Nuclear Issues

Putin and his government seek respect, stability from next U.S. administration, panel says.

As the policy community prepares to assess an agreement between the U.S. and its P5+1 partners and Iran, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker asked me to review the history of analogous agreements for lessons that illuminate the current challenge. In response to his assignment, I reviewed the seven decades of the nuclear era, during which the U.S. negotiated arms-control treaties, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968; strategic arms limitation talks and agreements from SALT to New Start; the North Korean accord of 1994; the agreements that helped eliminate nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus in the early 1990s; and the pact that eliminated the Libyan nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Among many lessons and clues from this instructive history, five stand out

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator was heading back to Tehran on Sunday to consult with his nation’s leadership, as negotiators remained divided over how to limit and monitor Tehran’s nuclear program and even on how to interpret the preliminary agreement they reached two months ago.

Five former members of President Obama’s inner circle of Iran advisers have written an open letter expressing concern that a pending accord to stem Iran’s nuclear program “may fall short of meeting the administration’s own standard of a ‘good’ agreement” and laying out a series of minimum requirements that Iran must agree to in coming days for them to support a final deal.

"...[W]hen the smart scientists decided to add global warming and biological harms to the clock's matrix in 2007, their previous laser focus on nuclear Armageddon lost its impact. Their explanation of why things have gotten one minute worse is a laundry list that includes nuclear proliferation, Iran, Japan's nuclear disaster and its effects on nuclear power investments, carbon emissions, and virulent strains of viruses that can be used for lethal purposes."

Russian leaders have previously promised to improve the survivability of their offensive nuclear missile force as a means of ensuring that they would retain an effective nuclear deterrent, and that will likely happen.  But recent events and announcements indicate that Russia is also investing money in its own increased missile defenses.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many observers feared that terrorists and rogue states would obtain weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or knowledge about how to build them from the vast Soviet nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons complex. The United States launched a major effort to prevent former Soviet WMD experts, suddenly without salaries, from peddling their secrets. In Our Own Worst Enemy, Sharon Weiner chronicles the design, implementation, and evolution of four U.S. programs that were central to this nonproliferation policy and assesses their successes and failures.

Winner of the 2012 Louis Brownlow Book Award