The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2020 35 of nonstrategic (so-called “low-yield”) warheads and delivery systems. • The United States can achieve a numerical or technical advantage over our nuclear-armed adversaries by con- stantly pursuing improvements and new nuclear weapons capabilities. (The administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review makes several references to the U.S. “technical edge,” which is of little relevance in an all-out nuclear conflict.) Sadly, no U.S. official today is allowed to repeat the obvious fact that motivated President Ronald Reagan and General Secre- tary Mikhail Gorbachev to jointly declare in November 1985: “A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.” (The White House is reportedly concerned that repeating this declara- tion would send the wrong message to Pyongyang.) Ignoring Core Arguments In a Feb. 11 speech in London originally titled “The Psycho- politics of Arms Control,” Assistant Secretary of State for Inter- national Security and Nonproliferation Chris Ford laid out the administration’s critique of arms control advocates. In seeking to take down several straw-man arguments, which he termed the “pathologies” of those who advocate for “outdated” approaches to arms control, Ford attributed to unnamed advocates words they never said, while ignoring their core arguments. He falsely accused arms control practitioners, presumably going back through the decades, of being unconcerned about national and international security and of using support for arms reduction as “absolutist performative moralism,” “ideological identity poli- tics” and a means of “virtue signaling.” Such accusations do great disservice to the many dedicated national security professionals who work in this field, both inside and outside government. There is a genuine disagreement whether, as Ford argued in the same speech, a favorable interna- tional security environment is a precondition for disarmament or, instead (as I believe history demonstrates), disarmament helps to foster international security. But Ford is wrong to say that those who may be critical of this administration’s approach on nuclear weapons policy matters are blind to the actual secu- rity conditions that shape our foreign policy and arms control goals. Ford also erroneously charged that the arms control com- munity ignored Russia’s violation of the 1987 Intermediate- Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and suggested there should be no response other than the United States remaining in the INF Treaty. There were alternatives to the United States leaving the treaty and options for bringing Russia back into compliance, none of which were perfect. But the United States’ exit from INF, even if justified by Russia’s violation, was not the only possible course of action, nor even a smart thing to do. Ford may be right, as he argued in his speech, that the cred- ibility of agreements requires a readiness to abandon agree- ments that are being violated. But that does not explain the Trump administration’s violation of the 2015 Joint Comprehen- sive Program of Action, with which Iran was in compliance, or its reluctance to extend the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which both Russia and the United States are implementing in full, but which is due to expire in less than a year unless extended by mutual agreement. A Dangerous Void Ford’s claim that the United States is pursuing new forms of arms control has the same credibility as most White House pro- nouncements these days. What is most embarrassing for those of us who took pride in seven decades of America’s global leader- ship in arms control, always setting the global security and risk reduction agenda, is that the United States today has no propos- als on the table for new agreements that would reduce the risk of nuclear war, other than a vague and passive call for trilateral negotiations with Beijing and Moscow on nuclear arms control. Worse, a year after floating the idea, the administration has not even bothered to sketch out any possible incentive for China (whose nuclear arsenal is one-twentieth the size of the Russian and U.S. arsenals) to join in such a negotiation. At the same time, President Trump implausibly pledges to make the United States “invulnerable to missile attack,” and his officials have refused to engage in negotiations on the topic of ballistic missile defense, the U.S. program that stokes Russian paranoia and that Vladimir Putin uses to justify his own pursuit of new and more dangerous weapons systems. In both Moscow and Washington, military and strategic thinkers are again talking about the plausibility of “limited nuclear war” and are building the delivery systems and In both Moscow and Washington, military and strategic thinkers are again talking about the plausibility of “limited nuclear war.”