The United States and Russia can work together to address global nonproliferation and nuclear security threats even if bilateral relations remain tense, according to Ambassador Linton Brooks, former head of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration.
In a Monday interview with NS&D Monitor, the veteran nuclear security expert noted that President Donald Trump has regularly expressed hopes for better relations with Russia. His two predecessors hoped for the same, often to their frustration, but that did not mean the nations could not find areas of common ground, Brooks said.
“The United States and the Russian Federation in the early days of the Putin regime were able to work together on counterterrorism, in which the Russians made very difficult decisions under their system to allow access,” he said. “So I think that the right question is not what will happen to the overall relations, but where in this inherently competitive and cooperative system can we find things to cooperate on? I believe that cooperation in nonproliferation and nuclear security outside of Russia is an important opportunity, because I think it’s in both our interests.”
While both nations will likely seek ongoing nuclear weapons arsenal cuts, according to Brooks, an extension or follow-on agreement to the New START accord will be difficult to negotiate until the United States addresses the Russian violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This will be another major issue for the Trump administration, he said.
Brooks served as NNSA administrator from 2002 to 2007, and prior to that as the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency’s deputy administrator for nuclear nonproliferation. The career Navy officer also served as director of defense programs and arms control on the National Security Council staff and chief Strategic Arms Reductions (START) negotiator responsible for the preparation of the START I Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union.
He spoke to NS&D Monitor ahead of his appearance at the ExchangeMonitor’s Nuclear Deterrence Summit, scheduled for Feb. 28-March 2 at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C. More details about the conference can be found here.
In the Q&A, Brooks also discussed DOE’s relationship with the NNSA and its contractors, avenues for the agency’s national laboratories to sustain their nuclear weapons design expertise, and the future of the MOX program to convert surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial nuclear reactor fuel. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How has the NNSA changed over the years? Have there been any major shifts in mission or focus, especially at the nuclear weapons design labs?
I think the major shift actually occurred before NNSA, and that was with the end of the Cold War, the end of testing, the end of a continuous new weapons culture. If you look back at the Cold War, we were always developing the next-generation weapon, and now we shifted into [monitoring] existing weapons and [extending] their life, and that was a substantial change for the national labs. That all happened before NNSA, so you have to look at the predecessor organizations within the Department of Energy.
I think that [in] the history of NNSA since its formation, there have been sort of two macro issues. One has been – as we started doing life-extension programs – shifting from a focus on understanding the stockpile to a focus on actually delivering product. And that had some speed bumps. And the other thing, which is a dialogue that continues today, is exactly what should be the relationship between NNSA and the broader Department of Energy.
The buzzword that NNSA tends to use is semiautonomous, and the hope was that you would get the advantages of both having a Cabinet secretary to help fight your battles, but not having a lot of interference, and it’s not clear that it’s worked that way. I think there’s a good deal of dissatisfaction with the way that has worked. There is less clarity on what you do about it now. It’s really important to understand that organization can facilitate leadership but it can’t substitute for it, so if you have good leaders at NNSA and good leaders at DOE, that’s vastly more important than the wiring diagram, but the wiring diagram matters.
Do you think the DOE-NNSA configuration is going to change?
I don’t know. I think you’re going to need to wait a little bit . . . Governor [Rick] Perry does not have a lot of background in the nuclear weapons business, so he’s going to have to form his own opinions. He doesn’t have his team in place yet – they’re going to have to form their own opinions, and then since any substantial change would require Congress, it has to fit in with other administration priorities. So you can speculate, but tell me who the new deputy secretary of energy is, tell me who the new NNSA administrator is, tell me how Secretary Perry is going to think in six months, and then we can answer that question.
What about the DOE-contractor relationship? Some panels and commissions have identified a burdensome relationship in terms of DOE oversight of its contractors.
This is not an entirely new issue. The history as I understand it shows that the oversight model and the evaluation model that NNSA and its predecessors have used with the production plants – with Y-12 and Pantex and the tritium extraction facility – that model seems to work reasonably well, and that’s because the output of the plants is a measurable, deliverable quantity. [Reporter’s note: The DOE in recent years has pursued reforms to give contractors greater flexibility in implementing safety and security approaches without excessive federal oversight.]
And at least when I was there . . . the complaints about excessive oversight don’t usually come from the plants. The labs have been where excessive oversight has happened, or has been perceived. I think it’s getting better. I think we went through some periods that are documented in National Academy of Sciences reports . . . that suggest some significant tension. I think there will always be tension . . . but I think we’ve gone through better periods and worse periods. My impression is things are getting better.
I am an advocate of some fairly draconian measures there. The need for separate oversight [by contractors and the DOE] and particularly for separate rules on environment, safety, and health, is not clear to me. You have to have security rules because there aren’t commercial standards for security rules. You have to have rules about nuclear safety, because there aren’t nuclear weapons safety commercial standards. But I don’t know that you have to have rules about regular environment, safety, and health issues – some not-recent data suggests that there’s a significant cost pressure.
A project we did at the Kansas City Plant when I was there several years ago suggested that we could shift to a focus on industry best practices rather than DOE orders, and it saved money and it didn’t seem to hurt mission and it didn’t seem to hurt safety. I think that for various reasons the [DOE] has been slow to migrate that model, and if I had the power I would just do it and then see what happens. But it’s easy for me to say because I don’t have any of the responsibility.
Why has that process been slow?
Because there are legitimate other players who worry that these are government-owned facilities, these are facilities that fulfill an important national security purpose, and . . . there is concern that the government would be stepping away from its responsibilities and letting the contractors grade their own homework. That’s not what I think is being done. There are issues that have been raised – if you use industrial best practices for non-nuclear safety, does that spill over into nuclear safety? Not surprisingly, people who have made their career on overseeing nuclear safety tend to think it does; people who have made their career having that oversight imposed on them tend to think it doesn’t.
It is not entirely fair for people like me to comment on jobs I don’t have to do, but I hope they continue to focus on that, because I think it’s an area of tension. On the other hand, there’s so much that the labs and the headquarters do well together, that you don’t want to over-focus on the speed bumps – and some of the speed bumps are natural, and some of the speed bumps are not NNSA’s fault. The laboratories get looked at by the Government Accountability Office, they get looked at by the [DOE] inspector general, and the NNSA administrator cannot control either of those things. And much of the minutiae of financial oversight is effectively mandated by the Congress, sometimes formally mandated, sometimes mandated by what they have told the organization they expected. So my former home gets flak for things it deserves, but it gets fair amount of flak for things it doesn’t.
How can the nuclear enterprise maintain its weapons design capabilities? Some suggest design competitions between the national labs and even prototyping a weapon without adding it to the stockpile. Is that a good idea?
The issue is complicated because it depends a lot on what you believe future requirements will be. And if there is anything we have learned from the last quarter century, it’s we are terrible at predicting future defense needs . . . The fundamental issue is, if you think that we will sometime in the future need some kind of fundamentally different weapon, then somebody will have to design it, and the people who have experience designing weapons are small in number and aging . . . You maintain a good capability to continuously evaluate current stockpiles, to make small adjustments, but how do you maintain a capability to design things that are new?
One way that is now sanctioned is to look at foreign nuclear designs. It’s in the U.S. interest to understand foreign designs and to understand them at a deep technical level, understand whether they’re likely to work, understand their safety. And that requires the same kind of skills that evaluating a new U.S. design would. Many people want to see the efforts that we’ve been doing for years in that area more robust and more technical. Other people have argued that we should, as you suggest, take a design and carry it at least to the stage of a full-scale design, do it competitively between the two physics labs.
The three objections to that: one is that’s a non-trivial cost, both in dollars but also in diverting highly skilled people from other missions . . . We continue to have significant deficits in budgeting and solving that is a broader issue for the country that the country doesn’t seem likely to solve in the near future. So there’s the issue of, is it worth taking that? There’s the issue of whether you really exercise skills if you’re doing something that you know is not for real. It is one thing to say, I want you to be creative and design a new weapon that will do these kinds of things because the military desperately needs it . . . It’s another thing to say, I want you to design a new weapon but we’re not actually going to build it. And the question is, does that fully engage people – and reasonable people can disagree.
And there are those – I am not one – who will be suspicious that this is just a code word for resuming the arms race or is a make-work for scientists. I think those are canards but we live in a world where there are people who think that. So I think this is hard – on the other hand, if you don’t like that answer, you have to either decide the question isn’t important or you have to have a better answer. You can decide the question isn’t important; you can say realistically we are on a path to make nuclear weapons less salient. I happen to think that that path is petering out, but if you believe that it is, [that] there’s only a vanishingly small chance that we will need something fundamentally new, then maintaining that capability is less important.
Further, if you believe that, if it happens it would be a major national emergency and we would throw a lot of money at it – after all, all the things we’re trying to maintain the capability were done for the first time with fewer tools than we have now. The one thing we can’t fix by throwing money at it is lifetimes of experience, and therefore I would like to see us find ways to maintain in mid-career and younger designers the capabilities that we are seeing age out . . . The first step in deciding on the solution is to decide the problem’s important. I think the laboratories think the problem’s important, I think the NNSA leadership thinks the problem’s important, I think the problem’s important; whether the people who write checks think the problem’s important, we’ll just have to see.
What are your thoughts on the nuclear security and arms control legacy that Barack Obama is leaving behind, and is there any part of that legacy you think will continue in the new administration?
Sure. I think that the former president’s vision of a world free of nuclear weapons has not proven something that the rest of the world is ready for. I think if the Constitution had been changed and Barack Obama had a third term, that would have continued to be less and less relevant. The perception of the president based on his early first term efforts on abolition has to be matched with the fact that if you look at the second term, and you look at what the president personally said on nuclear weapons, it’s very little about a world free of nuclear weapons. The Berlin speech of 2013 was the last time he addressed it, and that’s because, whatever the merits of that, it has not caught fire with other holders of nuclear weapons, except perhaps in the United Kingdom. So I don’t think that that’s going to continue, but I don’t think it would have continued if the election had gone differently.
I think that the focus on nuclear weapons security, nuclear material security, will continue. It’s had very strong bipartisan support, it’s objectively necessary. The problems have been that much of the effort has been focused in the Russian Federation, and clearly we’re going to have a different relationship with Russia. President Trump has made it clear he wants a better relationship with Russia. President Obama wanted a better relationship with Russia, President Bush wanted a better relationship with Russia. The last two presidents have been disappointed – they’ve had good things and bad things. We’ll see whether history repeats itself, but I think it is very unlikely that we’re going to go back to the massive efforts within Russia. But in terms of the global effort on nuclear security, I think that continues.
What about the nuclear deterrent modernization program?
It’s had strong bipartisan support on the Hill. The new secretary of defense has said he supports it. I think that it is almost certainly going to continue. I think it’s going to continue to be contentious. There are thoughtful people in the United States who don’t believe in the need for a new [nuclear] cruise missile; I think we’re going to continue to have that debate. There are thoughtful people in the United States who are not sure we need ICBMs; I think we’re going to continue to have that debate. But I think that in both cases, the most likely outcome is something that looks very much like the current modernization program.
History suggests that programs often get stretched out. We’re more likely to truncate and elongate a program than to just say no, I’m not going to do it. Whether or not all the dates that are written down right now are real – some of them pretty much have to be. There is a technical reason the new submarine has to come when it’s intended to come; the new bomber, I think the Air Force is very eager to have it, but whether it comes on the dates and on the schedules that the Air Force would prefer, that’s kind of hard to say. It is true that these large-scale procurement programs tend to slip much more often than they tend to be accelerated, so 15 years from now when we look back on the modernization program, I think we will see that most of it has been implemented, but I think some of the details will be adjusted for budgetary realities and for strategic realities.
I think the biggest challenge will be with the cruise missile, and I personally would not be surprised to see [it] delayed. I’d be disappointed – I don’t think that we have done as good a job until recently in explaining why that’s necessary. We’re going to have a new bomber and we’re going to have a new cruise missile, and we’ve tended to mush those together in the public debate, but the rationale for each is different. As we come to explain the rationale for the new cruise missile, I’m hoping there’ll be greater public support. But there are people like [former Secretary of Defense] Bill Perry who don’t see the strategic value and see strategic risks in the cruise missile. You have to take people like that seriously . . . I don’t think this is a trivial decision. I think most of the modernization program will survive because it’s in the national interest.
Do you think the new administration will address policy debates such as the push for adopting no-first-use nuclear posture or continuing to maintain the stockpile without nuclear explosive testing?
The new administration is somewhat difficult to predict, because we know a little bit about the Cabinet level leadership but we don’t know who will support them. For example, in the Department of Defense there are plausible people for a Republican administration who might differ among themselves. First of all, on testing, we have a procedure where the three laboratory directors write their independent assessment on the health of the stockpile and the portions for which they are responsible. Separately, the director of the U.S. Strategic Command writes an assessment. The laboratory directors’ letters are by law provided to the Congress unchanged by the administration. [They] state whether they believe that the stockpile remains safe, secure, and reliable, and they state whether they think nuclear testing is necessary. So far, they have not suggested a need for nuclear testing. Further, it is difficult to come up with a good example of a problem for which nuclear testing was a crucial part of the answer.
Even if you had a problem and you thought only testing could fix it, it isn’t self-evident that that’s enough to overcome the inhibition against testing. I think if a lab director comes in and says, the W76, the most numerous warhead that we have, has a problem, I think any administration would have to look seriously at testing – but I don’t expect that to happen. And I think to say we ought to test because we ought to test, that’s not right. First of all, I do not see any possibility of returning to resume testing on a long-term basis. I don’t think the technical need is there, I don’t think the political will is there, and I think that the difficulty in doing that is pretty significant . . .
No-first-use: never say never. But it’s awfully hard for me to see this administration embracing no-first-use. The last administration took a serious look and rejected it because: A, it’s unverifiable, and B, it’s not very meaningful because if a president ever has to face the question of using nuclear weapons – which is probably the most fateful decision in human history – he or she is not going to say, well four years ago I had my U.N. ambassador make a speech saying that we were going to do no-first-use. So it’s not a particularly meaningful commitment, but above all, it suggests a reduction in our willingness to use all our national power in the defense of our allies.
During the campaign the president said some things which some have taken as a reduction in the importance he ascribes to allies, but I think that’s not likely to be the way he governs, and certainly the people he has brought in – to the extent that they have a public record on this – are very supportive of alliances. So I think no-first-use is pretty firmly rejected by all elements of the last administration, and nothing suggests to me that this is going to be a more dovish administration. I think that people who are in the anti-nuclear [camp] see the dangers more than most and will continue to push that idea, and there will be those who will try to find ways to advocate it. Nixon went to China and maybe President Trump will go to no-first-use, but I don’t think so.
On his Cabinet picks, specifically Governor Perry, some say leadership ability is more important than subject matter expertise. Do you agree, or will his lack of nuclear-specific background be detrimental?
I don’t think it’s going to be a detriment. I think we have to see. Cabinet officers work through the sub-Cabinet. When you tell me who the new administrator is, you tell me who the new deputy is, you tell me whether the undersecretary for science and the NNSA administrator work well together on the national labs, then you can get an informed opinion. I’ll just point out I think [former Secretary of Energy] Ernie Moniz was a spectacular secretary. But he was very unusual. He had had very senior positions in the [DOE] before, and I can’t think of another secretary for whom that’s true . . .
On the other hand, the first secretary I worked for, Spencer Abraham, had voted to abolish the [DOE], not just made it a throwaway line in a campaign . . . and he did not have a nuclear background. He was an exceptionally good secretary. He was very good on nonproliferation and he took hugely seriously his responsibilities on the nuclear stockpile. I think that the [DOE] is a large, confusing, and complicated bureaucracy. If Governor Perry can make it a slightly less confusing bureaucracy and can keep the different parts of it working together well, that’ll be fine. That’s way more important than whether or not he’s got a good understanding of the methodology for evaluating primary to secondary energy transfer . . . I’m much more interested frankly in who the next administrator is, because the administrator’s job is a hard job and not always an easy job to fill.
Do you believe President Trump will restore the U.S.-Russian relationship? What would that take, and more specifically, what would it take to negotiate a follow-on to New START?
The president is unique in many ways, and one way is that he has not served before in government or in the military, so we don’t fully understand – and he is still developing – the practical implication of the broad principles set forth. I’m very skeptical of anybody who purports to predict how things will go. The president has said that it would be better if we had a better relationship with Russia, which I think is right, and that he hopes he can do that, but he may not be able to, which I think is a fair assessment. My personal belief is that we should not focus on the overall relationship as much as finding things where we can work together.
The United States and the Soviet Union at a time when we were using terms like “evil empire” were able to do some things jointly on arms control, on nonproliferation. The United States and the Russian Federation in the early days of the Putin regime were able to work together on counterterrorism, in which the Russians made very difficult decisions under their system to allow access. So I think that the right question is not what will happen to the overall relations, but where in this inherently competitive and cooperative system can we find things to cooperate on? I believe that cooperation in nonproliferation and nuclear security outside of Russia is an important opportunity, because I think it’s in both our interests. On arms control, the [Russian] foreign minister has said they’re ready to talk on arms control, but that’s not new news – the question is, what are they ready to talk about?
The Russians and the Americans each have a list of things that are going to be very, very difficult. I think that the Russian Federation is very worried or claims to be very worried about U.S. ballistic missile defense in Europe. I think that Republican administrations generally, and Republican members of Congress, are not going to be inclined to truncate ballistic missile defense, so if that becomes a pre-requisite, then I think we don’t go anywhere. There are other things where the United States has traditionally worried a lot about what are sometimes called non-strategic nuclear weapons, or theater nuclear weapons – weapons that are outside the arms control regimes where the Russian Federation has by almost everybody’s estimate a very substantial advantage.
Whether the Russians can be brought to discuss that in a serious way, I don’t know. But the Russian Federation and the Soviets have historically not liked the situation where there’s no regulation of the amounts. What that suggests to me is that the Russians will not want to have New START expire in 2021 without a replacement. The Americans tend to see value in the transparency and predictability provided by New START, at a minimum, so I don’t think we’ll want to see it expire without a replacement. So one thing is to say we’re going to be able to solve all these other problems, and the other thing is to say, we’re going to recognize the other problems are too hard for right now, we’re going to concentrate on something that preserves New START either by extending it for five years – which the treaty allows, which I happen to think would be a good idea – or by something that is basically the same treaty with somewhat lower numbers.
I think that the hardest problem of all, however, is one we haven’t mentioned, and that is the Russian violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. It is inconceivable to me that the United States would negotiate a new arms control regime while that violation is not addressed in some manner. And it’s even more inconceivable that a treaty that was negotiated without dealing with that violation could be ratified by this or any other Senate. So I think that those who want to see future arms control on both sides have to figure out what we’re going to do about that violation. I tend to think that what would work will be something that looks like a consent decree – where the Russians don’t acknowledge that they were cheating, but they do something concrete to verify that they’re not going to do these prohibited tests again. I think that how you operationalize that is not completely clear.
My sense of the Putin administration is they’re not going to do what was done in the 80s with the Krasnoyarsk radar [the United States detected an early warning radar under construction in violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty] where the Soviets acknowledged that it was a violation because it was so obvious. The problem here is that in order to protect the way we know [of the INF violation], we’ve not been prepared to put a lot of detail into the public domain, and I don’t have any reason to believe that that’ll change. If you can’t solve that, then it’ll be hard even to extend New START, let alone replace it. If you can solve that, it’ll still be hard, but it will not be impossible.
I think the next couple of years, the arms control agenda is to keep New START going routinely and make sure both sides actually get down to the levels and to work very quietly to figure out how you’re going to resolve the INF issue. But I think the INF issue is a big issue . . . it was a big issue for the last administration, and once again we don’t know all of the people who are going to be part of this administration, but compliance has tended to be a major issue for conservative and Republican administrations, so I don’t see this administration likely to be any softer on this.
Is the MOX issue going to reappear?
There’s a myth in Washington that just because you can describe a problem, that proves there’s a solution. North Korea is an example of that – you can describe the problem but that doesn’t prove we know what the solution is. MOX may be the domestic equivalent of it . . . The alternatives are not very attractive, but the cost growth has been spectacular. I was the administrator when we approved MOX and I knew we had a shaky cost profile but I thought that meant 50 percent off maybe – but the idea that we would be in the space we’re in now financially, I didn’t see that one coming. I think we’ll muddle through somehow and I have no idea what way, but I don’t think there’s a clear answer. I do think the last administration looked pretty hard at other answers and I don’t think they found any.
Is there anything else we didn’t discuss that you think we should watch for during the next few years?
Yes, it doesn’t particularly focus on NNSA. The United Nations First Committee, with the support of the vast majority of states in the world but of none of the states that actually have nuclear weapons, embraced a resolution that calls for the negotiation of a global nuclear weapons ban beginning in the near future. The advocates of that ban are not under any illusion that somehow this will cause the nuclear weapons states to disarm. But they are under the belief that this will stigmatize the nuclear weapons states that these will be illicit weapons, that they will be like biological weapons in that they are condemned by all, even though some still have them.
The American people may or may not be more moral than other people, but we want to believe we are, and this is a moral argument. This is an argument that says that nuclear weapons are so horrific that there are no circumstances in which they can be considered legitimate. Over the long term, the United States, although we’re turning more to domestic issues, I still think there’s a certain degree of global leadership that is inescapable. The United States is going to have to decide how to deal with that. Largely we’ve been ignoring it right now. The reason we have to deal with it is not because a series of small states should be allowed to dictate U.S. policy, but because in the long run, the American people may not be willing to support a policy that others regard and they come to regard as immoral.
I believe that we need to take this head-on. I don’t want to get into a discussion and debate on morals with the Pope, who has spoken out in favor of these things, but I believe there are millions of people who are alive today because there’s been no major war in Europe, and that one of the reasons there’s been no major war in Europe is nuclear weapons make major war inconceivably dangerous. In an imperfect world that’s a plus and we need to find a way to articulate those advantages. I don’t think that we have done enough to engage on that, and I think that the nuclear policy community, less so the nuclear technical community, does need to engage on it.
It’s fine to say that nuclear use is horrific – I understand that. I lived in Germany in 1946 and 1947 and I will tell you that the aftermath of non-nuclear large-scale war is not something you want to aspire to. And I think we’ve been slow to give this one the seriousness it deserves. International law cannot compel us to do something on that; international law is a binding compact among sovereign states and we’re not going to sign up for that, and neither are any of the other nuclear weapons-possessing states. But as a moral issue that weakens the support and increases the divisiveness – this is a divisive issue in the United States – I think this needs to be dealt with. I don’t know who the right people to deal with it are, and its problem is it’s important but it’s not urgent. In this city the urgent tends to crowd out the important, but this one may be important and I would like to see more thought given to it.
