Meanwhile, India and Pakistan continue to produce nuclear material and create new types of weapons. And in contrast to the success with Ukraine, neighboring Belarus reneged on a 2010 commitment to remove its uranium less than a year later.
“Regional conflicts have gotten worse, not better” over Obama’s 6½ years, said former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), now the CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. “All the things that give rise to nuclear ambitions … in my view have gotten worse.”
In addition, the possibility that terrorists could acquire enough radioactive material to create a nuclear weapon or so-called dirty bomb is “one of the greatest dangers facing the global community,” according to a report released in June from the 80-member Fissile Materials Working Group. Nuclear experts warn that highly enriched uranium at civilian sites — enough for hundreds of nuclear weapons spread over 100 facilities in the remaining 25 countries that possess it — tends to be less secure than that used in military applications. It’s generally up to the states that have those materials, including South Africa, Belarus and Kazakhstan, to keep them safe.
And even as global stockpiles of uranium have been shrinking, caches of a different fissile material, plutonium, have been growing at a rate of about 740 bombs’ worth a year, according to a 2013 Department of Energy report cited by the Center for Public Integrity.
Nonproliferation advocates have also been disappointed by the administration’s moves in recent years to cut the budget for the Energy Department’s nonproliferation efforts — a reflection of their success, the White House says — while pumping more cash into modernizing the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal.
On the one hand, Obama has vowed not to develop new nuclear weapons technology, a departure from previous presidents. That’s been key to America’s moral authority on the world stage, the White House contends.
“Imagine what it would be like trying to get an international coalition to negotiate with Iran if we were actively building new nuclear weapons,” Wolfsthal said.
On the other, that doesn’t mean the U.S. isn’t upgrading the planes, submarines and missiles that can deliver those nuclear weapons to a target. This process is quietly ensconcing the status quo, critics say, even as Obama publicly aspires to reduce American stocks by another third beyond the New START levels.
“The plans are wildly ambitious and exceed what the president has already said is necessary for nuclear deterrence,” said Reif, who criticized the administration for taking an “autopilot” approach to nuclear rebuilding. “It’s the procurement that’s driving policy, as opposed to the other way around.”
A familiar storyline is behind another failed part of Obama’s nuclear agenda. Despite his 2009 pledge in the Prague speech to “immediately and aggressively pursue” ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, there’s been inadequate support in the Senate. Russia ratified the 1996 multilateral agreement in 2000; the U.S. Senate rejected it in 1999, and it hasn’t come up for a vote since.
So while Obama set high expectations in his Prague speech and with his early successes, Nunn noted that arms control and nonproliferation are long-term projects that span several presidencies, so progress should be judged on “a continuum from one administration to another.”
Within a single presidency, “you do not have tremendous changes in the nuclear picture,” he said.

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