By Jason Sibert
Joe Biden is now the fourteenth president over eight decades to attempt to reconcile the risks that derive from nuclear deployments with the demands of deterrence.
He is discovering how difficult this can be. It appears that President Biden is content with changing nuclear weapons policy just a bit around the edges, as stated by writer Joseph Cirincione in his story "Achieving a Safer Nuclear Posture." Press reports indicate that the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review may cancel one or two small weapons programs begun during the Trump administration, retire an older warhead, and ratchet back Trump-era policies that allowed the use of nuclear weapons in a wide variety of conflict situations.
However, and most important, Biden's nuclear posture doesn't differ radically from President Donald Trump's, as the press reports that the administration's 2022 NPR will endorse dozens of different nuclear weapons programs that will cost the taxpayer $634 billion over the next decade, said the Congressional Budget Office. Cirincione gives an example of the attitude at work in the newest NPR: "this includes proceeding with a new land-based strategic missile rushed toward production in the last months of the previous administration without examining less expensive and less dangerous alternatives to its production. This project alone could cost $264 billion over its lifetime." To be fair, every president of the nuclear age has struggled to contain the rush to make more of these weapons.
President Biden is a lifelong proponent of nuclear arms control. However, it seems as if he will bend to the needs of the military-industrial complex. To understand nuclear policy, one must look at the drivers behind it - the need for global primacy, domestic politics, and profits. Perhaps Biden feels it's too political costly to stand for arms control. He has let the Pentagon dictate his strategy rather than challenge a bureaucracy resisting any alteration of current programs and doctrine. But there might be a chance that the administration to change course.
American University Professor Sharon Weiner recently wrote: "the nuclear weapons establishment will limit choice by presenting everything as an interlocking set of military requirements instead of multiple options for meeting deterrence goals." The review process Weiner references begins with the NPR, NPR's consistently fall short of the views of the president they are supposed to represent because they are written by those with the biggest stake in maintaining and expanding current nuclear programs. The Pentagon holds the pen, with token participation of other departments and agencies and with few fiscal constraints. As Cirincione said, "those who oppose the status quo are bullied, isolated, and pushed aside."
Arms control has been successful in the past, especially in the latter years of the Cold War. After engaging in a nuclear arms buildup in the first four years of his administration, President Ronald Reagan engaged in arms control with Soviet Russia. This continued in the administration of President George HW Bush. Arms negotiations, diplomacy, and security assurances persuaded most nations to abandon nuclear-weapons programs, and, in several cases, to give up nuclear weapons, including South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
However, arms control stalled under the administration of President Bill Clinton in the 1990's. Clinton's policy favored some arms control combined with large military budgets. President George W Bush turned this policy on its head. Guided by John Bolton, who served as Bush's undersecretary of state for arms control, he switched U.S. policies from nonproliferation to "counterproliferation." Although some arms control with Russia reduced the overall stockpile.
Carnegie Endowment scholars Toby Dalton and Ariel Levite warn that "stalled progress toward nuclear disarmament by states with nuclear weapons," and the spread of sensitive nuclear materials and technologies, have pushed the global nonproliferation regime to the breaking point. Biden's AUKUS deal, announced simultaneously in Canberra, London, and Washington last September, sets a dangerous precedent, allowing Australia for the first time to enrich uranium to near-bomb levels of purity to fuel nuclear reactors in new attack submarines it will now acquire, thus opening the door to future proliferation. Urgent steps are needed, argue Dalton and Levite, "to restore the nonproliferation regime's role as a bulwark of global stability." Can we turn the tide?
Jason Sibert is the Lead Writer for the Peace Economy Project.
