Digests and Blog

The February 5 Washington Post editorial, “The emerging Iran nuclear deal raises major concerns,” accuses the Obama administration of moving the goal post on an Iranian nuclear deal. The editorial says, “where it once aimed to eliminate Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, the administration now appears ready to accept an infrastructure of thousands of Iranian centrifuges.” False. Zero enrichment is not, and has not, been the Obama administration’s aim for a nuclear agreement. Nor is it necessary to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The goal of U.S. policy has been, is, and must be…

On February 2 the Obama administration released its fiscal year (FY) 2016 federal budget request. The request is the administration’s biggest down payment to date on a planned unaffordable and unsustainable nuclear spending binge to rebuild all three legs of the nuclear triad and their associated warheads and supporting infrastructure. The administration’s budget proposal includes significant increases for several strategic nuclear weapons systems, including increase for some programs above what was projected in the FY 2015 budget request (see the chart). Most notably, the budget accelerates…

Updated on February 2, 2015  Iran’s launch of a Fajr (Dawn) observation satellite into orbit on February 2 will undoubtedly confuse the debate over whether or not Iran will soon have an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). It should not; this was not an ICBM-related event. The space launch vehicle (SLV) used in this launch appears to have been a modified Safir, which is based on the Shahab 3 medium-range ballistic missile with an operational range of around 2,000 kilometers. The Simorgh SLV mockup displayed five years ago would, if built, be able to carry a payload 2-3 times heavier…

 Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which implements and verifies the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), announced at the 48th Meeting of the OPCW Executive Council on January 21 that Myanmar, one of only six countries remaining outside of the Convention, had voted to ratify the treaty and would be submitting the instrument of ratification for Myanmar President Thein Sein’s signature and formal submission to the United Nations Secretary General as the CWC’s Depositary.This long-awaited step by Myanmar is most welcome and…

Negotiators from the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, the U.K., and the United States, plus Germany) and Iran are stepping up the pace of their talks on a long-term formula to verifiably limit Iran's nuclear capacity in exchange for phased sanctions relief. Less than a week after the P5+1 and Iranian negotiating teams concluded several days of meetings in Geneva on Jan. 18, Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman and European Union Political Director Helga Schmid met again with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on January 23 and 24 in Zurich, Switzerland. The P5+1 and Iranian political…

By Kingston Reif A new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released today estimates that the United States will spend $348 billion on nuclear weapons over the next decade, or 5 percent to 6 percent of the total costs of the administration’s plans for national defense. But this is just the tip of the coming budget bow wave. Over the next 30 years, the bill could add up to $1 trillion, according to recent report of the National Defense Panel Review of the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review. This planned spending encompasses a massive rebuild of all three legs of the existing nuclear…

It has been obvious for decades that advances in strategic ballistic missile defenses can complicate efforts to maintain a balance in strategic offensive forces while reducing overall nuclear arsenals. The two Cold War superpowers addressed this problem by negotiating the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, which limited the breadth and scope of ballistic missile defense (BMD) deployments. But U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002 and enthusiastic pursuit of BMD by the United States has again brought the negative impact of missile defense on nuclear arms control efforts to the…

A decades-long struggle to forge binding international rules on the trade of nearly all conventional arms transfers reached a milestone this month when the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) formally entered into force on December 24. The ATT was opened for signature in June 2013 and since then the treaty has rapidly garnered more than 125 signatures, including all NATO countries (except Canada) and U.S. allies, such as Israel and South Korea. More than 60 states have ratified the treaty as of this month. The landmark accord, which required 50 ratifications to become international law, establishes…

In his Nov. 25 New York Times op-ed “America Mustn’t Neglect Its Nukes,” Elbridge Colby urges the nation to stop aspiring to eliminate nuclear weapons, stop worrying about nuclear deterrence, and willfully pay the trillion dollar price tag to replace the entire nuclear triad. Colby complains that apathy and even hostility toward the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy from prominent voices in and out of government is part of the problem.  In a similar vein, Robert Spalding complains in the Washington Post that “it erodes morale and encourages perpetually low funding…

The third Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons was held in Vienna on Dec. 8 -9, 2014. The first conference was held in Oslo, Norway, and the second was held in Nayarit, Mexico. Notably, the Vienna conference was the first conference attended by the United States. The U.S. statement, given by Special Representative of the President for Nuclear Nonproliferation Adam Scheinman, can be found here.The conferences aim to discourage the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons by discussing the dangers they pose to civilians and the general public in terms of contamination of the…