On the quiet Friday afternoon of March 11, 2011, Natsuo* was working in Fukushima, the capital city of Fukushima prefecture. At 2:46 p.m., a devastating earthquake of 9.0 magnitude hit the Pacific coast of Japan, where the prefecture of Fukushima is situated. Natsuo recalled to me the sheer power of this earthquake: “The whole office shook like hell, everything began to fall from the walls. I thought to myself ‘That’s it … I’m going to die!’”

Natsuo quickly returned to her hometown of Koriyama City, unaware that the earthquake had triggered a massive tsunami, which inundated an important part of the prefectural shoreline and ultimately claimed the lives of nearly 20,000 people. On top of the initial devastation, the tsunami severely damaged the Fukushima Dai’ichi Nuclear Power Plant, in Ōkuma, Fukushima, located on the east coast of Fukushima prefecture. She later learned on TV that something “seemed wrong” with the nuclear power plant. “During that time,” she said, “I tried to get as much information as I could, but the media weren’t being clear on the situation.”

Read the rest at Sapiens

In recent months, tensions have once again flared between Pyongyang and Seoul, calling into question the state of inter-Korean and U.S.-Korea relations. As the future of denuclearization talks with North Korea remains uncertain and the United States looks towards the November 2020 presidential election, APARC gathered experts on Korea and international security to provide analysis of where we stand with the DPRK and what considerations future Korea policies should involve.

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Gi-Wook Shin, APARC’s director and the director of the Korea Program, moderates the APARC-led discussion hosted by the Freeman Spogli Institute. Robert Carlin, a longtime analyst of North Korea and frequent visitor to the DPRK, joins the panel from the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Leading North Korea and international affairs expert Victor Cha provides insight into the public statements and apparent policy goals of North Korea's leadership, while fellow Georgetown scholar and imminent APARC center fellow Oriana Mastro offers commentary on the ongoing need for military stability in the area. Siegfried Hecker, an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction, and nuclear security, adds his expertise in nuclear nonproliferation and arms control to the discussion.

President Donald Trump’s chief arms control envoy last week acknowledged the possibility that the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) could be extended, but he added, “only under select circumstances.”  He then put down conditions that, if adhered to, will ensure the Trump administration does not extend the treaty.

New START and Extension

New START limits the United States and Russia each to no more than 700 deployed strategic missiles and bombers and no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads.  It expires by its terms on February 5, 2021 but can be extended for up to five years.  The Trump administration has adamantly refused to do that.

From the perspective of U.S. national security interests, extending New START is a no-brainer.  As confirmed by the State Department’s annual report, Russia is complying with the treaty’s limits.  Extension would keep Russian strategic forces constrained until 2026.  It would also ensure the continued flow of information about those forces produced by the treaty’s data exchanges, notifications, on-site inspections and other verification measures.

And extension would not force a single change in U.S. plans to modernize its strategic forces, as those plans were designed to fit within New START’s limits.

Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin, have raised New START extension since the first days of the Trump administration.  In 2017, Trump administration officials deferred on the issue, saying they would consider extension after (1) completion of a nuclear posture review and (2) seeing whether Russia met the treaty’s limits, which took full effect in February 2018.

Russia fully met the limits in February 2018.  At about the same time, the administration issued its nuclear posture review.  Yet, more than two years later, New START extension remains an open question.

On June 24, Amb. Marshall Billingslea, the president arms control envoy, briefed the press on his meeting with his Russian counterpart two days before in Vienna.  Asked about extending New START, Amb. Billingslea—never a fan of the treaty or, it seems, any arms control treaty—left the option open.  However, he described three conditions that will block extension.

China

Amb. Billingslea’s first condition focused on China, which he claimed had “an obligation to negotiate with [the United States] and Russia.”  Beijing certainly does not see it that way—saying no, no and again no—citing the huge disparity between the size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal and those of the United States and Russia.  China has less than one-tenth the number of nuclear warheads of each of the two nuclear superpowers.

To be sure, including China in the nuclear arms control process is desirable.  But Beijing will not join a negotiation aimed at a trilateral agreement.  What would such an agreement look like?  Neither Washington nor Moscow would agree to reduce to China’s level (about 300 nuclear warheads).  Nothing suggests either would agree to legitimize a Chinese build-up to match their levels (about 4,000 each).  Beijing presumably would not be interested in unequal limits.

This perhaps explains why, well more than one year after it began calling for China’s inclusion, the Trump administration appears to have no proposal or outline or even principles for a trilateral agreement.

For its part, Moscow would welcome China limiting its nuclear arms.  The Russians, however, choose not press the question, raising instead Britain and France.  Amb. Billingslea pooh-poohed the notion, but France has as many nuclear weapons as China, and Britain has two-thirds the Chinese number.  The logic for bringing in one but not the other two is unclear.  The question raises yet another hinderance to including China.

A more nuanced approach might prove more successful.  It would entail a new U.S.-Russian agreement providing for reductions beyond those mandated by New START.  Washington and Moscow could then ask the Chinese (and British and French) to provide transparency on their nuclear weapons numbers and agree not to increase their total weapons or exceed a specified number.  Much like his president, however, the arms control envoy does not appear to be into nuance.

Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons

Amb. Billingslea’s second condition dealt with including in a new negotiation nuclear arms not constrained by New START, especially Russia’s large number of non-strategic nuclear weapons.  Again, this is laudable goal, but getting there will require much time and unpalatable decisions that the Trump administration will not want to face.

Russian officials have regularly tied their readiness to discuss non-strategic nuclear arms to issues of concern to them, particularly missile defense.  The Trump administration,  however, has made clear that it has zero interest in negotiating missile defense.

Even if Moscow severed that linkage, negotiating limits on non-strategic nuclear weapons would take time.  New START limits deployed strategic warheads by virtue of their association with deployed strategic missiles and bombers.  The only warheads directly counted are those on deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

By contrast, most if not all non-strategic warheads are not mounted on their delivery systems.  Monitoring any agreed limits would require new procedures, including for conducting on-site inspections within storage facilities.  This does not pose an insoluble challenge, but it represents new territory for both Washington and Moscow.  Working out limits, counting rules and verification measures will prove neither quick nor easy.

Verification

Amb. Billingslea earlier suggested some dissatisfaction with New START’s verification measures, though he did not articulate any particular flaw, and, as noted, the State Department’s annual compliance report says Russia is meeting the treaty’s terms.  Last week, he made verification measures for his desired U.S.-Russia-China agreement the third condition for New START extension. 

Verification measures are critical.  Treaty parties have to have confidence that all sides are observing the agreement’s limits or, at a minimum, that any militarily significant violation would be detected in time to take countervailing measures.  Working out agreement on those measures will prove a long process, even in just a bilateral negotiation, especially if it addresses issues such as stored nuclear weapons.  That is not just because of Russian reluctance to accept intrusive verification measures such as on-site inspection; the U.S. military also wants verification measures that do not greatly impact its normal operations.

Russian officials have reiterated their readiness to extend New START now.  Amb. Billingslea’s conditions will thwart extension for the foreseeable future.  That’s unfortunate.  By not extending New START, the Trump administration forgoes a simple action that would strengthen U.S. national security and make Americans safer.

Ending the moratorium would not advance U.S. security interests.  The United States has conducted about as many nuclear weapons tests as the rest of the world combined (and 30 percent more than the number conducted by the Soviet Union/Russia).  U.S. weapons scientists learned more from testing.  When I served as a diplomat at the American Embassy in Moscow in 1988, I accompanied a U.S. team to the Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk (in what is now Kazakhstan).  Our Soviet hosts showed us a vertical shaft for an upcoming underground test; it was about three feet in diameter.  A U.S. team member from the test site in Nevada, which the Soviets would visit the following month, commented that U.S.-drilled vertical shafts for nuclear tests typically were nine to eleven feet in diameter.  That maximized the area above the weapon for instruments that would gather a burst of data in the nanosecond before they vaporized.

The testing moratorium and the CTBT, if ratified and entered into force, would seem to lock in an area of U.S. advantage regarding nuclear weapons and nuclear effects.  Why would we want others to test and erode that advantage?

Up until the idea of gaining leverage with Beijing and Moscow arose, the primary possible reason for a return to testing was if it became necessary to confirm the reliability of a weapons type in the stockpile.  However, the National Nuclear Security Administration has overseen for 25 years the Stockpile Stewardship Program, intended to confirm that U.S. nuclear weapons are safe, secure and reliable without having to test them in a manner that produces a nuclear yield. To do so, the program uses supercomputers, modeling and tools such as the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility (think of the world’s most powerful X-ray device).

Each year, the commander of Strategic Command and the directors of the national nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore certify the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile.  When I visited Los Alamos several years ago, the director told me that, as long as the Stockpile Stewardship Program was funded, he was confident that nuclear testing was not needed.  He added that, as a result of the program, weapons scientists had learned things about how nuclear weapons work that they did not and could not learn from testing nuclear weapons underground.

The smart thing for U.S. national interests is to continue the moratorium, ratify the CTBT, and press others to ratify so that the treaty can be brought into force.  The Senate failed to give consent to ratification in 1999, due to concerns about how to maintain the stockpile’s reliability without nuclear testing and about monitoring the treaty.  The Stockpile Stewardship Program, just in its beginning stage then, can now answer the first concern and has been doing so.

As for monitoring a test ban, U.S. national technical means have improved over the past two decades, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization has established the International Monitoring System with some 300 stations around the world.  It can detect underground nuclear explosions down to below one kiloton (the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of 15 kilotons) as well as detecting tests in the atmosphere or ocean, both of which are banned by the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty.  Once in force, the CTBT also provides for an inspection mechanism.

As former Secretary of State George Shultz said in 2013, senators might have been correct not to consent to ratification in 1999, but given the Stockpile Stewardship Program’s development and enhanced monitoring systems, they would be right to vote for ratification now.

Conducting a nuclear test to bring China and Russia to the negotiating table will not work.  It will instead open the door for others to resume testing and close a nuclear weapons knowledge gap that favors the United States.  That will not make us safer or more secure.  It is an unwise idea that hopefully will continue to meet resistance within the U.S. government.

The Department of Defense has begun to ratchet up spending to recapitalize the U.S. strategic nuclear triad and its supporting infrastructure, as several programs move from research and development into the procurement phase.  The projected Pentagon expenditures are at least $167 billion from 2021-2025. This amount does not include the large nuclear warhead sustainment and modernization costs funded by the Department of Energy, projected to cost $81 billion over the next five years.

Nuclear forces require modernization, but that will entail opportunity costs. In a budget environment that offers little prospect of greater defense spending, especially in the COVID19 era, more money for nuclear forces will mean less funding for conventional capabilities.

That has potentially negative consequences for the security of the United States and its allies. While nuclear forces provide day-to-day deterrence, the Pentagon leadership spends most of its time thinking about how to employ conventional forces to manage security challenges around the world. The renewed focus on great power competition further elevates the importance of conventional forces. It is important to get the balance between nuclear and conventional forces right, particularly as the most likely path to use of nuclear arms would be an escalation of a conventional conflict. Having robust conventional forces to prevail in or deter a conventional conflict in the first place could avert a nuclear crisis or worse.

Nuclear Weapons and Budgets

For the foreseeable future, the United States will continue to rely on nuclear deterrence for its security and that of its allies (whether we should be comfortable with that prospect is another question). Many U.S. nuclear weapons systems are aging, and replacing them will cost money, lots of money. The Pentagon’s five-year plan for its nuclear weapons programs proposes $29 billion in fiscal year 2021, rising to $38 billion in fiscal year 2025, as programs move from research and development to procurement. The plan envisages a total of $167 billion over five years. And that total may be understated; weapons costs increase not just as they move to the procurement phase, but as cost overruns and other issues drive the costs up compared to earlier projections.

The Pentagon knew that the procurement “bow wave” of nuclear weapons spending would hit in the 2020s and that funding it would pose a challenge. In October 2015, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense said “We’re looking at that big bow wave and wondering how the heck we’re going to pay for it…  and probably thanking our stars that we won’t be here to have to answer the question.”

The Pentagon’s funding request for fiscal year 2021 includes $4.4 billion for the new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine that will replace Ohio-class submarines, which will begin to be retired at the end of the decade; $1.2 billion for the life extension program for the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM); $1.5 billion for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to replace the Minuteman III ICBM; $2.8 billion for the B-21 stealth bomber that will replace the B-1 and B-2 bombers; $500 million for the Long-Range Standoff Missile that will arm B-52 and B-21 bombers; and $7 billion for nuclear command, control and communications systems.

The Pentagon funds primarily go to delivery and command and control systems for nuclear weapons. The National Nuclear Security Administration at the Department of Energy bears the costs of the warheads themselves.  It seeks $15.6 billion for five nuclear warhead life-extension and other infrastructure programs in fiscal year 2021, the first year of a five-year plan totaling $81 billion. The fiscal year 2021 request is nearly $3 billion more than the agency had earlier planned to ask, which suggests these programs are encountering significant cost growth.

Some look at these figures and the overall defense budget (the Pentagon wants a total of $740 billion for fiscal year 2021) and calculate that the cost of building and operating U.S. nuclear forces will amount to “only” 6-7 percent of the defense budget. That may be true, but how relevant is that figure?

By one estimate, the cost of building and operating the F-35 fighter program for the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marines over the program’s lifetime will be $1 trillion. Amortized over 50 years, that amounts to $20 billion per year or “only” 2.7 percent of the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2021 budget request. The problem is that these percentages and lots of other “small” percentages add up. When one includes all of the programs, plus personnel and readiness costs as well as everything else that the Pentagon wants, the percentages will total to more than 100 percent of the figure that Congress is prepared to appropriate for defense.

Opportunity Costs

The defense budget is unlikely to grow. Opportunity costs represent the things the Pentagon has to give up or forgo in order to fund its nuclear weapons programs. The military services gave an indication of these costs with their “unfunded priorities lists,” which this year total $18 billion. These show what the services would like to buy if they had additional funds, and that includes a lot of conventional weapons.

The Air Force, for example, would like to procure an additional twelve F-35 fighters as well as fund advance procurement for an additional twelve F-35s in fiscal year 2022. It would also like to buy three more tanker aircraft than budgeted.

The Army is reorienting from counter-insurgency operations in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq to facing off against major peer competitors, that is, Russia and China. Its wish list includes more long-range precision fires (artillery and short-range surface-to-surface missiles), a new combat vehicle, helicopters and more air and missile defense systems.

The Navy would like to add five F-35s to its aircraft buy, but its bigger desire is more attack submarines and warships, given its target of building up to a fleet of 355 ships. The Navy termed a second Virginia-class attack submarine its top unfunded priority in fiscal year 2021. It has set a requirement for 66 attack submarines and currently has about 50. However, as older Los Angeles-class submarines retire, that number could fall to 42.  Forgoing construction of a Virginia-class submarine does not help to close that gap.

Moreover, the total number of Navy ships, now 293, will decline in the near term, widening the gap to get to 355. The Navy’s five-year shipbuilding program cut five of twelve planned Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and cost considerations have led the Navy to decide to retire ten older Burke-class destroyers rather than extend their service life for an additional ten years. This comes when China is rapidly expanding its navy, and Russian attack submarines are returning on a more regular cycle to the Atlantic Ocean.

The Navy has said that funding the first Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine forced a cut-back in the number of other ships in its fiscal 2021 shipbuilding request. The decision not to fund a second Virginia-class attack submarine appears to stem directly from the unexpected $3 billion plus-up in funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s fiscal year 2021 programs.

These are the opportunity costs of more nuclear weapons: fewer dollars for aircraft, ships, attack submarines and ground combat equipment for conventional deterrence and defense.

Nuclear War and Deterring Conventional Conflict

The principal driving factor behind the size of U.S. nuclear forces comes from Russian nuclear forces and doctrine. Diverse and effective U.S. nuclear forces that can deter a Russian nuclear attack should suffice to deter a nuclear attack by any third country. In contrast to the Cold War, the U.S. military no longer seems to worry much about a “bolt from the blue”—a sudden Soviet or Russian first strike involving a massive number of nuclear weapons designed to destroy the bulk of U.S. strategic forces before they could launch. That is because, under any conceivable scenario, sufficient U.S. strategic forces—principally on ballistic missile submarines at sea—would survive to inflict a devastating retaliatory response.

The most likely scenario for nuclear use between the United States and Russia is a regional conflict fought at the conventional level in which one side begins to lose and decides to escalate by employing a small number of low-yield nuclear weapons, seeking to reverse battlefield losses and signal the strength of its resolve. Questions thus have arisen about whether Russia has an “escalate-to-deescalate” doctrine and whether the 2018 U.S. nuclear posture review lowers the threshold for use of nuclear weapons.

If the United States and its allies have sufficiently robust conventional forces, they can prevail in a regional conflict at the conventional level and push any decision about first use of nuclear weapons onto the other side (Russia, or perhaps China or North Korea depending on the scenario). The other side would have to weigh carefully the likelihood that its first use of nuclear weapons would trigger a nuclear response, opening the decidedly grim prospect of further nuclear escalation and of things spinning out of control. The other side’s leader might calculate that he/she could control the escalation, but that gamble would come with no guarantee.  It would appear a poor bet given the enormous consequences if things go wrong. Happily, the test has never been run.

This is why the opportunity costs of nuclear weapons programs matter. If those programs strip too much funding from conventional forces, they weaken the ability of the United States and its allies to prevail in a conventional conflict—or to deter that conflict in the first place—and increase the possibility that the United States might have to employ nuclear weapons to avert defeat.

For the United States and NATO members, that could mean reemphasis on an aspect of NATO’s Cold War defense policy.  In the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, NATO allies faced Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional forces that had large numerical advantages, and NATO leaders had doubts about their ability to defeat a Soviet/Warsaw Pact attack at the conventional level. NATO policy thus explicitly envisaged that, if direct defense with conventional means failed, the Alliance could deliberately escalate to nuclear weapons. That left many senior NATO political and military officials uneasy. Among other things, it raised uncomfortable questions about the willingness of an American president to risk Chicago for Bonn.

Russia found itself in a similar situation at the end of the 1990s. With a collapsing economy following the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Russian government had to cut defense spending dramatically. As its conventional capabilities atrophied, Moscow adopted a doctrine envisaging first use of nuclear weapons to compensate. (In the past fifteen years, as Russia’s defense spending has increased, a significant amount has gone to modernizing conventional forces.)

The United States and NATO still retain the option of first use of nuclear weapons. If the U.S. president and NATO leaders were to consider resorting to that option, they then would be the ones to have to consider the dicey bet that the other side would not respond with nuclear arms or that, if it did, nuclear escalation somehow could be controlled.

Assuring NATO allies that the United States was prepared to risk Chicago for Bonn consumed a huge amount of time and fair amount of resources during the Cold War. At one point, the U.S. military deployed more than 7000 nuclear weapons in Europe to back up that assurance. Had NATO had sufficiently strong conventional forces, the Alliance would have been able to push that risky decision regarding nuclear first use onto Moscow—or even have been able to take comfort that the allies’ conventional power would suffice to deter a Soviet/Warsaw Pact attack.

In modernizing, maintaining and operating a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent, the United States should avoid underfunding conventional forces in ways that increase the prospect of conventional defeat and/or that might tempt an adversary to launch a conventional attack. If Washington gets the balance wildly out of sync, it increases the possibility that the president might face the decision of whether to use nuclear weapons first—knowing that first use would open a Pandora’s box of incalculable and potentially catastrophic consequences.

Getting the Balance Right in the COVID19 Era

This means that the Department of Defense and Congress should take a hard look at the balance. The Pentagon presumably has weighed the trade-offs, though it is not a unitary actor.  “Nuclear weapons are our top priority” has been the view of the leadership. The trade-offs have been easier to manage in the past several years, when nuclear programs were in the research and development phase, and defense budgets in the first three years of the Trump administration grew. As nuclear programs move into the more expensive procurement phase and the fiscal year 2021 budget shows little increase, the challenge of getting the balance right between nuclear and conventional spending has become more acute. It is not apparent that the Pentagon has weighed the opportunity costs over the next ten-fifteen years under less optimistic budget scenarios.

As for Congress, which ultimately sets and approves the budget, no evidence suggests that the legislative branch has closely considered the nuclear vs. conventional trade-offs.

All that was before COVID19. The response to the virus and dealing with the economic disruption it has caused have generated a multi-trillion-dollar budget deficit in 2020 and likely will push up deficits in at least 2021. It would be wise now to consider the impact of COVID19.

Having added trillions of dollars to the federal deficit, and facing an array of pressing health and social needs, will Congress be prepared to continue to devote some 50 percent of discretionary funding to the Department of Defense’s requirements? Quite possibly not. If defense budgets get cut, the Pentagon will face a choice:  shift funds from nuclear to conventional force programs, or accept shrinkage of U.S. conventional force capabilities and—as the United States did in the 1950s and early 1960s—rely on nuclear deterrence to address a broader range of contingencies. In the latter case, that would mean accepting, at least implicitly, a greater prospect that the president would have to face the question of first use of nuclear weapons, i.e., a conventional conflict in which the United States was losing.

This is not to suggest that the U.S. military should forgo the strategic triad. Trident II SLBMs onboard ballistic missile submarines at sea remain the most survivable leg of the strategic deterrent. The bomber/air-breathing leg offers flexibility and can carry out conventional missions. The ICBM leg provides a hedge against a breakthrough in anti-submarine warfare. Moreover, if in a crisis or a conventional conflict, the Russian military were to develop the capability to attack U.S. ballistic missile submarines at sea, the Kremlin leadership might well calculate that it could do so without risking a nuclear response. Attacking U.S. ICBMs, on the other hand, would necessitate pouring hundreds of nuclear warheads into the center of America. A Russian leader presumably would not be so foolish as to think there would be no nuclear retaliation.

While sustaining the ICBM leg, one can question whether maintaining 400 deployed ICBMs, as the current plan envisages, is necessary. Reducing that number for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) would achieve budget savings, albeit later in the production run.  Another question is whether some way might be found to extend the service life of some portion of the current Minuteman III force that would allow delaying the GBSD program, which is projected to cost $100 billion, by ten-fifteen years and postponing those costs—freeing up funds in the near term for conventional force requirements.

Another issue concerns the Long-Range Standoff Missile (LRSO) and its cost, estimated at some $20 billion when including the nuclear warheads. The B-21 bomber will incorporate stealth and advanced electronic warfare capabilities allowing it to operate against and penetrate sophisticated air defenses. The LRSO, to be deployed beginning in 2030, is intended to replace older air-launched cruise missiles carried by the B-52 bomber and could later equip the B-21 if it loses its ability to penetrate.

An alternative plan would convert B-52s in 2030 to conventional-only missions and delay the LRSO to a future point if/when it appeared that the B-21’s ability to penetrate could come into question. By 2030, the Air Force should have a significant number of B-21s (the B-21 is scheduled to make its first flight in 2021 and enter service in 2025). With at least 100 planned, the Air Force should have a sufficient number of B-21s for the 300 nuclear weapons it appears to maintain at airfields where nuclear-capable bombers are currently based.

These kinds of ideas would free up billions of dollars in the 2020s that could be reallocated to conventional weapons systems. Delaying the GBSD and LRSO and their associated warhead programs by just one year (fiscal year 2021) would make available some $3 billion—enough money for a Virginia-class attack submarine.  Delaying those programs for ten-fifteen years would make tens of billions of dollars available for the military’s conventional force needs.

All things being equal, it is smarter and more efficient to choose to make decisions to curtail or delay major programs rather than to continue them until the money runs out and forces program termination. As it examines the administration’s proposed fiscal year 2021 defense budget, Congress should carefully consider the trade-offs and press the Pentagon to articulate how it weighed the trade-offs between nuclear and conventional forces. In the end, Congress should understand whether it is funding the force that is most likely to deter not just a nuclear attack, but to deter a conventional conflict that could entail the most likely path to nuclear war.

Originally for The National Interest

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, North Korea continues to carry out weapons testing and to declare that not a single COVID-19 patient has emerged in the country. Analysts and medical experts, however, are highly skeptical of Pyongyang’s claims. A coronavirus outbreak would overwhelm the North’s weak healthcare system and would be devastating to its people, who suffer from relatively high levels of malnutrition and have no access to information about the pandemic.   

North Korea is one of the worst human rights violators in modern history. In February 2014, the United Nations Human Rights Council published the landmark Report of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a comprehensive account of human rights abuses committed by the authoritarian country’s leadership against its people. It was seen as a major milestone in the effort to shine a light on the gravity and scope of the problem and to hold the perpetrators accountable by bringing them before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Over the past three years, however, the momentum for action on the report’s recommendations has faded and the human rights issue has been largely viewed as less serious a concern than the regional and global security threat posed by the North Korean nuclear program and long-range missiles.

Coinciding with the sixth anniversary of the COI report, it was the goal of the Korea Program’s twelfth annual Koret Workshop to regenerate awareness of the role of human rights in policy toward North Korea by gathering experts at Stanford to discuss the topic and generate concrete recommendations for action. In this post, we share highlights from select presentations prepared for this workshop that was canceled due to the COVID-19 crisis.

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Human Rights and Denuclearization

As the Trump administration shifted from a “war of words” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to prioritizing summit diplomacy, the focus on the human rights problem receded and many stakeholders, both within and outside the administration, preferred to play it down so as not to jeopardize the negotiation over a denuclearization agreement.

Yet the irony, argues Asian affairs and security expert Victor Cha, is that the denuclearization and human rights agendas are inextricably intertwined. “Human rights is an integral and unavoidable component of a comprehensive North Korea strategy,” he says. Cha, professor of government and holder of the D.S. Song-KF Chair in Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University, joined APARC as the Koret Fellow in Korean Studies for the winter quarter of 2020.

Cha notes that revenues gained from forced labor exports and other human rights abuses help the Kim regime finance its proliferation activities. Furthermore, improvements in the country’s human rights condition would reflect the leadership’s commitment to reform and make a denuclearization commitment by the DPRK more credible. The United States, claims Cha, must take actionable steps to include the human rights issue in bilateral relations with Pyongyang: establish a rights-first approach in future negotiations, resume humanitarian assistance, and fill the position of a Special Envoy for Human Rights as mandated by the Congress.

Watch Professor Cha discuss these issues in our recent virtual Q&A:

Tae-Ung Baik, professor of Law and director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, calls for a step-by-step approach, advancing small, concrete changes that will have a cumulative effect toward better protection of the rights of the people of North Korea. For example, cooperation and consultation on human rights protection should be exerted to promote reform in specific areas such as the North Korean judicial and criminal justice systems.

Ambassador Robert King, who served as a special envoy for North Korean human rights issues at the U.S. Department of State in the Obama administration, also stresses that addressing the human rights problem is essential to making progress toward denuclearization and security goals. King argues that North Korea must accept international norms and standards for denuclearization, but its acceptance of international human rights standards is necessary if it is to win international legitimacy.

Listen to highlights from King’s talk at the Korea Program’s seminar, which he delivered in the fall quarter of 2019 while being affiliated with APARC as the Koret Fellow in Korean Studies:

Freedom of Information

Although the human rights condition in North Korea has not improved, the information landscape in the country has changed significantly over the past quarter-century. Nat Kretchun, deputy director of the Open Technology Fund, describes the transformation as “trending up from an extremely low base toward greater openness and access before, more recently, retrenching.”

In the years following the famine of the mid-1990s, information flowed into the country like never before, exposing North Korean citizens to a range of new content via an array of non-networked technologies, including information from China, South Korean entertainment media, radio broadcasts from NGOs, and outside broadcasts by Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. As they regained some measure of economic stability, however, the North Korean authorities began to reestablish control over information flows. The recent available data demonstrates that access to information is falling off and the era of more socially normalized consumption of outside information is over, says Kretchun. “The government has begun implementing a far more technologically savvy information control strategy than it previously had the capacity to do […in an] effort to move communications and media consumption onto state-controlled networks via state-controlled devices.”

Indeed, Martyn Williams, a veteran watcher of North Korea’s information technology sector, shows that, while the digitization of media was the catalyst that led to the mass spread of foreign content across the country, so too has the same technology been employed to help the government combat it. For example, every Android tablet and smartphone in North Korea logs every page a person visits with the web browser and randomly takes screenshots during his/her use of the device. Users are allowed to see this database of collected screenshots but cannot delete them. “The system is sinister in its simplicity. It reminds users that everything they do on the device can be recorded and later viewed by officials […] it insidiously forces North Koreans to self-censor in fear of a device check that might never happen.”

Furthermore, the security software pre-loaded onto North Korean phones and computers cannot be replaced and the state’s digital certificate system makes mobile devices little more than consumption tools for state propaganda and personal memories. “While digital technology has created new pathways for foreign content, the increased networking of products could work against information freedom and eventually lead to the creation of an even more Orwellian society,” concludes Williams.

Minjung Kim, director of the South Korean NGO Save North Korea, emphasizes that a key to addressing the human rights problem in the country lies in discrediting the regime’s ideology in the minds of the North Korean people. It is, therefore, necessary to further produce and deliver content that educates citizens on how the regime shapes and manipulates ideology.

The Role of the United Nations

The Kim Jong Un regime responded to the 2014 COI report with outrage and denunciation, and Pyongyang has continued to refuse to cooperate with UN Special Rapporteurs.

For three consecutive years following the publication of the report, the UN Security Council returned to consider the North Korean human rights record. Since 2018, however, the issue has not been placed back on the Security Council agenda, while the U.S.-DPRK summit denuclearization diplomacy has not included a single statement regarding improving the lives of North Korea’s people.

The North Korean human rights problem has long been subject to political debates. Still, claims Joon Oh, former ambassador of South Korea to the UN and former president of the UN Economic and Social Council, future efforts can focus on helping the North Korean people realize economic and social rights, as these do not necessitate political reforms that threaten the regime. The challenge here, though, Oh recognizes, is that such efforts require technical cooperation and humanitarian assistance, which, in turn, have been narrowed down since the UN security council imposed sanctions on North Korea in 2017 for its nuclear and ballistic missile development.

Former Justice of the High Court of Australia Michael Kirby, the chair of the COI report, who has argued that there will never be peace on the Korean peninsula as long as there are grave human rights abuses occurring in North Korea, claims that “When a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert [mass atrocity crimes], the wider international community has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary. […] It is not acceptable simply to wring our hands and cry ‘never again.’ Action must be taken, however difficult and even dangerous is the path of pursuing such action can sometimes be.”

Granted, the international community must urgently reduce and eliminate the dangers posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles. However, says Kirby, turning a blind eye to human rights crimes because their mention will upset those who are alleged to have committed them or permitted them to be committed in their name is neither a rational nor a just response.

North Korea continues to declare that it has not had a single case of COVID-19, but health experts find it inconceivable that the infectious disease would not be in the country given its proximity to China and South Korea, two early victims of the pandemic. A coronavirus outbreak in the North could be devastating, says Asian affairs and security expert Victor Cha, as it would act on an extremely vulnerable population with already-compromised immune systems and outdated health care infrastructure.

Cha, professor of government and holder of the D.S. Song-KF Chair in Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University, has joined Shorenstein APARC as the Koret Fellow in Korean Studies for the winter quarter of 2020. He spoke with APARC via videoconferencing about the threat of COVID-19 to North Korea, the deadlock in the diplomacy of denuclearization, and the North Korean human rights problem.

COVID-19 or not, the Kim regime has recently stepped up again its weapons testing. The North typically resorts to missile tests, notes Cha, in periods of non-dialogue with the United States, and the data also shows that North Korea will bolster weapons testing before and after U.S. presidential elections.

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What is to be done about engagement with the North? Cha believes that any new U.S. administration should prioritize three areas: first, focus not only on North Korea’s nuclear program but also on its ballistic missile delivery capability; second, enable the flow of humanitarian assistance into the country; and third, genuinely work with our allies and partners in the region, “who have tended to be neglected lately and seen in largely transactional terms.”

While at Stanford, Cha has been researching a project that he calls “Binary Choices” and that examines how U.S. allies and partners in Asia react when they are forced to choose between the United States and China over various issues. Regardless of how one feels about the U.S.-China trade war, Cha concludes, the question is if we are “calculating the other externalities, in terms of how our allies make choices, into our net assessment of whether a policy towards China is working or not.”

Watch the Q&A with Cha above or on our YouTube channel:

For the first time in the history of the Leonard M. Rieser Award, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists gave an honorable mention. The honor goes to Ivan Andriushin, Cecilia Eiroa-Lledo, Patricia Schuster, and Evgenii Varseev for their essay “Nuclear power and global climate change.”  (Photo is of the authors.)

This essay, written by an a team of two Russian and two American young researchers sprung from a collaboration under the umbrella of the U.S.-Russia Young Professionals Nuclear Forum (YPNF), a project established by CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker to encourage dialogue on critical nuclear issues between the younger generations of nuclear engineers and scholars in the US and Russia.

The essay that received the Rieser honorable mention was one of a series of articles born out of the YPNF program. “Their articles are of interest because they represent the views of some of the younger generation of professionals working together across cultural and disciplinary divides,” said Hecker.  “We were particularly struck by the following comment in their essay reflects on the perceived urgency of the task at hand: ‘We are the first generation that is experiencing the dramatic effects of global climate change and likely the last that can do something about it.” 

Since its first meeting in 2016, the YPNF meets alternatively in Moscow and Stanford, with its agenda designed to promote an open-minded approach to consideration of technical and political challenges presented by the use of nuclear power in energy production and in the military realm. The participants represent not only two different countries, each a world leader in nuclear scholarship, research, and technology expertise, but also a range of disciplines from nuclear engineering to particle physics to international relations to anthropology. 

On the 4th YPNF in Moscow in November 2018, one forum exercise was on The Future of Global Nuclear Power. It was designed to have the young professionals take a close look at the benefits and challenges facing nuclear power globally and to examine and debate the role that nuclear power should play globally in this century. The backdrop for the discussion was the trend of the declining share of electricity produced by nuclear power plants in the world electricity. In the past few years, it dropped to only 11% of global electricity in spite of increasing concerns about the impact of burning fossil fuels on global climate change. This exercise was the start of the winning essay.

Read the Rest at Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

The sixth Young Professional Nuclear Forum (YPNF6), sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (MEPhI), was held at MEPhI, Moscow, on November 4-7, 2019.

The mission of the forums is to foster collaboration between young professionals from Russia and the United States in the nuclear power and nonproliferation fields. The forum allows them to discuss and evaluate pressing global nuclear issues during times that the two governments are not cooperating and are not in serious dialogue. In recent years, the two governments have severely restricted opportunities and venues that previously used to be open to experienced nuclear professionals on both sides to cooperate with each other.  The benefits of nuclear cooperation were clearly demonstrated in hundreds of mutually beneficial collaborative projects by Russian and American nuclear professionals during the breakup of the Soviet Union and in the 20-plus years that followed.

These forums allow Stanford University and MEPhI to prepare the next generation to help rejuvenate cooperation once the governments realize that cooperation in the nuclear arena is essential. The young professionals participating in these meetings are upper level undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, young faculty and junior specialists. They are the new generation who will be stepping in to solve the mounting challenges including nuclear security, nonproliferation, nuclear disarmament and how to mitigate the effects of climate change and toxic pollution of the planet.

The November 2019 meeting included two and a half days of lectures and group work on two exercises – one on a “World free of nuclear weapons” and the second on “The impact of nuclear accidents on the future of nuclear power.”

Most young professionals acknowledged – or came to realize – the enormity and complexity of Nuclear Zero as both a study area and a goal. At the same time, many noted that this very complexity provoked deeper thinking and the discussion opened new perspectives, especially for those on the engineering side. The young professionals also realized that they share more common ground on the issue of Global Zero than one might have thought.

The feedback on the nuclear accidents exercise also showed several notable takeaways. The aspects that appealed to the young professionals were: the comparative approach that pushed them to look beyond the known facts into similarities and specifics across the three accident cases; a perspective that integrated the technical, social, and cultural angles; and such examination being directly relevant to improved safety of nuclear energy, the objective close to heart to many of them who see their future as nuclear professionals.

It is also interesting that in this exercise the young professionals noted differences of perspective and opinion rather than similarities. As has been the case in all previous forums, these differences were valued and accepted as leading to a richer, more productive, discussions.

Their reports were sufficiently impressive that we have decided to follow the model of YPNF4 and have the young professionals turn the six short articles to be published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We have the go-ahead from the editor of the Bulletin.

In addition to the working sessions, the forum provided the opportunity for personal interaction and connections. The young professionals rated their overall satisfaction of the meeting as 8.6 out of 10 expressed a strong preference to stay engaged between the forums working on collaborative projects.

On the whole, the response to the 6^th YPNF seems to show a growing engagement and sense of ownership by the young professionals on both sides. The forum presented various opportunities for the young professionals to learn about issues, each other, and each other’s countries. Young professionals approached many of the senior experts individually with questions both within and beyond the Forum discussion areas and exchanged contacts for future interaction.

The forum was supported by MEPhI, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the MacArthur Foundation.