The Smoking Gun on Obama’s North Korea Policy
I have stated that North Korea's second nuclear weapon test represents the first failure of Brand Obama's foreign policy approach. This approach is basically a repeat of second term Team Bush.
Now I have a smoking gun to support this position.
I am speaking of twin articles by David Sanger in The New York Times on North Korea. The first is devoted to looking at Obama's North Korea and Iran policies. The first states of North Korea that,
...After examining what went wrong in the Bush years, when North Korea harvested most of the plutonium for its small arsenal, and Iran sped ahead to build the capability to make its own nuclear fuel, Mr. Obama and his aides are now designing different strategies for the two countries that are based on radically different assessments of their motivations...
The idea appears to be "let's get tough with the North while engaging with Iran."
The get tough on the North is based on
...The decision to confront North Korea with overwhelming pressure — designed to bring its shipping and financial transactions to a virtual standstill — is based on the conclusion that re-entering negotiations to buy the dismantlement of the country’s main nuclear facility at Yongbyon is a futile strategy. It has already failed twice, once for President Clinton, once for President Bush...
Point number one.
You can tell that Sanger knows how the system works. I bet he's got a good life going working as a senior reporter. This is the same person who wrote The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenge to American Power. He spends a good portion of that book criticising Team Bush's "squeeze them till they expire" approach to North Korea.
Notice that is all now out of history. You can't read Sanger and tell me that what Chomsky says about the media is wrong.
However, let me get back on message. You can see that the assessment that North Korea has no interest in disarming, even though Bush scuttled a disarmament accord before the first test, forms a very important part of the get tough policy. By reading the first Sanger article you are left with the impression that this is a new post-second test policy.
Not so, according to the second article.
This article provides a smoking gun for my thesis. Sanger states,
...A review, carried out by the Obama administration during its first month in office, concluded that North Korea had no intention of trading away what it calls its “nuclear deterrent” in return for food, fuel and security guarantees...
There you have it. The "new" policy was already formulated in Brand Obama's first month in office.
Just like I have been saying from the get-go.
US Nuclear Strategy and the Counterforce Mission
The future of US nuclear strategy has become a hot topic, pretty much since Obama came into office and especially after his Prague speech. Personally I think what has made US nuclear strategy a hot topic is the Bush era reforms. When I did my Masters on nuclear strategy I was asked by my supervisor; "who is interested in that now?"
Since Bush, plenty.
One thing that I have been thinking about is the role of dissuasion. I think that it is actually more important than deterrence, even though deterrence gets all the attention. This involves a modification of my previous views. I will blog a little bit about that, but first we must discuss the role of counterforce in US nuclear strategy. In fact, as we shall see in a future post the two are not unrelated. That relation is where my view on dissuasion has changed.
The Federation of American Scientists and the National Resources Defense Council have jointly published a very good and detailed report on the role of counterforce in US nuclear strategy. Indeed, one of the author's, Robert Norris, provided me a copy of the report for which I am thankful.
One thing I really like about the report is a Google Earth rendition of Kosvinsky Mountain. The caption under the image states that targeting Kosvinsky Mountain was one of the strategic drivers behind the B61-11. I really, really liked that bit. In my Masters I had argued that, most likely, Kosvinsky and the B61-11 warhead were related. There is a good interview in a Los Alamos publication with then director Sigfried Hecker, still during the Soviet era, who argued that the targeting of deeply buried command bunkers was an important capability gap that Los Alamos needed to address.
I don't where where that publication is; I have a copy. I do know that it is at the FAS Los Alamos mirror site which features a whole raft of documents starting from LA-1, which of course is the Serber primer. The publication can be found somewhere in that vast collection for those interested.
I am not going of on a tangent here. The reason why Hecker stated that he had a capability gap is because under Presidential Guidance, which then was NSDD-13, such a capability gap in fact existed. Now, it says a lot about Clinton era nuclear strategy that that capability gap was still an issue and still an issue with reference to Kosvinsky.
Anyway, the main point of the counterforce report is that if we are serious about deep cuts, indeed if Obama is serious about deep cuts, then counterforce must go. It can only go if Presidential Guidance is changed so that nuclear weapons are for deterrence only. That means that US nuclear strategy should reflect a strategy based on a second strike countervaule attack after actual nuclear detonations on US soil (or Allies) are detected.
The report argues that,
...at least from the early 1960s - the dominant mission for US strategic weapons has been counterforce, that is, the attack of military, mostly nuclear, targets and the enemy's leadership...
The report then goes on to make a very, very important point
...The requirements for the counterforce mission perpetuate the most dangerous characteristics of nuclear forces, with weapons kept at high levels of alert, ready to launch upon warning of an enemy attack, and able to preemptively attack enemy forces...
That is absolutely correct. If Obama's Prague declaration was sincere then we would expect that he would sign Presidential Guidance that repudiates the counterforce mission. The beauty of this report is that it gives us a metric by which we can judge Obama's actions in the nuclear field.
Reports already suggest that Obama will go down to 1,500 weapons as a part of the post START arms control process with Russia. This is a number I picked very early...I personally think I was the first to call 1,500 (nothing wrong with a little gloating) precisely because I felt that the cuts would end up being largely consistent with the maintenance of the counterforce mission.
Of course, the Russians also want 1,500 as recent reports suggest. The reasons why they want 1,500 have been best analysed by Pavel Podvig.
This time strategic arms control has been too hasty. It would have been better if it was put off until after the NPR. What could very well happen now is that arms control will effectively lock in the current approach to nuclear strategy, presenting the NPR with a fait accompli.
The report makes a good case for the adoption of minimum deterrence. It does not make a call for abolition, at least not yet. The report states that
...We further assume that on the glide path down to zero, the United States and the rest of the world may pause at a certain point for some extended period of time to allow the world's nuclear powers to establish a stable equilibrium while they develop the international institutions and political confidence necessary for moving toward complete global nuclear disarmament...
Those currently making the case for abolition won't like that. However, I believe that the argument made here is sound. We will hear more about that very soon.
The report also makes a very good point about current planning
...During preparations for the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) that was to enter into effect in March 2003, the head of the Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Admiral James Ellis, said the word "single" in SIOP no longer accurately described the new plan. "STRATCOM is changing the nation's nuclear war plan from a single, large, integrated plan to a family of plans applicable in a wider range of scenarios."...
That precisely reflects the role that tailored deterrence has played in US nuclear war planning.
This leads me to make a point. I think that the cuts that the report recommends are too conservative. The report recommends cutting to 1,500 (overall that is, not just the operational stockpile) by 2020 and 500 by 2025.
We can do better.
Adaptive planning has been an important technological development (both in terms of software and hardware) that has enabled strategic planning to shift from a "single" plan to a "family of plans." In that sense adaptive planning has not been a favourable development.
However, that need not be the case. Science and technology is inherently neutral. Many anti-technologists like to argue otherwise, like various critical theory types, but the neutrality of technology is essentially a truism. Adaptive planning is a technology like any other. I tend to believe that adaptive planning can be a good thing.
Let me explain.
I think that with adaptive planning one can adopt a posture of minimum deterrence at much lower numbers. It would be possible to go to 200 and still safely deter all comers. This is because with adaptive planning you really don't need a one to one correspondence between targets and weapons. Adaptive planning is a nuclear strategy force multiplier.
The other point I would like to make deals with the reports force structure. The report firstly suggests lowering the current yield of nuclear weapons by taking out the D-T gas that is used to boost primaries and by inerting the second stage. Secondly, the report suggests a dyad of ICBMs and Bombers to deliver a second strike consistent with a minimum deterrence target set.
One can imagine the line of attack against such a posture that would be mounted by hawks. They would bring up the old "window of vulnerability" and argue that more accurate Chinese and Russian ICBMs would make the US ICBM force vulnerable to a first strike.
The Russians definitely would argue like that. More accurate US ICBMs means counterforce can be achieved at lower yields. By keeping the current warhead types the force structure also leaves open the option of rapid reversal. To be sure SLBMs have become the main counterforce threat, but that was not the case when McNamara announced the strategy.
The force structure that the report recommends must come with a pretty good set of confidence and security building measures therefore. I would suggest keeping warheads and delivery vehicles separate and that this be open to verification. I would also suggest keeping warheads in dis-assembled form, i.e. keeping the A,F&F separate from the physics package.
There could be an issue here from the perspective of permissive action links, but I will leave that aside for now.
The report does call for a minimum deterrence to be adopted as a measure on the road to zero. However, things could go the other way and absent such confidence and security building measures that could be easily achieved. Under the adopted force structure measures need to be taken to make the bar higher in so far as going in the opposite direction is concerned.
One final point must be made. The US is committed to maintaining strategic primacy as a way of cementing its leading position in international relations. So long as that policy obtains I doubt whether much will change in so far as counterforce is concerned. For any state that aspires to strategic primacy mutual deterrence is a complete no, no. The US must first be politically committed to abandoning the role that military power plays in cementing its hegemonic position in international relations. This must come first.
Absent this I am not optimistic about a move toward mutual deterrence at low numbers.
By the way there is a very good discussion of nuclear weapons effects in the report. This appears at the section on countervalue targeting. It's the best succinct and to the point discussion I have seen.
Swine Flu and Bioterrorism
William Clark is Professor Emeritus of Immunology at UCLA. He wrote a splendid slim volume on bioterrorism called Bracing for Armageddon: The Science and Politics of Bioterrorism in America (Oxford University Press, 2008). One of the most important arguments in his book is that (pp71-72)
...The greatest threat that we face from biological agents today is not from humans - it is from nature itself. A bioterrorist attack is a possibility...but, as we will discuss in Chapter 9, one with low probability. A pandemic caused by a naturally occuring biological pathogen that could kill tens of thousands, possibly millions of Americans is an absolute certainty...we remain, after decades of study, terribly vulnerable to killer flu pandemics...
Clark goes on to wager that 9 out of 10 Americans probably fear bioterrorism more than they do a flu pandemic. I think that swine flu demonstrates that Clark is correct. Although, of course, there has been much fear mongering on swine flu too. Clark's big concern is with avian Influenza, although swine flu is caused by influenza A virus types.
It is worth noting, therefore, that the Obama administration is planning to take $3 billion from the Project Bioshield Special Reserve Fund to help finance the response to swine flu. This has drawn fire, especially from the bio-industry
...Project Bioshield is intended to provide funding to spur development of WMD countermeasures by the private sector. Pulling funds from $5.6 billion program would discourage private investment in the development of biological-weapon countermeasures for the U.S. national stockpile, according to industry representatives...
The Obama administration's action is appropriate and provides a powerful confirmation of the Clark thesis. I rather suspect, furthermore, that the Bioshield Fund is a form of industry policy for the bio-tech sector.
Even the Obama administration tacitly concedes, by its actions, that the bioterrorist threat is overblown and that the real biosecurity concern that we face is centred upon a flu pandemic. Our resource allocation for biosecurity should thereby be redirected towards dealing with flu pandemics. Perhaps if we were better prepared for something like swine flu, instead of Jihadi bioterrorists, we might have been able to provide a better response.
From Tritium To A Fissban To Space Arms Control In One Go.
Two reports, though seemingly unrelated, might actually have interesting interconnections. The first concerns a little spat of the tritium gas component of US nuclear weapons. According to the GSN
...The U.S. Senate has moved to at least temporarily ban a reassignment in design work on a key nuclear warhead component -- the tritium gas system -- from one national laboratory to another...
...The legislation would put the brakes on a National Nuclear Security Administration determination that the Bush administration announced on Jan. 5. The decision was to consolidate responsibility for designing tritium "gas transfer systems" from the two organizations currently performing the work -- the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories -- down to a single site, Sandia's facility in Livermore, Calif...
The planned consolidation of the tritium gas transfer system should be seen in the context of Complex Transformation formerly known Complex 2030.
The article does sort of draw the link towards the end
...The gas transfer move was also notable for being among the first specific actions the nuclear agency announced it would take to implement the Complex Transformation plan, leaving critics questioning why other initiatives that offer greater cost savings or lower risk might not be implemented first.
"A lot of the major infrastructure decisions that we'll be looking at, in essence, depend on the outcome of that Nuclear Posture Review," D'Agostino said.
"Today it's a done deal," he said, referring to the gas transfer system decision. "But can I predict that the NPR won't change that? No, I can't. Because we need to be flexible enough to adapt the program to where the country thinks it's going."...
There is no mystery here I would hazard to guess. Consolidating the tritium gas transfer system clearly formed a bridgehead for Complex Transformation. Complex Transformation aka Complex 2030 has not been supported in Congress. You can't go for bigger items on the Transformation shopping list without bipartisan support. Even the bridgehead has been cut back by Congress, pending a review by the JASONs (which is part of a larger review into the entire program).
Now the Jedi Master Walter Pincus is reporting that there has been a breakthrough of sorts in the CD on a fissile material production cut-off
...It was a small step. But after almost a decade of deadlock, the United Nations Conference on Disarmament last week approved a working group to negotiate a treaty banning the production of fissionable material for nuclear weapons and another to discuss preventing an arms race in outer space.
The U.N. group, which met in Geneva, had been unable to agree on a work agenda for the past 10 years. That was partly because of the U.S. refusal to give in to demands by the Chinese and Russians for the conference to study prevention of arms in space. In turn, those countries and others blocked negotiations sought by the United States to ban production of new fissile material for weapons without verification provisions...
How is this related to Complex Transformation?
Both Russia and the US have a huge stockpile of fissile materials left over from the cold war. Complex Transformation, in part, revolves around the Bush administration's strategy of "dissuasion". The idea here is to "dissuade" a "near peer competitor" from hoping to catch up with and surpass the strategic capabilities of the US. That means having a responsive nuclear weapons complex able to "surge" US force levels to "cold war era" levels.
Put that together with the fissile material overhang and in turn put that in the context of a fissile material production ban then you have indefinite US strategic nuclear primacy.
US Nuclear Primacy = Complex Transformation + Fissile Material Stock + Fissban
Can a Fissban be achieved in the context of dissuasion and Complex Transformation?
Will Complex Transformation be finally dealt a death blow in order to help secure a Fissban? It might well be necessary.
The space weapons angle was really, like really, really, interesting
...Speaking for the Obama administration, U.S. delegate Garold N. Larson noted that a verifiable fissile material cutoff treaty is "the top U.S. priority at the Conference on Disarmament." He emphasized "verifiable" as marking "a significant gesture" because the Bush administration had subverted attempts at negotiating such a treaty by proposing it be done without any verification provisions.
His talk did not mention the space weapons working group, referring only to beginning "serious discussions on the range of other disarmament matters that reflect the ongoing concerns of Conference on Disarmament members....
That's not exactly an enthusiastic endorsement of space arms control. One gets the impression that Brand Obama let that through in order to kick start talks on a Fissban. If you really believed in the "change we can believe in" rhetoric this is a bit of a puzzle.
According to the rhetoric Brand Obama is all in favour of space arms control. Remember the White House agenda statement when he came into office?
Larson's silence speaks volumes does it not?
P.S. Notice that Bob Gates has indicateda boost in spending on Ballistic Missile Defence is a possibility.
Slipping Towards War With North Korea
We seem to be slipping towards war with North Korea, a war nobody really wants. We all know that North Korea has again tested a nuclear weapon and seems to be making the initial moves to conduct an actual test of the Taepodong 2. In this post I would like to make a few points on the issue.
Was the Test a Fizzle?
The actual nature of the nuclear test continues to attract attention. Jeffrey Park, writing for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is calling a fizzle
...According to early reports, Monday's North Korea event certainly seems like a deliberate explosion in the right place. However, it was too small to be a successful Hiroshima-class crude explosive device, by a factor of three or four. The reported estimates of Richter magnitude spread from 4.5-5, and the standard conversions to explosive yield suggest a yield of 2-6 kiloton-equivalents of TNT. Most of the latest Richter magnitude estimates have come in the low half of the 4.5-5 range, so it seems likely that the yield was 4 kilotons or smaller...
Notice Park is calling a fizzle based on a yield of ~4 Kt. This is because
...That's a lot of energy, much larger than the 2006 North Korean test, but it still falls far short of an expected 12-20 kiloton yield of a crude Hiroshima-style device...
The editors got a bit sloppy here. That should have read the expected yield of a crude 20Kt Nagasaki type device.
Personally I am not inclined to accept Park's analysis. I have no quibble with his yield estimate. We are fairly sure that the North Koreans informed the Chinese about 20mins before that October 2006 that they were gunning for a yield of 4Kt, however.
They got 4Kt this time. So, assuming that they tried to replicate the 2006 test, we might state that this was successful. Even Park concedes a yield of about 4Kt.
Earlier in the year Selig Harrison reported a North Korean boast of "weaponisation." This likely means that now, post 2009 test, North Korea has a functioning Nodong nuclear warhead.
How we got here
According to most reports we should hang all of the shit on the North. Out of history is all the skulduggery engaged in by Team Bush. The North isn't clean, going back to the Agreed Framework, but the collective amnesia in the past couple of weeks must have all the propagandists in the North watching in awe.
The best analysis of the wider implication of this aspect has come from Leon Sigal and Bruce Cumings. Sigal points out what I have been saying to all and sundry
...Despite the promise of change, the Obama administration has started to address North Korea just as the Clinton and Bush administrations did--accusing it of wrongdoing and trying to punish it for its transgressions. As Pyongyang's recent nuclear test demonstrates, the crime-and-punishment approach has never worked in the past and it won't work now...
That's right. Sigal focuses on the reaction to the Unha-2 launch, which has really pissed off Pyongyang in a big way. However we could point out the early testimony of Brand Obama's intel Tsar Admiral Dennis Blair
...The IC continues to assess North Korea has pursued a uranium enrichment capability in the past. Some in the Intelligence Community have increasing concerns that North Korea has an ongoing covert uranium enrichment program...
That came right after hawks in Team Bush were using an extensive verification protocol demands to determine whether these concerns had any basis. All this in order to scuttle the de-nuclearisation process. Blair could have have skirted this. That he didn't would have signalled to Pyongyang not to take Obama's "change we can believe in" too seriously.
Sigal points out
...The current crisis truly began last June when North Korea handed China a written declaration of its plutonium program, as it was obliged to do under the October 3, 2007 Six-Party joint statement on second-phase actions. In a side agreement with Washington, Pyongyang committed to disclose its uranium enrichment and proliferation activities, including the help it had provided for Syria's nuclear reactor.
Many in Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul were quick to question whether the declaration was "complete and correct," prompting the Bush administration to demand arrangements to verify the declaration before completing disabling and moving on to permanent dismantlement of North Korea's plutonium facilities. However, the October 2007 accord had no provision for verification.
The day Pyongyang turned over its declaration, the White House announced its intention to relax sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act and to delist North Korea as a "state sponsor of terrorism"--but with an important proviso. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Heritage Foundation on June 18, "[B]efore those actions go into effect, we would continue to assess the level of North Korean cooperation in helping to verify the accuracy and completeness of its declaration. And if that cooperation is insufficient, we will respond accordingly." She acknowledged Washington was moving the goal posts: "What we've done, in a sense, is move up issues that were to be taken up in phase three, like verification, like access to the reactor, into phase two."
In bilateral talks with the United States, North Korea agreed to establish a Six-Party verification mechanism and allow visits to declared nuclear facilities, a review of documents, and interviews with technical personnel--commitments later codified in a July 12 Six-Party communiqué. Pyongyang also committed to cooperate on verification in the dismantlement phase.
But Tokyo and Seoul demanded more, and President George W. Bush tried to change the terms of the agreement again. The United States handed the North Koreans a draft verification protocol and on July 30 announced it had delayed delisting North Korea as a "state sponsor of terrorism" until they accepted it. Pyongyang retaliated by suspending the disabling at its plutonium facilities at Yongbyon on August 14. Not long after, North Korea began restoring equipment at its Yongbyon facilities.
With disabling in jeopardy, U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill went to Pyongyang on October 1 with a less intrusive draft protocol in hand. His North Korean interlocutor Kim Gae Gwan agreed to allow "sampling and other forensic measures" at the three declared sites at Yongbyon--the reactor, reprocessing plant, and fuel fabrication plant. The United States believed that might suffice to ascertain how much plutonium North Korea had produced. Kim also accepted "access, based on mutual consent, to undeclared sites," according to the State Department. The oral understanding led President Bush to reverse course again on October 11 and delist North Korea as a "state sponsor of terrorism."
This move angered the hard-line Aso government in Tokyo. Seconded by an internally divided government in Seoul, it insisted that energy aid promised under the October 2007 accord be suspended until Pyongyang accepted a written protocol with more intrusive verification, and President Bush changed his stance. On December 11, the United States, Japan, and South Korea announced the decision.
In response to the renege, North Korea stopped disabling. In early February it began preparations to test-launch the Taepodong-2 in the guise of putting a satellite into orbit...
Put in this context the Blair testimony meant "expect more of the same."
Disablement reversal bottom line
What does disablement reversal mean? The best analysis comes from Sigfried Hecker
...Taking all of these factors into account, the best North Korea could do is to separate approximately 8 kilograms of bomb-grade plutonium by October 2009 and produce at most another 6 kilograms of plutonium per year for the next two to four years with its existing stocks of fresh fuel. This fuel would have to be reprocessed to be turned into bomb fuel. In the mean time, it could refurbish the fuel fabrication facility completely and continue this cycle for many years to come. North Korea has the material and manpower to do so. The only way North Korea could increase this rate of plutonium production is to build bigger gas-graphite reactors. In their April 14 statement announcing the resumption of nuclear operations, Pyongyang stated that it will consider building a light-water reactor on its own; it did not threaten to resume construction on its bigger gas-graphite plutonium production reactors, a process that would take 5 years or more because North Korea has limited industrial capacity...
The main threat from here on is not (a) massive fissile material production due to reversal of disablement (b) even transfer of fissile materials to state or non-state actors as commonly supposed, but rather (c) a slippage towards war.
The potential road to war
The Proliferation Security Initiative forms the most likely catalyst to this. The new conservative government of South Korea has indicated that it will now buy into the PSI. Whatever we might think of the PSI and North Korean nuclear and missile technology trading, and that is bad no doubt, the PSI could provide the escalatory dynamics that could lead to war. Aggressive boarding of ships to and from the North could create an incident that might escalate up towards war.
According to Cumings
...The Obama administration, and especially Secretary of State Clinton, are running on the same tracks as George Bush did in ’07 and ’08. They’re even talking about the Proliferation Security Initiative, PSI, which is something that was handcrafted by John Bolton to put pressure on North Korea...
The South Korean membership of the PSI could have implications running from it (a) being largely symbolic to (b) to be used as a means to pressure the North economically with a proliferation cover.
If it is (b) and it is done in a non-discriminating and aggressive fashion war is a likely outcome.
So, what now?
What is the appropriate policy now that we have come to this pretty pass?
I believe it to be 2 party high level talks between the United States and North Korea with no pre-conditions. I am convinced now of the main reason why Washington opposes this. This is opposed because it is felt that agreeing to 2 party talks, the main North Korean demand, will dent US global "credibility."
It won't.
This aspect reminds me of an exchange between Kissinger and De Gaulle as retold by Kissinger in his memoirs. Kissinger is asked at a diplomatic reception by De Gaulle why the US won't withdraw from Vietnam. Kissinger explained that a withdrawal from Vietnam would dent US credibility in the Middle East.
De Gaulle is reported to have replied (to the effect); "how very odd. One would have thought that it is your opponents who have the credibility problem in the Middle East."
The credibility argument here also is "how very odd" and probably made with reference to US credibility in the Middle East.
However, this argument is sloppy. Daryl Press has written an important book called Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats." At page 1
...Every country strives to make its threats and promises credible, but how is this done? What causes credibility?...
To which he answers
...This book argues that the conventional wisdom about credibility is wrong. A country's credibility, at least during crises, is driven not by its past behavior but rather by power and interests...
Engaging in two party talks with North Korea would not diminish US credibility.
What is the bottom line here? Well, it was provided by Winston Churchill (I think)...
"To jaw, jaw is better than to war, war".
Contact.
Categories
Archives
About the Author
Marko is also interested in philosophy, especially the theory of knowledge, and science, especially physics, and considers himself to work within the naturalist and enlightenment tradition. He is writing a book on nuclear terrorism.