A top adviser to President Barack Obama on Monday cited a lack of Russian engagement as a major obstacle in fulfilling the administration’s nonproliferation and arms control initiatives.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said at the Arms Control Association’s annual meeting that the administration fell short of the goals outlined in the 2009 Prague speech in part due to a political freeze in U.S.-Russian relations.
In his Prague speech, Obama spoke of achieving a world without nuclear weapons through bilateral and multilateral agreements cutting nuclear arsenals worldwide. This began with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which committed the U.S. and Russia to by 2018 cap their nuclear arsenals at 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers; 1,550 deployed strategic warheads; and 800 deployed and non-deployed launchers.
Highlighting nonproliferation and arms control progress over the last several years, Rhodes noted that since the first Nuclear Security Summit in 2010, which brought together world leaders to discuss the threat of nuclear terrorism, 3.8 tons of enriched uranium and plutonium have been removed from over 50 facilities in 30 countries. He also said Russia was a critical part of the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal, arguing that the agreement would have been unlikely without the Kremlin’s cooperation.
However, “we have not been able to lock in further stockpile reductions beyond New START,” Rhodes said, attributing that largely to “President Putin’s unwillingness to come to the table.” The administration was also unable to secure all vulnerable nuclear material globally – one of the goals in the Prague speech – also due in part to Russia’s “reduced enthusiasm” for nuclear security initiatives, Rhodes said. He added that U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty remains another unfulfilled goal.
The latest U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile numbers from the Pentagon indicate that stockpile reductions and warhead dismantlements have slowed under the Obama administration. Asked about this downward trend in light of the legacy Obama intended to leave through the goals laid out in his Prague speech, Rhodes said that “the lower you get, obviously, the more complex your reductions get, and that’s partially why it was our determination that we want to pursue more ambitious reductions through a negotiated agreement with Russia.”
National Nuclear Security Administration spokeswoman Francie Israeli said by email that Obama’s Prague declaration “continues to guide U.S. efforts,” and that the United States “has had an open invitation to Russia to resume arms reductions since right after New START was signed, and Russia has refused to come to the table.”
Israeli noted that the administration is seeking to accelerate warhead dismantlements by 20 percent. “If this funding is appropriated, NNSA will add additional dismantlement workforce to increase the dismantlement rate in order to meet the Administration’s commitment to dismantle all retired nuclear warheads retired prior to 2009 one year earlier,” she said.
Rhodes said at the event that although “we’ve not fulfilled our ambition with respect to reductions,” the White House nevertheless laid the path for further nonproliferation and disarmament initiatives.
“The goals set by Prague were so big that they could make even historic progress look smaller,” Rhodes said. “We may not achieve the goal of a world without nuclear weapons in our lifetime . . . but we can set a course and we can move in that direction.”
Other speakers at the conference offered different interpretations of the president’s nonproliferation objectives and results. Zia Mian, director of the Project on Peace and Security in South Asia at Princeton University, said the next president must avoid “what has been nonproliferation theater,” or grandiose statements about fissile material security such as the goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear material worldwide within a few years.
The fissile material security achievements of the Nuclear Security Summit process, as highlighted by the White House, represent 0.2 percent of all the fissile material in the world, Mian said. Moreover, the countries that were producing fissile material at the beginning of the process – Pakistan, India, North Korea, and Israel – continue to do so, while the other nuclear-weapon states had ceased fissile material production long before the summits, he said.
The president’s focus has been in the wrong place, Mian said. Rather than securing materials in civilian facilities in non-weapon states that were already under safeguards and accounted for, the president should have focused on the large share of fissile materials held by nuclear-weapon states – namely the legacy stockpiles of the United States and Russia. This could begin with a joint U.S.-Russian effort to account for each other’s existing fissile material stockpile, he said.
The administration has said its work in securing materials at civilian sites, including security upgrades at vulnerable facilities, intends to prevent terrorists from acquiring materials that could be used in nuclear or radiological weapons.
Mian said the United States last declared its excess quantity of highly enriched uranium in 2005 – saying it had twice as much fissile material – enough for 10,000 weapons – than the total amount needed for its over 4,000 operational warheads. Reducing this excess stockpile, he said, would be a start.
Israeli said the U.S. on March 31 released data on its highly enriched uranium inventory as of Sept. 30, 2013, by which time the total holding was 585.6 metric tons of HEU. Of that total, 499.4 metric tons went to national security or non-national security programs such as nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, she said. “Of the remaining 86.2 metric tons, 41.6 metric tons was available for potential down-blend to low enriched uranium or, if not possible, disposal as low-level waste, and 44.6 metric tons was in spent reactor fuel,” she said.
Overall, Mian said, the next administration should focus less on “countries that we don’t like” with insignificant quantities of nuclear material and more on large fissile material quantities. The president should take a “fissile materials perspective . . . rather than the old-school nonproliferation perspective,” he said.
