The Defense Department unexpectedly announced plans to develop a new variant of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb.
December 2023
By Shannon Bugos
The U.S. Defense Department unexpectedly announced its intention to develop an additional variant of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb, to be known as the B61-13.
“Today’s announcement is reflective of a changing security environment and growing threats from potential adversaries,” said John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, in an Oct. 27 statement. “The United States has a responsibility to continue to assess and field the capabilities we need to credibly deter and, if necessary, respond to strategic attacks, and assure our allies.”
The Pentagon acknowledged its hope that the B61-13 variant would help catalyze the stagnant retirement process of the B83 megaton gravity bomb.
“The B61-13 will provide the President with additional options against certain harder and large-area military targets, even while the department works to retire legacy systems such as the B83-1,” according to a Pentagon fact sheet.
Members of Congress have strongly resisted retiring the B83, claiming the largest bomb in the U.S. nuclear arsenal at 1.2 megatons is necessary to target hard and deeply buried targets. (See ACT, November 2023.) The Trump administration contributed to this resistance with the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which called for retaining the B83 bomb, rather than proceeding with its planned retirement. (See ACT, March 2018.)
But the Biden administration aims to follow through on the retirement of the B83. The megaton-class bomb is “of increasingly limited utility, and retiring it does not change the hard and deeply buried target set,” Plumb told Congress last year.
“The case for the B61-13 is strange,” assessed the Federation of American Scientists in an Oct. 27 blog post. “For the past 13 years, the sales pitch for the expensive B61-12 has been that it would replace all other nuclear gravity bombs,” as well as “cover all gravity missions with less collateral damage than large-yield bombs.”
The B61-13 would be deliverable by modern aircraft and have a maximum yield similar to the 360-kiloton B61-7 variant, a massive increase when compared to the most recent 50-kiloton B61-12. The B61-12 is scheduled for initial deployment this year, replacing the 100 B61-3/4 bombs believed to be stationed across Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey under the NATO nuclear sharing mission.
The Defense Department emphasized that the B61-13 would not increase the overall size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. “The number of B61-12s to be produced will be lowered by the same amount as the number of B61-13s produced,” according to the Pentagon fact sheet.
In an Oct. 24 letter to Congress, the Energy Department officially requested to amend its fiscal year 2024 budget request to cover development engineering activities for the B61-13.
Whether the request will be granted remains to be seen because Congress has yet to pass the necessary legislation to fund any department for all of fiscal year 2024.
This book is a must-read for those seeking to understand the first signals of revolutionary change that AI is bringing to the challenge of preventing nuclear war.
December 2023
Nuclear Deterrence: Unsafe at Machine Speed
A
I and the Bomb: Nuclear Strategy and Risk in the Digital Age
By James Johnson
Oxford University Press
May 2023
James Johnson’s book is the most important book about preventing nuclear war that has been published in recent years. The author confronts head-on the complexity of the dangers that artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies pose for nuclear deterrence. He combines a commanding view of deterrence theory with the imagination to point toward where technology is already obscuring deterrence practice and concludes darkly that, “[i]n the context of AI and autonomy, particularly information complexity, misinformation, and manipulation, rationality-based deterrence logic appears an increasingly untenable proposition.”
AI and the Bomb opens with a gripping account of a “flash war” between China and the United States, taking place over less than two hours in June 2025, in which nuclear weapons are used, millions of people die, and afterward, no one on either side can explain exactly what happened. This story underscores the fact that even if not given control of nuclear weapons, AI and emerging technologies connected to adjacent or seemingly unrelated systems may combine in unforeseen ways to render nuclear escalation incomprehensible to the humans in (or on) the loop.
Johnson’s book is the first comprehensive effort to understand the implications of the AI revolution for the Cold War notion of “strategic stability” at the core of nuclear deterrence. He finds new challenges for deterrence theory and practice in emerging technologies, centering inadvertent escalation as a “new model for nuclear risk.” He formulates a novel “AI-security dilemma” more volatile and unpredictable than the past. He also adds a new dimension of “catalytic nuclear war” by which states without nuclear weapons or nonstate actors might use AI to cause nuclear war among nuclear-armed states.
Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technology, and Deterrence Theory
The author embraces and extends the emerging conventional wisdom that AI should not be plugged into nuclear command-and-control systems, observing that “the delegation of the decision-making process (to inform and make decisions) to machines is not a binary choice but rather a continuum between the two extremes—human decision-making and judgment and machine autonomy at each stage of the kill chain.” Beyond using AI to facilitate nuclear launch decisions, Johnson shows how AI could affect the nuclear balance by changing nuclear weapons system accuracy, resilience and survivability, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for targeting. AI capabilities also may give conventional weapons systems dramatic new capabilities to attack nuclear weapons systems, through increased ability to penetrate air defenses; increased ability to “detect, track, target, and intercept” nuclear missiles; and advanced cybercapabilities, potentially including manipulation of “the information ecosystem in which strategic decisions involving nuclear weapons take place.”
Importantly, Johnson uses AI as a shorthand for referring to AI and a suite of other emerging technologies that enable AI, including “cyberspace, space technology, nuclear technologies, GPS technology, and 3D printing.” This choice mirrors the practice of other thought leaders, including Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher in The Age of AI and Mustafa Suleyman in The Coming Wave.
The book is a grim journey for scholars of nuclear deterrence theory, forcing them to confront concepts such as “machine-speed AI warfare,” “non-human agents,” nuclear arsenals with a “larger attack surface” in a world in which ubiquitous sensors feed data oceans, and “disinformation cascades” that could lead to an “unravelling of deterrence in practice.” These ominous signs begin to flesh out the broad concerns about nuclear strategy that Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher raise, including that “[t]he management of nuclear weapons, the endeavor of half a century, remains incomplete and fragmentary” and that the “unsolved riddles of nuclear strategy must be given new attention.”
Johnson centers Barry Posen’s concept of “[i]nadvertant escalation” as “a new model for nuclear risk.” He finds that “AI-enhanced systems operating at higher speeds, levels of sophistication, and compressed decision-making timeframes will likely…reduce the scope for de-escalating situations and contribute to future mishaps.” He observes AI undermining the utility of Herman Kahn’s familiar “escalation ladder” metaphor: “AI is creating new ways (or ‘rungs’) and potential shortcuts up (and down) the ladder, which might create new mechanisms for a state to perceive (or misperceive) others to be on a different rung, thus making some ‘rungs’ more (or less) fluid or malleable.” Instead of a discrete escalation ladder, Johnson helps the reader envision any number of misperceptions, miscommunications, accidents, and errors interacting with one another across distances, failure modes, and time scales beyond effective human cognition.
‘The AI Security Dilemma’
The book arrives at a moment of urgent, real-world demand for updated nuclear deterrence theory. Last year, Admiral Charles Richard, the U.S. Strategic Command commander, told the annual Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, that his command was “furiously” rewriting deterrence theory to solve a “three body problem” resulting from China’s emergence as a near-peer nuclear arms competitor to the United States and Russia.1
Johnson carefully examines the specific challenges that AI poses for nuclear deterrence theory. He identifies three ways that AI and other emerging technologies have become a singular aggravator of the security dilemma, the enduring challenge at the heart of international relations by which development of defensive capabilities by one state necessarily threatens others.
First, the AI security dilemma features the possibility of extraordinarily fast technological breakthroughs, incentivizing states in competition with peers in AI technology to move first rather than risk being second. For example, the U.S. National Security Commission on AI found that “defending against AI-capable adversaries [notably China] operating at machine speeds without employing AI is an invitation to disaster.”
Second, the AI security dilemma risks placing latent offensive capabilities in civilian hands, such as the massive data facilitated by communication and navigation satellites. Whereas the traditional security dilemma is driven primarily by the misinterpretation of defensive military capabilities, the AI security dilemma also can be driven by the misinterpretation of ostensibly peaceful commercial capabilities.
Third, the AI security dilemma is driven by commercial and market forces not under the positive control of states. Whereas the traditional security dilemma causes states to fear each other’s actions, the AI security dilemma drives states increasingly to fear the actions of private firms. Taken together, these three novel characteristics of potentially explosive technological breakthroughs, ambiguous commercial capabilities, and the absence of positive control over commercial capabilities led Johnson to conclude that AI is “a dilemma aggravator primus inter pares.”
AI extends the problem of nuclear deterrence stability beyond the nuclear-armed states to all states or other actors with offensive AI capabilities. During the Cold War, nuclear proliferation threatened a possible future world with too many nuclear-armed states for confidence in stable nuclear deterrence. Fortunately, nuclear proliferation has been limited enough to be forced, however awkwardly, into various dyads by which mutual threats render nuclear deterrence practice more or less comprehensible, stable, and aligned with necessary assumptions. Johnson worries that offensive AI capabilities may add additional variables to the nuclear escalation equation. Even without the further spread of nuclear weapons, states or other actors could use AI to leverage the deterrent arsenals of nuclear-armed states through “catalytic war.” As the author writes, “The catalyzing chain of reaction and counter-retaliation dynamics set in motion by nonstate or third-party actor’s deliberate action is fast becoming a more plausible scenario in the digital era.”
Beyond Rational Nuclear Deterrence?
The book demonstrates repeatedly how revolutionary change in the technological terrain in which nuclear deterrence takes place demands urgent theoretical and practical adaptation. Old assumptions and human rationality may decrease sharply in effectiveness as tools for preventing nuclear war.
Johnson offers some initial ideas of how to manage the stark challenges that AI poses for nuclear deterrence. Arms control will remain important, if challenging, in new ways; he suggests that banning AI enhancements to nuclear deterrence capabilities might be an important first step.
Another early step that could align with Johnson’s insight might be to work toward the internationalization of processes modeled on the U.S. nuclear “failsafe review” mandated by Congress in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act and now underway at the Department of Defense. The failsafe review “aims to identify nuclear risk-reduction measures that the [United States] could implement to strengthen safeguards against the unauthorized, inadvertent, or mistaken use of a nuclear weapon, including through false warning of an attack.” Since early 2020, Co-chair Sam Nunn and Co-chair and CEO Ernest J. Moniz of the Nuclear Threat Initiative have championed the initiative’s effort to encourage the U.S. government to undertake such a review aimed at strengthening nuclear failsafe and to challenge other nuclear powers to conduct their own internal reviews.2
Johnson recommends applying AI as part of the solution to support nuclear risk reduction, including through “normative, behavioral and confidence building measures to increase mutual trust.” There may be ways that dangers created or accelerated by AI can be mitigated or better managed through adjustments to legacy nuclear deterrence force structures and practices in which patterns of daily life and the massive “data exhaust” of people and systems constituted less of a vulnerability.
The author also recommends bilateral and multilateral dialogue on strategic stability, including with an expanded range of stakeholders through which “partnerships should be forged between commercial AI developers and researchers to explore risk reduction measures in the nuclear enterprise.” AI-enabled capabilities make more states and even nonstate actors immediately relevant to strategic stability. Multinational corporations and leading innovators increasingly own capabilities and data that may be implicated in nuclear deterrence.
Elon Musk’s change to Starlink operations in apparent response to a nuclear threat from Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year is a clear signal that the potential exposure of nuclear deterrence to the commercial sector should no longer be ignored. Observing that “it is inevitable that AI is going to be used for things that touch nuclear weapons,” Jill Hruby, the administrator of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, recently imagined a path forward, a future in which “you’re almost going to need AI systems battling each other to do the verification.”3 If the world wants to prevent a future in which algorithms fight nuclear war, leaders must act and invest now in algorithms to prevent nuclear war.
Ultimately, Johnson expects that “AI technology in the nuclear domain will likely be a double-edged sword: strengthening the [nuclear command-and-control] systems while expanding the pathways and tools available to adversaries to conduct cyberattacks and electronic warfare operations against these systems.” He encourages policymakers to act “before the pace of technological change outpaces (or surpasses) strategic affairs.”
Johnson concludes his book with a quote from machine learning pioneer Alan Turing: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” AI and the Bomb is a must read for those seeking to understand the first signals of revolutionary change that AI is bringing to the challenge of preventing nuclear war. It sends a clear warning that the world does not yet know how to manage the effects of AI on nuclear deterrence and, without significant urgent effort, it is likely to fall short.
ENDNOTES
1. Theresa Hitchens, “The Nuclear 3 Body Problem: STRATCOM ‘Furiously’ Rewriting Deterrence Theory in Tripolar World,” Breaking Defense, August 11, 2022, https://breakingdefense.com/2022/08/the-nuclear-3-body-problem-stratcom-furiously-rewriting-deterrence-theory-in-tri-polar-world/.
2. Nuclear Threat Initiative, “The Failsafe Review,” January 25, 2023, https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/the-failsafe-review/.
3. Jill Hruby, Remarks to the Nuclear Threat Initiative Board of Directors, Washington, October 24, 2023.
With a potential change in government on the horizon, the United Kingdom has an opportunity to rethink its nuclear weapons policy and return to a leadership role.
December 2023
By Louis Reitmann
The next UK general election is due by January 2025, and for the first time in more than 10 years, a win by the Labour Party seems possible. Polling between 44 and 47 percent, Labour is as popular as the Conservative Party was when Boris Johnson won a landslide victory in 2019.1 Remarkably, 62 percent of members of Parliament believe that Labour will win the next election, as do most voters and 48 percent of Conservative voters.2
With a potential change in government on the horizon, the United Kingdom has an opportunity to rethink its nuclear weapons policy and return to a leadership role on nuclear risk reduction and disarmament among the five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). After decades of reductions, the Johnson government stunned the world in 2021 by raising the limit on the UK nuclear stockpile from 180 warheads to 260 warheads and by reducing arsenal transparency.3 With this decision, the UK lost political leverage over other nuclear powers, further polarized the global disarmament debate, and contributed to growing nuclear risk. The present government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has shown no interest in changing course.
Although Labour has criticized Conservative nuclear weapons policy, it is far from united on the issue. The party seems stuck in a cyclical debate about whether to appear tough on defense or pursue nuclear disarmament, but there is a clear path by which a Labour government could take meaningful yet realistic action to reduce nuclear risk and make progress toward disarmament without unilaterally surrendering the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Giving Perspective to a Disillusioned Party
The issue of the UK’s nuclear weapons has been thorny for Labour. Its vocal pro-disarmament wing has exposed the party to questions about its commitment to national defense and nuclear deterrence. Credibility issues intensified under Jeremy Corbyn, the previous party leader and a lifelong disarmament advocate who said that he would never use nuclear weapons if elected prime minister.
The current leader, Keir Starmer, has tried to silence the critics by cementing Labour’s commitment to the UK’s nuclear weapons as “non-negotiable” and by underlining support for the ongoing modernization program.4 More recently, Starmer abolished the Office of Shadow Minister for Peace and Disarmament, held by a lawmaker who campaigned for the country to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).5 In terms of electoral strategy, this seems smart; voters currently prefer Labour policies in all areas except defense, where the Conservatives have an 18-point lead.6 To win the next election, Labour must appeal to more center-right voters, the majority of whom support the UK having nuclear weapons.7
At the same time, Starmer’s Labour Party has condemned the Johnson government for breaking its goal of gradually reducing the stockpile, criticized the Dreadnought-class submarine program’s spiraling cost as wasteful, and pledged to “lead efforts to secure multilateral disarmament.”8 There is a clear desire to differentiate Labour from the Conservative approach without appearing “weak” on defense.
To do so, Labour has to move beyond the limits of its internal debate, which has long been defined by an imagined binary choice between maintaining the arsenal as it is and complete nuclear disarmament, when in reality there are many options in between. If Labour wants to restore UK leadership in the global nuclear order, it should take a long, hard look at them.
Taking Meaningful, Realistic Action
A future Labour government’s nuclear weapons policy should be based on several broad objectives: countering the trend toward nuclear armament, reducing the risk of nuclear war, and easing the tension between the five nuclear-weapon states and TPNW states-parties that undermines a collaborative pursuit of nuclear disarmament. Implementing the following policy options would help achieve these objectives.
The lowest hanging fruit for a Labour government would be to declare a moratorium on increases to the nuclear weapons stockpile enabled by the 2021 Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy. This would leave open the option of growing the stockpile in the future while acknowledging the questionable strategic necessity of a larger stockpile at this moment.
Defense officials at the time said that the cap increase was “driven by a desire to be more assertive and ‘not apologize’ for the UK’s position as a nuclear state,” rather than by strategic thinking.9 Not only was the decision unforeseen by the expert community, it also contained very little detail about the capabilities of adversaries that made a stockpile increase necessary and why alternatives, such as increasing the operational part of the stockpile, arming the patrolling submarine with more than 40 warheads, or enhancing submarine stealth or missile reentry for greater arsenal survivability, were not viable options. Going a step further, a Labour government could reinstate the previous limit of 180 warheads and resume work toward this goal to be completed in the mid-2030s.
Reversing a second decision announced in the 2021 Integrated Review, a Labour government could enhance transparency by resuming publication of the number of deployed UK missiles and warheads, and the size of the operational stockpile. The decision to pursue strategic ambiguity was meant to complicate the decision-making of adversaries during crises, but critics note that there is little evidence that ambiguity about capabilities strengthens deterrence. Indeed, the principal lesson from the Soviet-U.S. arms control experience was that mutual transparency increased both sides’ confidence that credible deterrence was possible even with fewer nuclear weapons.10 Strategic ambiguity raises the risk of miscalculation, which is why governments, such as those involved in the Stockholm Initiative, a cross-regional group of 14 countries committed to advancing nuclear disarmament, have been calling for enhanced information exchanges, dialogue, and transparency to reduce nuclear risk.11
Strategic ambiguity is inconsistent with the UK’s practice of lobbying for transparency and national reporting under the NPT and undermines its ability to credibly criticize Chinese and Russian nuclear secrecy. It also may increase distrust within the P5 process, a consultative mechanism initiated in 2009 to facilitate cooperation among the NPT’s five nuclear-weapon states that the UK inaugurated and shepherds. As former UK Defense Secretary Desmond Browne concluded, “There is really no good explanation for ending this transparency.”12
Adopting a Sole-Purpose Policy
By adopting a sole-purpose policy, the UK would declare that its nuclear weapons are only intended to deter an attack with nuclear weapons, not with any other weapons of mass destruction, conventional weapons, or cyberweapons. This change would reflect the broad consensus in the UK nuclear community that it is unthinkable that London would ever use nuclear weapons first and that the arsenal is too small to deliver a preemptive strike against its main adversaries, Russia and China. There also is no majority support among the UK public for a first-use policy.13
A sole-purpose declaration would be a positive step toward risk reduction, helping to prevent miscalculations by adversaries that could trigger a nuclear first strike against the UK. The argument that retaining a first-use option deters conventional war ignores the fact that even a lower-yield nuclear response to a conventional attack easily could escalate into full-blown nuclear war.
Adopting a sole-purpose policy would require coordination with allies to ensure complementarity with NATO’s nuclear posture. There is potential for the UK and the United States to act jointly on this in the future since the Biden administration was viewed as likely to adopt a sole-purpose policy prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Another option is for a Labour-led Parliament to adopt legislation linking future nuclear weapons modernization to further reductions in the stockpile or nuclear posture, affecting updates to the arsenal after the Dreadnought-class submarines now under construction leave service in the 2070s. This would be a long overdue response to criticism that the nuclear-weapon states are not making concrete plans for disarmament in the spirit of the NPT while still giving the UK another 40 years to prepare for reductions.
Although politically difficult, this option must be considered seriously, not least because each modernization bears a considerable risk that the update cannot be delivered on time, at the expected capability, or at all. Currently, concerns are emerging that the Dreadnought program will not be completed; several components are already severely behind schedule and billions over budget.14 Regarding the development of a new reactor to power the submarines, the UK Infrastructure and Projects Authority has concluded that the “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable.”15 Facing many challenges from economic security to public health, the UK may not want or be able to take on an immense financial risk like this again.
As for alternatives to the current UK posture with at least one nuclear-armed submarine always at sea, a 2013 governmental review gave concrete options, for example, coordinating deployment schedules more closely with France and the United States to ensure that the UK is protected by NATO capabilities when not deploying its own submarines.16 Reductions in the stockpile or nuclear posture could be combined with a UK Ministry of Defence program to investigate how the state could bolster its conventional capabilities with the savings that accrue from a smaller nuclear arsenal.
Attending a TPNW Meeting
A Labour government could make history if the UK becomes the first nuclear-weapon state to attend a TPNW meeting of states-parties as an observer. This could be a step toward a broader change in the UK approach to the treaty if it no longer works to undermine the TPNW, discourages states from joining it, or asserts the treaty’s incompatibility with the NPT.
Normalizing the UK relationship with the TPNW would be a smart choice. It would acknowledge that the campaign by the nuclear-weapon states against the treaty has backfired by antagonizing many non-nuclear-weapon states and strengthening support for the TPNW. At the same time, a less hostile approach would not prevent the UK from continuing to assert that the treaty has no political or legal effect on itself or other states that are not party to it.
It is worth remembering that the UK previously has changed course in a similar way. After abstaining from the first two conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, in Oslo and Nayarit, the UK and the United States attended the third conference, held in Vienna in 2014, and were the only nuclear-weapon states to do so.
Finally, a Labour government could fund assistance for victims of UK nuclear testing and for restoration of the ecosystems that UK tests have destroyed in Australia, the Pacific region, and Nevada. Assistance could be given directly to the affected communities or via a trust fund that TPNW states-parties are discussing.17
Emphasizing humanitarian and environmental concerns would align well with Labour’s ambitions to carve out a new, progressive role for the UK on the world stage. It also would help address the country’s colonialist legacy as nearly all 45 of its nuclear tests were conducted on or near indigenous land. The UK pays pensions to veterans who worked on the tests, and Labour has promised each veteran a ₤50,000 lump sum.18 Yet, the UK has never extended apologies or support to indigenous peoples who for generations have suffered the trauma and health consequences of nuclear testing. In Kiribati alone, 189 families have been afflicted by illness due to UK tests.19 Despite persistent lobbying, including at the 2023 UN General Assembly, calls for compensation have been ignored.
From an opportunistic perspective, providing such support could further the UK’s self-perception as a responsible nuclear-weapon state. Along with France and the United States, the UK has used this term to differentiate itself from China and Russia, which have embarked on modernization and expansion programs for their nuclear arsenals with minimal transparency.
The UK could even fund assistance to people and places affected by Soviet testing, for example, in Kazakhstan, thus demonstrating the difference between Russian and UK conduct as nuclear powers. TPNW states-parties reject the idea that any state with nuclear weapons could be considered responsible, but expanding the concept to include victims assistance and environmental remediation could strengthen the UK case that there are more responsible ways of maintaining nuclear weapons.
An Opportunity to Be Seized
If elected, Labour must move past its self-sabotaging internal struggle between unconditional commitment to the status quo and unilateral disarmament toward a balanced and results-oriented approach to the country’s nuclear arsenal. Labour’s pursuit of a “safe-choice-for-defense” image should not prevent it from seizing this unique opportunity to restore the UK’s international leadership regarding nuclear risk reduction and disarmament. There are plenty of policy options on the table, from low-hanging fruit to ambitious initiatives.
ENDNOTES
1. Ipsos, “Latest UK Opinion Polls: Government Approval Recent Changes,” October 4, 2023; YouGov, “YouGov/The Times Survey Results,” n.d., p. 1, https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/TheTimes_VI_231018_W.pdf.
2. Matthew Smith, “Half of Tory MPs Say the Conservatives Are Going to Win the Next Election,” YouGov, July 14, 2023, https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/45901-half-tory-mps-say-conservatives-are-going-win-next.
3. Kingston Reif and Shannon Bugos, “UK to Increase Cap on Nuclear Warhead Stockpile,” Arms Control Today, April 2021, pp. 18-19.
4. Helen Catt, “Labour Renews Vow to Keep Nuclear Weapons,” BBC News, February 26, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-56198972.
5. Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, “Starmer Removes Peace and Disarmament Role From Shadow Team,” September 8, 2023, https://www.labourcnd.org.uk/2023/09/starmer-removes-peace-and-disarmament-role-from-shadow-team/; Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, “Parliamentarians Supporting the TPNW,” January 7, 2021, https://cnduk.org/parliamentarians-supporting-the-tpnw/.
6. Gideon Skinner et al., “British Public Think Labour Have the Best Policies on Key Issues but Are Often Unsure How They Would Tackle Them,” Ipsos, June 27, 2023, https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/british-public-think-labour-have-best-policies-on-key-issues.
7. Milan Dinic, “YouGov Study of War: Nuclear Weapons and War,” YouGov, September 21, 2022, https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/43812-part-three-nuclear-weapons-and-war.
8. Dan Sabbagh and Jessica Elgot, “Keir Starmer Accuses PM of Breaking Policy on Nuclear Disarmament,” The Guardian, March 16, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/16/keir-starmer-accuses-pm-of-breaking-policy-on-nuclear-disarmament; Dan Taylor, “Row as Labour Criticises ‘Significant Issues’ With Dreadnought Programme,” The Mail, September 7, 2022, https://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/20988403.row-labour-criticises-significant-issueswith-dreadnought-programme/; Helen Catt, “Labour Renews Vow to Keep Nuclear Weapons,” BBC News, February 26, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-56198972.
9. David Cullen, “Extreme Circumstances: The UK’s New Nuclear Warhead in Context,” Nuclear Information Service (NIS), August 2022, p. 36, https://www.nuclearinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Extreme-Circumstances-print-version.pdf.
10. Pavel Podvig, “Transparency in Nuclear Disarmament,” UN Institute for Disarmament Research, March 2012, p. 6, https://unidir.org/files/publication/pdfs/transparency-in-nuclear-disarmament-390.pdf.
11. 2020 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, “A Nuclear Risk Reduction Package: Working Paper Submitted by the Stockholm Initiative, Supported by Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland,” NPT/CONF.2020/WP.9, May 14, 2021, p. 3.
12. James McKeon, “Q&A: Des Browne on the UK’s Decision to Increase the Cap on Nuclear Warheads,” Nuclear Threat Initiative, April 14, 2021, https://www.nti.org/atomic-pulse/qa-des-browne-on-the-uks-decision-to-increase-the-cap-on-nuclear-warheads/.
13. Tim Street, Harry Spencer, and Shane Ward, “The British Government Doesn’t Want to Talk About Its Nuclear Weapons. The British Public Does,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 6, 2023, https://thebulletin.org/2023/04/the-british-government-doesnt-want-to-talk-about-its-nuclear-weapons-the-british-public-does/.
14. NIS, “Trouble Ahead Update - Winter 2022/23,” YouTube, December 20, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLRP8Q70LA0.
15. NIS, “Increasing Risk of Problems in Derby Delaying Dreadnought Schedule,” August 7, 2023, https://www.nuclearinfo.org/article/increasing-risk-of-problems-in-derby-delaying-dreadnought-schedule/.
16. Government of the United Kingdom, “Trident Alternatives Review,” July 16, 2013, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c65b1e5274a7ee2567320/20130716_Trident_Alternatives_Study.pdf.
17. International Human Rights Clinic, Harvard Law School, “Designing a Trust Fund for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons: Precedents and Proposals,” January 2023, https://humanrightsclinic.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/011323_Trust-Fund-Report-Combined.pdf.
18. UK Labour Party, “It’s Time for Real Change: The Labour Party Manifesto 2019,” November 2019, p. 101, https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Real-Change-Labour-Manifesto-2019.pdf.
19. Becky Alexis-Martin, “Veterans Join Pacific Islanders in Bid for Nuclear Testing Compensation,” The Telegraph, October 19, 2023, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/britain-nuclear-testing-programme-kiribati-compensation/.
Louis Reitmann is a research associate at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, focusing on nuclear disarmament, export controls, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the nuclear field.
Hruby discusses what the United States is doing to ensure that its nuclear weapons are safe and reliable and how transparency can help prevent nuclear-weapon states from returning to testing.
December 2023
For decades, the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its predecessor agencies at the Department of Energy have been at the center of the technical and political issues relating to nuclear weapons: warhead design and development, explosive testing, and non-explosive techniques to maintain the nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal.
The last U.S. nuclear test explosion was conducted in September 1992, and since then, the United States has observed a test moratorium and supported the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Although the treaty has established a norm against nuclear explosive tests, it has not entered into force because eight specific states, including the United States, have not ratified it.
Meanwhile, Russia, China, and the United States are engaging in activities at their former test sites at Novaya Zemlya, Lop Nur, and the Nevada National Security Site, respectively, prompting accusations of CTBT noncompliance and concerns about the possible resumption of full-scale nuclear testing. Recently, Russia took the unusual step of withdrawing its CTBT ratification in order to “mirror” the U.S. status vis-à-vis the CTBT. Nevertheless, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia will maintain its nuclear test moratorium as long as the United States does.
Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, and Carol Giacomo, editor of Arms Control Today, explored these issues in an interview with NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
ARMS CONTROL TODAY: Can you say why, in your technical judgment, the United States does not need to resume explosive testing to maintain the U.S. arsenal or to build new design warheads?
NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby: When the United States signed the CTBT and made the decision to stop doing full-scale nuclear explosive testing, we simultaneously put in place, during the Clinton administration, this process that we refer to as the annual assessment process, by which we evaluate how the stockpile is aging. The three NNSA lab directors do an evaluation every year on the technical health of our weapons, and a major part of the determination is to say whether there is a technical reason to resume nuclear explosive testing. That evaluation has been done for about 27 years and has resulted in a finding every year that there is no technical reason to conduct nuclear explosive testing.
The process is larger than just the three lab directors. The [U.S. Strategic Command] commander also determines whether he or she believes that the stockpile is effective. So, that’s a separate process. I can’t say as much about that because that’s not the process in the NNSA, but from a technical perspective, there has not been a reason to resume testing.
It’s a very considered judgment. It’s a process by which we spend a lot of time making sure we do enough examination of old weapons. There are flight tests, laboratory tests, smaller subcomponent tests, and component testing of elements of our stockpile. We’re confident that the stockpile has the performance, reliability, safety, and security that it needs.
ACT: What is your response to the Russian suggestion that the United States is making preparations for nuclear testing at the Nevada National Security Site?
Hruby: This is the primary reason why we really stepped up talking about what we were doing at the Nevada National Security Site. Everybody makes allegations about everybody else’s activity at test sites, and it makes sense. We have a treaty that says we’re not going to test, so of course, everybody watches everybody else.
The truth is, we have activity going on at our former test site, the Nevada site. We’ve been using it all along for three reasons. One is to do subcritical experiments for our science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program [SSP]. This is part of what we need to do to make sure that our stockpile is behaving and aging the way that we think it is so that we don’t have to do a full-scale test. Another thing that we’ve done consistently at [the Nevada site] is conduct experiments for the nonproliferation program that helps us improve our ability to detect testing. We do this, as many other countries do, to improve our capability to monitor. Those tests are chemically explosive tests. They use conventional explosives; they don’t use nuclear explosives. But they use enough chemical explosives that we can get the seismic activity that’s sort of equivalent to a low-yield test so we know whether or not we could monitor that.
The third thing is that the Nevada site people have done other national security missions not associated with the NNSA but associated with larger national security missions, in particular for the Department of Homeland Security. When the Department of Homeland Security’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office was active, they wanted to test the monitors that they were putting at ports in the United States and around the world.
Honestly, we have in the last three or four years gotten sophisticated enough with this other set of experiments that we do now, concentrated on the NNSA subcritical experiments, that we are actually investing in significant new diagnostics. We call those projects “enhanced capability for subcritical experiments,” where we’re preparing to be able to do radiography, for example, which we haven’t been able to do before. To set those experiments up in the U1a tunnel [at the Nevada site], which is where we’ve done all our subcritical experiments, meant that we actually had to mine some new tunnels. These are fairly large pieces of diagnostic equipment, so we’ve had to do some new mining. The same thing is true with our nonproliferation-associated experiments. We’ve done some new mining to do some work that has better diagnostics associated with it.
Not to pick on the Russians, but if you’re the Russians or anybody else that is looking at the activity going on at the Nevada site, you’re going to see activity associated with mining. So, as soon as the Russians started saying these things, our sense was, oh well, we understand why they might interpret it that way. We need to be clearer about what we’re doing because we have nothing to hide and we’re not preparing for an underground [nuclear explosive] test. But it’s not a completely unreasonable thing, when you see mining at a former test site, to believe that something could be going on. That’s really why we wanted to just put everything out there and be very straightforward about what we are doing.
There’s one additional reason why we have actually been upgrading the infrastructure. Because of this increased amount of work associated with preparing for these new diagnostic capabilities, we have actually replaced some of the office buildings [at the site].
We’re very happy to be honest and straightforward and transparent about what we’re doing. Then we thought, well hey, if we’re going to be honest and straightforward, let’s just go the whole step and say maybe there’s more we can do in terms of transparency.
ACT: Let me ask one clarifying question about what a subcritical experiment is and what a supercritical experiment is. According to the Department of State, the United States and other governments participating in CTBT negotiations agreed that the treaty “prohibits all nuclear explosions that produce a self-sustaining supercritical fission chain reaction of any kind.” Can you provide any more clarification for the nontechnical expert about how your scientists distinguish between a subcritical and a supercritical experiment?
Hruby: We use a definition of subcritical that adheres to the strictest standard of zero yield and the international standard that we’ve proposed and hope is adopted by everybody that signed up to the CTBT. For the subcritical testing, we do not produce a sustained fission reaction. It’s hard to describe that in non-physics terms, but the difference is that there is not only not a large explosion, but there is also no sustained reaction.
ACT: You said that the United States wants to be as transparent as possible because it is not planning to or is not engaged in supercritical nuclear explosions. How are you seeking to do that? You proposed back in June at the CTBT: Science and Technology Conference that the NNSA is “open to working with others to develop a regime that would allow reciprocal observation with radiation detection equipment at each other’s subcritical experiments to allow confirmation that the experiment was consistent with the CTBT.” Could you describe what methods, technical or otherwise, you are pursuing to demonstrate that the U.S. activities are consistent with the CTBT and to address concerns about these subcritical experiments?
Hruby: We’ve been trying to be transparent. We announce, and we let the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) know, for example, when we do these chemical explosive tests; we let everybody with monitoring stations know. We publish all the results of the experiment. So, we’ve already been doing a lot of the nonreciprocal transparency. We didn’t agree to do reciprocal, but we’ve done lots of things to try to make the work that we do transparent. We also take people on tours of [the Nevada site]. We’ve invited members of the U.S. nongovernmental community to [the site] at the end of November.
What we’ve put on the table is, if other countries that formerly tested were interested in more transparency about the experiments they are conducting—because we know everybody’s doing some activities at their former test sites—we would be willing to do more intrusive things as opposed to just putting out the information. This includes ideas that would enable you to make sure that they didn’t produce a signature associated with a sustained nuclear chain reaction.
I know Arms Control Today just published an article about a verification approach that [Princeton University physicist] Frank von Hippel was involved in, and he had talked to me beforehand about his ideas. We had a team of people also looking at technical ideas and other ideas that would enhance confidence building. So, we could, for example, do video feeds that might build more confidence. Then we could do more intrusive things like radiation detection monitors within the chamber where other people, other countries, could probe. That would be a reciprocity thing that we could both do to allow people to in fact make sure that there wasn’t a supercritical reaction.
We have not provided all the details. Before I announced the potential for greater transparency, we did enough work on it to say, hey, we think this is technically feasible in a way that everybody should be willing to share, that isn’t going to reveal information about the design of their weapons or anything sensitive like that because these are not weapons that we’re working with, they’re just material samples. We think that this could be a great scientific interchange and good confidence-building measure. We’re trying to determine whether there’s enough interest to go further, to put more detailed approaches on the table.
As you know, all monitoring and verification of other people’s work requires both sides to be comfortable with the approach. So, before we go do a lot of work to put a detailed proposal on the technical approach on the table, we are trying to judge the interest. That’s the stage we’re at now. We believe there are multiple ways you could do this that we would be comfortable with. We’re trying to judge if there’s enough interest to put these ideas on the table and begin a dialogue with our counterparts in other countries and have reciprocity.
ACT: In terms of the dialogue, would the Biden administration be open to consulting with the CTBTO about some of these techniques because, ultimately, it is going to be responsible for verifying compliance with this treaty?
Hruby: Absolutely. [CTBTO Executive Secretary] Rob Floyd has been out to the Nevada site. I think he was our last international visitor. We’re willing to have other CTBTO ambassadors come visit. Again, we really have nothing to hide, but we also feel like the benefit of this is if we all do it, not just if one of us does it. That’s where we’d like to go. Rob’s been out, I’m sure we’ll have him out again. We bring the public to [the Nevada site]. We’ll do a special tour for people that are more interested in the subject, hopefully the ambassadors in Vienna. We’ll see if we can work up some momentum and some interest in transparency and reciprocity.
ACT: You say you’re trying to “judge the interest,” but what has been the interest so far?
Hruby: The interest so far is hard to judge. There are obviously people listening because there’s more chatter about it, including comments by the Russians. That being said, it doesn’t seem to be moving in exactly the direction that we had hoped, where people are saying this seems like a good idea and something that is relatively easy to do from a confidence-building measure or technical measures [perspective].
We know the arms control regime is not in a good place. We know that strategic stability isn’t where we need it to be. We would like to get back to real arms control discussions. We would like to get back to strategic stability discussions. That’s not in a good place, but let’s choose something easy, and we consider this quite easy. But so far, I would say we don’t have a positive vibe. What we have is a vibe of, well, okay, put more on the table. So, that’s going to have to be a whole-government decision whether we put more on the table. I can’t decide just to do that by myself, that would be presumptuous. Congress has a role to play in that, the White House has a role to play in that. It’s not just my decision alone. So, what we’ve gotten is,
it feels a bit more like a challenge than like a discussion.
ACT: Not only has Russia withdrawn its ratification of the CTBT, but there are reports that Russia is making improvements around Novaya Zemlya. Do you interpret these moves as political signaling, an indication that Russia is going to resume testing, or both?
Hruby: I’m not in the intelligence community. I’m not making assessments. My job is to be aware and prepared for actions that the Russians or anybody else may make. That’s why we’re doing the nonproliferation experiments, to get better at detecting seismic activities at former test sites or anywhere in the world. So, I don’t know. I don’t know whether it’s political signaling or they’re getting prepared to test. But I sure would like to have an agreement that we’re going to abide by the CTBT and that we’ll do this together in a cooperative way. I’m trying to nudge it in that direction because I think the CTBT has been a stabilizing treaty and I’d like to see us all continue to uphold that treaty. If there is anything that we can do to help with that, we would like to do that.
ACT: It’s been about a quarter century since the SSP was established and nuclear explosive testing in the United States was halted. Would you say, in your experience previously as a lab director and now as NNSA administrator, that the United States has a better or diminishing level of confidence in the reliability and performance of the warheads and the arsenal? Are we learning more from
the SSP as it has evolved than we did during the days of frequent full-scale explosive testing?
Hruby: I feel like we know more fundamentally about weapon performance today as a result of our SSP than we knew during the era of large-scale nuclear explosive tests.
ACT: One of your agency’s responsibilities is maintaining the safety and reliability of the warheads, and the NNSA has a very ambitious schedule and plan for modernizing and upgrading existing types of warheads. But questions come up from time to time about whether this refurbishment program is introducing new variables and new components that veer from previously tested designs and concepts. How are you trying to ensure that the warhead refurbishments now planned do not introduce those kinds of variables that raise questions about reliability that could in turn lead to calls for resuming nuclear explosive testing?
Hruby: We have a robust surveillance program, and that starts as we deploy weapons. We don’t wait for the systems to be in for 10 to 20 years and then surveil them. We begin surveillance immediately, and if we uncover any issues with any components, we address those immediately. There is this thing that we fondly refer to as the bathtub curve, where most problems happen very early from manufacturing defects, then things are pretty stable for a while, and then there’s an increase in issues over time as weapons age. So, we try to find all the problems. Again, we do flight tests. We do lab tests. We have a very active surveillance program. Can I guarantee there won’t be an issue that doesn’t require testing? No, that’s why we have the active surveillance program. But so far, when we find things, we can address them in a way that we don’t need testing. Our models and these experimental programs that we do, including the subcritical programs, help us make sure we don’t need to do nuclear explosive testing again.
ACT: The final report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States recommends that your agency plan to increase its production capacity beyond the current program of record to meet the two-peer threat from Russia and China. Is that even practical, given that the NNSA is having trouble fulfilling its plan to produce at least 30 plutonium pits for nuclear warheads per year at Los Alamos and at least 50 per year at Savannah River?
Hruby: We’re going through the recommendations of the strategic posture commission report carefully. The administration will be reviewing, as we already do, our nuclear deterrence posture. At the NNSA, we are trying to design for flexibility as we build these new facilities, including the pit facilities that you referred to. The requirement for us was a minimum of 80 pits per year. We have tried to build these facilities so that there’s some room so that if we have to expand capability in the future that we would have the capacity to do that. We don’t want to overbuild, and we don’t want to underbuild, but we need to build flexibility into the way we think about the facilities that we’re constructing now.
We always talk about how we’re trying to build a resilient and flexible enterprise. Flexible means the ability to scale up as suggested in the strategic posture commission report or the ability to scale down without closing things the way we did at the end of the Cold War, which has now caused us to be in a position where we have to start from scratch on some things. Resilience means that we don’t want single-point failures. So, for example, that’s why we’re building a facility at Los Alamos and another one at Savannah River. If anything were to go wrong at either one of those, we would have resilience.
On Sunday, Nov. 20, 1983, I left my college dorm to visit my parents’ home in the suburbs of Oxford, Ohio. That evening, along with some 100 million other Americans, we witnessed two hours of stunning television that would mobilize the nation, as well as some of its leaders, to take meaningful steps to reduce the nuclear danger.
December 2023
By Daryl G. Kimball
On Sunday, Nov. 20, 1983, I left my college dorm to visit my parents’ home in the suburbs of Oxford, Ohio. That evening, along with some 100 million other Americans, we witnessed two hours of stunning television that would mobilize the nation, as well as some of its leaders, to take meaningful steps to reduce the nuclear danger.
“The Day After,” shown on the ABC television network, took viewers into the lives of characters in typical towns and cities in the midwestern United States, not far from U.S. nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos. Following a fictional NATO-Russia military confrontation that spun out of control, the film showed the shocking effects of an all-out nuclear exchange designed to hit “military and related-industrial targets” and the catastrophic aftermath.
The film remains a devastating reminder that nuclear deterrence is a strategy that can and will fail someday. It fueled criticism of the Reagan administration’s aggressive nuclear buildup and added momentum to the powerful public movement demanding that U.S. and Soviet leaders freeze and reverse the arms race. It spurred concerned citizens into action. It inspired me to help form a chapter of United Campuses Against Nuclear War at Miami University.
Four decades later, as a result of landmark bilateral nuclear arms reduction agreements, Russian and U.S. Cold War nuclear stockpiles have been reduced drastically, but continue to pose an existential danger. Russia and the United States still cling to Cold War-era nuclear doctrines and deploy thousands of high-yield nuclear warheads on hundreds of ICBMs, designed to annihilate each other’s military and command capabilities within 30 minutes of a presidential launch order.
A new study by Princeton University researchers in Scientific American this month documents the effects of a nuclear attack from Russia on the 450 U.S. ICBM silos located in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska. These high-yield nuclear detonations would rain lethal fallout on several million people in the first hours, with tens of millions more people dying of radiation sickness thereafter—the same scenario as the 1983 film. Depending on weather patterns, more than 300 million people in the continental United States, the most populated areas of Canada, and northern Mexico would be at risk of lethal fallout.
The Pentagon’s official rationale for the U.S. ICBM arsenal is to force China or Russia to direct a large portion of their long-range nuclear forces at U.S. ICBMs to try to limit the damage that they would suffer from a U.S. nuclear counterstrike. Because the bulk of the U.S. ICBM force would be destroyed in a large-scale nuclear attack, it remains U.S. policy to keep the ICBMs on prompt alert to allow for “launch under attack.” This gives the president mere minutes to decide whether to authorize the use of ICBMs, which increases the risk that a false alarm or misinformation could trigger a nuclear catastrophe.
A large ICBM force hair-trigger alert is not only dangerous, but also pointless. The United States has more than 1,000 nuclear warheads on invulnerable strategic ballistic missile submarines at sea and long-range nuclear-armed bombers that can be airborne ahead of a surprise nuclear attack. Just one U.S. nuclear-armed submarine, carrying 160 thermonuclear warheads, each with an explosive yield of 100 kilotons TNT equivalent or more, could devastate a large country and kill tens of millions of people. The United States maintains eight strategic subs on continuous patrol. Furthermore, U.S. ICBMs, which likely are targeted against Russia’s land-based strategic rocket forces, would be hitting empty silos because Russia’s ICBM forces also would be launched on warning of a U.S. retaliatory attack if they were not already part of a Russian first strike.
Nevertheless, the United States has initiated a program to replace its existing Minuteman III missiles with 666 newly designed Sentinel ICBMs, 400 of which would be deployed through 2070 at a cost in excess of $150 billion. That assumes, incorrectly, that the United States needs to have 400 ICBMs for the indefinite future. Presidents can change outdated military requirements, and future arms reduction agreements certainly can reduce the number of ICBMs or, better yet, eliminate them altogether.
Amid the catastrophic destruction of “The Day After,” one character, a woman about to give birth, complains to her doctor, “We knew the score. We knew all about bombs. We knew about fallout. We knew this could happen for 40 years. But nobody was interested.”
We may not be so lucky to avoid nuclear Armageddon for another 40 years. Once again, our survival depends on more interest, more public engagement, and more pressure on policymakers to turn away from dangerous nuclear deterrence policies of the past. We must push leaders to reengage in disarmament negotiations to reduce the risks, the role, and the number of nuclear weapons, beginning with ICBMs.
Inside the Arms Control Association
November 2023
More than a decade ago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recognized ACA as an “exceptional organization that effectively addresses pressing national and international challenges with an impact disproportionate to its small size.”
June 2023 Digital Magazine
May 2023 Digital Magazine
Russia has reneged on another international commitment by refusing to share data on its military forces with 57 participating states as called for in the Vienna Document, according to a letter obtained by Arms Control Today and a European official.
March 2023
By Gabriela Rosa Hernández
Russia has reneged on another international commitment by refusing to share data on its military forces with 57 participating states as called for in the Vienna Document, according to a letter obtained by Arms Control Today and a European official.
The failure to participate in the annual data exchange occurs as Russia is waging an illegal war against Ukraine, suspending its participation in the last treaty limiting Russian and U.S. strategic nuclear weapons and taking other steps to undermine the post-Cold War European security architecture.
Overseen by the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Vienna Document is a confidence and security-building mechanism that has allowed the 57 participating states to observe and notify each other about their military exercises and other relevant events to prevent misinterpretation of these activities. It is one the few remaining mechanisms for political and military cooperation in Europe.
Moscow’s decision was first communicated on Jan. 16, 2022, in a letter signed by Konstantin Gavrilov, head of the Russian arms control delegation in Vienna, to Siniša Bencun, the ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the OSCE who at the time also chaired the organization’s Forum for Security and Cooperation.
Gavrilov said that Russia would not provide national information about its armed forces for 2023 as stipulated by Chapter I of the Vienna Document, essentially suspending its participation in the annual exchange that is supposed to be provided each year by Dec. 15.
Russia still has not provided the required data even though the new reporting year has begun, an official from an OSCE participating state told Arms Control Today on condition of anonymity.
In his letter, Gavrilov wrote that the Russian decision “was taken in response to the Czech Republic’s step to suspend the implementation of its commitments under [the Vienna Document] towards Russia and due to Ukraine’s interpretative statement about its refusal to participate in the 2023 [annual information exchange], as well as to send certain routine notifications provided by the Vienna Document.”
“We proceed from the assumption that if the Russian Federation exchanges its national [data] report, it will for sure end up in the hands of the above-mentioned participating states,” he added.
The letter also accused 29 of the participating states, including Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, of not providing certain notifications on time and alleged that the Netherlands excluded Russia from the list of notification recipients. In addition, Russia accused Bulgaria, France, and Poland of not inviting Russian representatives to their military bases.
As of February, 50 participating states provided the required information for 2023, the official from the OSCE participating state said, while Armenia, Mongolia, Poland, and Ukraine, provided information “on delay,” meaning they were late. The remaining two countries, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, have not submitted information for years.
When asked about Russia’s accusations, U.S. State Department spokesperson, Ned Price said in an email on Feb. 28 that, “the United States continues to fully adhere to all of its commitments under the Vienna Document 2011 on Confidence- and Security-Building Measures, including the provision of required notifications and other information to all Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe participating states, among them Russia.”
Price did not specifically address the issue of Russian compliance.
According to Western officials, Russian adherence to the document has long been eroding. As Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu said in August, “the Vienna Document 2011 remains formally in force, but there are no prospects for its practical implementation.”
“In the absence of trust between the parties, the verification mechanism actually becomes a source of intelligence information, which does not meet the spirit of the agreement," he said at the Moscow Conference on International Security.
When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, Ukraine requested under Chapter III of the document that the OSCE send unarmed military and civilian personnel to its territory, starting in Odesa, to dispel concerns about military activity. OSCE military assessment personnel were denied entry to Crimea.
In 2021, Ukraine called for a meeting under Chapter III and requested that Russia clarify its military activities as Russian forces were building up near the Ukrainian border. Russia refused to respond to the inquiry and insisted that it had no obligation to do so but accepted a Swiss inspection in the territories of Voronezh and Belgorod.
In early 2022, before launching its full-scale war on Ukraine, Russia announced that it would no longer host visits to verify the data part of the information exchange or inspections of specified areas to observe military activities. It cited the COVID-19 pandemic as the reason.
Many recent Western proposals for modernizing the Vienna Document have focused on confidence- and security-building measures as a crisis response tool. Because of the deterioration of the European security architecture, efforts after 2014 were also geared toward the prevention of military incidents between NATO allies and Russia. The latest initiative came just before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine when Western nations offered arms control ideas to build a common security in Europe.
The West has long been concerned about Russian adherence to the Vienna Document. But Moscow’s decision to further cloak its military activities and conventional forces makes the situation worse by signaling a return to full scale strategic ambiguity as its forces and equipment are spent in Ukraine.
Russia has also increased its defense budget and mobilized its defense industry to support its war in Ukraine. On Dec. 21, Russia announced that it planned to carry out in 2023 its large-scale Zapad exercise, which typically takes place every four years and focuses on the Russian Western Military District and Belarus.
March 2023 Digital Magazine
