As President Obama will soon discover, erasing the nuclear weapons
legacy of the cold war is like running the Snake River rapids in
Wyoming — the first moments in the tranquil upstream waters offer
little hint of the vortex ahead. Now that Mr. Obama has set a promising
arms reduction agenda with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, he
faces the greater challenge of getting his own government and the
American nuclear weapons establishment to support his audacious plan to
make deep weapons cuts and ultimately eliminate nuclear weapons.
So far, Mr. Obama has effectively coupled an overarching vision of getting to a world without nuclear weapons, outlined in a speech in Prague earlier this year, with concrete first steps like the
one-quarter reduction in operational strategic nuclear weapons promised
in Moscow this week. Given his short time in office, and the looming
December expiration of the treaty with Russia covering strategic
nuclear arms reductions, the new limits are a good, realistic start. It
is especially important to extend the monitoring and verification
provisions of the expiring arms accord.
But the overall Obama
approach involves a balancing act that requires him to move boldly
while reassuring opponents that he is not endangering our security. Put
simply, he has to maintain a potent nuclear arsenal while slashing it.
Mr.
Obama might consider Ronald Reagan’s experience when he tried to set a
similar course. The nuclear weapons crowd practically disowned Reagan
when he proposed abolishing nuclear weapons during his 1986 summit
meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland. After the
meeting, when Reagan asked his generals to explore the ramifications of
possibly sharply cutting warheads and eliminating nuclear-tipped
ballistic missiles, they politely but firmly told their commander in
chief it was a terrible idea.
Mr. Obama’s moment of truth with his generals is coming later this year when the Pentagon completes its periodic Nuclear Posture Review.
This, in the Pentagon’s words, “will establish U.S. nuclear deterrence
policy, strategy and force posture for the next 5 to 10 years.” So it
will be the American nuclear weapons bible for the remainder of Mr.
Obama’s presidency, one term or two.
President Obama must make
sure it reflects his thinking. That will not be automatic, because the
nuclear weapons complex — the array of Pentagon and Energy Department
agencies involved in nuclear operations, including the armed services
and the weapons labs — harbors considerable doubt about his plans. The
same goes for the wider world of defense strategists. There is
resistance in Congress, too.
The view in these quarters is that
the weapons cuts Mr. Obama envisions — deeper than the modest goals set
in Moscow this week — would dangerously undermine the power of
America’s arsenal to deter attacks against the United States and its
allies. Sentiment also favors building a new generation of warheads, a
step Mr. Obama has rejected.
If the White House does not assert
itself, the Nuclear Posture Review could easily spin off in unhelpful
directions. The review that was produced when Bill Clinton was
president in 1994 offered a rehash of cold war policies. The one that
was done when George W. Bush took office in 2001 was more
unconventional, but was quickly overshadowed by the terror attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq.
To serve Mr. Obama’s
interests, the new review should lay the groundwork for pronounced cuts
in weapons and shape America’s nuclear stockpile to fit a world in
which threats are more likely to come from states like North Korea and
Iran than from a heavily armed power like Russia.
After the
review, the next big test for Mr. Obama will likely be Senate
consideration of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He has pledged to
resubmit this 1996 United Nations treaty, which was flatly rejected by
the Senate in 1999.
To get the two-thirds majority needed for
its approval, Mr. Obama will need to hold his fellow Democrats in line
— far from a sure thing — and also pick up some Republican support. Two
influential Republican senators — John McCain and Richard Lugar — are
pivotal. Both voted against the treaty in 1999.
Opponents wrongly
argue that the treaty is unverifiable. That might have been the case a
decade ago, but technological advances make monitoring of even small
underground nuclear tests possible today. Critics also say a permanent
ban on testing — the United States has honored a moratorium since 1992
— would eventually cripple the nation’s ability to maintain reliable
warheads. So far, most weapons experts would say, that has not proven
to be true and should not be for many years.
Few presidential
moments are more glittering than the announcement of arms reduction
accords in the Kremlin’s gilded halls. For Mr. Obama, that was the easy
part.
