All The President's Nukes

By Steve Hynd

The UK's Guardian breaks the news that President Obama has sent back the first draft of the new nuclear posture review and told the folk working on it to do better.

Obama has rejected the Pentagon's first draft of the "nuclear posture review" as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, according to European officials.

Those options include:

� Reconfiguring the US nuclear force to allow for an arsenal measured in hundreds rather than thousands of deployed strategic warheads.

� Redrafting nuclear doctrine to narrow the range of conditions under which the US would use nuclear weapons.

� Exploring ways of guaranteeing the future reliability of nuclear weapons without testing or producing a new generation of warheads.

The review is due to be completed by the end of this year, and European officials say the outcome is not yet clear. But one official said: "Obama is now driving this process. He is saying these are the president's weapons, and he wants to look again at the doctrine and their role."

The move comes as Obama prepares to take the rare step of chairing a watershed session of the UN security council on Thursday. It is aimed at winning consensus on a new grand bargain: exchanging more radical disarmament by nuclear powers in return for wider global efforts to prevent further proliferation.

The wingnut Right, predictably, read no further than "nuke reductions" and concluded that Obama was either stupid, deliberately evil or dangerously irresponsible, planning to leave America disarmed. I think it's probably warhead-envy. None managed to explain how a matched reduction with Russia, first to 1,500 warheads and later to parity with other nuke-wielding nations like China, Israel or France "disarms" America. Julian Borger notes that in the best-case scenario "At that point, the second tier nuclear powers - France, Britain and China - would join the negotiations." Again, how's that disarming America in respect to other nations?

In an op-ed co-ordinated to run with the Guardian's main story, British foreign minister Peter Milliband writes:

This is one of the most critical issues we face. Get it right, and we will increase global security, pave the way for a world without nuclear weapons and improve access to affordable, safe and dependable energy � vital to tackle climate change. Get it wrong, and we face the spread of nuclear weapons and the chilling prospect of nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists.

Friends in the know tell me that Milliband's staff are signalling that his op-ed means Britain's Trident nuclear weapons are very definitely on the reduction table.

Borger, at his new proliferation blog, outlines the uphill path disarmament must still climb.

Obama's disarmament drive could falter before it really takes off. There is plenty of opposition in the Pentagon and Congress to the sort of deep cuts he is seeking, and a lot of vested interest, in the weapons labs and elsewhere, in keeping nuclear weapons projects going. It will not be easy to get the two-thirds Senate majority to ratify the long-delayed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Without that momentum, next year's NPT Review Conference could be a washout like 2005, and it is unclear how much more failure the non proliferation regime can stand. If Iran is still enriching uranium ever more efficiently next summer, there are a string of Arab states who will consider starting a programme of their own. An Israeli air strike on Iranian targets would almost certainly make matters worse, raising tensions and decreasing transparency. The number of weapons states, kept to single figures for so long, could jump dramatically in a generation.

America's nuclear weapon industry is a $54 billion a year one, and keeps a lot of generals, bureaucrats and arms makers comfortable. But keeping them, and the hawkish rightwing think-tanks the support, happy is what will make America less secure.