Arms Control & Non Proliferation

Documents & Texts from America.gov

25 April 2008
United States Reducing Nuclear Weapons at an Extraordinary Pace

By Jacquelyn S. Porth
Staff Writer

Washington -- All three candidates for president of the United States have expressed support for nuclear arms reductions and strengthening the 1970 treaty governing nuclear nonproliferation.

The executive editor of The New Republic, J. Peter Scoblic, says nuclear disarmament has become a subject of polite conversation in Washington; it generates interest on both sides of the political aisle.

Scoblic attributes this, in part, to the penning of two Wall Street Journal opinion pieces by former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn published in 2007 and 2008 calling for a nuclear weapons-free world.

In April 2008, a group of National Academy of Sciences members called for new, steep nuclear reductions to a threshold of only 1,000 weapons and called for U.S. leadership on the issue.

Nunn told Arms Control Today that achieving further reductions will require collective effort. "It’s not going to be a unilateral move," he said. And it will take time for nations to overcome what he describes as a psychological dependence on these weapons.

Congress has appointed a bipartisan commission to examine the role of nuclear weapons in future U.S. security policy. The commission's report is due in December.

The Wall Street Journal pieces also call for strengthening compliance monitoring of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a counter to the global spread of advanced technology.

The treaty regime that prevents the spread of nuclear weapons and associated technology was extended indefinitely in 1995 and now is reviewed every five years. NPT members met in Vienna in 2007 for a preparatory session for the 2010 Review Conference, are meeting again in Geneva in April and May, and will hold a third round in 2009.

The head of the U.S. delegation told America.gov the parties will have two solid weeks of "serious, substantive discussions on important issues." Christopher Ford said this is a unique forum to discuss key issues and to "hopefully agree upon how to meet the most important challenges affecting the treaty regime."

Ukrainian Ambassador Volodymyr Yel'chenko will serve as chairman of the session. Signatories to the treaty will be assessing each of its articles, discussing peaceful uses of nuclear energy and examining disarmament progress with a view toward making specific recommendations for 2010.

PACE OF U.S. REDUCTIONS IS EXTRAORDINARY

The United States will have the opportunity to highlight its retirement of more than 1,000 strategic ballistic missiles, including the Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile, 350 heavy bomber aircraft and 28 ballistic missile submarines.

National Security Affairs Advisor Stephen Hadley says the United States now has fewer than 3,800 operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons -- the lowest level since "the early days of the nuclear standoff" during the Eisenhower administration.

Thomas D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, says the pace of U.S. reductions has been extraordinary. Since 1992, he says, the United States has retired or eliminated 13 different types of nuclear weapons.

The United States also has removed four Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines from service -- each carrying 96 Trident missiles -- and dismantled its last W-56 warhead for the Minuteman II missile in 2007.

Although much of the disarmament focus is on strategic systems, U.S. tactical weapons also have declined to one-tenth of the Cold War level. U.S. and NATO allies, for example, have dismantled all nuclear artillery shells, warheads for short-range ballistic missiles and naval nuclear anti-submarine warfare weapons.

Strategic reductions have been broad ranging. Moscow and Washington signed the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Talks agreement to reduce the number of warheads for each from the 10,000 to 6,000 range.

The 2002 Moscow Treaty is driving the number of deployed U.S. and Russian warheads down from 6,000 in 2001 to an intermediate point of around 3,000-plus in 2007, and to a final range of 1,700 to 2,200 by 2012. Both countries are ahead of schedule.

Beyond the Moscow Treaty, President Bush pushed for reductions in the total number of warheads in the overall U.S. nuclear stockpile, including deployed and nondeployed warheads, beginning in 2004. By 2012, the U.S. nuclear stockpile will be cut by nearly half of its 2001 level and by three-quarters from the 1990 level.

The United States also offered a draft in 2006 for a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty that would halt any future production of fissile materials needed to produce nuclear weapons. It has not produced enriched uranium for nuclear weapons since 1964 or plutonium for those weapons since 1988, having closed the last plutonium reactor in 1989.

The United States has had a moratorium on nuclear testing moratorium since 1992.

State Department official Jeffrey Eberhardt says the United States focuses not so much on what has to be done to eliminate nuclear weapons but on what future circumstances would clearly allow nuclear disarmament to become "the most stabilizing, deliberate policy choice."

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