Nuclear Posture Review
In January 2007, a Wall Street Journal piece entitled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons” by former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former senator Sam Nunn, and former Secretary of Defense William Perry, triggered a renewed national discussion among policy makers, foreign policy experts, and activists about the role of nuclear weapons and steps to reduce the threat they pose.
Throughout its 40-year history, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has advocated for policies to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, prevent their spread, and diminish their role as an instrument of U.S. and international security policy. During the 2008 presidential campaign, UCS published Toward True Security: Ten Steps the Next President Can Take to Transform U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy. We also published ads, conducted polling, and urged our activists and supporters to press the candidates to make nuclear weapons an important policy concern.
President Barack Obama has stated his desire to enact a number of the policy steps that UCS and others recommend. In early April, the president gave a major speech in Prague laying out a bold agenda that includes ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a nuclear arms reduction agreement with Russia, a global ban on the production of the fissile materials used to make nuclear weapons, and a strengthened Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In early July, the president held a summit with Russian president Dmitri Medvedev in which they committed to negotiating and completing by year’s end a new arms reduction agreement that will reduce each country’s deployed nuclear weapons to no more than 1675.
However, these positive steps fall well short of the transformational changes that should be made in U.S. nuclear policy if we are going to achieve real reductions in the nuclear threats that we face. Unfortunately, it appears that many of the administration officials responsible for the current Nuclear Posture Review (NPR)—which will lay out the role and purpose of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security policy—are taking a very cautious approach. UCS and other organizations are actively urging the president and his closest advisors to make sure his call for transformational change is reflected in the NPR.
These steps include:
- A declaration that the United States maintains nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of deterring the use of nuclear weapons by another country against the United States or its allies.
- A policy change that would eliminate the requirement that our nuclear weapons be capable of a rapid launch in response to a nuclear attack, and halt any such plans to develop or exercise such rapid launches. Instead, the United States should develop and exercise plans that allow the President to delay a nuclear response for days, and change U.S. operational and deployment practices accordingly. The United States should make Russia aware of this new policy and urge it to make similar changes in its policy and practices.
- Declare that, at present, the United States requires no more than a total of 1,000 warheads—including strategic and tactical weapons, deployed and in storage.
It is widely expected that the Department of Defense will provide President Obama with options for the basic parameters of the NPR by the end of the summer. The time to influence the process and his thinking is short. The president must match his bold rhetoric with a new nuclear weapons policy.
