Defense Technology

“Piracy and Private Security,” The Economist, April 14, 2012. Private security teams patrol the decks of around 40% of large vessels in the “high-risk area” that stretches from the Persian Gulf to the Seychelles in the south and the Maldives in the east. When pirates attack, these armed guards respond with flares or warning shots. This usually scares off assailants (or sends them in search of easier prey). If it fails, they fire at an attacking boat’s engine, before finally turning their sights on the pirates. No ship carrying armed guards has so far been hijacked. (3PA: For cool photos of how to “pirate-proof” the shipping industry, see here.  Much cheaper than using the U.S. Navy.) Bryan Bender, “World More Dangerous, Top General Says,” Boston Globe, April 13, 2012. Army General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told students at a forum on the Cambridge campus that even though the world appears to enjoy greater stability and interdependence, threats looming beneath the surface—from cyber warfare to the proliferation of long-range missiles—actually place American security at greater risk. “The truth is, I believe I am chairman at a time that seems less dangerous but is actually more dangerous,” Dempsey said, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. “That’s the essence of what I like to call the security paradox.” (3PA: For why I think General Dempsey’s assessment is flawed, read my recent blog post.) Guidelines for Revised Terms of Engagement with USA/NATO/ISAF and General Foreign Policy, April 12, 2012. The U.S. footprint in Pakistan must be reviewed. This means (i) an immediate cessation of drone attacks inside the territorial borders of Pakistan, (ii) the cessation of infiltration into Pakistani territory on any pretext, including hot pursuit; (iii) Pakistani territory including its air space shall not be used for transportation of arms and ammunition to Afghanistan. Memorandum of Understanding between Afghanistan and the United States on Afghanization of Special Operations on Afghan Soil, April 8, 2012. Recalling the recommendations of the November 2011 Traditional Loya Jirga, with particular focus on the recommendation that “night operations conducted by the American forces must be Afghanized as soon as possible. The Participants affirm their intent to ensure that special operations are conducted within the framework of the Constitution of Afghanistan, including in particular articles 4, 5, 7, 38 and 57 of the Constitution. To that end, the Participants affirm their intent as follows: Special operations that are expected to result in detention or the search of a residential house or private compound are to be authorized in accordance with Afghan laws; Residential houses are to be searched only if necessary, and as part of the conduct of special operations, only Afghan Forces should search residential houses and private compounds; The KAQ/QKA can enter private compounds, residential houses, and other areas for the purposes of search and arrest, in accordance with Afghan laws, with support from U.S. forces only as required or requested. (3PA: Despite this specific language, according to the Pentagon spokesperson, Kabul will not have a veto power over U.S. special operations missions: “It’s not about the U.S. ceding responsibilities to the Afghans.”) Tara McKelvey, “Interview with Harold Koh, Obama’s Defender of Drone Strikes,” Daily Beast, April 8, 2012. Koh brushes off my question about the New York Times interview in which he criticized targeted killings and claims his views on the subject have been consistent. “I have never changed my mind,” he says. “Not from before I was in the government—or after.” (3PA: In an interview with the New York Times in 2002, Koh stated: “’’The inevitable complication of a politically declared but legally undeclared war is the blurring of the distinction between enemy combatants and other nonstate actors… The question is, what factual showing will demonstrate that they had warlike intentions against us and who sees that evidence before any action is taken?’’ Under the Obama administration’s definition of “due process” for targeted killings, we do not have answers to either of the questions raised by Koh ten years ago.) Patrick B. Johnston, “Does Decapitation Work? Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Targeting in Counterinsurgency Campaigns,” International Security, Spring 2012. My results challenge previous claims that removing militant leaders is ineffective or counterproductive. On the contrary, they suggest that leadership decapitation (1) increases the chances of war termination; (2) increases the probability of government victory; (3) reduces the intensity of militant violence; and (4) reduces the frequency of insurgent attacks. It is important that the findings be interpreted with care and in light of their limitations. Although the estimated impact of decapitation is substantial, decapitation is not a silver bullet. A better interpretation is that, although decapitation is likely to help states’ overall efforts against militant organizations, other factors will also matter greatly in most cases. In other words, decapitation is more likely to help states achieve their objectives as an operational component within an integrated campaign strategy than as a stand-alone strategy against insurgent and terrorist organizations. (3PA: Johnston found that out of 118 attempts, leadership decapitation worked 39 percent of the time, which challenges previous findings by Jenna Jordan.) Tom Cheney, “He’s Been So Much More Attentive Since He Found Out I Have the Bomb,” New Yorker, March 26, 2012. General Martin Dempsey, Town Hall Meeting at Pensacola Naval Air Station, February 23, 2012. QUESTION: The question goes back to the (inaudible) question asked by Ensign Adams (ph) in regards to the ethical considerations of using drones in additional to traditional (inaudible) combat. How do you balance the issue of electronic vehicle that there is no (inaudible) in the cockpit intervening somewhere with traditional questions of sovereignty and human rights? DEMPSEY: Yeah, I got asked that question by Fareed Zakaria actually. He said—he phrased it, “Are you concerned about the ethics of unmanned armed aircraft?” And what I told him was that any time we employ that capability we do so only after a very significant series of discussions about the legality, authorized use of military force. And secondly, we do confront the ethical basis for our actions. That is to say, is there a clear threat to the homeland. I mean, I don’t need to walk you through it. But I will tell you this is not, as sometimes the media would portray it, it’s not a bunch of kind of Nintendo generation kids sitting someplace, you know, with a little joystick making autonomous or semiautonomous decisions. These decisions are taken at the highest levels. And I am very confident as I stand here today that we have both the legal basis and the ethical basis on which to make those decisions. Now, that said, whoever asked me the question about, you know, as we watch nonbiological intelligence and artificial intelligence, cyber activities, as we watch those technologies increase, I think we have to be alert for not only legalities but ethics. And I can promise you we are—we do that. But for standing here right now I can tell you I’m confident we’re—we have a process in place that allows us to look ourselves in the mirror and say we’ve got both legal basis and ethical basis. But we—there’s constant reflection and scrutiny. Stephen I. Schwartz, “Unaccountable: Exploring the Lack of Budgetary Transparency for U.S. Nuclear Security Spending,” Nuclear Threat Initiative, January 5, 2012. There are many reasons why the U.S. nuclear weapons program has consumed at least $8.7 trillion (in adjusted FY 2010 dollars) since its inception, and why it grew as large as it did as quickly as it did, from a handful of hand-built weapons in 1945 to 31,255 advanced warheads and bombs 22 years later (or, to put it another way, from a total explosive yield of 40 kilotons in 1945 to a peak of nearly 20,500 megatons in 1960, equivalent to 1.7 million Hiroshima-sized bombs). These include: perceptions of the Soviet and Chinese threat, the indeterminate nature of deterrence, redundant targeting, technological advances and obsolescence, interservice and inter-laboratory rivalry, nuclear weapons as “free goods” for the military services (because the cost of warheads and bombs was borne by the AEC, not the military), pork barrel politics, corporate lobbying, secrecy, political considerations, and arbitrary decision making, to name a few. The profound lack of financial accountability and transparency from the very beginning was a critical factor. (3PA: According to a recent study, Assuring Destruction Forever, “Combined, the nuclear weapon possessors have spent approximately one hundred billion USD on their nuclear programmes. At this rate, they will collectively spend at least one trillion USD on nuclear weapons over the next decade.”)

On February 15, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee: “I can’t impress upon you that in my personal military judgment, formed over thirty-eight years, we are living in the most dangerous time in my lifetime, right now.” Two weeks later, during a House Budget Committee hearing, when asked to expand upon his earlier statement, he replied: “There are a wide variety of nonstate actors, super-empowered individuals, terrorist groups, who have acquired capabilities that heretofore were the monopoly of nation states. And so when I said that it’s the most dangerous period in my military career, thirty-eight years, I really meant it. I wake up every morning waiting for that cyber attack or waiting for that terrorist attack or waiting for that nuclear proliferation, waiting for that proliferation of technologies that makes it an increasingly competitive security environment around the globe.” Under U.S. law, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the “principal military adviser to the President, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense” on a range of issues, including strategic planning, contingency planning and preparedness, budgets, and training. I respect General Dempsey’s responsibility to prepare the armed forces to respond to a number of scenarios and contingencies. Although the chairman cannot order troops into battle, his authority stems from the bully pulpit of the nation’s most senior military official. However, I respectfully disagree with the assessment that America is in a more dangerous position today than at any other point since 1974, when General Dempsey graduated from West Point. Take nuclear weapons. As I pointed out previously, for the past sixty-two years, the U.S. intelligence community has continuously assessed the potential for nuclear terrorist attacks on the United States. Despite the expressed interest of three terrorists groups in acquiring a bomb, there is no known instance of a nonstate actor or “super-empowered” individual possessing a nuclear weapon, or the requisite fissile material to build one. Meanwhile, nine states—the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea—have the bomb. Moreover, the threat of nuclear terrorism is markedly reduced from the early 1990s, when more than thirty thousand nuclear weapons and tons of fissile material were poorly secured at over two hundred facilities throughout the former Soviet Union. After twenty years of U.S.-funded cooperative threat reduction programs that removed, consolidated, and secured nuclear material, Harvard University professor and nuclear security expert Matthew Bunn wrote in April 2010: “Overall, the risk of nuclear theft in Russia has been reduced to a fraction of what it was a decade ago.” The habitual tendency to overinflate threats facing the United States was the focus of an essay I co-wrote with Michael A. Cohen in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, “Clear and Present Safety: The United States Is More Secure than Washington Thinks.” In stark contrast to the prevailing rhetoric from Washington, we argued that the world today is one with fewer violent conflicts, increased political freedom, and greater economic opportunity than at virtually any other point in human history. On average, people enjoy longer life expectancy. The United States faces no plausible existential threats and no near-term competition for the role of global hegemon. The U.S. military is indisputably the most powerful in the world, and the U.S. economy remains the largest as well as among the most vibrant and dynamic. A tremendous number of blog posts and online observations have been written about our piece—see below for a number of such responses. In addition, we’ve heard from friends and colleagues in academia, media, think tanks, and the Obama administration, and the responses have been overwhelmingly positive. Unfortunately, despite our hopes of generating a substantive debate, no serious blog post or essay has yet been written that challenges our main thesis. Ahead of what is sure to be a highly contested election season, U.S. government officials, policymakers, and pundits owe the American people an honest and realistic assessment of the threats facing the country, which can only be realized through a genuine debate that challenges what we believe to be a flawed conventional worldview. It is up to the American citizens and the media to question and contest such over-hyped threats. Our essay will be behind a paywall as of Monday, April 16, so please enjoy while it is freely available. MENTIONS “Charlie Oscar Hotel Echo November!” Line of Departure, April 12, 2012 (Q+A with Michael Cohen). “Clear and Present Safety,” Line of Departure, April 11, 2012 (Q+A with Michael Cohen). Robert Farley and Michael Cohen, "Foreign Entanglements,” Blogging Heads, April 11, 2012. “State of Security: Rethinking Safety and Danger in the 21st Century,” Digital Journal, April 10, 2012. Dan Murphy, “Fear Not! Reality isn’t as Scary as Some Would Like Us to Believe," Christian Science Monitor, April 8, 2012. Tim Ferguson, “Count the Ways Our World’s Actually Improving,” Forbes, March 18, 2012. Bernd Debusmann, “Relax, America! Not Everything Is as Dire as You Think,” Reuters, March 9, 2012. Joshua Holland, “American Has Never Been Safer—So Why Are Politicians and the Media Trying to Terrify Us?” AlterNet, March 4, 2012. Mano Singham, "Land of the Fearful,” Free Thought, March 2, 2012. Mary Kaszynski, "Consequences of the Military Option," Ploughshares Fund, March 2, 2012. Stephen Benedict Dyson and Jeremy Pressman, "Misperceptions, Foreign Policy, and Iran," The Monkey Cage, March 1, 2012. “Clear and Present Climate Blindness,” Empty Wheel, March 1, 2012. David Judson, "When Nostalgia Rivals Threat Exaggeration," Hurriyet Daily News, March 1, 2012. Russ Wellen, “Hyping Threats Is a Smokescreen that Obscures the Real Threats,” Focal Points, February 28, 2012. Paul Pillar, "Why We Exaggerate Dangers," The National Interest, February 27, 2012. James Fallows, “Chronicles of a Paranoid Nation: The Deciduous-Infrastructure Factor,” The Atlantic, February 27, 2012. Ed Kilgore, "A Nation (Relatively) Secure," Political Animal, February 24, 2012. Jerry Brito, "The United States is More Secure Than Washington Wants You to Think," Jerry Brito, February 24, 2012. "The Republican Party’s Favorite Theme: The Fear Card," Under the Mountain Bunker, February 24, 2012. Andrew Sullivan, "News of the Obvious: Americans Are Extremely Safe," Letters from a Farmer in Ohio, February 24, 2012. David Dayen, "Breaking: U.S. Not in Mortal Danger," Fire Dog Lake, February 24, 2012. Michael Cohen, "What’s the Matter with Martin Dempsey?” Blog of the Century, February 24, 2012. Stephen M. Walt, "America is Really, Really Secure," Foreign Policy, February 23, 2012. Andrew Sullivan, "Chill Out, America," The Daily Beast, February 23, 2012. "Threat Inflation," Dart-Throwing Chimp, February 23, 2012. Steve Hynd, "A 99 Percent Doctrine," The Agonist, February 23, 2012. John Glaser, "Fear, Threat Inflation, and Public Choice," Antiwar, February 23, 2012. "Fear and Present Danger," The Edge of the American West, February 22, 2012. Alan Greenblatt, "As Wars Wind Down, What Are U.S. Security Needs?" National Public Radio, February 15, 2012.

Peter Cynkar, “Opinion Briefing: Mexico’s Drug War,” Gallup, April 4, 2012. Mexicans personally feel less safe in their own neighborhoods in 2011 than they did at the onset of the drug war. While perceptions about safety have fluctuated, the 42% who said they feel safe walking alone at night in 2011 is down 15 percentage points from 57% in 2007. Mexicans’ trust in their local police has dropped substantially since the drug war began, to 35% in 2011 from 50% in 2007. This loss of faith may reflect the country’s ongoing security issues, as well as the removal of thousands of corrupt cops during Calderon’s crackdown. Mexico’s military replaced many of these police officers. Majorities of Mexicans have consistently expressed confidence in the country’s military in the same period, although confidence has edged lower over the years. CBC Television Interview with Secretary Panetta, April 2, 2012. The fact is we are on the right track and the fact is we’ve got to stay committed there because in the end, you know, the American people, the Canadian people, the British people, people of the world, I think, understand that the lives we’ve lost there—and we’ve spilled a lot of blood there—that those lives cannot be lost in vain, that the whole goal here was to achieve an Afghanistan that could secure and govern itself, and that’s what we’ve got to stay focused on and that’s the mission we’ve got to accomplish. (3PA: As of today, 1,919 U.S. soldiers have died in Operation Enduring Freedom.) Ken Dilanian and David S. Cloud, “In Yemen, Lines Blur as U.S. Steps Up Airstrikes,” Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2012. As the pace quickens and the targets expand, however, the distinction may be blurring between operations targeting militants who want to attack Americans and those aimed at fighters seeking to overthrow the Yemeni government. U.S. officials insist that they will not be drawn into a civil war and that they do not intend to put ground troops in Yemen other than trainers and small special operations units. "We don’t want to become involved in the country’s internal battles," an Obama administration official said. "We don’t want to turn every antigovernment fighter against the United States." Elizabeth Dickinson, “Look Who’s Saving the World: BRICS Pump Up Foreign Aid,” March 26, 2012. Between 2005 and 2010, Brazil and India grew their foreign aid spending by more than 20 percent. China and South Africa both upped their assistance by about 10 percent. Russia, which had increased its own spending earlier in the decade, now devotes about $500 million annually to development spending overseas. Over the same period, the foreign aid budget of the United States grew just 1.6 percent. UN Security Council, Final Report of the Panel of Experts Concerning Libya, March 20, 2012. NATO provided reports of inspection activities to the sanctions Committee on a regular basis. As at 31 October 2011, NATO had hailed 3,100 ships, boarded 300 and denied 11 vessels access to Libyan ports; no breach of the arms embargo was reported by NATO, however. (3PA: To see NATO actively breach the arms embargo, watch this video, which was published by NATO.) Donna L. Hoyert, “75 Years of Mortality in the United States, 1935-2010,” Center for Disease Control, March 2012. Although single year improvements in mortality were often small, the age-adjusted risk of dying dropped 60 percent from 1935 to 2010. Heart disease, cancer, and stroke were among the five leading causes every year between 1935 and 2010. Director of National Intelligence, “Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions,” January 1-December 31, 2011. During the reporting period, Iran continued to expand its nuclear infrastructure and continued uranium enrichment and activities related to its heavy water research reactor, despite multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions since late 2006 and most recently in June 2010 calling for suspension of these activities. Although Iran has made progress in expanding its nuclear infrastructure during 2011, some obstacles slowed progress during this period. North Korea nuclear test activity in 2006 and 2009 strengthens our assessment that the North has produced nuclear weapons. (3PA: It is remarkable that, after two tests in 2006 and 2009, the intelligence community still cannot definitively state that North Korea has nuclear weapons.)

This is a guest post by CFR senior fellow Frank Klotz. The National Research Council (NRC) released its long-awaited update on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) last Friday. Given the renown of the scientists and former officials who authored the report, it is likely to have an important impact on the longstanding debate over whether the United States should ratify the CTBT. The report itself concludes that over the past decade the United States has significantly improved the technical capabilities needed both to maintain a reliable nuclear weapon stockpile without nuclear explosion testing and to detect clandestine testing by others. By thus addressing two of the major concerns raised when the treaty was rejected by the Senate in 1999, the report clearly strengthens the position of those who favor ratification now. The CTBT prohibits states from carrying out “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion.” It also lays out in great detail the means for monitoring compliance, including the establishment of a worldwide network of more than 300 detection stations and provisions for on-site inspection. Interestingly, the treaty does not specifically define “nuclear explosion.” The United States and the other major nuclear powers have consistently held that the CTBT is a “zero yield” treaty. In other words, it bans weapon tests that produce a self-sustaining, fission chain reaction; but, it does not preclude weapon experiments that do not. Such experiments—and the subsequent analysis performed on increasingly powerful computers—have played a critical role in assessing the health of the nuclear weapons stockpile since the United States unilaterally stopped testing in 1992. For the CTBT to actually enter into force, it must be ratified by all forty-four nations that possessed nuclear power or research reactors and participated in the treaty negotiations from 1994 to 1996. Of these, only eight have not yet done so:  China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and the United States. Ironically, the United States played a leading role in negotiating the treaty, and President Clinton was the first world leader to sign it in 1996. However, when the Senate formally considered ratification three years later, treaty proponents failed to muster the necessary two-thirds vote. It has languished in political limbo ever since. The Obama administration signaled early on that it intended to renew efforts to ratify the treaty as part of a broader agenda to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons and to prevent nuclear terrorism. In the wake of the successful, but politically contentious approval of the U.S.-Russian New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), senior officials openly acknowledged that a renewed Senate debate over CTBT would likely be “spirited.” Accordingly, they have avoided setting a time table for taking up the treaty and concentrated instead on laying the groundwork for a push when the time seems right. With this objective in mind, the Obama administration has publicly emphasized the merits of the treaty, as well as the steps taken to mitigate previously-expressed concerns about monitoring compliance and ensuring the continued reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapon stockpile without explosive testing. While the NRC report avoids taking a policy position on treaty ratification, it notes that these steps have been even more effective than originally anticipated. It concludes in fact that “the United States is now in a better position than at any time in the past to maintain a safe and effective nuclear weapon stockpile without testing and to monitor clandestine nuclear testing abroad.” This is very encouraging news for treaty supporters. The NRC report is, however, unlikely to persuade the more ardent opponents of the treaty. They argue that U.S. ratification will do little to eventually bring the treaty into force since some of the remaining hold-outs—such as Iran or North Korea—will probably not follow suit. They also contend that ratification will hardly dissuade nations who feel it is in their best interest to develop nuclear weapons or to improve the ones they already have. Finally, they assert that the United States may ultimately need to resume testing to ensure the reliability of existing nuclear weapons, or eventually to replace them in order to satisfy new strategic requirements. In reality, the U.S. has refrained from nuclear explosive testing for nearly twenty years. Successive administrations of both parties have determined a unilateral testing moratorium to be U.S. policy. Absent a radical change in the international environment, the political barriers to a resumption of testing would be practically insurmountable. While the United States probably garners some credit for exercising this self-imposed restraint, it is likely to be in a far better position to rally international pressure against would-be proliferators and to constrain regional arms races if it joined the 157 nations who have already ratified the CTBT. Most treaties have a “supreme national interest clause” that allow nations to opt out if fundamental conditions change. The CTBT is no exception. So, if the direst predictions of its opponents did in fact come true, there are provisions within the treaty itself for withdrawal. In the meantime, it only makes sense to seek maximum diplomatic leverage for something the United States is already doing anyway by ratifying the treaty. Frank Klotz is a Senior Fellow for Strategic Studies and Arms Control at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the former commander of Air Force Global Strike Command. 

An edited version of this post originally appeared on CFR.org as a First Take. On his first foreign trip as a U.S. senator in 2005, Barack Obama accompanied Senator Richard Lugar on a week-long tour of WMD facilities in the former Soviet Union. Afterward, Senator Obama often spoke about the trip, in particular the vast amount of poorly secured lethal materials that he witnessed at the sites. As a presidential candidate, Obama declared, “The single most serious threat to American national security is nuclear terrorism.” While President George W. Bush deserves credit for highlighting the seriousness of nuclear terrorism and committing the resources to work with Russia to secure nearly all of its potentially loose nukes, nuclear security has been a top-tier priority for Obama.  As early as July 2008, he vowed to “lead a global effort to secure all loose nuclear materials around the world during my first term as president.” Building on the work of the Bush administration, the potential threat of nuclear terrorism has been markedly reduced due to the high-level focus produced by the initial Nuclear Security Summit in April 2010 and reinforced by the current summit in Seoul, South Korea. The practical effect of both summits is the development of a clearly articulated workplan that prioritizes strategic objectives and specifies national commitments for the forty-seven participating countries. These pledges are voluntary and nonbinding, and there are no enforcement measures to compel compliance. Yet, approximately 80 percent of national commitments from the first Nuclear Security Summit have been fulfilled. This was not due to diplomatic pressure or economic sanctions, but was instead driven by national leaders’ fear of embarrassment that they could not deliver on their promises, combined with U.S. technical and financial assistance. For example, Ukraine (as a Soviet republic) once maintained a stockpile of five thousand nuclear weapons; last week, it shipped its remaining weapons-grade uranium to Russia, where it will be blended down to low-enriched uranium to fuel civilian research reactors. Despite the sustained progress of the Nuclear Security Summits, President Obama will not meet his four-year deadline. In December, Obama administration officials backtracked, claiming that the deadline was more of a “forcing function” that would accelerate U.S. nuclear nonproliferation programs and mobilize international support for nuclear material security.  Moreover, there is still no comprehensive and coordinated U.S. government plan to secure all nuclear materials. National Security Council officials recently admitted to GAO investigators that “developing a single, integrated cross-agency plan that incorporates all these elements could take years.” For most, the word “nuclear” immediately brings to mind Iran or North Korea. Yet, Iran does not have enough fissile material to fuel a nuclear weapon; together, Iran and North Korea have less than a fraction of 1 percent of worldwide nuclear material. Today, thirty-two countries possess 1 kilogram or more of weapons-usable nuclear material. Preventing nuclear terrorism requires, in large part, locking down all of that material—at least in accordance with the latest IAEA guidelines. Raising awareness among the forty-seven national leaders attending the Nuclear Security Summit increases the likelihood of achieving the ultimate goal of nuclear material security. However, lasting and effective nuclear security is not a one-time pledge, but rather an ongoing process that will only end with the universal elimination of all weapons-usable material. Since that will not occur anytime soon, world leaders will need sustain the progress of the past two years with the results to be reported at the next Nuclear Security Summit in 2014.

Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, "The Situation in Syria," March 7, 2012. SENATOR WEBB: I want to ask you about one thing that you said, because I think we all need to think about it. You said: Any government -- I think this is a direct quote; I’m an old journalist here, I can write fast: "Any government that indiscriminately kills its own people loses its legitimacy." Would you say that is a statement of the policy of the United States? SECRETARY PANETTA: I would. WEBB: Would you believe that with the circumstances in Tiananmen Square in 1989 when Chinese government turned its own soldiers loose and its own tanks loose on its own people and killed more than 1,000 people? Would you say that fits into this statement? PANETTA: Let me put this on a personal view. My personal view would be that that was the case there. Editorial Page, “Mr. Holder’s Epiphany,” Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2012. Most important, he defended the targeted killing of al Qaeda leaders, including U.S. citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki, killed in Yemen last September: "Based on generations-old legal principles and Supreme Court decisions handed down during World War II, as well as during this current conflict, it’s clear that United States citizenship alone does not make such individuals immune from being targeted." He added that while citizens have a right to due process, that doesn’t mean judges have to review battlefield decisions. "Where national security operations are at stake, due process takes into account the realities of combat," he said. "The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process." This is a welcome endorsement of executive power in war-fighting. Matthew Duss, “Iran’s Elections and the Nuclear Standoff,” Center for American Progress, March 6, 2012. Facing considerable internal tensions and growing popular discontent resulting from increasing international economic and financial sanctions because of Iran’s continued nuclear program, Iran’s leaders were clearly desperate to present the elections as an affirmation of the regime’s flagging legitimacy, and a rebuttal to international criticism and pressure over its controversial nuclear program. Iranian state television quoted Khamenei as declaring a religious obligation to vote, saying that a high voter turnout would “safeguard” Iran’s reputation. Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi similarly stated that a large turnout would “deal a heavy blow to the mouth” of Iran’s foes. Attorney General Eric J. Holder, Address at Northwestern University, March 5, 2012. An individual’s interest in making sure that the government does not target him erroneously could not be more significant. (3PA: For earlier, comparable attempts by the Obama administration to explain and justify its policy of targeted killings, see the speeches given by Jeh Johnson, Harold Koh, and John Brennan. For my thoughts on the major shortcomings of Holder’s speech, read my blog post.) Jim Michaels, “Use of IEDs by Syrian opposition rises sharply,” USA Today, March 5, 2012. Unclassified numbers released by the agency show that IED usage in Syria has been steadily climbing since the revolt started last year, reaching about 38 in December. These unclassified numbers are based on media and other "open sources." The presence of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and the heightened level of fighting suggests that Syria has moved beyond a citizen revolt, analysts say. "We have reached a point where it is an insurgency," said Joe Holliday, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. Kimberly Dozier, “CIA Could Control Forces in Afghanistan After 2014,” Army Times, March 3, 2012. If the plan were adopted, the U.S. and Afghanistan could say there are no more U.S. troops on the ground in the war-torn country because once the SEALs, Rangers and other elite units are assigned to CIA control, even temporarily, they become spies. But a CIA-run war would mean that the U.S. public would not be informed about funding or operations, as they are in a traditional war. Oversight would fall to the White House, top intelligence officials, and a few congressional committees. Embedding journalists would be out of the question. Chaitra M. Hardison, Michael G. Mattock, and Maria Lytell, “Incentive Pay for Remotely Piloted Aircraft Career Fields,” RAND Corporation, March 2012. U.S. Department of State, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report: 2012, March 2012. Senator Barack Obama, Town Hall Speech in Pendleton, Oregon, May 18, 2008. You know, Iran, they spend one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a chance. And we should use that position of strength that we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen. From the archive: Micah Zenko, “Anwar al-Awlaki: What We Learned From His Killing,” October 3, 2011.

During an interview with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2011, Piers Morgan posed a serious question: MORGAN: Do you have nuclear weapons? NETANYAHU: Well, we have a longstanding policy that we won’t be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, and that hasn’t changed. MORGAN: So you don’t have any? NETANYAHU: That’s our policy. Not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Despite the word games, it is well known that Israel has been a nuclear weapons power for forty-five years. As several Israeli historians and journalists have revealed, Israel crossed the nuclear threshold on the eve of the Six Day War in May 1967. Summarized by Patrick Tyler in his book, A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East—from the Cold War to the War on Terror: “[Prime Minister Levi] Eshkol, according to a number of Israeli sources, secretly ordered the Dimona [nuclear reactor] scientists to assemble two crude nuclear devices. He placed them under the command of Brigadier General Yitzhak Yaakov, the chief of research and development in Israel’s Defense Ministry. One official said the operation was referred to as Spider because the nuclear devices were inelegant contraptions with appendages sticking out. The crude atomic bombs were readied for deployment on trucks that could race to the Egyptian border for detonation in the event Arab forces overwhelmed Israeli defenses.” It took years, however, for the United States to verify that Israel had developed a nuclear weapon. This uncertainty persisted despite numerous U.S. inspections of the Dimona reactor—carefully stage-managed by the Israeli government to deceive the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—and assurances that Israel would not “introduce” nuclear weapons into the region. On May 1, 1967, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach wrote to President Johnson under the heading, “The Arab-Israeli Arms Race and Status of U.S. Arms Control Efforts:" “Nuclear Weapons. Concerned that over the long run the Arabs will achieve superiority in conventional forces, Israel is carefully preserving its option to acquire sophisticated weapons, including, we believe, nuclear weapons. We have no evidence that Israel is actually making a bomb, but we believe Israel intends to keep itself in a position to do so at reasonably short notice should the need arise. The Israeli reactor at Dimona is capable of producing enough plutonium to make one or two bombs a year, but thus far our periodic inspections of this facility (most recently on April 22, 1967) have uncovered no evidence of weapons activity.” If you replaced the words “Israel” with “Iran,” it would largely echo the recent findings of the U.S. intelligence community on the suspected Iranian nuclear weapons program. In a twist of historical irony, Iran’s contemporary playbook mirrors the one used by Israel to acquire a nuclear weapon in the 1950s and 1960s. As Tehran worries about an Israeli attack on its nuclear program today, Israeli officials in the 1960s were also deeply paranoid that Egypt would initiate a preventive attack on the Dimona reactor. In 1965, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Yitzhak Rabin, warned, “If Egypt bombs Dimona, and we want to wage a war, we could be issued an ultimatum from the entire world.” While Israel assembled its first nuclear weapon in May 1967, Egypt conducted high-altitude reconnaissance flights of Dimona. After sifting through the evidence, historian Avner Cohen concluded, “Egypt may have been very close to launching an aerial attack on Dimona on May 26 or May 27, but it was called off by [Egyptian Prime Minister Gamal Abdel] Nasser on a few hours’ notice.” In 1974, the CIA revealed in a special national intelligence estimate (SNIE), “we believe that Israel already has produced nuclear weapons,” but, “we do not expect the Israelis to provide confirmation of widespread suspicions of their capability, either by nuclear testing or by threats of use.” [That same SNIE assessed: “[Iran] is a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and all its reactors and other facilities will be safeguarded. Although withdrawal from the NPT or abrogation of safeguards is possible, no Iranian leader is going to take that step while a nuclear energy program is in the middle of implementation.” Of course, we now know this was wrong, because by April 1984 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had already decided to restart the Iranian nuclear program to defend the Islamic Revolution from external threats.] Today, Israel’s nuclear arsenal is estimated to include up to two hundred nuclear warheads that can be delivered by F-16 fighter-bombers, Jericho missiles, and Diesel-powered Dolphin-class submarines supplied by Germany. The existence of this vast destructive power—with secure second-strike capability—has never been acknowledged by Israeli officials, and is rarely vocalized by U.S. policymakers. In his recent interview with The Atlantic last Thursday, echoed before the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual conference, President Obama warned that if Iran had a bomb, “It is almost certain that others in the region would feel compelled to get their own nuclear weapon, triggering an arms race in one of the world’s most volatile regions.” Concerns regarding a cascade of proliferation instigated by an Iranian nuclear weapon are as likely today as when Israel built the bomb forty-five years ago. It is no coincidence that nuclear weapons were introduced to the region primarily by adversaries of Iran: the United States via its nuclear-weapons capable submarines; the Soviet Union’s vast arsenal that included deployments in countries bordering Iran; Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities that emerged in the mid-1980s; and the 60-70 B-61 bombs that still remain in Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. Excluded from this list are Iraq’s dual-track covert uranium enrichment efforts in the 1980s, which were eliminated by the Gulf War in 1991. Israel gains nothing by sacrificing its moral and political authority to maintain the farce of "nuclear opacity" that no one believes. As I’ve written elsewhere, Israel should come out of the nuclear closet by following three concrete steps:                   Provide transparency about the size, command and control, nuclear security features and nonproliferation objectives of its nuclear arsenal as other non-NPT nuclear powers do. Sign a safeguards agreement with the IAEA covering all existing or future civilian nuclear facilities Participate in legitimate international forums where the issue of a WMD-free Middle East is debated.  

Today, the State Department surprised North Korea watchers with the following announcement: “The DPRK has agreed to implement a moratorium on long-range missile launches, nuclear tests and nuclear activities at Yongbyon, including uranium enrichment activities. The DPRK has also agreed to the return of IAEA inspectors to verify and monitor the moratorium on uranium enrichment activities at Yongbyon and confirm the disablement of the 5-MW reactor and associated facilities.” Despite U.S. policy that food aid should only be based on three criteria—need, severity of need compared to other countries, and satisfactory monitoring systems—the same press release also announced a “targeted U.S. program consisting of an initial 240,000 metric tons of nutritional assistance.” Anyone with a long-term memory (or access to Google) should be deeply skeptical of this latest agreement with North Korea. The North Korean government has made a number of similar promises regarding its nuclear and ballistic missile programs in the past, including the 1992 Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, 1994 Agreed Framework, 2002 agreement with Japan (in which Pyongyang promised not to test long-range missiles), and 2006 Six-Party Talks agreement. None of these were fulfilled. This afternoon, in a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Representative Howard Berman echoed this widely-held skepticism: “You know, I know, the chair knows, we all know, that we’ve been down this road several times. Hopefully, this time North Korea will keep its promises.” A few thoughts: First, this is a very limited agreement that does not begin to cover all of North Korea’s suspected nuclear weapons activities. The 5-MW reactor and reprocessing facility at Yongbyon were basically dismantled under the observation of U.S. experts from October 2007 until April 2009, when they were expelled by the North Korean government. In November 2010, the Institute for Science and International Security released satellite photographs of new construction at Yongbyon, which might have involved a new experimental light-water reactor. While Yongbyon should be a high-priority intelligence collection and analysis target for the United States, the presence of IAEA or American inspectors on the ground could be decisive in verifying the extent of nuclear activity at the facility. However, the more important site to observe and monitor is the gas centrifuge facility, also at Yongbyon, which was shown to an unofficial U.S. delegation in November 2010. It is estimated to be capable of producing enough highly-enriched uranium for one nuclear weapon per year. In addition, the United States believes there are other clandestine enrichment facilities. In December 2010, Glyn Davies, formerly the permanent representative to the IAEA and now the special envoy for North Korea, warned, “There is a clear likelihood that DPRK has built other uranium enrichment-related facilities in its territory.” Second, according to Secretary Clinton, today’s announcement was only brokered between the United States and North Korea. Since the first Six-Party Talks (involving North Korea, South Korea, United States, China, Russia, and Japan) in August 2003, both the Bush and Obama administrations have emphasized the need for a regional approach to a comprehensive agreement. Such a regional approach would include the minimum requirements of U.S. allies in South Korea and Japan (who want an end to military provocations and the return of kidnapped Japanese remains), as well as Russia and China (who want to avoid or mitigate the sudden collapse of North Korea). Presumably, follow-up discussions with Pyongyang will be broadened to include the other four members of the Six-Party talks. Third, the agreement will restart the provision of much-needed U.S. food aid to vulnerable populations. According to the New York Times, the aid will be “limited to high-protein biscuits, infant formula and other nutritional supplements, rather than rice and grains,” which can be more easily diverted by the regime.  The latest joint UN Food and Agricultural Organization-World Food Program report, Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, noted: “The planned commercial imports and recommended food assistance do not fill the entire uncovered food deficit, leaving an additional gap of 294,000 tons.” It is probably not a coincidence that the promised American food dispersal matches the gap (when converted from metric tons). Finally, it’s a relatively cheap deal. Since the 1994 agreement, the United States has provided North Korea with over $1.6B in assistance (adjusted for inflation)—roughly 60 percent for food aid and 40 percent for energy assistance. This breaks down to: $916 million under Clinton, $717 million under Bush, and $10 million under Obama. Extrapolating from earlier estimates of U.S. food aid to North Korea, the 240,000 metric tons announced today will cost somewhere between $150 to $200 million. Not surprisingly, a North Korean statement reads differently than the American version, noting: “[North Korea] agreed to a moratorium on nuclear tests, long-range missile launches, and uranium enrichment activity at Yongbyon and allow the IAEA to monitor the moratorium on uranium enrichment while productive dialogues continue.” It is uncertain how one would verify “productive dialogues,” or even know when they had ended. But if history is any guide, we will find out years from now—and the outcome will not involve North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons capability.

In 1982, on a tour of the Middle East to monitor the deployment of U.S. Marines to Beirut, Lebanon, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger received a security briefing from his Israeli counterpart, Ariel Sharon. As Weinberger later recounted of his visit with Sharon in his memoirs: “I was also shown the Israeli camera-carrying drone, a remotely piloted vehicle that had made video tape recordings of me the day before, on my visit to our troops in Beirut. It was a most impressive technical achievement. The drone was in effect a model airplane, but one equipped with sophisticated photographic and recording capabilities. Its small size and low cost were also welcome features, particularly for short range battlefield reconnaissance. Especially appealing was the fact that the drone did not put lives at risk, and was hard to detect, given its small size. Later, I directed the Joint Chiefs to give us that same capability again: The Israeli drone had actually be developed by us, but the Congress had refused to fund its deployment. It was then sold to the Israelis.” In the thirty years that have passed since Weinberger was awed by drones, the U.S. military and intelligence community have developed drones for an ever-expanding number of surveillance, strike, and transportation missions. For a description of some of these missions, as well as some little-known facts on drone technology, read my new piece in the current issue of Foreign Policy, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Drones.” A point that I did not address—to which no one knows the answer—is the scope of potential applications of drones in the future. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution concluded with an important insight (which echoes conversations I’ve had with countless U.S. officials): “Last year, I met with senior Pentagon officials to discuss the many tough issues emerging from our growing use of robots in war. One of them asked, ‘So, who then is thinking about all this stuff?’” Two weeks ago, I posed this question to a senior Air Force official whose military occupational specialty is unmanned systems, to which he replied, “You’re speaking to him.” Although this official could have been exaggerating, there is a disconcerting lack of critical thinking and strategic planning for the future of drones in support of U.S. foreign policy and military objectives. I can think of three reasons to explain this apparent disconnect: First, the average senior civilian appointee in the Pentagon serves less than two years, so critical institutional knowledge comes and goes as some head into the private sector or a new administration enters the White House. Second, the relatively limited number of drone experts has been extremely busy over the past five years supporting the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Consequently, many may not have received time off for staff or joint appointments, or to go back to school in the professional military education system, which is an essential prerequisite for promotions. Third, drones are incredibly popular. Representative Brian P. Bilbray declared, "If you could register the Predator for president, both parties would be trying to endorse it.” As a result, some members of Congress and their staffs simply have not performed the necessary oversight into drone acquisition, system-wide architectures, or military and intelligence missions. As the aforementioned senior Air Force official told me, “When you speak with members of Congress about the differences between C-Band, X-Band, and KA-Band [microwave bands on the electromagnetic spectrum] their eyes glaze over.” Despite the demonstrated popularity of drones today, a number of current and former officials, policy analysts, nongovernmental organizations, and concerned citizens have voiced their unease over the use of drone technology, and the apparent lack of ceiling for how and where it might be used in the future. Some of this concern stems from the relative absence of transparency and accountability, particularly regarding the use of drones for targeted killings. President Obama inched the CIA drones out of the shadows when he acknowledged the strikes in Pakistan during a Google+ “Hang Out.” However, the president’s temporary transparency was soon reversed by his administration, and many remain apprehensive about America’s unmanned future.

In 1995, Kenneth Waltz and Scott Sagan coauthored the book, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate, which sought to address the question: what are the likely consequences of the spread of nuclear weapons? In a self-help international system, Waltz contended, “states must rely on the means they can generate and the arrangements they can make for themselves.” He argued that a second-strike nuclear capability is the most reliable means for a state to assure its survival by dissuading other states from attacking. Due to fears of escalation, “new nuclear states will feel the constraints that present nuclear states have experienced.” Sagan, meanwhile, countered Waltz’s optimism with two arguments based in organizational theory. First, “professional military organizations—because of common biases, inflexible routines, and parochial interests—display organizational behaviors that are likely to lead to deterrence failures and deliberate or accidental war.” Second, “future nuclear-armed states will lack the positive mechanisms of civilian control.” Sagan therefore called for a U.S. nonproliferation policy that includes reaffirming to nascent nuclear states that the bomb “will make their states targets for preventive attacks by their potential adversaries, will not easily lead to survivable arsenals, and will raise the specter of accidental or unauthorized uses of nuclear weapons.” This academic discussion has direct relevance to the ongoing policy debate over Iran, and whether Israel, the United States, or some combination of states should use preemptive military force against the regime’s suspected nuclear weapons program. We cannot ask the Iranian government directly what they would do with a bomb, because it continues to maintain that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful for the purposes of producing nuclear power and medical diagnostic isotopes. Nevertheless, as President Obama stated recently, it is U.S. policy “to do everything we can to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and creating an arms race, a nuclear arms race, in a volatile region.” To explore this issue further, I asked several international relations and security studies scholars who have extensively researched and written on the topic of nuclear proliferation to contribute their thoughts on the impact of a potential Iranian nuclear weapon. Specifically, I asked: “If the international community believed—through testing or intelligence estimates—that Iran possessed a nuclear weapon, what impact would the bomb have on Iranian foreign policy?” ____ Kyle Beardsley is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Emory University and is the author of The Mediation Dilemma. A nuclear-armed Iran is not likely to act much differently. Most importantly, Iran will have no incentive to use its nuclear weapons in aggression; doing so against Israeli or American targets would gain Iran little and cost it much. On a more practical level, an Iranian bomb also will not substantially change the general strategic dynamics. In a series of articles, Victor Asal and I have shown that states with nuclear weapons tend to face less hostility from opponents, be in shorter crises, and prevail more often in their crises against non-nuclear states. The logic is that nuclear weapons are an effective deterrent that temper aggression. According to this logic, the main benefit to Iran of acquiring nuclear weapons is to deter military threats by its primary adversaries, Israel and the United States. Given that Iran already has a strong deterrent—via its importance to hydrocarbon supplies, robust conventional forces, ability to disrupt fragile situations in Lebanon and Iraq, and Western war weariness—it is doubtful that Iran will notice much immediate advantage from obtaining nuclear weapons. Its main incentive for proliferating apparently is to lock in the regime’s security in the long run. Victor Asal and I also find that proliferators are sources of instability prior to attaining weapons, so a modest upside to successful proliferation would be movement away from the current alarming exchanges. Sarah Kreps is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University and is the author of Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions after the Cold War. To answer this question, we should distinguish between Iran’s bark and bite. Having a nuclear weapon would give Iran a bigger bark. Armed with the bomb, Iran could make threats that might win it economic aid and political concessions. Influence, as Schelling noted, comes from “the power to hurt,” and nuclear weapons provide the ultimate power to hurt.  Having such “latent violence” in the form of nuclear weapons can translate into considerable bargaining influence. The North Korea model is instructive here. The Kim Jong-il regime used its nuclear program as a bargaining chip, promising to dismantle its Yongbyon reactor in exchange for political concessions and economic aid. Often they gained concessions, however, while only temporarily or incompletely complying with their end of the bargain. On the other hand, it seems doubtful that having the bomb would give Iran a bigger bite. Rather, there’s every reason to believe that deterrence theory should hold. How much influence Iran’s weapons can confer, again drawing on Schelling, “will indeed depend on how much the adversary can hurt in return.”  Iran’s primary rivals are Israel and the United States, each with arsenals that are far more lethal than what Iran could assemble even over the next decade. That each has enough weapons to hurt Iran quite badly should be enough to keep Iran’s bite in check. Matthew Kroenig is Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University and a Stanton Nuclear Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons. A nuclear-armed Iran would pose a grave threat to international peace and security.  It would lead to further nuclear proliferation as other countries in the region sought nuclear weapons in response.  As I discuss in Exporting the Bomb, a nuclear Iran would likely become a nuclear supplier and transfer uranium enrichment technology—the basis for dangerous nuclear programs—to U.S. enemies in regions around the world. Iran currently restrains its foreign policy for fear of U.S. military retaliation, but with a nuclear counter-deterrent it would be emboldened to push harder, stepping up support for terrorist groups, brandishing nuclear weapons for coercive purposes, and adopting a more aggressive foreign policy. A nuclear Iran could constrain U.S. freedom of action in the Middle East by threatening nuclear war in response to major U.S. initiatives in the region. A more aggressive Iran would lead to an even more crisis-prone region, and any crisis involving a nuclear-armed Iran could spiral out of control and result in a nuclear war against Israel or even, once Iran has developed the requisite delivery vehicles, the U.S. homeland. In sum, a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a severe threat that Washington would have to live with as long as Iran exists as a state and has nuclear weapons, which could be decades or even longer. Annie Tracy Samuel is a Research Fellow in the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of History at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iran-Iraq war, and Iranian security and foreign policy. Iran’s possession of a nuclear weapon would be a troubling and disturbing development, especially for the future of the nonproliferation regime and for stability in the Middle East.  However, there is reason to believe that Iran’s theoretical possession of a nuclear weapon would not profoundly alter the essence of its foreign policy. Iran’s foreign policy, both before and after the 1979 revolution, has been largely pragmatic, particularly in action if not always in rhetoric. Though it has miscalculated the effects of and reactions to its policies, as well as adopted violence as a tool to achieve its strategic goals, Iran’s policies have generally been conceived with rational security objectives in mind.  The hypothetical development of a nuclear weapons capability would not fundamentally alter Iran’s overriding foreign policy objective—regime security. Iran’s leaders, like those in other states, want to remain in power.  They want the regime in which they have invested and which serves their interests to endure.  Foreign policy, in addition to safeguarding Iran’s borders and national integrity, is a means for safeguarding the regime.  Possession of a nuclear weapon will likely make Iran more impervious to attack and may make Iran bolder in its support for armed groups.  However, possessing a nuclear weapon will is not likely to alter Iran’s paramount foreign policy goals of national and regime security. Further, possession of a nuclear weapon is likely to cause Iran’s isolation from the international community, an outcome Iran does not want.  Iran would therefore be likely to use any advantages of possessing a nuclear weapon in a way that would not significantly increase its international isolation even further. The Islamic Republic is not an irrational or suicidal regime.  A nuclear weapon will not make it one. Todd S. Sechser is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia and a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. For further information, read his op-ed coauthored with Matthew Fuhrmann, “Would a nuclear-armed Iran really be so dangerous?” What could Iran achieve with a few nuclear weapons?  The historical record offers a clear answer: very little. Pessimists worry that a nuclear Iran would be able to blackmail Israel, seize major oil fields, or force the United States out of the Middle East. But they ignore a key lesson of the nuclear age: nuclear weapons are not very useful for coercion. Israel, for example, did not suddenly acquire the ability to push around its neighbors when it obtained nuclear weapons. (If it had, it might have dissuaded Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons today.) Nor did China, North Korea, South Africa, or any other state that has ever built nuclear weapons. The reality is that nuclear weapons have never been very useful tools of blackmail. The reason is that nuclear threats lack credibility. If Iran ever used nuclear weapons against one of its neighbors, it would suffer unprecedented international isolation, unify the region against it, and even trigger nuclear retaliation from the United States or Israel. Given these prospects, Iran’s neighbors are likely to doubt whether its nuclear threats are actually sincere. At best, nuclear weapons are credible tools of self-defense. But we need not worry that a nuclear Iran will wield vast new coercive leverage in the Middle East. In 1983, Robert McNamara observed that nuclear weapons "are totally useless – except only to deter one’s opponent from using them." This lesson is worth remembering today.

Reading the professional punditry in Washington or the rhetorical nuclear and military pronouncements from Tehran, one would assume that Iran is very close to acquiring a nuclear weapon—and that the United States and Iran are on the brink of war. In the United States, serious thinkers have offered articles that make “The Case for Military Action in Iran,” advocate for “Why Obama Should Take Out Iran’s Nuclear Program,” and assert it is “Time to Attack Iran.” Earlier this week, a more extreme version of the Iran-war-determinism meme was penned by Thomas P.M. Barnett, chief analyst at Wikistrat, an organization that refers to itself as “the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Online Consultancy.” In an op-ed entitled, “The New Rules: The Coming War with Iran,” Barnett wrote: “Israel and America will soon go to war with Iran—for as many times as it takes. In each instance, our proximate goal will be to kick the nuclear ‘can’ as far down the road as possible, but our ultimate goal will be regime change…Nothing is going to stop this war dynamic from unfolding…nothing. So get ready for war with Iran. Because once Assad is gone, that is what comes next.” In Tehran, meanwhile, claims are made weekly about the supposed indigenous development of nuclear fuel rods, killer drones, next-generation centrifuges, and long-range missiles. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dons a white lab coat, points at some new technological innovation, or walks amidst a uranium-enrichment centrifuge cascade (which itself is under IAEA comprehensive safeguards). Elsewhere, ballistic missiles are rolled through Tehran like a homecoming parade for threat projections. Or, the possible mock-up of the downed U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel drone is prominently displayed next to uniformed men who run their hands over its radar-reflective skin. These supposedly groundbreaking “threats” from Tehran are then elevated by the Western media, rewarding the Iranian regime with the strategic communications coup that it so desperately seeks. Outside of the threat industries in Washington and Tehran, however, are the professional analysts of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), who provide assessments of foreign policy and national security issues for policymakers. Yesterday, two senior members of the IC testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Over the course of two-plus hours, the officials made four statements that provided a much-needed clarifying perspective amidst all the hyperventilating by the media. Clapper: “We believe the decision [to pursue a nuclear weapon] would be made by the supreme leader himself, and he would base that on a cost-benefit analysis.” Iran does not want “a nuclear weapon at any price.” Sen. Carl Levin: "Is it your implication that it will take more than a year for Iran to build a bomb?" Clapper: "Yes, sir." Burgess: "The [DIA] assesses Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict.’’ Burgess: "To the best of our knowledge, Israel has not decided to attack Iran." In other words, according to the heads of the IC and DIA: 1) against all odds, the supposedly “mad Mullahs” of Tehran are endowed with the capacity for rational human thought, and thus there might be diplomatic or economic inducements that could compel an agreement on outstanding questions regarding the nuclear program; 2) the United States has at least a year; 3) Iran is not looking to start a war with the United States; and 4) Israel has not yet decided to undertake a preemptive war with Iran.

As President Obama articulated in his State of the Union address, the goal of U.S. policy toward Iran is clear: “To prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.” There are a number of problems inherent to this objective, however. How do you operationalize it? How would you know that Iran has produced a nuclear weapon, or is nearing the completion of one? From recent history in North Korea, we know of five distinct steps on the spectrum toward becoming a nuclear weapons state. 1. The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) estimates that North Korea has sufficient weapons-grade fissile material to build a nuclear weapon. In 1989, North Korea shut down its 5 megawatt graphite-moderated reactor at Yongbyon and removed the nuclear fuel rods, which were reprocessed into plutonium in March 1990. However, the full extent of North Korea’s deception regarding spent fuel removal and reprocessing as well as its plutonium cache was unknown until the release of IAEA environmental measurements in 1991. In November 1993, the CIA briefed President Bill Clinton that North Korea has a “better than ever” chance of possessing enough plutonium for one or two nuclear weapons,” based on estimates of the maximum it could have produced during the shutdown. (Today, North Korea possesses between six to ten bombs worth of plutonium.) 2. The U.S. IC estimates that North Korea has a weapon. In April 2001, Deputy Director for Central Intelligence John McLaughlin stated, “ North [Korea] probably has one or two nuclear bombs.” It is important to note that this belief was not based on a nuclear test.  In August 2001, in an unclassified response to questions from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the CIA revealed: “North Korea has produced one or two simple fission-type nuclear weapons and has validated the designs without conducting yield-producing nuclear tests.” 3. North Korea informs U.S. officials that it possesses a nuclear weapon. In December 2002, North Korea removed the metal seals and disabled the fifteen surveillance cameras installed by the IAEA at the Yongbyon nuclear reactor and reprocessing facility. On December 31, 2002, the final two IAEA inspectors (both Russians) in North Korea were forced to leave the country. In April 2003, North Korean negotiators disclosed to U.S. diplomats that they possessed nuclear weapons and had reprocessed all of the spent fuel previously frozen under the 1994 Agreed Framework. In February 2005, in its most definitive public statement to date, the North Korean foreign ministry stated that the country had indeed “produced nuclear weapons.” 4. North Korea conducts a verifiable nuclear test. On October 9, 2006, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, which it claimed was “conducted with indigenous wisdom and technology 100 percent” and created a “powerful self-reliant defence capability.” One week after the test, the Office of the Director of Intelligence (ODNI) released a statement affirming North Korea’s nuclear progress: “Analysis of air samples collected on October 11, 2006, detected radioactive debris which confirms that North Korea conducted an underground nuclear explosion…The explosion yield was less than a kiloton.” After claims of a second test in May 2009, the ODNI assessed, “North Korea probably conducted an underground nuclear explosion…The explosion yield was approximately a few kilotons.” 5. North Korea has a verifiable nuclear delivery vehicle. North Korea could attempt to covertly transport a nuclear weapon aboard an airplane, ship, submarine, or ground vehicle, although all are probably too unreliable to successfully deliver such a highly-valued weapon. If there were a crisis, however, North Korea could decide to rush a bomb onto one of those platforms, much as Israel quickly assembled nuclear weapons to be delivered by plane on the eve of the Six Day War in 1967. According to the National Intelligence Council in 2001, the more plausible delivery method is ballistic missiles: “Missiles provide a level of prestige, coercive diplomacy, and deterrence that nonmissile means do not.” In an unclassified report to Congress in August 2007, the ODNI stated, “North Korea has short- and medium-range missiles that could be fitted with nuclear weapons, but we do not know whether it has in fact done so.” In January 2011, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned that within five years North Korea could develop the capability of striking the U.S. homeland with an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM), presumably with the Taepodong-II missile, which failed in flight tests in July 2006 and April 2009. (Various Pentagon officials have acknowledged that the thirty ground-based missile defense interceptors deployed in Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, will be capable of intercepting a North Korean—or Iranian—missile “for some years to come.") In the case of Iran, the U.S. IC does not believe that Iran has reached any of the five steps along the nuclear weapons spectrum. Moreover, as the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper affirmed last week in a Senate hearing, “we don’t believe they’ve actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon.” However, if Iran fulfills any of the five steps, it could spell failure for the Obama administration’s strategy to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state. Prior to these steps are a series of “red lines;” policymakers and analysts continue to guess what specific Iranian actions would trigger a military response by the United States. In an upcoming post, I will tackle the question of red lines, and what could compel a preemptive attack against the Iranian nuclear program.

On Tuesday, Apple released its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2012, which comprised fourteen weeks and ended on December 31, 2011. The company earned record quarterly revenues of $46 billion, largely due to the thirty-seven million new iPhones  sold in that quarter—an increase of 128 percent from the same period last year. Overall, however, smartphones like the iPhone are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, as they are now used by 43 percent of all Americans and 27 percent of all people worldwide. The past few years have witnessed an exponential development of applications (or, ‘apps’) that can be used wherever a smartphone has high-speed data access via mobile broadband or Wi-Fi. In the App Store alone, there are over 500,000 apps, which have been cumulatively downloaded tens of billions of times. Many are silly in nature, such as Hangtime—toss your smartphone in the air and see how far it goes and how long it takes to hit the ground—and CatPaint—add cat pictures to any photo! Others are practical: iNap@Work produces noises such as keyboard clicks and rustling while you take a nap at the office (because that is sure to fool your boss), and Designated Dialer, which prohibits you from calling certain contacts (think exes or frenemies) that you wouldn’t call sober. The ongoing expansion of smartphones, apps, and high-speed data access provide users with a networked system that can serve almost any purpose, and are limited only by the imagination. In many ways, the components and uses of a “smartphone system” are comparable to unmanned aerial systems, or drones. Within the military, only fifteen years have passed since drones were first used in a meaningful way for surveillance missions—and only ten years since they dropped bombs—and yet they already comprise one-third of all aircraft. On the civilian side, drones are used by environmental activists to track and monitor Japanese whaling ships, and a paparazzi drone could soon be used to track down celebrities. Last summer, engineers at the University of Southampton even “printed” a nearly silent surveillance drone with a 3-D laser printer that was assembled by hand within minutes. It is not surprising, then, to learn that smartphone apps have been applied to drone technology. In 2009, the MIT Human and Automation Lab, in coordination with Boeing Research and Technology, designed and built an iPhone app and a miniature drone—a helicopter with four rotors called the Ascending Technologies Hummingbird—within six weeks for $5,000. In a test, the Boeing engineers in Seattle successfully flew the drone, located over 3,000 miles away at the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Last July, Stephen Colbert interviewed Professor Missy Cummings, director of the MIT Lab, and demonstrated how to use an iPhone to control a drone, although with limited (albeit entertaining) success. As Professor Cummings acknowledged: “The military stuff is kind of passé. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist from MIT to tell you if we can do it for a soldier in the field, we can do it for anybody.” Active duty soldiers are also capitalizing on the pilot programs and designing smartphone apps to use in the field. The apps cover a wide range of utilities, including assessing burn wounds, providing visual feeds of base perimeters, and even tracking the Taliban. As of September 2011, the Marines had more than thirty iPads in the cockpits of their helicopters and fighter jets, used for pinpointing locations and quickly determining best flight patterns. It goes without saying that if engineering students can create a functioning unmanned aerial system quickly and cheaply, intelligent nonstate actors with deep pockets and malicious intent could do so as well. There are well-known examples when American students did as much, but with a vastly more destructive weapons system. In 1964, U.S. government scientists devised the “Nth Country Experiment,” in which they hired two PhD students, with no knowledge of nuclear physics, to determine “if a credible nuclear explosive device can be designed with modest effort, by a few well-trained people without contact with classified information.” Within three years, using only publicly available scientific literature and the crude computational power of punch-card computers, the two students created technical specifications for an implosion bomb fueled by plutonium. The bomb was subsequently deemed credible and classified by the U.S. government. In 1977, Princeton undergraduate student John Phillips famously repeated this feat with his term paper, “How to Build Your Own Atomic Bomb." His advisor physicist Freeman Dyson later recalled: "I remember telling him I would give him an ‘A’ for it, but advised him to burn it as soon as the grade was registered.” Over time, the guarded knowledge of how to build a nuclear weapon has only widened. In 2004, then-Senator Joe Biden went so far as to tell an arms control conference at Georgetown University: “When I was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee…I gathered the heads of all the national laboratories and some of their subordinates in [the Capitol]. I asked them a simple question. I said I would like you to go back to your laboratory and try to assume for a moment you are a relatively informed terrorist group with access to some nuclear scientists. Could you build, off-the-shelf, a nuclear device? Not a dirty bomb, but something that would start a nuclear reaction—an atomic bomb. Could you build one? They came back several months later and said, “We built one.”… I literally asked the laboratories to physically take this device into the Senate…it was bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a dump truck but they were able to get it in. They literally put it in a room and showed and explained how—literally off-the-shelf, without doing anything illegal—they actually constructed this device.” Of course, these nuclear weapons designs would still require access to the essential ingredient of fissile material to fuel any explosion. Nevertheless, the fact that what the Pentagon terms “Critical Nuclear Weapons Design Information,” the most highly classified documents within the U.S. government, could have been replicated by educated nonexperts and built with Home Depot components, is a prime example that even the biggest national security secrets cannot and do not remain truly secret. As compared to nuclear weapons, smartphone applications and basic drone designs are freely available and designed to be user-friendly, cost efficient, and modular. There are effectively blank-slate platforms that are intended to be updated constantly to meet the innovative user demands, with an ever expanding repertoire of tasks and functions. Beyond the iPhone app created by Boeing and MIT, there are several that already allow you to operate a drone from afar, including AR.Drone, Free Flight, and Drone Control. As one would expect, the App Store will give the green light to any app that is “free of explicit and offensive material.” What someone does with these apps, or with smaller, cheaper, faster, and more lethal drones, is anybody’s guess—for good or bad.

In March 2003, two weeks before a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction program, President George W. Bush was asked to assess progress on U.S. policy toward North Korea, which was the "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement" of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. Bush replied: "It’s in process. If they don’t work diplomatically, they’ll have to work militarily. And military option is our last choice." Calling a North Korean nuclear weapon “unacceptable,” in May 2003 President Bush declared: “We will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea. We will not give in to blackmail. We will not settle for anything less than the complete, verifiable and irreversible elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.” Over the next six years, neither the diplomatic nor military approach worked to compel North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program. Between 2003 and when President Bush left office in January 2009, it is estimated (PDF) that North Korea’s plutonium stockpile increased from 1-2 bombs worth of fissile material to 7-11. Today, North Korea has between 6 and 10 bombs worth of plutonium, including the material used in the nuclear tests that took place in October 2006 and May 2009. (Although sensors did not detect (PDF) radionuclide evidence after the second test, it was believed to be a plutonium bomb. It is unknown if North Korea has produced highly-enriched uranium (HEU) at the gas centrifuge facility shown to an unofficial U.S. delegation in November 2010, estimated to be capable of producing one bomb’s worth of HEU per year, or at other enrichment sites that the Obama administration said exists.) As it turned out, the existence of several North Korean nuclear weapons were both tolerable and acceptable to the Bush administration. The collective weight of the Six Party Talks, economic sanctions, and positive incentives in the form of fuel oil or security guarantees failed to convince the North Korean regime to abandon their nuclear program and accept intrusive verification. As Arthur Brown, CIA East Asian division chief during the first term of the Bush administration, asked pointedly: “If you were Kim [Jong-il], would you give up the only thing that has protected your regime from collapse?” Although former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld placed two dozen B-52 bombers and B-1 bombers on high alert to deter “opportunism,” the Bush administration never seriously considered a preemptive attack on North Korean nuclear facilities for a number of reasons: the military was busy with regime change in Iraq; South Korean citizens would have borne the brunt of retaliatory artillery and rocket attacks; and there were no guarantees that airstrikes would effectively destroy the plutonium or any assembled nuclear warheads. As a Bush administration official readily acknowledged in December 2002: “I’m not saying we don’t have military options. I’m just saying we don’t have good ones.’’ Re-reading contemporary news accounts and the memoirs of senior Bush administration officials, it is striking that none believed the policies they developed, defended publicly, and implemented would achieve their strategic objective—the "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement" of North Korean nuclear weapons. There is an important lesson to be learned from the twenty years invested in U.S. efforts to disarm North Korea, with particular application to the unfolding crisis over the Iranian nuclear program: there are some foreign policy objectives that simply cannot be achieved given the amount of attention and resources that policymakers are willing to commit. President Bush could have virtually assured that North Korea did not possess a bomb by authorizing a ground invasion that removed Kim Jong-il from power, subdued the military, and verified the absence of nuclear material north of the 38th parallel. However, the economic and human costs of such a military campaign would have been catastrophic. Thankfully, President Bush didn’t live up to his word. In the recent uproar over Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, political leaders are once again vowing to achieve a maximalist strategic objective without demonstrating any willingness to commit the necessary resources to assure its success.  After President Obama was elected, and again in the White House, he reaffirmed that Iranian nuclear “weaponization…is not acceptable.” Other world leaders have echoed President Obama’s commitment, including Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and David Cameron, who said it is “the clear view in Europe that Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon is fundamentally unacceptable." Even while opposing additional sanctions on Iran, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao stated, “China adamantly opposes Iran developing and possessing nuclear weapons." It is important to note that there is no evidence from the U.S. intelligence community or the IAEA confirming that Iran has decided to pursue a nuclear weapon. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta clarified the U.S. position: “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability.” However, if it were known with certainty that Tehran authorized the completion of a bomb, do world leaders truly believe that the previously implemented policies will prevent Iran from doing so? If so, it would only be possible with an array of covert actions in Iran, which have never been reported in the press. If not—as was the case of the Bush administration and North Korea—Iran could be another instance where policymakers promise a strategic policy objective that cannot be verifiably achieved. Maximalist rhetoric should not constrain the pursuit of other policies that fall short of the ultimate goal. In the case of the Iranian nuclear program, this should include negotiations without preconditions; containment in cooperation with U.S. regional partners; deterrence through conventional and strategic military power; targeted economic sanctions that limit Iran’s access to dual-use exports; and countering influence in the public sphere and international institutions. To prevent another political and military quagmire, it is essential that the Obama administration limit the rhetoric and focus on prudent, responsible, and achievable policy objectives.

Driving in rush hour traffic yesterday morning in Tehran, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, chemical engineer and department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, was killed. Reportedly, two men on a motorcycle attached a “sticky bomb” to Ahmadi Roshan’s Peugeot, killing the scientist and his bodyguard. Although estimates vary, Ahmadi Roshan is the fifth Iranian official or scientist connected to the country’s nuclear or ballistic missile program who has been violently killed since 2007. Another scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi, narrowly escaped a similar “sticky bomb” assassination attempt in November 2010—he now leads Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. Iranian officials quickly pointed to Israel and the United States as likely perpetrators, and the Atomic Energy Organization released a statement affirming its commitment to the nuclear program: "The heinous actions by the criminal Israeli regime and America will not disrupt the path the Iranian people have chosen." Additionally, the Iranian permanent representative to the UN, Mohammad Khazaee, sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that claimed, but did not provide, “firm evidence that certain foreign quarters are behind such assassinations.” He added, “These quarters have spared no efforts in depriving the Islamic Republic of Iran from its inalienable right to peaceful nuclear energy and called for conducting covert operations ranging from assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists to launching a military strike on Iran as well as sabotaging Tehran’s nuclear program.” The statements of denial from the Obama administration were atypically emphatic. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responded: "I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran." Tommy Vietor, spokesperson of the National Security Council, said, “The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this.” In previous attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, U.S. officials have been evasive and far less forthcoming. In January 2010, after the assassination of physics professor Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a State Department spokesperson rejected the allegations of U.S. involvement as “absurd.” Later that year in November 2010, coordinated attacks targeted two nuclear scientists, killing one and severely injuring the other. State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley did not directly address the incident: “All I can say is we decry acts of terrorism wherever they occur and beyond that, we do not have any information on what happened." Recent statements of denial are unique because, normally, the U.S. government does not comment "as a matter of policy" on targeted killings. Since September 11, the U.S. government has conducted similar operations—outside of the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq—in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and possibly elsewhere. According to anonymous U.S. officials, drone strikes have killed more than 2,000 militants and approximately fifty noncombatants in Pakistan alone since 2004, although the number of civilian casualties is hotly contested. A few dozen suspected militants have also been killed outside of Pakistan. Despite over ten years and 300 operations, there is no transparency and little congressional oversight over the U.S. policy of targeted killings. We know that the United States has somewhere between four and seven kill lists; kill lists are not coordinated; and U.S. citizens— possibly including children—can be targeted, thus denying their Fifth Amendment due process protections. The reason these operations remain “secret” is that if the Bush or Obama administrations were to acknowledge any aspect of the program, it would create an architecture of justification and precedence for which the U.S. government can be held publicly accountable. Even democratic governments want limited oversight and total autonomy, especially when authorizing sensitive military operations. Many senior U.S. officials who have left government since September 11 admit that the degree of transparency is inadequate. Jack Goldsmith, legal adviser for the Defense Department during the Bush Administration, questioned, "What are the procedures being used to ensure the right people are being targeted?" John B. Bellinger III, former legal advisor for the State Department, has similarly argued: “The [Obama] administration needs to work harder to explain and defend its use of drones as lawful and appropriate—to allies and critics—if it wants to avoid losing international support and potentially exposing administration officials to legal liability.” Former director of national intelligence Dennis Blair also called for public acknowledgment of the drone program: “You need a way to make it something that is part of your overt policy.” According to administration officials, suspected members of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups can be legally targeted and killed because they fall under the September 2001, Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which passed the House 420 to 1 and the Senate 98 to 0. According to the AUMF, the “President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.” Who is authorizing the assassination of scientists and officials in Iran? President Bush reportedly authorized covert—although nonlethal—action to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program. It is unknown if President Obama extended the Bush administration authorization (as he did for Pakistani drone strikes), but it is highly doubtful that he expanded them to permit lethal force against civilian scientists. Moreover, it is unlikely that the U.S. intelligence community has been permitted to share information with other countries or foreign agents in order for them to use lethal force. The absence of transparency and oversight of ten years of targeted killings by the CIA and special operations forces makes U.S. denials regarding Iran less credible. President Obama famously said, "The CIA gets what it needs." In this case, I hope that the CIA did not request the authority to kill Iranian civilian scientists and, if they did, that the president did not acquiesce.