OPINION — “Militarily, the expiration [last Thursday] of New START [2010 Treaty with Russia] enables the United States to take parallel steps. We will complete our ongoing nuclear modernization programs that were initiated while New START entered into force. The United States also retains non-deployed nuclear capacity [some 1,900 stored nuclear warheads and bombs] that can be used to address the emerging security environment, if directed by the President. Such actions include expanding current forces, diversifying our capabilities, developing and fielding new theater-range nuclear forces, and adapting our extended deterrence posture as necessary.”

That was Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Thomas DiNanno speaking in Geneva last Friday at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.

One day earlier, in a post on Truth Social, President Trump offered this arms control idea: “Rather than extend ‘NEW START’ (A badly negotiated deal by the United States that, aside from everything else, is being grossly violated), we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

Having written about nuclear weapons and covered arms control efforts over the past 60+ years, I thought I would join with others to offer some ideas on where we are now and where we ought to be headed. But rather than doing it alone, I thought I would include some matters raised by former U.S. government nuclear weapons and arms control experts who testified last Tuesday before the Senate Arms Services Committee during a hearing on the post-New START treaty environment.

Let’s start with who is at Trump’s future negotiating table. Trump and other U.S. officials have said China along with Russia has to be there, although so far the Chinese have refused to discuss their nuclear programs. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in response to the Chinese participating idea, said he would then want the United Kingdom and France, two other nuclear powers, also included.

At last week’s Senate Armed Services hearing, Rose Gottemoeller, the lead U.S. negotiator for New START and now Lecturer at Stanford University and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute, gave what I believe would be the best ideas for the way forward.

She said, “I do not support trying to do a trilateral negotiation. I believe that these negotiations [with Russia and China] should be done in parallel. We have 50 plus years of experience limiting and reducing nuclear weapons with the Russians. We can continue that kind of process [to include tactical and hypersonic nuclear weapons] with them.”

Gottemoeller added, “And by the way, I agree that non-strategic nuclear weapons [should be included]. We did not constrain non-strategic nuclear weapons in the New START treaty. It was not designed for that purpose. So to fault it for not controlling those weapons is a bit bizarre, but nevertheless, I agreed with the Trump administration during the first term when they said we need an all-warhead limit in the next negotiation. I think that is definitely the priority we need to proceed on with the Russians.”

Gottemoeller also said, “It’s been my recent experience working with them [the Chinese] in track two [non-U.S. Government] settings that they seem very interested in trying to figure out ways to begin a conversation with the United States about nuclear risks… developing better communications, links with them at the strategic level, hotline arrangements, these types of things. I think they are valuable to begin a conversation about the necessity of controlling nuclear weapons at the negotiating table and [for the Chinese] not being so un-transparent about what they’re doing with their modernization. That has to be the first and foremost objective talking to them about what their intentions are.”

She added, “I’ve already spoken about the Chinese. I think they are willing to talk to us now, but it is about risk reduction and the beginning of more predictability and transparency about their nuclear objectives,” matters that up-to-now they have refused to discuss.

Picking up Gottemoeller’s idea for China at the Senate hearing was another witness, retired-Adm. Charles A. Richard, former commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), and incoming chief executive officer of the Institute for Defense Analysis.

Richard told the Senators, “I think that is an excellent starting point for a conversation with China. There are terms like confidence building and transparency that I would certainly endorse. But fundamentally it comes back to how do you responsibly operate weapon systems with this magnitude of destructive potential. That is to everyone’s benefit including China. And I think that makes an excellent starting point for diplomacy.”

The Gottemoeller/Richard approach reminded me of discussions I had had back in the early 1970s with Paul Nitze when he was part of the Nixon team negotiating SALT I. Nitze told me the Soviet negotiators who were Foreign Office diplomats had little knowledge about nuclear weapons thereby leaving most of the negotiations to the Russian hard-line military. As a result, the Americans had to educate the Soviet diplomats about the destructive power of these weapons to get them more active in the negotiations.

Under Secretary DiNanno in his Friday Disarmament Conference Geneva speech said future discussions meant “taking into account all Russian nuclear weapons [strategic and tactical], both novel and existing strategic systems.” DiNanno specifically mentioned Russia’s “nuclear-powered Skyfall cruise missile and its doomsday Poseidon [nuclear strategic] torpedo. New START constrained neither of these systems and Russia has successfully tested both within the last few months.”

Faced with Russia and China, two potentially peer nuclear powers, both Gottemoeller and Richard agreed about the need for the U.S. to increase its nuclear forces.

Gottemoeller said, “I actually agree with the notion that we need to think carefully about the threat that is presented by two nuclear peers by China and by the Russian Federation going forward. And we need to make judicious choices juxtaposed against the other demands on our defense budget. And I mentioned the conventional force posture, but also the new technologies that are coming our way and must be judiciously incorporated into our new weapon systems as well as the whole arena of cyber threats and how we are going to contest the Russians and the China Chinese in that space.”

Richard was much more specific. He said, “I think that the United States needs to immediately start taking steps, steps that are currently precluded by the New START treaty…to include uploading [currently stored U.S. nuclear] warheads to our intercontinental ballistic missiles, removing covers off the four [launch] tubes on our Trident [strategic] submarines that are currently empty [of strategic nuclear sea-launched ballistic missiles], and several other posture steps that should be taken now, and not a year from now.”

At Geneva Friday, Under Secretary DiNanno raised questions about “Russian and Chinese nuclear testing in violation of their respective moratoria on yield-producing nuclear tests.” He said, “The annual U.S. compliance report has previously assessed that Russia has failed to maintain its testing moratorium by conducting supercritical nuclear weapons tests.”

DiNanno also disclosed, “Today, I can reveal that the U.S. Government is aware that China has conducted nuclear explosive tests, including preparing for tests with designated yields in the hundreds of tons…China has used decoupling – a method to decrease the effectiveness of seismic monitoring – to hide their activities from the world. China conducted one such yield producing nuclear test on June 22 of 2020.”

However, at the Senate hearing, Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), talked about the Nevada National Security Sites where the U.S. has carried out its nuclear testing saying, “Today the site’s underground laboratory is undergoing major mining and construction to provide enhanced capabilities for sub-critical experiments [that are allowed because they don’t involve a nuclear yield] and it will host in the near future two of the most capable weapons radiographic systems in the world.”

Rosen added, “Together with other efforts, these machines will provide greater certainty and data about the performance of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. Far better data, experts say, than the information that could be gleaned if the U.S. were to break the [1992] moratorium [on underground nuclear testing] and conduct an explosive nuclear test, as the President [Trump] and some in his orbit have advocated.”

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Rosen then got ret.-Adm. Richard to agree that while he was STRATCOM commander four years ago, U.S. sub-critical experiments and robust computer modeling provided data that led him to certify the military effectiveness of our stockpile without the need to resume explosive testing.

Gottemoeller added, “President Putin himself said that they would only resume testing on a

reciprocal basis with the United States. So, I would expect that to be the outcome. And I do expect that it would disadvantage us, you know, because we conducted more explosive nuclear tests than any nuclear weapon state. We have more data available to us with which we are able to do a massive amount of calculation and other activities in order to assure our stockpile is safe,

secure and effective.”

Gottemoeller and Richard both delivered their own views on the advantages of arms control.

“Stable deterrence is driven by predictability and nuclear negotiations done right deliver predictability,” Gottemoeller said. She added, “The effect comes about because restraints on our opponents reached through agreement bolster predictability which in turn supports our nuclear forces in their drive for reliable, stable and effective deterrence. Lack of predictability by contrast feeds uncertainty about the status of the nuclear forces among our adversaries, which means we may end up spending more than we have to on nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles.”

Richard said, “Our entire nuclear deterrence posture is designed to, by threat of escalation, convince your opponent — have a perception in your opponent’s mind — that restraint, inaction is their least bad course of action. And that has been successful for over 60 years in deterring not only nuclear attack on the United States and our allies, but has made a great contribution to the deterrence of great power war.”

I want to close with a reminder that I often use when discussing nuclear weapons. That is to remind readers the original handful of nuclear weapons were built by U.S. scientists, including Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, as terror weapons, to kill as many people as possible to end a war – not to fight one.

And as ret.-Adm. Richard noted above, despite the much too large a number of both tactical and strategic nuclear weapons that have since been built and exist today, none has been used in a war situation since two were used in 1945, and they did end a war.

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