WASHINGTON -- U.S. President Barack Obama's national security team is struggling to choose its words carefully in describing how it intends to maintain a viable nuclear deterrent into the future, according to a senior Defense Department official (see GSN, Aug. 27).
(Sep. 18) -
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, shown yesterday, is leading the Obama administration's Nuclear Posture Review. The wording of fact sheets describing the review has come under scrutiny (Win McNamee/Getty Images).
Even before the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review concludes late this year, policy leaders are encountering rhetorical land mines as they parse Obama's stated objective of keeping the arsenal "effective" or "reliable," the official indicated in an interview late last month.
"The question of what's sufficient for 'reliability' and for 'effective' deterrence is a question that we will look at," said the senior official, who declined to be cited by name.
The two terms have been used almost interchangeably in official Pentagon fact sheets describing the posture review, a sweeping congressionally mandated assessment of nuclear strategy, forces and readiness.
Some experts suspect, though, that the words could have very different connotations. The language that the Obama administration chooses in outlining its review assumptions today might signal its willingness to ultimately pursue a controversial warhead-modernization program, or perhaps instead to follow an another politically contentious path toward nuclear disarmament, according to observers.
By way of illustration, one Defense Department document describing the review's approach to arms control and deterrence -- released Aug. 6 to issue specialists -- states that the nation "will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies."
This wording echoes precisely Obama's April speech in Prague, in which the president laid out his vision for eliminating nuclear weapons. His White House will reduce the size of the arsenal and seek to decrease the role these weapons play in international security, the president said. For the time being, though, the United States "will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies," he said.
However, a second Pentagon fact sheet also released on Aug. 6, providing general background on the nuclear review, adds the word "reliable" to its description of the future posture. The United States, it said, would "maintain a safe, secure, effective and reliable nuclear deterrent."
Some nuclear arms experts see the difference as something more than semantics.
Jeffrey Lewis -- who called attention to the wording variations last month on his well regarded blog, ArmsControlWonk.com -- said the Defense Department move to insert "reliable" into Obama's formulation suggests a hidden agenda.
"Mark my words," he opined in an Aug. 7 blog post, "the Reliable Replacement Warhead will be back."
Under the Bush administration concept, a number of different versions of a new warhead would ultimately replace all the nuclear explosive packages in the U.S. arsenal.
Congress last year struck down the project for the second time, citing concerns that building a new warhead design could undermine Washington's global efforts to thwart emerging nuclear programs in North Korea, Iran and elsewhere.
However, Obama national security officials have had a hard time describing the elements of their emerging approach to maintaining a future nuclear deterrent without stirring up images of the divisive RRW program.
Administration officials are keenly aware that their Nuclear Posture Review risks touching off a politically sensitive debate if it recommends modernizing the aging U.S. nuclear arsenal with anything that sounds like the "Reliable Replacement Warhead," the senior defense official said.
"You have to use the word 'warhead,' right?" he told Global Security Newswire. "But if you use the word 'reliable' or you use the word 'replacement,' some people fear it's a code word for going exactly back to RRW."
Complicating the matter is that Defense Secretary Robert Gates was a vocal proponent of the replacement warhead when he served under President George W. Bush (see GSN, Oct. 29, 2008). Now Obama's top defense hand, Gates in June is said to have crossed swords with Vice President Joseph Biden over the idea of resuming work on a replacement approach (see GSN, Aug. 18).
Since then, national security officials have been debating exactly how to implement Obama's vision of moving toward nuclear disarmament, while keeping the remaining force viable.
The senior defense official told GSN that extending warhead service lives in today's arsenal is likely to demand a mix of three approaches: reusing some existing components; refurbishing some parts that are candidates for upgrade; and replacing other elements with new technologies.
Looking at the big picture, it will be necessary to maintain a "reliable" arsenal as just one facet of the "effective" nuclear deterrent that Obama seeks, the official said.
Effectiveness has two dimensions, he said. First, an "effective deterrence" would prevent would-be adversaries from attacking the United States or its allies out of fear of Washington's nuclear retaliation. Second, effectiveness refers to "the ability to effectively destroy a target," under a remote scenario in which nuclear weapons are actually used.
Addressing both aspects of the arsenal's effectiveness, national security leaders are seeking "an adequate degree of reliability and a perception that [the weapons are] reasonably reliable," the official said.
Another senior Defense Department official agreed, saying an effective deterrent demands a sense of assurance that weapons would function reliably, if launched.
"We keep people from nuking each other. That would be effective [deterrence]," the official said in an interview last month. "Reliability is part of that."
To Lewis, who directs the New America Foundation's Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative, the Pentagon's focus on reliability seems misplaced.
"I think 'reliability' gives a false sense of precision," he said. In the absence of nuclear explosive testing, confidence in the stockpile reflects more of a judgment call than precise measurements of capability, according to Lewis.
A moratorium on such tests that the United States has voluntarily implemented since the early 1990s has forced the scientific community to find new ways of certifying the arsenal's continued viability.
Warhead inspections and assessments can call attention to aging or performance problems that demand fixes, but only explosive tests could demonstrate with certainty that a weapon would actually detonate and meet its intended destructive yield.
The lack of decisive measures to assess the stockpile, absent testing, has led some U.S. officials to seek replacement warheads that they believe could provide an extra margin of confidence that the weapons would still work.
However, Lewis sees this path as inappropriate for the challenges Washington faces today. In the post-Cold War world, effective deterrence is more about the signals the United States sends the world about its nuclear posture, and less about mathematical measures of weapon performance, he suggested.
"In this day and age, the details [of weapon reliability] don't matter for deterrence," Lewis told GSN. "Either they get the job done or they don't."
During the Cold War, theorists postulated nuclear exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union numbering thousands of weapons. Today the primary role of nuclear weapons might be to deter several potential adversaries from threatening the use of, or launching, just one or a handful of atomic bombs, according to this view.
One nuclear weapons expert who consults with the Pentagon asserted that some national security officials have mixed motives for demanding a heightened degree of reliability in the absence of underground testing.
"I am not aware of anyone who is deterred less by our older nuclear warheads or who will be deterred more by a new round of nuclear weapon development and production," said this source, who was not authorized to address the matter publicly and requested anonymity. "The link between 'reliability' and 'credibility' is being overstated to justify budget, not support deterrence."
Still, the senior defense official who described the Nuclear Posture Review approach insisted the Pentagon could not hope to demand total confidence in the reliability of its nuclear weapons.
"Nobody should believe in perfect systems," the official said. In fact, to account for the possibility that a defect might be discovered in one or more warhead types, the nation has "developed a diversity of systems" in its nuclear arsenal, the official noted.
The Nuclear Posture Review is expected to maintain multiple warhead designs as a guard against the possibility of discovering a chink in the armor.
"Part of overall effectiveness in deterrence, I think, is going to be having more than one type of warhead," the senior official said. "So if one didn't work, if we found trouble with one, or if, God forbid, if we ever were in a situation where we were employing it and it didn't work and we obviously we were in a situation where ... the president felt he had to make a nuclear response, then there would be another option available."
Lewis did not quibble with the need to maintain several warhead designs in today's arsenal.
At the same time, he said, "the plain meaning of Obama's [Prague speech] sentence is to admit the possibility of an 'effective' arsenal that does not make a fetish of reliability."