2023/06/08
Drew Angerer/Getty Images North America/TNS
You may not know it from watching cable news, going grocery shopping or doing any other mundane chore of daily life, but the world is at an increased risk of nuclear confrontation. That’s at least the assessment of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who delivered a speech at the Arms Control Association last week about a multidecade arms control structure that is gradually losing its sturdiness.
The system of nuclear agreements and risk-reduction measures spurred on by the 1962 Cuban missile crisis “has begun to erode,” Sullivan told the group. His boss, President Joe Biden, was even more dramatic in October when he told a Democratic Party fundraiser that the chances of nuclear Armageddon were at their highest since that high-stakes gambit six decades earlier when President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stared each other down for 13 long days in October.
While discussions about nuclear proliferation are often subject to hysteria, troubling developments have led Biden and Sullivan to these worrisome conclusions. Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the process of deploying tactical nuclear warheads, Iskander-M missiles and nuclear-capable Su-25 aircraft to his ally Belarus. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is pressing forward with his own nuclear development plans, including but not limited to the miniaturization of nuclear warheads, the testing of military reconnaissance satellites and the production of solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Meanwhile, China’s nuclear modernization remains in full swing, with the Pentagon estimating that Beijing’s nuclear arsenal could reach 1,500 warheads by 2035 if its current pace is maintained. And let’s not forget that the New START accord, the last major nuclear agreement between Washington and Moscow, is no longer operable; last week, the U.S. responded to Russia’s February withdrawal from the deal by limiting the usual information it sends to the Russians.
All of this sounds frightening to those who study nuclear weapons for a living. It’s clearly frightening to the Biden administration as well; otherwise, a senior U.S. security official wouldn’t have spent part of his day delivering an address on the topic.
Fortunately, the White House has a plan to deal with all of this. Unfortunately, the plan has very poor odds of success.
According to the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Washington’s strategy relies on two planks: modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons apparatus to ensure that deterrence holds and exploring new nuclear transparency and risk-reduction measures to manage or, better yet, downgrade nuclear rivalry between the U.S. and its adversaries.
“Mutual, verifiable nuclear arms control offers the most effective, durable and responsible path to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our strategy and prevent their use,” the strategy states. Sullivan reiterated those points last week, reminding everyone in the room that the U.S. is willing to get back to the table with Russia on developing a new arms control framework and enter nuclear talks with China without preconditions.
It takes more than one party for diplomacy to work, however. And as sober-minded as the Biden administration wants to be with one of the most important subjects on the planet, it’s largely talking to itself. Russia, China and North Korea are at best uninterested in pursuing a nuclear dialogue with the U.S.
The three countries all have their own reasons for staying away from the negotiating table.
For China, it’s partly a matter of basic arithmetic. From where Beijing sits, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to enter into bilateral nuclear talks with a country whose nuclear arsenal is nearly 13 times the size of its own. The U.S. has more than 5,200 nuclear warheads in its inventory to China’s 410, according to a Federation of American Scientists assessment.
The Chinese are already at a massive disadvantage numerically, which means any mutual weapons reductions wouldn’t alter the overall picture for the country. It should therefore be no surprise why Beijing would dismiss Washington’s offer to talk. Sadly, there is unlikely to be any U.S.-China nuclear reduction negotiations unless one of two things occurs: Washington drops to Beijing’s level or Beijing rises to Washington’s.
For Russia, the situation is different. Unlike China, Russia is largely at parity with the U.S. — in fact, Russia’s nuclear arsenal is larger than America’s. Yet because U.S.-Russia relations are so acrimonious today, principally over the war in Ukraine, it is almost unfathomable to envision Putin greenlighting serious, substantive nuclear talks with the U.S., Ukraine’s biggest military supplier. Whereas Washington and Moscow have historically separated strategic stability from other issues of dispute, this no longer appears to be the case.
The Russians are currently using the prospect of nuclear arms talks as a way to leverage concrete changes to U.S. foreign policy. This includes reentering arms control agreements, such as New START, that have long been in effect. As Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said over the weekend, Moscow will return to New START only if the U.S. abandons what he called “its fundamentally hostile policy toward Russia.”
As far as North Korea is concerned, what is there to discuss? A nuclear deterrent is the ultimate insurance policy for an internationally isolated state that shares a heavily militarized border with a neighbor, South Korea, whose military is more sophisticated than its own and that considers the world’s predominant superpower its main enemy. North Korea isn’t any more likely to abandon its nuclear weapons program than the U.S. is. No amount of talk about denuclearization from State Department officials is going to change that basic dynamic.
We all like to envision a world without nuclear weapons. Reality, however, has a habit of crushing hopes and dreams.
____
ABOUT THE WRITER
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
You may not know it from watching cable news, going grocery shopping or doing any other mundane chore of daily life, but the world is at an increased risk of nuclear confrontation. That’s at least the assessment of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who delivered a speech at the Arms Control Association last week about a multidecade arms control structure that is gradually losing its sturdiness.
The system of nuclear agreements and risk-reduction measures spurred on by the 1962 Cuban missile crisis “has begun to erode,” Sullivan told the group. His boss, President Joe Biden, was even more dramatic in October when he told a Democratic Party fundraiser that the chances of nuclear Armageddon were at their highest since that high-stakes gambit six decades earlier when President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stared each other down for 13 long days in October.
While discussions about nuclear proliferation are often subject to hysteria, troubling developments have led Biden and Sullivan to these worrisome conclusions. Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the process of deploying tactical nuclear warheads, Iskander-M missiles and nuclear-capable Su-25 aircraft to his ally Belarus. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is pressing forward with his own nuclear development plans, including but not limited to the miniaturization of nuclear warheads, the testing of military reconnaissance satellites and the production of solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Meanwhile, China’s nuclear modernization remains in full swing, with the Pentagon estimating that Beijing’s nuclear arsenal could reach 1,500 warheads by 2035 if its current pace is maintained. And let’s not forget that the New START accord, the last major nuclear agreement between Washington and Moscow, is no longer operable; last week, the U.S. responded to Russia’s February withdrawal from the deal by limiting the usual information it sends to the Russians.
All of this sounds frightening to those who study nuclear weapons for a living. It’s clearly frightening to the Biden administration as well; otherwise, a senior U.S. security official wouldn’t have spent part of his day delivering an address on the topic.
Fortunately, the White House has a plan to deal with all of this. Unfortunately, the plan has very poor odds of success.
According to the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Washington’s strategy relies on two planks: modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons apparatus to ensure that deterrence holds and exploring new nuclear transparency and risk-reduction measures to manage or, better yet, downgrade nuclear rivalry between the U.S. and its adversaries.
“Mutual, verifiable nuclear arms control offers the most effective, durable and responsible path to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our strategy and prevent their use,” the strategy states. Sullivan reiterated those points last week, reminding everyone in the room that the U.S. is willing to get back to the table with Russia on developing a new arms control framework and enter nuclear talks with China without preconditions.
It takes more than one party for diplomacy to work, however. And as sober-minded as the Biden administration wants to be with one of the most important subjects on the planet, it’s largely talking to itself. Russia, China and North Korea are at best uninterested in pursuing a nuclear dialogue with the U.S.
The three countries all have their own reasons for staying away from the negotiating table.
For China, it’s partly a matter of basic arithmetic. From where Beijing sits, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to enter into bilateral nuclear talks with a country whose nuclear arsenal is nearly 13 times the size of its own. The U.S. has more than 5,200 nuclear warheads in its inventory to China’s 410, according to a Federation of American Scientists assessment.
The Chinese are already at a massive disadvantage numerically, which means any mutual weapons reductions wouldn’t alter the overall picture for the country. It should therefore be no surprise why Beijing would dismiss Washington’s offer to talk. Sadly, there is unlikely to be any U.S.-China nuclear reduction negotiations unless one of two things occurs: Washington drops to Beijing’s level or Beijing rises to Washington’s.
For Russia, the situation is different. Unlike China, Russia is largely at parity with the U.S. — in fact, Russia’s nuclear arsenal is larger than America’s. Yet because U.S.-Russia relations are so acrimonious today, principally over the war in Ukraine, it is almost unfathomable to envision Putin greenlighting serious, substantive nuclear talks with the U.S., Ukraine’s biggest military supplier. Whereas Washington and Moscow have historically separated strategic stability from other issues of dispute, this no longer appears to be the case.
The Russians are currently using the prospect of nuclear arms talks as a way to leverage concrete changes to U.S. foreign policy. This includes reentering arms control agreements, such as New START, that have long been in effect. As Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said over the weekend, Moscow will return to New START only if the U.S. abandons what he called “its fundamentally hostile policy toward Russia.”
As far as North Korea is concerned, what is there to discuss? A nuclear deterrent is the ultimate insurance policy for an internationally isolated state that shares a heavily militarized border with a neighbor, South Korea, whose military is more sophisticated than its own and that considers the world’s predominant superpower its main enemy. North Korea isn’t any more likely to abandon its nuclear weapons program than the U.S. is. No amount of talk about denuclearization from State Department officials is going to change that basic dynamic.
We all like to envision a world without nuclear weapons. Reality, however, has a habit of crushing hopes and dreams.
____
ABOUT THE WRITER
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
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