Joe Cirincione on “False Claims of Bush's Success on WMD”

Joe Cirincione, President of the Ploughshares Fund, and Alexandra Bell, Research Associate at Ploughshares, put out a great piece on HuffPo on Tuesday that reviews and debunks many of the somewhat outrageous claims made by the Bush administration about its legacy, including many nuclear weapons issues. The full piece is available here, although I’m also including the full text of it below as well.

The victors write history. Few would ascribe that right to the outgoing Bush Administration. The "Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush" is fifty pages of glossy photos and false claims of the last eight years, complete with "Did You Know" sections usually seen in 8th grade textbooks.

Some of the claims have already been rebutted on Huffington Post.

Here, we just want to set the record straight on the 10 big wins claimed on nuclear weapons. Rather than making us safer, President Bush leaves office with nearly every proliferation problem more dangerous than when he entered. Here are the claims and the facts.

"1-Prevented our Enemies from Threatening America and our Allies with
Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)"

True, that there were no attacks in the seven years following 9/11, but there were also none in the seven years previous. Globally, threats have grown. Every member of the "axis of evil" is more dangerous to America today than in 2001. Iraq is in turmoil; Iran and North Korea advanced their nuclear programs more in the past five years than in the previous ten. The Taliban and Al Qaeda have regrouped in unstable and nuclear-armed Pakistan. Nuclear sites around the world remain at risk while funding for securing and eliminating nuclear threats stagnates. Net risk has increased.

"2-Secured a commitment from North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program."

True, but only after the neoconservative fantasy of overthrowing the Pyongyang regime thwarted negotiations for five years. Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of State John Bolton championed policies that let North Korea go from having enough fissile material for 2 weapons in 2001 to enough for 12 by 2006. It restarted its plutonium processing, withdrew from the NPT, tested new missiles and detonated a nuclear bomb. It also may have traded nuclear secrets with Syria, Pakistan and Iran. At the end of 2006, the Bush Administration finally began negotiations in earnest and got the tenuous agreement that stands today. It is a deal we could have secured eight years ago.

"3- Persuaded Libya to disclose and dismantle all aspects of its WMD and
advanced missile programs and renounce terrorism."

This is the most notable success of the Bush years, but made possible only by breaking with the neocon strategy. Instead of trying to change the Libyan regime, we changed the regime's behavior. US military strength played a role, but so did strong alliances, negotiations, sanctions, security assurances and persuasion over four administrations. Diplomacy delivered the victory, not force. Libya has now dismantled its nuclear, chemical and long-range missile programs. It provided the model for stopping the North Korean programs and could be applied to Iran.

"4- Withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and operationalized missile defense."

We did withdraw from the treaty, but all we have to show for it is a scarecrow of a weapons system. Over the past 8 years, the U.S. has spent almost $70 billion on anti-missile systems with no real increase in capability. The Bush-created Missile Defense Agency Pentagon faked tests, misled Congress and adopted a bizarre "spiral development" process in which interceptors and radars are deployed before they are fully tested, fail, are fixed, fail again, are fixed again, etc. This $9 billion dollar-a-year booster club should be disbanded; the weapons devolved back to the management and budgets of the military services from whence they came.

"5- Dismantled the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network."

Partially true. The A.Q. Khan smuggling network was finally disrupted in 2004, only after sensitive technology was transferred to Iran, Libya, North Korea and possibly other states. Pakistan's lack of cooperation, including its refusal to allow Khan to be questioned, has thwarted attempts of the U.S. and its allies to determine if the network persists. European intelligence reports note that nuclear black market sales continue in the region.

"6- Established the Proliferation Security Initiative and multilateral coalitions to stop WMD proliferation and strengthen our ability to locate and secure nuclear and radiological materials around the world."

The Proliferation Security Initiative is a good idea of marginal benefit. It is good at detecting and stopping illicit shipments of large items, like missiles and centrifuges, but cannot stop a suitcase full of plutonium or key nuclear components shipped through legitimate channels. This program was a major talking point of the administration, but did little to stop the nuclear program in Iran, for example. The legacy booklet points out that Bush programs have removed enough material from insecure sites for 30 nuclear bombs. That's good, but there is enough material in the world for 200,000, says Harvard's Matt Bunn. This boast is like bragging about throwing a bucket of water on a burning building.

"7- Halved the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile five years ahead of schedule."

This has been positive. We have moved ahead of schedule to cut weapons down to the numbers negotiated with Russia in the 2002 Moscow Treaty. The problem is that the treaty has no verification provisions, no dismantlement requirement and expires the day it comes into force. After this treaty the Bush Administration ended arms negotiations with Russia, leaving the increasingly authoritarian state with over ten thousands thermonuclear bombs and a deteriorating command and control system.

This is dangerous even during good times; today, U.S.-Russian relations are at their worst point since before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Administration plans to expand NATO and deploy anti-missile bases on Russia's borders inflamed Russian concerns over U.S. intentions.
There remains no coherent plan for addressing the danger from the almost 1,300 Russian nuclear warheads poised for attack within 15 minutes and thousands more in insecure storage. Former Senator Sam Nunn warns, "It's insane for us, 16 years after the Cold War, to think of the Russian president having four or five minutes to make a decision about whether what may be a false warning requires a response before he loses his retaliatory force."

The War to Nowhere

Finally, the greatest sin in the Bush Legacy Book is one of omission. Nowhere does the history note that senior officials led by President Bush and Vice-President Cheney intentionally misled the American people on the threat from chemical, biological and nuclear weapons from Iraq. Not one claim was true. At the time of the invasion Iraq did not have any significant quantities of these weapons or weapons components, did not have any programs for making these weapons, did not have any plans to restart programs to make these weapons and did not have any operational ties to Al Qaeda or involvement in the attacks of September 11.

President Bush called the failure to find any weapons in Iraq "a disappointment." It is much more. President Bush committed the greatest mistake any president can: he lead the nation into an unnecessary war. That is a legacy we will never forget.

Cirincione on Obama’s Nuclear Future

The National Journal’s Lost in Translation has a great interview with Joe Cirincione on President-elect Obama’s nuclear future here.

The interview includes further potential reductions with Russia, prospects for the CTBT, missile defense, and de-alerting nuclear weapons.

Good stuff. Check it out.

Highlights of House Hearing on Missile Defense

On March 5, the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs held a hearing entitled, “Oversight of Ballistic Missile Defense (Part 1): Threats, Realities, and Tradeoffs.” In his opening statement, Subcommittee Chairman John Tierney (D-MA) described the hearing as the beginning of “a robust and concerted investigation into the rationale for missile defense; its costs, benefits and technical obstacles; and the accountability, transparency and testing regime of the Missile Defense Agency.” The specific purpose of this first oversight hearing was to examine “the potential threat our country faces from ballistic missiles and how that threat compares to other homeland security and weapons of mass destruction vulnerabilities.”

The witness list for the hearing included Joe Cirincione (President of the Ploughshares Fund), Stephen Hildreth (of the Congressional Research Service), Baker Spring (of the Heritage Foundation), and Stephen Flynn (of the Council on Foreign Relations). Their testimony’s can be found here, here, here, and here, respectively.

In keeping with the stated goals of the hearing, the majority of the Member’s questions focused on the relative severity of the ballistic missile threat. Here are some (paraphrased) highlights:

Tierney: Do you agree or disagree that it is more likely a nuclear weapon would enter the US by unconventional means?

Cirincione: Agree.
Spring: Disagree.
Hildreth: I don’t know.

[snip]

Tierney: What is the likelihood that someone would attack the US knowing the result would be their ultimate destruction?

Cirincione: Deterrence is alive and well. There are military measures we can take to enhance deterrence on Iran.

[snip]

Stephen Lynch (D-MA): Is the $120 billion funding proportional to the ICBM threat?

Cirincione: Absolutely not. It is the biggest scam in history. This program is out of whack, and this budget is unsustainable.

[snip]

John Yarmuth (D-KY): What should we be spending our money on?

Cirincione: We need a more comprehensive threat assessment, and then we need to do our funding based on that. We need to cut back funding and let the joint chiefs decide how to distribute it.

[snip]

Chris Van Hollen (D-MD): During the Bush administration, ground-based missile defense (GMD) has been deployed despite a test success rate of 50% on “dumbed-down” tests. Would this even succeed?

Cirincione: The history of this program is that the threats and capabilities have been inflated. So, funding is being inflated. You’ve got to restore some realism. We have never had a realistic test, not even under the most primitive conditions. Without these tests, how can Congress justify deploying? You have to fly before you buy. We need to cut back and give funding to our actual number one threat: preventing another 9/11 with the nuclear component.
Spring: I think you are describing a cycle of failure, where you’re going to cut funding for testing even while saying more testing is necessary.
Flynn: I wish I could take the money you cut and use it for my stuff. There is a disconnect between how much we spend on the threat of containers getting to the US, which is a miniscule amount of funding, as compared to what we have put into the missile defense system.

Dan Burton (R-IN): We need a more complete threat assessment, and I still think we need ABM at all three levels (inter-continental, intermediate, and short-range).

Tierney: We have a tendency to overexaggerate the capacity of others, for example with Iran and North Korea. Neither country has come even remotely close to completing ICBMs, correct?

Hildreth: I would agree, yes. You can’t get around issues without testing, and we just don’t see these countries doing that.

In sum, the consensus opinion of the witnesses (Spring notwithstanding) was that:

• The ballistic missile threat has been wildly inflated
  
• The U.S. is far more likely to be attacked with WMD transferred via non-missile means such as a dirty bomb than by ICBMs
  
• The opportunity costs of spending roughly $10 billion a year on missile defense are enormous. According to Flynn, the combined budgets for funding domestic and international maritime and port of entry interdiction efforts and nuclear detection activities is equal to roughly one-half of the annual budget for developing missile defense.
  
• The Missile Defense Agency should not be exempted from normal acquisition, testing and reporting requirements
• We need a comprehensive assessment of the threat posed by ballistic missiles in relation to other threats, such as threats to the homeland transferred via non-missile means

Joe Cirincione: A Nuclear-Armed Pakistan Teeters on the Edge

With all of the commentary and analysis on Bhutto’s assassination, surprisingly little has focused on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. And so comes one of the few pieces on the topic from Joe Cirincione on yesterday’s Huffington Post:

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the intensification of the political crisis in Pakistan at the end of the year brings into sharp relief our most immediate nuclear threat. It comes not from Iraq or Iran, but Pakistan. With an unstable military ruler, enough material for 50 to 100 nuclear bombs, strong Islamic fundamentalist influences in the country and armed, Islamic fundamentalist groups--including Al Qaeda--operating with its territory, Pakistan is the most dangerous country on earth. The nuclear weapons and material are believed secure for now, but increased instability could split the military or distract the units guarding the weapon materials, providing an opening for a raid by an organized radical group.

For all the focus on Iraq and Iran over the past six years, it is in Pakistan that Osama bin Ladin may have his best chance of getting the nuclear weapon we know he wants.

Joe Cirincione: A Brief History of the Atomic Age

Interested in learning the history of the Atomic Age in just over 15 minutes?

Well, you’re in luck.

Click below to watch a fascinating video of Joe Cirincione’s opening remarks from the 2005 Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference that does just that.

The video is an adapted multimedia version of Cirincione’s speech, produced by Dot-Org Digital Media Services.

Alternatively, you can read the text of the presentation here or listen to an audio version here.

C-SPAN Q&A with Joe Cirincione on Nuclear Weapons

In the off-chance that you’re looking for an interesting video on nuclear weapons issues during these hot, long summer days, look no further than a recent C-SPAN Q&A with Joe Cirincione. Senior Fellow and Director for Nuclear Policy at the Center for American Progress, he is also the author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons and Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats, and altogether rock star on nuclear weapons issues. (And, yes, I’m fine with being a Joe Cirincione shill…)

Below is a list of the five parts to the interview; part 3 seems to be missing, but don’t let that stop you.

C-SPAN Q&A with Joseph Cirincione, Part 1,
C-SPAN Q&A with Joseph Cirincione, Part 2,
C-SPAN Q&A with Joseph Cirincione, Part 4,
C-SPAN Q&A with Joseph Cirincione, Part 5

Nevertheless, if you must hear every word, you can visit C-SPAN to download the full video in either Real Media format or Windows Media Video format.