As some may have noticed, last week’s IAEA General Conference ended without member states being able to agree on a safeguards resolution. Reuters put the blame on some member states, quoting two Western envoys. This story was picked up by Global Security Newswire on 27 September. While there is some truth to the story, it doesn’t pick up on all the complexities of the debate.

I followed the safeguards discussion for at least three years, during a time when there was no problem for non-governmental delegates to attend. In fact, I remember being pulled into the room by a colleague from an important Western state who said, “all the action is in this room, and the rest of the conference is boring”.

It was a quiet time, not many non-governmental organizations were roaming the hallways, and the only non-IAEA colleague I can remember was Mark Hibbs, who then worked at Platts Nuclear Fuels. For the last two years, however, I have been too busy with bilateral meetings and those other matters that take up a director’s time. Since then, I have lost touch with the people in that room (for they were always the same crowd) and their mission to come up with the perfect formula.

Now, I understand the Secretariat, pushed by a few member states, has become much stricter in controlling access to this room. This is unfortunate, since it allows for subjectively biased information to appear unchallenged in the open domain. In addition, some of our younger colleagues have also been ejected rudely from the rooms in a way that, if these young friends have recollected correctly, has reflected badly on the Secretariat. Indeed, less discontent – not more – is needed in the hallways of the M-building. And while I hope that this is not a continuing trend, my intuition tells me attitudes will become worse before they become better.

But let’s go back to the safeguards resolution. Over the years, the main struggle has principally been between states who wish to reflect and promote the development of a stronger safeguards standard, and those who want to block collective support of this. Indeed, earlier in the week, there was even a tendency by a minority to resist the idea of “information driven safeguards”. There is also resistance against any language that hints that the Additional Protocol may become the new safeguards standard. That intrusiveness is not welcomed, nor thought needed, by all states. This division was reflected in the safeguards resolution.

Indeed, the debate may be at its fiercest in this little room at the General Conference, but the shockwaves can be felt beyond its walls, for instance throughout the NPT Review Conference cycle. Anyone examining the final document of last year’s conference will find scars of this disagreement running throughout. The discussions in Austria are not new, and the outcome, frankly, not that surprising.

So, disarmament language may have been one source of discontent this year, but it is not the main battle ground, and I dare say that it will not be for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the objection to including disarmament language, and I remember such language being suggested more than two years ago, is mostly procedural. The safeguards resolution ought to deal with safeguards matters, the argument goes. Other roles of the IAEA should be dealt with through other means. True, there is a minority of nuclear weapon states that may resist the inclusion on substantial grounds (and I think we know who they are), but their views have never been fully articulated. There are also those that believe that nuclear disarmament indeed falls under the Agency’s safeguards mandate. After all, the IAEA Statute refers to “safeguarded worldwide disarmament”. Also, the mandate in Article III.A.5 does not exclude an Agency role in safeguarding weapons usable material. On the contrary, it seem to foresee it.

Personally, though, I agree with the first view. Over the years, the word safeguards have come to mean instruments deployed mostly in non-nuclear weapon states. Its usage has been strongly associated with non-proliferation. Altering the meaning now is bound to lead to resistance, and perhaps confusion.

In addition, the safeguards resolution is already too clumsy, too long, too vague, and too meaningless to matter that much. After a long preamble, one would expect to find some exciting operative language. Alas, the resolution simply continues with more preamble language, making the entire document one long tiring list of ideals, soft welcoming statements, with one or two twists embedded for show. As the years have passed, revisions have been added to revisions, suggestions interbred with suggestions, and confusion squared with confusion. I stopped reading it some time ago and I’m not surprised that some Agency officials just shrugged at its absence this year.

Some will see this is a great setback. Others, to paraphrase a close colleague in Vienna, will simply see this as an accurate reflection of the state of affairs and the divergence of views in the house. I see this is a great opportunity.

It would be wise for those who care deeply about the Agency to use the coming year to rework the resolution into a text that is cleaner and more reflective of state views. Most delegates in the safeguards resolution working group are passionate supporters of the Agency, and its role. It would also be sensible by those same delegates to think of ways in which the debate on the Agency’s role in broader verification is allowed to flow freely throughout the corridors of its General Conference.

This is a crosspost from my own blog, and from the VERTIC blog. Apologies if you’re receiving multiple notifications.

My piece, “Official Estimates of the Taepo Dong 2″, examines the over 15 year history of U.S. government estimates regarding North Korea’s ballistic missiles.

David’s piece, “Secretary Gates and the North Korean Missile Threat”, examines actual North Korean capabilities and possible future developments.

Check them out and let me know what you think.

As a side note, I had the honor of writing on the Wonk as a result of working for Jeffrey while he was at New America. When he departed New America, I stayed on and focused on terrorism and India-Pakistan issues with the Counter-terrorism team. Now, I’m looking elsewhere to stay in the field of nuclear weapons policy and nonproliferation. If you know of positions  or opportunities around DC, let me know. Thanks readers.

One meeting in particular stand out from those days. I met with a member of the International Monitoring System Division, who took me through how the system works. He started off with this brilliant presentation – a slideshow that I really think should be placed on the CTBTO website – which made everything perfectly clear. I realized that for all its complexity, the verification regime is actually based on simple assumptions. There was a clean beauty hidden in its simplicity. There was also something remarkably touching to see ancient earth science techniques mated with the latest in 21st century processing, analysis and communication.

Now anyone can get that experience. The CTBTO has recently started a new course on the treaty and its verification regime. It covers the verification system, of course, but also offers more, much more. It may be too late to apply to the present round, but those interested in a similar experience may want to contact the Secretariat to inquire about the next round.

And don’t despair if you cannot get there in person. It’s all going to be streamed. Live.

KPA Journal is a valuable resource on the Korean People’s Army.  Each issue and article title are listed after the jump. Special thanks also to North Korea Leadership Watch.

Vol 1, No-1:  Salvage of a DPRK “Mother Ship” |  KPA Engineer River Crossing Units During the Fatherland Liberation War, Part 1

Vol 1, No-2: KPA Engineer River Crossing Units, Part 2 | KN-02 SRBM | Editor’s Notes | Endnotes

Vol 1, No-3: KPA Engineer River Crossing Units, Part 3 | Scud B SRBM | KPAF Fortified SAM Base | Editor’s Notes | Endnotes | Addendum: Hang-gang Bridges | Addendum: KN-02 TEL

Vol 1, N0-4: Noto-Hanto Infiltration, March 1999 | P’okpoong (Storm) Main Battle Tank | DPRK Intelligence Agencies, 1967-1971 | Editor’s Notes | Endnotes

Vol 1, No-5: DPRK Intelligence Services 1967-1971 | Part 2, Han-gang Bridges June-August 1950 | Editor’s Notes | Endnotes

Vol 1, No-6: DPRK Intelligence Services 1967-1971, Part 3 | Addendum: P’okpoong Main Battle Tank | Editor’s Notes

Vol 1, No-7: The KPA Mechanized Infantry Battalion | BTR-60 in KPA Service | Addendum: Han-gang Bridges |Addendum: P’okpoong Main Battle Battle Tanks | Editor’s Notes

Vol 1, No-8: KPA Engineer River Crossing Forces | A Look Inside a DPRK “Mother Ship | Editor’s Notes | End Notes

Vol 1, No-9: Mi-2 Hoplite in KPA Service | KPA Lessons Learned from Foreign Conflicts | Vice Marshall Jo Myong Rok | Vice Marshall Yi Tu-ik | Editor’s Notes | Endnotes

The malware, Stuxnet, attacks Siemens Windows OS software and is incredibly aggressive. Stuxnet, unlike other forms of malware that extract information, allegedly can take control of an automated system and change it. What makes Stuxnet frightening is the level of sophistication.  It is complex, targeted and massive, a completely new virus that has the feel of a cyber warfare weapon.

Iranian officials stated the malware had infected 30,000 computer systems, including personal computers for personnel who work at Bushehr. Officials stated it will take a month or two to root it out.  It is unclear if the virus directly attacked the power facility or if the virus attacked other Iranian nuclear facilities. It is also unclear if it is the main reason for the now three month delay for startup at the Bushehr plant.

What makes the story interesting is the level of sophistication is only possible by a government or a highly trained group, leaving speculation that the attack came from the United States or Israel. However, no government or organization has claimed responsibility. So, the question remains, who dunnit?

The immediate response is the United States or Israel committed the attack. This morning John Markoff and David Sanger of the New York Times authored a piece offering the idea that perhaps the Israelis, specifically their Technology Intelligence section Unit 8200, launched the virus.  However, the sole link to the Israelis is the mysterious word “Myrtus”, embedded in the virus, a possible reference to the Biblical Book of Esther, and a Jewish preemption of a Persian attack. The evidence is mere speculation, but offers some possible clues.

There have been previous reports of efforts to covertly sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, which may explain the decline in the number of Iranian centrifuges at the Nantanz plant.  These efforts involve stories of faulty centrifuge parts and stopping shipments from arriving in Iran. The NYT story today did not directly link the virus to the Natanz facility, but linked it to an ongoing effort by Western governments to covertly sabotage the Iranian program.

But, maybe laying blame at the U.S. or Israel is too quick a judgment. Other states like India, Russia, an Arab state like Saudi Arabia, or a European state could have also created Stuxnet. Each has their own motives for slowing an Iranian program. Also, while not outside the realm of possibility, highly sophisticated Iranian dissident groups could have created and launched the virus.

There are many unanswered questions, like the true target of the attack, if the virus just spiraled out of control, which led it to affect other systems in other countries, and extent of the damage. There is not enough information to accurately pinpoint the guilty party or the true motivation.

However, if the Stuxnet attack was government sponsored and not a third party, then perhaps it is an example of the impact of cyber warfare. The debate for potential containment of Iran  is usually framed in a kinetic military component, military strikes, arms deals to Saudi Arabia, etc.  Perhaps, this latest attack is a glimpse of the behind the scenes world of cyber warfare and exploiting another country’s infrastructure.

In moving forward with discussions on the Iranian nuclear program, the Stuxnet virus may provide analysts another variable in calculating  possible deterrence and containment with Iran.  If it is a cyber attack weapon, what are its implications on military strategy? On diplomatic strategy?  Is an attack fully untraceable, or can Iran attribute an attacker? How would Iran respond to a cyber attack on its nuclear facilities? Would Iran immediately assume Israel or the U.S. launched an attack even if both did not launch the virus?  All are interesting questions looking forward.

This is a photo I took on February 14, 1992 at one of the two Soviet nuclear weapons laboratories, the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics, in a closed city known then as Chelyabinsk-70, and now renamed Snezhinsk. Seated in front of the dusty blackboard is visiting U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, listening to nuclear weapons scientists describe their serious economic plight less than two months after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Standing on the right is Yevgeny Avrorin, the scientific director of the laboratory then. He described for Baker the “difficult, trying situation” the nuclear lab faced as government subsidies dwindled. The scientists wanted productive and challenging work. “We have no shortage of ideas,” Avrorin said, presenting Baker with a long list of commercial products they could make if they had Western investors: artificial diamonds, fiber optics, food irradiation, nuclear medicine. But they had no investors, and no way to reach any.

I was there that day as a correspondent for The Washington Post, covering Baker’s trip. It was one of those moments that is hard to forget—Baker slipping into the snow-covered once-secret lab compound, ringed by barbed wire fences, to be greeted by hundreds of workers with their faces pressed against the windows for a glimpse of the American secretary of state. This wasn’t the Evil Empire anymore.

On February 17, in the Kremlin in Moscow, Baker met with President Yeltsin and they announced formation of the International Science and Technology Center to help Soviet weapons scientists shift to civilian projects and keep them from spreading their knowledge around the world. The ISTC, which opened its doors in 1994, has allocated $836 million over the years for this purpose. The United States, European Union, Japan, Canada, Norway, Finland, Sweden, South Korea, and businesses have contributed the money. There is a parallel, sister organization based in Ukraine.

Today, the program is endangered.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree August 11 to pull Russia out of the ISTC within six months. The order was issued without explanation. If the decree is implemented, the ISTC will probably be forced to close its doors, since Russia is the host. The ISTC has said it is studying the situation.

There’s no question that Russia, flush with oil revenues, is a different country than it was when the ISTC was founded in 1992, and it may no longer need, nor want, a helping hand from abroad. The Medvedev order may be an effort to throw off what seems to Russian to be an anachronism, a humiliating reminder of those early years when the country hit rock bottom.

But the decision also raises some questions about nonproliferation and the end of the Cold War. At the time the ISTC was founded, a big worry was that Russian weapons scientists would slip through the porous borders and take their knowledge elsewhere. Has that danger abated? With the rise of instant digital global communications networks, should we worry about a different kind of proliferation? Would it be just as easy to share weapons knowledge using email? Has the ISTC become out-moded?

If Russia no longer wants to host such a program, is it the place of outsiders to object? If Russia now has the resources, will it spend the money on science, or elsewhere?

If Moscow shutters the ISTC, what happens to the work that has been done in the other former Soviet republics, particularly those in Central Asia and the Caucasus, where the proliferation risks may be more urgent?

For many scientists, it worked

Over the years, the ISTC touched a good chunk of the weapons scientists set adrift after the Soviet collapse. Glenn E. Schweitzer, the first executive director of the ISTC, wrote later in his book Moscow DMZ that there were about 60,000 core specialists who developed and designed weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems who were of interest to the program. That was in the early 1990s. Among them, about 30,000 were in aerospace, 20,000 in the nuclear field, and 10,000 in chemical and biological weapons, he said. And about half of them came from institutes around Moscow.

According to the ISTC’s latest annual report, from the first grants in 1994 until 2009, the program gave grants to 73,152 scientists. The overwhelming majority were in Russia, but the grants also reached Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. No doubt, many scientists and engineers received only limited funds. It wasn’t enough for full employment for all. No one knows for sure how many might have sold their skills to Iran or North Korea. But the data suggests that at least part of Schweitzer’s core benefitted from the grants and turned their skills away from weapons and toward civilian projects.

Over the years, I’ve heard inspiring stories from weapons scientists who participated. One example, which I relate in The Dead Hand, is Victor Vyshinsky, a specialist in fluid dynamics who worked at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute in Moscow, carrying out wind-tunnel tests on cruise missiles. Vyshinsky was eager to make it in the new Russian economy. His team knew how to test a cruise missile in a wind tunnel, so they came up with an idea to dry timber. No luck. Then they proposed to use their mathematical models to predict the course of overflowing rivers. Again, a dead end. Vyshinsky turned to the ISTC, and his group of experts put together a proposal to study vortex wakes caused by airplanes at civilian airports, a project with widespread application that the science center supported.

The mission accomplished?

After the ISTC governing board met in December, 2009, the board issued a statement which said that the center was founded “at a critical moment for the scientific communities of the Russian Federation and the other countries of the former Soviet Union.” Then, the statement added, “Since that time, these communities have regained much of their potential.”

In other words, the struggling scientists are no longer struggling. According to my sources, there was a serious discussion about this in the board meeting. The Russians pressed hard for a statement like this, suggesting that the ISTC mission was accomplished. They want out from under this program.

And once it was issued, they may have taken that as a cue to pull the plug.

One reason this issue is so difficult is that the evidence of proliferation is hard to obtain. While the ISTC knows how many scientists were helped, it does not know how many were not helped. The actual extent of “brain drain” involving weapons scientists and engineers from Russia and the other former Soviet republics is simply elusive.

Certainly, there is evidence Russian engineers helped the missile programs in Iran in earlier years. But what is the situation today? The rise of the Russian security services under Vladimir Putin’s rule has meant tighter restrictions at the scientific institutes than prevailed in the 1990s. But is that enough to assume proliferation is no longer a risk?

If we don’t know the full scope of the problem, then it is doubly difficult to judge whether it is time to close the doors.

Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to Secretary of State Clinton on August 31, asking some pointed questions about what comes next. He inquired about how the administration will remain engaged with the scientists, and whether it has a Plan B. He also asked how the Medvedev decision fits in with the administration’s “reset” of relations with Russia. Lugar wants the administration to be more pro-active on the issue.

Avrorin, the nuclear lab director who spoke to Baker in 1992, said in a recent interview with Rossiskaya Gazeta, a government newspaper, that the ISTC “has indisputably benefited Russian science.” He urged the government not to abandon it.

Several events are today and a few later in the week.

• September 13, 12:00-1:30 p.m., Gen. Kevin Chilton, Commander, U.S. Strategic Command, “Nuclear Deterrence, Arms Control, Missile Defense, and Defense Policy.” Part of the NDUF-NDIA Seminar Series. At the Capitol Hill Club, 300 First St., SE, Washington

• September 13, 2:00-3:00 p.m., Rose Gottemoeller, Assistant Secretary of State for Verification, Compliance, and Implementation, and Richard Burt, Global Zero, “A Discussion on the New START Treaty.” Georgetown University, Copley Formal Lounge, 37th and O Sts., NW, Washington.

• September 13, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Henry Sokolski, Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, “Missiles for Peace: Dual-Track Options.” Carnegie Endowment, 1779 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington.

• September 13, 7:00-9:00pm, Sen. Richard Lugar (IN), “America and the New Nuclear Strategy.” George Washington University, Jack Morton Auditorium, 805 21st St., NW, Washington. This event is full, however.

Other events this week:

• September 14, 8:00-9:00am, Missile Defense Policy, National Defense University Foundation, Peppi DeBiaso, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense, Capitol Hill Club, 300 First Street, SE, Washington, DC, RSVP

• September 14, 12:00-2:00 p.m., Amitai Etzioni, George Washington University; Robert Litwak, Wilson Center; and Ray Takeyh, Council on Foreign Relations, “Deterring a Nuclear Iran: Can It Be Done?” Wilson Center, Fifth Floor Conference Room, Regan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington.

• September 14, 1:30-3:30 p.m., Mark Gunzinger, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), “Sustaining America’s Strategic Advantage in Long-Range Strike.”  2212 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington DC.

• September 16, 8:00-9:00am, Maintaining and Modernizing the Nuclear Empire, National Defense University Foundation, John Foster, member, Strategic Posture Commission,  Capitol Hill Club, 300 First Street, SE, Washington, DC.

• September 16, 9:30 a.m., Senate Foreign Relations Committee, vote on the New START Treaty. Room TBA, Capitol Hill, Washington.

As always, if you would like to send out an announcement for an event of report, please email armscontrolevents@gmail.com

I focused on threats made during crises or wars between 1970 and 2010. Threats were defined so as to include both observable actions taken (e.g. increasing alert levels, forward-deploying nuclear-capable forces) and statements by high-ranking executive branch or military officials. The choice to study threats made in crises or wars was driven in part by a fear that including threats made in less tense times would include a lot of cheap talk – if making a threat doesn’t bear a risk of inadvertent escalation, the party making it doesn’t face any costs. So the focus on crises and wars helps avoid some “threats” that have more to do with domestic politics than anything else (though obviously any public statement by a politician reflects at least some consideration of the statement’s domestic impact).

There are lots of caveats which are discussed at length in the full report, but there’s one that I want to note here as well. In any quantitative study of nuclear threat-making, you’re going to face a choice: to include all signals that might plausibly have been interpreted as being nuclear threats by the target, or to rely on case studies to restrict the list of possible nuclear threats to ones that were demonstrably intended or interpreted as such. In the first case you’ll be able to stick to a set definition. In the second you’ll have a smaller data set that is more reliable, and a lot of borderline cases, because the burden of proof will be high and the evidence will likely be thin, especially for political systems in which information of this sort is not readily available. I opted to stick to a set definition, which led to the inclusion a few strange cases (the 1977 threat against Guatemala comes to mind) but also provided some benefits. These included being able to use a definition which provided a clear reason for including some threats and excluding others, rather than making a judgment call on each and every data point. The inclusive approach also yielded a perspective which focuses more on the vast majority of countries that don’t possess nuclear arms (since it includes all events that they might plausibly have interpreted as being nuclear threats).

All that being said, I’ll turn to the findings. The most significant of them, to me at least, was how infrequently non-nuclear weapons states that are in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations are threatened with nuclear weapons. There were 9 threats against NNWS in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations in the 1970-1990 time period, 36% of all nuclear threats during that period. There were 7 between 1991 and 2010, and these comprised just 13% of all nuclear threats in the last two decades. The significance of this finding is even more important given the political positions taken by these states. The NNWS regularly demand legally-binding assurances against the threat or use of nuclear weapons against them. Yet they have never been freer from nuclear threats, at least during crises or wars, than they are now.

So what do we make of the NNWS’s demand for legally-binding negative security assurances? Two-thirds of all nuclear threats against NNWS in the last two decades were against states that possessed chemical or biological weapons or against states that failed to live up to their IAEA safeguards commitments. It’s unclear to me how the vast majority of NNWS which are in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations benefit from demanding benefits which would mainly protect the least compliant of their colleagues. One possibility is that the NNWS have so little confidence in the ability of the nonproliferation regime to prevent their neighbors from acquiring WMD that they are trying to remove obstacles to being able to do the same, if necessary. Another possibility is that the NNWS don’t think that nuclear threats have much of an effect on the actual ability of their colleagues to acquire WMD, and would simply prefer to keep regional tensions as low as possible. Thirdly, it could be that it is the existential threat from nuclear weapons rather than nuclear threats during crises or wars that most concerns the NNWS.

The bigger picture isn’t something discussed much in the report. A smaller group of states is responsible for a much larger share of all nuclear threats during the 1991-2010 time period than during the preceding two decades. And furthermore, in the last twenty years, nuclear threat-making has been concentrated across a smaller number of crises and wars involving this same small group of states. What appears to be happening is that nuclear threat-making is becoming confined to a small number of political conflicts that are more removed from the normal course of international relations than before.

Two specific types of conflicts – the narrow one between India and Pakistan and the broader one involving America’s efforts to prevent WMD proliferation – were responsible for a much, much larger proportion of all nuclear threats between 1991 and 2010 than any other pair of conflicts in the previous two decades. If nuclear threats are less dispersed across countries and conflicts now than they were before, but the overall number is up, the crises or wars that do involve nuclear threats will involve more of them per crisis or war. I would argue that when a crisis involves multiple threats to use nuclear weapons, this is a symptom and/or cause of increased escalatory potential. Thus, those with a stake in preventing the future use of nuclear weapons would do well to pay attention to these particularly dangerous political conflicts.

Paragraphs 9 and 85 of the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (INFCIRC/153) details how inspectors are selected. In practice, the Agency suggests a roster of inspectors to the state. The inspected state does have the right to object to any of the suggested names. If it does so, the IAEA has to propose an alternative name. This procedure aims to minimize the risk that intelligence officers, or perhaps corporate spies, infiltrate the inspectorate with a view to gathering classified or sensitive data.

However, the state’s right to refuse inspectors is not unrestricted. If a state refuses designations repeatedly, and that refusal should “impede the inspections” carried out by the Agency, the Director-General has the choice to refer the matter to the Board for consideration and action. The text doesn’t spell out who should decide that a repeated refusal impedes inspections. An ordinary reading strongly suggests that it is the Secretariat itself that makes that determination. It cannot be the state, because that would make the entire paragraph meaningless (it would never admit that its behavior impedes inspections). It also cannot be the Board of Governors, since that would make the language on referral irrelevant.

The paragraph is likely to target behavior when the state is trying to obstruct the inspection process. It does not have a problem with the names on the list. Rather, it has a problem with the inspections themselves. In the present case, Iran is trying to use the mechanism to put pressure on the Secretariat to curb leaks of the Director-General’s reports to the media. While Iran’s irritation is understandable, its objections, as reported, have little to do with the inspectors themselves. After all, we’ve not seen a repeat of the Chris Charlier story.

The Director-General’s impatience is also clear. The latest report reveals that the IAEA met with Iran’s Ambassador to the Agency on 20 July 2010 to discuss this particular matter. According to the report, the IAEA held that Iran’s “repeated objection … hampers the inspection process and thereby detracts from the Agency’s capability to implement effective and efficient safeguards in Iran.” This language, forcefully put, closely resembles the wording of the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement. The Director-General does not clearly ask the Board to consider the matter at its meeting next week. So the report’s language is probably meant to be a shot across the bow.

However, even if the Board were to discuss the matter, there’s not much it can do. It could call on Iran, under paragraph 18 of the Agreement, to accept the Secretariat’s inspector designations “without delay.” Whether Iran, in such a case, complies with the Board’s request is another matter entirely.

I wouldn’t make a spot bet on it.

The new study is based on extensive computer modeling of a nuclear war, and it suggests strongly that both the United States and Russia could preserve deterrence with fewer warheads and launchers than under New Start. The current treaty calls for 1,550 warheads and 700 active launchers on each side. But the computer modeling showed that further reductions to 1,000 warheads and 500 launchers—or, even lower levels—would not weaken security on either side.

The new study also shows that de-alerting would not erode deterrence. It offers a useful counterpoint to some in the Pentagon, who have argued that a rush to re-alerting in a crisis would create dangerous and destabilizing incentives to strike first.

No doubt the outlook is cloudy, at best, for further nuclear arms reductions by the United States and Russia. Sticking points abound: the asymmetry in arsenals of tactical nuclear weapons; Russian objections to U.S. missile defense plans; and U.S. reserves of non-deployed strategic warheads. On top of that, the political situation in both countries may not be conducive to deeper cuts in the next few years. But this new study ought to inspire the policy-makers and negotiators on both sides to get back to the table. There is clearly room to do more. The authors also call for other countries to begin to ponder lower levels of nuclear weapons along with the United States and Russia.

The conclusions are laid out in an essay in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs.

I think the piece is a welcome reminder, yet again, that Russia and the United States remain locked in a Cold War mindset long after that confrontation expired. They each maintain far larger nuclear arsenals than they need for deterrence. For another perspective which also suggested that the United States could rely on lower levels of weapons, see the article in Strategic Studies Quarterly earlier this year, in which three Air Force thinkers, James Wood Forsyth Jr., Col. B. Chance Saltzman (chief of the Air Force Strategic Plans and Policy Division) and Gary Schaub Jr. concluded that “America’s security can rest easily” on a comparatively small nuclear force. The United States, they wrote, could “draw down its nuclear arsenal to a relatively small number of survivable, reliable weapons dispersed among missile silos, submarines, and airplanes.” They said such a force might number only 311 nuclear weapons.

What’s interesting about the new study in Foreign Affairs is that three of the authors are Russians with extensive experience in Soviet and Russian nuclear forces. Not everyone in the Russian establishment is enthusiastic about deeper cuts; these are voices to be taken seriously.

The three are: Victor Esin, a retired Colonel General, former chief of staff of the Strategic Rocket Forces, and professor at the Institute of the United States and Canada; Valery Yarynich, a retired Colonel who served at the Center for Operational and Strategic Studies of the Russian General Staff, and is now a fellow at the Institute of the United States and Canada; and Pavel Zolotarev, a retired Major General, former section head of the Russian Defense Council, who is deputy director of the Institute of the United States and Canada. The U.S. authors are Bruce Blair, President of the World Security Institute and Co-coordinator of Global Zero, and Matthew McKinzie, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. All the authors are members of the research arm of Global Zero.

The study was supported by the Hewlett Foundation and the Fullerton Family Foundation.

In running their computer models, the authors say they used public estimates of U.S. and Russian forces. For the different scenarios, they ran more than 100 computer simulations of each, in an effort to get the best possible sense of what might happen in a real conflict. They are posting a detailed technical appendix here.

The authors conclude:

Once the New Start agreement is approved by the U.S. Senate, the arms control process between the United States and Russia needs to continue moving  forward. Washington and Moscow could easily reduce their nuclear forces to just 1,000 warheads apiece without any adverse consequences.

They could also de-alert their nuclear forces, diminishing the risk of an accidental or unauthorized launch. Eventually, in concert with other nuclear states and after progress has been made on missile defense cooperation, they should be able to reduce their arsenals to 500 weapons each. Even after these deep cuts, hundreds of cities would still remain at risk of catastrophic destruction in the event of a nuclear war.

Such changes to the nuclear relationship between the United States and Russia should be accompanied by a change in attitude as well as forces: both countries must be more open in assessing nuclear threats and the requirements of deterrence.

Secrecy about safeguards against unauthorized or mistaken launches and about estimates of first- and second strike attacks hamper informed public debate and instill mutual suspicion. Open analysis can help inform the public and policymakers on the best way forward for nuclear policy, elevating the debate above the fray of politics, ideology, and secrecy to a higher plane of objective and transparent analysis. This openness could pave the way toward a safer and more stable world with fewer, and eventually zero, nuclear weapons.