Arms Control Wonk

MDA really does need to get its story straight. In November 2007, Rear Admiral Alan B. Hicks, Program Director for Aegis, gave a presentation at the George C. Marshall Institute indicating six Aegis ships armed with the SM-3 Block IB interceptor would be needed to defend NATO.

But replace that interceptor with the upgraded SM-3 Block IIA interceptor that’s in the hopper for delivery by 2016, says Adm. Hicks, and just two Aegis ships are required to provide nearly gapless coverage of Europe. Check it out:

As Jeffrey points out, MDA head Obering told a radically different story just months earlier:

It will require 10 Aegis ships on station with SM-3 Block IIA interceptors to provide 40 to 60% coverage of Europe (central Europe would not be protected). To provide this persistent partial coverage, it would require four rotations for a total of 40 ships dedicated to the European defense.

First forty, then two, now apparently four ships? And 40-60% coverage to nearly complete coverage? I mean, really. Rep Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), chair of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, said it best:

MDA is an agency that needs some adult supervision.

Iran’s reported proposal for negotiations on a wide variety of issues with the P5+1, including hints of direct talks with the United States, is fueling speculation that Tehran may have turned over a new leaf of cooperation (even as it stands firm on its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment and conducts a raft of missile tests). The WaPo’s David Ignatius, for example, has a piece today discussing a recent interview with Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki. Ignatius’ conclusion is that:

The Iranians are signaling that they want talks with the West — and hinting that they are ready for a serious dialogue with the Great Satan in Washington.

That may be true—I would welcome it—but I’m skeptical it means Tehran is any more willing to compromise on the nuclear issue at this juncture. It would mark a significant shift in Iran’s posture, which is hard to explain. Why now?

I think this is more likely a tactical shift. By showing a bit of leg, the Iranians can convey the appearance of cooperation and get through the waning months of the Bush administration to see what the next U.S. administration will bring to the table.

That’s the title of a short piece published today that the UK Guardian asked me to write on Obama’s proposed Iran policy, about which I have very nice things to say.

A few weeks ago I attended a day-long pow-wow here in DC on U.S. policy towards Iran. Mehrzad Boroujerdi, an associate professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and director of its Middle Eastern Studies Program, gave an incisive, thought-provoking presentation on the structure and varied preferences of the Iranian government and its constituent actors. He has graciously agreed to share his PowerPoint slides (edited a wee bit for public release) with Wonk readers. Definitely worth a look.

President Bush apparently convinced European leaders to support additional sanctions against Iran during his farewell tour of Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, said that “one cannot exclude another round of sanctions.” Bank Melli and other Iranian financial institutions would be the main targets.

That’s good news, but the difficulties inherent in sustaining this coalition inevitably raise the question of far Germany and other European countries are willing to go to keep the pressure on Iran—and what the United States can do to help sustain transatlantic unity.

On the one hand, there seems to be something approaching a consensus in Europe on the need to constrain Iran’s nuclear program and even for the European Union to flex its muscles a bit in pursuit of that objective. For example, the European Union has reportedly agreed on what action to take against Bank Melli, even if (contra Gordon Brown’s embarrassing assertion yesterday) the EU has not in fact agreed on when to take action.

Still, with energy prices soaring to record levels and the global economy on a downturn, the chances of mobilizing international support for sanctions targeting Iran’s economic lifeline, its oil and natural gas exports, are slim to none. But there is still plenty that can be done on the sanctions front, particularly in the financial sector.

What does seem clear, however, is that President Bush’s saber-rattling towards Iran—his stock reminder that “all options are on the table”—is singularly unhelpful. It rattles politicians in Europe more than it gives pause to mullahs in Iran, who know that the United States is uniquely vulnerable to retaliation so long as there are 150,000 American troops in Iraq.

Why Bush insists on repeating this swashbuckling mantra at every turn boggles the mind. Everybody knows that military force is always hypothetically available, so why keep trumpeting it when the practical result is to put our allies in an exceedingly awkward spot: how to sell a foreign policy of putting pressure on Tehran to domestic audiences while at the same time distancing oneself from Bush’s bellicose (and failed) policy towards Iran?

Consider the plight of Chancellor Merkel. She’s comparatively hawkish by European standards—her political party recently endorsed missile defense installations in Europe. But her ruling coalition, comprised of the Social Democratic Party and her Christian Democratic Union, is beginning to fracture due to internal disputes ranging from minimum wage policy and health care reform to German foreign policy on China’s human rights record. National parliamentary elections are scheduled for fall 2009, but one cannot dismiss the possibility of early elections.

Now consider this in light of the fact that European publics—and I’m not joking here—tend to regard Bush’s policies as a greater threat to world peace than Iran’s. For example, nearly half of the German public, according to a recent poll conducted by Stern, a German language weekly, sees the United States as a bigger threat to world peace than Iran. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), a leading German newspaper, noted that even Russian President Putin received a warmer farewell from Europe before he left office.

Small wonder, then, that Merkel has bent over backwards to make it clear that the UN in New York, and not the White House in Washington, will remain the center stage for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, and why she insisted on thorough implementation of the latest round of UNSC sanctions before moving on to harsher measures.

Sanctions are almost always effective in the sense that they hurt the target country. That is certainly true in Iran’s case, where sanctions have exasperated conditions in its already dysfunctional economy. But sanctions are seldom successful in actually changing the target government’s policies unless the international community—or at least the United States and Europe—is committed to the endeavor over the long term. Sustaining this commitment in the case of Iran is difficult enough, but Bush’s saber-rattling only makes it harder.

Fabian Lieschke, a graduate student at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service interning with me for the summer, co-authored this piece and was the driving force behind it.

Late yesterday the House passed the FY 2009 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 5658) sans the administration’s request for dedicated RRW funding. It also thwarted a last-ditch effort by Congressional supporters of RRW to restore some of that funding, which the HASC had cut the previous week when it voted the bill out of committee.

Here is what HASC said last week about RRW in its summary of the bill:

The Committee’s priority is to sustain and modernize the Stockpile Stewardship Program. While there is value in continuing the design-cost study of the RRW program, the Committee redirects $10 million requested for RRW by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to other, higher priority SSP activities. The Committee also redirects $23.3 million in RRW funds requested by the Navy.

The full text of H.R. 5658 as enacted is available here. NNSA items begin at Section 3101 (p.684). The Committee Report explains the funding in some detail at p.201.

Good riddance.

ISIS posted a copy of that letter Iran sent to UN SecGen Ban Ki Moon last week. The letter, entitled The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Proposed Package for Constructive Negotiations, does not mention a suspension of uranium enrichment, a key demand of the P5+1, but it suggests the possibility of intrusive inspections and multinational enrichment on Iranian soil.

The Iranians have dangled these possibilities in the past, and although neither could prevent Tehran from diverting centrifuge technology to a clandestine facility, the added transparency would make it harder. How much so is open to debate.

What really jumped out me, however, was Iran’s proposal for:

An effort to encourage other states to control the export of nuclear material and equipment.

That’s a remarkable statement coming from a country that has decried the existing export control regime as a suppliers’ cartel bent on holding back the economic development of developing countries.

Perhaps some nuance was lost in the translation. (The original Farsi text is included in the .pdf file that ISIS posted). Either that, or Tehran is trying to head-off the regional proliferation consequences of its actions, as its Arab neighbors suddenly acquire interest in nuclear energy.

That’s the title of a disturbing new study conducted by a team of experts from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. It concludes that “the prospect of hunger-related deaths occurring in the next several months is approaching certainty.”

Here is a summary:

North Korea is on the brink of famine. The aggregate food picture appears worse than at any time since the famine of the 1990s. The margin of error between required grain and available supply is now less than 100,000 metric tons. Local food prices are skyrocketing faster than world prices. The regime has soured its aid relationships with key donors, and its control-oriented policy responses are exacerbating distress. Support for aid has been further eroded by evidence of diversion of food aid to the military and the market. Hunger-related deaths are nearly inevitable, and a dynamic is being put in place that will carry the crisis into 2009.

The long-run solution to North Korea’s chronic food insecurity problems is a revitalization of industry, which would allow North Korea to export industrial products, earn foreign exchange, and import bulk grains on a commercially sustainable basis. In the short run, North Korea should openly acknowledge the growing crisis and conclude negotiations with the World Food Program and other donors so that assistance can begin to flow. The United States can provide aid in ways that maximize its humanitarian impact while limiting the degree to which aid simply serves to bolster the regime. It should also exercise quiet leadership with respect to North Korean refugees.

North Korea has said in the past that nearly a quarter million people died during the great famine that occurred in the latter half of the 1990s; independent experts think the real tally is much higher, in excess of one million. The United States and North Korea’s neighbors should do whatever they can to stave off this crisis, first and foremost for humanitarian reasons, but also because a widespread famine in North Korea could make the government behave in unpredictable ways.

The PrepCon ended on Friday, and the group Reaching Critical Will has posted a bunch of documents from it, including the Chair’s controversial Factual Summary of the conference proceedings and a really bizarre presentation to NGOs by the Iranian representative that reads like a tortured pop quiz on nuclear energy.

According to Rebecca Johnson, co-founder of the Acronym Institute and brave observer of the PrepCon, the conference wasn’t the unmitigated disaster that many feared it would be. Check out her informative (though in desperate need of editing) summary.

I just returned from an informative lunch at the Council on Foreign Relations featuring Ambassador Tetsuya Endo, who chaired a recent Japanese government task force on nuclear energy. Fuel assurance was a prominent theme in the not-for-attribution discussion, and I was surprised to hear several prominent American nonproliferation experts assert that there never has been, nor ever will be, any real fuel assurance problem.

There is a legitimate debate to be had on the reliability of the existing constellation of nuclear fuel suppliers. I am conducting a study on this question that I hope to complete in the next 6-8 weeks. My view, in summary, is that a state’s confidence in the existing commercial market for enriched uranium is primarily a function of its broader political and economic relationship with one or more of the main suppliers. I will elaborate further when the study is complete.

But there is no room for debate on whether nuclear fuel assurance has been a legitimate concern in the past. The experts were wrong — it most certainly has.

For example, it became a major issue in the 1970s when, among other disruptive developments, the United States implemented a series of changes in enrichment services contracting policy that dramatically undermined global confidence in its reliability as a supplier of enriched uranium. The effect was to “increase the pace of commitments to plutonium fuels, breeder reactors, and indigenous enrichment and reprocessing plants,” particularly in Western Europe, where Urenco and Eurodif were taking shape.

That quote comes from a masterful 1979 MIT Energy Laboratory study conducted for DOE by Thomas L. Neff and Henry D. Jacoby, entitled Nuclear Fuel Assurance—Origins, Trends, and Policy Issues. The study really captures the prevailing sentiment during this key historical period:

The evolution of commercial nuclear power and nuclear fuel supply internationally has been characterized by interdependent changes in technological, political and commercial dimensions. What was once a world in which the U.S. was the dominant force in all three dimensions—the major source of technology and fuel supplies as well as political leadership in spreading atomic power and controlling it—is now a world in which these powers must be shared with other states whose balance of interests is not necessarily the same as that of the United States. Other industrialized countries have developed their own domestic nuclear industries—first reactors and now enrichment and other fuel cycle services—thus reducing U.S. involvement and influence abroad. New suppliers have also begun to compete with the United States in the remaining export markets, notably the developing countries; this competition has been made more intense by the need to find external markets for nuclear industries whose domestic markets are threatened by public opposition or other difficulties. In addition, the rising expectations and desires for autonomy of the developing world have altered their traditional relationships with industrialized countries.

These changes have been paralleled by a new awareness of the importance of secure energy supplies to national health and security, engendered, initially, by the oil embargo and price increases of 1973-74. The countries of Western Europe and Japan—whose established economies are critically dependent on energy which is largely imported—and the developing countries—whose hopefully rapid growth is dependent on increasing energy supplies—were also more strongly affected than the U.S. by multiple failures and growing pains of the nuclear fuel supply system over the past five years.

Thus, while insecurity of fossil fuels was intensifying interest in nuclear power, there were increasing concerns about the security of nuclear fuel supply. In part these were due to conventional market development problems but they also reflected the changing political and commercial relationships between the United States and its traditional nuclear customers. Both have been responsible for the drive for nuclear autonomy represented by acquisition of LWR fuel cycle facilities and development of plutonium breeders.

This study is required reading for anybody interested in nuclear fuel assurance.

Addendum: For more on the chaotic nuclear fuel market of the 1970s, I also recommend Neff’s book-length analysis, The International Uranium Market (1984), Edward F. Wonder’s Nuclear Fuel and American Foreign Policy (1977), William Walker and Måns Lönnroth’s Nuclear Power Struggles (1983), and Michael J. Brenner’s Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation—The Remaking of U.S. Policy (1981). Paul Joskow provides an excellent overview of the 1975 Westinghouse debacle in Commercial Impossibility, the Uranium Market and the Westinghouse Case (6 J. Legal Stud. 119 [1977]).