On the heels of the resumption of U.S.-Jordanian 123 talks, the pressure on the Obama Administration to maintain its commitment to the so-called Gold Standard is getting stronger. Indeed, the pressure is coming from across the political spectrum.

In a spate of OpEds and Commentaries over the last several weeks, everyone from stalwart nonpro booster Senator Richard Lugar and former State Department eminence gris John Bolton, to anti-nuke Congressman Ed Markey have espoused the virtues of holding the line on requiring all countries with whom the Administration seeks an agreement for nuclear cooperation to forgo enrichment and reprocessing (ENR). How, they ask, can President Obama speak so passionately about reducing nuclear arsenals and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and then NOT require that non-nuclear weapons states forgo development of processes which facilitate the construction of nuclear weapons in other countries? Critics rightly point out that this is hypocrisy.  Even the “case-by’case” approach the Administration has articulated creates exceptions which would only serve to anger potential nuclear partners and, as Senator Lugar points out, unfairly isolate the UAE, which agreed to forgo ENR technologies in its agreement for cooperation.  Vietnam isn’t in the Middle East, reason the folks at Foggy Bottom, so they don’t have to forgo ENR technologies.  But, Jordan, which is in the ME, does.  To say this doesn’t pass the “blush test” is a masterpiece of understatement.  Let’s also fast-forward to the upcoming Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul.  How will President Obama defend this position to his 49 other colleagues next month?

The crucible test, of course,will be what kind of U.S.-Vietnam 123 and/or Jordan agreement the Administration submits to Congress for the statutorily-required review. If neither agreement contains the no-ENR provision, will Congress have the backbone to refuse its consent?  Will Senator Kerry, who chairs the Committee of jurisdiction (and also has Hanoi’s ear), grant Senator Lugar’s request for a hearing to conduct oversight on the Administration’s policy on requiring no-enrichment/reprocessing commitments in new nuclear cooperation agreements?  Or will he wait until he has to pass judgment, as required of him by the Atomic Energy Act, and introduce the required resolution of approval or disapproval of a Vietnam agreement which may – critics could charge – allow the communist government in Hanoi to develop the same kind of enrichment facilities that Iran has?  It is clear where Senator Lugar, the Ranking member on that Committee, stands.  However, it will be critical for Congress, as a whole, to speak with one voice. Obviously, their recent record in this regard is less than stellar.  But, the politics of this issue are different than those surrounding, say, the ratification of New START.  Taking a stand to broadly enforce the Gold Standard has something for everyone, politically speaking.  So, the possibility of a united Congress speaking as one on the need to promulgate the Gold Standard with no exceptions, albeit for different reasons, could be more likely.

Senator Lugar had hoped to convince Chairman Kerry to hold a hearing on the Administration’s “new” case-by-base policy regarding ENR technologies and 123 agreements.  However, the hearing has been postponed.  Those on both sides of the political spectrum are urging Senator Kerry to schedule and hold that hearing pronto.  It is only in doing so can Congress perform its oversight function and take the Administration to task for backpedaling on this key nonproliferation tenet.

The estimable Robert Kagan, senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brooking Institution has a new book, The World America Made (Knopf). Because Kagan is the most formidable of the neoconservative foreign policy intellectuals, and because he reputedly has the attention of both the Obama administration and the Romney campaign, a condensed version of the book that recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal has got wide attention–and wrongly so.
For the sake of brevity, I shall confine myself to Kagan’s more glaringly questionable major assertions:
“In a genuinely post-American world, the balance would shift toward the great-power autocracies.”
Why? Europe, collectively the world’s foremost economic power, hardly represents autocratic values, and nor do its major powers, Germany, France and the UK. As Kagan himself concedes, there are many other emergent democracies of considerable weight–not just Turkey, Brazil, India and South Africa, but Mexico, Argentina, South Korea and so on. Actually, there are just two important authoritarian states–China and Russia–and while it would be an overstatement to say their days are numbered, their days are surely not unnumbered.
“The balance in a new , multipolar world might be more favorable to democracy if some of the rising democracies . . picked up the slack from declining U.S. Yet not all off them have the desire of the capacity to do it.”
What slack? Cannot Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico tend to the preservation of liberal democratic values in Latin America; Japan and its neighbors in East Asia; India and its neighbors in South Africa, and so on? The various European powers always have been more engaged and active in Africa than the United States, and increasingly this is the case in the Middle East as well. (With large North African and Turkish populations, and enormously much more dependent on Gulf oil than the United States, they cannot afford to be unengaged in the Middle East, whereas the United States actually can; our involvements are a matter of choice.)
“The creation and survival of a liberal economic order has depended, historically, on great powers that are both willing and able to support open trade and free markets. If a declining America is unable to maintain its long-standing hegemony on the high seas, would other nations take on the burdens …?”
Is Mr. Kagan seriously suggesting that if the United States were to eliminate its navy, it would be the end of oceanic free trade?
“. . .the rules and institutions of international order rarely survive the decline of the nations that erected them. They are like scaffolding around a building.”
Actually, as historian Kagan must know, since 1648 and the doctrine of sovereignty, international institutions have proved much more durable in the long run that the particular sovereign nations that created them.
“… international order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others–in America’s case, the domination of free-market and democrtic principles….”
Has Kagan actually forgotten that through the Cold War and beyond American power was often used to prop up authoritarian right-wing governments, some of which could be described as fascistic? Isn’t he overlooking that the Arab spring is an uprising against old friends of the United States as well as old enemies?
You really have to be a figure of Kagan’s stature to get certain statements past a major newspaper’s top editors: America’s dominance has been generally welcome because we are “like the mobster Hyman Roth in ‘The Godfather’ “; Francis Fukuyama’s doctrine about the “end of history” has “retained its appeal” though it’s been “discredited by events.” Huh?
Tellingly, the word “Europe” appears nowhere in Kagan’s lengthy Wall Street Journal essay. Surely this is no accident. Kagan is of course best known for his short and brilliantly provocative book, Of Paradise and Power, in which he described Europeans as from Venus and Americans from Mars. Because Kagan so overemphasizes the effectiveness and importance of hard power (as Michiko Kakutani rightly observed in her scalding New York Times review), he doesn’t seem to see all the places and all the ways in which it’s soft power that’s actually getting the job done.
All this might be merely academic were it not for a new report that appeared at the beginning of this week, saying that the U.S. chief of special operations is seeking a freer hand to operate everywhere in the world. In spirit, that request is of a piece with Kagan’s notion that everything good in the world emanates from the United States. In fact, as Kakutani also pointed out, the United States is widely viewed as a bully (even to a great extent by our European allies)–and that is one reason why some countries are still seeking what they see as the great equalizer, a weapon of mass destruction.

U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross argues compellingly in today’s New York Times that Iran sanctions are biting hard and that Tehran may be getting in the mood for serious negotiations. In particular, Ross reports that Iran has declared its willingness to discuss the so-called Russian step-by-step plan, in which parties to the nuclear dispute take reciprocal actions in four stages.

As summarized by Peter Crail in an Arms Control Association issue brief on January 25, in the Russian plan:

• Iran would initially freeze expansion of its uranium enrichment program and freeze enrichment at 5 percent
• the IAEA would gradually get greater access to sensitive facilities and key individuals
• eventually Iran would suspend enrichment for three months
• the P5 + 1, collectively, would gradually lift UN sanctions
• the P5 + 1 individually would lift sanctions
• the P5 + 1 would provide incentives offered in 2006 and 2008 proposals

I remain skeptical about whether the nuclear dispute can be settled on terms that are limited essentially to elements of the dispute. But if in fact Iran is no readier for a “grand bargain” than its main counter-party, the United Stats, then perhaps the Russian plan will prove a viable way to go.

Photo Credit: Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters

Reporting in Nature, Geoff Brunfiel explains that, in May of that year, detectors in South Korean picked up some radioactive xenon which became the topic of discussion three months later at a gathering at the CTBTO. At the time, no one could figure out where the xenon came from. However, De Geer decided to examine the data more closely and, nearly a year later, concluded that the North Koreans had conducted two clandestine nuclear tests – one in April and one in May of 2010.

The appearance of xenon-133 and xenon-133m, according to De Geer, point to the possible tests in mid-April. Barium-140 and decay product lanthanum-140 were detected in May, which De Geer believes indicate a second test. “In Sweden, we saw this kind of thing decades ago from Russian underground tests.”  De Geer’s analysis will appear in the April/May issue of Science and Global Security.

But, not everyone is convinced of De Geer’s findings. Jeffrey Lewis, father of Arms Control Wonk and now director of the East Asia non-proliferation program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California and Ola Dahlman, a retired geophysicist who previously worked with the CTBTO, are skeptical that De Geer’s data conclusively point to nuke tests. Both believe that, absent additional data, including seismic data, it is not clear that the presence of xenon means that the tests did occur. Lewis, for example, points to the operation of a number of nuclear power plants in the vicinity of the sensors and which could have been responsible for the presence of xenon.

Nonetheless, the discussion surrounding the xenon detection and other data will no doubt serve to strengthen the network by encouraging analysis of abnormalities and other unexplained evidence picked up by the CTBTO’s sensors.

Meanwhile, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, the leader of the Wisconsin team contributing to the H1N5 work forcefully makes the case for urgently carrying on such work if global pandemics are to be prevented. Some opinion leaders, including the editorial board of the New York Times, have suggested that the work never should have been done in the first place. Besides rebutting that view, Kawaoka also takes exception to the Science Board’s recommendation that the bird flu papers be redacted. He argues that following the recommendation will put a huge administrative burden on the researchers, who will have to communicate omitted details to qualified researchers, without seriously impeding somebody who seriously wanted to manufacture a transmissible flu virus.

In unclassified testimony, Clapper stated that Iran is “keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons, in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. Iran nevertheless is expanding its uranium enrichment capabilities, which can be used for either civil or weapons purposes.”  This conclusion is in marked contrast to what Israeli officials are saying.

Jacqueline Martin, AP

On North Korea, he said that it was too early to tell what Kim Jong Il’s successor, Kim Jong Un, had in store, but that as a proliferator, North Korea was still a threat. Said Clapper, “[North Korea's] export of ballistic missiles and associated materials to several countries, including Iran and Syria, and its assistance to Syria — now ended — illustrate the reach of the North’s proliferation activities. We remain alert to the possibility that North Korea might again export nuclear technology.”  Clapper added that the North Korean nuclear weapons program is a continued threat to global security, though the program is intended for self-defense: “We judge that North Korea would consider using nuclear weapons only under narrow circumstances” and “probably would not attempt to use nuclear weapons against U.S. forces or territory, unless it perceived its regime to be on the verge of military defeat and risked an irretrievable loss of control.”

NTI took the time to respond to the IDSA piece, countering that it did indeed consider including radiological materials, but that “While a real threat, radiological sources vary widely in terms of type of materials, nature of application (used by a diverse set of actors and facilities for medical, industrial and research purposes), and the consequences and impact of a dirty bomb attack. As such, they require a substantially different set of security requirements. Because the dirty bomb concern is an analytically different problem, we chose to focus on how to prevent a nuclear terrorism attack using a catastrophic nuclear yield-producing device fueled by dangerous weapons-usable nuclear materials.”

As for the charge of political and Western bias, NTI countered that relied on an independent panel of experts which had “more representation from the non-Western and developing world (e.g., Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and South Africa) than any other sector to ensure the Index reflected an international point of view. The panel provided extensive input into the framework before data was gathered to ensure its objectivity.”

A little anecdote:  In the mid-1990s, a team from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission traveled to India under the helm of then-Chairman Ivan Selin.  At the time, the technical team found the safety and physical conditions of the nuclear facilities they visited strongly lacking.  Not wanting to offend their hosts, the team held their opinions.  However, Dr. Selin was so alarmed at the condition of the plants that he strongly pressed the head of the technical team to speak candidly about the condition of the nuclear facilities.  Needless to say, the Indian government was not pleased and vowed never again to allow the U.S. government to visit any of their nuclear facilities again. (Sidenote: The rift was not permanent and, after the 1998 test sanctions were lifted, the NRC again visited India and was able to gain access to the unsafeguarded nuclear plant at Chennai, as well as BARC. Yours truly was part of that visit.)

Now, the Indian government is by no means alone in showing technological pride in its innovations – after all, the Indians were cut off from Western nuclear cooperation after 1974 and, as a result, were forced to improvise, creating their own “INDU” reactor, a riff on the Canadian-Deuterium. or CANDU, Reactor given to them by Canada before the weapons test. However, as NTI rightly points out, the Index was created to instigate “a broad and deep conversation about the role of transparency in nuclear materials security…” NTI also adds that “…India and other states can take steps to make public its security regulations (absent sensitive information) and invite meaningful peer reviews.” I would add here that, of the Member States of the IAEA with nuclear power programs, one notable country has never requested a safety review of its facilities. Guess which one?

The decisions this week by the Rotterdam and Madison researchers responsible for making the H5N1 virus variant to suspend their research for 60 days, and by Science and Nature magazines honor the HHS recommendation and publish the research in a redacted form, are reassuring but also somewhat disconcerting.

The statement by the Rotterdam and Madison research leaders, co-published online by Science and Nature yesterday, makes an odd impression. Written in a curious hybrid of third-person and first-person narration, it characterizes their research as “critical information that advances our understanding of influenza transmission” and yet recognizes “that we and the rest of the scientific community need to clearly explain the benefits of this important research.” They are declaring a 60 day moratorium on their work, they say, because “organizations and governments around the world need time to find the best solutions for opportunities and challenges that stem from this work.”

Where, one wonders, are the normally outstanding editors of Science and Nature? We don’t find solutions to opportunities, and had an editor firmly pointed this out to the lead researchers, perhaps they would have had to address the real issues raised by their work rather than tiptoe around them. Their statement refers to a “perceived fear that the ferret-transmissible H5HA viruses may escape from the laboratory,” as if this were the only or the main concern. The authors do not, contrary to what The New York Times reported today, refer at all the possibility of somebody maliciously replicating the virus variant and unleashing it on the world.

The discomfiting impression is that the lead researchers just do not get it, and that they have accepted some limited restrictions kicking and screaming. That impression is amplified by what the Rotterdam lead researcher Ron Fouchier told the Times: “It is unfortunate that we need to take this step to stop the controversy in the United States,” he said. “I think if this were communicated better in the United States, it might not have been needed to do this.”

Actually, if the researchers had never publicized their news at all and instead had communicated it confidentially to relevant authorities “it might not have been needed to do this.” Perhaps the researchers could have taken inspiration from a practice common in software engineering, where discovered vulnerabilities are communicated “responsibly,” giving software engineers the opportunity to fix them before they are widely known.

However that may be, somebody should probably tell Dr. Fouchier that the United States has probably the world’s strongest prohibition on “prior restraint” in publishing, and that the principle of no prior restraint is breached only with the greatest reluctance. Over government objections, The New York Times was allowed to publish the Pentagon papers, undermining the case for the Vietnam War, and The Progressive magazine published “The H-Bomb Secret,” despite Cold War paranoia.

One of the articles posted in Science magazine’s H5N1 bird flu package yesterday does a nice job of putting the HHS recommendation in the context of concerns about prior restraint. Putting the current controversy in the context of past cases, constitutional law, and government procedure, John D. Kraemer and Lawrence O. Gostin of Georgetown University emphasize that HHS merely asked Science and Nature to exercise restraint, without ordering them to do so.

A second article makes a strong case that our main focus should be on eradicating the bird flu virus itself, not bioterrorism or laboratory escape. The two studies “are a wake up call,” says Daniel R. Perez, of the University of Maryland’s Department of Veterinary Medicine. “Make no mistake, it is likely that these viruses can emerge in the field.”

If a human-transmittable bird flu virus emerges, will we be able to detect it and counteract it before it starts to wreck havoc? Not likely, say Michael T. Osterholm and Donald A. Henderson. Osterholm, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota and Henderson, a biosecurity expert at the University of Pittsburgh, highly affected countries like Egypt and Indonesia are not doing a good job of detecting and tracking the existing bird flu virus. So the notion that the Rotterdam-Madison research must be published in every detail to give us the tools to fight a human transmittable virus does not hold water. But “should a highly transmissible and virulent H5N1 influenza virus that is of human making cause a catastrophic pandemic, whether as the result of intentional or unintentional release, the world will hold life sciences accountable for what it did or did not do to minimize that risk.”

The 60-day moratorium is a good start, but there’s every reason to think more time than that will be needed to address the complex issues raised by the modified bird flu virus, as Osterholm told a reporter for Nature. Over-eager and excessively complacent researchers like Fouchier should be ignored, and the world should take as much time as it needs to develop procedures to deal with situations like this one. Meanwhile, as Perez argues and Osterholm and Henderson imply, we need to launch a much more aggressive campaign against the existing unmodified bird flu virus.

In its latest effort to highlight the danger of loose nukes – in this case, weapons-usable nuclear material – the Nuclear Threat Initiative has launched its Nuclear Materials Security Index. The intent, according to NTI co-Chairman, Chief Executive Office and public face of NTI former Senator Sam Nunn, is to provide a “country-by-country assessment of the status of nuclear materials security conditions around the world.” The Index, which identifies North Korea and Pakistan as having the world’s worst overall atomic material security conditions among the universe of 32 nations holding a threshold level of nuclear material, is intended to help pinpoint where the trouble spots are. The threat of nuclear terrorism still exists and the index points out these all countries possessing such materials have work to do, some more than others.

At the top of the heap, the Index ranked Australia the highest of the 32 nations. Hungary and the Czech Republic came in second and third place.  The United States was given a ranking of 13, while the United Kingdom was ranked 10th.  The other remaining acknowledged nuclear powers, France, Russia and China, were respectively ranked 19th, 24th and 27th.

Developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the NTI index assesses the 32 states that possess a minimum of 1 kilogram of weapon-usable nuclear material on their overall nuclear protective conditions by looking at five broad factors: quantities and sites; security and control measures; global norms; domestic commitments and capacity; and societal factors. The index also analyzed the nuclear security conditions in 144 other nations that have less than 1 kilogram of weapon-usable material using a subset of conditions such as domestic legislation criminalizing atomic materials smuggling and participation in international nonproliferation agreements. Denmark was in the top spot on that list. Throughout the process, the EIU and NTI were advised by an international panel of experts who included former IAEA Nuclear Security head Anita Nilsson, Carlos Augusto Feu Alvim da Silva, the former head of the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC), and Harvard Belfer Center nuke expert Matthew Bunn.

Speaking at the Index release on January 10th, Nunn said that they found that, while governments were becoming more engaged on nuclear material security, there was not a consensus about what security measures mattered most. He also stated that the Index was not meant to punish the low scorers while praising the high ones. “I want to be clear that the Index is not about congratulating some and chastising others. Instead, it should be used as a tool for initiating discussion, analysis and debate, as well as beginning to help build a consensus. My bottom line: If the world is to succeed in preventing catastrophic nuclear terrorism, all countries can and must do more to strengthen security around the world’s most dangerous materials. The NTI Index challenges governments worldwide to respond to the threat by taking appropriate steps to strengthen security conditions.”

Nunn hopes that the Index will help inform the Nuclear Security Summit process, including the upcoming March meeting in South Korea.

Ahmedinejad meets with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Credti: EPA

In an Arms Control Association issue brief published on January 4, Greg Thielmann ably makes the case for trying to resolve the Iranian nuclear dilemma by means of old-fashioned diplomacy. The ACA’s introduction to the piece forcefully gets across just how drastically and dangerously U.S.-Iranian relations have deteriorated in the last months:

“At the end of 2011, the U.S. Congress passed new legislation to sanction transactions with the Central Bank of Iran. In response, Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz…. Republican presidential candidates meanwhile charged Iran with everything from building nuclear facilities under mosques to declaring its intent to attack the United States with nuclear weapons. And the Obama administration stated repeatedly that ‘the military option remains on the table.’ “

In the meantime, on a slightly more positive note, Defense Secretary Panetta has specified that (only) Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would represent a red line for the United States. And whatever Republican contenders may have been saying, it’s clear the American public wants out of the old wars the country is in and does not want to get into new ones. But today comes news of another assassination in Iran, a sharp reminder that this particular war is not merely a cold one.

Thielmann argues for opening U.S.-Iranian diplomatic channels if only to avoid possibly fatal misunderstandings. Why, if we found it possible to deal with tyrants like Stalin and Mao, he wonders, cannot we deal with the unattractive crowd currently running the show in Tehran?

I have no quarrel with anything Thielmann says here. But let me introduce just two cautionary notes as to the limits of his analysis. First, though his issue brief find many pertinent cautionary tales in the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States, we should bear in mind that the “real war” (to borrow a phrase from Richard Nixon and Walt Whitman) is not between the United States and Iran but between Iran and Israel. It is not the United States that is assassinating Iranian scientists, condoning such acts, or sabotaging nuclear facilities. Everybody knows it’s Mossad.

So if some real talking is going to take place, Israel needs to be made part of that conversation.

Second, let’s be clear that this is not just a cold war between Israel and Iran. Even during the worst years of the cold war the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union did not openly threaten to literally annihilate each other as living entities. And nor did the two superpowers assassinate each other’s scientists or blow up each other’s factories. What’s going on between Israel and Iran is virtually war, and it’s serious.

The so-called “grand bargain” between the United States and Iran–diplomatic recognition of Iran in exchange for full nuclear transparency, understandings about respective interests in Iraq, perhaps U.S. promises not to interfere in Iran’s domestic affairs for Iranian promises not to support terrorist organizations, maybe even something concerning Israel’s nuclear status and the future of a Middle Eastern nuclear-free zone–that would be much too much to hope for in a U.S. presidential election year. But in 2013? Maybe.

National Institute for Biological Standards and Control/Photo Researchers

Evidently I’m not the only one who found the genetic manipulation of the H5N1 bird flu virus quite frightening. Last Sunday, the New York Times lead editorial was devoted to “An Engineered Doomsday.” The Times takes the view that the research should never have been done at all, suggests that nothing describing it should be published, and that only a small number of laboratories should be given access to the full research results.

“The Erasmus team [that did some of the work] believes that more than 100 laboratories and perhaps 1,000 scientists around the world need to know the precise mutations to look for [so as to detect a spontaneously occurring or maliciously induced transformation of the virus into a form transmissible through the air to humans],” the Times noted. “That would spread the information far too widely. It should suffice to have a few of the most sophisticated laboratories do the analyses.”

I’m inclined to agree with that recommendation, but counterarguments could be made, ironically, on the basis of presentations delivered on Monday at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday conference in Washington, D.C. Kathleen Vogel of Cornell University and Marie Chevrier of Rutgers University, both well accredited experts on bioweapons, made the following observations:

• malignant viruses are a lot harder to make than you might think; prior to the bird flu (H5Ni) episode, there was an analogous incident in 2003, which one of the speakers analyzed; it turned out only a handful a hugely specialized labs worldwide had the equipment, personnel and know-how to replicate the malignant virus
• there has been no successful attempt to mass-manufacture a biotoxin: the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo signally failed in its efforts to produce anthrax
• nor has there been an attempt to actually commit mass murder with a bioweapon; even the presumed perpetrator of the 2003 anthrax attacks wrote on the envelopes he sent, “Contains anthrax. Take antibiotic.”
•nevertheless, bioweaponry represents a very real and scary threat; biology is now the most popular major among entering college students, because biotech is so hot; it’s the dream of all the smartest and most ambitious entering students to start inventing and fabricating new life forms; some of those students, it is implied, will turn out to be sociopaths
• accordingly, the bioweapons convention talks need to be invested with more urgency

I hope I have all that about right, and I apologize to Vogel and Chevrier if I do not. After eight straight hours of unrelenting doomsday talk, it was hard not be feel doomed and dazed.

It seems that the new year has begun with less of a bang and more of a whimper, as the venerable Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its symbolic Doomsday Clock a minute closer to midnight on Tuesday. The reason for the move: inadequate progress on nuclear weapons reduction and climate change.  The clock was moved to five minutes to midnight, the first adjustment since the beginning of 2010, when it was moved back one minute to six minutes from midnight — or “doomsday”.

In a formal statement issued at the time of its announcement, the group noted:

“It is five minutes to midnight. Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007.”

Despite the conclusion and implementation of the New START agreement, a plus in the arms control world. the Bulletin still believes much more needs to be done and that the events of the last two years warrant increasing, and not decreasing, concern.

According to Bulletin member and former United Nations under-secretary-general for Disarmament Affairs Jayantha Dhanapala:

“Despite the promise of a new spirit of international cooperation, and reductions in tensions between the United States and Russia, the Science and Security Board believes that the path toward a world free of nuclear weapons is not at all clear, and leadership is failing.  The ratification in December 2010 of the New START treaty between Russia and the United States reversed the previous drift in US-Russia nuclear relations.  However, failure to act on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by leaders in the United States, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel, and North Korea on a treaty to cut off production of nuclear weapons material continues to leave the world at risk from continued development of nuclear weapons. The world still has over 19,000 nuclear weapons, enough power to destroy the world’s inhabitants several times over.”

The Bulletin also made a number of other recommendations, including the need to strengthen the International Atomic Energy Agency’s capacity to oversee nuclear materials, technology development, and its transfer, ratification by the United States and China of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and progress on a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty; and the implementation of multinational management of the civilian nuclear energy fuel cycle with strict standards for safety, security, and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, including eliminating reprocessing for plutonium separation.

The Bulletin made the decision to move the clock closer to midnight through deliberations conducted at a symposium the day before, in which Bulletin members considered a number of topics, including civilian power after Fukushima, and prospects for disarmament.

While the perception of the Bulletin by some is that they are a bunch of bunny-hugging, left wing peaceniks, we should continue to remind ourselves that this organization was founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project.  They “created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 using  the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero), to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The decision to move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is made by the Bulletin’s Board of Directors in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies in the life sciences.”

Indeed, the Doomsday Clock continues to be a potent reminder of the “glass is half empty” scenario in the nuclear weapons world: that no matter how far we have come in disarming, the job is clearly not done.  With every step Iran, North Korea and other countries take in nuclear tipping a missile or enriching uranium to upwards of 20%, the clock ticks ever closer to the big bang we all hope to avoid.

Photo: Department of Defense

The notion of asymmetric power–referring generally to the danger of lesser powers resorting to unconventional weaponry and tactics as an answer to the United States’ immense conventional military superiority–has been in vogue among American defense analysts since the first Gulf War; Gulf War II and its aftermath, with the devastating appearance of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), gave the idea more credence than ever. So it’s important to be clear about the root of that asymmetry. It’s a result not primarily of other countries’ weakness but of the wildly over-built U.S. military and the country’s stubborn belief that it’s still its job to be the world’s policeman.

Despite the end of the Cold War, the irrelevance of a global conflict between capitalism and communism, and the unthinkability of armed conflict between what once were called the world’s two superpowers, U.S. defense spending has increased more than 50 percent since 2000. Although the United States is arguably only the world’s second largest economic power (strictly speaking the European Union is the biggest), the United States spends more on its bloated military complex that the next 10 countries combined.

President Obama made just that point in yesterday’s slightly peculiar Pentagon press briefing, which appears to have been staged to get the top brass used to the idea that defense spending cuts are ahead–and to send a message that team players will be expected to act the part of team players. But the president was not suggesting that U.S. defense spending should now be cut 50 percent and then some, which would be the logical thing to do now that the neo-imperialist fantasies of former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney have been discredited and repudiated. No, what the president was evidently doing was positioning the military to accept the $450 billion in defense cuts already mandated by the budget supercommittee, and the additional cuts of $500 billion that will have to be made if congressional Republicans and Democrats are unable to agree on alternative spending cuts. Together, those cuts would equate to about 15 percent of the U.S. military budget, as the highly respected defense analyst Lawrence Korb pointed out in an interesting exchange published in the Sunday New York Times’s Review section on Nov. 13 last year.

Korb argued that the United States could easily go further than that, for example by reducing the number of its nuclear warheads from 5,000 to 311, “as recommended by some Air Force strategists” (as he said); reducing the number of aircraft careers and Air Force fighters by 25 percent; and cutting ground forces by 100,000 to pre-9/11 levels.

Readers reacting to Korb pointed out that the United States could in fact go even further than that, for example by ending its quixotic attempt to develop a leak-proof missile defense system, retiring 50 naval ships and scrapping plans to build up to a fleet of 300 ships, dumping plans to replace the current fleet of nuclear missile submarines, and sharply curtailing the “modernization” of U.S. nuclear weapons. (In that connection, here’s another idea not mentioned by those readers: Shutter one of the country’s two nuclear weapons laboratories, either Lawrence Livermore or Los Alamos, and reduce the other’s budget by 75 percent.)

Responding to those readers, Korb said, interestingly, that he basically agreed with them. So what are the prospects of cuts going even further than those resulting from the supercommittee’s mandate? Regrettably, not good.

On the positive side of the ledger, there now seems to be a bipartisan consensus, as The New York Times has pointed out, that defense spending needs to be cut; indeed, the supercommitte’s mandate was an implicit acknowledgement of that consensus. In a poll of its readers the Times published earlier last year, when they were asked where they would most prefer to see U.S. spending reduced, defense spending ranked at the very top. Though some of the Republican presidential candidates have made intemperate remarks about taking military action against Iran, Ron Paul appears to have got considerable traction with his neo-isolationist argument that the U.S. president should first and foremost keep the country out of unnecessary armed conflicts. Whoever the Republican presidential candidate turns out to be, Obama will surely be able to prevail with a position that avoiding new military entanglements will have equal place with preparedness in his second administration.

But on the negative side, there’s no indication that the president is ready or ever will be to confront head-on the country’s military and intelligence establishments, by far the country’s biggest and more fearsome vested interest. It’s hard to imagine that any president will ever have the guts and skill to face that challenge. But until one does, American military asymmetry will continue to provoke other countries to seek an equalizer, whether it’s an old-fashioned nuke or some much more fearsome biological or chemical device.