Disarmament Agency Research Articles

An ambitious arms control agenda requires a new organization equal to the task

ABSTRACT An exceedingly challenging agenda of urgent, important, and diverse arms control issues awaits the incoming Biden administration. To address it, the administration should consider the creation of a new agency to focus on cooperative threat reduction; alternatively, deft reorganization of key elements of the executive branch could be pursued swiftly, without requiring legislation. An examination of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency’s impressive record of accomplishments (and some failures) between 1961 and 1999, when it was disestablished, can help identify some ideas and options for its potential successor today.

“We Are Not a Nonproliferation Agency”: Henry Kissinger's Failed Attempt to Accommodate Nuclear Brazil, 1974–1977

In the aftermath of India's first nuclear explosion in 1974, U.S. officials concluded that Brazil posed a growing proliferation risk, and they proposed to target Brazil with a new set of nonproliferation policies that included the denial of fuel-cycle technologies. However, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger expressed doubt that such an approach would curb Brazilian nuclear ambitions. Pushing back against influential voices in the U.S. Congress, the State Department, and the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Kissinger argued that Brazil should be allowed to proceed with its plans to master the nuclear fuel cycle in exchange for U.S. assistance and new nonproliferation commitments. He justified this attitude on the grounds of alliance politics (Brazil was too important a pillar of U.S. Cold War policy in Latin America) and the interests of key domestic constituencies (U.S. private companies eyed Brazil's burgeoning nuclear industry). The Brazilian government responded well to Kissinger's approach and would have struck a deal if the transition to the Carter administration had not rendered the bargain untenable.

Whose Speech Is It Anyway? Ownership, Authorship, and the Redfern Address

Whose Speech Is It Anyway? Ownership, Authorship, and the Redfern Address

Sidney David Drell

Sidney David Drell

American Biodefense: How Dangerous Ideas about Biological Weapons Shape National Security by Frank L. Smith III

Reviewed by: American Biodefense: How Dangerous Ideas about Biological Weapons Shape National Securityby Frank L. Smith III Thomas I. Faith (bio) American Biodefense: How Dangerous Ideas about Biological Weapons Shape National Security. By Frank L. Smith III. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. 208. $35. Biological weapons pose a threat, both to the U.S. military and to civilians who live near potential terrorist targets, and defending against viruses is a difficult undertaking—so why has the United States not made a more effective investment in biodefense projects in the past? Frank L. Smith III provides an answer to this question in his American Biodefense: How Dangerous [End Page 495] Ideas about Biological Weapons Shape National Security. Smith identifies frames of reference that rely on kinetic weapons and stereotypes about non-kinetic weapons within the U.S. military bureaucracy, and he argues that they have resulted in poor policy decisions and systemic complacency with regard to biodefense. In the first two parts, Smith describes the history of U.S. biodefense viewed through a variety of interpretive frames. His discussions of realism, bureaucratic interests, and organizational frames are contextualized with an overview of biodefense from World War II through the Iraq War. The shortsighted decision to vest biological warfare responsibilities with the Chemical Warfare Service (later the Chemical Corps), made in part because chemical warfare and biological warfare were presumed to be similar, is highlighted as an example of a decision influenced by stereotypes within U.S. military organizations about biological warfare. Smith accurately argues that institutional use of terms such as CBR (Chemical, Biological, and Radiological) or WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) “glosses over extreme differences in kind,” and “incorrectly implies that knowledge about one of these phenomena equates to useful knowledge about the others” (p. 28). Smith describes the negative effects such stereotypes have had on the progress of scientific research, and how misconceptions about biological weapons led to a neglect of biodefense doctrine. Time and resources were wasted on unworkable biodefense systems because of an apparently widespread belief that a release of hazardous biological agents could quickly be detected in the same manner as chemical agents. The reality, Smith writes, is that “it is difficult to detect biological attacks until after the victims have already been exposed, by which time it is too late for physical protection to provide effective cover” (p. 7). Misconceptions about the availability and production cycle of vaccines led the Department of Defense to rely on a single aging thoroughbred at the University of Minnesota Medical School, named First Flight, for its entire supply of botulinum antitoxin in the decade that preceded the Gulf War. American Biodefensereviews the missteps that led to the failure to deploy adequate medical countermeasures to soldiers serving in the Persian Gulf, who could have potentially encountered biological weapons and been injured or killed as a result. Its final chapter describes the emergence of civilian biodefense—an ironic development given that “biological weapons and biodefense were widely regarded as military issues throughout the Cold War” (p. 102). Historians of military technology will enjoy Smith’s discussion of civilian biodefense development in the context of the long-running debate about how much control civilian researchers should exercise over scientific projects with national defense applications. Smith’s work is an overview, and it sometimes generalizes about what large, diverse institutions knew or did about biological threats. For example, [End Page 496] American Biodefenseasserts that the Department of Defense should have developed more operable biodefense programs given that “the United States was aware of the Soviet BW program throughout the Cold War” (p. 20). However, events such as the Sverdlovsk incident (which the author highlights) demonstrated how elements of the intelligence community were hindered by a lack of dependable information on Soviet biological weapons programs during the period. More than one year after the incident, members of the National Security Council and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency remained frustrated by their inability to satisfactorily confirm that the anthrax outbreak at Sverdlovsk had been the result of prohibited biological warfare activities. Readers also should note that American Biodefensedoes not include a discussion of the defense of U.S...

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War

<i>Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War</i>

Introduction: Global Order, Cooperation between the Superpowers, and Alliance Politics in the Making of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

Introduction: Global Order, Cooperation between the Superpowers, and Alliance Politics in the Making of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

India, Pakistan and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

54 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXIV, No.4, Summer 2011 India, Pakistan and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty M. Yousuf Saeed* In its Final Document adopted in May 2010, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference urged India and Pakistan to subscribe to the NPT as non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS) and to put all their nuclear facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards “promptly and without conditions.”1 This was not the first time that members of international community asked the two South Asian states to sign the treaty. Similar appeals were made by the U.N. Security Council in 1998 and by the NPT Review Conference in 2000.2 Both countries have remained unresponsive. This article reviews the origin and evolution of India and Pakistan’s attitudes toward the NPT. It discusses the reasons they offer for staying out of the treaty, describes the similarities and differences in their policies and the changes that these policies have undergone over a period of time. It suggests that both countries should be admitted into the treaty as nuclear weapon states (NWS), the status assigned to the first five nuclear powers. India and Pakistan: Initial response The idea of an international non-proliferation treaty, when first mooted in 1961, was supported by both India and Pakistan. The Irish resolution on the “Prevention of the Wider Dissemination of Nuclear Weapons,” to which the legislative origin of the NPT is traced,3 was presented to the U.N. *M. Yousuf Saeed is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of History and Sociology at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. He received his Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of South Carolina. His research interests include international relations of south and southwest Asia, and nuclear proliferation. 1 United Nations, 2010 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Final Document, 16. www.un.org. 2 U.N. Security Council resolution 1172, June 6, 1998; 2000 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Final Document, May 24, 2000. 3 Mason Willrich, Non-Proliferation Treaty: Framework for Arms Control (Charlottesville, Virginia: The Michie Company, 1969), 61. 55 General Assembly that year and was favored by the two countries when put to vote on December 4.4 The central paragraph of the resolution, which contained language similar to what was later used in Articles I and II of the NPT,5 asked for the conclusion of an international agreement containing provisions under which the nuclear States would undertake to refrain from relinquishing control of nuclear weapons and from transmitting the information necessary for their manufacture to States not possessing such weapons, and provisions under which States not possessing nuclear weapons would undertake not to manufacture or otherwise acquire control of such weapons....6 In addition, both India and Pakistan supported other resolutions, moved around this time in the U.N. General Assembly that recommended cessation of all nuclear tests.7 India and the NPT Indian policy regarding non-proliferation underwent a change after the Chinese nuclear explosion in October 1964.8 Defending its nuclear detonation, the Chinese government claimed that the 1963 Moscow partial test ban treaty, which prohibited tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water, was an attempt “to consolidate the nuclear monopoly held by the three nuclear powers and tie the hands and feet of all peace loving countries.” China, it further stated, supported “the complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons” and believed that partial suspension, or complete prohibition, of nuclear testing, or destruction of nuclear weapon delivery vehicles could not be the first step toward complete disarmament. Rather, in Chinese view, an international summit conference had to be convened which “as the first step” should conclude an agreement under which the nuclear-weapon and nuclear-weapon threshold states “undertake not to use nuclear weapons, neither to use them 4 Resolution 1665 (XVI) was unanimously approved. Documents on Disarmament 1961 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1962), 694. 5 Article I of NPT requires NWS not to transfer nuclear weapons...

A Verifiable Limited Test Ban for Anti-satellite Weapons

The growing number of actors pursuing sophisticated outer space programs gives rise to one of the more novel challenges of the global commons. Once the privileged domain of the United States and th...

H. G. Wells and peace education

H. G. Wells produced some of the best literature and practical ideas on peace, providing essential clues for achieving a mutually beneficial federal human unity through an ‘Open Conspiracy’, as he put it, i.e. an intellectual and political transformation, and a revolution in education. It is possible to abolish war and ensure lasting human progress and prosperity—facilitated today, as Wells had foreseen, by emerging third‐world countries like China and India, which are becoming essential pillars to sustain world civilization in the 21st century. However, world peace is impossible to achieve without humanity possessing common historical ideas. As people everywhere become ‘citizens of the world’, a ‘world commonweal’, with universally applied education and elements of a global administration, is actually emerging, as Wells predicted. Concretely, for this to fully meterialisie in our present age, shaped by the predicament of the nuclear age, globalisation and the internet, we must bring to completion Wells’ vision to achieve some sort of ‘Confederation of Man’, with a disarmament agency to pool the military, naval, and air establishments of the federating nations into one global force, and then go on to reduce that force to the size of a world police. As we proceed to understand the narrative of our collective past, Wells gains renewed significance, and as the future unravels, his ideas empower and encourage us to take the necessary steps in responsible global citizenship. All over the world, in books, newspapers, on the air, in the cinema, and in the brain of the world, that war goes on, until at last it ends in a mutually tolerant federal human unity. But that will not be the end of war. It will be its crowning transformation. Men will be, if anything, more aggressive … The men of the Ultimate War will explore the hidden wealth within our planet and the secrets of matter. They will control and increase the harvests of the sea, they will abolish waste places, end swamp and jungle, and turn the surface of the whole earth into a smiling garden. They will gain a new purchase upon their own lives; living more stoutly and longer and with a new elation. They will explore their own creative possibilities for a mightier art and a more abundant beauty. The world begins anew – if they carry on this last transformation of war to its completion. …You cannot sit back and beg to be excused. The War into which War is now being transformed will not tolerate that (Wells, 1942, p. 27). Hunting the truth is an art (Wells, 2002, p. 58).

Selected Comments on Inside GHQ, a Prodigious Work

Journal Article Selected Comments on Inside GHQ, a Prodigious Work Get access Ulrich Straus Ulrich Straus Ulrich (Rick) Straus served 30 months (1946–1948) in the Occupation as a Japanese language officer. His longest assignments were with the prosecution staff at the Tokyo Trial and at G-2, GHQ. He also served more briefly with ATIS, G-2 and with ESS. At the Tokyo Trial, Straus was responsible for the accurate translation of German documents into English and Japanese. While completing work toward a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Michigan, Straus entered the State Department. Half of his 30-year diplomatic career was spent on the US–Japan relationship, including assignments to the Political Section at the Tokyo Embassy, the Japan Desk in Washington, and as Consul General on Okinawa. Other assignments included US Mission Berlin when the city was divided, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Embassy Bern, and as an adjunct professor at the National War College in Washington. After retiring from the State Department in 1987, Straus taught adult education courses on Japan at Washington area universities, headed the Japanese/Korean language section at the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, and worked on declassification of State Department documents. Straus lives in Northport, Michigan where he lectures and comments on foreign policy for the local PBS station. He is the author of The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II, which was published by the University of Washington Press in early 2004 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Science Japan Journal, Volume 7, Issue 1, April 2004, Pages 123–127, https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/7.1.123 Published: 01 April 2004

Summary of Research on Light Water Reactor Improvement Concepts

The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency of the U.S. Department of State instituted a study aimed at improving the light water reactor (LWR) fuel consumption efficiency as an alternative to fuel recycle in the late 1970s. Comparison of the neutron balance tables of an LWR (1982 design) and an “advanced” Canada deuterium uranium (CANDU) reactor explained that the relatively low fuel efficiency of the LWR was not primarily a consequence of water moderator absorptions. Rather, the comparatively low LWR fuel efficiency resulted from its use of poison to hold down startup reactivity together with other neutron losses. The research showed that each neutron saved could reduce fuel consumption by about 5%. In a typical LWR some 5 neutrons (out of 100) were absorbed in control poisons over a cycle. There are even more parasitic and leakage neutron absorptions. The objective of the research was to find ways to minimize control, parasitic, and other neutron losses aimed at improved LWR fuel consumption. Further research developed the concept of “putting neutrons in the bank” in 238U early in life and “drawing them out of the bank” late in life by burning the 239Pu produced. Conceptual designs were explored that could both control the reactor and substantially improve fuel efficiency and minimize separative work requirements.The U.S. Department of Energy augmented its high burnup fuel program based on the research in the late 1970s. As a result of the success of this program, fuel burnup in U.S. LWRs has almost doubled in the intervening two decades.

The Soviet Union, Russia, and the biological and toxin weapons convention

Michael Moodie is the co-founder and President of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute (CBACI) in Alexandria, Virginia. He has more than 25-years experience on international security issues both in government and the policy research community. He is a former Assistant Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, where he had responsibility for a range of arms control matters, including negotiations concluding the Chemical Weapons Convention and issues related to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Recently, he was the primary author of the CBACI report, Contagion and Conflict: Health as a Global Security Challenge. Other recent publications include “Fighting the Proliferation of Biological Weapons: Beyond the BWC Protocol,” in Disarmament Forum and Cooperative Security: Implications for National Security and International Relations.

Using Military Spending Data: The Complexity of Simple Inference

This study assesses the reliability of estimates of the direction of military spending growth obtained from two main sources - the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). It examines the average directional agreement between early and late ACDA and SIPRI spending estimates for a full sample of countries and for seven different regions (Africa, East Asia, Latin America, Middle East, South Asia, NATO Europe, and the Warsaw Pact). It shows that the direction of ACDA and SIPRI estimates diverge significantly over time and that the two data sources appear especially challenged when estimating the sign of smaller, and especially negative, growth-rate changes and of spending in regions (Africa and the Middle East) where growth-rates vary markedly. It further establishes that, when a single source publishes consistent directional estimates, these estimates can diverge considerably from those published by the other source. Based on the findings, this study proposes a set of simple validation procedures and tests their strengths and weaknesses on various sets of countries.

The status of Norms against nuclear testing

The Nonproliferation Review/Winter 1999 20 George Bunn, the first general counsel of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, served on the US delegation that negotiated the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and later became a US ambassador to the Geneva disarmament conference. He is now working on nuclear nonproliferation problems as a consulting professor at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation. THE STATUS OF NORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR TESTING

Consider the Source: Organizational Bias in Estimates of Foreign Military Spending

I seek to determine the degree and nature of bias in the military spending estimates of the two main sources of such data—the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). I examine how ACDA and SIPRI revise their estimates of foreign military spending. I do so by evaluating ACDA and SIPRI growth rate estimates from successive statistical volumes for a full sample of countries and years as well as for seven identified regions (Africa, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, NATO Europe, and the Warsaw Pact), to determine whether, and by how much, early and late estimates of each organization depart from its own or the other's final estimates. The findings reveal that systematic (or patterned) error for some regions is high and that unpatterned error for some regions is extremely high. The latter finding is important because unpatterned error can become systematic with changes in sample size.

Weapons physicist ‘denied access’ to remanufacture data

washington The US National Security Council has blocked a planned study by the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency into the maintenance of the United States nuclear weapons stockpile.

The arms trade in the 1990s: Changing patterns, rising dangers

Analysts of the conventional arms traffic have long understood that international trading patterns are closely related to developments in the world security environment, with changes in the global correlation of forces producing corresponding shifts in the worldwide flow of arms. It should not be surprising, then, to find that the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union have been accompanied by dramatic changes in the character and direction of the global arms traffic. Whereas arms once flowed in great plenty from the USSR to its allies in Eastern Europe and the developing world, today the outflow from the former Soviet Union (FSU) is significantly reduced. Other cold-war trade patterns have also been disrupted, producing a generalised decline in the dollar value of international arms transfers. At the same time, however, we have seen the emergence of new arms trade patterns that reflect the altered power relationships of the post-cold war era. As these new power relationships transform world politics in the years ahead, the arms traffic will continue its own evolution, resulting ultimately in a complete transformation of global trading patterns. To appreciate the extent of this transformation fully, it is first necessary to review the arms trade system of the cold-war era. For much of this period, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, the global arms traffic was largely governed by the competitive practices of Washington and Moscow. Eager to establish and maintain close military ties with the rising powers of the Third World, the two superpowers offered increasingly sophisticated arms to those regimes willing to align themselves with one or the other of the major blocs. As a result, arms supplied by the two superpowers (and by their close allies) constituted a large share of the global weapons flow: according to the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), US and Soviet arms accounted for 65% of the total worldwide weapons traffic in 1972-88 (when measured in dollars), while those provided by all NATO and Warsaw Pact countries combined accounted for around 90% of the traffic during this period.' The Cold War competition between Washington and Moscow also governed the direction and composition of the arms flow during this period. In their pursuit of Third World allies, the superpowers concentrated their arms-supply activities in a number of major areas considered pivotal to the global correlation of forces-most notably the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia. As a result, the

The Nuclear Fleecing of America

The author is former director of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and former chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. One of the major news channels has a feature called “The Fleecing of America.” It brings to the public9s attention wasteful spending on items costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, but seldom those in the billion-dollar range. One such fleecing is presently being contemplated by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). All U.S. nuclear weapons production facilities are presently closed down, and if the various START agreements are adhered to, those facilities will probably never be required except for one critical capability. All modern nuclear weapons use uranium, plutonium, and tritium. Uranium and plutonium have very long half-lives, and there is a large surplus of these materials. Tritium, however, has a relatively short half-life of about 12.6 years, so about 5 percent of the amount on hand must be replaced each year to maintain the current inventory. Because of the large retirement of nuclear weapons by the United States in compliance with early SALT agreements and national policy, tritium from retired weapons has been used to make up that lost through natural decay. However, in about 10 to 15 years, depending on future START negotiations, the United States will need a guaranteed supply of tritium to maintain its stockpile at whatever level is agreed on. In anticipation of this future need to produce tritium, DOE is pursuing two technologies. One uses a nuclear reactor that could also produce electricity whose sale would recover not only the capital cost of the reactor but also its annual operational cost. Unfortunately, the present Administration has a definite bias against nuclear power, so an alternative method is also being pursued even though it is agreed that it will cost twice as much as a reactor and use as much electricity as a reactor would produce. This technology uses an accelerator to produce high-energy protons that in turn produce neutrons that interact with either lithium or helium three to yield tritium. The main argument for the accelerator is that it produces no conventional nuclear wastes. Proponents readily admit that it will produce radioactive materials, but with a relatively short half-life compared with that of wastes from spent nuclear fuel. The fact that the accelerator will require the equivalent of a nuclear power plant to supply its electricity is ignored. Proponents also neglect to mention that about 22 percent of all electrical energy generated in the United States comes from nuclear power plants, so that 22 percent of the power used by the accelerator will generate conventional nuclear wastes, in addition to those the accelerator produces. There is an alternative to either the reactor or the accelerator, which is simply to buy the required tritium from Canada or Russia. Canada presently cannot supply tritium for defense purposes, but its government might be convinced that by supplying tritium and thus preventing the construction of new production facilities they would contribute to nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation and gain revenue from a material for which they have little use. Russia has a surplus of tritium from the START stockpile reductions and produces tritium in some of its power reactors. Our first reaction to the idea of buying tritium from Canada or Russia is that we cannot rely on a foreign nation for a component that is vital to our nuclear deterrent. But a decision to build a reactor or an accelerator is not required for at least 3 years, and actual production is not needed for 6 to 10 years. If we contracted with Canada or Russia to supply only the tritium required to replace 1 year9s decay, the decision date could also be delayed 1 year. If the supplier reneged, we would be in the same relative position as before the agreement. In the meantime, modest funding to continue design of the appropriate reactor or accelerator system could proceed. The advantage of such a proposal is that if we ever need our own production system, enough time will have been spent in its design to ensure the very best technology, and we will have deferred a very large capital expenditure. If we purchase tritium from Russia, we will also improve our relations with them and help alleviate their need for hard currency. We have made arrangements to buy enriched uranium from their stockpile, so the precedent for buying nuclear materials from Russia already exists. Contracting to buy our tritium needs would avoid a $2-billion (or more) fleecing of America and could even contribute to world stability.

Military Expenditures, Health, and Education: Bedfellows or Antagonists in Third World Development?

Whether military expenditure, health, and education are strange bed-fellows, antagonists, or complementary to modernization, economic development and the physical quality of life are the major questions addressed in this paper. Fundamental military roles in underdeveloped countries are discussed; and empirical cross-national analyses of aggregate data from the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), the World Bank, and world political and social indicators, are used to test competing hypotheses. Educational expenditures as related to human capital formation and the percentage of labor force in industry are found to be the best allies in predicting economic development. Other findings indicate that military expenditures are adversarial (or antagonistic) to health and the physical quality of life. The theoretical and policy implications of the findings are discussed.