Federal Judiciary

JAMES JAY CARAFANO
The president lists five priorities in the NPR. Defending the U.S. isn?t one of them.

You?d think it would be job Number One. That?s why we invented nukes. Instead, the Review is largely a political document for trumpeting the president?s ?road to zero,? a vision that will leave the U.S. with a smaller, less reliable, less credible nuclear force -- making the world a more dangerous place.

Maintaining a strong nuclear deterrent and combating proliferation are not incompatible, as the Review suggests they are. The last administration made great efforts in pursuit of nonproliferation (such as the Proliferation Security Initiative) without gutting the U.S. arsenal.

The NPR also makes a muddle of U.S. declaratory policy. Written under Carter and reaffirmed by Clinton (after the Cold War ended), the old policy served us well. Obama has substituted a lawyerly mess that will confuse allies and adversaries alike.

The correct U.S. defense strategy would emphasize:

a modernized, credible nuclear force;

comprehensive missile defense;

robust conventional forces, as well as vigorous efforts to prevent proliferation, illicit trafficking in nuclear technology and materials; and

combating terrorism.

That would be a more robust and effective deterrent for a post-Cold War world than Obama?s road to nowhere.

-- James Jay Carafano is director of the Heritage Foundation?s Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies and deputy director of Heritage?s Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for International Studies.

JAMIE M. FLY
The nuts and bolts of the NPR report are not that dramatic -- the document has the imprimatur of Secretary of Defense Gates on it and therefore does not represent a major departure from the policies pursued by the Bush administration.

That said, there is also the clear imprint of this president?s conviction that by reducing U.S. nuclear weapons and, in the case of the new declaratory policy, limiting our use of them, we may be able to convince rogue regimes such as those in Iran and North Korea that the path to greater security lies in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

This is pure fantasy. Iran and North Korea do not care how many nuclear weapons the United States possesses, and a promise to use nuclear weapons against them only if they are in noncompliance with the international nonproliferation regime will not cause them to modify their behavior.

Some will argue that the declaratory-policy change represented by this document is so minimal that it is harmless. The problem is that this Nuclear Posture Review is littered with references to existing treaties that our enemies disregard and treaties yet to be negotiated that will take years of diplomatic effort to achieve but do little to make Americans more secure. Releasing such a document does nothing to confront the actual threat to the international nonproliferation regime. That threat is not the U.S. nuclear arsenal; it is a nuclear Iran.

-- Jamie M. Fly is executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative.

BRIAN T. KENNEDY
The Nuclear Posture Review has just been released. Would that it had not. One does not have to read too far into it to see the amazing capacity human beings have for self-deception.

There is much in it that simply re-articulates the American Left?s antipathy to our strategic nuclear arsenal, the weapons system that has checked the aggression of totalitarian states against the free world for six decades. This was to be expected. More striking is the transparent naïveté contained within the president?s ?vision? of a world without nuclear weapons and its bold and bizarre assertion that Russia is not our enemy. Much as we would hope otherwise, the Russians continue to build ever more advanced ballistic nuclear missiles, supply Iran with the technology and knowhow to develop such weapons for use against the United States and Israel, and, with the Communist Chinese, seek to marginalize the United States and its allies.

The morality and economy of nuclear weapons is painfully simple: They are hideous weapons absolutely essential to our national survival. So long as they exist, and exist they will, we must have the world?s most effective nuclear arsenal and must possess a missile-defense system to protect ourselves against any nation that employs nuclear weapons. We do so in order to comply with the Constitution?s requirement to provide for the common defense of these United States. The NPR, with its declaration to build no new nuclear weapons and to refrain from building missile defenses against the Russians and the Chinese, is a signal that the Obama administration, as a matter of high government policy, would neglect that responsibility.

-- Brian T. Kennedy is president of the Claremont Institute and  publisher of the Claremont Review of Books.

CLIFFORD D. MAY
Let me see if I have this straight: Iran is developing nuclear weapons and threatening to use them and/or share them with terrorists. In response, President Obama has renounced the development of any new nuclear weapons by the U.S. and pledged that America will not deploy nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries -- not even in retaliation for a biological or chemical attack, assuming, of course, that said attacker is, at the time of said attack, in compliance with its nonproliferation obligations under international treaties.

Well, if that?s not worth a second Nobel Peace Prize, what would be?

Seriously, the least one can say about Obama?s new Nuclear Posture Review is that it is -- as advertised -- posturing. As foreign/defense policy, it makes little sense.

Which past American president -- other than Harry Truman -- has spent any time sitting around the Oval Office contemplating nuking a foreign country, least of all one that possesses no nuclear weapons?

And who really believes that this document will persuade a future president to rule out deploying whatever weapons would be most effective to bring down a regime that had just used a disease bomb to exterminate the good citizens of Los Angeles?

Russia?s Vladimir Putin and China?s Hu Jintao must be rolling their eyes. When they are done, they?ll think hard about how to gain a lead in the arms race Obama has decided not to run. They?ll note, too, that Obama is simultaneously slashing missile defense.

 As for Iran?s jihadist rulers, we can confidently assume they view this development not as a virtuous act that ought to be emulated, but as one more sign of a weakening America. If the U.S. no longer wants to be seen as nuclear power to be reckoned with, that?s welcome news for those regimes that do.

-- Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.

TOM NICHOLS
For all the sound and fury surrounding the release (finally) of the Nuclear Posture Review, it is not a revolutionary or radical change in U.S. strategy.

And that?s the problem.

The NPR, insofar as it says very much, only acknowledges things that are obvious, particularly that the threat to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states using non-nuclear weapons was never a credible -- or morally defensible -- threat. Was it truly likely that any president, of any party, would respond to the use of a chemical weapon by, say, North Korea, by consequently incinerating millions of innocent North Korean civilians and covering large swaths of South Korea, Japan, and other nations in radioactive debris for weeks? An unlikely response, at best, and one that would have turned the entire world, even our closest allies, against us. And so the NPR tries to make a virtue of necessity by making common sense seem like a step forward. (On the other hand, given the poor public diplomacy of the Bush 43 administration, it probably didn?t hurt to say some of these things out loud.)

The larger problem is that the NPR is very clear on carrots -- including a long-overdue commitment to reducing the centrality of nuclear weapons in U.S. national-security strategy -- but lacks any corresponding sticks. The Posture Review says that the United States will enhance its conventional capabilities as a deterrent. But what does that mean? How, exactly, would those conventional capabilities (which are going to cost a lot more than nuclear weapons) deter rogue states?

And here the NPR swerves away from the obvious answer: Conventional capabilities mean conventional war. The classical model of deterrence that governs our nuclear relations with the Russians and the Chinese never made much sense for dealing with small countries in crowded neighborhoods. Unfortunately, the NPR not only preserves outdated thinking about nuclear forces (such as retaining the nuclear holy ?Triad? that includes heavy bombers), but it does not move forward and take on the hard question of what conventionally deterring -- and even destroying -- rogue regimes would really involve if all else failed.

Until we are ready to confront that reality, our thinking about nuclear weapons will continue to be little more than an extension of our previous concepts, only at smaller numbers -- a kind of ?mini-me? of our Cold War policies. (It is telling that we publicly agreed to nuclear limits with the Russians before releasing our own nuclear review, which, even if only as a matter of public diplomacy, seems backward and makes the NPR seem like an afterthought.) The NPR should not be criticized for being too bold; rather, it should be lamented as a missed opportunity to send a real warning to future proliferators about what awaits them if they do not change their ways.

-- Tom Nichols is a professor at the Naval War College and a fellow of the International Security Program and the Project on Managing the Atom at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The views expressed are his own.

DAVID TRACHTENBERG
The Obama administration?s Nuclear Posture Review represents another step toward rationalizing the president?s goal of moving toward a world without nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, that goal is ill-advised at best and dangerous at worst.

The NPR weakens the deterrence policy of ?calculated ambiguity? that has been part of every administration?s nuclear strategy -- both Republican and Democrat -- and retreats from the threat of nuclear retaliation against an adversary using chemical or biological weapons. This may increase rather than decrease the risk of such an attack.

It says regional deterrence will be strengthened -- but it supports additional cuts to the U.S. ?nuclear umbrella,? which guarantees the security of some 30 other countries. In so doing, it may drive at least some of them to seek their own nuclear deterrents, undermining our nonproliferation objectives.

By justifying the arms-control cuts reflected in the New START treaty, the NPR ignores the fact that what allows the administration to seek significant nuclear reductions -- our overwhelming conventional superiority -- also drives others to seek nuclear weapons to offset that superiority. Consequently, instead of setting an example for others to follow, the NPR is likely to have the opposite effect by encouraging the proliferation of the very weapons we seek to abolish. Because of this, the vision of a nuclear-free world is likely to remain unfulfilled.

-- David Trachtenberg was the principal assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs at DOD for President George W. Bush and the principal author of the previous nuclear posture review.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on April 07, 2010 (boomark / email).