SCOTT RITTER: The Future of US Nuclear Strategy

The state of play today regarding strategic arms control between the U.S. and Russia can best be likened to a patient on life support whom no one is trying to revive.

This makes the 2024 U.S. presidential election one of the most critical in recent history. Simply put, the future of humanity may ride on whomever the American people vote for in November 2024.

In short, a vote for either Biden/the Democratic establishment or Trump/MAGA Republicans is a vote in favor of continuous nuclear-armed Russian roulette, where there exists only one certainty — eventually the pistol will go off. But in this case, it’s not a pistol, but a nuclear weapon that leads to general nuclear war and the termination of life on planet earth as we currently know and understand it.

April 7, 2023

The fallout from Washington’s policy of seeking Russia’s strategic defeat has seen Moscow radically alter its arms control position. That raises important questions about the winner of the next U.S. presidential election.

By Scott Ritter, Consortium News

The United States finds itself wandering in a wilderness of indecision when it comes to arms control policy.

The situation regarding the status of the last existing nuclear arms control treaty with Russia — the New START treaty — is dire. Implementation is currently frozen after Russia suspended its participation in protest to a stated U.S. policy objective of seeking the strategic defeat of Russia, something Russia finds incompatible with opening its strategic nuclear deterrent (which exists precisely to prevent Russia’s strategic defeat) to inspection by U.S. officials.

The U.S. is not talking with Russia about the future of arms control once New START expires in February 2026.

Moreover, fallout from the U.S. policy of seeking strategic defeat of Russia has seen Moscow radically alter its position regarding future arms control treaties. Any future agreement must, from the Russian perspective, include missile defense; the French and British nuclear arsenals, as well as the U.S.-supplied NATO nuclear deterrent.

Russia has further complicated any future negotiations by deploying tactical nuclear weapons to its Baltic enclave in Kaliningrad, as well as extending its Russian-controlled nuclear umbrella to Belarus where it has mirrored the NATO nuclear umbrella. 

The state of play today regarding strategic arms control between the U.S. and Russia can best be likened to a patient on life support whom no one is trying to revive.

Russia is in the process of finalizing a major modernization of its strategic nuclear forces, built around the new Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and the Avangard hypersonic reentry vehicle. The United States is on the cusp of initiating its own multi-billion dollar upgrade to the U.S. nuclear Triad consisting of the B-21 stealth bomber, the Columbia class missile submarine and the new Sentinel ICBM.

If no treaty vehicle exists designed to verifiably limit the deployment of these new weapons, once New START expires, the U.S. and Russia will find themselves engaged in an unconstrained nuclear arms race that dramatically increases the probability of unintended nuclear conflict.

When viewed in this light, the future of global security hinges on the ability of Russia and the U.S. returning to the negotiating table and resuscitating arms control from its present moribund state.

Key to this will be the willingness of Washington to incorporate Russian concerns into U.S. nuclear posture. To achieve this, the U.S. nuclear establishment will have to be shaken out of the calcified policy assumptions that have guided U.S. arms control policy since the end of the Cold War.

First and foremost amongst these assumptions is the need to promote and sustain U.S. primacy in global nuclear weapons capability. Whether such an assumption is jettisoned will be tied to the person occupying the White House after the February 2026 expiration of New START.

This makes the 2024 U.S. presidential election one of the most critical in recent history. Simply put, the future of humanity may ride on whomever the American people vote for in November 2024.

………………………………………………………………………………………… Biden ran in 2020 on a promise to change U.S. nuclear strategy away from the George W. Bush-era policy, when preemptive U.S. nuclear strikes were a possibility, to a doctrine holding that U.S. nuclear forces exist for the sole purpose of deterring a nuclear attack against the U.S., or retaliating if deterrence failed.

However, once elected Biden’s promise fell to the wayside as an “interagency process” run by unelected bureaucrats and military officers intervened to prevent campaign rhetoric from becoming official policy.

Biden, like every American president before him in the nuclear age, has been unable and/or unwilling to expend the political capital necessary to take on the American nuclear enterprise, and as a result the American people and the rest of humanity are held hostage by this deadly nexus between the U.S. military industrial complex and the U.S. Congress.

Congress allocates taxpayer money to underwrite a nuclear weapons-oriented, defense industry, which in turn feeds this money back into campaign contributions that empower a compromised Congress to keep funding the nuclear enterprise – creating a vicious cycle impervious to change of its own volition.

Biden or anyone Democratic candidate in 2024 is a byproduct of this very establishment, and a willing participant in the corrupt circle of money and power that is the nuclear, military industrial-congressional complex. In short, if Biden or his proxy is sitting in the White House in 2025, there will be no change in the U.S. nuclear posture on arms control policy.

This means any Democratic Party-controlled candidate voted into office in November 2024 may very well be the last president to hold office, given the probability of nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, which an unchanged nuclear posture and arms control policy will foster.

The Trump Standard

…………………………………………………. Whether Trump could pull off a second successful presidential run is not the issue here. Instead, the question is whether Trump can promote an arms control stance different from Biden and the Democratic and Republican establishments that could break free of existing constraints — giving arms control a chance.

Trump’s track record is decidedly mixed in this regard…………………..

Trump’s willingness to break free of the ideological prison of rampant Russophobia by considering the possibility of friendly relations between the U.S. and Russia makes him unique among mainstream presidential candidates of either party……………………………………………………………

But there is another side to Trump which bodes poorly for any meaningful change in U.S.-Russian arms control. First and foremost is his abysmal record on arms control……………………………………………….

The bottom line is that the “Trump Standard” for arms control is in many ways even more dangerous than that of the “establishment,” promoting as it does an aggressive posture founded in dominance.

In the end, Trump proved incapable of acting on his own belief, allowing himself to be subordinated to a radical America-first national security ideology which promoted the enhancement and expansion of the American nuclear enterprise — the exact opposite trajectory the U.S. needs to be taking come 2024.

There is no reasonable expectation that a second Trump term would deviate meaningfully from that track record. 

A New American Standard in Arms Control

The harsh reality today is that neither of the two potential sources of viable presidential candidates for the 2024 election — Democratic National Committee or MAGA Republicans — are positioned to effect meaningful, positive change regarding either U.S. nuclear posture or underlying arms control policy.

That leaves the American people, and the world as a whole, with the inevitability of a massive nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia, which will unfold unconstrained by meaningful arms control treaty-mandated limitations………………………..

In short, a vote for either Biden/the Democratic establishment or Trump/MAGA Republicans is a vote in favor of continuous nuclear-armed Russian roulette, where there exists only one certainty — eventually the pistol will go off. But in this case, it’s not a pistol, but a nuclear weapon that leads to general nuclear war and the termination of life on planet earth as we currently know and understand it.

The rally held in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 19 provided a platform for some voices of sanity who have presidential potential, either as independent candidates, or rogue outliers within their respective party establishments. Tulsi Gabbard, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, and Jimmy Dore all addressed the threat posed by nuclear weapons and the need to control them through meaningful arms control.

But none who spoke have put anything in writing that would remotely constitute an arms control “standard” that could compete with either Biden or Trump — or their proxies — on the public stage. Moreover, other than Dore, a comedian, none of these individuals has announced an intention to run, making moot, for the moment at least, the notion of a third option on arms control and American nuclear posture.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, has announced his intention to challenge Biden for the Democratic nomination…………………………………

Kennedy has not published a detailed position on arms control and the U.S. nuclear posture. But in a recent conversation with me, he spoke about the legacy of his uncle, Jack Kennedy, and how he took guidance from that legacy.

Any man who draws upon the wisdom and patience displayed by President Kennedy to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis would be on the right track when it comes to arms control. https://consortiumnews.com/2023/04/07/scott-ritter-the-future-of-us-nuclear-strategy/

April 9, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | 1 Comment

US Department of Energy is once again promoting large nuclear reactors, despite lack of supply chain and absurdly unaffordable costs

 The US Department of Energy (DOE) is once again promoting large-scale
reactors after spending a decade advancing smaller models. It boldly
declares in a report last month that the domestic nuclear industry has the
potential to “scale from ~100 GW in 2023 to ~300 GW by 2050 — driven by
deployment of advanced nuclear technologies.”

This is beyond absurd — it’s irresponsible.

It’s absurd because the US no longer has the supply
chain needed for large-scale nuclear projects — it can’t even forge a
pressure vessel; it’s irresponsible because the cost of building 200-300
new reactors would be more than $3 trillion.

Resources devoted to rescuing
a dying industry are resources that wouldn’t be available for viable,
less-costly strategies to achieve net-zero emissions in the power sector.

More than that, the report reflects an energy agency still dominated by a
nuclear-centric culture, and badly out of step with the times.

 Energy Intelligence 3rd April 2023

https://www.energyintel.com/00000187-2f8a-db48-adf7-ef9af9880000

April 8, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

What nuclear disarmament leadership should look like — Beyond Nuclear International

Risk of nuclear war is too great for inaction

What nuclear disarmament leadership should look like — Beyond Nuclear International

Time to chart a new path before disaster strikes

By Robert Dodge and Sean Meyer

President Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement that Russia was suspending its participation in the New START Treaty—the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia—is the latest, stark reminder of the nuclear brink on which the world finds itself. This is on the heels of repeated reckless threats from Putin and other Russian officials to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine and at a time of rapidly deteriorating relations with China.

In short, the risk of nuclear war is all too real, perhaps greater than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It’s well past time for the United States, Russia, and the rest of the world’s nuclear powers to revitalize global nuclear disarmament efforts and take concrete steps to prevent nuclear war.

For its part, Congress has a very important role and voice in championing nuclear risk reduction and disarmament. Unfortunately, very few members have made this existential threat to humanity the priority it needs to be. That needs to change before the unthinkable happens.

…………………..  here’s today’s reality: in less than one hour, billions of people could be killed because of an accident, miscalculation, or one person making a very bad decision. Last August, a landmark scientific study laid bare shocking truths about the potential consequences if even a small percentage of the world’s 13,000+ nuclear weapons are detonated over cities. The result would be catastrophic, with the ensuing climate disruption starving and killing hundreds of millions, even billions, of people and effectively ending human civilization as we know it. A large-scale nuclear conflict between the U.S. and Russia could lead to the deaths of up to 75% of the world’s population.

This time of war and heightened global tensions is precisely the right time for the United States, Russia, China, and all nuclear weapons states to recognize their mutual self-interest, and that of all humanity, in preventing a catastrophic nuclear war. Global adversaries can and must work together to solve global problems, especially in times of crisis or heightened tensions. This is exactly what President Ronald Reagan and then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev did in the 1980s resulting in landmark nuclear arms control agreements that made the world a safer place.

Certainly, the problem won’t be addressed without leadership and new, bold thinking. Importantly, President Joe Biden needs to know that members of Congress, and the public, will have his back if he pursues a global nuclear disarmament agenda, even if it means negotiating with adversaries like Russia and China.

For members of the House, there’s one simple step they can take to show that leadership and signal to the administration and their constituents that this issue is important to them. They should co-sponsor H. Res. 77 introduced on January 31st by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.).

H. Res 77 calls on the United States to embrace the goals and provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which has now been signed by 92 countries and ratified by 66 of them “to actively pursue and conclude negotiations on a new, bilateral nuclear arms control and disarmament framework agreement with the Russian Federation before 2026 as well as to pursue negotiations with China and all other nuclear-armed states on an agreement or agreements for the verifiable, enforceable, and timebound elimination of global nuclear arsenals.”

H. Res 77 further calls for the the U.S. to lead a global effort to reduce nuclear risks and prevent nuclear war by

adopting the following common sense policies:

• Renounce the option of using nuclear weapons first;
• End the President’s sole authority to launch a nuclear attack;
• Take U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; and
• Cancel the plan to replace the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States with modernized, enhanced weapons at a cost that could exceed $2 trillion.

And there’s widespread public support for these policies. To date, over 70 municipal, county, and state governments including Los Angeles, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, and many more have passed resolutions advocating for these very policies that have been organized by Back From the Brink, the national grassroots nuclear weapons abolition campaign. Some 150 local, state, and national organizations including the Union of Concerned Scientists, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Peace Action, Public Citizen, and dozens of faith organizations have endorsed H. Res 77……………. more https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/04/02/what-nuclear-disarmament-leadership-should-look-like/
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April 3, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment