The Trump administration is reconsidering every piece of U.S. nuclear arms policy – even the broad end goal of global nuclear disarmament – in its upcoming Nuclear Posture Review, a senior National Security Council official said Tuesday.
“We’re being encouraged . . . to do a real honest-to-God, bottom-up review, to rethink things from the start, to look again at what policy alternatives might be available without being constrained by conventional wisdom or untested assumptions,” Christopher Ford, NSC senior director for weapons of mass destruction and counterproliferation and the administration’s top nonproliferation appointee, said at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference in Washington, D.C.
He said an interagency team is “gradually” being built to work on the NPR, which will set the nation’s nuclear policy for up to a decade. The review will focus “a bit more pragmatically on policies and programs that are fairly directly related to U.S. national security needs,” in contrast with the Obama administration’s 2010 review that outlined a broad agenda toward an eventual world without nuclear weapons, according to Ford, who served during the George W. Bush administration as deputy assistant secretary of state in the arms control and international security bureau.
Ford pointed to an ongoing tension in U.S. policy between that ultimate goal and current national security needs. “It’s a part of this review . . . to explore whether traditional U.S. fidelity of that visionary end-state of abolition, and demonstrating fidelity to it by pointing to rapid progress and reducing arsenals, is still a viable strategy,” he said. This means the administration is reconsidering whether a world without nuclear weapons fits into U.S. nuclear policy.
Other matters to be addressed in the review include the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – Ford said President Donald Trump “has made very clear he will not accept a second-place position in the nuclear weapons arena” – and a potential response to a Russian violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. “We need to do more to disincentivize violations and I think we need to do more to ensure . . . Russia doesn’t obtain a military advantage from its violations,” Ford said.
Ford did not offer a timeline for completion of the NPR, only saying “we need to take the time to get it right.” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein indicated last month that the Defense Department would complete the review this spring.
The United Nations conference to negotiate a legally binding nuclear weapons ban treaty will begin next week in New York, despite U.S. officials’ ongoing resistance to this disarmament approach. Ford said the administration opposes U.N. member states’ efforts, which “actually would make the world a more dangerous and unstable place because they appear to be intended to have the effect of delegitimizing and undermining the extended deterrence relationships with our allies in Europe and in the Asia Pacific region.”
Ford also said the administration is committed to promoting nuclear security worldwide. The Obama administration held a series of high-level Nuclear Security Summits to encourage international cooperation in protecting nuclear materials and weapons. The last summit in 2016 highlighted the International Atomic Energy Agency’s role as the central body coordinating such efforts in the future. “That seems like a sound approach to me,” Ford said.
Ford noted that consideration of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty would also be part of the review process, leaving open the possibility of distinguishing U.S. support for the CTBT Organization’s International Monitoring System from the issue of commitment to the treaty itself.
The United States is one of eight nations that must still ratify the treaty for it to enter into force and establish a legal ban on nuclear testing. The Senate rejected ratification of the treaty in 1999; observers say the Trump administration is unlikely to submit it to the body for consideration.
Some Republican lawmakers are now calling for the administration to cut funding to the CTBTO – with the exception for money for the International Monitoring System, a global verification regime consisting of hundreds of monitoring stations to detect nuclear tests.
