Nuclear Posturing, Obama-Style

Nuclear Posturing, Obama-Style
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, April 09, 2010

WASHINGTON -- Nuclear doctrine consists of thinking the unthinkable. It involves making threats and promising retaliation that is cruel and destructive beyond imagining. But it has its purpose: to prevent war in the first place.

During the Cold War, we let the Russians know that if they dared use their huge conventional military advantage and invaded Western Europe, they risked massive U.S. nuclear retaliation. Goodbye Moscow.

Was this credible? Would we have done it? Who knows? No one's ever been there. A nuclear posture is just that -- a declaratory policy designed to make the other guy think twice.

Our policies did. The result was called deterrence. For half a century, it held. The Soviets never invaded. We never used nukes. That's why nuclear doctrine is important.

The Obama administration has just issued a new one that "includes significant changes to the U.S. nuclear posture," said Defense Secretary Bob Gates. First among these involves the U.S. response to being attacked with biological or chemical weapons.

Under the old doctrine, supported by every president of both parties for decades, any aggressor ran the risk of a cataclysmic U.S. nuclear response that would leave the attacking nation a cinder and a memory.

Again: Credible? Doable? No one knows. But the threat was very effective.

Under President Obama's new policy, however, if the state that has just attacked us with biological or chemical weapons is "in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)," explained Gates, then "the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it."

Imagine the scenario: Hundreds of thousands are lying dead in the streets of Boston after a massive anthrax or nerve gas attack. The president immediately calls in the lawyers to determine whether the attacking state is in compliance with the NPT. If it turns out that the attacker is up-to-date with its latest IAEA inspections, well, it gets immunity from nuclear retaliation. (Our response is then restricted to bullets, bombs and other conventional munitions.)

However, if the lawyers tell the president that the attacking state is NPT noncompliant, we are free to blow the bastards to nuclear kingdom come.

This is quite insane. It's like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections.

Apart from being morally bizarre, the Obama policy is strategically loopy. Does anyone believe that North Korea or Iran will be more persuaded to abjure nuclear weapons because they could then carry out a biological or chemical attack on the U.S. without fear of nuclear retaliation?

The naivete is stunning. Similarly the Obama pledge to forswear development of any new nuclear warheads, indeed, to permit no replacement of aging nuclear components without the authorization of the president himself. This under the theory that our moral example will move other countries to eschew nukes.

On the contrary. The last quarter-century -- the time of greatest superpower nuclear arms reduction -- is precisely when Iran and North Korea went hellbent into the development of nuclear weapons.

It gets worse. The administration's Nuclear Posture Review declares U.S. determination to "continue to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attacks." The ultimate aim is to get to a blanket doctrine of no first use.

This is deeply worrying to many small nations who for half a century relied on the extended U.S. nuclear umbrella to keep them from being attacked or overrun by far more powerful neighbors. When smaller allies see the United States determined to move inexorably away from that posture -- and for them it's not posture, but existential protection -- what are they to think?

Fend for yourself. Get yourself your own WMDs. Go nuclear if you have to. Do you imagine they are not thinking that in the Persian Gulf?

This administration seems to believe that by restricting retaliatory threats and by downplaying our reliance on nuclear weapons, it is discouraging proliferation.

But the opposite is true. Since World War II, smaller countries have agreed to forgo the acquisition of deterrent forces -- nuclear, biological and chemical -- precisely because they placed their trust in the firmness, power and reliability of the American deterrent.

Seeing America retreat, they will rethink. And some will arm. There is no greater spur to hyper-proliferation than the furling of the American nuclear umbrella.
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Obama, Unilateral Denuclearizer-in-Chief
Frank Gaffney
Monday, April 12, 2010

Sarah Palin has clearly gotten under President Obama's skin with her sharp critique of his wooly-headed pursuit of U.S. denuclearization. In response, Mr. Obama felt compelled to note that he wasn't acting on his own. He told ABC News last week, "If the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it, I'm probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin."

Now, based on the acquiescence of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and JCS Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen with respect to the President's other radical assault on the U.S. military - namely, his determination to repeal the law barring avowed homosexuals from serving in the armed forces, one would have reason to doubt the ability, or at least the willingness, of these two men to give the Commander-in-Chief "advice" he did not want to receive.

In fact, it appears to have taken the policy-equivalent of sustained waterboarding to bring the Pentagon leadership around to support much of Mr. Obama's anti-nuclear agenda. The New York Times reported that it required 150 interagency meetings, including 30 by the National Security Council, to produce the new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and START follow-on treaty. Give the guys on the E-Ring credit for holding out as long as they did. But in the end, the Defense Department was reduced to agreeing to the following extraordinary decisions:

* The United States will not design, produce or test any new nuclear weapons. This condemns the nation to relying for the indefinite future (Mr. Obama says for more than his lifetime, and he's a fairly young man) on an arsenal comprised of bombs and warheads that are, on average, already some 30 years old. There is no getting around it: They are obsolescing, increasingly unsupportable and, in any event, primarily designed to destroy super-hardened Soviet silos, not to perform the deterrent missions of today.

* The United States will not test any of its old weapons, either - even when changes to their components have to be made to try to maintain their viability. These are among the most complex pieces of equipment every manufactured. In the absence of realistic underground nuclear testing, it is a leap of faith to believe that new components and materials can be introduced to replace old ones (including, in some cases, vacuum tubes!) without affecting the weapon's performance and perhaps its safety.

* That safety, and indeed, the reliability and credibility of the nuclear deterrent will, accordingly, rely ever more critically on a dwindling number of highly skilled scientists, engineers and technicians in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. It is unlikely they will be terribly motivated - or be, at least over time, the best and the brightest the country has to offer. After all, pursuant to the NPR, the government will not only be hamstringing their work (see the above), but is determined to "devalue" the role of such weapons.

Importantly, the directors of the nation's three nuclear laboratories have - at long last -begun to express publicly serious concerns about their ability to provide the "certifications" that have permitted Mr. Obama and his immediate predecessors to forego both nuclear weapons modernization and testing. Such candor is not only fully justified and urgently needed; it is all the more remarkable insofar as these individuals know they can be fired at will by Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

In addition, the new Obama nuclear "strategy" leaves it up to lawyers - including apparently those of the International Atomic Energy Agency (whose members include China, Russia and Iran) - whether the United States will be allowed to use nuclear retaliation if we are attacked with chemical weapons, deadly biological viruses or electric grid-cratering cyberwarfare. Like the rest of the President's denuclearization agenda, this exemplary act of restraint is supposed to dissuade the Iranian and North Korean regimes and other nuclear wannabes from thinking it important to have and wield "the Bomb." As William Safire would say, "Fuggedaboutit."

The Pentagon leadership is doubtless consoling itself that at least it staved off still-more-radical aspects of the Obama denuclearization agenda. Even with the deep cuts the START follow-on treaty requires in U.S. strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, it may still be possible to retain a nuclear "Triad" of long-range bombers and land- and sea-launched ballistic missiles. And those forces will not be "de-alerted," as Mr. Obama had wanted, which would have rendered them useless as deterrents.

Still, for the foregoing reasons, it is misleading - and potentially dangerously so - when Secretary of Defense Gates declares, as he did Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press": "The Nuclear Posture Review sets forth a process by which we will be able to modernize our nuclear stockpile to make it more reliable, safer, more secure and effective." Ditto when Adm. Mullen promises, as he did last week: "We must hold ourselves accountable to unimpeachably high standards of nuclear training, leadership and management. And we must recruit and then retain the scientific expertise to advance our technological edge in nuclear weaponry. I'm encouraged to see these requirements so prominently addressed in the Nuclear Posture Review...."

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs did provide one bit of advice at the end of his remarks on the Nuclear Posture Review - advice that the Disarmer-in-Chief would have been well advised to heed, but didn't: "Without such improvements, an aging nuclear force supported by a neglected infrastructure only invites enemy misbehavior and miscalculation."