Good morning, everyone.  With so much else going on in our national politics and in the Washington policy community, it’s a special pleasure to see a group of Senators, Representatives, staffers, and policy community experts come together to talk about arms control and its possible future.  Thank you, Senator Paul, for asking me to speak to the group today.

I’ve been asked to talk about whether or not arms control is “dead,” and I’m happy to oblige.  Naturally, these remarks represent only my personal views, as I cannot speak for anyone else.  But it is an important topic.

To say that arms control is “dead” would be strong statement, however, and might seem to imply that we should give up hope of seeing it “alive” again.  And I’d say that conclusion would be too strong.  Arms control may be in a coma right now, but if you bear with me, I’ll try to explain how we can perhaps revive the poor, bedraggled thing.

The Collapse of the Arms Control Enterprise

We really have been on a most remarkable journey.  I am old enough to remember the early post-Cold War years of arms control optimism, which gave rise in some quarters of the Western policy community to a remarkably powerful belief in the teleology of “zero” – that is, a belief that we would eventually and inevitably achieve the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons in a peaceful world finally free of the ugly challenges of great power rivalry.  (After all, if miracles like the dissolution of the Soviet Empire could happen, why not abolition?)  It seemed a heady time. 

For all this psychic energy of that period, however – and the rosy glow with which it often seems that people remember it – its worth remembering that things began to fray relatively quickly.  The second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty(START II) – the follow-on to the original START which set the superpowers’ strategic arsensals on a trajectory that sees them today at a fraction of their Cold War levels – was signed in 1993 and approved by the U.S. Senate in 1996, but it never came into force because the Russian Duma refused to endorse it.

That was, with hindsight, perhaps a sign of problems to come.  But some of the early challenges to the U.S.-Russian arms control enterprise did not actually have to do with the United States and Russia at all.  Instead, they derived from the growing missile threats to the United States and other Western countries from third-party proliferators, particularly North Korea.  The growth of missile threats against U.S. homeland from such rogue regimes – as highlighted in 1998 by the Rumsfeld Commission Report – put growing pressure on Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972, pursuant to which the United States and the USSR had sharply limited their possession of ABM systems. 

For some time, the Clinton Administration negotiated small adjustments in interpretation of ABM Treaty in response to such pressures.  Before too long, however, those tweaks became increasingly unviable as long-range North Koran missile capabilities improved, and in the wake of U.S. intelligence assessments that Pyongyang had separated plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, and may indeed have built some.  Eventually, driven by such “third-party pressures,” the United States pulled out of the ABM Treaty in 2002.

It’s important to remember, however, that despite many later claims to the contrary, the impact of that U.S. decision upon arms control more broadly was fairly modest.  To be sure, the day after the U.S. withdrawal from ABM became effective, Vladimir Putin formally pulled Russia out of START II.  Nevertheless, as noted, that agreement was already moribund, because the Russian Duma had refused to ratify it.  One shouldn’t let Putin’s later posturing lead us to forget that Russia was not actually furious over the end of the ABM Treaty in nearly the ways it later claimed to have been.  Indeed, Russia was perfectly happy signing a new strategic arms treaty with the United States – the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty(SORT, a.k.a. the “Moscow Treaty”) – just a few months after the United States announced it was pulling out of ABM.  So arms control remained reasonably healthy then

That said, clouds were certainly starting to gather on the horizon even in the mid-2000s.  U.S. officials revealed in 2006, for example, that Russia had never fulfilled all its promises under the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) of 1991 and 1992, meaning that Moscow had retained considerable numbers of shorter-range nuclear forces after the United States had fulfilled its own PNI promises by scrapping most U.S. systems.  Nevertheless, the Moscow Treaty remained in place until it was replaced – amidst great Obama Administration disarmament fanfare – by the New START agreement of 2010, which continued the then-ongoing process of post-Cold War strategic reductions.

But Russian behavior was by then already worsening.  As we now understand, even before the Kremlin agreed to New START, it had in 2008 begun illegally testing a cruise missile that violated the terms of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987 – the pathbreaking agreement the Reagan Administration reached with the USSR to entirely eliminate that entire class of nuclear delivery system.  After entirely unsuccessful private remonstrations with the Russians over this illegal new missile, U.S. officials publicly assessed this INF Treaty violation in July 2014. 

Even after this finding, the United States did little to respond to Russia’s violation for some years except wag its finger; nor did Russia change course.  Even after we made clear early in the Trump Administration that we would no longer tolerate Russia violating INF while we refrained from developing INF-range missiles and began research and development (R&D) work on our own (conventionally armed) systems to put pressure on Moscow, the Kremlin refused to return to compliance.  By 2019, in fact, Russia had moved from flight testing its illegal missile to having that weapon reach operational capability, moving into full production and even deployment.  Accordingly, the United States pulled outof the INF Treaty.  (Elsewhere on the nuclar front, U.S. officials also revealed in 2019 that Russia had not adhered to its proclaimed moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, and had in fact secretly been conducting low yield nuclear tests.)  After years of negotiated reductions undertaken jointly with the United States, Russia was now clearly beginning to rebuild a more Cold War-style nuclear arsenal.

Nor were nuclear arms treaties the only institutional elements falling apart under the pressure of the Kremlin’s renewed neoimperialist ambitions.  In 2007, Russia had “suspended” its observance of – that is, began violating – the Conventional Forces in Europe (CTE) Treaty, slipping out of its restrictions on and transparency requirements for large-scale troop movements just in time to mount Putin’s war against Georgia in 2008. 

The Open Skies Treaty (OST) also came increasingly under pressure from Russian violations.  In fact, Moscow had neverhaving fully complied with it, and eventually also tried to use OST point-of-entry and flight path restrictions in an effort to symbolically validate Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, as well as the proxy-territory spoils of the Georgia war. (In the face of such gamesmanship, the United States pulled out of the OST in 2020.)  Putin’s government also announced in 2012 that it would end its involvement in the Cooperative Threat Reduction program (CTR, a.k.a. “Nunn-Lugar”) with the United States.

As if all this demolition of the post-Cold War arms control framework wasn’t enough, Russia also engaged in multiple violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) of 1997.  It not only maintained an illegal offensive chemical weapons (CW) program that included new types of nerve agents (the so-called “novichok” agents), but it actually also used these agents – not merely in an attempt to kill Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020, but also in an assassination attempt against a Russian defector (and British citizen) in the United Kingdom in 2018.  More recently, Russia has been using chemical agents in its Ukraine war in ways that are also illegal under the CWC.

Making matters worse, Russia maintains an offensive biological weapons (BW) program in violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, as revealed by sanctions decisions by Trump Administration in August 2020, and formally confirmed by the Biden Administration in 2021.  With its attacks on Ukraine beginning in 2014, Russia also broke the pledge to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity it had made in the Budapest Declaration of 1994—an assurance which had been critical to securing Kiev’s agreement to relinquish the nuclear weapons stranded on its territory upon the USSR’s collapse. 

All in all, therefore, the Putin regime’s record of arms control-related compliance has been truly appalling.  He has literally kept none of his legally-binding obligations, and under pressure from Putin’s desire to rearm Russia and to turn its energies to recreating a neo-tsarist imperium, almost the entire existing arms control framework has fallen apart. 

Today, all that remains – sort of – is New START, though it will itself expire in 2026.  Even there, moreover, Putin has for the better part of the last decade also been developing new strategic systems that are not covered by that agreement at all. (These include a bizarre nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed cruise missile and underwater drone torpedo.)  Beginning in 2023, moreover, Russia began to violate the terms of New START too, by refusing to permit required missile inspections and convene Treaty-required meetings.

For its part, China hasn’t been ripping apart the arms control enterprise with Putin’s gusto.  This is only, however, because China never let itself become involved in arms control in the first place.  To this day, Beijing shuns even the idea of talking about arms control with the United States. 

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party is now building up an increasingly large nuclear arsenal and seems to be on a sprint to achieve at least strategic nuclear parity with the United States and with Russia.  Specifically, the Pentagon predicts that Beijing “will likely field a stockpile of around 1,500 warheads” by 2035, which closely parallels our own current New START limit of 1,550 operationally deployed weapons.  Making matters worse and raising further serious questions about the future, U.S. assessments have also questioned whether China has secretly been conducting low-yield nuclear weapons tests.  (Nor, for that matter, has China eliminated its old biological weapons program, even while it has engaged in various activities that raise questions about whether it has an active offensive BW program today.)

After that optimistic start in the 1990s, in other words, post-Cold War arms control has certainly been a pretty grim trajectory. 

A Revisionist Agenda

Especially with regard to Russia, by the way, it is not merely that Russia under Vladimir Putin has been revealed as a congenital violator of arms control agreements.  It is also that Putin has worked to systematically weaponize arms control institutions – and the United States’ remarkable and sometimes dumbfounding commitment to observing arms control agreements for long periods of time even when Russia isn’t – in service of his agenda of bellicose strategic revisionism. 

By not fulfilling its PNI promises to reduce shorter-range systems and by violating the INF Treaty, for example – even while we in America remained faithful to our own commitments and obligations – Russia was able to amass theater-range nuclear assets that it now uses in nuclear saber-rattling and coercive bargaining against NATO in an effort to deter us from providing military equipment to the Ukrainians Putin wishes to conquer and subjugate.  Violating the CFE Treaty also helped the Russians accumulate and position conventional forces that it has used in wars of regional aggression, first against Georgia in 2008 and then against Ukraine in 2014 and in 2022.  All in all, Putin has used the violation and manipulation of arms control agreements to help him develop and deploy what I have for years called his “offensive nuclear umbrella” – that is, a protective shield of nuclear posture and threat-making designed to deter the rest of the world from stopping his efforts to devour his neighbors.

Meanwhile, Russia’s violations of the CWC have given it nerve agents with which it has tried to assassinate Russian defectors abroad and dissidents at home, and other chemical agents it illegally uses in Ukraine today.  And its most recent violations of New START have reduced our own ability to understand the state of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, even as the Kremlin continues to build new strategic systems that aren’t covered by New START, and apparently also to conduct secret, low-yield nuclear weapons tests as part of its ongoing nuclear weapons development and maintenance program.

This all bodes exceedingly ill.  As also occurred in the 1930s as the authoritarian revisionists of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan – each on their own trajectory toward aggressive war against its neighbors – all gradually turned away from and undermined the multilateral framework for naval arms control that had been established in the 1920s after the First World War, so too has Russia undermined (and China shunned) the architecture of arms control restraints we inherited from the waning years of the Cold War and the heady 1990s period of institution-building. 

So this certainly leads raises questions about whether arms control is “dead.”

A Framework for Considering Arms Control Availability

In a paper I published with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory earlier this year, I discussed the prospect of future arms control agreements through a conceptual framework for assessing the availability of arms control.  In contemplating the potential “availability” of arms control, I tried to think through how likely it would be that two would-be arms control counterparties would try to reach an agreement with each other, and how likely it would be (if they tried) that they would be able to come to terms. 

To make rather a long story shorter, my conclusions were not encouraging – at least not with regard to the short- or medium-term prospects for arms control success. 

In that paper, I hypothesized the existence of what I termed a “continuum of community” – a sort of sliding scale depicting the degree to which would-be counterparties trust each other, the degree to which see their security interests as being in at least some respect congruent, and the degree to which they generally feel at lesat some sense of shared “community.”  The would-be parties’ location along this continuum, I argued, helps shape the de facto availability of arms control. 

But I don’t meant that high degrees of trust, shared security interests, and a sense of affinity are requirements for arms control success.  In fact, if you have a lot of those things, you don’t need arms control in the first place, since the perceived security interests of the two would-be arms control counterparties won’t fundamentally diverge very much. 

So imagine that continuum depicting varying degrees of trust, shared security interests, and sense of affinity.  On the left-hand side these factors are high.  There, I submit, arms control is unnecessary – and indeed, even suggesting arms control might be problematic.  (You only need arms control where you worry about the other side’s capabilities and intentions, after all.  I’d imagine that British leaders might find it offensive, for instance, if we urged them to sign an arms control agreement with the United States!  Why on Earth would that be needed?)

Arms control comes into its own, however, as one moves “rightward” along the “continuum of community” into zones where security interests are more oppositional and trust declines – that is, where there is much less of a sense ofcommunity at all, and more of a general sense of antagonism.  There, the structure and formalities of an institutional arms control framework might indeed be useful in helping to channel dangerous competitive energies and manage nuclear risks between rivals. 

As I explained in that paper, in this “arms control zone,” arms control counterparties generally regard each other with considerable worry and concern—which is why arms race and nuclear escalation concerns arise in the first place, making arms control potentially useful.  Nevertheless, they still retain at least enough minimal sense of community and trust that they regard it as theoretically possible to make deals with each other.  There is no love between such partners, in other words, but this territory in the broad middle of the continuum is where at least some agreement remains possible, at least if it is negotiated carefully and accompanied by appropriate safeguards.

The problem comes on the far right-hand side, however, where there really is no sense of community, where interests are felt to conflict perhaps even existentially, and where trust is almost entirely lacking.  Over on that end, I argue, arms control becomes much more problematic, arguably to the point of impossibility, because the parties regard each other with such distrust and antagonism that there is virtually no way that any agreement would really be attempted, an agreement would be unlikely to be trusted, and it would be unclear even that both parties would actually fully comply with it in the first place. 

In my paper, I argued that you can basically track the evolution of U.S. and Russian perceptions of each other as movements back and forth along that continuum.  There were points in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin in the early years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for instance, when Washington and Moscow looked at each other warmly enough that you almost didn’t need arms control.   

Indeed, you might say that for a while, U.S. arms control treaties with Russia didn’t realy need to be “negotiated” at all. The Moscow Treaty of 2002, after all, just codified strategic arms reductions that both U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin had already and independently agreed to make, and that each had already unilaterally announced.  (That agreement only took treaty form because the Russians valued the political symbolism of a legally-binding deal with America.  Both sides’ actual arms reductions were going to happen anyway.) 

In those days, one could thus say, both we and the Russians still both felt each other to be reasonably comfortably on the “happy” left-hand side of my hypothesized continuum.  We weren’t nearly as far over to the left on the scale as we were – and have remained – vis-à-vis Britain, of course, but the two big nuclear powers were certainly not then in bad territory.

Over time, however, as the Putin regime began to violate arms control deals and turned with increasingly aggressive predatory hunger on its neighbors from the late 2000s, that changed on both sides – and by a lot.  In my paper, in fact, I speculated that perhaps U.S. and Russian mutual perceptions have today slid so far to the right along the continuum that arms control may not be presently “available” as a policy option for the two sides at all.

Particularly as a result of Russia’s attempt to finish invading, occupying, and annexing Ukraine in 2022 – not to mention the atrocities and abuses associated with its military operations there – the Biden administration came to perceive the Russo-American relationship in almost apocalyptic, existentially conflictual terms.  President Biden, for instance, has described the conflict over Urkaine’s fate as demonstrating the existence of an epochal “battle between democracy and autocracies.”  In his 2022 National Security Strategy, the U.S. relationship with Russia (and with China) was similarly depicted as “a strategic competition to shape the future of the international order.”  For him, the conflict is, in effect, structurally systemic, and existential: Russia’s aggression “sought to shake the very foundations of the free world.”

For Biden, not only was negotiation and cooperative engagement with Russia all but impossible, but it would apparently also continue to be impossible for so long as Putin was in charge in the Kremlin. “President Putin,” Biden has declared, had “spurned [all prior U.S. efforts at constructive engagement] and it is now clear he will not change.  Russia now poses an immediate and persistent threat to international peace and security.”

At the same time, Russian rhetoric and posturing about the United States and the West has become even moreapocalyptic.  Trends in Russian depictions of the United States had been worsening for years, but they are incomparably worse today than even a few years ago. 

The U.S. leadership role and American influence in the world, Putin has fulminated, is “simply a means of justifying dictatorship over people and countries,” and pushing back against malevolent outside pressures orchestrated by the West is Russia’s holy duty as “a state-civilization, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, [the] Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions.”

This sense of civilizational oppositionalism and inherent conflict with the West – and with the United States in particular – became almost feverish in 2022 as the Kremlin worked to complete the war against Ukrainian sovereignty it had begun in 2014.  The West, Putin declared, was “racist and neocolonial,” even “Satanic,” and it was Russia’s sacred civilizational duty to defend and promote Russian “traditional values” – which Putin seems to envison as being more or less synomyous with the “official nationality” of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” propounded by the government of Tsar Nicholas I in the early 19^th Century.  The creation of his own neo-tsarist imperium, Putin made clear, includes the imperative of simply erasing Ukraine, the very existence of which Putin has described as so offensive that it is “comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.”

Both of the would-be U.S. and Russian arms control counterparties, therefore, seem to be quite far out there on the right-hand end of the “continuum of community” – out where where antagonism is so great, trust is so lacking, and interests are perceived to diverge so fundamentally that it’s very hard to imagine them being able to successfully negotiate (or sustain) a viable agreement.  This is challenging territory indeed.

Nor, I should add, is it just a question of the current U.S.-Russian relationship being remarkably poisonous.  Quite irrespective of whatever appraoch President-Elect Trump will end up taking to Russia, Putin’s track record as a congenital violator of arms control agreements – and of trying weaponize the West’s earnest arms control intentions for strategic advantage – would make it exceedingly hard for American leaders to trust him even if the contours of a meaningful agreement were more apparent.

When it comes to China, moreover, both the fist Trump Administration and the Biden Administration perceived Beijing to present a tremendous threat.  With his pivotal National Security Strategy of 2017, of course, Donald Trump set in motion an official U.S. shift to prioritizing great power competition against revisionist autocrats such as China.  For its part, the Biden Administration also sees China as “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security. 

Neither these U.S. perceptions of China nor China’s rhetoric about the United States presently have the dark tone or intensity of the U.S.-Russian relationship, of course.  In my schema of the “continuum of community,” therefore, arms control negotiation may remain theoretically possibile between Washington and Beijing.  The problem, however, is that China has actively spurned U.S. efforts even to discuss possible concepts for some kind of arms control relationship with the United States, or trilaterally between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.

As you may remember, when I was sitting in the seat of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and Nonproliferation during the Trump administration, we proposed a “trilateral” arms control deal with China and Russia that would have involved a de facto “freeze” on nuclear force expansion through an “unprecedented overall warhead cap” – either as an enduring way to forstall an arms race between us, or at least as a temporary expedient to slow the bleeding and buy time in which to try to negotiate something more permanent.  Yet China wasn’t interested, and it remainsuninterested, even in talking about possibilities for arms control.  As the saying goes, it takes two to Tango, and at the moment Beijing clearly feels no incentive to negotiate.

A Way Forward

So where does this leave us?  Beijing is uninterested in arms control while it sprints for at least nuclear parity with the United States, while Russia hates us with the fire of a thousand suns and seems to feel it’s doing just fine with its own uncontested build-up of theater-range nuclear weapons and development of new, uncontrolled strategic systems.  Neither power, clearly, feels any incentive to talk meaningfully with us about anything to do with arms control. 

Nonetheless, I wonder whether the solution – if there is to be one at all, of course, which I hardly guarantee – may to some extent lie precisely in that understanding of the problem: namely, that neither Russia nor China feels any incentive to negotiate with us about arms control. 

I think we need to change their perceived incentives.

As the bipartisan Strategic Posture Review Commission recently agreed unanimously, our current nuclear force posture modernization plan is “absolutely essential,” but it is nonetheless also “not sufficient to meet the new threats posed by Russia and China.”  To meet the demands of this fraught era, I think we need to be willing to expand our own capabilities. 

At the moment, we are badly outclassed in effective theater-range nuclear-capable delivery systems, having at present – for all intents and purposes – almost no such capability, even as our adversaries lean into leveraging their growing overmatch in such systems for coercive bargaining and to deter us from impeding their plans to invade and occupy their neighbors.  The Submarine-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N) is a necessary step toward this need, but the Biden Administration tried to cancel it and, even when basically forced by Congress to pursue that system anyway, it has still been dragging its feet. 

As noted, we may also need greater numbers of nuclear weapons in the near future, confronted as we soon will be by twonuclear adversaries each having an arsenal comparable to our own both in terms of delivery capabilities and overall scale.  As I mentioned, China is expected to have about 1,500 operationally deployed nuclear warheads by 2035, and  absent some change in our own posture, that means parity. 

Nobody has ever before had to deter two hostile nuclear peers at the same time.  Our current nuclear force posture sizing was effectively decided in 2010, when our nuclear modernization program began and both Russia and the United States agreed to New START.  Under that treaty, Russia’s arsenal was limited to 1,550 operationally deployed warheads, and at the point it was signed China’s arsenal amounted to a modest 200-300 weapons – for a “potential adversary” total of presumably not much more than 1,850 weapons.  If you assume the U.S. stockpile was the right size to maintain deterrence then, however, it can hardly be anything but inadequate in 2035, when Russia and China together will have something more like 3,050 warheads, even assuming Russia doesn’t deploy more after New START expires.  I’m not arguing that we necessarily need to match them one-for-one – as if that were even possible – but it really can’t be true that our current plans are enough to ensure deterrence in ten years’ time.

The Biden Administration has grudgingly admitted that “we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required,” and officials have told the press that we need to be prepared to expand our arsenal.  If that’s the case, however, the time get working on that is now, not a some point “in the coming years.”  (Remember, it takes enormously long to build new systems, and in the face of such forseeable future needs, we’re already far behind schedule.)  Precisely because we need to change Russian and Chinese incentives in order to get them to negotiate, moreover – and because they can’t be incentivized by something they don’t know about – we need to be making such preparations not quietly, in the shadows, but instead publicly, and without apology or embarrassment. 

Which brings me to the imperative of repairing and augmenting our nuclear weapons development and production infrastructure.  As I’ve been trying to make clear for years, a robust infrastructure is critical to deterrence in at least three ways: 

First, our nuclear weapons infrastructure is critical to preserving deterrence over time, for it physically maintains the nuclear devices that allow us to hold at risk what our adversary prizes, and hence to disincentivize aggression. 

Second, our nuclear weapons infrastructure enables us to preserve deterrence against future threats.  Productive capacity provides a “hedge” against worsening global threats, since if you need more weapons you can make them.  (If you need more to deter aggression and you can’t make enough, however – or you can’t make them fast enough – that’s a recipe for deterrence failure, which is a fancy way of saying “adversary aggression and catastrophic war.”)

Third, our nuclear infrastructure is critical to preventing an arms race and encouraging arms control negotiation.  If you’re really good at developing and producing nuclear weapons and you are ostentatiously ready and willing to do so if needed, your adversaries are more likely to conclude that having an arms race with you is not in their interest – and that they should thus sit down and talk.

That third point is especially important as we talk about the future of arms control.  Our ability to build a respectable number of additional weapons if needed and to develop new ones to meet changing threats is precisely what helps give our adversaries an interest in arms control with us.  On the other hand, if we foolishly hard-wire ourselves into being unable to do so, we all but invite the adversary to engage in an arms race.  If you have only a small productive capacity, you’re basically telling him that he can likely win an arms race with you, which is giving him an excellent reason to try.

The problem, however, is just that: we currently lack both the deployed nuclear capabilities and the production throughput and new weapon development capacity that we need to meet the evolving threats America faces.  And that’s why I believe that deterrence “hawks” and arms control “doves” should both support a robust new agenda of “muscling up” in the ways that U.S. security requires. 

Fortunately, as the student of arms control history will know, there is a strong precedent for building up nuclear capabilities in response to expanded threats and using such muscularity to incentivize adversary arms control engagement.  It was the courageous decision of the United States and all our NATO allies in 1979 to build a new arsenal of intermediate-range nuclear forces (the so-called “Euromissiles”) to counterbalance the Soviet Union’s deployment of hundreds of new SS-20 missiles – and to stick to that decision through deployment in 1983 despite ferocious opposition from the disarmament community – that made possible Ronald Reagan’s huge achievement in negotiating the abolition of all such delivery systems with the INF Treaty in 1987. 

Nor did this occur by accident, for such a negotiated abolition of INF-class systems was precisely the point of the so-called “zero-zero offer” Reagan announced to the Soviet Union in November 1981.  His model of “building up to meet threats but also in hope of negotiating those threats away” worked well for the United States then.  It is also a model that we invoked in the Trump Administration when in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review it was expressly said that we hoped our pursuit of the SLCM-N would “provide the necessary incentive for Russia to negotiate seriously a reduction of its non-strategic nuclear weapons, just as the prior Western deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe led to the 1987 INF Treaty.”

To find a future for arms control, I thus think we need to invoke that model once more, and at scale, by augmenting our nuclear posture and expanding our nuclear weapons infrastructure in order – finally – to give China and Russia a real incentive to sit down with us to talk about restraint.  In effect, therefore, as I argued in my paper earlier this year,

“we now need to start the arms control enterprise all over again from scratch, beginning not with agreement-seeking but instead with resolute statecraft and counterstrategy.  Such an approach would focus less on pursuing arms agreements per se than upon changing the decision calculus in Moscow and Beijing in ways that give them concrete incentives to engage with the United States on these issues notwithstanding their dislike and distrust for Washington, and for reasons of specific security interest in which equally distrustful American leaders can place some reliance even while utterly discounting any notion of Russian or Chinese good faith.”

Conclusion

And that’s where President-Elect Trump comes in.  He has, I would argue, a unique opportunity here to make good on the “peace through strength” concept he has propounded at the United Nations and elsewhere.  He is well positioned to act resolutely to change the incentive structures facing our geopolitical adversaries in Beijing and Moscow in ways that make it at least possible to evision some meaningful future revival of arms control engagement.

Unfortunately, the modern Democratic party seems all but incapable of the kind of “leverage strength for peace” approach I think is needed here.  To their credit, in the face of the huge and growing threats we face today, they’ve come farther than one might have expected back when Barack Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize for his “vision of a world free from nuclear arms.”  And I know from personal discussions that there are definitely some thoughtful people on the other side of the aisle from me – and certainly, I should also add, within our country’s career national security bureaucracy – who very much “get” the points I am making here with you today.

On the whole, however, the Democrats have not come nearly far enough to meet the contemporary challenge, and I’m frankly not sure they’re capable of it.  Too many of them, I fear, still seem too intoxicated by memories of the glory days of disarmament movement after the end of the Cold War, too reflexively committed to seeking and sticking to arms control agreements at almost any cost, too anxious about maintaining their anti-nuclear political bona fides, too fixated up on preserving the good opinion of the Arms Control Association and the disarmament community, and too terrified of being thought, well, Reaganesque.

That’s why we need President-Elect Trump to step into the breach.  He now has a chance both to confound his critics and – much more importantly – to take the forward-leaning steps America needs to give arms control another chance, by demonstrating to Beijing and Moscow that not having a meaningful arms control relationship with the United States is very much against their interests. 

This won’t be easy, of course, nor cheap.  It will require skilled arms control diplomats to shape our negotiating strategy and, hopefully, to shepherd eventual negotiations through to their conclusion.  But it needs to start with the Department of Defense, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NSSA), and institutions such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and the Sandia National Laboratory (SNL). 

It will also require a substantial and sustained influx of resources, and strong and sustained bipartisan support and political “top cover” over time.  And this is not just a question of reorienting high-level policy to a new direction.  Doing this right will also require a fundamental cultural shift in our national security bureaucracy.

Reinvigorating our nuclear infrastructure in the ways we need will be impossible without dramatic changes in NNSA’s operational culture and that of the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories.  In the post-Cold War era of naïvely optimistic assumptions about the teleological inevitability of nuclear weapons abolition, we allowed NNSA and the labs – and indeed, I’m almost ashamed to say, encouraged them – to settle into an “avoid risk at all costs” culture that is light-years removed from the “mission-accomplishment” psychology that made possible the impressive achievements of their glory years during the Cold War. 

We need to turn that passive and timid culture around, and to do so ASAP.  This will require sustained effort and attention by savvy and resolute political appointees and career professionals who understand the need for change.  Right now, such people aren’t in charge.

All of this won’t be easy, but I believe we can do it – and we badly need to.  Without such a significant and sustained shift in our approach, I fear we will not be able to interest either China or Russia in arms control again.  At present, they calculate that it’s more promising to try to win a nuclear arms race than to negotiate restraint.  Let’s see what we can do to change that assessment in the years ahead.

Thanks for listening!

– Christopher Ford