Tag Archive for: arms control

The ramifications of Russia’s reckless anti-satellite test

The Russian military’s test of a direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon against a defunct satellite has created a huge cloud of more than 1,500 trackable pieces of debris, which may pose a threat to spacecraft for decades.

The destruction of Cosmos 1408 on 15 November was confirmed by the US State Department and the US Department of Defense. Space debris-tracking company LeoLabs said that the blast likely generated hundreds of thousands of smaller pieces that can’t be tracked. Travelling at orbital velocity, even a small piece of debris can seriously damage a spacecraft.

The debris from the explosion posed an immediate threat to the International Space Station, and the danger of collisions will repeat every 90 minutes as the ISS, China’s Tiangong space station and many satellites pass through the expanding debris cloud. Secure World Foundation’s Brian Weeden declared that it was ‘beyond irresponsible for Russia to do this’.

Russia is the latest in a group of nations to demonstrate kinetic-kill anti-satellite weapons (ASATs) in a ‘live test’ that destroyed a target in orbit. China tested a kinetic-kill ASAT in January 2007 against a defunct weather satellite, producing a large cloud of debris, much of which remains in orbit.

In Operation Burnt Frost in October 2008, the US used a modified SM-3 interceptor missile to bring down a malfunctioning satellite and prevent an uncontrolled re-entry that could have dispersed toxic fuel over populated areas.

In 2019, India tested an ASAT against one of its own satellites, creating more long-lasting debris.

The Secure World Foundation’s unclassified report on global developments in counterspace weaponry states that Russia’s Nudol direct-ascent ASAT, the system most likely to have been used in this test, is a ground-based ballistic missile designed to intercept targets in low-earth orbit. The system has been tested at least 10 times, with numerous failures, and this is the first time it’s destroyed a target satellite. Like its US counterpart, the SM-3, which is normally based on naval vessels, the land-based Nudol is adapted from ballistic missile defence. Unlike the SM-3, the Nudol ASAT could be nuclear-armed under some circumstances.

In addition to the immediate dangers from space debris generated by the Russian test, it’s a huge setback to international efforts to prohibit kinetic-kill ASATs that physically destroy their targets. Those efforts are supported by Russia’s Roscosmos space agency and its head, Dmitry Rogozin. The test shows contempt for efforts through the United Nations to create new norms of responsible behaviour following the UK’s tabling of General Assembly resolution 75/36 in December 2020 and the planned establishment of an open-ended working group in 2022 to pursue responsible behaviour in space.

There should be added urgency in the space policy and arms control communities to increase efforts to agree on a ban on kinetic-kill ASAT testing and development. The Secure World Foundation has called on the US, Russia, China and India to declare unilateral moratoriums on further testing of ASATs that could create additional debris and to work with other countries towards solidifying an international ban on destructive ASAT testing.

But there’s a risk that an intensified security dilemma emerging from this test could torpedo efforts to achieve such a ban and weaken trust within the working group on space threats and responsible behaviour despite the need to make rapid progress.

The challenges are clear.

A ban on testing and deployment of kinetic-kill ASATs must be verifiable and enforceable. The fact that systems such as the Nudol and SM-3 are based on ballistic missile defence technologies complicates verification and monitoring of compliance. Would states such as Russia and China agree to intrusive inspections as an essential component of a verification and monitoring regime? How can dual-role systems, which can carry out both ballistic missile defence and ASAT tasks in low-earth orbit, be differentiated? A suspicion that states will maintain such capabilities will intensify pressure to develop counter-responses.

The proponents of a ban need to confront the reality that while their diplomatic efforts occur through international bodies such as the UN working group, the activities of states’ military forces may be disconnected from the objectives and statements of civil authorities or the good intentions of representatives at such negotiations.

It doesn’t seem credible that Roscosmos would have agreed to a test of a kinetic-kill ASAT that could then place the ISS, its own cosmonauts and US astronauts at risk. It must not have known that this test was going to take place, and almost certainly would have taken protective measures if it had been warned. The Washington Post quoted NASA administrator Bill Nelson as saying he believed the Russian space agency was not informed of the test by its own government.

There’s still the question of who should be held responsible if there’s to be a verifiable and meaningful ban on ASATs.

The Russian ASAT test is a huge setback to efforts to build international trust upon which any future ban on ASATs, let alone norms of responsible behaviour, could be based. In addition to blowing up a satellite and endangering the space environment, Russia has seriously damaged the prospects for meaningful progress in arms control in space. The fallout leaves serious questions as to whether the Russian government, which would have authorised this test, is genuine in promoting efforts towards arms control in space.

Trump chaos highlights risks of sole nuclear launch authority

Critics of nuclear weapons have long pointed to two sets of risks. First, deterrence stability depends on all fail-safe mechanisms working every single time in every bomb-possessing country. That is an impossibly high bar for nuclear peace to hold indefinitely. Second, it also requires that rational decision-makers be in office in all the world’s nine nuclear-armed states.

In the past four years the latter risk has intensified in particular because of the personality traits of two of the nine leaders concerned, which is why US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un were described as the godfathers of the UN nuclear ban treaty. The late Bruce Blair, a former nuclear launch officer and respected anti-nuclear campaigner, said in 2016: ‘The thought of Donald Trump with nuclear weapons scares me to death.’

The issue acquired unexpected urgency amid ugly scenes outside and inside Congress after it duly certified Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. On 8 January, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi discussed with General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, precautions for ‘preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike’. Milley’s office confirmed to the New York Times that he had answered her questions about the nuclear command authority.

The US has no extant legal mechanism for addressing Pelosi’s concern. On 22 December 2008, in the final days of the George W. Bush presidency, Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed the unchecked presidential authority. For 50 years, he said, the US president has been ‘followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football [so-called because the code word for the first set of nuclear war plans was ‘Dropkick’] that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use … He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.’

Because of the launch-on-warning posture of nuclear weapons on high-alert status, the US nuclear system is designed to respond to a commander-in-chief’s launch order instantaneously. Missiles would leave their silos just four minutes after the president’s command authorising a strike, so that they launch before they’re destroyed by enemy missiles and hit their targets within 30 minutes of launch.

The one historical occasion on which the president’s unchecked power was an issue was in the dying days of Richard Nixon’s presidency amid the Watergate crisis. Writing in Politico in 2017, Garett Graff recalled how Defense Secretary James Schlesinger had issued an unprecedented set of orders, directing that if Nixon gave any nuclear launch order, military commanders were to check either with him or with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before executing them. This was after Senator Alan Cranston had phoned Schlesinger to warn him about ‘the need for keeping a berserk president from plunging us into a holocaust’. Apparently Nixon had alarmed congressmen by telling them during a meeting: ‘I can go in my office and pick up a telephone, and in 25 minutes, millions of people will be dead’.

In 1973, Harold Hering, a US Air Force major on training to command nuclear missile silos, asked: ‘How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?’ Good question. Instead of receiving an answer, Hering was eased out of the military, lost his final appeal in 1975 and changed careers to take up long-haul trucking. Recalling Hering’s ‘forbidden question’, Ron Rosenbaum comments in How the end begins: the road to a nuclear World War III:

You might think such a question—the sanity of a president who gives a nuclear launch order—would require some extra scrutiny, but Major Hering’s inconvenient query put a spotlight on the fact that the most horrific decision in history could be executed in less than fifteen minutes by one person with no time for second-guessing.

According to law professor Anthony Colangelo, military officers have ‘a legal duty to disobey illegal nuclear strike orders’ and the use of nuclear weapons wouldn’t satisfy the tests of legality under international humanitarian and human rights laws. However, a Congressional Research Service note on 3 December restated the prevailing consensus: ‘The US President has sole authority to authorize the use of US nuclear weapons.’

A former head of US Strategic Command, General Robert Kehler, notes that military officers are bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice ‘to follow orders provided they are legal and have come from competent authority’. In a statement on 7 January, even the International Crisis Group, whose primary field of interest is the conflict-riven regions of the world, highlighted the president’s ‘unfettered power to launch nuclear weapons’ among the perils of the chaotic transition from Trump to Biden.

An angry and vengeful president in denial about the election outcome but with his finger still on the nuclear button—the same one that he’d boasted was ‘bigger and more powerful’ than Kim’s—has helped to reconcentrate minds. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, President John F. Kennedy kept his head while the military advisers around him, led by the notorious General Curtis LeMay, wanted to deploy nuclear weapons and invade Cuba.

Since Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, the world has desperately hoped that, given the strategically challenged president’s unpredictability and unreliability, former generals in his cabinet would act as the adults in the room in any crisis situation. It was in the context of Trump’s failure to grasp core nuclear realities that his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, famously remarked that Trump was a ‘fucking moron’.

The sole launch authority is so powerful and so unchecked that it’s truly scary. Bruce Blair’s two-step recommendation was adoption of a no-first-use policy in the short term and total elimination of all nuclear weapons through ‘global zero’ in the medium term. Biden can and should change the nuclear command structure once he’s in office and require the agreement of at least one other senior official for authorisation of a nuclear strike to be legal.

If this can be of more than theoretical concern with respect to the US, we surely are justified in having even graver concerns about the potential for nuclear weapons being used irresponsibly by some of the other leaders with their fingers on nuclear triggers. Having put ‘guardrails around the sole authority of the US president … to launch nuclear weapons’, Biden could then focus on the urgent need to reduce nuclear risks globally.

Biden’s chance to revive nuclear arms control

As President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris prepare to be sworn in on 20 January, there’s an expectation of US re-engagement with multilateralism and a return to some semblance of normality, stability, continuity and predictability. Exciting days may be behind us and there will be a general sigh of relief around the world for that.

Going by repeated campaign promises and the transition-team website, among the earliest foreign policy decisions of the Biden administration will be to ‘recommit’ to the Paris pact on climate change and ‘restore’ the US’s relationship with the World Health Organization in battling the coronavirus pandemic that is now showing the expected winter surge across North America and Europe.

The normative architecture of nuclear arms control comprising various bilateral and multilateral agreements will also be up for reconsideration. Among the easiest decisions should be to extend current agreements that are nearing the end of their shelf lives.

Russia and the US signed New START in Prague in April 2010 and it came into force on 5 February 2011. The treaty reduced each country’s strategic missile launchers by half, limited the numbers of warheads that can be deployed on the missiles, and established an inspection and verification regime to monitor implementation. It has a provision for a one-off extension by five years, but President Donald Trump repeatedly rebuffed Russian overtures to do so. Extending it will help maintain stability and buy time to negotiate a follow-on agreement. Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin should also discuss additional measures to control new types of strategic offensive arms under development, as well as strategic defensive arms.

A second priority should be to rescind US withdrawals from treaties that were operating largely successfully but that the Trump administration pulled out for short-sighted and extraneous reasons. Three are especially relevant.

On 22 November, six months after serving notice, the US withdrew from the 35-party 1992 Open Skies Treaty that was both a symbol of political engagement and a practical contribution to risk reduction. Over the course of its lifespan, the treaty authorised nearly 1,500 missions, including more than 500 flights over Russia as the most overflown and best-monitored country, with every flight muting anxiety about surprise attack. Describing it as ‘One of the pillars upholding international peace and security today’, former US secretary of state George Shultz, former defence secretary William Perry and former Armed Services Committee chair Sam Nunn noted that even during times of tension in Russia–US relations, the treaty helped to ‘preserve a measure of transparency and trust’. They warned in October 2019 that ‘withdrawal would be a grave mistake’. Biden would do well to correct the mistake.

Signed in December 1987, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was the first nuclear disarmament agreement that prohibited both conventionally armed and nuclear-tipped ground-launched missiles in the 500–5,500 kilometre range. By the implementation deadline of mid-1991, around 2,700 missiles had been destroyed, of which two-thirds were Soviet-made. It made a significant contribution to the security of Europe as the main Cold War front line and helped underpin broader international security for 30 years. When Trump pulled out of it in February 2019, Russia followed suit and the treaty lapsed in August 2019. Because of the potentially destabilising consequences of an arms race involving intermediate-range missiles, it would be good to begin negotiations on restoring the reciprocal restraints while simultaneously exploring practical opportunities to bring China into trilateral frameworks.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had reversed and mothballed Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapon program. Its resuscitation may prove complicated because the politics around it involve Iran and the ayatollahs, Israel, other Arab allies, and weapons of mass destruction. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, yet in 2020 bizarrely claimed that the US could trigger reimposition of sanctions on a noncompliant Iran as a party to the JCPOA. Most UN Security Council members rejected the US move. Biden has indicated a desire to return to the deal, but only if Iran is in compliance with it.

If the domestic US and Middle East regional politics can be taken care of, the legal route to the US returning to the JCPOA is simple enough. Biden could simply revoke Trump’s decisions and actions and return to full compliance with the agreement. A major benefit of this would be to restore US credibility with the European allies and also China and Russia as the original deal-makers and signatories of the P5+1 negotiations that produced the JCPOA, which in 2015 received unanimous endorsement by the Security Council in resolution 2231.

Unfortunately, following the US withdrawal, Iran breached the JCPOA’s purity and quantitative limits on uranium enrichment. With Trump’s pullout having discredited the accommodationists, there will also be stiff resistance in Tehran to an on-again, off-again relationship with Washington.

The assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, on 27 November, almost certainly by Israel, gives a strong hint of how Biden’s election is already shaking up Middle Eastern affairs. It could embolden Trump to engage in scorched-earth policies in the dying days of his presidency. Iran is left with a lose–lose choice: retaliate against Israeli targets and risk a military strike by Trump and the death of the JCPOA, or do nothing and suffer an erosion of domestic support and a loss of regional prestige.

Iran’s initial response, as reported by the New York Times, appears to have been to mandate an increase in uranium enrichment to 20%, a move that would ‘give Iran the ability to convert its entire stockpile to bomb-grade levels within six months’.

The most vexed nuclear problem to confront the new administration will be North Korea. Trump’s unbounded faith in his deal-making prowess notwithstanding, he failed to achieve any concrete progress in denuclearisation in return for conferring a degree of legitimacy on the Kim regime as a de facto nuclear-armed state. Biden may have little choice but to live with this reality. He could aim for a system of restraint that puts verifiable and enforceable limits on North Korea’s numbers and range of warheads and missiles while reaffirming extended deterrence to reassure Seoul and Tokyo.

Finally, there is unlikely to be any noticeable shift in the US position on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that will enter into force exactly two days after Biden and Harris are sworn in.  But perhaps they could soften the stridency of the opposition that has served to poison the atmosphere ahead of the postponed review conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In an address in London in February, Trump’s ranking arms control official Chris Ford was openly contemptuous of the arms control community as virtue-signalling nuclear identitarians. An early commitment by the Biden administration to preserve, uphold and further advance nuclear arms control agreements would help to protect the integrity of the rules-based international system with effective multilateralism as a key principle.

A nuclear world in disarray

We are in a uniquely dangerous period in the atomic age. Geopolitical tensions have spiked in Europe, in the Middle East, on the subcontinent and in East Asia. The nuclear arms control architecture is fraying and crumbling, but no negotiations are underway to reduce global nuclear stockpiles.

A hostile international security environment, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the emergence of new space, cyber and AI technologies have increased the risk of accidental or deliberate use of nuclear weapons. The growing strategic risks and uncertainty in turn fuel the vicious cycle of renewed interest among US allies in a nuclear deterrent as a hedge against receding US primacy and reliability.

At the conclusion of a United Nations conference on 7 July 2017, 122 states parties of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty adopted a new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. All nine countries that possess the bomb (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the UK and the US) boycotted the conference and rejected the treaty. They have done their very best since then to validate the concerns behind the drive to adopt it.

The 2018 US nuclear posture review will guide the Trump administration’s nuclear decision-making, modernisation, targeting and signalling. With an expansive vision of the role of nuclear weapons, its threefold effect is to enlarge the US nuclear arsenal, lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, and broaden the contingencies in which the threat of nuclear weapons can be wielded as a tool of diplomatic coercion.

The 2015 Iran nuclear deal established a robust dismantlement, transparency, inspections and consequences regime. Last year, President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the agreement and reimposed sanctions on Iran, despite its still being in compliance with its obligations. That put Washington in breach of the multilaterally negotiated and UN-endorsed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Trump’s decision will have reconfirmed North Korea’s belief that the one thing standing between its security and a US attack is the bomb. It has also caused the recent surge in tensions in the Persian Gulf.

On 1 February, Trump decided to suspend US participation in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces  Treaty—an arms control agreement with Russia that contributed to the end of the Cold War and underpinned European strategic stability for three decades. It lapsed on 2 August. Trump has also rebuffed Russian overtures to discuss a five-year extension of New START beyond 2021. His second summit with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi in February collapsed without agreement and Pyongyang now seems to be expanding its nuclear arsenal. Still, at least the US and North Korea are engaged in high-level and working-level discussions and the fear of an imminent war has faded.

The altered US nuclear posture will have cascading effects on the arsenals, doctrines and deployments of other nuclear-armed states. On 1 March 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted of a new array of invincible nuclear weapons that can penetrate any defences anywhere in the world. He noted the US had not heeded Russian warnings when it pulled out of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2002. ‘You didn’t listen to our country then. Listen to us now’, he said. Putin’s language was reminiscent of the Cold War.

After the US–Russian suspensions of the INF Treaty, Putin warned that Russia could place hypersonic nuclear weapons on submarines deployed near US waters to match the time in which US missiles based in Europe could strike Russia. He also warned of a radioactive tsunami that could be triggered in densely populated coastal areas by a new nuclear-powered underwater drone dubbed ‘Poseidon’.

The more that Putin and Trump revalidate the role of nuclear weapons in strengthening national security, the more they normalise the discourse of nuclear weapons use and embolden calls for nuclear weapon acquisition in other countries. In Australia, this debate has been restarted most recently by Hugh White.

Meanwhile, the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army has called for China to strengthen its nuclear deterrence and counterstrike capabilities to match the US’s and Russia’s developing nuclear strategies. China is upgrading its relatively small nuclear arsenal. It rejected Germany’s request to save the INF Treaty by agreeing to trilateralise it, emphasising that its warheads in the low hundreds cannot be compared with US and Russian arsenals in the several thousands.

India and Pakistan are enlarging, modernising and upgrading stockpiles, while investing in battlefield tactical nuclear weapons and systems to counter them. The INF Treaty was the first disarmament agreement of the nuclear age. In an unwelcome symmetry, on 26 February we witnessed the first airstrikes by one nuclear-armed state against another, and the two engaged in a deadly dogfight above the skies of Kashmir the next day. Another India–Pakistan war is a question of when, not if.

The US, described by former Canadian disarmament ambassador Paul Meyer as ‘the high priest of nuclear orthodoxy’, has left its allies looking rather foolish. Washington had led them in dismissing the nuclear weapon ban treaty as impracticable virtue-signalling, instead extolling the decades-long efforts at step-by-step measures to advance the cause of nuclear disarmament that had seen global stockpiles plummet by over two-thirds from their Cold War peak.

When unkind critics noted that the only steps that were visible were leading backwards, Washington responded by launching a new initiative on ‘creating the conditions for nuclear disarmament’. Lest some conditions be specified and met, however, Washington suddenly embraced the more nebulous and inherently subjective language of ‘creating an environment for nuclear disarmament’.

During the Cold War, Soviet citizens who kept to the straight path as the communist party veered sharply to the left or right were denounced as ‘deviationists’. For decades, US allies have been singing from the same hymn book, joining it in the insistence that the step-by-step, progressive approach was the only realistic path to nuclear disarmament. Instead of embracing the new orthodoxy from their fallible high priest, they should do a hard-nosed analysis of the merits of the changing risk–reward calculus of integrating more deeply with the nuclear alliance structure or joining the majority of countries in trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons.