New Paradigms Forum

For a Neo-Legitimist International Law

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:14:48 GMT

Dr. Ford's article arguing for a "neo-legitimist" approach to international law and law-making was published in Missouri State University's journal Defense & Strategic Studies Online (DASSO) in April 2026. You can find DASSO's webpage here , and an online copy of Dr. Ford's article here -- or use the button below to download a PDF.

Arms Control Typologies and Dynamics

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:56:39 GMT

Below is the essay of Dr. Ford's that INHR published on April 10, 2026. The essay can be found on the INHR website here , or read the text below.

The last few years have not been good ones for arms control. Russian arms control violations , for instance, led to the collapse of both the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty (OST), and multiple instances have also surfaced of Russian violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), and even some provisions of New START , the last remaining strategic arms control treaty between Washington and Moscow.

Notwithstanding their ostensible policy moratoria on nuclear weapons testing, moreover, both Russia and China have been revealed to have been conducting secret small-scale nuclear explosive tests notwithstanding their ostensible support of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty , while Russia is developing a space-based nuclear weapons system prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty . With New START’s expiration in February of 2026, moreover, not a single strategic arms agreement remains in force, and despite U.S. efforts dating back at least to 2019 to get Russia and China to the table to develop a trilateral “ next-generation ” new arms control framework, there seems little prospect of a new agreement being negotiated any time soon.

To the contrary, China still shows no interest in any form of arms control at all, and is engaged in a massive nuclear build-up that involves not only the construction of hundreds of new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silos , but also an expansion of its nuclear weapons “pit” production facilities . China, in fact, is building at a pace that will give Beijing strategic parity in operationally-deployed nuclear weapons at around New START treaty levels by 2035 . Meanwhile, Russia continues to expand the arsenal of theater-range nuclear systems it amassed in part by refusing to honor its arms reduction promises under the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) of 1991-92 and by violating the INF Treaty. In response, the Washington expert policy community has now long since come to coalesce around the idea that our current deterrent force is inadequate , and that as a result of our current “ two-peer” nuclear deterrence problem , the United States now needs – at the very least – to upload additional nuclear weapons onto its existing strategic deliver systems.

Nevertheless, hope in the arms control and disarmament community seems to spring eternal, and even the Second Trump Administration has said that it would like to negotiate a new arms control accord . As strategists and leaders consider what arms control arrangements (if any) might serve the interests of strategic stability without undermining or precluding what Western nations now clearly need to do in order to augment deterrence in the face of growing Russian and Chinese threats, this paper hopes to serve as a reference guide to the conceptual terrain. For present purposes, I offer no specific recommendations about which of the measures discussed herein, if any, can or should be pursued today. Nevertheless, I hope this paper will be useful in helping the reader understand the range of what has been attempted in the past and is theoretically possible.

I. Purposes of Arms Control

Arms control agreements do not always do so, unfortunately, but they are at least capable of serving a variety of valuable functions in the international security environment. A key point always to keep in mind in assessing this value, however, is that arms control is not an end in itself, but rather a tool by means of which to protect and advance security interests and those of international peace and security more broadly. Arms control agreements arms control diplomacy, in other words – and arms control diplomats themselves, for that matter – must therefore always be understood to be the servants of national security and be employed in its pursuit.

Arms control being thus an instrument of national policy rather than an intrinsic objective thereof, leaders reverse this connection at their strategic peril. Sometimes arms control is indeed exactly what one needs, but at other times it must be refused, or perhaps – if it is in place – even abandoned. Western leaders have invariably professed this commonsensical view, but it is not always clear that they have genuinely believed it. The point is hence worth stressing here, for clarity.

Nonetheless, when things are properly understood, it is clear that arms control agreements can, under the right circumstances, do valuable things. It can, for instance, serve at least 10 potential purposes:

Prevent actual or potential strategic competitors from acquiring weapons or other military capabilities – either in terms of types of systems or of the level of armament ( i.e. , numbers) – that would be undermine deterrence, tempt belligerent powers to aggression, or otherwise undermine strategic stability;

Facilitate or require transparency and the exchange of information in ways that help prevent or reduce the risk of dangerous misunderstandings, errors, accidents, or strategic miscalculations that could lead to (or exacerbate) conflict; [1]

Create or preserve technical or institutional communications channels between adversarial parties in crisis or conflict, thereby providing means through which relevant decisionmakers can communicate with each other to help manage escalation risks, discuss possible ways to avoid, limit, or resolve a conflict that is already in progress, or otherwise to conduct the sort of information exchanges described in point (2) above;

Provide verification procedures for reassuring each party to an arms control agreement that its counterparties are in fact complying with the deal, or at the very least for ensuring that any violations come to light as quickly as possible;

Set forth and provide for the implementation of agreed-upon reductions in armaments, allowing parties to an agreement to reduce the arsenals with which its parties threaten each other;

Prohibit or otherwise regulate – and hence potentially reduce the incidence of – behaviors by parties that might otherwise increase the risk of escalation and conflict, or perhaps (as does the Law of Armed Conflict in aspiring to regulate the barbarity of warfare more generally) shape or channel behavior in a conflict into forms that are less likely to lead to catastrophe;

Help parties to an agreement limit their respective expenditures on armaments or other military systems, thereby allowing leaders to devote more money to other national policy priorities;

Demarcate a limited group of countries that must unavoidably be indefinitely or temporarily “permitted” to possess certain types of military capability, while prohibiting others from acquiring such dangerous tools;

Help national leaders preserve forms of armament that they deem essential to deterrence or otherwise necessary for national security, by clearly delineating permissible systems from problematic ones, and by providing a formal means ( e.g. , in treaty text) of articulating or illustrating agreed-upon concepts for what types of system or armament levels are more (or less) destabilizing than others; or

Set in place agreed-upon frameworks for permitting and/or placing limits upon particular countries’ military capabilities in ways that accommodate the otherwise-destabilizing rise of “challenger powers” while yet reducing the risk that untrammeled strategic competition will lead to conflict, or in some other way set in place procedures or formalize understandings intended to reduce tensions and minimize the degree to which countries are likely to wish to acquire additional armaments or to war against each other.

II. Arms Control Typologies

Beyond simply these ten ways to think about the purposes of arms control, one could also categorize arms control agreements in various ways. I can imagine several possible relevant typologies, for instance, as follows below.

Bilateral vs. Multilateral

Agreements, for instance, could be distinguished on the basis of whether they are bilateral or multilateral (or perhaps “plurilateral”). New START, for instance, was a bilateral agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation, whereas the Chemical Weapons Convention is multilateral on a very large scale. The START agreement of 1991 between the United States and the Soviet Union began as a bilateral treaty, but was subsequently multilateralized after the breakup of the USSR created a number of new states that each succeeded to the limits articulated therein.

Symmetric vs. Asymmetric

Arms control restrictions can also be distinguished on the basis of whether they impose rules or restrictions symmetrically upon parties to the agreement or have different limits or rules for different parties. Strategic arms treaties between Washington and Moscow have tended to be symmetric in terms of their basic rules, though they often nonetheless allowed the parties some flexibility in fine-tuning their specific force mix within specified overall numerical limits. Nevertheless, the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 – which set different naval tonnage limits for capital ships and aircraft carriers for the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan – shows that it is also quite possible to have a treaty that imposes limits asymmetrically.

Legally Binding vs. “Politically” Binding

Treaties that are negotiated and signed by officials enjoying what are called “full powers” on behalf of their national governments, and which are thereafter formally ratified by the governments in question, become legally binding agreements under international law and are generally applied and interpreted pursuant to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties . This is the stereotypical “heart” of the arms control business. It is also possible, however, to have meaningful agreements that don’t rise to this legal standard, and that are thus merely “morally” or “politically” binding. Most well-known arms control agreements – and, by definition, all arms control treaties – are the former, but examples of the latter have also occurred. Neither the old Russo-American PNIs nor the more recent “ Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA) Iranian nuclear deal of 2015 were legally binding, for example, nor even were actual signed agreementsin the formal sense at all.

Reciprocal vs. Unilateral

Arms control measures are commonly adopted on the basis of actual or applied reciprocity – that is, each side undertakes to adopt and comply with them on the understanding that the other side will too – and this is indeed the general rule. This common practice, however, does not necessarily preclude arms control occurring merely through the articulation of unilateral measures by the parties that are, in principle, adopted entirely independently of each other. With the PNIs and then later the strategic arms reductions subsequently codified in the Moscow Treaty of 2002 , for instance, both sides theoretically intended to comply irrespective of whether the other side did.

(It might not even be too much to call it “arms control” even where a country adopts a framework of restraint both unilaterally and alone . In 1984, after all, William van Cleave pointed out that in the Western democracies “arms are always controlled. They are controlled and limited by traditional values, by political and budgeting processes, and by the influences of the media and public opinion.” [2] )

A Functional Typology

Perhaps more interestingly, however, one can categorize types of arms control agreement from a functional perspective. In this regard, and drawing in part upon my abovementioned list of potential arms control purposes, I would suggest at least five basic categories, as follows below. (As will be seen, these categories are not mutually exclusive, and some agreements contain elements serving fitting into more than one of them.)

Capability-limitation agreements that impose arms caps or reductions, or that prohibit certain types of weaponry. This is the most stereotypically “arms control-y” type of agreement, and includes treaties such as the Strategic Arms limitation Treaty (SALT I, a.k.a. the “Interim Agreement”) and Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972, the INF Treaty, START, the Moscow Treaty, New START, the CWC, the BTWC, and the contemporary, highly aspirational Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) can also be deemed a capability-limitation agreement to the extent that its Article II prohibits defined “non-nuclear-weapons states” from manufacturing or otherwise acquiring a nuclear explosive device.

Behavioral limitation agreements that require or prohibit certain types of action – as opposed to certain weapons systems – that are deemed to be unduly dangerous because they increase escalation risks, impose problematic externalities upon third parties, or are otherwise destabilizing. Historically, this category includes measures as diverse as the Incidents at Sea (INCSEA) agreement of 1972 , the Hague Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation (HCOC), the CTBT, and the Limited Test Ban Treaty . The NPT is also a behavioral limitation treaty to the extent that its Article I prohibits defined “nuclear weapon states” from providing nuclear weaponry to a non-nuclear weapon state or otherwise helping them to acquire it. Also into this category would fall the Four-Power Treaty of 1922 – in which the United States, Britain, France, and Japan agreed to consult with each other before taking action in a future crisis in East Asia – as well as the 2015 effort by a group of national experts convened by the United Nations to articulate “norms of behaviour” in cyberspace such as the need to avoid cyberattack upon civilian critical infrastructure during peacetime. (A number of countries have also been talking for years about the possibility of a code of conduct for operations in outer space .)

Communication agreements that institutionalize channels of crisis communication, provide for data exchanges, or impose other dialogue and transparency measures intended to reduce the risk of dangerous misunderstanding or miscalculation. Examples of such agreements include the original U.S.-Soviet “hotline” accord of 1962 , the Open Skies Treaty, the establishment of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) network, the Vienna Document , and arguably also the specific data-exchange provisions of START and New START.

Exclusion agreements that bound the specific geographic or other physical locations or battlespace domains in which armed forces or particular weapons systems are permitted to be, or from which they are banned. Historical examples include the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty , the Outer Space Treaty prohibiting the placement of nuclear weapons in space or on the Moon, the Antarctic Treaty barring all military forces from that continent, regional nuclear weapon prohibition treaties such as the Treaty of Tlatelolco , the Montreux Convention of 1936 setting certain limits on what naval forces can pass through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus and when they can do so, and the range of geographic demilitarization accords various countries have signed over the years.

What scholars such as Emily Goldman [3] have called “ political arms control ” agreements that are – as I phrased it in an article several years ago – aimed “not so much … at regulating armaments per se , but … [rather at] mitigat[ing] the conflicts and tensions that might encourage nations to want more such armaments.” Into this category might fall, for instance, the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922 , in which the signatories pledged to respect China’s territorial integrity but also to recognize Japanese dominance in Manchuria. Indeed, the entire package of treaties reached at the Washington Naval Conference that year could be seen, together, as a “political arms control” framework that – for some years, at least – successfully reduced the prospect of war arising from a “ Thucydides Trap ” of confrontation between rising and status quo powers. Specifically, that 1922 naval package both: (i) accommodated but limited the growing might of U.S. naval power by recognizing American naval co-equality with Britain’s Royal Navy but at the same time capping the naval tonnage of both powers to prevent a further arms race between them; and (ii) accommodated but limited the rising naval might of Japan by imposing island “non-fortification” requirements upon other powers so as to grant Tokyo effective supremacy in its home waters of the Western Pacific, while yet restricting Japan’s naval strength to levels significantly less than the overall forces of the globally-deployed U.S. and British navies.

III. The Historical Progression of Arms Control

At least in U.S.-Soviet and U.S.-Russian practice, moreover, it might also be possible to view arms control as having a step-by-step conceptual sequence reflecting both the parties’ institutional and psychological “learning curves” and the complexities of what actually feels possible to the parties in a changing geopolitical environment. This logical sequence might be summarized as: (a) risk reduction communications; (b) constraints upon dangerous externalities; (c) limitations on competitive behaviors and military capabilities; (d) prohibitions of specific weapon types; and (e) elimination of entire types of weapon and/or agreed reductions in arsenal size.

Risk Reduction

This Russo-American sequence began, historically, with the abovementioned “hotline” accord, which tried to institutionalize an improved crisis communication mechanism in the wake of the terrifying nuclear escalation “near-miss” of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. This first foray into nuclear risk reduction represented a fairly simple and comfortable first step, not only because it responded to a clear need for better crisis communications between national leaders during that crisis, but also because the agreement did not actually require the Cold War superpowers to limit the nuclear forces they were then working furiously to build against each other.

Constrain Externalities

Actually taking steps to constrain competitive behavior between the two strategic rivals took a bit longer, and arrived first in a form – the Limited Test Ban Treaty – that also did not actually constrain what arms either side could possess or what they could do with them. Instead, it merely took measures to eliminate the dangerous externality of worldwide radioactive fallout that was being produced in those years from aboveground nuclear weapons tests. The competitive development and deployment of nuclear weapons thus continued apace, but nuclear testing thereafter could occur only underground.

Limit Behaviors

The third step in the sequence saw the United States and the Soviet Union actually begin to limit their directly competitive behavior, at least in terms of the hijinks permitted as forces confronted each other at sea. As noted earlier, the INCSEA agreement of 1972 was designed to help prevent such problems by setting out reasonably clear standards of good conduct, such as steps to avoid collisions, maintaining safe standoff distances for surveillance ships, and “not simulating attacks at” or “launching objects toward” the other side’s vessels. [4]

Limit Military Capabilities

Around the same time, the superpowers also set about taking the next logical step: starting to limit the number and type of systems they could possess. Specifically, SALT I capped how many strategic delivery systems each side could possess, while the ABM Treaty barred the superpowers from deploying anything other than a very thin missile defense system. The second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II ), moreover – had it actually ever come into force – would have capped the two sides’ possession of strategic delivery systems topped with Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs).

Prohibit or Eliminate Weapon Types

The fourth step in this sequence was to start actually prohibiting certain types of weapon, which became more possible after the United States and the USSR had moved into the period of somewhat less heated competitive rivalry in the early 1970s remembered as the era of “ détente .” In fact, preparations for this phase arguably began with the negotiations over the ill-fated SALT II agreement, during which the Americans briefly considered pursuing a ban on placing MIRVs on heavy ICBMs. (President Richard Nixon, however, opted simply to seek an ICBM MIRV “freeze ,” and SALT II ended up containing provisions that would have placed limits on the number of launchers that could be “MIRVed.”)

Soviet nuclear deployments in the mid- and late-1970s and Moscow’s geopolitical adventurism in the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 thereafter led to a period of increased tensions, and also to a strong U.S. response that began late in the administration of President Jimmy Carter and picked up further steam under President Ronald Reagan. Nevertheless, the range of arms control possibilities expanded again after U.S. deployments had checked previous Soviet advantages gained during the 1970s, and as Cold War tensions thereafter began to wane as the relationship warmed between U.S. Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

At their famous Reykjavik Summit in 1986 , in fact, the two leaders actually discussed the possibility of actually eliminating all their nuclear weapons. They failed to close the gaps between them on that momentous point, of course, but in 1987 Reagan and Gorbachev did agree upon the INF Treaty, which ended the theater arms race between Soviet SS-20s and the American Pershing II and Tomahawk “Euromissiles ” by banning the category of intermediate-range delivery systems entirely. (That treaty also provided for the dismantlement of the parties’ existing arsenals of INF-class systems, which occurred as planned.)

Arms Reductions

Though the elimination provisions of the INF Treaty already represented a step along this road, the fifth step in this historical sequence was for the two nuclear superpowers to move into overall arms reductions once Cold War tensions had all but evaporated as a result of structural change in the Soviet system and then the collapse of the USSR. Proving the wisdom of that phrasing in the Preamble of the NPT that makes clear that “the easing of international tension and the strengthening of trust between States” would be necessary “in order to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons” and “the liquidation of … existing stockpiles,” the end of the Cold War indeed made possible huge reductions in the two former rivals’ nuclear arsenals. Beginning with START in 1991, continuing with the Moscow Treaty of 2002, and then proceeding through New START in 2010, Washington and Moscow were able to reduce inventories to a fraction of their respective Cold War peaks .

A Logical Sequence

Looking back across this sweep of events, it is not hard to see how these steps followed a logical sequence that flowed loosely from the strategically “easier” to the strategically “harder” depending upon the degree of flexibility that leaders in Washington and Moscow felt themselves to in light of on the perceived intensity of their strategic competition at the time. The wise observer should thus carefully note the directionality of the causal arrow that this sequence suggests: arms control movement has historically depended upon progress in easing strategic tensions, rather than things being the other way around.

As Winston Churchill made clear in 1934, peace creates disarmament, not the converse: “ When you have peace you will have disarmament .” And U.S. officials have recognized this for a long time, as can be seen as in Reagan’s famous aphorism that “ [w]e don’t mistrust each other because we’re armed; we’re armed because we mistrust each other .” (More personally and more recently, I myself made this insight the cornerstone of the “ Creating the Environment for Nuclear Disarmament” [CEND] diplomatic initiative .) Arms control enthusiasts do not always keep the arms control cart and the geopolitical horse in their proper order, however, and even the Second Trump Administration has now dismantled the State Department office that ran CEND. As we think about the possible future for arms control, therefore, it is worth stressing that arms controllers should give at least as much attention to addressing and easing the tensions and circumstances of competitive rivalry as they do to devising clever ways to articulate, implement, and verify arms limitations in a treaty instrument.

IV. A Comment on Verification

One important topic that has historically often been the subject of intense study and debate is the verifiability of arms control agreements. For the most part, a discussion of verification is beyond the scope of this paper, but for present purposes it is worth remembering that verifiability is a relative concept rather than an absolute one. The quality of verification matters, of course, and a verifiable agreement is certainly generally better than an unverifiable one, but perfection is both unrealizable and (fortunately) generally not required.

Arms control experts have debated for years how to conceptualize these challenges. By the 1980s, for instance, an important strain of such thinking came to focus upon the idea of “effective verification.” As Amy Woolfe has summarized , this concept holds that

“the United States should be able to detect not only militarily significant violations in time to respond and counter any potential threat, but also other types of violations or discrepancies where it might need to employ a political response.”

A closely related concept is the idea of “timely warning” in connection with nuclear energy safeguards, which can be traced back as far as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report of 1946, which noted the importance of ensuring that “danger signals must flash early enough to leave time adequate to permit other nations – alone or in concert – to take appropriate action.” As I put it myself in an article about nuclear safeguards in 2010 ,

“... [t]imeliness [of warning] … has long been understood with an eye not simply to the specific … time required for a particular [violation to manifest], but also to the time it would take … to respond to the violation detected.”

This point has also long been made explicit in the arms control context, including by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Fred Iklé, who emphasized in 1961 that

“... [i]n entering into an arms control agreement, we must know not only that we are technically capable of detecting a violation but also that we or the rest of the world will be politically, legally, and militarily in a position to react effectively if a violation is discovered.”

But it is also the case that not all violations, as it were, are created equal. A strong case can be made that it is important to detect and respond in some fashion to every violation of an arms control agreement – if nothing else, for fear that even small-scale cheating, if unaddressed, will contribute to a climate of lawlessness in which larger violations are more likely, much as in James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s “ broken windows theory .” Yet it is also the case that some violations are clearly more significant than others. Some, for instance, might consist merely of minor or merely “technical” faults that do not really touch on the core security issues and concerns addressed by the agreement. In other cases, however – as also signaled by the concept of “material breach” set forth in Article 60 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties , under which a violation of sufficient seriousness by one party can absolve the other party of its own obligation to comply – cheating can have very significant consequences.

Verification procedures should alert the other side to any violation, and presumably must alert it to the big ones, but just what it takes to constitute a structurally significant breach will depend a good deal on the context. What military advantage, for instance, would that violation give to the party who is cheating? How easily could it be detected? And how easy and rapidly could the aggrieved party respond to it in a way that addresses the threat created by the violation? All of this makes assessing the adequacy of any given set of verification procedures a complex and context-dependent calculation.

The logic of effective verification, for example, is one of the reasons why actual nuclear weapons experts find it so difficult to imagine full nuclear weapons abolition. In the hypothetical context of an arms treaty that capped nuclear arsenals at 5,000 weapons for each party, it might perhaps be considered acceptable to have a verification protocol with an “error margin” of 50 weapons – that is, for the mechanisms established by that treaty to be unable to ensure that a party did not secretly possess 50 weapons more than the treaty allowed. For an abolition treaty that set nuclear arsenals at zero , however, just such a 50-weapon error would be catastrophic, for cheating of that magnitude could give the violator a huge and potentially war-winning advantage. (An advantage of 50 might make little difference against an adversary still possessing 5,000, but it would be immeasurably important when nobody else has any.) Verification of complete disarmament, therefore, would have to be something very near perfect – which seems rather unlikely.

By the same token, however, some real-world arms reductions have occurred entirely without specific formal verification measures at all. SALT and SALT II, for instance, relied heavily upon verification measures that were exogenous to the treaty itself – specifically, in the form of the “national technical means” of each party’s independent intelligence gathering apparatus ( e.g ., spy satellites). The Moscow Treaty of 2002, moreover, lacked verification provisions simply because the United States and the Russian Federation already understood and expected each other, for their own independent strategic and financial reasons, to bring arsenals down to the levels specified; no desire to cheat being expected in the first place, no particular need was thus felt for verification procedures to detect it.

That said, verification issues do crop up with great intensity – and become quite challenging – when competitive rivalry is hot and all other signs point to national leaders’ desire to maximize strategic and operational advantages in the arraying of arms against each other. Under such conditions, the advantage to be gained from clandestine cheating tends to be high, and hence also the incentive (or at least the perceived incentive, as seen by the other party) to cheat. Looking at the potential future of arms control in today’s context, in other words, verification is likely to be a significant challenge.

V. Arms Control Diplomacy in Strategic Competition

As a final note, it should also be noted that like arms control agreements , arms control diplomacy is itself a tool with instrumental rather than intrinsic value, and one that should be – and, in practice, often is – employed not merely to reach arms control agreements, but also in other ways to pursue broader strategies of maneuvering for competitive advantage. In this context, countries frequently pursue deliberately lopsided arms control proposals that are designed to leave one’s most cherished military capabilities untouched while harshly disadvantaging the other party, or they make unserious and disingenuous offers for purposes of political rather than substantive gain.

And, in truth, there can be many possible reasons to engage in arms control diplomacy even beyond the actual desire to sign a treaty that contributes to the cause of international peace and security. Even if “Plan A” for a given country is indeed to get a stereotypically “good” arms control agreement, in other words, the process of arms control negotiating might be felt to have value for various “Plan B” reasons, including:

Ideally, to hoodwink the adversary into accepting subtly mischievous terms that will actually disadvantage him;

Failing that, to force the adversary to reject seemingly reasonable proposals and thereby (i) permit one’s own diplomats to shame and embarrass him for “not taking diplomacy seriously” or “being a warmonger,” and/or (ii) gain political advantage with third party observers (or domestic audiences) who want arms control;

To distract the adversary and lead him to delay doing things you do not wish him to do, but that he might opt to do if diplomacy were not “underway”;

To use stalling at the negotiating table to buy time in which to prepare for a new strategic move or other wise to change “facts on the ground” to the adversary’s disadvantage;

To keep allies, partners, and domestic stakeholders “on side” while preparing bellicose actions against one’s adversary by “proving” to the world that one has “exhausted all other remedies” and “given diplomacy every chance” (after which one can announce – more in sorrow than in anger, of course – that “diplomacy has failed” and it’s time for tougher measures).

I do not necessarily advocate all (or even any) of these “Plan B” approaches, but the serious observer of arms control history cannot fail to have noticed that they occur with some frequency in the real world. And if indeed arms control is a servant of national security interest rather than the other way around, the wise statesman should probably rule out none of them.

VI. Adaptations and Combinations

My hope is that this paper can help make policymakers a bit more conceptually agile as they struggle with the challenges of finding an arms control framework – or perhaps arms control frameworks , in the plural – both diplomatically feasible and substantively useful in today’s (and tomorrow’s) strategic environment. Perhaps awareness of the possible repertoire of arms control alternatives or elements, in other words, can open the door to creative adaptation of one or more elements of the elements discussed here in order to meet the needs of the day.

As we contemplate how to approach the possibility of involving a hitherto unwilling China in “trilateral” arms control with the United States and the Russian Federation, for instance, it might be helpful to recall that the Washington Naval Treaties of 1922 did indeed manage to support strategic stability for a decade or so, accommodating rising powers and yet checking uncontrolled competition by simultaneously setting unequal limits for key aspects of naval tonnage while nonetheless effectively acknowledging certain prerogatives – in terms of regional force postures – for some parties in ways that did much to meet what were then their strategic ambitions. It is not impossible to imagine some modern nuclear variation on this theme in which all arsenals would be capped, with China at a level of strategic capability higher than it possesses today but yet lower than the other two, while yet also being accommodated by some kind of understood framework of regional balances favoring each power in “its” area of the globe. Conversely, it might even be conceivable for the United States to agree to cap its theater-range capabilities at a level lower than that possessed by China and Russia – but yet higher than today – in similar accommodative conjunction with some kind of three-way understanding about what regional posture or behaviors would be off limits in return.

I take no position here on whether we should establish such a variegated trilateral framework, whether it would indeed be saleable to China, or whether it would in fact represent a good solution to today’s “three-body problem” of tripolar nuclear rivalry. But an awareness of arms control history and typological analysis of elements that have been employed in the past can at least help identify possibilities that have not heretofore been explored.

Even in terms of bilateral agreements, moreover, were Russia and the United States to pursue some sort of follow-on two-party strategic treaty – “Re-START,” anyone? – it is similarly not beyond imagining that they might be able to agree to terms that address their shared strategic concerns about China’s growing nuclear weapons capabilities through what might be called an “escalation clause.” Under such a provision, for instance, the two powers might agree to cap their arsenals at “X” operationally-deployed strategic weapons, but only under the condition that if a third power built up its capabilities to a level equal to or greater than “X minus N,” either Washington or Moscow would have the option of increasing its own forces by whatever increment it felt necessary to address this third-party challenge, provided that the other signatory would thereupon also acquire the right to increase its own forces by the same increment. (That way the Russians and the Americans could remain at parity with each other, while retaining the lawful option to fend off the arrival of Chinese parity by deploying more forces to the degree that they are willing to devote resources to this task.)

Such complicated mechanisms for coping with third-party challenges would be less necessary for Transparency and Confidence-Building Measures (TCBMs) between nuclear weapons possessors, however, for less strategic disadvantage would accrue from an additional power being left out of a risk-reduction framework than would be the case if its actual nuclear capabilities were unconstrained while others faced treaty limits. Bilateral TCBM frameworks related to things such as data exchange, transparency visits, crisis communications, and missile launch notification, for instance, could be negotiated in order to be expandable to include new signatories over time not unlike how new signatories were welcomed into the NPT itself after it was opened for signature in 1970, how new adherents have periodically joined the Hague Code of Conduct on Missile Proliferation (HCOC), and how new participants have from time to time been welcomed into the NRRC network.

Indeed, such a TCBM treaty could perhaps be drafted to be fully “modular” even on a participant-by-participant basis, allowing new signatories either to accept its terms in full or to accede to some of them, with the option of acceding to additional elements of the framework over time. Such a structure would maximize diplomats’ ability to bring in additional states in on terms palatable to those not hitherto accustomed to such engagement, allowing newcomers to be progressively “acculturated” or “socialized” to more TCBMs over time. In fact, if one drafted it carefully without making acknowledged or “legitimized” nuclear weapons possession a requirement, such a modular TCBM framework might also be able to accommodate powers outside the nuclear weapons mainstream – such as those which openly possess weapons but have shunned the NPT ( e.g. , India and Pakistan), those widely believed to possess such weapons but who have never admitted it ( e.g. , Israel), or even a nuclear weapons pariah state ( e.g ., North Korea). When it comes to risk reduction measures, after all, it’s presumably generally the case that more risk reduction is better than less risk reduction, so why not be flexible and accommodating in the interest of involving as many nuclear weapons-relevant states as possible?

VII. Conclusion

Any strategy for approaching arms control negotiating in today’s context of multipolar strategic competition and nuclear rivalry will face formidable, and in some ways quite unprecedented, challenges. As officials and scholars struggle with these challenges, I hope that this paper will have helped shed some light upon the complex repertoire of concepts and precedents that has emerged from the last several generations of arms control debate and practice.

-- Christopher Ford

Notes

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[1] I do not mean to suggest that all transparency and mutual understanding conduces to peace, of course. It is possible that improved mutual understanding can heighten tensions, such as by making one side’s aggressive intentions more clear than before. Nevertheless, accurate understandings – however grim and alarming they may turn out to be – are presumably generally to be preferred to misapprehensions, and arms control can contribute to correcting false assumptions.

[2] Quoted by J.D. Crouch II, “Transcending the Academic Haze, or How I Learned to Learn about the Bomb,” Defense & Strategic Studies Online, vol. 2, no. 1 (Autumn 2025 ), 41.

[3] See E. O. Goldman, Sunken treaties: naval arms control between the Wars (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 5-7 & 244-47.

[4] More contemporary incidents involving Russian pilots engaging in provocative ways with NATO aircraft and a 2001 incident in which a hotdogging Chinese fighter pilot crashed into an American EP-3 surveillance aircraft over international waters show that such problems have by no means gone away.

Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Weaponry

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:16:38 GMT

Below is the essay of Dr. Ford's that INHR published on March 27, 2026. The essay can be found on the INHR website here , or read the text below.

For most people, the topic that first comes to mind when talking about nuclear weapons and Artificial Intelligence (AI) relates to the question of whether or not “ killer robots” problems might emerge in the arena of nuclear warfighting, with national leaders outsourcing their judgment to a machine on whether (or how) to start a nuclear war. And indeed, this was the issue that U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping addressed in their November 2024 summit, where they agreed that any decision to use nuclear weapons should be controlled by humans, not by artificial intelligence .

That said, the Biden-Xi statement really only addressed low-hanging fruit, for such a declaration seems a pretty easy one to make. As I have argued before , “fully autonomous ( i.e., ‘human out of the loop’) nuclear weapons systems are not terribly likely,” and that “[i]f there is any area in which national leaders would refuse to countenance handing over their own most existentially critical trigger-pulling authority to a computer … this is presumably it.”

One can’t say that this is unequivocally true, of course, since there is at least one historical counterexample of a major nuclear power being willing to countenance automatic nuclear weapons use. The Soviet Union, after all, built and deployed the so-called Perimeter (or “Dead Hand”) system many years ago, which was apparently designed to launch all of Moscow’s remaining nuclear arsenal if sensors confirmed nuclear strikes on Soviet territory and the system’s robot brain lost its computerized communications with the Soviet General Staff. As far as I know, the Russians have kept Perimeter in service to this day. So there is already a “killer nuclear robot” out there; it’s just a Russian one rather than a Chinese or American one, and it seems to be intended for what are already basically “the world is already ending” scenarios rather than for any quesitons related to whether or when to get into a nuclear war .

Such potential exceptions aside, more national forays into actual autonomous nuclear weapon-firing feel unlikely – though I’d not put anything past the North Koreans. More realistically, however, I think there’s a high likelihood that AI will increasingly come to be used in providing decision-support assistance to national leaders making nuclear weapons decisions, so that’s perhaps where the questions get a bit more interesting. Starting from that observation, therefore, let me offer a few musings about the potential impact of AI on nuclear escalation risks.

AI and Nuclear Targeting

Crisis Target Selection

Whether it occurs in the context of conventional warfighting or nuclear warfighting, one of the potential risks of AI-facilitated decision-making – e.g. , AI -based decision-support tools for human leaders – is that in high-pressure situations in which huge volumes of incoming information need to be analyzed and acted upon with extraordinary rapidity, overwhelmed human operators may become so reliant upon machine-generated decisional inputs that they essentially cede their judgment to the computer. In such circumstances, the classic distinction can erode between having a “human in the loop” ( i.e. , a human actually making the final decisions) and a “human on the loop” ( i.e., a human merely overseeing a process of machine-made decision). Indeed, the utility even of having a human merely onthe loop could also disappear if the speed and complexity of AI decision processes increase beyond the ability of any given supervisor to follow it. (After all, being “on the loop” is only helpful if you can tell what’s happening in it!)

One already hears concerns being raised about this happening. It’s hard to know just what to make of the various often-conflicting reports that have appeared in the press about Israeli AI-assisted decision making during the Gaza campaign of 2023-25, for instance. Nevertheless, it has at least been claimed that the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF’s) “Lavender” AI program – a “human in the loop” tool for generating targets for air strikes – effectively evolved in some instances into an essentially wholly autonomous program, because under high-stress and high-operational-tempo (OPTEMPO) wartime conditions, human operators feeling “ enormous pressure to accelerate and increase the production of targets and the killing of these targets ” sometimes “ treated the outputs of the AI machine ‘as if it were a human decision ’” and acted unquestioningly as no more than a “ rubber stamp ” for machine-generated prompts. Similar worries have also been voiced about the U.S. Department of Defense’s “ Project Maven ” target-identification program, with one media recounting operators merely “ concurring with the algorithm’s conclusions … in a rapid staccato: ‘Accept. Accept. Accept .’”

From the outside, I can’t evaluate the merits of concerns raised about Lavender or Project Maven, and for all I know both systems work extremely well, making their operators not unquestioning approvers of robot decisions, but in fact simply vastly better human targeteers. Nonetheless, functional decisional displacement to AI remains theoretically possible, and it is a potential hazard that could have an effect in constraining effective escalation management by human leaders in a nuclear crisis.

That said, as I see it, the key question to ask about AI-based nuclear decision-support capabilities is not about their absolute but rather their relative value. From what I understand of the processes and procedures for U.S. presidential nuclear weapons decision-making in a crisis, in fact, it could actually be good to have more AI-facilitated decision-support tools in this area.

Very little is known publicly about the details of what decision-options are made available to the U.S. president in the immediate time-urgent press of a nuclear attack warning scenario, of course, and that’s surely for the best. Yet my impression is that while American planners have worked for years to improve the flexibility of the system and increase the range of nuclear use options available to the president in such circumstances, the diversity of the “menu” of pre-planned targeting packages that would be available to him in such a crisis is inherently quite limited. Moreover, the ability of the system to generate new possibilities in response to in-the-moment presidential questions and directions – e.g., his desire to spare certain targets while perhaps adding additional ones to the mix based upon his judgment about what circumstances actually warrant – would be unavoidably constrained if one only had a handful of minutes in which to make the call.

Compared to this status quo , therefore, it might well be that some kind of AI decision-support tool could actually help the president make decisions – and be able, at least in general terms, to evaluate the actual operational military and civilian collateral damage impact of bespoke alternative nuclear courses of action – with much more care, consideration, and nuance in a nuclear crisis than he can today. With such support, the president’s decisions might perhaps still be worse ones than if he had the help an army of experienced human advisors and technical advisors, and hours or days in which to make the call. But if you’re talking about a nuclear attack warning crisis, he’s probably not ever going to have either of those things – and well-designed AI decision-support might be a definite improvement.

In that sense, therefore, it may be that AI support to nuclear decision-making here could be quite valuable and stabilizing: aiding and facilitating human critical reasoning and moral judgment rather than displacing it, and in fact allowing more such reasoning and judgment than the system presently permits in a crisis. The impact of AI might thus be a very good thing in this particular part of the nuclear decision-making arena.

“Damage Limitation” Warfighting

Another potentially important – though much grimmer – way in which AI might be incorporated into nuclear weapons-related decision-making without the real-world leaders involved finding it to be more problematic than helpful, however, relates to weapon allocation and release decisions in the very specific and extreme circumstances of conducting a “damage limitation” campaign once a full-scale nuclear conflict has begun.

Most aspects of nuclear strategy revolve around issues of how to deter war in the first place, how to prevent or at least control escalation to nuclear use in a conventional conflict, and how to handle issues of “escalation management” in ways that keep any limited nuclear use that might occur from spiraling into a full-scale exchange. There is a subset of nuclear weapons thinking, however, that concerns itself with what to do in the event – hopefully extremely unlikely – that both deterrence and escalation management have failed, and all-out nuclear war has begun.

In those unhappy circumstances, “damage limitation” refers to the effort, in effect, to destroy as many of the enemy’s nuclear assets as possible, as quickly as possible, in order to prevent them from being used against you. It is not damage prevention , of course, because in such circumstances that is presumably impossible. Nevertheless, there is an undeniable logic in the idea that it is better to be hit by only some of an adversary’s nuclear arsenal than by all of it, and damage limitation strategies seek to make this “some” as small a number as possible.

My point with respect to AI integration flows from the extremity of this challenge, but let me first back up for a moment to explain my priors. I am not myself of the view it is always inappropriate to allow AI to make lethal decisions. As I outlined in a policy paper published when I was performing the duties of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security in 2020 , the key question here is contextual. We are already comfortable with permitting computers to make lethal-engagement decisions in certain narrowly defined situations, such as when a shipboard Close-In Weapons System (CIWS) is turned to “automatic” when the vessel is under assault from incoming enemy missiles. (Indeed, even an antique anti-tank landmine could be considered a crude form of lethal autonomous weapon: humans set the weight, vibration, and other parameters under which it is permitted to explode under the wheels of a vehicle, and then trust the mine, in effect, to make this “decision” for itself in the field.) The question thus is not autonomy per se , but when, under what circumstances, and within what pre-assigned parameters a machine is permitted to exercise such autonomy.

As will be discussed further below, it may very well be that AI tools are poorly suited to handle the more “human” aspects of nuclear decision-making that involve questions of deterrence and escalation management, where outcomes depend upon the interaction of opposing leaders minds , and outcomes are shaped not merely by reason and available information but also by hopes, fears, moral judgments, anxieties, ambitions, antipathies, affinities, and whole range of contextual assumptions about how the world works. For these sorts of issues, I suspect machine autonomy will perform quite badly for the foreseeable future.

Once one crosses over into the context of nuclear “damage limitation” strategy, however, such “human” variables are far less important, the main questions seem an essentially mechanical ones of how to locate, attack, and disable adversary nuclear capabilities as rapidly as possible, and the speed and effectiveness of that engagement cycle is essentially the soleperformance criterion. For nuclear decision-making in that context, it may be that – somewhat akin to turning the CIWS to “auto” when one its out in the middle of the ocean away from civilian targets and facing multiple inbound missile threats – there may well be some logic in fully autonomous AI nuclear warfighting. Taking such an approach would hardly be consistent with the November 2024 Biden-Xi statement, of course, but if the world were already burning, such fidelity might not be considered a high priority.

Conventional War, Escalation, and AI

Compared to automated nuclear trigger-pulling, however, I am more concerned about the potential effect upon nuclear escalation risks from the use of AI in conventional warfighting. And indeed, a targeting revolution seems already to be well underway in the conventional arena.

Even before the current AI boom, we were already well into an era of increasingly computer-facilitated “sensor-to-shooter” reconnaissance and strike planning, in which adversaries compete for advantage in combat by having the shortest “OODA loop” – that is, each trying, in John Boyd’s famous formulation, to be quicker than the other in observing their environment, orienting themselves within it, deciding what to do, and acting upon that decision. If you can cycle through the OODA loop faster than your opponent, the theory goes, you can generally outfight him, as you’ll be changing his operational environment to his disadvantage faster than he can react to it.

A key to warfighting success here is thus “accurate speed,” and it’s easy to imagine that AI tools could do a lot to further shorten warfighting OODA loops, at least within whatever physical parameters may unavoidably be set by factors such as weapon systems range and transit time (relative to geography) and munitions “magazine depth.” As one report by the Royal United Services Institute put it two years ago,

“[t]heoretically[,] the processing power of machine learning could empower analysts to make decisions with much higher accuracy, combining intelligence [from myriad sources very quickly] to provide a rigorous depiction of the potential target.”

To this end, AI-based targeting decision-support tools are being designed to “ accelerate the kill chain and make the process of killing progressively more autonomous ” by accomplishing data collection and analysis tasks at far greater speed and scale than ordinary human operators can – and, in principle, without the errors that human analysts can and sometimes do make as the result of fatigue, stress, or emotion.

In the context of conventional military operations, some of this this acceleration seems already to be happening. As noted earlier, Israel has built a machine-learning algorithm called “Lavender” that can quickly sort data to hunt for low-level militants . In the recent Gaza campaign, Lavender reportedly helped the IDF quickly amass a list of 37,000 human targets based on their ties to Hamas . The American “Project Maven” is also said to be “ built for speed ,” apparently permitting an operator to “ sign off on as many as 80 targets in an hour of work, versus 30 without it. ” This is greatly increasing the rapidity at which strike planning can be done. Time Magazine has quoted a former IDF legal advisor , for example, that whereas a decade ago “you needed a team of around 20 intelligence officers to work for around 250 days to gather something between 200 to 250 targets[,] … [t]oday, the AI will do that work in a week.”

But all that just has to do with picking targets. To the degree that armed forces also explore letting the machines play a greater role in deciding whether to shoot, in addition to merely what to shoot, the tempo of conventional warfighting is sure to accelerate still further.

Either way, however, there may be a potential nuclear escalation problem in connection with the fact that in conflicts that occur between nuclear-armed adversaries, the interests of conventional warfighting efficacy – the sort of thing that military AI would presumably be trained to maximize – may not always coincide with the interests of nuclear-related escalation management. This point is worth unpacking a bit.

In effect, leaders in a conflict involving two nuclear weapons states must play two slightly different but overlapping games at the same time. On the one hand, since they are in a conventional fight, they need to fight that fight, and do so as effectively as they can. But because these are also nuclear powers with the capability to incinerate each other – and perhaps a good deal of the rest of the world besides – their leaders simultaneously need to be playing a nuclear deterrence and escalation control game. The difficulty, however, is that these simultaneous games each have slightly different rules, and that some targets have considerable relevance in both games at the same time, but in ways that may be in tension with each other.

It’s not hard to imagine that an optimized “kill chain” for prosecuting a conventional war, for instance, might in some circumstances call for striking a range of enemy command-and-control targets the destruction of some of which might affect not only that country’s ability to control its regular forces but also its ability to control its nuclear ones. Though undertaken for purely conventional warfighting reasons and perhaps with every desire to avoid escalation across the threshold of nuclear weapons use, such attacks might be hugely escalatory, for they could create actual or perceived risks to the victim’s nuclear command-and-control capability, leading its leadership to feel “use or lose” incentives with respect to its nuclear arsenal – and perhaps even to conclude (falsely) that a nuclear assault is commencing.

All this could produce escalation that may have been entirely unintended by, or even come as a surprise to, the attacking power. (The same could be said of strikes on dual-capable missile systems or aircraft – that is, those capable of carrying either nuclear payloads or conventional ones – and perhaps on other targets, such as key leadership nodes.) This is something of an inherent danger in any high-intensity fight between nuclear states, I would imagine, but widespread incorporation of AI into conventional warfighting could increase these risks by making it harder for human leaders to monitor the evolution of their own battle plans and to interpose some kind of check upon behaviors that – however useful they might be in conventional terms alone – could create unwanted nuclear escalatory pressures.

It may be that, as I suggested earlier, battlefield efficacy in a high-OPTEMPO conventional fight involving a vast array of different assets is something that AI would indeed be quite good at optimizing. That feels to me like a quasi-“mechanical” set of calculations that could scale and automate quite well, and hence to some extent be well-suited to some degree of AI-mechanical decisional outsourcing.

By comparison, however, deterring an adversary from aggression and controlling nuclear escalation risk in crisis or wartime feels like a much more “human” sort of game – one involving, among many other variables, the psychology and emotions of leaders on both sides, the temperament and political dynamics of politicians and publics, and deep issues of what values two competing governments and peoples feel are in play in the first place. (There may also an alchemy of timing involved here, too, insofar as even strikes that have identical operational military effect in conventional terms could have very different results in affecting nuclear-relevant perceptions of the adversary power depending upon when in a conflict they are administered.) It is thus far from obvious to me that deterrence and escalation management are “automatable” at all, even with really good AI, and it’s certainly not clear how one could train AI to optimize for success in both the mechanical and the human/perceptual arenas at the same time.

For these reasons, my own thinking is that the potential nuclear-related risks that could be presented by the use of AI in the military context are potentially much greater at the nexus between conventional warfighting and nuclear deterrence and escalation management than they are within the specific domain of nuclear command-and-control itself. One key question for inquiry is thus how movement is likely to occur “up” and “down” the so-called “escalation ladder” of conflict in situations where AI-based decision-making is introduced into more traditional approaches to warfighting – and whether (or to what degree) this could change what would otherwise occur when unaided humans interact with each other in a conflict situation.

Strategists have been theorizing about how adversaries might interact moving up and down such escalation ladders for years, of course. The seminal U.S. nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, for instance, articulated a 16-step ladder, beginning with a mere “subcrisis disagreement” between two potential adversaries and progressively increasing in severity through “rungs” such as “crisis,” “show of force,” “controlled local war,” and “some kind of ‘all-out’ war.” (He also elaborated this into a remarkable 44-step escalation ladder that included an almost bewildering variety of gradations, including such ladder rungs as “‘peaceful’ worldwide embargo,” “demonstration attack on zone of interior,” “slow-motion counterforce war,” “countervalue salvo,” and even “spasm or insensate war.”)[1]

As a RAND Corporation report observed in 1984 , Kahn “did not require that his ladders be uniquely correct,” of course. He was instead “largely concerned with providing a structure within which to do more nearly rigorous thinking about the unthinkable.” The question for us, therefore, is about whether or how the introduction of AI could change dynamics of interaction that have hitherto been conceived as being exclusively ones between counterpoised human decision-makers.

Escalation ladders have occupied the attention of strategists for many years precisely because strategy – including especially nuclear strategy – has been so centrally and necessarily concerned not with avoiding all escalation risk but rather with manipulating it safely and effectively. Deterrence, after all, requires deliberately creating some degree of risk for the adversary, including the risk of escalation to absolute catastrophe, in order to persuade him that it is not in his interest to start a war, or to take the next step “up” the escalation ladder within one . It requires, in effect, finding a sort of “Goldilocks Point” between creating enough risk to deter what one wishes to deter, on the one hand, and creating so much that things spiral out of control. ( Zero escalation risk, it also follows, means something very much like “no deterrence.”) Questions of how to handle the challenges of “escalation management” – both leading up to war and within a conflict itself – are thus critical to national security policy, to questions of deterrence, and to how (or to what degree) one might hope to prevent escalation into a devastating nuclear exchange.

It is perhaps noteworthy, therefore, that some observers have suggested that the widespread introduction of autonomous weapons systems could make decisions to go to war – a war in which escalation to nuclear levels might occur – more likely. A recent article in Time , for instance, speculates that conventional military capabilities based upon autonomous systems might have a greater potential to lead to warmaking decisions than where the participants could only call upon human soldiers, sailors, and airmen:

“… [I]if the ability to wage war remotely and autonomously leads to minimal human toll, that in itself may increase risk tolerance, meaning more operations that have higher escalation potential. For instance, it would be a gutsy move for a conventional U.S. Navy vessel to attempt to break any Chinese blockade of self-ruling Taiwan. Sending an unmanned submersible, however, feels less confrontational – as would a People’s Liberation Army decision to sink it. Yet those ostensibly lower-risk scenarios may in fact accelerate an escalatory spiral toward full-blown conflict. If a nation can wage war without the political cost of bringing home flag-draped coffins, will it be more likely to engage in unnecessary conflicts?”

Since any conflict between nuclear-armed states has at least some potential to escalate into the nuclear arena, such dynamics of conflict initiation could certainly also have potential nuclear implications.

Another question, which I have noted above in my comments about the nexus between conventional warfighting and nuclear war, is whether the introduction of AI systems into such equations could lead one adversary to move more quickly into nuclear portions of the escalation ladder, in the eyes of its opponent, than had in fact been intended or understood. How high-speed AI-facilitated decision-making in the conventional arena – let alone some degree of fully automated decision-making – is likely to interact in the real world with more traditional human decision-making, and how this admixture may affect movement up or down some hypothesized escalation ladder, is a subject that presumably needs more study, including through game-theoretical simulations.

And here, it needs to be stressed that despite occasional pretenses to the contrary such as China’s always but nowadays increasingly non-credible “no first use” (NFU) policy, questions about AI’s impact upon conventional-to-nuclear escalation are salient for all three of the largest nuclear weapons states. Each in their own way, Washington, Moscow, and Beijing all clearly contemplate circumstances in which sufficiently adverse circumstances even of purely non -nuclear attack could lead them to turn to nuclear weaponry.

This is least surprising, perhaps, for the United States, because during the Cold War NATO made it very clear – and indeed made it central to allied deterrence doctrine – that it might use nuclear weapons if faced with an otherwise overwhelming conventional attack by Warsaw Pact forces on the Central Front in Europe. More recently, U.S. officials also made it clear in both the 2010 and 2018 Nuclear Posture Reviews that there were circumstances in which a sufficiently grave non-nuclear attack – what the latter document called a “ significant non-nuclear strategic attack ” – might result in an American nuclear response.

Russia, too, has made such a possibility central to its nuclear planning. In guidance issued in 2024 by President Putin , for instance, it was explicitly stated that Russia “reserves the right to employ nuclear weapons” in response to an act of “aggression … with the employment of conventional weapons” which created “a critical threat” to the country’s sovereignty or territorial integrity. And even China, virtue-signaling NFU posturings aside, revealed in guidance issued to its strategic missile forces in 2004 that “nuclear coercion” by China might be appropriate when “a strong enemy only using conventional attacks” creates “enormous threats to us,” such as “[w]hen conventional war continuously escalates and the strategic situation is extremely disadvantageous to us.”

With all three powers thus clearly able to imagine circumstances in which some kind of nuclear response might be appropriate in response to non-nuclear attacks by others – and with all three now also increasingly incorporating AI into their own non-nuclear warfighting as they stare uneasily at each other – it is clearly important for us to consider the potential impact of such AI integration upon potential nuclear escalation.

AI and Strategic Stability

Threats to Second-Strike Forces?

Another question related to the possible impact of AI on nuclear weapons issues relates to whether or not AI-facilitated data-aggregation and pattern recognition could help overcome traditional obstacles to detecting and targeting hitherto survivable second-strike nuclear forces. That AI could help lead to dramatic advances in such engagement is certainly possible, though whose nuclear forces might most stand to gain from such advances is less clear.

From Washington’s perspective, the danger is that AI-related advances in data-collection and analysis could finally help our adversaries crack the nut of submarine survivability. For decades, the United States has invested huge sums and enormous amounts of effort in ensuring that it possesses survivable second-strike nuclear forces in the form of ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) capable of quietly disappearing into the “deep blue” of clandestine mid-ocean deployments, where their acoustic stealth protects them from adversary detection or attack. The Soviets tried hard to overcome U.S. advantages here, but they were thankfully never able to figure out how to detect, track, and engage American SSBNs on deterrence deployment. (London and Paris have also benefited from this situation, for their deterrence postures both rely heavily – and the British now exclusively – upon SSBNs.) Nor have Russia or China yet solved this sub-hunting problem today, leaving U.S. retaliatory capabilities secure.

Advances in AI, however, could perhaps change this, and this possibility may excite strategic planners in Moscow and Beijing. Were advances to “make the sea transparent,” as the saying goes, thus facilitating targeting of deployed SSBNs, this would clearly represent an enormous problem for the United States and its allies. In this respect, therefore, AI-facilitated advances in detection and tracking in the ocean depths could be deeply destabilizing by providing strategic advantages for Russia and China. The Russians and the Chinese do not themselves depend so much upon “deep blue” concealment, preferring to protect their own SSBNs not far out at sea alone, but rather within reasonably well-defined underwater “bastion” sanctuaries close to their home territory, patrolling within concentric circles of air and naval assets whose job it is to prevent U.S. fast-attack submarines (SSNs) and other potential sub-hunting assets from intrusion.

I do not mean to suggest that “making the seas transparent” would exclusively harm the Western powers, however. In fact, those very same Russian and Chinese SSBN “bastions” might well become just as transparent as the deep oceans – and perhaps do so in some respects more quickly, since the expanses of undersea space that would have to be searched for submarines would likely be much less than would need to be surveyed in order to find Western vessels. In these respects, Russian and Chinese submarines might have as much to lose as U.S. ones do from an AI-facilitated revolution in antisubmarine ISR.

AI-facilitated strategic Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) might present a threat to America’s adversaries in other ways as well. Both Russia and China rely heavily in their own nuclear postures – and vastly more than the Americans – upon mobile, land-based missile forces that are difficult to locate and track by virtue of their cross-country mobility and their ability to shelter at various locations in networks of caves, tunnels, or revetments. Ever since the infamous “SCUD-hunting” problems U.S. forces encountered with Iraqi missiles in the Gulf War of 1991, it has been clear that finding deployed missies on their mobile Transporter-Erector-Launcer (TEL) units can be extremely challenging. And both Russia and China have invested heavily in such missiles as part of their strategic deterrent.

All in all, to whom the “net” advantage (or disadvantage) would belong is not obvious. This would also depend upon additional factors, such as the reliability and speed by which each party could actually sink the other side’s boats. (“Kill-chains” have “links” beyond simply reconnaissance, after all, and mere detection absent the capacity also effectively to engage would be much less destabilizing.)

Threats to Nuclear Command and Control

Another way in which AI-facilitated warfare might affect strategic stability relates to its potential – possibly through activity in cyberspace, where AI bots are proving themselves increasingly adept – to enable effective attacks upon nation’s Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) architectures. And in fact, while the specific utility of AI tools in this respect may be a new factor, cyber-facilitated NC3 attack – that is, deliberate degradation rather than the inadvertent sort I discussed earlier in the context of conventional-to-nuclear escalation – may become easier.

Indeed, “NC3 warfare” seems to have been developed as a possible wartime option even before the current age of AI. It is not well known, but for the last several years declassified information has been available making clear that U.S. planners have contemplated the possibility of using cyber-facilitated attacks to impede the potential wartime effectiveness of adversary NC3, in extremis , ever since the early 1980s. As I recounted in remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 2024 based upon unclassified doctoral dissertation research at George Mason University by a colleague of mine , the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) created a special unit in 1982-83 that was dedicated, among other things, to exploring how jamming and signals injection into Soviet communications networks could be weaponized against Moscow’s NC3 systems as part of an overall strategy against deployed Soviet SSBNs.

According to one report, by the mid-1980s, U.S. scientists were developing ways to reliably deny access to and disrupt Soviet communications networks and nuclear weapons systems in the event of armed conflict.[2] As later explained by one of its participants, some of this work envisioned what was essentially cyber-facilitated NC3 attack:

“… [W]e realized we were looking at an automated system that was meant to keep the Soviet leadership in control of their forces – basically it was an early digital system, a Soviet style concept of a network. We understood that we had an opportunity to effect [sic] the network and affect confidence in the network for deterrence purposes ….”[3]

These preparations for command-and-control warfare, moreover, were coupled with the more openly signaled posture of a new “Maritime Strategy,” pursuant to which the U.S. Navy prepared itself for possible wartime operations against Soviet SSBNs in their bastions and for launching nuclear strikes against the USSR from carrier battlegroups in those northerly seas.[4]

It would have been an inherently provocative and potentially escalatory step actually to take those steps, of course, but U.S. officials believed that if full-scale war had broken out with the USSR, there might be little alternative but to launch such attacks. (Signaling something of our ability to do so with the naval posturings of the Maritime Strategy, it was felt, might also contribute to deterring the Soviets from launching a war in the first place, by holding at risk key elements of what the Kremlin felt it would need to preserve in order to have any hope of winning such a conflict.) As on participant in these U.S. efforts put it later, it was felt that “we cannot afford not to do this if war broke out one day.”[5] It thus seems quite clear that in the peak years of late-Cold War strategic competition, if deterrence had failed and World War III had indeed begun, the United States was prepared for an unstinting damage limitation campaign against Soviet strategic nuclear assets.

All of that being now a full four decades or more ago, one can only assume that cyber-facilitated NC3 attack probably remains a possibility today – and that AI tools could perhaps now make such campaigns even more viable than before. This could have important implications for strategic stability and nuclear escalation. Powers with such AI-augmented “NC3-defeat” capabilities, for instance, might be tempted to use them in a crisis, to uncertain but potentially destabilizing effect. Since adversary powers would presumably also use AI in an attempt to detect such AI-facilitated NC3 attacks, moreover, strategic stability could depend in worrying ways upon the effectiveness and error rates of such technologies in an offense-versus-defense arms race. Such a nuclear balance would surely feel highly fraught, for while false positives – i.e. , an incorrect assessment that one’s adversary has begun attacking one’s NC3 – could lead to extreme and escalatory “use or lose” nuclear responses, false negatives could result in one’s strategic defeat.

Disinformation and Decisional Context?

Though the topic is well beyond detailed treatment here, AI-facilitated disinformation might also be used to shape nuclear crisis bargaining and escalation (or de-escalation) decisions by an adversary’s national leaders, especially but not exclusively those in the Western democracies. Leaders make their decisions, after all, in a broader context made up of the innumerable different facets of what they perceive to be happening in the world and the factors bearing upon how they interpret its meaning. If AI allows both for disinformation campaigns to be undertaken at machine speed and scale and permits them to be “tailored” to particular targeted leaders’ specific personal political, emotional, or psychological “hot buttons,” this could certainly have an impact upon nuclear decision-making.

AI Counterproliferation

Finally, it is worth saying a quick word about the potential implications of strategically-relevant AI on counterproliferation . As AI tools become increasingly important in the conduct of (and preparation for) warfare, it seems to me all but inevitable that strategic competition between rival powers will also accelerate in “AI defeat” capabilities, with each competitor feeling powerful incentives to impede the other side’s pursuit or implementation of AI. In other words, strategic competition in AI will likely come to involve elements of nonproliferation and counterproliferation policy, including not just efforts to deny critical inputs to adversary AI development, but perhaps even efforts to sabotage competitors’ AI programs through means such as data poisoning, manipulative or destructive cyberattacks, or influence operations that erode a possessors’ faith in the integrity of its AI tools.

Data poisoning attacks on AI models have already been reported in the form of Russian insertions of corrupted or fabricated information into Wikipedia pages and the data pools used for training Western AI models in order to rewrite the history of Vladimir Putin’s war of annexation in Ukraine. Such data injections are apparently intended to support broader Kremlin influence operations by tricking the large language models (LLMs) of popular AI chatbots into telling Western users lies the Russian government wishes them to believe about the war.

It seems increasingly to be felt that “ data poisoning operations against adversary AI systems” can help a country achieve “a decisive asymmetric advantage in future conflicts .” And AI systems are sure to become greater targets for covert sabotage in direct proportion to the degree that they continue to help countries achieve better and better warfighting capabilities.

This is a possibility to which Craig Wiener and I have already drawn special attention in the extreme case of potential future Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) capabilities We argued recently in Missouri State University’s journal Defense & Strategic Studies Online for an approach we labeled “Persistent Offensive Preclusion of Adversary AI” (POPAAI) – or “PopEye.” This would represent, we suggested, “a new, forward- leaning approach to U.S. competitive strategy in the ASI arena focused upon counterproliferation” aimed at

“intervening actively to interdict problematic [ASI] proliferation-facilitating transactions or transfers that are already underway, and perhaps even to roll back whatever progress would-be proliferators have already made.”

We contended in that article that the potential dangers resulting from adversary possession of superintelligent AI made such an aggressive approach a strategic necessity, but at least some of the same logic could still apply even to adversary AI tools well below the level of AGI or ASI. All in all, I would thus be surprised if we were not now entering a new arena of sparring in AI counterproliferation .

Conclusion

The advent of military AI is still a new enough phenomenon that in many respects we can only really speculate about the full range of its future implications. Nevertheless, I hope these musings will provide useful food for thought, and that they can perhaps serve as a jumping-off point for further inquiry.

-- Christopher Ford

Notes

[1] Kahn’s lists derive most famously from Herman Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (Prager, 1965). They can be found more conveniently, however, in Paul K. Davis & Peter J.E. Stan, “Concepts and Models of Escalation” (RAND Corporation, 1984), 5-6, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2007/R3235.pdf .

[2] Nicole Perlroth, This is How they Tell Me the world Ends: The Cyber-Weapons Arms Race (Bloomsbury, 2021), 82.

[3] Craig J. Wiener, “Penetrate, Exploit, Disrupt, Destroy: The Rise of Computer Network Operations as a Major Military Innovation,” dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs, George Mason University (October 26, 2016), t 83 & 84 (quoting Richard L. Haver, in interview by Craig J. Wiener (December 11, 2015)).

[4] See, e.g., Christopher Ford & David Rosenberg, The Admirals’ Advantage: U.S. Navy Operational Intelligence in World War II and the Cold War (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2005), 77-108.

[5] Ibid (emphasis added).

US Claims of Secret Nuclear Testing & Implications

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:36:57 GMT

Below is the essay of Dr. Ford's that INHR published on March 12, 2026. The essay can be found on the INHR website here, or read the text below.

Recent comments by U.S. Government officials about secret Chinese nuclear testing have led to much speculation and interest. On February 6, 2026, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Tom DiNanno revealed to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that

“China has conducted nuclear explosive tests, including preparing for tests with designated yields in the hundreds of tons. The [People’s Liberation Army] sought to conceal testing by obfuscating the nuclear explosions because it recognized these tests violate test ban commitments. 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.”

On February 17, Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control and Nonproliferation Christopher Yeaw clarified further that the event in question occurred “right near” China’s nuclear facility at Lop Nur in Xinjiang, and that it produced a seismic signal of magnitude 2.76 that was captured by a monitoring station in Kazakhstan. The specific yield of the test, Yeaw noted, was unclear, though he did say that the data suggested that it was “a 10 tons nuclear explosion – or 5 tons conventional equivalent.” (That 10-ton figure, Yeaw made clear, was calculated on the basis that the explosion was “fully coupled in hard rock” – which, as I’ll explain further below, it would not have been if it were a larger explosion that had been decoupled.) Yeaw also echoed DiNanno’s comment that China had been “preparing designated tests of hundreds of tons” in yield.

How should the reader evaluate these claims? And what are the implications of these U.S. conclusions?

Evaluating the U.S. Claims

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) initially put out a statement that its monitoring system “did not detect any event consistent with the characteristics of a nuclear weapon test explosion at that time.” Nonetheless, that same statement also noted that the CTBTO’s system is only “capable of detecting nuclear test explosions with a yield equivalent to or greater than approximately 500 tonnes of TNT,” so it remains quite possible that the CTBTO would have missed an event of the limited size indicated by the U.S. revelations. And indeed it was subsequently reported that the CTBTO had in fact picked up “two very small seismic events, 12 seconds apart,” in the time period described by Yeaw, though these signals were too small to “assess the cause of these events with confidence.” So seismic data alone doesn’t seem to give us a lot of clarity.

Bear in mind, however, that the U.S. officials are clearly not relying just on seismic data. Recall, for instance, that both DiNanno and Yeaw noted that the Americans knew beforehand that China was “preparing” for tests of up to “hundreds of tons” of explosive yield – and note also that DiNanno used the term “tests” in the plural, rather than talking exclusively about a single test. This assessment therefore obviously draws upon intelligence information, which we shouldn’t be surprised they haven’t revealed to the public.

So what should we then, as observers on the outside, make of this? For my part, it’s worth noting that I have some degree of experience with these issues. Indeed, in my last period of government service I sat in the chair now occupied by DiNanno – at which point he reported to me – and I also served, like Yeaw does today, as the assistant secretary in charge of nonproliferation issues. Back in the George W. Bush Administration, moreover, I was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in charge of assessing arms control and nonproliferation compliance – a point at which Yeaw served as director of my Nuclear Affairs Office – and during the Clinton Administration I was a U.S. Senate staffer during the Senate’s famous vote to reject the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in October 1999 . I was also an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve from 1994 until 2011.

Drawing upon this background, I find the U.S. claims highly credible.

To being with, it’s no secret that the “decoupling” DiNanno mentioned is a highly viable way to conceal a nuclear explosive test. This has been known for many years, and possible cheating on the CTBT through such decoupling techniques was in fact one of our major concerns during the Senate’s 1999 debates over CTBT.

As recounted in a 2002 study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), without special concealment techniques, “nuclear explosions with a yield of 1 kiloton (kt) or more can be detected and identified with high confidence in all environments” – and in hard rock in many parts of the world, down even to something like a tenth of a kiloton ( i.e. , 100 tons) of explosive yield. (Indeed, in some highly-studied areas such as the Russian nuclear test site at Novaya Zemlya, this detection threshold was said to be even lower: down to “0.01 kt (10 tons) or less.”)

That’s actually pretty good. But the report also noted that there exist “evasion scenarios that need to be taken seriously.” Among these is “cavity-decoupling” – that is, conducting a test in the middle of an otherwise empty chamber underground in order to reduce the extent to which the explosion transmits shock to the surrounding earth in ways that can be picked up elsewhere as a seismic signal. As the National Academy further explained in a 2012 report that basically reaffirmed its prior conclusions , a “fully decoupled” explosion would still produce some seismic waves in the Earth’s crust, but “most of the energy” would go into “increasing the gas pressure in the cavity, thereby reducing the apparent yield of the original explosion.”

Another way help to reduce a test’s seismic signature might be to couple decoupling, as it were, with the use of a large steel containment vessel in which the test explosion would initially occur. As the Arms Control Association has reported , it has been known for years that the Soviet Union used to conduct some nuclear-weapons-related explosive experiments “in large ‘Kolba’ vessels designed to contain explosions with total energy yields (chemical explosive plus fission) up to 50 kilograms of TNT” without crossing the CTBT’s detection threshold.

I’m pretty sure there’s no way to build a Kolba strong enough to contain an explosion of the size DiNanno and Yeaw have been talking about in connection with secret Chinese testing. One should remember, in this respect, that back in 1945 the United States built a colossal, 25-foot-long, 214-ton steel vessel nicknamed “J umbo ,” which it was initially hoped might contain the chemical explosive power of the Manhattan Project’s “ Gadget ” implosion device in the event that the “ Trinity” test at Alamogordo, New Mexico , failed to produce nuclear fission yield. (As it turned out, Jumbo was never actually used.) Yet though Jumbo was apparently designed to contain a force of 50,000 pounds per square inch, even it probably would have fragmented from explosive yields of between 100 and 300 tons .

That said, I imagine using a large Kolba-type container might help at least reduce the seismic signature produced by a fully decoupled test, because it would force the explosive yield to break out of the steel container first and only then to radiate outward through the excavated cavity to transmit energy to the surrounding earth. You surely couldn’t contain an explosion of “hundreds of tons,” but it stands to reason that a massive vessel could nonetheless make a decoupled test even stealthier.

So how much difference might decoupling make? Well, the 2002 NAS report suggests it’s possible to achieve a “signal-reduction factor” of 70 for small tests. This has apparently been demonstrated in at least one historical test of around 0.4 kilotons – that is, about 400 tons. (It’s not clear whether that old example used a Kolba-type containment vessel, but if not, the effective signal reduction available to Chinese technicians today could perhaps be even greater.)

Ominously, the “hundreds of tons” figure cited recently by U.S. authorities as being the size of the tests China was preparing to conduct would seem to fall easily into this window of such “decouplable” testing.

U.S. Assessments, 2019-20

It’s also worth remembering that this is not the first time the United States has raised the issue of secret Chinese nuclear testing. In fact, this is a subject we took some pains to raise – and draw attention to – in the First Trump Administration.

In May 2019, Lieutenant General Robert Ashley, the head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), announced at a Hudson Institute event with Hudson’s Rebeccah Heinrichs that

“China continues to use explosive containment chambers at its nuclear test site, and China[‘s] leaders previously joined Russia in watering down the language of the P5 statement that would have affirmed a uniform understanding of zero-yield testing.”

In a further statement issued on June 13, 2019, DIA said that China’s nuclear activities raised “questions about those activities in relation to the ‘zero yield’ nuclear weapons testing moratorium adhered to by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France” and were “inconsistent with the commitments undertaken by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.”

In the First Trump Administration, we followed up these revelations in our official 2020 report at the State Department on Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments – a report, by the way, that Tom DiNanno and I were both involved in preparing. There, our formal compliance finding about China declared that

“China maintained a high level of activity at its Lop Nur nuclear weapons test site throughout 2019. China’s possible preparation to operate its Lop Nur test site year-round, its use of explosive containment chambers, extensive excavation activities at Lop Nur, and lack of transparency on its nuclear testing activities – which has included frequently blocking the flow of data from its International Monitoring System (IMS) stations to the International Data Center operated by the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization – raise concerns regarding its adherence to the ‘zero yield’ standard adhered to by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in their respective nuclear weapons testing moratoria.”

(You’ll also note, by the way, that this language – as well as Ashley’s earlier comments – include reference to “explosive containment chambers” – that is, “Kolbas.”)

Those sentences were all we had permission to say about China at the time. But remember that this was a report we published in June 2020 – which meant that it was drafted and worked through the painful U.S. interagency clearance process before the June 22, 2020, Chinese test described by DiNanno and Yeaw. Even then, however, we did flag at that point that “[a]dditional information” was provided at a “higher classification” level in our classified Annex to the report. I can’t tell you what was in that Annex about this Chinese nuclear testing question, of course, but we did make quite clear that we did have more information than we could publicly disclose at the time.

As you can see, therefore, some of the Chinese nuclear testing backstory has been available for several years, for anyone who cared to pay attention to it. This adds credibility to the current U.S. accounts.

The Implications

So what are the implications of these revelations about secret, yield-producing Chinese nuclear weapons tests? Most obviously, this is just another in a series of remarkable revelations – including the vast proliferation of Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silos in the deserts of Xinjiang and the expansion of nuclear weapons “pit” production at Pingtong – about the extraordinary pace of Beijing’s provocative and destabilizing nuclear weapons buildup.

That buildup, in fact, seems well on track to give China strategic parity in terms of operationally deployed strategic warheads with both the United States and Russia by 2035 , unless one or both of those powers expand their forces beyond their current size. Under the New START agreement of 2010 , which recently expired, Washington and Moscow were limited to 1,550 such warheads. Current U.S. projections put China at about 1,500 by 2035. (Hence strategic parity, although both the Russians and Americans would likely still have larger a larger overall, factoring in non-deployed warheads.)

But another implication of these Chinese developments relates to U.S. nuclear testing. Remember that President Trump declared in October 2025 that in light of what our strategic adversaries have been doing, the United States would resume testing on an “equal basis” with Russia and China. “Because of other countries’ testing programs,” Trump said, “I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”

I should stress that this “equal basis” phrasing doesn’t seem to suggest any U.S. return to full-scale nuclear weapons tests, though former Trump National Security Advisor Robert O’Brein publicly urged this back in July 2024 . Nevertheless, it does suggest that we will now be willing to engage in small, yield-producing tests akin to those we have assessed that China – and indeed Russia as well, as we made clear back in 2019 and 2020 – has been doing.

For me, this is an especially interesting result, for I’ve actually been suggesting just such an approach for years – including suggesting such a thing to my State Department superiors back when we first publicly surfaced the issue of clandestine Russian tests, and our “concerns” about possible Chinese ones, six or seven years ago. More recently, I’ve even suggested this publicly, explicitly recommending in a roundtable discussion at the National Defense University in late 2024 that in the next U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, the United States

“modify its current ‘zero-yield’ testing policy in order to permit small-scale yield-producing tests akin to those U.S. officials believe Russia and perhaps China to have conducted.”

Why? Well, as I subsequently explained to the European Leadership Network in December 2024,

“…[f]rom a technical perspective, there may be useful things to be learned even from extremely small yield-producing tests, but while we ourselves have foregone learning such things for decades, our adversaries apparently have not.”

The alternative to doing such tests ourselves – as I put it in a LinkedIn post last month – is “unilaterally holding ourselves back while our nuclear adversaries advance.” Accordingly, though the issue is likely to be much debated in U.S. policy circles, I am myself supportive of President Trump’s approach on this issue:

“I wish nobody was testing at all — and perhaps we can get back to that world eventually — but I don’t want us to be sitting on our hands while our adversaries use such tests to improve their weapons. The liberty and security of too many people — in the United States as well as in many other countries — depends on the credibility of our nuclear deterrent to just give Moscow and Beijing a free pass on this.”

National security policy doesn’t have the luxury of dealing with the world as one wishes it were; we have to deal with the world we have. And in that world – the real one – it would appear that the United States is going to be getting into the business of doing small-scale yield-producing tests, at least until our adversaries convince us that they’ve stopped. I wish things were otherwise, but under the circumstances, I would say the U.S. approach makes sense.

-- Christopher Ford

Negotiating Nuclear Security: A View from the First Trump Administration

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 23:06:42 GMT

The March-April 2026 edition of the Foreign Service Journal published Dr. Ford's article entitled "Negotiating Nuclear Security: A View from the First Trump Administration." You can find the article online by clicking here .

U.S. Claims of Secret Nuclear Testing & Implications

How should the reader evaluate these claims? And what are the implications of these U.S. conclusions?

Evaluating the U.S. Claims

Bear in mind, however, that the U.S. officials are clearly not relying just on seismic data. Recall, for instance, that both DiNanno and Yeaw noted that the Americans knew beforehand that China was “preparing” for tests of up to “hundreds of tons” of explosive yield – and note also that DiNanno used the term “tests” in the plural, rather than talking exclusively about a single test. This assessment therefore obviously draws upon intelligence information, which we shouldn’t be surprised they haven’t revealed to the public.

Drawing upon this background, I find the U.S. claims highly credible.

I’m pretty sure there’s no way to build a Kolba strong enough to contain an explosion of the size DiNanno and Yeaw have been talking about in connection with secret Chinese testing. One should remember, in this respect, that back in 1945 the United States built a colossal, 25-foot-long, 214-ton steel vessel nicknamed “ Jumbo ,” which it was initially hoped might contain the chemical explosive power of the Manhattan Project’s “ Gadget ” implosion device in the event that the “Trinity” test at Alamogordo , New Mexico, failed to produce nuclear fission yield. (As it turned out, Jumbo was never actually used.) Yet though Jumbo was apparently designed to contain a force of 50,000 pounds per square inch, even it probably would have fragmented from explosive yields of between 100 and 300 tons .

That said, I imagine using a large Kolba-type container might help at least reducethe seismic signature produced by a fully decoupled test, because it would force the explosive yield to break out of the steel container first and only then to radiate outward through the excavated cavity to transmit energy to the surrounding earth. You surely couldn’t contain an explosion of “hundreds of tons,” but it stands to reason that a massive vessel could nonetheless make a decoupled test even stealthier.

U.S. Assessments, 2019-20

In May 2019, Lieutenant General Robert Ashley, the head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), announced at a Hudson Institute event with Hudson’s Rebeccah Heinrichs that

(You’ll also note, by the way, that this language – as well as Ashley’s earlier comments – include reference to “explosive containment chambers” – that is, “Kolbas.”)

The Implications

“modify its current ‘zero-yield’ testing policy in order to permit small-scale yield-producing tests akin to those U.S. officials believe Russia and perhaps China to have conducted.”

Why? Well, as I subsequently explained to the European Leadership Network in December 2024 ,

-- Christopher Ford

Marxing America Great Again: Marxist Discourse in Right-Wing Populism and the Future of Geopolitics

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:10:49 GMT

Dr. Ford's article entitled " Marxing America Great Again: Marxist Discourse in Right-Wing Populism and the Future of Geopolitics " was published in Defense & Strategic Studies Online (DASSO), vol. 2, no. 2 (Winter 2026). You can find the whole issue on the DASSO website here , or use the button below to download a PDF of Dr. Ford's piece. (Also, the home page for DASSO can be found here .)

A Time of Strategic Flux in the Middle East: Possible Implications for Proliferation

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:53:04 GMT

Below is an lightly edited version of the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks on February 4, 2026, at the conference on "Regional Security and Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East" sponsored by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Prague, Czech Republic.

Thank you for giving me the chance to participate in this workshop here in beautiful Prague.

Having in my last role in the U.S. Government served for three years as Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation – and having spent more than a year of that time performing the duties of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security – I’d like to talk specifically about nuclear weapons proliferation issues in the Middle East.

These are only my personal views, of course, and they don’t necessarily represent those of anyone else. Nevertheless, it’s certainly the case that the current period of strategic flux in in the Middle East could have dramatic implications, andthere’s no way to start but to note that I quite agree that there is huge uncertainty surrounding the implications of recent events in the region. And there’s more uncertainty regarding regional proliferation risks right now, I’d say, than at any other time in many years.

Nonproliferation as Strategic Calculus

Times of strategic change inherently raise questions about the degree to which leaders will continue to find inherited certainties and long-established approaches – including to nonproliferation questions – to be adequate to their present security needs. For most countries, avoiding the further spread of nuclear weapons has been one of the cardinal priorities and policy objectives of the modern era for a long time, both in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Precisely because nonproliferation is a question of national security policy rather than an imperative of deontological ethics, however – that is, because real-world leaders are obliged as stewards of their countries’ security interests to weigh costs, benefits, and risks against each other and make decisions in a world in which the “perfect” answer is seldom available and they must often choose between varying degrees of unwanted alternatives – shifts in the security environment may sometimes indeed drive significant reassessments of policy approach.

It is also the case that because of the complexity of that environment and the difficulty of reaching inarguable conclusions about it, interpretations about what the situation calls for can vary significantly, not merely between the leaders of differently-situated countries but also even between i individual leaders in one country even when they face the same set of facts. There is thus nothing simple about predicting where things are going in a complex security environment in which both the “facts on the ground” and the “butts in the seats” are changing.

So as my comments today – more as a scholar’s contribution than merely than a participant’s advocacy piece – let me mention three sets of changes that it seems to me will likely affect proliferation risks and feed into the broader questions and uncertainties of peace and security in the region – specifically, with respect to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States itself.

The Iranian Situation

The first set of issues concerns Iran , its regional situation, and the status of the uranium enrichment program Tehran began years ago as part of its effort to develop nuclear weapons:

Just three years ago or so, Iran could boast of leading what it described as an “ Axis of Resistance ” stretching all the way from the tip of Arabian Peninsula across Iran itself and on to the Mediterranean: a network of allies and proxies that included the Houthis, the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Lebanese terrorists of Hezbollah, and the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas.

Today, however, with the fall of Assad’s murderous dictatorship, Israel’s deft mauling of Hezbollah, and the Israeli invasion and occupation of Gaza in response to the genocidal Hamas attack upon Israel in October 2023, things look very different. The collapse of the “Axis” is a huge shift that robs Iran of enormous strategic depth and weakens its regional power base. It also deprives Tehran of what many observers long felt was the “deterrent effect” of Hezbollah’s enormous rocket arsenal on Israel’s northern border – a force that it was presumed would protect Iran from direct Israeli attack, lest moves against Tehran confront Israel’s population with a rain of fire from southern Lebanon.

(Nor, it has been astutely pointed out to me, did Iran’s status as a “virtual” nuclear weapons possessor provide much “deterrence” agasint Israeli or American attack. This could be quite important, teaching Iran – and perhaps others – that a “hovering on the brink of having a weapon” status actually doesn’t provide the security benefit some might have expected.)

As for Iran’s nuclear program, after President Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal in 2018, Iran went on to build an increasingly formidable fissile material production capacity and stockpile of highly-enriched uranium – just as the JCPOA would so lamentably and foolishly have permitted, but now (thanks to the U.S. withdrawal) earlier than the JCPOA would have allowed – thus dangerously positioning itself as a so-called “virtual” nuclear weapons possessor, merely a quick sprint away from weaponization.

Today, however, that nuclear program has been to some important extent degraded, first by Israeli attacks (including the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists) and then by the “ Operation Midnight Hammer ” U.S. cruise missile attack on a nuclear facility at Isfahan and bunker-busting strikes against underground centrifuge cascades at Natanz and Fordow. It’s not clear how much these attacks in the summer of 2025 set back the Iranian program, and pronouncements by the Trump Administration have been wildly inconsistent. (Sometimes they describe it as having suffered such “ monumental damage ” that it was “ completely and fully obliterated ” and at other times they merely assess that it was “ significantly ” degraded, being set back “ one to two years at least .” Confusingly, and hardly reassuringly, U.S. officials have sometimes even advanced such differing assessments even within the same document .) Nevertheless, the Iranian nuclear situation is today clearly very different than it was at this point in 2025.

In addition, European leaders have now invoked the “snapback” provisions of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 , forcing Iran to contend with the full formal reimposition of United Nations sanctions in response to its continuing violations of its International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear safeguards obligations . Now, if Iran wishes to escape from the dire economic implications of these sanctions, it will have to reform its behavior enough to convince all the Permanent Members of the U.N. Security Council that it deserves such relief. As I have argued elsewhere , this “snapback” can be a powerful tool to incentivize nuclear negotiations, especially if deftly coupled to threats such as President Trump’s recent signal to Iran that “ time is running out ” in which to reach a nuclear deal.

Iran also has also come to face domestic instability and huge popular protests against the oppressive rule of its clerical theocracy of a sort unseen since at least 2009, with the regime itself admitting that thousands of people have now been killed as a result of its harsh crackdown on the protests. It is not clear how long this instability will last, of course, and despite President Trump’s encouragement of the recent protests and proclamation that “ help is on the way ” for the beleaguered Iranian masses, Trump has apparently now opted to follow Barack Obama’s sad example from 2009 by simply standing by and watching as the regime crushes pro-democracy protestors . That said, the ayatollahs and their Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps praetorians today still face a domestic legitimacy crisis without precedent in many years, even as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – at 86 years of age and with what are rumored to be serious health challenges – faces growing questions about leadership succession.

It is far from clear what the net effect of all of these developments will be upon Iranian proliferation risks. Will Iran’s leaders, for instance, decide that their weakened position requires that they begin nuclear weaponization as a kind of last-chance insurance policy against the foreign foes who have now struck them with impunity? Or might this very weakness induce the clerical regime to negotiate and accept a deal that meaningfully and enduringly constrains Iran’s nuclear capabilities – much as Ayatollah Khomeini himself eventually opted to accept the “poison” of a ceasefire with Iraq in 1988 despite his enormous ideological commitment to the Iran-Iraq War? It’s hard to say, but viewed from Tehran, today’s greatly changed strategic circumstances presumably make some major shift in Iran’s approach more likely now than at any other time in the last decade or more. The question is: what kind of shift?

Saudi Arabia

From a nonproliferation perspective, there have also been important developments vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia. To begin with, after years of on-again/off-again efforts, the United States and Saudi Arabia announced their agreement on a package of deals that included not only a so-called “ 123 Agreement ” for civil-nuclear cooperation pursuant to which Riyadh will purchase U.S. nuclear reactors, but also a “strategic defense agreement” that may include purchases of U.S. battle tanks and F-35 fighter aircraft.

The precise contours of these arrangements remain unclear. The United States had tried for years to get the Saudis to agree to “Gold Standard” terms such as those in the 123 Agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2009, whereunder the UAE forswore enrichment of uranium or separation plutonium, and had also tried to get Riyadh to accept adherence to the strong nuclear safeguards of the IAEA’s “Additional Protocol ” (AP). Saudi Arabia, however, always refused.

There is no sign as yet that the deal recently struck by the Trump Administration contains either of those elements – and Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said that it does not cover enrichment – so it seems likely that the United States has backed down on both counts. In that event, the new U.S. agreement seems likely to advance Saudi nuclear know-how while not precluding that country’s future ability to acquire fissile material production capabilities from other sources, even while allowing it to avoid IAEA inspections to police against undeclared nuclear activity.

And indeed, Saudi Arabia has long proclaimed its intention to acquire all elements of the nuclear fuel cycle , while also pledging to match Iran’s nuclear weapon capabilities if and when Tehran itself builds a nuclear device . Last autumn, moreover, the Saudis reached a “ Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement ” (SMDA) with the nuclear-armed country of Pakistan, which Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammed Asif declared meant that “ [w]hat we have, and the capabilities we possess, will be made available to [them] according to this agreement .”

That said, the text of that agreement apparently makes no reference to any specific military capability and Asif later retracted his comment about providing nuclear weapons to the Saudis, leaving the situation notably unclear . Nevertheless, especially given that rumors have swirled for many years of just this sort of nuclear weapons understanding between Islamabad and Riyadh , and that the 2025 SMDA apparently does declare that “ any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both ,” it seems that at least some aspect of “extended nuclear deterrence” has indeed now been injected into Middle Eastern affairs.

Whether this encourages regional nuclear weapons proliferation in the Middle East by making nuclear weapons a critical currency of power and influence there – and easier to acquire – or whether it makes regional proliferation less likely by helping Saudi Arabia feel less need to for indigenous weaponization is at this point anyone’s guess. There can be no question, however, but that 2025 has been a year of significant developments.

The United States

Finally, it has also been a time of important shifts with respect to the United States and questions of Middle Eastern nuclear proliferation, for American thinking on regional security and nonproliferation strategy seems to have shifted in significant ways under the Second Trump Administration. On the one hand, with its “Midnight Hammer” strike against Iran last summer, the Trump Administration has now created a precedent for a very active form of counterproliferation engagement against the nuclear program of a state that is in violation of its nonproliferation obligations. This is a hugely significant step, though it is not clear whether Trump would have taken it had not the Israelis begun by striking Iran’s nuclear program first. (Even if attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities was unwisely provocative, there was a compelling logic to the United States helping out once the Israelis began to attack, since for an “angry Iran [to have] a small, bashed-up nuclear capability” was better “than [for it] to have a large and intact one .”)

Those strikes, however, do not necessarily signal the continuation of a powerful general U.S. commitment to nonproliferation, in the Middle East or elsewhere, for American thinking appears to be shifting in other respects. For one thing, as I have suggested elsewhere , in the current strategic environment of triangular great power rivalry it is hard to imagine nonproliferation retaining quite the top-shelf priority it was after the end of the Cold War and during the United States’ “Global War on Terrorism.” As new strategic threats or points of strategic focus evolve – whether that is great power competition vis-à-vis China and Russia (for the First Trump Administration and then the Biden Administration) orthe alleged need to focus upon homeland security and an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere (for the Second Trump Administration) – it is all but inevitable that the relative priority of nonproliferation in the U.S. policy agenda will shrink.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that U.S. officials feel nonproliferation to be unimportant , but it does mean that nonproliferation is likely to stack up differently against other policy priorities now than it did before. In particular, given the Second Trump Administration’s palpable distaste for bearing significant burdens to defend traditional U.S. allies – as well as the increasing sense of existential threat faced by those allies in the face of growing Russian, Chinese, and North Korean threats – it feels to me as if Washington is gradually shifting from regarding nonproliferation as a per se good to assessing nonproliferation questions more on a “case-by-case” basis.

American officials may remain committed to preventing Iranian proliferation, for example – and indeed the recently-released 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS) still proclaims that “Iran will not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons” – but their desire to prevent some other countries from taking such a step may lack quite that intensity. Notably, neither the new NDS nor the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) specifically mention either “proliferation” or “nonproliferation” at all; the issue seems to have slipped off the roster of the United States’ highest-priority national security concerns, and this could of course have implications in the Middle East.

Relatedly, but more broadly, the shift of the Second Trump Administration’s focus from the wider international arena to a more constricted horizon concerned primarily with homeland security, trade policy, and “hemispherist” regional self-aggrandizement also has the potential to affect how American leaders approach and prioritize proliferation questions in the Middle East. Though the recent NDS says that the United States will not permit Iran to acquire nuclear weaponry, it also seems to treat the Iranian nuclear problem as one that President Trump has basically already solved by “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear program, though the NDS still notes the possibility that the Iranians “may … seek to rebuild devastated infrastructure and capabilities.” The NDS also seems to herald a declining U.S. military concern for the Middle East, observing that there exist “opportunities for us to enable individual partners to do more for their defense,” and seeming to suggest that this will permit the United States to reduce its own involvement.

This theme of reduced American interest in the Middle East – whether with regard to proliferation or in other respects – is even more pronounced in the 2025 National Security Strategy . In terms of American national security or foreign policy interests in the region, the NSS articulates only one : the importance of preventing any “adversary power” from dominating the region. Beyond that, however, little reason is given for the United States to care about events there.

Indeed, while the NSS explicitly notes that while U.S. strategists have traditionally “prioritized” the Middle East on account of its being (1) “the world’s most important supplier of energy,” (2) a “prime theater of superpower competition,” and (3) “rife with conflict that threatened to spill into the wider world and even to our own shores,” it also observes pointedly that “at least two of those dynamics no longer hold” today. Specifically, the United States no longer particularly needs Middle Eastern oil, and the region is today merely the locus of “great power jockeying ” – whatever that means, though this odd term seems intended to sound more playful than threatening – rather than actual competition, and because in such “jockeying” the United States has the strongest position. As the NSS notes, in fact, as U.S. energy production increases, “America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede” even further.

According to the NSS, therefore, the only reason for Americans to care about the Middle East today is the danger that local conflicts there could spread into broader realms. Even in that regard, however, there is said to be “less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe,” because Iran has been gravely weakened by recent events. All in all, the National Security Strategy thus seems to suggest, the Middle East has lost its importance for strategists in Washington: one way or the other, events there simply don’t seem to matter to U.S. leaders the way they used to.

This does not necessarily bespeak a general lack of concern for regional proliferation, but it certainly signals a conclusion by the Second Trump Administration that Middle Eastern issues of any sort are of merely secondary or tertiary importance for the American national security agenda. To the extent that U.S. officials have traditionally been closely engaged with Middle East proliferation risks and have made regional nonproliferation an extremely high priority for decades, this American shift could be very significant over time. If the attitudes expressed in the 2025 NSS and the 2026 NDS persist, Washington’s willingness to devote time, energy, and resources to restraining regional proliferation in the future may be reduced.

It is also a time of considerable flux in U.S. strategic thinking on nuclear matters more generally – and in ways that are also likely to affect whether, how, and the degree to which leaders in Washington focus upon nuclear proliferation relative to other challenges.

Faced with the unprecedented problem of having to deter two nuclear near-peers simultaneously, for instance, U.S. strategic thinkers on both sides of the political aisle – as can be seen, for instance, in the 2023 report of the Strategic Posture Review Commission and the 2025 report of the U.S. Institute of Peace Senior Study Group on Strategic Stability – have warmed to the idea of increasing the size of the American nuclear arsenal for the first time in decades, even as the New START agreement expires later this week.

Apparently reacting to what are now longstanding U.S. assessments that Russia at the least – and possibly China, too – have been conducting secret low-yield nuclear tests, American officials have also suggested the possibility that we might feel the need to do something of the sort as well, though any such U.S. plans, if indeed there are any, remain quite opaque.

The Second Trump Administration is also keen to reduce the costs and scale of U.S. commitments to defending our allies, even while these allies feel more threatened by Russian and Chinese military aggression than at any other time since the Cold War. This could well create new incentives to undertake or accept what might be termed “friendly proliferation ,” pursuant to which one or more of our allies might consider nuclear weaponization because it felt there was no other way to protect itself from Russia or China.

I believe we can be less certain today of the central role of nonproliferation in American thinking than at any time in a great many years.

Conclusion

Together, these developments suggest that we are indeed at least at a potential watershed from the perspective of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. The watershed could remain only potential , of course, and nothing guarantees that some spike in regional proliferation will occur. As I have argued for some time now – including here , here , here , and here – I still think we have a chance to leverage Iran’s present weakness into a diplomatic solution if we take the trouble to develop a clear and thoughtful negotiating strategy and are willing actually to work with the Europeans to implement it; it’s also conceivable that the clerical regime of the ayatollahs could simply collapse . But who knows?

What is clear, however, is that the strategic terrain here has been shifting rapidly, even as important attitudinal adjustments are occurring or seem likely in both the United States and Iran. Where this ends up going, I cannot prophesy. But today’s Middle East is clearly now in an unusual state of strategic flux, and the proliferation implications could be quite dramatic – for good or for ill.

—Christopher Ford

Ford's 2025 Round-Up

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 19:42:28 GMT

The year 2025 is ageing fast, and the end of the year is now just around the corner. So here’s a compilation of my public work product from the year. As you can see from the list of 10 papers or articles and 26 presentations below, it’s been a busy one.

Keep checking New Paradigms Forum for new material as we move into 2026. And Happy New Year, everyone!

Papers and Articles

1) “ Defense and Strategic Studies at MSU: Security Sensibility and Strategic DNA ,” Defense & Strategic Studies Online, vol. 2, no. 1 (Autumn 2025), pp. 1-11, https://irp.cdn-website.com/ce29b4c3/files/uploaded/DASSO_v2no1_Ford.pdf

2) “ ‘By National Security Professionals, For National Security Professionals,’ ” Defense & Strategic Studies Online, vol. 2, no. 1 (Autumn 2025), pp. 46-52, https://dss.missouristate.edu/_Files/MSU-DASSO-2025-Vol_2-No_1-FacultyBackgrou.pdf

3) “ 24 Years Later: 9/11 in the Rear-view Mirror ,” Fair Observer (September 17, 2025), https://www.fairobserver.com/history/24-years-later-9-11-in-the-rear-view-mirror/

4) “ Thinking About Strategy in an Artificial Superintelligence Arms Race ” (with Craig J. Wiener), Defense & Strategic Studies Online, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 2025), pp. 1-49, https://dss.missouristate.edu/_Files/MSU-DASSO-2025-Vol_1-No_4-Ford-Wiener.pdf

5) “ Final Report of the Senior Study Group on Strategic Stability – Sustaining the Nuclear Peace: On the Urgent Need for a New Strategy of Stability ” (with multiple SSG co-authors), U.S. Institute of Peace (February 2025), https://irp.cdn-website.com/ce29b4c3/files/uploaded/USIP+Senior+Study+Group+on+Strategic+Stability+Final+Report.pdf

6) “ Thinking About Russian Nuclear Weapons Thinking ,” Journal of Policy & Strategy, vol. 5, no. 2 (2025), pp. 39-60, https://irp.cdn-website.com/ce29b4c3/files/uploaded/Ford_Russia_Nukes_NIPP_article.pdf

7) “ Cybernetics and Comprehensive National Power: The Grand Strategy of China’s ‘National Rejuvenation ’” (with John Schurtz, & Erik Quam),Defense & Strategic Studies Online, vol. 1, no. 3 (Spring 2025), pp. 1-89, https://dss.missouristate.edu/_Files/MSU-DASSO-2025-Vol_1-No_3-FordSchurtzQuam.pdf

8) “ Struggling with the Bomb: Competing Discourses in the Nuclear Disarmament Movement ,” National Institute for Public Policy Occasional Papers, vol. 5, no. 2 (February 2025), https://irp.cdn-website.com/ce29b4c3/files/uploaded/Ford_NIPP_disarmament_paper_Vol._5_No._2.pdf

9) “ Rebutting Sino-Russian Political Discourse and Getting Rights Right ” (with Lord Nigel Biggar), Defense & Strategic Studies Online [Missouri State University], vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter 2025), pages 2-27, https://dss.missouristate.edu/_Files/MSU-DASSO-2025-Vol_1-No_2-FordBiggar.pdf

10) “ Snapping Back and Looking Forward: A New Old Approach to the Iran Nuclear Crisis ,” Center for Global Security Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Occasional Papers (January 2025), https://cgsr.llnl.gov/sites/cgsr/files/2025-01/occasional-paper-nuclear-middle-east_0.pdf

Remarks and Presentations

1) “ The INF Treaty's Two Ghosts ,” remarks to an event at DACOR Bacon House (December 8, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/the-inf-treatys-two-ghosts

2) “ Three-Power Nuclear Instability and Possibilities for Diplomatic Intermediation ,” remarks at the Doha Forum at an event organized by the Qatar Mediation Forum (December 7, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/three-power-nuclear-instability-and-possibilities-for-diplomatic-intermediation

3) “ Root Causes of Instability in the Sino-American Relationship ,” remarks to an event at the Belfer Center at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (November 19, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/root-causes-of-instability-in-the-sino-american-relationship

4) “ Geopolitical Risk and the U.S.-China Relationship ,” remarks at an event sponsored by Forward Global and the Oxford University Alumni Network (November 18, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/geopolitical-risks-and-the-u-s-china-relationship

5) “ U.S. Perspectives on Nuclear Deterrence and Use ,” remarks at a conference in China (November 8, 2025),https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/u-s-perspectives-on-nuclear-weapons-deterrence-and-use

6) “ Whither the U.S. Nuclear Policy Process? ” remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (October 20, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/whither-the-u-s-nuclear-policy-process

7) “ USIP’s Clarion Call on Strategic Stability ,” remarks at Hudson Institute (October 2, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/usip-s-clarion-call-on-strategic-stability

8) “ ‘ Type A’ versus ‘Type B’ Proliferation Risks and the Challenge of This Era ,” remarks to a workshop for Congressional staff organized by the University of Pennsylvania Washington Center and the Wilson Center (September 30, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/type-a-versus-type-b-proliferation-risk-and-the-challenge-of-this-era

9) “ An Old Guy’s Advice for Staffers and Emerging Leaders in Arms Control and Nonproliferation ,” remarks to the “arms control boot camp” organized by the CSIS Project on Nuclear Issues (September 30, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/an-old-guys-advice-for-staffers-and-emerging-leaders-in-arms-control-and-nonproliferation

10) “ Showing ‘Tough Love’ in Demythologizing Arms Control ,” remarks to a webinar with the National Institute for Public Policy (September 23, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/showing-tough-love-in-demythologizing-arms-control

11) “ Opportunities and Challenges for Nonproliferation and Nuclear Governance in Southeast Asia ,” remarks at a conference in Singapore sponsored by the Pacific Forum (September 22, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/opportunities-and-challenges-for-nonproliferation-and-nuclear-governance-in-southeast-asia

12) “ Here’s How to Get a Nuclear Deal with Iran Now ,” remarks on a webinar sponsored by the National Institute for Deterrence Studies (August 29, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/heres-how-to-get-a-nuclear-deal-with-iran-now

13) “ Some Thoughts for my British Friends on Nuclear Weapons Policy and Deterrence Under the Second Trump Administration ,” remarks to a conference in London (July 28, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/some-thoughts-for-my-british-friends-on-nuclear-weapons-policy-and-deterrence-under-the-second-trump-administration

14) “ Nonproliferation and Geopolitical Structure: Conjunctive Polarities and the Challenges of a Doubly-Multipolar World ” remarks to a conference at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (July 22, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/nonproliferation-and-geopolitical-structure-conjunctive-polarities-and-the-challenges-of-a-doubly-multipolar-world

15) “ Diplomatic Dialogue around Existential Risk: The Intellectual Architecture of the ‘CEND’ Initiative ,” remarks to a conference at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Cambridge University (June 17, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/diplomatic-dialogue-around-existential-risk-the-intellectual-architecture-of-the-cend-initiative

16) “ Transatlantic Turbulence in Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence ,” remarks to a conference at the University of Birmingham (June 13, 2025),https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/transatlantic-turbulence-in-nuclear-weapons-and-deterrence

17) “ Nuclear Risks in the Indo-Pacific ,” remarks to a conference in Beijing sponsored by the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network and the Grandview Institution (June 12, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/nuclear-risks-in-the-indo-pacific

18) “ Arms Control Challenges in Strategic Technology Competition ,” remarks prepared for a conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, sponsored by the Arms Control Negotiation Academy and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (May 23, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/arms-control-lessons-for-strategic-technology-competition

19) “ NATO Multi-Domain Operations: Full Time, not just Wartime ,’” remarks at a conference in Ankara, Türkiye, sponsored by NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (May 21, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/nato-multi-domain-operations-full-time-not-just-wartime

20) “ Opportunistic or Coordinated Adversary Aggression and the Nuclear Force Posture Problem of ‘Numbers and Types,’ ” remarks to the National Institute for Public Policy (April 28, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/opportunistic-or-coordinated-adversary-aggression-and-the-nuclear-force-posture-problem-of-numbers-and-types

21) “ Challenges Facing an Iranian Nuclear Deal ,” remarks at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (April 21, 2025),https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/challenges-facing-an-iran-nuclear-deal

22) “ What is the Future of Arms Control ... Now? ” remarks to a workshop organized by the Geneva Graduate Institute's Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (March 13, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/what-is-the-future-of-arms-control-now

23) “ Meeting the Challenges of ‘Dark Quad’ Aggression in the ‘Gray Zone ,’” remarks to a conference at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (February 20, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/meeting-the-challenges-of-dark-quad-aggression-in-the-gray-zone

24) “ Nuclear Doctrines and Prospects for P5 Dialogue ,” remarks to a Track 2 dialogue on Military Risk Reduction in Europe (February 18, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/nuclear-doctrines-and-prospects-for-p5-dialogue

25) “ Evaluating Contemporary Nuclear Risks ,” remarks to the New York State Bar Association (January 30, 2025),https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/evaluating-contemporary-nuclear-risks

26) “ What Next from Washington on the Iranian Nuclear Problem? ” remarks to the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, UAE (January 23, 2025), https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/what-next-from-washington-on-the-iranian-nuclear-problem

The INF Treaty’s Two Ghosts

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:58:40 GMT

Below is the text of the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to a reunion at DACOR Bacon House , in Washington, D.C., of former U.S. Government officials involved with negotiating and implementing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987.

It sometimes seems as if the question of arms control limitations on intermediate-range nuclear delivery systems has shadowed me for most of my life.

As a middle schooler for some odd reason precociously interested in nuclear weapons policy, I followed closely the debates and political controversies that flowed from NATO’s 1979 decision to deploy the so-called “Euromissiles” – in reality, the U.S. Gryphon land-based Tomahawk cruise missile and the Pershing II ballistic missile – in response to the Soviet Union’s earlier deployment of SS-20 systems.

I was in college studying international relations when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987, abolishing that entire class of delivery system. Years later, I followed the emergent issue of Russia’s violation of that treaty when I was a U.S. Senate staffer, and thereafter ran the WMD and Counterproliferation Directorate at the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) in 2017 when we adopted the U.S. “responsive strategy” to Russia’s violation. When the United States finally pulled out of the Treaty in 2019, I was serving as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, and I had the honor shortly thereafter of also performing the duties of the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security as we took U.S. policy into the post-INF environment in the aftermath of the Treaty’s demise.

Accordingly, I wasn’t “present at the creation” of the INF Treaty like some of the other speakers at this event, but these events still feel like personal history for me. And I certainly was present for the Treaty’s collapse.

So thank you for asking me to be a part of this “INF Reunion” event! I’m sorry I have to be telling the unhappy parts of the INF story, but it’s an honor to be among you.

For my own contribution today, I’d like to record and recount my experience on INF’s deathbed, as it were, before then offering some thoughts about the two very different ways I think the Treaty haunts our arms control memory today – what I think of as INF’s two “ghosts.” These are just my own personal opinions, of course, and won’t necessarily correspond to those of anyone else, but let’s give all this a go.

Present at the Demise

By the time I left the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff and arrived at the NSC to take responsibility for U.S. policy development and coordination on arms control in January 2017, the problem of Russia’s INF violation loomed large in our minds. It had become an especially great concern for hawkish Republicans on Capitol Hill, where frustration had been growing about the Obama Administration’s lack of concrete response to Russia’s testing of a new cruise missile in violation of the Treaty.

Some Republicans, in fact, thought the problem went far beyond merely that administration’s foolish attachment to “arms control for its own sake” and weak-kneed unconcern with violations. Having learned from an interview Under Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller did with a Denver newspaper in 2016 that Russia had actually first illegally tested its new ground-launched cruise missile in 2008, Republican hawks on the Hill suspected that the Obama Administration had deliberately hidden news of this problem from them, stalling its revelation until after the Senate had been persuaded in 2010 to ratify the New START agreement that Gottemoeller had negotiated with the Russians over some conservatives’ objections.

To be sure, the Obama Administration apparently did only begin talking with Russia about its violation in May 2013 , and it took until 2014 for them to issue a public noncompliance finding in our annual State Department report on such issues . Despite the early date of Russia’s first illegal moves, Obama officials claimed they had not reached the internal conclusion that Russia was cheating until after New START’s hard-fought ratification in 2010 , but some hawkish Republicans found this explanation both implausible and rather too convenient. For some such Republicans, New START itself had thus started to seem like something of a fraud perpetrated on the Senate, and to Russia’s advantage. (That was, of course, way back when Republicans felt Russia was a national security threat, and when they thought it was the Democrats who were soft on America’s adversaries. Do you remember those days?)

Feelings also ran high because the Obama Administration had refused to do anything more than wag its finger at the Russians for the violation. As I have noted elsewhere , by the time the First Trump Administration took office, the illegal Russian missile had gone from mere developmental flight testing to the actual commencement of deployment. The threat was thus now not hypothetical, but rather dangerously concrete: a new nuclear-armed system in the field capable of ranging U.S. forces and NATO allies in Europe, and to which we possessed no countervailing capability because we had scrupulously complied with the Treaty all along.

Suffice it to say, therefore, that we were pretty darn focused on INF when I showed up at the NSC. Accordingly, it didn’t take us long in the first months of the First Trump Administration to move beyond mere finger-wagging into what we termed our “responsive strategy” of 2017. The core of this strategy was to finally provide Russia with concrete incentives to change course, and we tried to do this by authorizing the Department of Defense (DoD) to begin research and development (R&D) work on American INF-class systems – albeit ones, in contrast to the illegal Russian missile, that would be armed with conventional rather than nuclear warheads.

(Doing such R&D was perfectly legal under the treaty, by the way, as long as we stopped short of actual flight testing or manufacture. The White House’s directions to DoD were thus clear: the Pentagon was to start developing INF-class missiles up to a point just short of treaty non-compliance but go no further; anything beyond that would require a separate and specific Presidential authorization.)

Our message with this new strategy was quite clear: the Obama years in which Russia could freely work on prohibited systems while the United States remained constrained by INF Treaty limits were over. Moscow now had to choose between returning to compliance, and having America start competing with them in this space. (We also got nice support from Capitol Hill on this, with lawmakers introducing language for the 2018 National Defense Authorization bill that would authorize $58 million for initial work on a ground-launched mobile cruise missile of our own .) To make sure Moscow got the message, I met on November 6, 2017 , with Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov to walk him through our new approach.

Three weeks later, in light of continuing Russian lies that our accusations were fantasies and they weren’t working on any new missile at all, I also publicly released Moscow’s own designator for the illegal system, revealing in a November 29 speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars that the Russians themselves called it the 9M729. (My revelation led Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov to change his tune, admitting that they were actually building a new missile with that designator , but he still falsely claimed its range was too short to violate the INF Treaty.) Shortly before Christmas that year, we also put the system’s manufacturers – two Russian design bureaus known respectively as Novator and Titan – on the U.S. Commerce Department’s “Entity List ” for U.S. export control restrictions.

In early 2018, with the rollout of the new U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the United States raised the ante still further. In response to the growing problem of adversary overmatch in regional nuclear delivery systems caused by Russia’s INF Treaty violations and its failure to fulfil the promises it had made to get rid of shorter-range systems in the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) of 1991-92 , we announced that the United States would be deploying a new, lower-yield nuclear warhead – the W76-2 – aboard some of our submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).

The W76-2 was not an optimal solution for the problem of theater overmatch, of course, since it still rode on the Trident D5 strategic delivery system. Nevertheless, it was cheap, INF Treaty-compliant, very quickly deployable, and represented a sort of “bridge” capability to give the United States the option of at least some lower-level nuclear response in the event Russia or China used nuclear weapons in theater, thus “ help[ing] counter any mistaken perception of an exploitable ‘gap’ in U.S. regional deterrence capabilities .”

The 2018 NPR also announced that we would be developing a new submarine -launched nuclear cruise missile – the “SLCM-N” – that would provide theater-range nuclear delivery capability from the sea. This was explicitly framed, in part, as a response to Russia’s INF Treaty violation. We also raised the possibility that we might perhaps reconsider this program if Russia returned to compliance. As the NPR put it ,

“SLCM[-N] will provide a needed non-strategic regional presence, an assured response capability, and an INF-Treaty compliant response to Russia’s continuing Treaty violation. If Russia returns to compliance with its arms control obligations, reduces its non-strategic nuclear arsenal, and corrects its other destabilizing behaviors, the United States may reconsider the pursuit of a SLCM.

“Indeed, U.S. pursuit of a SLCM may provide the necessary incentive for Russia to negotiate seriously a reduction of its non-strategic nuclear weapons, just as the prior Western deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe led to the 1987 INF Treaty. As then Secretary of State George P. Shultz stated, ‘If the West did not deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles, there would be no incentive for the Soviets to negotiate seriously for nuclear weapons reductions.’”

The Russians, of course, never gave us the chance to really consider implementing such a deal, for they continued to build and deploy the 9M729 missile. As our efforts to induce a change of direction from the Kremlin by finally confronting Russia with real strategic choices rather than the easy option of simply continuing to take advantage of American arms control fecklessness, the United States thus gradually moved toward formally withdrawing from the INF Treaty.

Along the way, however, we spent a lot of time trying to get our allies to come along with us. Most of all, as I recounted in a 2022 paper , we worked to get the British, French, and Germans to join us in formally admitting that Russia had indeed violated the Treaty. For some time, however, they were reluctant to do so. Some of this had to do with the intelligence information involved, for while we could share some, we couldn’t share all of our data about the 9M729 with all NATO partners. The British came around first, for we could share all the relevant information with them through the “Five Eyes” intelligence partnership. The French and the Germans held out much longer, however.

But this was clearly not just a question of intelligence sharing – though the French did rather opportunistically try to leverage the INF issue by insinuating that they might agree that Russia was cheating if we were willing to admit them into “Five Eyes.” (I give them bemused credit for trying this gambit, I suppose, but we politely demurred.) Rather than just being a question of intelligence analysis, the issue was also deeply political . The French and (especially) the Germans were palpably unsettled by the prospect of having an arms control treaty collapse, and for a long while they seemed much more comfortable simply ignoring Russia’s violation than admitting that the INF Treaty had failed. On top of that, as I have written ,

“These challenges for Paris and Berlin became more acute with the election of President Donald Trump, whom they distrusted on a personal basis even on top of their political desire to avoid giving a victory to the U.S. arms control hawks who viewed Russia’s development of INF-class missiles as a material breach of the Treaty.”

Eventually, with more Russian missiles continuing to be deployed – thus increasing the threats facing NATO irrespective of one’s view on the Treaty – and with it becoming clear that the United States would pull out whether or not our allies concurred in our compliance finding, our NATO partners decided to put their political qualms behind them. On December 4, 2018, NATO’s foreign ministers issued a statement declaring that Russia was indeed in violation of the Treaty and calling upon Moscow to change course or else see the agreement collapse. “It is now up to Russia,” they declared , “to preserve the INF Treaty.”

Thereafter, it being quite clear that Russia was not going to change course, the White House issued a statement on February 1, 2019 , announcing that as a result of Russia’s breach, the United States was suspending its own obligations under the INF Treaty and would begin formal withdrawal procedures. This withdrawal was duly completed in September 2019 , and the INF Treaty was thus officially dead.

Today, with INF now long behind us, the issue of theater-range nuclear delivery systems has become a critical one in U.S. nuclear force posture planning vis-à-vis both Russia in Europe and China in the Indo-Pacific. As can be seen by the reports of the Strategic Posture Review Commission in December 2023 and the U.S. Institute of Peace Senior Study Group on Strategic Stability in February 2025 , the American strategic policy community has now coalesced behind a new bipartisan consensus not only that we need more nuclear weapons beyond the current U.S. strategic modernization program that dates from 2010, but also that the U.S. force posture must include new theater capabilities to offset Russian and Chinese overmatch in INF-class systems.

And indeed the United States is now developing multiple INF-range systems – though again, however, so far only with conventional warheads, with the exception of SLCM-N. In late 2024, in fact, it was announced that the United States would begin deploying conventionally-armed ground-launched intermediate-range systems to Germany on a rotational basis: Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles, a land-attack version of the Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), and a hypersonic missile would be sent on what were described as “ episodic deployments … as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future .”

The INF Treaty era is thus now emphatically behind us. Twelve years after Russia first began to violate the INF Treaty, the United States has now begun confronting the Kremlin with concrete consequences.

The INF’s Two “Ghosts”

So that’s the story of my time at the INF Treaty’s deathbed. From the perspective of how this episode has shaped the collective consciousness of the U.S. arms control and strategic policy community, however, it seems to me that the deceased Treaty still haunts us in two ways, each of which tends to point in a different direction in terms of its potential policy implications. These are what I refer to as the “two ghosts of the INF Treaty,” and I think it’s especially important to draw attention to both of them as we consider INF’s legacy.

The Ghost of Failed Endeavor

The first aspect of this Janus-faced specter revolves around the collective memory of the INF Treaty as a failed endeavor. And this is, indeed, how many of my students seem to see it. In this failure narrative, INF was a treaty that the Soviets signed, but that collapsed because Russia cheated. Along the way, moreover, our own adherence to the agreement – as well as America’s fulfilment of our PNI promises even though Russia opted to retain a great many of the shorter-range nuclear systems it had likewise promised to dismantle – kept us from developing countervailing systems for many years. Our prolonged adherence to INF thus contributed to the risks we face today of a potential failure of deterrence in the face of Russian overmatch in a broad range of sub-strategic delivery systems that the Kremlin has made into a vital plank of its strategies of coercive nuclear bargaining.

More sophisticated adherents to this view may add that even when Russia remained compliant, the INF Treaty kept us from developing and deploying the sort of theater-class systems we need vis-à-vis China in the Indo-Pacific. Some Republican hawks, moreover, still harbor the suspicion that the Obama Administration hid Russian cheating from the Senate to get New START ratified, adding a gloss of seeming domestic political betrayal into narrative of INF’s failure.

To be fair, the Obama Administration emphatically denied any such “hide the ball” interpretation, and people I know personally who were involved in the intelligence analysis and interpretation of the Russian flight tests have told me very clearly that nothing of the sort occurred – and that collecting, assessing, and validating the relevant information on Russia’s violation simply took a lot of time (as such things often do). Either way, however, the Obama Administration’s complacency in the face of this violation while Russia continued to build and deploy systems against us still stands as a cautionary tale about how politically fashionable commitments to “preserving” arms control can create a dangerous strategic unseriousness in the halls of power.

All in all, therefore, the Ghost of Failed Endeavor presents a frightening visage, haunting future U.S. approaches by making arms control look futile and suggesting that its pursuit can undermine our security.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not endorsing all those grim conclusions, mind you. I still like to remind my students, I fact, that we did actually succeed in making the feared Soviet SS-20s go away, of course, and that 20 years of Kremlin compliance isn’t nothing . (Nor, surely, can it be entirely unwelcome that the Treaty played a critical role in reducing tensions in the late 1980s and helping ease the two superpowers out of their Cold War rivalry.) And I certainly don’t believe that arms control is always – as some might have it – doomed, counterproductive, or both.

Nevertheless, the INF failure narrative is a telling one, and indeed offers us some genuine cautionary lessons. But it’s not the whole story, for there is thankfully a second ghost, too.

The Ghost of Negotiating Leverage

The second INF Treaty ghost has a happier face, however, and it also haunts American arms control culture as we look at the future. In this alternative narrative, the INF Treaty offers a salutary model of how to negotiate arms control agreements in the face of adversary nuclear threats. This spirit is the “Ghost of Negotiating Leverage.”

This more congenial ghost focuses not on the INF Treaty’s collapse that I witnessed firsthand, but rather upon how we got the Treaty in the first place. Specifically, it revolves around how the United States and its NATO partners reacted to the Soviet Union’s deployment of SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe not by imagining that arms control diplomacy could magically secure us against such threats all by itself, but rather by first making a hard-nosed and politically painful decision to meet those SS-20 deployments by our own development and deployment of a countervailing “Euromissile” arsenal.

Only then could arms control diplomacy – in the form of Ronald Reagan’s famous 1981 “ Zero Option ” proposal – step in to make the problem go away. Successful negotiating occurred only once we had finally given our adversaries an unmistakable reason to negotiate seriously with us.

We didn’t build and deploy the Euromissiles in order to bargain them away, of course; we did that to meet what was for NATO an existential threat. Having successfully met that threat with these missiles’ contentious deployment, however, negotiating space opened up for as it became possible to envision a U.S.-Soviet deal that would bring both sides back to the status quo ante prior to the SS-20 deployments that had so worried us and our Allies to begin with. And that’s precisely the deal that Reagan struck with Gorbachev in 1987 – and that so many of you had a hand in bringing about.

Where the Ghost of Failed Endeavor counsels reticence and caution, this happier Ghost of Negotiating Leverage counsels that peace through strength is possible, and that resolute attention to meeting threats in concrete ways that change adversary incentives can catalyze arms control opportunities.

Where the Ghost of Failed Endeavor points us in the direction of pessimism, therefore, this happier Ghost of Negotiating Leverage counsels that peace through strength is possible, and that such resolute attention to meeting threats in concrete ways that preserve deterrence and change adversary incentives can sometimes catalyze arms control opportunities.

Moreover, such a steely-eyed approach to arms control “fails well.” That is, even if our own counter-deployments don’t result in arms control progress in a Reaganesque “zero-zero” sort of way, we’ve still taken key steps to counter the threats and preserve deterrence! So even if “Plan A” of a good arms control deal doesn’t pan out, the “Plan B” of simply ending up with a more robust deterrent is immeasurably better than sitting back and wringing our hands while adversaries build up nuclear posture advantages against us.

We were able to get to the INF Treaty’s landmark achievement in making an entire class of nuclear delivery system disappear for two decades, in other words, not because arms control diplomacy is a miraculous salve for all strategic ailments, but rather thanks to NATO’s steely-eyed determination in deploying Euromissiles that finally convinced Moscow that it needed to be serious in negotiating with us.

And indeed, as evidenced by the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review , this second ghost also still roams the halls of power in Washington. As you’ll recall, that document explicitly invoked the Euromissile precedent in voicing the hope that Russia might be convinced by our development of SLCM-N to change course in its illegal development of the 9M729, and it just as explicitly suggested the idea of a new, Reagan-style “Zero Option” trade. In this respect, the idea lives on of the INF Treaty as a salutary negotiated outcome made possible only by resolute attention to deterrence and to counterpoising threat against threat, and – as I pointed out in a paper published earlier this year by the National Institute for Public Policy – by an equally resolute inattention to demands from the arms control and disarmament community that we make critical negotiating concessions to our strategic adversaries.

Conclusion

I myself like to keep both of these INF Treaty “ghosts” in my head. They both have lessons to teach us, and I think they are most usefully remembered not separately but together. Years after its death, the Treaty’s twin shades serve as a salutary reminder of both of the very real potential and of the very real pitfalls of arms control negotiating.

It’s been a pleasure to be here with you to remember all this history among people who played such an important role in the INF Treaty’s complicated story arc. There is, I believe, a lot to learn from here.

— Christopher Ford

Three-Power Nuclear Instability and Possibilities for Diplomatic Intermediation

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 21:09:57 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his shorter oral remarks on December 7, 2025, at the Doha Forum, on a panel on “Mediating in an Era of Nuclear Risks and Superpower Rivalry” organized by the Qatar Mediation Forum. Dr. Ford was joined on the panel by Dmitri Suslov and Wu Chunsi, and the discussion was moderated by Ambassador Karim Haggag, director of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute.

Good day, everyone, and my thanks for inviting me. It’s my first visit to Qatar, and I’m pleased to be here for this important event.

As always, I can offer here only my personal opinions, and I speak neither for Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies, nor for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington – nor, in fact, for anyone else. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to be here, and I’m happy to offer some thoughts on nuclear risks between the United States, China, and Russia, and the possibility of intermediation.

Perils of the Current Three-Power Nuclear Problem

From a U.S. perspective, I see the emergence of three-way multipolar great power rivalry as being enormously dangerous. To some extent this is just because of the inherent challenges of the so-called “three-body problem” we are coming to face of deterring two nuclear near-peers at the same time – since, as perhaps in Newton’s celestial mechanics, a three-body game-theoretical solution may be inherently unstable.

In addition, however, U.S. strategists see these developments as particularly problematic not just because of this three-way dynamic but because that dynamic also seems notably lopsided . This lopsidedness is a result not just of the “no-limits” partnership that has been proclaimed between China and Russia, but also because of the military alliance that has emerged between the Russians and the dangerous proliferator regime of the Kim family dynasty in North Korea, and also the now considerable defense cooperation between Russia and the belligerent theocracy in Tehran. These are new, novel, and – from our perspective in the United States – understandably dangerous developments.

So it’s not hard to see how this seems hugely destabilizing, and there should be nothing surprising in Washington’s resulting unease and antagonism. I have to imagine that Beijing, for instance, would look on things with special alarm if Washington and Moscow announced that they were now security partners “without limits,” and if they openly espoused their desire to “contain” China and reduce its power and influence in the world. (Or that Moscow would be appalled if the Americans and Chinese similarly ganged up on the Russians.) Yet that’s what they both say about us, and are working hard to accomplish.

As bad as the “three-body problem” already will be, in other words, there’s thus also an additional element now in play – namely, what is, not to mince words, a destabilizing geopolitically revisionist anti-American (and broader anti-Western) conspiracy by the world’s most powerful dictators. Having two nuclear near-peers and their rogue proliferator regime tag-alongs coordinating against you is clearly a very big deal indeed, and it is likely to elicit reactions from the United States that Beijing and Moscow will in no way like – though they will of course have brought it on themselves.

Making matters worse, Russia and (especially) China continue to be hostile to U.S. efforts to engage them in serious risk-reduction dialogue, let alone arms control negotiations intended to find a way to rein in capabilities and practices that the parties find most destabilizing. Because they have so systemically invested in strategies of risk-manipulation in support of their agendas of reshaping the international order in ways congenial to their territorially aggressive ambitions, Beijing and Moscow both seem to have concluded that such “risk reduction” isn’t actually in their interest.

Indeed, China and Russia seem to be promoting a philosophy of “crisis prevention” which amounts to demanding that they be given free rein to invade and annex their neighbors, in response to which the rest of the world should “prevent conflict” by not doing anything to impede such invasions. This is clearly an absurd and world-historically dangerous proposition – a callous ancient logic of imperialist hegemonism that is utterly antithetical to the preservation of international peace and security – but they advance it quite unashamedly. As a result, the world now faces enormous nuclear risks: a very considerable chance that a war of territorial aggression such as the one in Ukraine, or the one that seems ever more possible over Taiwan, will lead to nuclear weapons use and dangerous pressures for further escalation.

The threat of such wars of conquest and annexation, moreover, is creating new proliferation pressures both in East Asia and in Europe. Where once the primary risk of nuclear weapons proliferation stemmed from disruptive authoritarian regimes such as North Korea and Iran, these renewed threats of Russian and Chinese aggression – coupled with a growing degree of worrisome ambivalence in Washington about America’s traditional alliance relationships and security partnerships – are beginning to raise the risk of so-called “friendly proliferation” by countries who may simply see no other way to preserve their existence in the face of such threats.

So are there great and growing nuclear risks. Oh yes, indeed.

Nuclear Risk and the End of New START

As this account implies, however, I see the primary locus of nuclear risk lying not in the imminent disappearance of the New START agreement – or in the stereotypical “bolt from the blue” about which strategists worried a great deal in the Cold War – but rather in escalation out of a conventional conflict in either the European or East Asian theaters.

I would agree that there's certainly a pretty high likelihood of Washington and Moscow both increasing their nuclear numbers after New START goes away, and there may be additional nuclear risk there. Nevertheless, both we and the Russians have faced each other with vastly larger numbers of nuclear weapons before, and I don’t see higher numbers as being the primary locus of nuclear risk.

I should also note that there’s probably real nuclear risk if the United States doesn’t augment its nuclear posture somewhat. It’s no coincidence that Russian President Putin began proposing a brief extension of New START’s central limits after the U.S. strategic policy community began openly talking about the need to increase American warhead numbers and develop new systems; he wants us to refrain from doing what it’s now clear we need to do in order to preserve deterrence and strategic stability as our “two-peer” problem worsens. His proposal is hence a rather bad idea.

Higher U.S. and Russian numbers might also have the added benefit of delaying the day of reckoning for the full emergence of a “three-body problem” of nuclear peer deterrence. Despite the remarkable speed of Beijing’s huge current nuclear build-up, after all, it would presumably take China longer to reach strategic parity with the United States and Russia if reaching such parity required China to build to a higher level. And such additional delay might give all our respective diplomats longer to try to sort out a more constructive way forward between the three powers. So I don’t oppose somewhat higher numbers of U.S. and Russian strategic systems, and I certainly don’t think that’s the major nuclear risk we face.

Rather, as indicated, I think the biggest nuclear risk right now comes from escalation out of a regional war, and New START says essentially nothing about that. By far the most important drivers of actual nuclear risk are: (1) the Sino-Russian proclivity for wars of territorial aggression; (2) the strained solidity of America’s alliance networks and security partnerships; (3) the increasingly America-unfavorable relative balance of conventional forces in each theater; and (4) Russian and Chinese advantages in sub-strategic nuclear systems which could lead either or both of them to think they enjoy enough escalation dominance to deter us from acting to stop them from attacking their neighbors. The end of New START is nothing compared to this ugly combination of factors.

Can we Reduce Risks?

In the absence of Chinese and Russian willingness to talk seriously about these things, I don’t see much prospect for improvements in transparency and confidence-building measures between the three powers. U.S. officials – including me – have tried for years to engage their trilateral counterparts on such matters, to no avail. Sadly, powers whose strategies of self-aggrandizement rely upon creating and profiting from geopolitical instability simply don’t want to do much to reduce nuclear risks, much less to agree to meaningful arms control restraint.

Perhaps I’m too cynical about such things, but I also don’t agree with the facile assumption often made by professional diplomats and civil society activists that the main problems between these three powers stem from a “lack of mutual understanding.” As I tried to suggest to an audience at Harvard two weeks ago , for instance, it’s quite possible that we actually understand each other all too well – at least in the essentials – and that it is precisely this clarity about the degree to which our interests and objectives really do deeply conflict that helps keep our leaders on edge against each other. Perhaps that’s not misunderstanding; it’s just perceptiveness.

That said, as I also emphasized to that audience at Harvard, I think there would still be value in building better ways to keep talking to each other in times of calm and crisis alike. As I put it then,

“Doing more to routinize and institutionalize diplomatic engagement with each other over national security policy …could hardly be a bad thing – and might help, at the margins, in at least keeping things from being worse between the two rivals than structural circumstances all but compel them to be. …

“That way, at least, we would have a fighting chance of being able to talk reliably to each other on a regular basis. … [B]etter communications links and habits can at least help prevent actual misunderstandings, as well as giving our leaders better tools with which to try to manage the challenges and crises that are sure to arise along our two countries’ intersecting trajectories.”

To be sure, we already have at least some means of crisis communication between us. The Americans and Russians have had a “hotline” for decades – having struck an agreement to this effect in 1963 , just after the Cuban Missile Crisis – and there has also been a loose U.S.-Chinese analogue in place since 1998, as well as a military-to-military Defense Telephone Link (DTL) arrangement since 2008 . U.S. officials have recently said , moreover, that they are now working with Chinese counterparts to improve military-to-military crisis communication channels further. That’s all for the good.

But these mechanisms remain flawed, not least because the Russians and (especially) Chinese apparently don’t like to use them very much. U.S. officials have complained for years , for example, that Chinese officials often simply don’t answer when Americans try to reach them, while Chinese and Russian leaders also routinely shut down ongoing dialogues every time they want to express grievance over something or pressure Washington into making some kind of diplomatic concession.

Both Beijing and Moscow clearly feel that we Americans care about such diplomatic engagement and communication channels more than they do, and they thus see our communications and dialogue channels less as opportunities to manage problems between our countries than as additional chances to exert leverage against Washington. So I’m not hugely optimistic about improving such dialogue and such communications.

Nevertheless, I still think it’s important to try. For example, I’d like to see regularized and routinized security and strategic stability dialogues, both with Russia and with China, as well as for China to plug itself into the existing multilateral communications network of the U.S.-based Nuclear Risk Reduction Center . Such dialogues and communication channels probably wouldn’t be very useful most of the time, but it would be very valuable to have them available – and for using them to become a comfortable and routine way of interacting – before things get spicy.

A Role for Intermediaries?

As for the role of potential third parties in mediating matters between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, I’ve got some skepticism.

A Range of Alternatives

While I acknowledge that there’s a broad, expanding literature on mediation in the international arena – something about which many folks in this room surely know a great deal – I am new to the topic. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there are various ways one can think about the potential role of third parties in helping disputants handle the problems between them. And it’s certainly true that intermediaries can sometimes play important roles in diplomatic negotiations.

In some sense, in fact, intermediation is what foreign ministries exist to do, for and within national governments. For most things, most of the time, diplomacy runs through direct engagement between individuals who are not the leaders of the parties to an international disagreement or dispute, but who are trained and employed by those leaders to be each government’s representatives to other governments. That’s what diplomats are, and what they do for a living.

Sometimes professional diplomats from third-party countries can also play a routinized role as intermediaries between parties that are in antagonistic relationships. Pursuant to agreements between their country and the United States, for instance, Swiss diplomats have long played a role in unofficially-but-officially representing the U.S. State Department by providing a backchannel mode of communication with Iran . (Swiss diplomats were also set to provide consular services to Americans unlucky enough to be in Venezuela , but this agreement languished for years .)

For some issues, however, run-of-the-mill professional diplomats aren’t always enough. Sometimes – and for some of the most dicey subjects, I’d imagine – it can be helpful to turn to a more unique sort of interlocutor, in the form of individual officials each with some special gravitas or personal relationship or connection with his or her country’s leader, and whom that leader thus trusts as a go-between more than might be the case with “just another” foreign service professional.

The recent talks between U.S. and Russian officials in Miami , for example – at which Washington agreed to a range of sweeping Russian demands for Ukrainian territory and constraints upon Ukraine’s sovereign right to defend itself, which President Trump thereupon set out to force Volodymyr Zelensky to accept – were led not by regular U.S. State Department and Russian Foreign Ministry officials but rather by Trump’s friend and confidante Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev , who runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund for Vladimir Putin. This kind of thing is an important mode of interaction these days, for President Trump dislikes and distrusts U.S. professional civil servants and foreign service officers – and indeed most traditional foreign policy and national security experts – depicting them as part of a shadowy “Deep State” opposed to his agenda.

But even Witkoff-style intermediaries are at least employees of one’s own government while working in such roles. It is also possible, however, for intermediation to be done by genuine third parties, from outside the government or from another country entirely. There is a long history, for example, of U.S. presidents enlisting the temporary services of out-of-office American officials to undertake sensitive diplomatic missions. A classic example of this are the roles played by former President Jimmy Carter in 1994 in helping pave the way for a U.S. agreement with North Korea and helping persuade a military junta in Haiti to surrender power . The former head of the U.S. Department of Energy and governor of the state of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, also played an on-again-off-again role as a kind of unofficial envoy between Washington and Pyongyang in the 2000s.

A third-party intermediary with no connection to either side – but representing an important or influential state – can also sometimes play a role in mediating disputes. Think here, for instance, of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s famous “ shuttle diplomacy” in the Middle East in 1974-75 dealing with the aftermath of the October 1973 war there.

And that’s just intermediary people . It’s also possible for a third-party country to help facilitate negotiations between to disputants by providing a neutral venue : a meeting site that provides officials from each side the chance to meet with less political and symbolic baggage than were meetings to be held in their national capitals. This “trusted venue” function can be very important.

Arms control negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union (and then the Russian Federation) were held in the neutral venue of Geneva for many decades, for example, and the Six-Party Talks that ran with North Korea in 2003-7, for instance, were held in Beijing. Similarly, the recent ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas were held here in Qatar, as also were the talks with the Taliban in late 2020 which the First Trump Administration agreed to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan . (Qatar, in fact, has acquired a strong reputation as a host for such sensitive negotiations .) In the same vein, Saudi Arabia has hosted recent U.S.-Russia talks about Ukraine , and Oman played an important role in hosting the quiet discussions between the U.S. officials and their Iranian counterparts that helped lead to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal with Iran reached in 2015.

At a more attenuated level, even “Track II”-type dialogues – a term that refers to meetings between at least notionally private and non-governmental experts – can also provide a degree of intermediation between antagonistic parties. Track II discussions provide a chance to express opinions, air concerns, share views, and explore ideas much more freely than in “Track I” meetings between serving officials, precisely because Track II participants aren’t “officially” representing their nations.

Track IIs can thus be valuable in helping advance mutual understanding and exploring possible solutions, and it’s not uncommon for such engagements to be back-briefed to officials in the countries in question, thus transmitting new ideas or understandings back to actual decision-makers. Such talks, in effect, permit a kind of quasi-diplomatic engagement which has less rigidity, volatility, and potentially entrapping accountability than formal, official engagements. Former senior officials are commonly employed in this way, and I’ve done quite a few such dialogues myself.

The Trickiness of Great-Power Intermediation

There are thus lots of models out there to draw upon when considering what role intermediaries can play in helping manage or resolve tensions between disputants. I’m just not sure that the current U.S.-China-Russia problem is very amenable to most of them.

To be sure, especially given President Trump’s tendency to turn to friends and confidantes rather than policy professionals to handle sensitive negotiations, it is likely the case that if there were to be high-level talks to identify the basic outlines of something like a new trilateral nuclear arms framework, he would send a Witkoff-style chum to handle them. Even in traditional arms control negotiating between Washington and Moscow, after all, more senior officials, or even the top political leaders themselves, would sometimes hammer out a “framework” agreement setting the general parameters for a deal before turning negotiations over to actual policy experts to figure out the details. (Such a framework agreement was reached between U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2009 , for instance, ten months before the resulting New START agreement was formally signed.)

As for actual third-party diplomatic intermediation, however, I doubt that’s very likely to be useful in our current three-nuclear-peer context.

To begin with, the subject matter – nuclear weaponry – is not particularly conducive to third-party involvement. It may be unlikely that such talks would actually involve open discussion of proliferation-sensitive information in a way that would be a problem under Article I of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons , but nuclear weaponry is still sufficiently sensitive (and serves as such a powerful symbol of national power and, alas, greatness) that I very much doubt officials in Washington, Beijing, or Moscow would be comfortable having a non -nuclear weapons state in any way “in the loop.”

Moreover, third-party intermediation in the trilateral nuclear superpower context is likely be structurally challenging, too. Historically, some third-party mediations – such as President Jimmy Carter’s role in bringing about the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978 – have benefited from the third-party representing a stakeholder which enjoys a significant position of power and influence vis-à-vis both disputants. (This is why powerful countries are sometimes so good at helping facilitate conflict resolution between less powerful ones; they can have considerable sway over the disputants.) But this, of course, is hard to imagine in the context of U.S.-China-Russia talks, which would be between the most powerful players on the planet.

Other efforts at intermediation, by contrast, simply rely upon the intrinsic personal expertise of gravitas of a particular intermediary. In nuclear affairs, however, it’s hard to imagine who could credibly play this role in the eyes of American, Chinese, and Russian officials alike.

Sometimes an institution can have the gravitas and reputational weight to do this – think, for instance, of the International Committee of the Red Cross serving as a neutral intermediary in negotiations over the release and repatriation of detainees in Yemen in 2016-20 . Nevertheless, in the nuclear weapons arena, I can’t think of any institution sufficiently respected by all three parties to play this role in connection with nuclear weaponry. Many international institutions, such as the U.N.’s own Office for Disarmament Affairs , in fact, have tainted themselves as potential nuclear intermediaries precisely because they carry so much political baggage as disarmament advocates and hence opponents of the nuclear capabilities the three big nuclear powers still clearly feel they need, and over which they would be negotiating.

Accordingly, I’m not optimistic about any kind of formal third-party mediation. If there’s any talking to be done, I’d imagine the “Big Three” will do it all themselves, directly.

Nevertheless, it’s not hard to imagine a third-party country being able to offer a more-or-less neutral venue for high-level nuclear talks, should such negotiations occur. Nor need this venue necessarily be limited to Geneva – though, as I noted, that is indeed the traditional place for arms control negotiating because of Switzerland’s Cold War neutrality and the presence of extensive United Nations offices there.

With Geneva being the traditional locale for “Cold War arms race negotiations,” in fact, I could even imagine a different location being preferred for trilateral U.S.-China-Russia talks, precisely in order to send the signal that whatever this challenging “three-body problem” is, it is not quite the same thing as the Cold War. So perhaps a new location might have value as a “trusted venue” for trilateral talks if and when such engagement seems possible. (I can almost sense our Qatari hosts here in the audience sitting up with attention at the possibility!)

With all that said, however, I think the most promising “next steps” for handling nuclear risks still lie directly between the three powers in question, and along lines of the development, expansion, and routinization of diplomatic dialogue and improved crisis communication channels. That’s not really an area where third parties can help us much, but I still think there’s useful work to be done.

Thanks for listening.

—Christopher Ford

Root Causes of Instability in the Sino-American Relationship

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:26:09 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his shorter oral remarks to the U.S-China Nuclear Workshop on November 19, 2025, convened by the Protect on Managing the Atom and the Council on Strategic Risks, held at the Belfer Center at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Good afternoon to those of you attending in person at Harvard for this event, in which I’m pleased to be able to participate – even if only “virtually” from here in London. The organizers have asked me to explore the “root causes” of instability in the Sino-American relationship, and though I can only offer my personal views, I’m happy to offer what perspectives I can.

The question of “root causes” is somewhat analytically tricky, not least because in the enormous complex system of human society it might be possible – if you really wanted to do so – to trace all sorts of elaborate causal genealogies for problems in the U.S.-China relationship far back into the remote past. You could presumably conclude, for instance, that both China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, and England’s King Henry VIII each played some role in setting up the conditions of Sino-American rivalry in the 21st Century.

But since that kind of deep and attenuated causality isn’t actually very interesting – and because it also seems pretty useless when it comes to providing us policy insights today – we need something more concrete. To get our brains going a bit, therefore, let me thus offer a causal typology for Sino-American instability inspired by the ideas about causes offered in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics .

A (Sort of) Aristotelean Typology

Aristotle wrote about four different types of cause: the “material,” the “formal,” the “efficient,” and the “final”:

Material Cause: For him, the most immediate sort of cause was the “material” one, which identifies the elements out of which a thing or situation is constructed. (A house might thus be “caused” by bricks and beams, or instance, or perhaps the word “gobsmacked” likewise “caused” by the two syllables “gob” and “smacked.”)

Formal Cause: This type of cause sought to identify the essence of the thing or situation you’re considering, responding to the question: “What is it?” Think of the “formal cause” as a kind of form or blueprint for the thing in question, making it what it is. (Having a folding screen, keyboard, processing unit, and battery, for instance, might be said to make the device I’m looking at right now into a “laptop.”)

Efficient Cause: “Efficient cause” refers to what makes or produces the thing or situation in question, answering a question about the origin of the change or motion that gives rise to that thing. (You probably learned in high school biology about a bunch of processes that might be said to constitute the efficient cause, for example, of a puppy.)

Final Cause: Lastly, the “final cause” identifies, in effect, what most fundamentally set in motion the process by which a given thing or situation emerged. For Aristotle, this answer was teleological. “What is its good?” he asked – meaning, “ for the sake of what did it occur or was it done?”

Since I’m only offering this typology as one loosely inspired by Aristotle rather than actually following him, however, I’ll interpret this fourth cause as referring to something not tied to assumptions about purpose but simply pointing to the deepest usefully identifiable sort of causality: what is the most fundamental causal driver for the thing in question?

Accordingly, as food for thought in our discussions here, let me try to offer a causal analysis of U.S.-China geopolitical instability through a lens inspired by – though admittedly actually drawing only very loosely upon – this fourfold Aristotelean classification.

Material Cause

You could say, for instance, that the “material cause” of Sino-American instability is some aggregate of specific, discrete policy choices made by the leaders of the countries. Involved. And indeed, it’s surely true that in some sense problems in the U.S.-China relationship do result from choices such as the determination of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to seize control of Taiwan, America’s commitment to helping Taiwan defend itself and protect the democratic autonomy of its population, Xi Jinping’s nuclear weapons build-up and moves to dominate and militarize the South China Sea, Donald Trump’s tariff policies, Chinese exports of fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexican drug cartels, America’s maintenance of military alliances with Japan and South Korea, Beijing’s restrictions on rare earth element (REE) exports and policies of cyber-facilitated intellectual property theft, U.S. semiconductor export restrictions and the U.S. Navy’s conduct of “freedom of navigation operations” (FONOPS), and Chinese human rights abuses in places such as Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong.

Just as if you took away the “material causes” of a house by disconnecting or removing the stones and timbers out of which it had been constructed – thus making it no longer a house but rather something like a rubble pile – so also there would presumably be less tension and instability in the Sino-American relationship if such specific national policy choices were revised. If you take away the “bad behaviors” each sees in the other, in other words, it’s not hard to imagine that the relationship would feel a lot warmer.

Nevertheless, I don’t find this “material cause” analysis very interesting, because most such policy decisions aren’t just casual and adventitious choices – made in the same way one might perhaps decide to have chocolate ice cream today but vanilla tomorrow. Rather, they tend to be tied together in meaningful ways, and to be linked on each side to conceptually antecedent choices of policy and strategy informed by divergent national objectives and value-commitments that neither look nor feel merely adventitious. We aren’t just accidentally irritating each other; more important dynamics are involved.

That’s why we need to look to other types of cause.

Formal Cause

If asked to identify a quasi-Aristotelean “formal cause” for Sino-American problems – identifying the essence of the thing – you might respond that this is an example of clashing conceptions of national interest in the economic, military, and political arenas. China, for example, feels it to be essential that it seize control of Taiwan, ideally through what Beijing terms “peaceful reunification,” but by means of outright invasion if necessary. The United States, however, perceives a strong interest in not permitting China to acquire that island as a stepping stone toward unimpeded power-projection access to the Pacific beyond the “First Island Chain,” fears that such Chinese military advances would undermine Washington’s alliance relationships with others in the region, does not wish China to gain control over Taiwan’s vital semiconductor manufacturing industry, and does not wish to see Taiwan’s thriving (and friendly) democracy destroyed and subjected to authoritarian CCP rule. Where such interests clash, policies will naturally conflict and instability increase.

This level of causal analysis can yield policy-relevant insights, at least if it proves possible to identify trade-space in which each side has something to offer the other. It was recently announced, for instance, that U.S. President Trump and CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping had reached an agreement to resolve or reduce some of the then-outstanding friction points between the two countries, with Trump backing down from most of his tariff restrictions on China in return for Xi relaxing the REE controls and soybeans purchase embargo Beijing had imposed in response to Trump’s tariffs, and also reducing exports of fentanyl precursor chemicals. This kind of bargaining is the stuff of day-to-day diplomatic relationship management.

Yet this also seems to me still to be a somewhat analytically unsatisfying level of causal understanding, for there is more to the challenge of Sino-American instability than simply the sum total of diverging conceptions of national interest on a laundry list of specific, discrete policy questions. I think there are still bigger themes involved that we must understand if we are to understand the “root causes” of the challenges we face.

Efficient Cause

For a quasi-Aristotelean “efficient cause,” we need to look to the origin of the change or motion that gives rise to the thing in question. Here, one might say that the efficient cause of Sino-American instability is great power competitive rivalry. This lets us see something beyond merely the fact that many of our perceived national interests clash, opening the door further to some understanding of why and how they do so.

Here, I would offer an account of “efficient cause” that is made up of two closely-related elements: (a) the enormous growth of Chinese power in recent years in economic, military, and poetical terms; and (b) the particular, highly ambitious strategic vision of regional hegemony and global systemic centrality to which this power is wedded, and in support of which that power is increasingly being wielded. (It is important that these elements exist in conjunction. Neither Chinese muscle tied to a more benign strategic vision nor a bold vision without the capacity to implement it would be particularly problematic; challenges of instability arise when growing power gives more and more options to those harboring aggressive ambitions.)

I’ve written and spoken about this challenge for years, and indeed it’s a problem to which I first began to draw attention as a scholar nearly two decades ago . In its own somewhat romanticized (though not entirely fictitious) vision of itself, China enjoyed a well-deserved centrality in the global system for thousands of years as the “Middle Kingdom.” It was, in that imagining, a realm ruled by a benevolent emperor – the “Son of Heaven” – and a cadre of Confucian mandarins selected through a meritocratic examination system, and it was comfortably situated at the center of a regional system of tributary states. In this vision, China received respectful and even awestruck status-deference by all other peoples as its due, excepting only the most scandalously un-Sinicized barbarians on the geographic periphery – brutes who needed (for precisely this reason) to be kept at bay by great frontier walls and periodically subjected to expeditionary military “chastisements” to keep them in line.

This happily Sinocentric order – which to Chinese thinkers seemed quite the natural order of things, derogation from which was offensive and aberrant – was shattered by European imperialism (and, not long thereafter, Japanese imperialism) in the 19th Century. As a result of abuses beginning with the Opium War in 1839, China was subjected to what came later to be described as the “Century of Humiliation.”

It has been the objective of Chinese nationalist thinkers ever since to rectify things, returning the world to its proper state of (Sinocentric) order and China to its birthright of dominance within that world. General Secretary Hu Jintao talked about this as building a “harmonious world” modeled on the supposedly “harmonious society” created by CCP rule in China; his successor Xi Jinping terms it the global “shared community of common destiny” that will arise out of China’s “national rejuvenation.” But while the phrasing may vary, the dream remains deeply and ambitiously Sinocentric.

Making achievement of this dream seem increasingly possible , in turn, is the dramatic expansion of Chinese power that has occurred since the CCP finally abandoned Maoist madnesses and began to embrace market-based economics and export-driven growth in the early 1980s under Deng Xiaoping.

Even the weak may have dreams, but the flush of expanding power and influence can make dreams feel increasingly like plans . And, as I warned back in 2006 when I first began to publish on issues of U.S.-China strategic competition, with strength can come options and opportunity:

“As China’s strength grows …the Middle Kingdom may well become more assertive in insisting on the sort of Sinocentric hierarchy that its history teaches it to expect and its traditional notions of power and legitimacy will encourage it to demand.”

Alas, that is exactly what happened, and this conjunction of power and ambition has had huge implications for U.S.-China relations, because it is the United States that has long been the central and dominant state in the global system that this rising China seeks to reorder into a more Sinocentric form.

This should be in no way surprising, for some Chinese nationalists had begun to identify America as their country’s ultimate rival and competitor for hegemony even in the earliest years of the 20th Century. As early as 1903, for instance, the nationalist thinker Liang Qichao visited the United States and learned of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s construction of a powerful naval fleet. This distressed Liang, who felt that the growth of U.S. naval power in the Pacific would preclude China from its own ultimate destiny of global hegemony. Liang wrote that “no country is in a better position to utilize the Pacific in order to hold sway over the world than China,” but he lamented that as long as China remained weak and the United States dominant, his country would remain “unable to become the master of the Pacific” in the ways he clearly felt it eventually needed to be.(1)

The challenges created as the ambitions of rising powers rub up against the interests of dominant, status quo ones – and the stresses that such friction can place upon the system of order in which such dominant states hold sway – are an old story, but they are no less real for all that. Nor do such situations invariably result in war, for from the example of U.S.-British relations in the early 20th Century one can see that under certain conditions it is at least possible for the strategic baton to be handed off with relative amity from a formerly dominant power to an upstart rival. Nevertheless, the peaceful succession of the Anglo-American case may represent the exception more than the rule, and one can certainly see a recipe for dangerous geopolitical instabilities along the Sino-American axis.

Accordingly, if you’re looking for a quasi-Aristotelean “efficient cause” for Sino-American instabilities, I would point you to the ways in which China’s huge growth in wealth and power since the 1980s has increasingly encouraged it to try to operationalize the dreams of Sinocentric systemic “return” and regional hegemony that Chinese nationalists have nursed in their hearts since the Opium War.

Final Cause

But what about a “final” cause, representing, here at least, the deepest usefully identifiable sort of causality? Though, as noted, I’m veering away from Aristotle by looking not at teleology but at historical and structural factors, let me offer a thought.

I suggest that the deepest cause for the current challenges of the U.S.-China relationship lies well below the level of ideological confrontation between Leninism and democracy, the pressures that globalized free trade and capital mobility place upon industrialized economies in a world when labor costs are lower in developing countries, or the idiosyncratic ways in which romanticized memories of Sinic civilizational centrality inform contemporary CCP dreams of “national rejuvenation.”

More basic than all of these case-specific things are the more fundamental general dynamics of how the evolution of economic and military power occurs in eras of disruptive and transformative technological change.

The story of the traumatic encounter between an ancient and complacently arrogant China and a brash Europe that in the early 19th Century had just been gifted vast new power and dynamism by the scientific and technological advances of the First Revolution represented a radical new type of phenomenon, for no such full-spectrum range of interconnected and self-reinforcing human advancements had occurred before. The arrival of technological modernity in the 19th Century was stunningly disruptive, transforming the lives of people and the trajectory of nations more and faster than in any prior era of human history.

As I noted to an Oxford University alumni group earlier this week , however, while such transformative technology-driven change produced enormous benefits in many fields, it also

“turned geopolitics on its head, creating huge new asymmetries in power as some reached technological modernity far in advance of others. This asymmetry made possible a century of European politico-economic domination and imperialist expansion around the world.”

And while the First Industrial Revolution was the first major example of transformative science and technology (S&T)-based change, it was not the last. As Chinese strategic writers have themselves emphasized, a Second Industrial Revolution grounded in oil, steel, and heavy industry soon came along in the early 20th Century, itself also producing major changes in the geopolitical balance of power as the “first mover” in that second revolution (the United States) came to supersede the first-mover in the first (Great Britain) as the leading state in the international system. The Americans were then able to perpetuate their geopolitical advantages in the late years of the 20th Century through their first-mover status in Third Industrial Revolution.

Today, Chinese and U.S. officials alike seem to believe that a Fourth Industrial Revolution is coming, and each country is maneuvering against the other in hopes of seizing first mover position for itself – or at least of denying it to the other, for fear of catastrophic disadvantage. Much of the “through line” of Chinese nationalist thinking since the late 19th Century, moreover, has revolved around rectifying the so-called “Century of Humiliation” China faced at European and Japanese hands after those competitors first beat the Middle Kingdom to the mark in acquiring 19th Century industrial power and then exploited the resulting power advantages in their dealings with the Qing Dynasty.

To the same end, Xi Jinping’s great project of “national rejuvenation” now revolves around asserting Chinese power and prerogatives in ways that displace American power at the center of international order, thus returning China to the status, norm-setting role, and dominant global position it imagines to be its ancient birthright. Meanwhile, Beijing’s relative degree of success so far in advancing this agenda is beginning to elicit increasing resentment in an America that became accustomed to such a centrality as a result of its successes in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions.

Such dynamics, in fact, are widespread. Longstanding themes of perceived grievance keyed to real or imagined abuses of Western power made possible by the asymmetric advantages of differential modernization also continue to be powerful sources of political energy and mobilization – and drivers of various revisionist geopolitical agendas – in countries as diverse as Russia, Iran, and some states of the anti-imperialist Global South.

So let me make a sweeping claim: This kind of thing is a general characteristic of transformative technological change, which occurs unevenly and hence creates vast asymmetries in power between those countries that achieve the next level of S&T modernity first and those who lag behind. This makes technological development a powerful engine not just for material progress but also for geopolitical instability. The power asymmetries it produces become a locus of strategic competition, a source of imperial arrogance in some, and a reason for resentful grievance and oppositional counter-mobilization in others – even while also giving countries ever more sophisticated tools with which to attack or intimidate each other. They also give technological “haves” an incentive to slow or block particularly sensitive or empowering advancements by others.(2)

All of this naturally conduces to pervasive instability.

For all the wondrous advances they have brought the world, in other words, the disruptive changes of technological modernity have also been the engine for continuing cycles of advantage and resentment that have rippled through the international arena for two centuries – cycles of which today’s Sino-American challenges are just one example, and which show no sign of abating as the headlong rush of scientific and technological progress continues.

How’s that for a “final cause”?

Conclusion

I know it’s an important priority for the organizers of this conference to identify constructive agenda items for a diplomatic summit between U.S. President Trump and Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. To the degree that my analysis is correct, however, the ability of such a summit to ameliorate instabilities in the Sino-American relationship may be quite limited.

To be sure, there may yet remain some limited trade-space in the “formal cause” arena, in which diplomatic bargaining over specific, discrete issues may sometimes be able – at least temporarily – to relieve a degree of pressure. So there’s every reason to continue to seek such possibilities, and I wish our respective pre-summit “ sherpas ” well.

Especially at a time in which disruptive and potentially transformative technology-driven change seems to be accelerating and both Beijing and Washington already feel themselves to be in an acute strategic competition, however, I think we may be stuck with a great deal of baked-in instability for a long while yet. Nor is it hard to imagine things getting worse before they get better.

Nevertheless, if I had to suggest an agenda item for a Trump-Xi summit that speaks in some way to the deepest and most problematic dynamics here, I’d recommend we look for ways not to “solve” problems between us – for in some sense they may be insoluble except perhaps by time and structural change – but rather means by which to channel or to manage those tensions in ways that are at least somewhat less destructive than would otherwise be the case.

Doing more to routinize and institutionalize diplomatic engagement with each other over national security policy, for instance, could hardly be a bad thing – and might help, at the margins, in at least keeping things from being worse between the two rivals than structural circumstances all but compel them to be. This could include finally persuading China to accept a regularized security and strategic stability dialogue with the United States, and ideally also plugging Beijing into the existing multilateral communications network of the U.S.-based Nuclear Risk Reduction Center .

That way, at least, we would have a fighting chance of being able to talk reliably to each other on a regular basis. To be sure, there will surely continue to be lots of ways in which we each choose policies that raise tensions with the other, and it is likely wrong to attribute Sino-American problems primarily to a “lack of mutual understanding.” (To some extent, it’s possible that we actually understand each other – or at least the real divergences of interest and strategic objective that divide us – all too well!) Nevertheless, better communications links and habits can at least help prevent actual misunderstandings, as well as giving our leaders better tools with which to try to manage the challenges and crises that are sure to arise along our two countries’ intersecting trajectories.

This may seem rather a “small beer” answer to the world-historical and intractable dynamics of asymmetrically advancing modernity, but it’s something . And it may be, at least for now, the best we can hope for.

—Christopher Ford

Notes:

(1) Quoted in R. David Arkush & Leo O. Lee, Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (University of California Press, 1989), 83.

(2) It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that the “Dark Forest hypothesis” that animates so much of the second and third novels of Lu Cixin’s award-winning Three-Body Problem science fiction trilogy – namely, the idea that a scientifically advanced world will fear being overtaken by an initially less-advanced one capable of innovating rapidly, and will hence feel an incentive to block scientific progress in that world or perhaps even destroy it before such advances occur – came out of a China that is in the modern era obsessed with recovering from its own 19th Century techno-economic overmatch by the West and by threats of “containment” by the United States.

Geopolitical Risks and the U.S.-China Relationship

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 11:36:07 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his (much) shorter remarks on a panel on geopolitical risk on November 18, 2025, sponsored by Forward Global and the Oxford University Alumni Network.

Good afternoon fellow Oxford alumni, and thanks for having me be a part of this event. I can only offer my personal views, of course – and I’m not speaking here on behalf either of my two primary institutional affiliations, Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies or the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But I’m happy to offer what thoughts I can.

A Cautionary Note

To begin with, as a cautionary note, I can’t help but observe that it’s difficult to be “right” about which hypothesized global risks are ones that will actually materialize. Many risks have been hyped before and haven’t panned out.

I remember being told as a kid in the 1970s, for example, that the human population was growing out of control, that our numbers would soon outstrip mankind’s ability to produce food, and that billions of people would starve to death – that is, if we didn’t die first from the chemicals with which we were poisoning our air and water. At a time when the United States and the Soviet Union faced each other in a ferocious Cold War rivalry with scores of thousands of nuclear weapons on each side, moreover, many folks expected we’d probably incinerate ourselves long before that inevitable ecological apocalypse, leaving only cockroaches to enjoy all that polluted land if they didn’t freeze first from “nuclear winter.” To top it off, we were then said also to be passing “peak oil” and that our economies were thus destined to collapse into energy starvation.

Yet today, the Cold War is over, Washington and Moscow still compete in the nuclear weapons arena, but their arsenals nonetheless now stand at a fraction of their Cold War peaks, and there isn’t even a Soviet Union at all anymore. At the same time, many seem to feel today that the world actually doesn’t have enough people, or at least that declining fertility rates will soon create a demographic crisis of underpopulation . Meanwhile, we’re now said to be producing far too much energy, which will lead to a climate crisis of global warming that will kill a great many of us and much of the rest of the biosphere besides – at least if ruthlessly sentient Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots don’t preemptively murder or enslave all us inconveniently biological beings along the way to ensuring computational silicon’s mastery of the globe.

To be sure, today’s doomsaying might actually be right, and maybe we really are in conclusively catastrophic trouble for all these much-talked-of reasons. But history should probably serve as a reminder that for better or worse, Yogi Berra was correct that “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Risk in the U.S.-China Relationship

Nevertheless, let me try to answer your question about geopolitical risk in the U.S.-China relationship. In this respect, I’d like to point to four dynamics that together create particularly acute geopolitical risk right now, and that layer onto – or perhaps exacerbate – the trends and risks that your other guests today have already mentioned.

The first is the intrinsic risk of geopolitical destabilization from emerging and disruptive technologies (EDTs), the second is the deterioration of the modern information space, the third is the ongoing threat from weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation, and the fourth is the Chinese geopolitical ambition that has helped create a fierce competitive and increasingly hostile great power rivalry between United States and China. These dynamics, moreover, are related, for each has the potential to exacerbate and accelerate the others – and, I think, each does.

Emerging and Disruptive Technologies

As for EDTs, those of us in the nonproliferation community know well that even a single technological advancement can have huge geopolitical ramifications, as of course occurred with the development of nuclear technology. But more potentially significant is the way in which entire interconnected suites of technological innovation can rapidly transform the global system.

We’ve known this is possible since new scientific and technological (S&T) knowledge transformed everything as a result of the First Industrial Revolution some two centuries ago, which really could be said to have created the modern world.

Today, many believe a new suite of radical and interconnected technological changes are likely to transform things again. Most expect this charge to be led by advances in AI, but hugely transformative possibilities also exist with other EDTs such as quantum computing and various novel biological science applications, particularly where such rapidly-evolving technologies intersect, overlap, and reinforce each other’s disruptive potency.

To be sure, such disruption can produce many good things: think, for instance, of the impact of the First Industrial Revolution on transportation, health care, communications, and all sorts of other aspects of daily life.

But remember, too, that the economic, technological, and military advantages that accrued to those countries with “first mover” (or “earlier mover”) advantages in that revolution also turned geopolitics on its head, creating huge new asymmetries in power as some countries reached technological modernity far in advance of others. These asymmetries made possible a century of European politico-economic domination and imperialist expansion around the world.

Since such transformative science and technology (S&T)-driven changes can be so disruptive, it follows that should be rather uneasy about where today’s flush of technological change – which some have described as portending a new Industrial Revolution – may take us. Such change is indeed likely to bring lots of good things, but it may also upend geopolitics yet again, to uncertain and potentially very dangerous effect. Hence geopolitical risk.

The Collapsing Global Information Space

Another development that I think entails geopolitical risk relates to the decay of the global information space in an epistemological crisis that seems increasingly – and for perhaps the first time in centuries – to have deeply destabilized the very idea of objective knowledge and the possibility and means of seeking it. To be sure, so-called social media is hardly the sole villain in this story, but it’s one worth flagging for the divisive informational and ideational polarization that it has helped create. Deliberate epistemologically-destabilizing disinformation has also played a powerful role, originating not only from willful disruptors such as Russian and (increasingly) Chinese propagandists, but also from domestic actors who have learned to win political advantage from hyperscaling intellectually empty but incendiary informational flatulence, turning critical matters of national policymaking into mere opportunities for polarizing ideological performance art and tribalistic political onanism.

Whatever the many contributing factors, however, our age and our societies have clearly become desperately fractured by these dynamics. This is bad enough on its own terms, but it also has the side effect of retarding our ability – as a society, as a country, and as an international community – to handle the other geopolitical challenges I’m describing. These dynamics of information-space decay threaten to make thoughtful decision-making, policy consistency, and real strategy all but impossible, mitigating instead in favor of volatile extremism as the policy pendulum swings between reflexively outraged, provocative, and performative militancies of the Right and the Left without ever slowing around anything that looks like real policymaking seriousness.

WMD Proliferation

Third, I wouldn’t be much of a nonproliferation policy guy, if I didn’t also mention the geopolitical risk of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation. But it’s all too real.

Potential proliferation, and especially nuclear proliferation – either to “rogue regimes” with disruptively self-aggrandizing geopolitical agendas or to “friendly proliferators” who are worried about existential threats from great powers with such disruptive geopolitical agendas – has long been a threat. Yet, on the whole, the international system handled such pressures tolerably well during the Cold War years of alliance block bipolarity and the early post-Cold War years of American-dominated systemic unipolarity.

I am less convinced, however, that these WMD proliferation pressures are manageable in the emerging era of multipolar rivalry. It will likely be far harder to handle these challenges today, given the growth of Chinese military power and its destabilizing effect upon East Asian geopolitics, the return of naked ambitions of territorial expansion in Europe as Russia wages wars of annexation and conquest against its neighbors, the prospect of further such wars of territorial expansion by China ( e.g., against Taiwan) in the Indo-Pacific, the paralysis of international institutions due to great power rivalry, and the recent rise of quasi-isolationist political elites in America who do not prize alliance relationships and look rather askance on overseas commitments. From a proliferation perspective, the coincidence of these factors is quite a toxic and dangerous brew.

Chinese Ambitions of Global Predominance

The fourth dynamic I’d like to flag – Chinese ambitions of global predominance – intersects these other three dynamics in worrying ways. In the context of strategic competition exacerbated by such ambitions, for example, the huge impact of EDT-driven change can have on the relative power some countries have over others becomes particularly significant and potentially destabilizing. Asymmetries of power exacerbated and accelerated by S&T-driven change also increase WMD proliferation pressures, even while the collapsing information space in Western democracies makes a coherent and sustained response to geopolitical risk harder to achieve.

But let’s unpack those Chinese ambitions a bit. Not that long ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still followed Deng Xiaoping’s famous exhortation about “biding one’s time and hiding one’s capabilities,” and it tempered its rise as an economic superpower with policies of non-provocative military and strategic prudence and circumspection. As its power grew, however, China became impatient with such strategic cautiousness, and has clearly now thrown it aside in favor of open self-assertion.

Geopolitical impatience and self-confidence now rule the day in Beijing, and “hiding and biding” has been replaced by unabashed self-assertion as China seeks to achieve its “national rejuvenation” ambition of returning to the position of geopolitical centrality of which Chinese nationalists feel China was robbed by European and Japanese imperial power in the 19th Century. It should be quite clear by now that despite the carefully mollifying reassurances of Chinese diplomats during the “hiding and biding” period, China’s rise is really about far more than merely making the country and its huge population prosperous, safe, and comfortable.

It is also about power , and about Beijing’s desire to re-acquire the systemic centrality and norm-setting primacy that its romanticized vision of its own history as the “Middle Kingdom” – a term was always really more a systemic label than a geographic one – leads its leaders to conclude is China’s birthright and destiny. For an international system that is full of countries bristling with increasingly sophisticated and destructive weapons, wrapped in global interdependencies, and facing a potential whirlwind of transformative technological change – not to mention the core values of which still prize national sovereignty and autonomy and anathematize vassal state subjugation – China’s systemically disruptive ambitions present considerable geopolitical risk indeed.

To judge from what Xi Jinping has himself said, China believes a transformative “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is coming, and Beijing is determined to ensure that it – rather than the United States – sits in the “first mover” driver’s seat for this new revolution.

As officials in Beijing see it, it was the First Industrial Revolution that permitted its “first mover” – Great Britain – to acquire vast global power. Indeed, the world in some sense reordered itself around British economic, trading, scientific, and military might, helping make the 19th Century “Britain’s century.” And it is said to be, in turn, the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions that enabled America to dominate the 20th and early 21st Centuries.

So when Xi Jinping pledges China to the task of seizing the commanding heights of the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution, he is clearly signaling China’s aim to acquire an analogous position of relative power and systemic dominance for itself.

Not surprisingly, this conduces to geopolitical risk.

To be sure, the disruptive impact of these dynamics would likely be less if the United States succeeded in acquiring first mover” status in a Fourth Industrial Revolution than if China did, for America has already been the globally dominant power for many years, and its “victory” would, so to speak, break less geopolitical crockery.

By contrast, China’s success in Xi’s project to lead that revolution would change more things and present greater dangers to the many states whose sovereignty, democratic governance, and political autonomy have for many decades been protected by the existing international order and America’s power within it. A new Sinocentric order could thus be very dangerous to the sovereignty and autonomy of such states.

But make no mistake: the conjunction of rapid EDT-driven transformative change and great power rivalry represents a considerable geopolitical risk either way. No matter who “wins,” the prospect of these two giants competing for power and advantage in a world where S&T innovations can rapidly result in transformatively disruptive changes not just in economic but in military power is certainly something to worry about.

Conclusion

This all amounts to a pretty intimidating concatenation of geopolitical risks. But I hope our discussions today will help encourage more creative thinking about how to handle them.

—Christopher Ford

U.S. Perspectives on Nuclear Weapons Deterrence and Use

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 17:17:20 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks at a conference in China on November 8, 2025.

Good day, everyone, and many thanks for having me to this important discussion on strategic stability. For this section of our event, I’d like to say a few words about current thinking about nuclear weapons deterrence and potential nuclear weapons use in the community of U.S. nuclear strategy experts.

These are only my personal views, of course, and they don’t necessarily represent those of anyone either at Missouri State or at CSIS. With that caveat, however, I do believe it’s possible to say some things about current American perspectives.

Remarkable Consensus

In this regard, it bears emphasis that as far as I can tell, the nuclear experts community in Washington today is more unified on nuclear weapons issues than I can ever remember them being before.

For as long as I can remember, until recently, U.S. nuclear weapons policy experts were sharply divided over many key issues related to nuclear modernization, deterrence, and force posture. I’m not referring to the longstanding and quite intractable division between those who support some form of nuclear deterrence and hard-core nuclear disarmament advocates in American civil society who do not – though that divide of course persists, and has done so even in periods like today in which grave national security threats have led to disarmament perspectives being marginalized to the point of insignificance in U.S. policymaking circles. Rather, I mean that for most of the last half-century, even the deterrence community has been internally divided over questions of how to achieve the stable deterrence of adversary aggression that its members desire.

During the early heyday of détente in the 1970s, for example, the details of U.S. strategic arms agreements with the Soviet Union – for example, in the Interim Agreement on limiting strategic offensive arms (a.k.a. SALT I ) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 – arms control with Moscow was accepted by mainstream Republicans and Democrats but remained controversial on the hawkish political Right. In the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, fueled by the Soviet Union’s massive nuclear build-up and growing global adventurism in the 1970s, expert policy debates flared in America over U.S. new weapons programs such as the canceled Enhanced Radiation Weapon (ERW, a.k.a. “neutron bomb”), the MX missile (a.k.a. “Peacekeeper”), the B-1 bomber , and the intermediate-range cruise missiles and ballistic missiles NATO deployed in Europe in response to Soviet deployments of SS-20 systems .

There were fewer disagreements in U.S. expert circles after the end of the Cold War when attention shifted from how to meet Soviet threats to how best to manage reductions in our nuclear force posture now that the U.S.-Soviet rivalry had ended. Even then, however, debates continued about the pace and scale of such cuts – as well as over the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) , and whether Cold War-era limitations on ballistic missile defenses still made sense in the face of third-party missile threats from North Korea and Iran.

The early 2020s saw continued controversy in U.S. policy circles over our withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002, the nature and extent of American “extended deterrence” deployments of nuclear gravity bombs in Europe, and whether the United States should develop “new” nuclear weapons such as the abortive “ Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator ” and the “ Reliable Replacement Warhead ” programs. Policy debates flared still further in the mid- to late 2010s, fueled by the awkward coincidence of the Obama Administration’s disarmament-friendly agenda with Russia’s violation of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and failure to honor its promises to reduce short-range nuclear weapons , as well as the Kremlin’s return to a posture of territorial expansionism with invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014.

In light of all these debates, however, what strikes me as remarkable today is the degree to which there isn’t major disagreement in the U.S. nuclear expert community anymore, at least for now. In the face of recent events – including Russian and Chinese deployments of new strategic systems and theater-range nuclear weapons for we have no counterpart, the resurgence of Russian territorial aggression in Europe, the potential for Chinese aggression against Taiwan or others in East Asia, and the huge nuclear weapons build-up now underway as Beijing sprints toward what will soon be at least numerical parity, thus creating for U.S. defense planners the vexing “three-body problem” of having to deter two nuclear peers at the same time – the U.S. expert community has recently reached an essentially unprecedented degree of consensus that a more robust U.S. nuclear force posture is now urgently needed.

You can see this new consensus, for example, in the unanimous bipartisan conclusions of the Strategic Posture Review Commission in 2023 , which found that the current U.S. program for modernizing our strategic delivery systems was necessary but not sufficient – and hence that more weapons of some sort were thus needed if deterrence is to be preserved The similarly bipartisan and unanimous Commission on the National Defense Strategy endorsed this conclusion in 2024, while earlier this year the bipartisan and unanimous Senior Study Group on Strategic Stability at the U.S. Institute of Peace went even further, explicitly calling for uploading more warheads onto U.S. strategic delivery systems and for the development and deployment of new theater-range nuclear systems. Over this same period, the Biden Administration – which entered office pining nostalgically for the days in which President Obama could receive a Nobel Peace Prize merely for talking optimistically about disarmament – came around to this view. By the late summer of 2024, in fact, Biden Administration officials were clearly signaling that in the face of growing nuclear threats in this “ new nuclear age ,” the United States had to “ shift to a more competitive approach ” and might soon “ have no choice but to adjust our posture and capabilities to preserve deterrence and stability .”

Ours being a vibrant and diverse democracy that prizes free speech, there naturally exist some marginalized outliers still calling for complete disarmament. And even the expert community is bound to disagree more within itself as debates shift to specifically what new systems the United States needs, how many of them are required, and how much all this will cost.

That said, the degree of U.S. expert consensus today around having a more robust nuclear posture is quite extraordinary, and speaks volumes about the degree to which Russian and Chinese nuclear policies over the last decade or so have produced a new era of instability and arms race competition. In terms of sheer numbers, the U.S. nuclear arsenal has on the whole been shrinking since 1967 , but it now seems that “ U.S. nuclear policy is now back – more in sorrow than in anger, to be sure, but back nonetheless – in the ‘build-up’ business ” again, for the first time in many decades. Some expansion of nuclear capabilities, American experts tend to feel, is now necessary to preserve deterrence in a context in which our strategic adversaries are expanding their own nuclear holdings, proclaim themselves to be in a “partnership” against us and in an alliance with nuclear weapons proliferator regimes, and seem disturbingly interested in invading and occupying their neighbors.

There does still remain interest in arms control among U.S. experts, though much less optimism about it than in previous years, thanks to Russia’s appalling record of arms control violations and China’s continued disinterest in even talking about arms control at all. An additional problem is the degree to which China’s enormous nuclear buildup casts a shadow over the possibilities for arms control even with Russia, since limitations that Washington might find acceptable vis-à-vis Moscow were we still in a purely dyadic relationship now also need to be assessed in the context of what America needs in order to be able to deter Chinese aggression as well.

(The need for augmented U.S. capabilities vis-à-vis China, for instance, is already emerging as a key reason why the United States may have difficulty accepting Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that Washington and Moscow extend the central limits of the New START agreement for another year. Moscow has a long history of proposing arms control limits designed to strategically disadvantage the United States , and I doubt it’s a coincidence that Putin decided we should extend those limits only after U.S. experts recognized that we need a more robust nuclear posture to meet the challenges of deterring two nuclear peers simultaneously. That’s something, of course, that Putin doesn’t want us to be able to do, and extending New START limits would preclude changes to the current treaty-dictated strategic warhead cap.)

There is a bit more optimism in U.S. expert circles about the possibility of risk-reduction steps or other transparency and confidence-building measures (TCBMs) with Russia or China. Even here, however, after several years of Biden Administration attempts to elicit such dialogue, China’s continuing general disinterest in negotiations casts a pall over things.

To some extent, therefore, the most optimistic vision for traditional limits-based arms control among U.S. nuclear experts today seems almost to entail first passing through a period of U.S. counter-deployments of some sort in the hope of changing the concrete incentives facing Chinese and Russian leaders to finally make them take such negotiating seriously. This is, after all, what occurred with the so-called “Euromissile” deployments of 1983, which turned out to be exactly what was needed to entice the Soviets to agree to the INF Treaty of 1987. This conceptual model of deploy-and-negotiate first returned to the fore in the Trump Administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review , and to the extent that arms control has a future at this point at all, such an “INF model” feels like the best that most U.S. experts now expect.

This, then, is the conceptual terrain in Washington which I would urge you to bear in mind as we have our discussions here in Shanghai today. President Trump clearly does seem to want some kind of nuclear weapons deal on “the nuclear” with China and with Russia, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Chinese and Russian policies that have stacked the deck against any kind of dramatic solution in the short term. To the degree that the “INF model” – that is, undertaking countervailing deployments to meet nuclear threats and give one’s adversary concrete reasons to want to negotiate with you – does indeed represent a key pathway through which a Trumpian “ peace through strength ” agenda could catalyze arms control agreement, future progress may still be possible. But given the prevailing strategic circumstances, we should probably not get our hopes up too much.

Circumstances of Nuclear Use

Such is the context in which I think U.S. policy experts tend to see the challenges of deterrence today. A related question is about what such experts see as the most likely circumstances of nuclear weapons use .

To begin with, it’s worth remembering that most Western deterrence experts feel that it’s actually not a good idea to wholly preclude nuclear weapons use. That may sound paradoxical, but having nuclear weapons for deterrence basically requires at least some willingness to use them, since it’s precisely the possibility of potential use that does the work of deterring.

For this reason, though being too willing to use nuclear weapons would be powerfully destabilizing, it is to at least some degree essential to be willing to use nuclear weapons in the right circumstances: deterrence requires this, and this is especially true for the “extended nuclear deterrence” that the United States offers to its allies to preserve their security against aggression and reduce their perceived incentives to develop nuclear weapons on their own. So while keeping the risk of nuclear use as low as possible consistent with deterrence is clearly an important objective, entirely removing any such risk wouldn’t be wise unless and until the prospect of large-scale aggression – including purely conventionally-armed aggression, as well as attack with non -nuclear forms of WMD – can be reliably taken off the table.

As for the actual circumstances in which nuclear use is most likely to occur, most Western experts today do not seem to worry much about the kind of “bolt from the blue” first-strike threats that sometimes concerned U.S. planners during the Cold War. So far, the United States retains confidence in the survivable second-strike capability represented by its ballistic missile submarine fleet, and would appear that the overall deterrent balance of the central Russo-American and Sino-American strategic standoffs are holding.

Nor does there seem to be overmuch concern in Washington about nuclear weapons use resulting from an accidental or unauthorized nuclear launch, though such possibilities cannot be ruled out. The huge reductions in nuclear force posture since the end of the Cold War undertaken both by the United States and Russia have likely somewhat reduced the risk of such mishaps, as has the development of limited ballistic missile defense capabilities that can provide at least a partial buffer against such eventualities. President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense will likely increase the effectiveness of this buffer, moreover, while also adding a greater capacity to cope with – and thus deter – potential adversary efforts to use limited nuclear strikes on the U.S. homeland for coercive bargaining purposes in a crisis.

Rather, the most likely circumstances of nuclear weapons use today are felt to arise from of escalation dynamics in a conventional war involving nuclear-armed participants, such as in the Western Pacific under a Taiwan invasion scenario, or in Central Europe in the event of Russian attack upon a NATO ally. Nuclear use could occur in such a context if one of the nuclear-possessing belligerents felt itself at risk of a catastrophic loss in that war, and if it calculated that crossing the nuclear threshold would turn the tide in its favor or somehow shock its opponent into war termination or limitation on reasonably favorable terms. (Another possible use scenario involves an adversary that seeks regional aggression but lacks confidence in its ability to prevail with purely conventional arms, and which therefore opts to combine a conventional attack with limited nuclear strikes in theater, trusting to the overall strategic standoff – and its numerical advantages over its opponents in theater-level nuclear force – to deter effective responses.)

Especially in the face of Western countries’ numerical disadvantage in theater-range forces in comparison either to Russian or Chinese deployments and their leaders increasingly naked territorial ambitions, it has become a central challenge for Western strategy to deter such escalatory choices by deploying more theater-class systems to put more “rungs” onto the proverbial nuclear “escalation ladder” before the level of a strategic exchange.

This need was already beginning to become a concern as early as 2010, when the U.S. Senate’s resolution of ratification for New START made clear that any future arms control agreement with Russia needed also to include non-strategic weapons, a category in which Moscow even then enjoyed a considerable advantage. The need for more options in response to Russian and Chinese advantages in such systems was also the reason for the First Trump Administration’s deployment of a low-yield warhead option (the W76-2) for the Trident submarine-launched missile as a sort of interim or “bridging” solution, and for our initiation under that administration of the Submarine-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N) program. Building more theater-range capabilities – both in nuclear and in conventional systems – to offset destabilizing Russian and Chinese advantages and propensities to coercive bargaining is today an area of increasing agreement among the broad body of U.S. nuclear policy experts.

Conclusion

To sum up, I don’t think the basic theory underlying nuclear deterrence in Western minds has really changed at all. Instead, what has happened to create today’s remarkable degree of U.S. expert community consensus in favor of an augmented nuclear posture at both the strategic and (especially) the theater levels is the direct result of changes in the security environment created by China’s nuclear build-up, Russian and Chinese advantages in theater-class nuclear weaponry, Russia’s turn to regional aggression for purposes of territorial expansion, and the prospect of China’s invasion and annexation of Taiwan. In the face of these developments, Washington’s nuclear policy experts feel that more U.S. capabilities are required if deterrence is to remain stable in the future.

Advances by America’s adversaries have thus managed to accomplish what decades of doctrinal, ideological, and academic debate could not: they have brought about a notable degree of agreement in favor of a robust, deterrence-focused agenda of force posture augmentation among nuclear policy experts on both sides of the political aisle in the United States.

I hope this outline of thinking in U.S. nuclear policy circles has been useful, and that it will help contextualize our discussions here on strategic stability.

—Christopher Ford

Whither the U.S. Nuclear Policy Process?

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 21:47:36 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to the Labs Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS on October 20, 2025.

Good afternoon, everyone. It’s such pleasure to meet the inaugural cohort of the CSIS Project on Nuclear Issues’ “Labs Nuclear Scholars Initiative”! Congratulations for having been selected to be part of this program.

My name is Chris Ford, and I’m a professor with Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies, but I’ve been around the nuclear weapons policy business for quite a while now. I first got started in the field back in 2003, when I moved from the Senate Intelligence Committee staff to the State Department as the Deputy Assistant Secretary in charge of arms control and nonproliferation compliance assessment, and in various ways I’ve been involved in nuclear policy matters ever since.

Naturally, I can only offer you my personal opinions, and I’ve been out of office as Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation since early 2021. Accordingly, nothing I say here will necessarily represent the views of anybody else. Nevertheless, it’s wonderful to see bright young experts cutting their teeth and beginning to make names for themselves in this field. We need you!

I’ve been asked to speak about the role of the National Security Council (NSC) and State Department in interagency conversations surrounding nuclear policy, and I’m happy to try. As you’ll see, however, that’s actually a remarkably difficult question to answer right now.

A Little History

But let me backtrack a bit first. In more normal times, the NSC plays a huge role in coordinating policy development and implementation of U.S. policy in all (or most) areas of national security, certainly including nuclear weapons policy. That’s its whole purpose.

Formal interagency coordination came rather late to the U.S. Government, and only after a challenging combination of global national security emergency (World War Two) and a president (Franklin Roosevelt) who ran his cabinet rather chaotically. FDR once told cabinet member Henry Morganthau that “I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left one does.”

Among other things, for instance, he rather famously didn’t involve his Vice President in anything at all. Not for nothing did John Nance Garner – who was FDR’s Vice President from 1933 to 1941, thereby becoming the longest serving VPOTUS ever – say that the Vice President’s role under Roosevelt “wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.” (This was reported by some as him saying “warm spit,” but I think that was just the journalistic sensibilities of an earlier era talking. I believe it really was “ piss ” ; Garner had grown up in a log cabin in Texas .) Anyway, by the time FDR died in office in 1945, then-Vice President Harry Truman hadn’t even met with President Roosevelt in official capacity more than twice .

Anyway, the National Security Act of 1947 – in addition to establishing the CIA and creating the Department of Defense to bring the long-feuding War and Navy Departments under one coordinating roof – set up the NSC as a means to bring the U.S. interagency community together to coordinate policymaking on national security issues. And it’s tried to do this ever since, along the way acquiring a modest supporting staff.

The NSC is an institutional creature of the strong modern presidency, but there’s no universal formula for how it is structured and how it works. Unlike the other departments and agencies, which are governed by lots of statutes passed by Congress and subject to Congressional oversight by various committees, the NSC is basically organized and functions however the president wants. And those details have varied a lot over the years.

The NSC’s “Normal” Structure

Since 1991, however, the most common way of organizing the NSC – but by no means the universal one – has been around what is sometimes called the “Scowcroft Model,” associated with National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft who served the George H.W. Bush Administration. The fine details vary with each presidential administration, with a new president customarily issuing an Executive Order soon after arrival laying out a basic organizational structure and specifying who – in addition to the statutory members of the NSC set forth in the 1947 legislation – he designates to attend full NSC meetings.

In general, “Scowcroft”-type NSCs tend to have several tiers. At the top, the Principals Committee (PC) consists of the heads of the designated cabinet agencies, most often chaired by the National Security Advisor. (When the President himself chairs the meeting, it’s not a PC but rather a full “NSC” meeting.) Below that – making interagency decisions on its own where there is agreement or passing them upstairs to the PC – is the Deputies Committee (DC), consisting (you guessed it!) of the deputies of those departments and agencies, usually chaired by the Deputy National Security Advisor.

Below the DC, there are a range of similarly-functioning committees at the Assistant Secretary level, which these days tend to be called Policy Coordination Committees (PCCs) in Republican administrations and Interagency Policy Committees (IPCs) in Democrat administrations. (Don’t ask me why the name varies. I know of no good reason.) These are usually chaired by NSC Senior Directors, which was my role in the First Trump Administration’s NSC throughout 2017. At the most basic working level, below that, there can be more informal “Sub-PCCs” or “Sub-IPCs,” generally staffed at the Deputy Assistant Secretary level and chaired by directors from the various NSC directorates that happen to have been established by that initial Executive Order.

In principle, the NSC does not play an “operational” role in national security affairs and only coordinates policy development and implementation on behalf of the president. In practice, this sometimes varies. Some presidents like to use the NSC to keep a close eye on the various departments and agencies, to the point of occasionally problematic micromanagement. And sometimes – as with the notably dysfunctional NSC of Ronald Reagan’s first term – it has slipped into operational activities, such as in the lead-up to the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. (That obviously didn’t go very well, and is today regarded as something of an “anti-model.”) Nevertheless, for the most part, the NSC’s role is usually considered a purely coordinating one: its meetings bring interagency participants together to discuss and develop policy options, agree on solutions, and then coordinate tracking policy implementation. The execution of interagency policy choices – as well as autonomous policymaking within institutions’ particular jurisdictions, hopefully in ways consistent with the President’s agenda – occurs in the departments and agencies themselves.

As a result, the NSC staff – even in periods when it is considered to be at its most bloated – is tiny compared to those departments and agencies. Even a rather large and micromanagement-prone NSC like President Obama’s might have only around 300 persons, whereas Defense employs nearly three million civilians and armed servicemembers.

The number of NSC directorates varies constantly, as they are established (or disestablished) based upon the particular issues the administration in power prioritizes at any given time, but having something like 12 of them is not unusual. The directorate I ran in 2017 was the “WMD and Counterproliferation Directorate,” and I think we had something like 10 or 12 people. We handled all issues related to nonproliferation, arms control, disarmament, nuclear security, WMD terrorism, chemical and biological warfare threats, and foreign WMD programs – both actual and potential. (Despite our name, however, we were mostly concerned with other people’s WMD, for the care and feeding of American nuclear weapons was handled by the Defense Directorate.) Under the Biden Administration, with a slightly different name that made sure to name-check “arms control” and “disarmament,” the directorate – by then under Pranay Vaddi – had more or less those same responsibilities. It’s a common clumping.

The Executive Office of the President (EOP), of which the NSC staff is formally a part, generally doesn’t have a lot of money, so most of them aren’t full political appointees on EOP payroll and working directly for the President. NSC Senior Directors tend to be Special Assistants to the President, or “SAPs,’ a presidentially-appointed position more or less at the same level as an Assistant Secretary in a department or agency. Upstream of that are Deputy Assistants to the President (DAPs) and Assistants to the President (APs). The National Security Advisor one of the White House “APs,” which are very senior positions roughly at the agency-head level, though they don’t actually run big bureaucracies like many of the other folks who may be around the table with them in places such as the White House Situation Room.

The lion’s share of the NSC staff is made up of detailees from the departments and agencies, typically seconded to NSC for 1-2 year periods, and paid by the home agencies to which they’ll return afterwards. The NSC gets to pick who gets these detailee spots, and they are often highly sought-after in the departments and agencies. I was the only full-up EOP employee in my directorate, and only two of us had the blue badges that signify free access to the West Wing of the White House. (The rest of the team held “greens,” which were primarily for the Old Executive Office Building – a.k.a. Eisenhower Building – where the NSC has most of its offices.)

This is Not Normal

But remember that I said this basic Scowcroft-y structure is typical of “normal” times. In terms of the NSC’s structure and role in the policy process, however – including on nuclear weapons policy – we are most certainly right now not in “normal” times.

Today, in fact, under the Second Trump Administration, it’s not really clear if there’s really any meaningful NSC process at all. As I described it last summer at a conference in London , the NSC has been

“largely gutted – cut down to a skeleton-crew staff and explicitly deprived of its traditional interagency policy-coordination role in favor of … what appears to be a wholly top-down ‘just implement what we tell you’ role.”

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and key members of his team were sacked from NSC roles after five months in office following an intervention in White House personnel matters by the MAGA social media influencer Laura Loomer , who viewed them as insufficiently personally loyal to President Trump. Today, the NSC staff has been drastically cut, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio now being indefinitely “double-hatted” as National Security Advisor.

There is little sign today of any remnant of the policy development and coordination role that the NSC traditionally plays, and frankly it’s not at all clear what the NSC actually does at the moment at all. I have been told by insiders, for instance, that NSC staff aren’t actually permitted to hold PCC-level meetings at all – something we senior directors once did at our own discretion whenever it felt necessary – without first obtaining advance approval in writing from the National Security Advisor or his deputy. As a result, PCCs are reportedly quite rare, and Sub-PCCs are essentially non-existent.

Nor, by all accounts, is it the case – despite Rubio’s notional role as National Security Advisor – that the State Department is in the driver’s seat either. The NSC, at most, appears to be sort of signal-relay station for passing instructions from the Oval Office to everyone. There is no sign of an interagency policy process , nor of any mechanism for staffing out complex questions for analysis and recommendations from policy experts, nor of any mechanism for tracking policy implementation. As far as I can tell, national security policymaking process consists merely of a handful of senior advisors in the West Wing meeting episodically with President Trump and passing orders out to the rest of the system for implementation.

Indeed, in this new system, actual policy experts seem to be distrusted, or even feared. People with long expertise in the national security business are often felt to be tainted by their association with the Washington “swamp.” As with Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China – which envisioned a “ class conflict” between those who were “Expert” and those who were “Red” and hence ideologically loyal to the Communist Party – it would appear that having deep expertise inside the Washington Beltway makes one politically suspect. (Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for instance, has apparently actually prohibited Defense Department personnel from attending academic or think tank events, or engaging with such experts at all, on the grounds that they represent “ the evil of globalism .”)

To the extent that traditional experts are ever trusted at all, they need to display a degree of ostentatious personal loyalty to and love for the president far beyond what any administration has demanded before – and indeed this seems to the coinage of the realm more generally, at every level of any seniority. (Watch the video, for instance, of President Trump’s cabinet meeting on August 26, 2025 , in which senior officials appear to be basically competing to flatter him in the most effusive ways they can.) The current administration is determined to seize the reins of policymaking from the denizens of what it views as the “Deep State” of traditional policy elites and to sideline them in every respect, and loyalty is clearly far more important right now than expertise. There is no place in this model for a traditional NSC.

What of Nuclear Policy?

In this context, therefore, I’m hard pressed to give you an answer on the NSC’s role in U.S. nuclear weapons policy except to say that it’s not clear there is one. Nor can I tell you much about the current state of the U.S. approach to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons .

The United States has, so far, continued to participate in NPT meetings such as the 2025 NPT Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) meeting that took place in May in New York City, and – at least there, anyway – seems to have voiced surprisingly unsurprising, and indeed quite traditional-sounding, views there . Does that mean that the Second Trump Administration views NPT issues through a traditional prism? Or simply that it hasn’t thought much about them at all and has thus inadvertently left NPT policy in the hands of career civil servants? Or is it simply that the MAGA team just isn’t in place yet and a new approach will be coming soon? I wish I knew.

If it were done right, I think it might actually be a good thing to leverage President Trump’s “disruptor” image and use novel diplomatic approaches to shake up global NPT discourse. There’s been far too much intellectual stagnation and sterility in the international NPT community for many years, against which I have been trying to push back in my own work ever since first joining the State Department as a George W. Bush Administration political appointee more than two decades ago. Perhaps the Second Trump Administration can indeed come up with a way finally to get the world’s “nonproliferation” treaty diplomats off their duff and more constructively and effectively engaged in actually preventing proliferation. If that’s the idea, I say “Godspeed!”

All the same, it’s possible that the current administration’s lack of a meaningful policy development and implementation process – as well as its distrust of experts and its apparent focus upon domestic political issues and performative theatrics tailored for the social media attention economy – will mean that we will basically have no real NPT policy for a while.

The jury is still out.

—Christopher Ford

"The Negotiator Files: A Conversation with Christopher Ford"

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:54:55 GMT

In October 2025, the Next Generation Nuclear Network at the Center for Strategic and International Studies released a long recorded interview with Dr. Ford as part of its Arms Control oral history project entitled “The Negotiator Files.” You can find Dr. Ford's interview here .

USIP's Clarion Call on Strategic Stability

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 22:53:37 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks at an event at Hudson Institute on October 2, 2025, on the U.S. Institute of Peace Senior Study Group on Strategic Stability’s recent report on “ Sustaining the Nuclear Peace .”

At 36 pages of single-spaced print, our report on “ Sustaining the Nuclear Peace ” isn’t exactly short. But it’s pretty hard-hitting, both in its intellectual critique of prior U.S. approaches to nuclear deterrence and strategic stability policy and in its call for the United States to adopt a much more robust new approach as quickly as possible.

I’ll offer you my personal views about it here today, of course, and those views will only be my own. Nevertheless, the report’s actual analysis and findings were both bipartisan and unanimous, so they clearly represent the view of all of us.

New Definition of Strategic Stability

To begin with, I think we make an important contribution not only in terms of specific policy recommendations – which I’ll come to in a moment – but also to the theory that underlies U.S. approaches to nuclear deterrence. In particular, the report articulates a new, “updated” conception of strategic stability:

“Strategic stability is a condition in which the political relations and military balance between states that pose an existential threat to each other are such that they perceive neither a compelling need nor a viable opportunity to advance their interests at the expense of the vital interests of the other through the use of military force, and especially nuclear weapons.”

This is a broader definition than many experts have hitherto used in the nuclear weapons policy arena, and I hope it will be influential, because I think the policy community has created problems for itself by thinking of strategic stability for so long through the lens of only one of its facets: that of nuclear first-strike stability. That’s obviously important, but in the real world, there’s more to keeping the global security environment from decaying into full-scale war – including nuclear war– than just that angle. And our expanded definition reflects that.

After all, the definition of “strategic stability” has long been contested. Back in 2013, for instance, I wrote a chapter for a book co-edited by Bridge Colby and Michael Gerson on strategic stability , and we probably had as many different definitions of it in that volume as there were authors. So I’d offer our group’s definition, now, as a valuable conceptual advance.

Strong Critique of Obsolete Past Approaches

Now, I’m certainly a national security policy wonk and a professor at Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies, so I guess it’s not that surprising that I’m pretty proud of our contribution to defining strategic stability.

That said, I think the greatest strength of our unanimous and bipartisan report lies in its conclusions – not just about what to do in the months and years ahead, but also about the grave inadequacy of prior U.S. policy. We don’t just warn of growing threats: we explicitly call out the bankruptcy of prior approaches to strategic stability.

In particular, we don’t just add our voice to the rising chorus pointing out that the current U.S. strategic modernization Program of Record (POR) is insufficient: we add in the broader point that a whole generation of American strategy and strategic thinking has become obsolescent.

The report makes clear, for instance, that the traditional U.S. prioritization of direct diplomatic engagement and cooperative measures with our strategic adversaries is no longer viable as a route to strategic stability. Presidents Putin and Xi show little sign of actually wanting strategic stability, and indeed seem to view instability as essential to their geopolitical ambitions.

Accordingly, our longstanding approach has failed, and is actually now dangerous. “The US strategy for stability since the Cold War,” our report warns, is no longer “applicable to the emerging security environment.” Among other things,

“U.S. attempts to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in its security strategy have been ignored and, in fact, exploited. Washington’s calls for substantive, sustained, and high-level dialogue on strategic stability with both Moscow and Beijing have gone largely unheeded.”

Our traditional diplomatic strategy, therefore, has “failed to achieve its intended purposes,” and in failing so far to reorient its approaches to grave new threats, “we can see that the United States has been negligent in preserving and adapting a strong nuclear deterrent.”

As clearly as we can state things, therefore, our report stands as a repudiation of those who think that past approaches can still be made to work:

“There is no going back to the legacy approach. The effort to cooperate with Russia and China to identify and safeguard shared interests in strategic stability has come to naught—a situation that cannot be expected to change soon.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean that we should give up all hope of cooperation in the future, but our diplomats must “keep expectations appropriately low and prepare for failure.”

The main lesson from our unanimous and bipartisan report, I would say, is that it’s time to abandon the timid moralism and optimistic naivete of a conventional wisdom in strategic thinking that developed in a global security environment quite unlike the one we now face. It’s time, now, to be a lot less timid. “Leadership by example” has failed, and we now need to “rethink unilateral restraint.” Moscow and Beijing are already racing in a new arms race, and it would be madness for us to just stand back and watch. Instead, “the United States must go forward to a new approach.”

In our report, we do place great emphasis upon cooperative action, but we place it on cooperative action with our allies – who need themselves to do more in the common defense, and with whom we need to work closely to confront our shared adversaries with the insuperable strategic and theater-level nuclear and conventional dilemmas that they will need to face in order to be deterred.

This point about allies is one that can hardly be said enough in the current political climate in America, where it seems like the mental universe for our national defense planning is today shrinking back into a stale and antique 1890s hemispherism : there is no serious and sustainable approach to U.S. security that does not involve working closely with our allies in Europe and East Asia.

First and foremost, however, our new approach requires robust and resolute American action, because preserving deterrence and meeting the needs of strategic stability relies on our strength and resolve vis-à-vis our adversaries more than upon anything else.

“…[T]he United States must secure its interests in strategic stability in the absence of cooperation with Russia and China—and in the face of their cooperation with each other to threaten the United States and its allies.”

So what does this mean in practice? Most of all, our report says, we cannot get by merely with “a deterrence posture sized, scaled, and funded to meet only the requirements of a benign unipolar era now past. The time for such wishful thinking is over.” We cannot preserve the nuclear peace with a nuclear force posture that represents a diminished and shrunken “ Mini-Me ” version of one conceptualized two generations ago.

We agree with the Strategic Posture Review Commission’s 2023 conclusion that our current strategic modernization program of record is necessary but insufficient, but we take things a step further by calling for the United States to reverse nearly 60 years of force posture creep and begin to get back into the business of expanding our nuclear arsenal once again. Our report draws attention to the “likely requirement for a larger deployed strategic and theater nuclear force to address the two nuclear peer threat environment in the mid-to-late 2030s,” and urges we get moving to meet that requirement.

As the report pointedly observes, neither our strategic nuclear deterrent nor our “extended” nuclear deterrent are today fit for purpose, and they’re steadily losing ground in comparison to growing threats. In response, we need to expand National Nuclear Security Administration capacities to “meet the requirements of fielding and supporting larger deployed strategic and theater nuclear forces.” (In this period of mass federal layoffs and demoralizing chaos within the U.S. national security workforce, I should add, this includes recapitalizing both our “institutional and human capital assets.”)

We also need to begin uploading warheads to our strategic systems when the restraints of the New START agreement lapse, the report notes. And we need to accelerate procurement of the Submarine-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N), build more and better “deep precision strike non-nuclear systems,” improve homeland defenses against all varieties of missile, and develop “game-changing directed-energy defenses against regional missile threats.”

The Need for a Truly National Effort

I hope our report’s forthright call for forward-leaning, concrete steps to arrest the rot in our deterrent capability and redress the obsolescence of longstanding approaches to strategic stability will serve as a clarion call to the rest of the policy community. In concluding, however, I also want to emphasize that this is not just a problem that can be fixed by national security policy wonks like us.

The report makes a strong call for our leaders to engage directly with the American people, and with Congress, on these matters. Meeting the challenges described in our report and securing the nuclear peace over the next generation will not be easy, quick, or inexpensive. To succeed, this great project requires collective buy-in from stakeholders across our society and from the citizenry as a whole at a time in which there has hitherto been relatively little public engagement on these topics. Accordingly, the time to clearly articulate these stark needs and build support for doing what America’s future security requires is now .

—Christopher Ford

“Type A” versus “Type B” Proliferation Risk and the Challenge of This Era

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 16:02:51 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks at a briefing for Congressional staffers on September 30, 2025, organized by the University of Pennsylvania’s Washington Cente r and the Wilson Center .

For my contribution to this terrific panel, I’d like to highlight the strategic and conceptual novelty of the challenge we face today as a result of China’s military power and massive nuclear weapons build-up.

You hear lots of talk these days about the emergent “three-body problem” the world confronts today as we try to deter threats from two nuclear-armed near-peer adversaries at the same time, and this is certainly a huge problem. I want to emphasize here, however, that this emerging multipolar world is also likely to be unprecedentedly problematic from a nonproliferation perspective.

These are only my personal views, of course, and they won’t necessarily represent those of anyone else, but let me explain why I think this is such a challenge.

The Unprecedented Challenge of “Double-Multipolarity”

The problem is related, I think, to the basic structure of the international system. I’ve spoken about this in more detail elsewhere, but if you think of the world in terms of the structure of its highest-level power arrangements, you can see that its “polarity” – how the largest chunks of power are arranged – has historically varied. And it has varied both in terms of overall geopolitical power (think of conventional military might, economic size, and population and resources) and in terms of specifically nuclear weapons power.

Just after the end of the Second World War, the global system was bipolar in geopolitical terms – divided between the U.S. and USSR – but in nuclear terms it was initially unipolar , for we were initially the only player with “The Bomb.” After the Soviets detonated their first bomb in 1949, it then became bipolar in both the geopolitical and the nuclear senses.

After the end of the Cold War, things shifted again, becoming geopolitically unipolar , with only the United States occupying a real “superpower” spot. Yet it was in nuclear terms still bipolar , since Russia continued to possess an arsenal equivalent to our own. So in that sense, the world went from geopolitically bipolar but unipolar in nuclear terms to bipolar in both senses, and then then on to being unipolar in geopolitics but still bipolar in nuclear weapons.

Today, however, the world is becoming multipolar in both senses for the first time in history, with three primary players in both geopolitics and nuclear weapons. We’ve not seen that before, and I want to stress the novel a set of nonproliferation problems it creates.

“Type A” versus “Type B” Proliferation Risks

These structural shifts were hugely consequential for nonproliferation policy. Nonproliferation worked relatively well in those previous eras, in large part because the primary “poles” in each of these prior global configurations all seem to have felt at least some structural incentives to support nonproliferation. While there were instances of proliferation, including some deliberate encouragement of it – such as with the Soviets helping get China started, and China later helping Pakistan – the world didn’t see the huge cascade of proliferation many once expected.

But today, under “double multipolarity,” the challenges are greater.

For decades now, the primary focus of the international community’s nonproliferation concern has been the threats posed by the prospect of nuclear proliferation to smallish geopolitical disruptor autocracies like North Korea and Iran motivated by destabilizing regional security agendas. I think of these as “ Type A ” proliferation risks.

But in the present environment, rogue state proliferation is now only one of the types of proliferation challenge we need to be worrying about. Increasingly, concerns are being raised, too, about the prospect of proliferation to states that aren’t nasty and destabilizing rogue regimes but rather otherwise peaceable democracies who face threats from Russian or Chinese predation – threats it’s increasingly difficult to imagine being deterred by collective security arrangements grounded in America’s military power and willingness to bear cost and risk to protect our allies. This is what I think of as “ Type B ” risk.

Rather than being “bad” regimes that seek nukes for a mix of motives about which any serious person should be greatly concerned, in other words, the new potential proliferators people worry about are “good” regimes increasingly tempted to seek such weaponry for unquestionably defensive purposes when threatened by the most powerful and brutal dictatorships on the planet.

Living on New Diplomatic Terrain

These emerging Type B proliferation challenges may be qualitatively different – and, from the perspective of U.S. and other Western policymaking, much more complicated and challenging – than those to which we’ve become accustomed. It may be, for instance, that Type B issues will scramble the traditional cast of characters in nonproliferation diplomacy.

Will some of the states in the Non-Aligned Movement that for years have basically defended countries such as Iran against Western nonproliferation pressure, for instance, still defend fissile material production and “virtual nuclear weapons possessor” status if at some point we’re talking about South Korea, Japan, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, or Taiwan? Or will they suddenly decide that nuclear weapons-related technology proliferation is unremittingly bad after all, and that the international community needs to draw the line before one of America’s friends postures itself in such a fashion?

Will some of the Western states that have traditionally taken absolutist positions against proliferation come to make an exception for stable, rights-based democracies whose freedoms and even existence are threatened by territorially aggressive revisionist superpowers?

Will some states traditionally focused upon prioritizing disarmament and stigmatizing Western military and nuclear power suddenly discover that more American military might and “extended” nuclear deterrence is actually a good thing because it makes U.S. allies less likely to weaponize?

Might some longstanding U.S. allies end up in a de facto diplomatic alliance with Iran, North Korea, and their defenders in insisting upon a “right” to produce fissile material and the acceptability of choosing to withdraw from the global NPT regime?

So you can see how the advent of Type B proliferation challenges might make the diplomatic terrain rather more complicated.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Policy Needs

Beyond merely diplomatic discourse, why is the future security environment likely to be so much more problematic from a nonproliferation perspective? Well, if it doesn’t seem too glib, I’ll borrow a bit from the American psychologist Abraham Maslow and the famous motivational theory he developed.

In Maslow’s schema – which you could think of as being made up of human needs arranged in a pyramid, ascending to a point – basic requirements such as nutrition are depicted as being more foundational, while others such as self-actualization are considered “higher” needs. Notably, higher needs tend to be dependent upon “lower” ones being satisfied. (Having a fulfilling job, for instance, is a lofty psychological need, but it necessarily takes a back seat if you’re starving or living in continual physical danger.) Satisfaction of a higher need, on the whole, relies upon more basic ones already having been met.

So imagine, if you will, a “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Policy Needs,” in which those various needs include strict fidelity to global nonproliferation norms as well as a wide range of additional foreign policy and national security objectives. I would posit, furthermore, that from the perspective of any single actor in the international system, nonproliferation represents a reasonably “high” level of policy need – one the prioritization of which is dependent upon the prior fulfillment of some other more foundational requirements.

I won’t go so far as to say that nonproliferation is exactly a luxury good. After all, being able to live in an international system that is not routinely wracked by conflicts capable of escalating into nuclear war is in its own way a pretty foundational requirement for lots of other good things. From the perspective of any single player, however, the effort to be put into working on nonproliferation must to some degree necessarily be balanced against the effort that must be put into a whole host of other potential things. After all, seriously pursuing any good thing inevitably exacts an opportunity cost in terms of the time, effort, energy, political capital, and resources that are not devoted to pursuing alternative priorities. Navigating such trade-space is at the heart of policymaking.

The problem with Type B proliferation risks in this regard is that the changed geopolitical context that produces them may also change how players interpret the relative prioritization of competing objectives within our Maslowian hierarchy. Simply put, “higher” policy needs are easier to prioritize in comparatively benign geopolitical circumstances such as the one we inhabited after the end of the Cold War than they are in a rougher and more threatening environment. Tougher times force players to focus relatively more upon ensuring the availability of foundational goods more closely related to security and even survival, and leave less time and attention for higher ones.

Impact on Nonproliferation

For this reason, “double-multipolarity” may undermine collective international reactions to both varieties of proliferation risk. As noted, the major players in previous configurations of global power polarity previously felt some incentives to support nonproliferation – as illustrated, most famously, by the great work of the United States and the Soviet Union in jointly drafting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But this is less likely to be true in a “double-multipolar” environment of strategic rivalry.

After all, the other two poles of China and Russia are seeking to upend the hitherto-U.S. led world order, and in this context do not seem particularly mind Type A proliferation – which is far more problematic for and threatening to the United States, and disruptive of our grand strategy, than it is for them. In fact, China has been ignoring U.N. sanctions on North Korea for years, and the Iranians and (especially) North Koreans have recently become the Kremlin’s de facto military allies. As a result, “three-body problem” rivalries are making the world increasingly safe for Type A proliferation.

Meanwhile, we may ourselves may come to face increasing challenges from Type B proliferation, for the geopolitical context that produces Type B risks may also change the relative prioritization of competing American objectives within “Maslow’s hierarchy of policy needs.”

Type A rogue state proliferation was a “front and center” concern for us and most other major countries in geopolitically happier times less troubled by competing strategic priorities. In that context, it was easy to conclude that the highest and best use of our collective policy energies was to “secure all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world,” and easier to conclude that any new instance of nuclear weapons proliferation would always be much worse than its alternative.

In the context of Type B risk, however, other issues could easily come to be seen as relatively more important in comparison with nonproliferation. To put it bluntly, as valuable as the nonproliferation regime is, it would be difficult to imagine persuading leaders of a country immediately and directly threatened by Russian or Chinese conquest – and who felt their best chance of deterring such attack lay in nuclear weaponization – that fidelity to nonproliferation norms is so important that they should sacrifice their country on its altar.

All this is likely to confront us with challenges for which the inherited patterns of nonproliferation policy leave us unprepared. We may be asked more than ever before to wrestle with tough questions about when – or whether – nonproliferation should still “win” vis-à-vis other important priorities.

Hard Decisions Ahead

I can’t predict for you how such a rethinking may play out, nor any crisp account what the “right answers” are likely to be as we grapple with such questions. My point here is just that struggling with these issues will require equity-balancings far more challenging that what we saw in nonproliferation diplomacy during the post-Cold War era.

I think we need to work doubly hard to ensure our own conventional and nuclear military capabilities – and our willingness to stand alongside our allies in confronting Chinese and Russian threats – are up to the task of forestalling Type B proliferation by making it seem unnecessary. That’s the traditional U.S. answer, and it’s still “Plan A.”

Nevertheless, since the world does face growing Type B pressures, we will also need to start thinking about what “Plan B” might look like.

—Christopher Ford

An Old Guy’s Advice for Staffers and Emerging Leaders in Arms Control and Nonproliferation

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 15:43:43 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to the “arms control boot camp” program for young national security professionals organized by the CSIS Project on Nuclear Issues in Washington, D.C., on September 30, 2025.

I’m pleased to have the chance to contribute to this “arms control boot camp,” and it’s great for someone like me to see bright folks so eager to move into the arena in which I’ve spent a good portion of my life. With the caveat, of course, that these are just my personal opinions and don’t necessarily represent the views of anyone else, I’m thus happy to offer some thoughts in response to the questions the organizers have asked me to address. To that end, I’d like to discuss:

How working-level staff can most effectively shape senior-level decision-making in arms control and national security; and

How rising professionals can prepare themselves for the transition from staffer to mid-level or senior leadership.

Let me take each of those in turn. But I should start with a word about the somewhat odd type of senior leader that I myself represented when in government.

The Peculiarity of the “Political”

I thought I would frame my contribution this afternoon from the perspective of a political appointee. Though I’ve worked in four State Department roles and on the National Security Council staff, that’s actually the only type of role I’ve ever had as an Executive Branch employee – first as a “Schedule C” appointee, and then as a Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary who was later lucky enough to be delegated the responsibilities of an Under Secretary.

There may be some differences, and perhaps even significant ones, between what I’ll try to describe here and what might work best in staffing a career civil servant – e.g., a senior Senior Executive Service (SES) employee. We “politicals,” after all, are not career officials, not creatures of the permanent bureaucracy; instead, we are a strange sort of powerful, highly-idiosyncratic, and short-lived beast that is essentially unique to the Executive Branch in the United States.

If you’ve ever perused the so-called “ Plum Book ” – so called because it lists “plum” positions, or perhaps because of the purple cover it traditionally had – you’ll know that there are several thousand positions listed therein. By the standards of a parliamentary system such as in the United Kingdom, that’s an insanely large number. Especially if you include the non-confirmed Schedule C cadre on top of the Senate-confirmed seniors, our system has a vastly thicker layer of “politicals” at its top by comparison to other forms of government. (And that’s even before the current administration began trying to impose political loyalty requirements on an even broader swathe of formerly nonpartisan senior civil servants!) From the perspective of career staffers like many of you, however, that means you really do need to understand and work tolerably well with the political ranks: there are a lot of them, and some of them will be your bosses.

So this advice today, for whatever it’s worth, will be tuned to the peculiarities of staffing such politicals.

You should also be aware that in part because I have been only a political appointee in the Executive Branch, I am to some extent improvising here. Just as a part of the normal career development path for senior leaders, SES officials in the regular civil service are likely to have accumulated a lot of on-the-job training in their particular agency, and probably have some official career development training curricula under their belts to boot.

By contrast, I’d imagine that relatively few politicals come into office with a strong philosophy of organizational management, much less one tailored to the particular bureaucracy they’re joining. Some may have experience in relatively senior levels in private sector management, but that’s often not the case, and in any event their highest priority is not likely to be “good management” but rather producing policy results.

For we politicals have a different incentive structure and time horizon than senior leaders in the career civil service. We’re not there for a career: we drop in in short intervals, usually only in two-to-four-year stretches, and we’re not there to be good managerial stewards of the bureaucratic machinery. We’re creatures of political “teams” and we’re only in a Schedule C or Senate-confirmed position at all because our team has just won an election. We’re there only temporarily, we have precisely zero job security, and our premium is upon policy results – and generally policy change – rather than upon making things run smoothly. It’s nice if you’re a good manager, but that’s not at the top of the priority deck.

There may the occasional political who just wants to phone it in, lazily enjoying the fancy title, photo ops and press availability moments, and frequent flier miles. (I find such appointees contemptible – an insult to both the American voter and the American taxpayer – but they certainly happen.)

But for the most part – for good or for ill – I think politicals more commonly want to move fast, alter things, and build a policy-change legacy for our team (and for ourselves personally) before the political clock strikes midnight and our Cinderella chariot turns back into a pumpkin and we leave government again. That can makes staffing us somewhat idiosyncratic, for we’re not much like the regular SES professionals you’re probably more used to seeing.

So with that context, what would I recommend to you?

A Word on Trust

As a preliminary note, I would encourage professional staff and politicals to allow a bit of figurative space for reciprocal trust-building when they first start to work with each other. The relationship between a political appointee and his or her staff can sometimes go badly off the rails. I appreciate that career staffs are likely nervous about what they’re going to get when appointees come on board, just as politicals are not crazy to fear at least the possibility that a staff that disagrees with their politics will work in various subtle ways to thwart their agenda.

Nevertheless, the relationship doesn’t have to be a mess. Having things go bad is a choice that staff and political appointees, in effect, make together. And it’s a choice that they can refrain from making if they want to.

As a senior political official, I’ve found that even staffers who profoundly disagree with me can often be outstanding national security professionals who both do what I need them to do and do it really well. Not invariably, perhaps, but much more often that we politicals sometimes assume, especially in today’s polarized environment.

And I hope that they’ve found me to be a thoughtful and serious boss despite our disagreements. Truth be told, if government is to work for the best interests of the American people, politicals and career staff need each other. Both sides should remember this. Accordingly, I would recommend that staffers and their bosses give each other the benefit of the doubt, at least at the start. Professionalism may be a rebuttable presumption, but governance will probably work better for our collective good if it is at least initially presumed.

Shaping Senior-Level Decision-making

As it turns out, I probably illustrate my own point about politicals often not having much by way of a pre-existing philosophy of bureaucratic management. I think I turned out to be a pretty good boss – though you should take my former staffers’ word on that before you take my own – but if I was, it was largely by instinct . I must confess that until now, I never really had the chance or inclination really to spell out what I thought about such question. So thanks for giving me the opportunity to try think things through more explicitly.

Anyway, how would I answer the question about being an effective staffer? Well, with the caveat that I really am trying to express these points for the first time, I would say that a staffer’s effectiveness in supporting a senior leader in arms control and nonproliferation policy involves at least four main factors. In no necessary order, I refer to the staffer’s ability to provide and apply:

(1) institutional knowledge;

(2) technical knowledge;

(3) deftness and discretion; and

(4) what, for the lack of a better term, I’ll call “forward lean.”

Let’s take each of those in turn.

Institutional Knowledge

Especially when staffing political appointees, the institutional knowledge that professional career staff can provide is essential to making governance work. Career staffers are the human repositories of information about what has been tried before, which approaches worked (or didn’t) and why, the identities and characteristics of key diplomatic interlocutors, and all the rest of the “inside-baseball” details that often aren’t available to outsiders even when those outsiders are real experts. Professional staff thus provide their bosses with crucial context for (and assistance in) evaluating alternative courses of action, anticipating counterparty reactions, framing complex problems, and anticipating second- and third-order consequences.

If you’re lucky, a political boss will have good prior substantive experience in the field, but even then, he or she likely won’t have the window into the day-to-day goings on in diplomacy, intramural department or agency politics, or interagency engagement that you will. (We politicals will also likely have less of this background information at our mental fingertips, if you will, than a good career SES.) Accordingly, we rely on you to provide it.

To be sure, we need to be wise and self-aware enough to know to ask for such context, and to learn from it when you offer it – and some politicals probably aren’t, or don’t care to be. Nevertheless, we can’t listen unless you have something to impart. So the good staffer should always work to maximize his or her added value in being a master of such “behind-the-curtain” detail. We are unlikely to get it any other way.

Technical knowledge

Especially in technology-heavy arenas like nonproliferation, arms control, and disarmament policy, moreover, providing technical knowledge is also essential. The regular staffer doesn’t necessarily have to be a truly deep expert, for we can call upon hard-core specialists whenever needed, such as from the U.S. national laboratories or Federally-Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs); that’s what those institutions are for. Nevertheless, where policy issues concern things such as weapons of mass destruction, technical intelligence collection, and missile defense, most political appointees will neither have much technical background nor have the time and bandwidth to focus intently on such details anyway. Professional staff expertise can thus also be essential here, and even modest degree of “fluency” in both technical information and in policy detail can take a good staffer a long way.

Deftness and Discretion

An effective staffer needs to be prepared to provide brutal honesty in giving advice to his or her political appointee boss – that is to say, “inward” within the organization – but at the same time to show great discretion “outward.” What do I mean by that?

The independent judgment of professional experts is critical to making governance work, and history is littered with examples of institutional failure and incompetence where leaders convince themselves to ignore expertise and distrust the people who actually know what they’re doing in complicated organizational, technical, and policy arenas. Your job as a professional staffer is to help keep that from happening.

But the career staffer also needs to say “onside” in a policy-political sense, working diligently for the success of his or her seniors in the political ranks whatever he or she thinks of their objectives. Whether you like it or not, that boss is there because his or her team won the last election, and it’s therefore their job to set the agenda and yours to help them implement it. If you can’t live with that agenda, it’s time to quit.

So how to square these two commandments? How can you provide honest expertise in speaking competence to power while at the same time not being disloyal?

Maybe it’s just because of my legal training, but I think of this issue a bit like I think about lawyering. I like to distinguish, for example, between what I call “ no lawyers ” and “ yes lawyers .”

The “no lawyers” act as if it is the main point of their job to get in the way of policymaking, as if saying “no” were the objective rather than merely an unfortunate occasional necessity dictated by the fact that ours is a form of government that is – or at least should be – governed by laws.

By contrast, “yes lawyers” don’t mindlessly rubber-stamp what their bosses want to do – for that would be not really to be a lawyer at all, but merely a toady and a hack. Attorneys have a professional ethical responsibility to be zealous advocates for their client, but at the same time they have a responsibility to the legal system . They need to square these obligations.

To this end, the attorneys I think of a “yes lawyers” consider it their job to get the boss as close to his or her goal as is possible consistent with legality . They’re the psychological opposite of the “no lawyers” in that within the ambit of their necessary fidelity to the law, they aim to be facilitators rather than barriers. They understand that their job is to aid mission-accomplishment by finding a legally viable way to “yes” there if there is one.

So I think the good professional staffer in the policy realm should have an attitude similar to that of the “yes lawyer.” The good staffer, as a national security professional, supports achievement of the objectives of the team whose leadership won the last election, while at the same time also honestly and clearly – though (let me stress!) candidly and not publicly – warning the boss of pitfalls, drawbacks, likely problems, and what to expect by way of consequences from alternative courses of action being considered.

And this kind of cautionary feedback is perhaps especially important if the boss really likes one of those approaches, lest affection for it make his or her critical judgment less acute. It’s the political appointees’ prerogative to make policy choices, but it’s your job to make sure they make them with their eyes open and fully-informed as to the potential implications.

It’s actually good for the political bosses to hear such candid feedback from you, for it makes them better at their job and helps them make more of the kind of real and sustained policy impact that it is presumably their mission, as a political appointee , to try to have.

Not all politicals will necessarily see it this way, of course, and I don’t pretend that that’s always easy to pull this off. But that’s why I refer to deftness and discretion as key attributes of a good staffer. You need to figure out a way to deliver messages that are sometimes quite challenging in a way that doesn’t tank your relationship with the boss and produce a toxic relationship of distrust. You may sometimes need to be rather the diplomat here.

Nevertheless, doing this is essential. And your input is important to how well political appointees are able to translate their – and their team’s – policy vision into reality in the face of real-world complications. That’s why I say this is a bit like “yes lawyering.” It’s your job to make achieving the boss’ objectives as workable as possible in light of the realities of a complex world.

Forward Lean

Finally, I think it’s vital for staffers to bring a lot of forward-leaning “energy” to the equation. An experienced career staffer may have worked for many political appointees of varying abilities and perspectives – and have worked in pushing policy at various points in potentially contradictory directions. It might be understandable for such a staffer to feel a bit jaded about having to do so yet again.

Moreover, in order to safeguard against errors, maximize opportunities for feedback from the operational environment, and permit more by way of mid-trajectory course corrections, the typical career professional may also incline toward relatively cautious and gradualist approaches. Nevertheless, to be an effective staffer for a political boss, one needs to keep the energy level up anyway – and to be willing to forego some of that prudential caution.

As I noted at the outset, politicals are only in office only for a short time; they are generally hired specifically in order to effect some kind of change; they are subject to dismissal on a whim; and their tenure will end with the conclusion of the administration then in power in any event. They thus are generally inclined to try to move fast . And if “fast” is the agenda, it’s your job as the career professional to help them do it as effectively as possible.

I doubt there’s any magic recipe for how exactly to weave together these various attributes together into being a “perfect” staffer, but it’s easy enough to tell success in these regards when it occurs. To borrow a phrase from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous concurrence in the 1964 pornography case Jacobellis v. Ohio, you know it when you see it.

Preparing for Leadership

It can take a sometimes surprising of mental agility to shift from being an expert supporting staffer into the more generalist role of a senior leader. Those two roles are very different, and they demand different mindsets.

Especially in the civil-service-heavy parts of the State Department in which I worked – and one can perhaps make a partial exception here for Foreign Service Officers, who tend to be rotating generalists – the expert career staffer tends to be an expert, a specialist. After transitioning to a senior leadership role, however, he or she is now less likely to be the best-informed person in the room on the immediate topic at hand because the field of play for a senior leader tends to be much broader. Leaders previously accustomed to being the expert staffer will thus now find they need to rely on others as experts, and that they don’t have the bandwidth to inhabit the arcana of their subject matter as they did before.

Staffers spend much of their careers being responsible for bringing specific issues or equities to the decision-making table, and a lot of time working to ensure that those factors are properly considered. It’s part a staffer’s job to represent such issues clearly and strongly to leadership, so that important things don’t get ignored and leaders make decisions with eyes fully open to their context and consequences.

But a person having made the shift into leadership often has to be more of an equity-balancer between counterpoised values than an advocate for any one of them. As a senior leader, in other words, a promoted staffer will now tend increasingly be in the business of adjudicating between values and agenda items that exist in tension, not all of which can ever be fully vindicated. Leaders need to make trade-offs between competing agenda items that are all important but that can’t be optimized; much of leadership is about struggling with prioritization and compromise.

This practicing “the art of the possible” in a complex world of competing values can require a very different mindset, which longtime staffers can sometimes struggle to acquire when they become a leader.

Conclusion

I hope these somewhat tentative thoughts are helpful for you. There’s much of being a good staffer for senior leaders and exercising a constructive influence upon policymaking that that is idiosyncratic, so the successful recipe will be highly dependent upon the personalities involved and the circumstances of the moment.

So don’t take these comments as Gospel, by any means, but do at least consider them. The American people still need the government to have a good bench of expert professional staffers in the arms control and nonproliferation arena, and perhaps this advice will help you meet this need.

I look forward to your questions.

—Christopher Ford

Showing “Tough Love” in Demythologizing Arms Control

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 14:43:35 GMT

Below are the remarks upon which Dr. Ford based his opening remarks in a webinar on September 23, 2025, sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP).

Thank you for having me on this program.

It’s hard to follow such a terrific roster of speakers who have flagged such important issues, but – and with apologies for any lapses of coherence due to jet lag, since I’m joining you guys from Singapore right now and it’s just past two in the morning here – let me at least add a little of my own gloss on these issues. These will just be my own personal opinions, of course, and they won’t necessarily correspond to those of anyone else, but I think they’ll dovetail well with what the others have said.

Let me note at the outset, however, that I don’t consider myself a die-hard arms control skeptic. When it’s done right, arms control can , I think, play a valuable role in helping us meet security threats and preserve strategic stability. The problem, however, is that it’s far more difficult, and rather less common, for arms control to be “done right” than we in the West like to think it is.

The Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch once wrote to one of his patrons about how to tell a friend from a flatterer . He called, in effect, for true friends to show each other the kind of tough love that does not evade or sugar-coat what the other really needs to hear. The flatterer, wrote Plutarch,

“always takes a position over against the maxim ‘Know thyself,’ by creating in every man deception towards himself and ignorance both of himself and of the good and evil that concerns himself; the good he renders defective and incomplete, and the evil impossible to amend.”

By contrast, the true friend is both able and willing to offer “admonishment and frankness of speech.” Precisely because he is truly a friend, in other words the true friend “blames … when he must.”

This is a distinction tow which I ’ve been fond of pointing for years , because I think Western diplomatic culture has had a tendency to let hope outrun the lessons of experience when it comes to addressing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) issues. So bearing that in mind, let me try here to offer a little such “blame,” puncturing some of the flattery of arms control that I sometimes see in the policy community. I want instead to be a true friend to arms control by b eing honest about some of its potential pitfalls and seductions.

To put it simply, we sometimes want arms control so much that we get in our own way.

To illustrate this, let me describe a few types of characteristic challenge that can be created by the mindset we bring to dealing with issues of arms control. These are, in a sense, political or perhaps cultural problems – challenges related to how morally and intellectually serious we really are about arms control, if you will – and there are at least four of them. These four relate to:

whether and when to enter into arms control in the first place;
whether and when to withdraw from an arms control agreement;
challenges of compliance assessment; and
challenges of compliance enforcement.

Problems of Entering

My good friend the late Jeff Eberhardt was fond of reminding State Department negotiators that “if you want it bad, you get it bad.” That is, if you’re too eager for a deal, you give the other guy a powerful tool with which to take advantage of you. Less eagerness to get a deal can thus sometimes produce better results.

Malevolent actors like the Iranians and Russians often excel at arms control gamesmanship. We’ve taught them over the years that the mere prospect of talks is often enough to get the United States to back off from doing things that might annoy or disadvantage them. And they frequently try to take advantage of this, in effect weaponizing our earnest desire for diplomatic solutions against us.

The Soviets were particularly eager practitioners of such gamesmanship. (I discussed this in more detail in a paper published by NIPP earlier this year .) After they had deployed a new generation of strategic delivery systems as well as their intermediate-range SS- 20 missiles in the late 1970s, they began offering “nuclear freeze” resolutions at the United Nations, hoping to lock in place an advantageous balance before Washington could respond with countervailing deployments.

When their forces outnumbered us in central Europe, Moscow promoted a “no-first use” treaty that would have taken off the table our nuclear deterrence against those forces. When President Reagan began pursuing potentially space-based missile defenses and was building up U.S. conventional might, the Kremlin duly offered a plan to ban weapons in space and proposed “Talks on the Non-Increase and Reduction of Military Expenditures.”

One might wonder, in fact, whether that tradition continues today. I saw recently, for instance, that Vladimir Putin – the man who has been violating the New START agreement and who announced Russia’s “suspension” of that treaty in 2023 – is now suggesting to President Trump that we extend observance of the central limits on strategic systems in New START . One wonders whether Putin’s newfound liking for New START has anything to do with the fact that the U.S. national security strategic policy community has recently coalesced on a bipartisan basis , perhaps for the first time in my lifetime, around the idea that we need to have new nuclear delivery systems and more nuclear weapons than before in response to the new challenge of deterring two nuclear peers at the same time.

If indeed deterrence requires that we now deploy more weapons – and I agree that it does – it’s obviously a terrible idea to agree to extend limits that would preclude us doing so. So of course Putin now wants to lock us in at present force levels! His game (and its dangers) should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but arms control can be seductive, and we’ve been fooled before.

Anyway, arms control negotiating is clearly not a business for the incautious or naïve. Sometimes “nyet” is exactly the right answer to an arms control proposal. Ronald Reagan knew that, but the prospect of reaching a “deal” – any deal! – is apparently eternally tempting, and not everybody has the Gipper’s moral courage, as his wife Nancy put it in a different context, to “just say no.”

Problems of Remaining

A second set of political problem with arms control revolves around how long to stay in an agreement when circumstances are changing.

The most obvious way that relevant facts can change, of course, is that the other side may cheat. This was, for instance, the reason for the United States’ withdrawal in 2019 from the INF Treaty: Russia was flagrantly cheating, and it had been doing so for years.

It’s also possible for withdrawal to become appropriate even when the other side is complying, if other facts change in ways that make it disadvantageous to remain. This was the case for us with the ABM Treaty, from which we withdrew after the growth of third-party missile threats from North Korea and Iran.

But here’s the rub. Historically, we have struggled politically with withdrawal even when it’s needed. Our earnest desire for arms control has sometimes made it difficult for us to gather the courage to get out of it when circumstances demand.

Russia, for example, began testing a new cruise missile in violation of the terms of the INF treaty in 2008. The United States knew about this not long afterward, but it actually took the Obama Administration until 2014 to be willing actually to publicly declare Russia a violator, and even then Washington did essentially nothing except simply talk about the problem until Obama left office. By the time we in the First Trump Administration arrived on the scene in early 2017 , Russia had begun actually deploying its new missile against us and our allies in Europe.

The United States did finally react concretely under the First Trump Administration, authorizing the Defense Department to start R&D on American INF-class systems. And when Russia didn’t change course, we announced in 2019 that we were pulling out. By then, however, it was already more than ten years after the first flight-tests of the illegal missile had occurred. That is disgracefully long.

Problems of Compliance Assessment

My third category of political problem is the challenge of honestly assessing compliance with arms control agreements. Admitting that problems exist can have major consequences, and that can sometimes make leaders reluctant to be honest in compliance assessment.

With INF, it proved extraordinarily hard for us to get even our friends in Britain, France, and Germany to admit that there was a Russian INF violation at all. They did eventually relent, but they prevaricated for a painfully long time, clearly fearing that their concurrence with U.S. assessments of a Russian violation would mean the end of the treaty. Especially for France and Germany – for, in fairness, the Brits came around sooner – it seemed better to ignore the Russian violation than to see a treaty officially collapse.

And it’s not just them. We ourselves have a mixed track record of being willing to admit the existence of problems where such honesty would suggest a need to do something in response to them. It was not until more than a decade after the U.S. Government first assessed Iran was in the early stages of a nuclear weapons development program, for example, that we were finally willing officially to state what obviously followed from that – namely, that Iran was in violation of its obligations under Article II of the NPT.

Problems of Enforcement

Turning to my fourth and final category of problem, there can also be huge political challenges associated with compliance enforcement . This is the old challenge Fred Iklé’s captured in the title of his 1961 Foreign Affair s article “After Detection – What?” If you find a violation, what are you willing to do about it?

As it turns out, leaders sometimes find it hard to take resolute and effective action to try to restore compliance even once a violation becomes undeniable.

The Obama Administration’s approach to INF is a good example, but we should also remember that after Iran’s nuclear program first came publicly to light, it took the international community a long time to do anything in response. By the time the first U.N. sanctions were imposed, for instance, the centrifuge plant at Natanz had gone from being merely a provocative hole in the ground to actually producing enriched uranium. Once again, shame on us.

Conclusion

So if there’s a myth to dispel here, it is the false idea that asking tough questions about arms control and approaching arms control proposals with some realistic skepticism is necessarily to be hostile to it. Pursuing good arms control requires a kind of “tough love” that our policy community has sometimes found difficult to apply.

Thanks.

—Christopher Ford

Opportunities and Challenges for Nonproliferation and Nuclear Governance in Southeast Asia

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 04:15:28 GMT

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered on September 22, 2025, at a conference in Singapore sponsored by the Pacific Forum.

Good afternoon, and thanks to the Pacific Forum and our Singaporean hosts for inviting me to Singapore for this dialogue. I’d like to offer both some optimistic and some more pessimistic thoughts about the future of nuclear security and nonproliferation cooperation in this region. Perhaps the other two speakers on this panel will be able to fill in more detail on valuable ways we can still move forward, but I’m afraid I’ll spend most of my time on the geopolitical chill that seems to have fallen over yesterday’s environment of multilateral cooperation.

Opportunities for Cooperation

First, the good news.

Not long ago, when I was still in government after taking up office as U.S Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, I had the opportunity on a trip to China to visit the Nuclear Security Center of Excellence (COE) that the U.S. Government had helped to establish just outside of Beijing. It had opened in 2016 as part of an international effort to set up multiple such centers around the world, each intended to serve as a nucleus for training and capacity-building efforts to bring regional states up to international “best practices.”

That push to set up COEs was part of a broader international effort to secure vulnerable nuclear materials, an undertaking that also included convening four major “Nuclear Security Summits” at which countries came together at the head-of-government level to promise improvements in nuclear materials security worldwide.

Today, nonproliferation, nuclear materials security, and the promotion of governance “best practices” in the civil-nuclear power sector remain important. Indeed, with the advent of a new generation of nuclear power generation technology – in the form, for example, of the range of Small Modular Reactor (SMR) designs that will soon be coming online – power generation is likely to be even more widespread than ever before.

As I understand it, Singapore decided back in 2012 not to pursue nuclear power generation, opting to wait until another generation of improvements in reactor technology and safety had occurred . With the emergence of all those new SMRs, however, that day may soon be upon us.

I hope Singapore will look carefully at these new systems, for they are likely to be safer and more proliferation resistant, less expensive, easier and quicker to deploy, and less likely to strain local power grids than “jumbo-scale” traditional power reactor units. And with the Singapore Nuclear Research and Safety Institute (SNRSI), moreover, it sounds like you are doing a very impressive job here at local capacity-building, which can be the foundation for more international cooperation. So the good news is that I think our two countries can indeed have a bright future ahead of us in these regards.

A Geopolitical Chill

On the less optimistic side, however, the years ahead are also likely to be a challenging time for the global nonproliferation regime as a whole, and for multilateral cooperation of the sort we’ve seen in prior years.

The most obvious and direct challenges for the nonproliferation regime stem from the potential for additional nuclear weapons proliferation as a result of growing threats of revisionist great power aggression. In Europe, of course, Vladimir Putin’s revisionist warfare has put unprecedented security pressures on nuclear-weapons non-possessors by raising the specter that invasion and conquest could erase states from the map for the first time since Adolf Hitler was alive.

But this is hardly just a European problem. Proliferation pressures are increasing in East Asia too, as growing Chinese military power and regional assertiveness – and Beijing’s huge nuclear build-up – confront local states with potentially existential threats to their autonomy and sovereignty in ways that traditional U.S. alliance relationships may find difficult to counter. Making things worse, current U.S. policy is leading some allies increasingly to worry about whether Uncle Sam really would “be there” for them in a pinch to fulfil the U.S. security guarantees that for years have helped our closest friends conclude they did not need nuclear weapons themselves .

That much, unfortunately, isn’t news.

Reprioritizing in the New Security Environment

But what I guess I’d also like to flag today, however, is that these challenges are likely also to have implications for nuclear security policy and the kind of multilateral, cooperative efforts that developed in the “Nuclear Security Summit” days. Specifically, these trends are likely to make such mass cooperation more difficult, or perhaps even preclude it.

The energy devoted to nuclear security cooperation and securing nuclear materials against loss or theft in those years reflected the fact that those issues were considered a top tier priority for the international community. But that kind of attention and prioritization is harder to imagine today, with leaders now so much more focused than they used to be upon the challenges presented by Russian and Chinese regional revisionism and by whimsically capricious volatility in U.S. policy.

The difficulty now is not that nuclear security issues are no longer important , for I think we would all agree they remain quite important. Rather, it is one of prioritization – and hence of the resources of money and political and diplomatic attention that are likely to be available for these matters if high-level decisions need to be made about policy tradeoffs, funding, and risk-tolerance.

Simply put, it is becoming harder today to argue that nuclear security cooperation is and must be a top-shelf priority for major states in the international arena. The emergence of other hugely important issues that are of potentially existential consequence to some international players cannot but mean that nuclear security will move at least somewhat further down the totem pole of collective policy priorities.

I believe there is still scope for continued nonproliferation and nuclear security cooperation, especially as new-generation civil-nuclear technology is rolled out in the near future and becomes increasingly available to countries such as Singapore. It is likely to be impossible, however, for the broader international community to keep its traditional focus on such work today.

You can see this happening already. When was the last time you heard a senior official emphasize these matters in a major speech? Having taken over the directorate at the NSC that dealt with such matters in 2017, I’ve seen this drift pretty vividly in the U.S. Government, in recent years – and its notable that you didn’t really hear a peep about this even out of the Biden Administration either, despite the huge priority put on the Nuclear Security Summits when he was Vice President – and it continues.

Accordingly, while I hope that cooperation will continue, I suspect that it will increasingly need to be done only on a bilateral basis – or perhaps on a “minilateral” one between small groups of likeminded serious and responsible states – rather than on the sprawling scale we saw 15 years ago.

I still believe there are many responsible governments in this region of the world who will continue to feel a strong shared interest in upholding the nonproliferation regime through nuclear security cooperation, the enforcement of U.N. sanctions against North Korea, cracking down on the transshipment of Chinese-origin missile proliferation supplies for Iran, and – now also, with the European invocation of sanctions “snap-back” on Iran under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 – re-imposing full global sanctions pressures on the Iranian regime. That’s vital work, and there may also still be continued opportunities for nuclear security and governance “best practices” cooperation. I think we can still do good work together to these ends.

The Problem of China

Regional efforts on nuclear governance and nonproliferation, however, will have their limits, and they won’t involve anything like the scale or intensity of the “Nuclear Security Summit” years. We will presumably, for instance, to have to avoid working with China for the most part or depending upon its good faith, for it has now become painfully clear that when it comes to international security affairs, Beijing is now much more part of the problem than part of the solution – and clear, too, what the side effects have been of such cooperative engagement with Beijing in the past.

Back in the heyday of “Nuclear Security Summit” enthusiasm, there was still optimism that engaging China on these issues would be constructive. That COE I visited near Beijing, in fact, was financed in part by U.S. taxpayer dollars .

For years, moreover, China was a major recipient of assistance from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Technical Cooperation program , receiving aid for nuclear technology development financed by countries such as the United States as if it were just another needy developing country. The Obama Administration was even willing to sign a new civil-nuclear technology-sharing agreement with China as late as 2015 .

In such engagements, however, the international community treated China as if it were a poor developing country full of good intentions and in need of foreign help. But China was none of these things. It was, in fact, turning into a huge, predatory top-tier competitor in the global nuclear marketplace that is today already building half of the new nuclear power plants under construction in the world, and which now enjoys a share of the global export market behind only that of Russia .

Those engagements also ignored China’s role as a notorious (and continuing) proliferator of unsafeguarded civil nuclear technology to Pakistan – and even, through the 1980s, at least, of nuclear weapons technology as well. (I myself have seen the Chinese nuclear weapons designs that the Pakistani proliferator A.Q. Khan gave to Muammar Qaddafi’s terrorism-sponsoring regime in Libya , by the way. We removed them from Libya in 2004 . My nuclear affairs office director flew them out sitting next to me in a chartered plane, in briefcase chained to his wrist!)

It also turned out that China was stealing nuclear reactor technology from the United States to help its own civil-nuclear program, and actually then diverting U.S. technology – including nuclear-related software codes – to help the People’s Liberation Army with naval nuclear propulsion in applications such as aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines . I’m proud that my team at the State Department led the way in 2018 in scaling back that foolish cooperation , but one side effect of the painful lessons we have learned about working with China in the nuclear arena is that as we and our regional friends explore further possibilities for cooperation, we’ll have to find ways to do this that carefully keep China out of such arrangements from here on out.

Yesterday afternoon I visited Fort Canning Park here in Singapore, and took the opportunity to tour the so-called “Battlebox” – that is, the bunker from which the British ran their ill-fated defense of Singapore against the Japanese in 1942. It helped bring home to me how people in this area of the world have good reason to remember what it is like when an aggressive rising power offers its neighbors realities of conquest and domination wrapped in a narrative of supposed liberation from the injustices of a Western-centric global system.

Singapore’s conqueror at that time, General Tomoyuki Yamashita – later to be executed as a war criminal in 1946 – declared that Japan’s aim was to “promote … social development by establishing the East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere on which the New Order of justice ha[s] to be attained under ‘the Great Spirit of Cosmocracy’ ….” As the historians Mark Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow have pointed out, that idea of a “Great Cosmocracy”

“stemmed from the Japanese notion of Hakkaoichiu (sometimes rendered in English as ‘Eight Corners of the World under One Roof’), a vague idea of universal brotherhood and mutual respect for diverse religions, customs[,] and languages.”

We all know what Yamashita really meant, of course. And I imagine that the people of Singapore and elsewhere in this region continue to bear this grim history very much in mind when they hear Chinese Communist Party officials proclaim their dreams of a “ community with a shared future for mankind ” – “ a world where people live in perfect harmony and are as dear to one another as family ” – and when they hear China’s leaders join the Russians (of all people!) in calling for an international order of “ more democratic international relations .” Everyone should know what that really means, too, and it is precisely this which is stressing the nonproliferation regime in East Asia today.

There is thus little reason to expect constructive nonproliferation cooperation of the broad, multilateral sort our leaders still hoped for a decade ago.

Yet the unfortunate necessity of countering China’s proliferation pressures and working around Beijing’s nonproliferation obstruction should in no way dim the bright prospects for U.S.-Singaporean bilateral cooperation on nuclear issues: on nuclear security and governance, on nonproliferation more broadly, and hopefully before long on nuclear power generation as well. Our two governments share strong interests in deepening our relationship in all these respects, and I very much hope that we will.

Thank you.

—Christopher Ford

Defense and Strategic Studies at MSU: Security Sensibility and Strategic DNA

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 14:36:23 GMT

Dr. Ford's essay on the history of Missouri State University's School of Defense and Strategic Studies was published in Defense & Strategic Studies Online (DASSO), vol. 2, no. 1 (Autumn 2025). You can find the whole issue on the DASSO website here , or use the button below to download a PDF of Dr. Ford's piece . (Also, the home page for DASSO can be found here .)

24 Years Later: 9/11 in the Rear-view Mirror

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 14:20:33 GMT

On September 17, 2025, the website Fair Observer published Dr. Ford's essay looking back on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and musing about the challenges facing America's political culture today. You can find the essay on Fair Observer 's webpage here , or use the button below to download a PDF.

Thinking about Strategy in an Artificial Superintelligence Arms Race

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 19:05:10 GMT

Dr. Ford's article on "Thinking About Strategy in an Artificial Superintelligence Arms Race" -- co-authored with Dr. Craig Wiener -- was published in Defense & Strategic Studies Online (DASSO), vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 2025). You can find the whole issue on the DASSO website here , or use the button below to download a PDF of the Ford/Wiener article. (Also, the home page for DASSO can be found here .)

Here’s How to Get a Nuclear Deal with Iran Now

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 15:21:37 GMT

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered to a webinar sponsored by the National Institute for Deterrence Studies on August 29, 2025.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks – as always – to Peter Huessy and the National Institute for Deterrence Studies (NIDS) for having me back to one of these events.

I’ve been struggling professionally for a long time now with the threats presented by Iran’s nuclear program and Tehran’s efforts to position itself for nuclear weaponization. In fact, this challenge has been a periodic preoccupation of mine ever I first joined the U.S. State Department bureau dealing with arms control and nonproliferation treaty compliance issues way back in early 2003, just a few months after news first broke in public that Iran had been secretly building a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz.

That’s quite a long time ago now. I suppose I should be pleased that after watching this issue pretty closely for more than 20 years, we haven’t yet seen Iran produce a nuclear weapon. Nonetheless, it does feel like we’re at a pretty critical threshold point right now.

So I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying that this an important topic at an important time – so thanks for inviting me. As always, I can only offer my own personal opinions, which won’t necessarily reflect those of anyone else. But I am pleased to be able to offer some reflections on the Iran nuclear crisis and what chance there might still be for a good resolution.

The Most Recent Developments

It’s actually an especially good time to be discussing this right now, because it’s been a pretty eventful week on this topic. For one thing – as you’ve clearly been following in the press – the former Deputy Speaker of the Iranian Majles [Parliament] Ali Motahari has been reported to admit that Iran actually had intended to build nuclear weapons. As he put it in a 2022 video that has apparently only now surfaced, “our real goal was to build a bomb. No point denying it.”

Now in one sense that’s not news, for everyone who’s been paying any attention since August 2002 has pretty much known that. Indeed, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has made public lots of information making that very clear years ago, and the Israelis managed to smuggle out of Iran some 55,000 pages of documentation – and a similar number of additional files on CDs, including videos – that provide extraordinary detail into Iran’s nuclear weapons work up through around at least 2003. The IAEA has also detailed how some of this weaponization-related work continued for a while thereafter, and Iran seems to have kept its weaponization team working together on relevant topics that can easily be leveraged back into weaponization whenever the regime wants to do so.

So in that sense, Motahari was basically telling everyone that the grass is green and the sky is blue. But it’s interesting nonetheless, despite its obviousness, and serves to re-highlight why this is all so important.

But the really interesting thing in the last few days is that Britain, France, and Germany have jointly informed the U.N. Security Council that they believe Iran is in “significant” violation of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This will trigger so-called “snap-back” sanctions under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 (UNSCR 2231) restoring full mandatory sanctions on Iran under international law, including the arms embargo, restrictions on ballistic missile production, asset freezes, and a visa ban.

That’s extremely important, and something that I’ve been urging them to do for some time now. I also think this is a crucial step that can now be used – if we are smart and clever and actually take the time an effort to engage in real diplomacy on this topic – to make a real negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear problem possible.

So kudos to you, Peter, for having this discussion now. With your indulgence, therefore, I’d like to outline how I think such an approach to a solution might work.

Earlier this year, I published with the Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory what was in principal part a short history of the Iranian nuclear negotiations, from the first public revelations about Natanz in August 2002 through the demise of the JCPOA. I also offered some musings about a possible negotiated solution based upon the invocation of “snap-back” sanctions under UNSCR 2231 before it expires this coming October. So I’d refer your viewers to that paper of mine for a lot more detail on the “how we got here” piece. It’s a complicated story.

For our purposes today, however, we should start with where we actually are right now , for even before the European invocation of “snap-back” this week, there have obviously been some very important developments since my CGSR paper came out in February.

The Summer 2025 Air Strikes

Most dramatically, of course, in June – with its remarkably successful campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon having essentially removed the “deterrent” factor created by that terrorist organization’s rocket arsenal that many had long assumed would prevent direct Israeli moves against Iran – Israel launched a series of strikes upon Iran’s nuclear program. President Trump then added American firepower to the mix, with a single strike by B-2 bombers that dropped a fistful of our huge, “bunker-busting” GBU-57 munitions onto hardened underground nuclear facilities at Fordow and Natanz, and with some cruise missile strikes on surface facilities at Isfahan.

Debate has raged about how successful those American strikes were in destroying things that the Israelis had lacked the capability to damage, with President Trump immediately claiming that those targets had been “ completely and totally obliterated ” and some critics claiming that the U.S. strikes had been largely ineffective. As best one can tell from the outside, it would appear that the truth is somewhere in the middle – with the attack apparently having done a lot of damage and setting back Iran’s progress significantly , but certainly not erasing Iran’s program from the face of the Earth.

I’m sure that observers will be “armchair quarterbacking” the June 2025 air strikes for years, but I feel pretty comfortable in my conclusion that even if you think the Israelis moved too precipitously and quickly against Iran’s nuclear program, the United States really was right to drop those bunker-busters. When I ran the Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counterproliferation Directorate at the National Security Council in 2017, I distinctly recall speculating to National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster about just this kind of a scenario, advising him that “Bibi [Netanyahu] might be able to start it, but we would have to finish it.”

And I still think that’s right. The attacks certainly provoked and enraged Iran, which is admittedly risky. Once that line had been crossed, however, I’d much prefer that this angry Iran have a small, bashed-up nuclear capability than to have a large and intact one. So you might argue that Israel jumped the gun, therefore, but once the fight was on, President Trump absolutely did the right thing to try to destroy the most critical remaining Iranian nuclear capabilities. Hopefully the resulting damage is indeed great, which will buy us some time in which to try to work on a better and more enduring solution.

So where did the attacks leave us?

On the negative side, it seems clear that Iran does still have a technical pathway ahead of it for nuclear weaponization, and in principle it certainly can reconstitute what it has lost, potentially now being spurred by these hostilities to try even harder and sprint even faster. It also sounds like we may not have hit Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium – a lot of which was already at level of 60 percent pure U-235, just a quick bump shy of proper weapons-grade, though you might be able to make a somewhat crude weapon with it even as is . This stockpile could easily become the feedstock for a clandestine enrichment “sprint” somewhere using only a fairly modestly-sized centrifuge cascade.

On the positive side, however, the U.S. attacks do appear to have set the Iranians back a lot, buying us some time that we did not previously have. It may also be, moreover, that the U.S. strikes have very constructively disabused the clerical regime in Tehran of any assumptions it may previously have made that neither the Americans nor the Israelis would, at the end of the day, prove willing to use military force to preclude Iranian weaponization.

The Challenge Now

What we can and will do with any time we have thus bought ourselves, of course, is precisely the question now. But I’d like to point out that if we want a good negotiated solution – and I dearly hope that we do – it’s time to get going on the diplomacy.

One of the biggest conceptual challenges here is that we’ve been very much up against a countdown clock, represented by the October 2025 expiration of Resolution 2231. And that’s why this week’s European announcement is so important.

Whatever you think of the ill-fated JCPOA negotiated by President Obama’s team and out of which President Trump pulled us in May 2018 – and, for the record, I myself have certainly criticized it plenty, speaking about this in public again , again , again , and again – one has to admit there was some pretty clever drafting that went into the formulation of Resolution 2231. I won’t bore you with the somewhat convoluted details, but the basic idea is that while Resolution 2231 lifted United Nations sanctions on Iran in 2015, it preserved the unilateral right of any JCPOA partner country to invoke so-called “snap-back” to re-impose all such sanctions at any point.

You might recall, in fact, that we tried to invoke such “snap-back” in 2020 , during the First Trump Administration. This resulted in lots of debate, however, over whether the United States was still entitled to invoke the Resolution 2231 “snap-back” rule because we had by that point already declared ourselves to be out of the JCPOA. I think we were right on the law, since those who count as parties to the JCPOA for purposes of being entitled to invoke “snap-back” are expressly defined in the text of Resolution 2231, and that text has never been modified. Accordingly, even though we stopped participating, we were still legally entitled to trigger the re-imposition of sanctions for so long as Resolution 2231 remains on the books as written. As a result of the controversy over this, however, most countries just decided to ignore Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s invocation of snap-back.

But whatever you think of that legal kerfuffle five years ago, invoking “snap-back” remained unquestionably available to Britain, to France, and to Germany. Or at least available until mid-October of this year, because Resolution 2231 has an expiration date. It evaporates on October 18, 2025, ten years after the JCPOA’s “Adoption Day” of October 18, 2015 .

And this means that time was getting very short until the huge diplomatic leverage provided by U.N. sanctions “snap-back” became no longer available to us. After October 18, thanks to the prospect of Russian and Chinese vetoes at the Security Council, there would literally have been no way to impose full United Nations sanctions on Iran again, no matter how egregious its nuclear behavior.

Consequently, if we were to set in place the incentive structures needed to ground a good negotiated nuclear solution with Iran – as opposed, for example, to an ugly future of periodic “mowing the grass” military strikes trying to keep ahead of Iranian efforts at secret weaponization – we needed to act quickly, and in close conjunction with our European friends, who have a critical role to play that we must not continue to ignore.

Thankfully, they have now acted, and it’s time for us to work together on a diplomatic package that both gets Iran to table and gets it to agree to a meaningful and enduring resolution that isn’t just another round of JCPOA-style diplomatic can-kicking that merely postpones Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions for a bit longer.

A Way Forward?

So how might one imagine a diplomatic plan capitalizing on Iran’s recent setbacks and leveraging the “snapping back” of U.N. sanctions that is now about to occur? Let me offer some thoughts.

Less to Ask Now?

I should begin by pointing out that while it surely will be challenging to get Iran to the negotiating table and to a successful negotiated solution, in some respects recent events may arguably have made the requirements for a negotiated solution at least somewhat easier to manage. What do I mean by that?

Well, as you’ll recall, when Secretary Pompeo spoke at the Heritage Foundation in May 2018 to outline the First Trump Administration’s criteria for what a good deal with Iran would look like, he voiced quite a few demands. In that admittedly rather maximalist laundry list, for example, he included Iran having to withdraw its forces from Syria, rein in Hezbollah, and cease developing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.

For some time thereafter, this made the odds of a deal seem very slim indeed, for it was surely going to be extraordinarily challenging to persuade Iran to abandon these capabilities in addition to agreeing to the kind of “no fissile material production” requirements that were also part of the list. Indeed, even on the basis purely of the nuclear issues in question – and leaving aside questions of missiles, Syria, and Hezbollah – events in subsequent years were already making things seem very improbable.

However difficult it was to get Iran to negotiate away the modest-sized nuclear program and fissile material stocks it possessed in 2018, it was harder still to envision Tehran relinquishing the much larger program and stockpile the mullahs had soon acquired. This difficulty, moreover, grew greater almost every day as the Iranians continuously expanded their program from 2019.

Between the U.S. list of necessary non -nuclear concessions and the growing difficulty of envisioning Iran’s relinquishment of its ever-expanding nuclear capabilities and uranium stockpile, therefore, I became quite pessimistic. Had you asked me several months ago, for instance, I would have said that the odds of a negotiated resolution were extremely low indeed. With a “successful” negotiation needing to achieve so much, I imagined the better odds by far would be on Iranian weaponization, on war, or both.

But that’s why, despite their tensions and bloodshed, the last few months may perhaps have made things at least slightly more hopeful. Simply put, now that Hezbollah has been quite effectively smashed by the Israelis, the Assad regime in Syria has collapsed and Iranian advisors have been expelled, and Iran’s missile program has also been dealt significant reverses by Israeli air power, Iran now has less to do if it is to meet a reasonable set of criteria for regional good behavior.

Iran, in other words, has to give up fewer concrete capabilities now than it did before, for the simple reason that it has already been deprived of many of them. In a sense, the primary objective for the non-nuclear portions of a negotiated settlement have thus been reduced from persuading Iran to dismantle most of its capabilities for regional destabilization to simply persuading Iran to agree not to reconstitute them. That seems like a very different – and arguably much easier – task.

And now, with President Trump’s strikes against the underground facilities, Iran now also has a smaller nuclear program that it would have to dismantle. In effect, therefore, a range of circumstances have coincided to make the “endowment effect” – that is, the cognitive bias that leads people to find it much more difficult to give up what they already have than to forswear it in the first place – much less of an obstacle to successful negotiation than it was before.

On top of this, as I noted earlier, Iran can now no longer assume that we in the United States are too timorous to take action against Iran’s nuclear program. Nor can they any longer assume that the Israelis are too deterred by the prospect of hellfire from on high in the north of their country from Hezbollah rocketry to act directly against Iran. Both of those assumptions – if indeed Iran had made them – have been shown to be quite false.

All this leaves Iran, in other words, both with less that it would have to “ do ” for the successful conclusion of a deal and with a great deal more reason to do it.

Now that the Europeans have added the imminent restoration of United Nations sanctions into the mix before Resolution 2231 expires – thereby putting the mullahs in the position of having to negotiate their way out of such sanctions again in order to avoid economic catastrophe – you can see why I am more cautiously optimistic now than I was at the beginning of the year.

Envisioning a Diplomatic Plan

Now, to be sure, working sanctions “snap-back” into the mix would require some dexterity. But I think it certainly can still be done.

The most important part of this, of course – the first, and sine qua non element – has now happily occurred: for our European partners actually to invoke Resolution 2231 “snap-back,” thus restoring full U.N. sanctions against Iran just as if it were 2014 once again. This is the critical first step. Because Iran will now confront a future of indefinite, crippling United Nations sanctions if it does not reach a negotiated solution unless the Security Council gives it a reprieve – which of course we (or the Brits or the French) can now easily prevent by the use of our veto – Iran has to negotiate for its economic future.

But the point is to reach a deal, of course, and not simply to punish Iran. So we need to accompany this re-imposition of sanctions with some reasonably sophisticated multilateral diplomacy.

To help set things up right to maximize the chances for a deal, we now need to draft, introduce, and negotiate the passage of a new U.N. Security Council Resolution on Iran sanctions. This might be a somewhat complicated instrument, but I envision it involving, at the least, what might be termed a “ double-block ” mechanism.

That phrasing probably needs some explaining.

In the broadest sense, the new UNSCR would establish a pathway for once again lifting U.N. sanctions on Iran. (Remember, by the time this new resolution would be enacted, sanctions will already have “snapped back” under UNSCR 2231 thanks to the Europeans’ move this week.) This is important, because it would need to be clear that the new resolution would indeed provide Iran a pathway out of the problems caused for it by the European invocation of “snap-back.”

In this context, the first part of my envisioned “double-block” mechanism would be straightforward. For the same reasons that UNSCR 2231 had a “snap-back” provision in the first place – that is, the need to provide a means of re-imposing sanctions if Iran violated the deal, and to permit this to happen without such re-imposition being subject to a Russian or Chinese Security Council veto – the new resolution would need its own “snap-back” provision much like the one originally in Resolution 2231.

If and when sanctions were lifted again pursuant to the new resolution in the wake of an agreement with Iran, therefore, they would remain subject to future re-imposition via a new “snap-back” provision if Iran cheats on a future negotiated deal. (Ideally, by the way, I also envision the new resolution not having an expiration date. Perhaps we have now learned our lesson about such dates and the evaporation of leverage?)

But I described the new resolution as having a “double-block,” and that’s just the first “block.” The second one would derive from the fact that we wouldn’t want to make this hypothetical new Security Council resolution work exclusively as a tool with which to implement a successful deal (i.e., by lifting the U.N. sanctions that had “snapped back” before October 18, 2025) and with which to incentivize Iranian compliance (i.e., by holding out the possibility of re-imposition). That’s critical, of course, but we would also want to make it work at a tool to help us reach such an agreement in the first place.

To that end, we would need to have a second “block” mechanism that would apply to this new resolution’s lifting of sanctions in the first place. That is, the U.N. sanctions on Iran that are now resuming pursuant to European invocation of “snap-back” would under the new Resolution automatically be lifted again unless one or more of specified parties – presumably the same roster of ex-JCPOA partners, including us – objected. Only if all those countries agreed upon lifting the sanctions, therefore, would this occur.

Such a “double-block system,” in other words, would allow the United States and our European partners both to preclude sanctions relief for Iran unless a good negotiated solution were in hand, and to re- impose sanctions on Iran once more if it were discovered to be in violation of such a deal.

You might now be wondering, of course: could we get the presumptively Iran-protective Russians and Chinese to agree to such a Security Council resolution without vetoing it? Well, that’s where this week’s European invocation of UNSCR 2231 “snap-back” is also important, for the “default setting” of the Security Council will now be set on indefinitely continuing Iran sanctions unless action is taken to the contrary. And, as a Permanent Member of the Council, after all, we – or the British or French – could veto any proposal offering Iran sanctions relief, as indeed we should before a good deal is agreed.

Under “snap-back” now, the best way for Moscow or Beijing to protect the Iranian regime is therefore be to agree to my proposed new resolution containing its “double-block” mechanism, since that would be the only way (through a negotiated deal) to get the Council to agree to lift sanctions again.

This proposed “double-block” may sound a bit complicated, but it’s not conceptually much different than the clever formulation of the original UNSCR 2231 “snap-back” provisions. It would just now point itself, as it were, in two directions at the same time: (i) one that allows unilateral blockage of otherwise-automatic sanctions relief unless there’s a negotiated solution, and (ii) one that allows unilateral triggering of sanctions re-imposition in the event of an Iranian violation once such relief has been given after reaching an agreement.

So if you ask me, it’s time, now , to articulate such a plan openly and clearly, with U.S. officials working closely and speaking as one voice with their British, French, and German counterparts. Now that Europeans have invoked “snap-back,” the United States should – with them – draft and introduce the proposed “double-block” U.N. Security Council resolution I have described. This would show Iran that we really do envision a path forward that would allow them sanctions relief in return for a good faith agreement and their compliance therewith.

Hopefully the resolution then passes, enabling the real negotiations to begin. If it doesn’t pass, that’s on the Russians or Chinese who would have vetoed it, and Iran just has to live with sweeping U.N. sanctions for the foreseeable future. Tant pis, mon ami, as the French might say. (My system, as it were, “fails safe.”)

With a bit of luck, however, it would indeed pass, and this would be enough to focus everyone constructively on the task at hand. As a further backstop, of course, both we and the Israelis should make sure that we ostentatiously leave “on the table” the option of more drastic, and kinetic, remedies for Iran’s pursuit of dangerous and destabilizing nuclear capabilities.

Could This Actually Work?

Is this a magic formula that will guarantee success? Certainly not.

Remember, too, that all I’m describing here is a basic institutional substructure for such a negotiated deal with Iran. Even if Iran were induced to the table on such terms, we would still need actually to negotiate the details of any such agreement.

That’s by no means impossible, but we know from the JCPOA process a decade ago that the Iranians are skilled and wily negotiators, and that negotiating the details of any technologically-restrictive nuclear deal requires not just diplomatic skill and stamina but also the ability to draw in a sustained way upon enormous reservoirs of subject-matter expertise from our civil service and our national laboratories.

Under the best of circumstances within the ambit of a negotiation facilitated by the kind of “double-block” Security Council resolution I advocate, such negotiations would be difficult and complex. And that’s even before you get to the challenge of verification, and of devising and implementing appropriate inspection and monitoring authorities and capabilities in Iran – e.g., for the IAEA – for the indefinite future. I hope the U.S. side will be up to this.

Nevertheless, I would argue that something along these lines represents the best (and perhaps the only) approach that is still available for a decent nuclear deal. Under the present circumstances, moreover – in the aftermath of this summer’s air strikes and now with UNSCR 2231 “snap-back” in motion – we may actually have a fleeting window in which to have some chance of success, at least if we and our European friends don’t delay any further.

Conclusion

Maybe I’m too optimistic, but please bear me out for one final point. I can’t help feeling that if we approach this right – and if we can, to emphasize again, work closely with our European friends in ways that the current U.S. administration may be disinclined to do but that it is imperative we do nonetheless – we also have a chance to do a great deal of good even beyond the vital matter of solving the long-simmering Iranian nuclear problem.

Specifically, we may thus also have a chance to repair some of the grave damage that’s been done to the global nonproliferation regime by two decades of nervous temporizing and diplomatic can-kicking by the international community on Iran, and by the all but total failure of the nonproliferation regime to address North Korean nuclear weapons threats.

I don’t mean to suggest that a successful nuclear deal with Iran and – finally, in contrast to the JCPOA, an enduring one – would necessarily entirely heal or save the nonproliferation regime given all the challenges it faces today in a world that is now multipolar in both its geopolitics and in its nuclear weaponry . That would be a tall order.

But it does feel to me that the nonproliferation regime rather badly needs a “win” right now, and perhaps we can give it one. And it would certainly be marvelous indeed to demonstrate that nonproliferation diplomacy is capable of producing a real success when it’s built upon the right foundations of strength and diplomatic savvy.

Specifically, I’d love to see us take an approach that is: (a) is grounded in real and clearly articulable strategy ; (b) employs clear and consistent messaging; (c) draws upon deep subject-matter expertise and technical competence, as well as skilled diplomatic interlocution; (d) is supported by keen political focus and unwavering resolve at the highest levels; (e) is undertaken in close coordination with key friends and allies; and (f) is backstopped by a demonstrable commitment to using force where necessary to prevent grave global ills.

That would truly be an excellent message to send to the future, and it would do the nonproliferation regime a world of good.

So here’s hoping.

Thank you.

—Christopher Ford

U.S. Institute of Peace Senior Study Group on Strategic Stability

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 21:57:44 GMT

Over much of last year, Dr. Ford participated in the Senior Study Group (SSG) on Strategic Stability at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP). Ably chaired by Brad Roberts of the Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Rebeccah Heinrichs of Hudson Institute, the SSG completed its report in February 2025, only to immediately run into publication problems as a result of the government's effort to shut down the USIP.

The litigation associated with that effort remains ongoing, but the SSG is pleased to be able now to publish its report. The report is not available on the USIP website, but you can use the button below to download a PDF.

Some Thoughts for my British Friends on Nuclear Weapons Policy and Deterrence under the Second Trump Administration

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 15:25:49 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford drew in his remarks to and discussions with a nuclear deterrence study group in London on July 28, 2025.

Good day, everyone, and thanks for having me here to London for this important discussion of nuclear weapons strategy, deterrence, and the vital relationship between our two countries. These are just my personal views, of course, and won’t necessarily represent those of anyone else, but hopefully they can help get a good discussion going here today.

The Challenge of Personnel and Process

I should start by noting that so far – in mid-July 2025 – it’s striking now little we know about the Second Trump Administration’s nuclear weapons policy. Part of this is simply because many of the key players who might be expected to develop and implement such a policy aren’t in place yet, though that’s certainly true. At the State Department, for example, there is a nominee for the position whose duties I performed in the last 15 months of the First Trump Administration – that of Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security – but last time I checked, no one is in place yet. And there aren’t even nominees yet for the position of Assistant Secretary for Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability, or for my old job of Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation.

To be sure, the uppermost politically-appointed positions at the Department of Defense have been filled – the Secretary, the Deputy Secretary, and the Under Secretary for Policy – but there’s still nobody in who might be able or expected to devote more than a fraction of their time to nuclear weapons policy. There is a nominee, for instance, for the Pentagon’s WMD policy role at the Assistant Secretary of Defense level, but he’s not yet in place and has a much stronger background in chemical and biological weapons issues than nuclear ones. The top three relevant positions at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which builds and maintains our nuclear weapons stockpile – the NNSA Administrator, the Principal Deputy Administrator, and the Deputy for Defense Programs – also have not yet been confirmed.

Nor does the National Security Council (NSC) seem to be in much of a position to fill the gap. In fact, it’s been largely gutted – cut down to a skeleton-crew staff and explicitly deprived of its traditional interagency policy-coordination role in favor of complete subordination to the Department of State in what appears to be a wholly top-down “just implement what we tell you” role.

Additionally, there is no sign that WMD-related issues are prioritized or appropriately staffed even within the denuded rump NSC that remains. In the First Trump Administration we had a Special Assistant to the President and NSC Senior Director for WMD and Counterproliferation – which was me in 2017! – but there is no such person today. To the extent that these matters are prioritized at all, WMD issues seem to be handled on an “extra duties as assigned” basis between other directorates.

This is a telling point. The NSC often plays a critical role at the outset of a U.S. administration because the White House gets to pick its staff at the NSC from the outset, whereas it usually takes many months before a full bench of senior departmental and agency nominees works its way through the Senate confirmation process. So even if you ultimately want the departments and agencies to take “point” on policy issues instead of the NSC, there aren’t senior political appointees from the new team in place in those organizations to lead things for some time at the start.

For the first portion of any administration, therefore, the NSC is critical to effective policy development on anything that doesn’t rise to the level of a personal priority for the cabinet secretaries and their deputies: in terms of having the President’s own people truly occupying most of the important roles, it’s usually the only game in town for a while.

That was the case, for instance, in the first Trump term. When I was at the NSC chairing Policy Coordination Committees (PCCs) on arms control, nuclear weapons, and other WMD issues in 2017, for instance, for a long time there weren’t any other “politicals” at the Assistant Secretary level around the table at all: just career civil servants who didn’t know when they’d be getting a new political boss, or who that would be. To some extent, from the Administration’s perspective, for a number of months, I was all there was at that level for policy development on WMD issues.

Now, with the Second Trump Administration apparently having decided that it actually doesn’t wish to have a policy coordination process based at the NSC at all – much less people in place with whom to do that – it’s not clear what is happening on nuclear weapons policy issues. It’s certainly ironic for an administration so apparently distrustful of and antipathetic to the career bureaucrats of the so-called “Deep State” to have passed up the opportunity to have presidentially-picked people from the White House complex seize the reins of nuclear weapons policy from the outset, but that’s apparently what has happened.

I am given to understand that there is initial work now underway in departments and agencies to feed into things such as the Nuclear Posture Review and the National Defense Strategy, but at this point such work is necessarily being done disproportionately by the career public servants. I have no reason to doubt their seriousness or integrity, mind you. (In fact, I have every confidence that their work product in these regards will be excellent.) But it is certainly a bit surprising for the Second Trump Administration to have left things to them for so many months!

To be sure, even without a functioning and effective NSC, it might to some degree still be possible to make up for an “early-in-the-term” deficit of senior appointees in the departments and agencies by using lower-level placeholder political appointees on an “acting” basis – something that President Trump has shown himself fond of doing because it avoids the scrutiny and accountability that come with more formal appointments. But even there, such a work-around would only really work if the people being temporarily housed in those “acting” roles had relevant experience and expertise to bring to bear on these complex topics. Nevertheless, there’s little sign of that right now, either.

I hope that all this does not bespeak a de-prioritization of or lack of interest in nuclear weapons policy and deterrence, but there’s scan sign of any prioritization of or focus upon nuclear weapons matters so far.

The Challenge of Policy Direction

Such a lack of focus and clear agenda in this field – other than reassuring but vague platitudes about “peace through strength” – is a striking contrast to the First Trump Administration.

When we came in in 2017 for “T1,” there were some very clear priorities. For example:

After several years of feckless and ineffectual Obama Administration responses to Russia’s violation of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, for instance, we were determined to set that right – either by finally pressuring Russia back into compliance, or by pulling out of INF ourselves. (We emphatically took off the table Obama’s answer of just living with Russian violations while America continued to comply with the Treaty!)

We were also tired of Moscow’s violations and manipulations of the Open Skies Treaty (OST), and began a process of responsive countermeasures that also ultimately resulted in our withdrawal when Russian abuses did not abate.

The issue hadn’t surfaced publicly yet, but we also knew about the disturbing new arsenal of “exotic” strategic delivery systems – some of which weren’t covered by the New START agreement – that Vladimir Putin publicly announced in March 2018, and it was clear to us that a new era in nuclear weapons competition was underway.

When it came to our own U.S. nuclear force posture, the First Trump Administration was also very focused upon starting to remedy the destabilizing gap that previous U.S. administrations had permitted to develop in theater-range systems between our own nuclear forces and the large and growing arsenals of such things deployed by the Russians and Chinese. (That was why, for instance, the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review announced the commencement of the Submarine-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear [SLCM-N] program, and why it set in motion the lower-yield W76-2 warhead program as a quickly-implementable stopgap capability.)

Moreover, as part of the “responsive strategy” we set in place vis-à-vis Russian INF violations, we authorized the Department of Defense to begin initial research and development work on potential American INF-class missile systems – though that effort was focused upon precision theater-range delivery of conventional warheads rather than nuclear ones.

All in all, we had a pretty good idea in the First Trump Administration of what we wanted to do right out of the box in 2017, and we were pretty forthright about it.

But it isn’t nearly so clear today where the Second Trump Administration wishes to go. Indeed, the “T2” team has been remarkably quiet about such matters.

Even to the degree that nuclear weapons issues were touched upon in the “ Project 2025” policy blueprint published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation – a long series of policy proposals that despite being ostentatiously disowned by Donald Trump during the campaign seems nonetheless to have been extremely influential in guiding many areas of administration policy in 2025 – we still have relatively little to go by. That document did emphasize the threats presented by China’s huge nuclear buildup [pp. 88 & 93-94], and it urged that China be made the top priority for U.S. defense planning. [p. 93] It also envisioned the United States continuing to rely upon nuclear deterrence to help protect our allies in Europe and East Asia, while urging that the burden of defending Europe in conventional terms be shifted increasingly to our NATO partners. [p. 94] (A similar point was made about defending South Korea. [p. 94])

As for U.S. nuclear weapons themselves, the Project 2025 blueprint stressed that “[t]he United States manifestly needs to modernize, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal.” [p. 94] Specifically, it said we need to

“Expand and modernize the U.S. nuclear force so that it has the size, sophistication, and tailoring to deter Russia and China simultaneously” and

“Develop a nuclear arsenal with the size, sophistication, and tailoring – including new capabilities at the theater level – to ensure that there is no circumstance in which America is exposed to serious nuclear coercion.” [p.95]

In terms of specifics, the Project 2025 plan called for accelerating the development, production, and deployment timelines for the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) slated to replace our ageing Minuteman III, the air-launched Long Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO) for our strategic bombers, the Columbia -class ballistic missile submarine that will replace our Ohio class boats, the new B-21 “Raider” bomber, and Dual Capable Aircraft (DCA) variants of the F-35 “Lightning II” strike fighter. [p.124] (It also called for improving the cyber resilience of our National Nuclear Command and Control [NC3] system. [p.120])

With respect to the U.S. nuclear weapons infrastructure, Project 2025 also recommended we continue to invest in rebuilding that infrastructure, accelerate the effort to restore plutonium pit production capabilities, and restore readiness to test nuclear weapons at the Nevada National Security Site. [p.125] (It did not, however, call for such testing.) It also advocated nuclear warhead life extension programs (LEPs) for the B61-12, W80-4, W87-1, and W88 Alt 370 devices. [p.124]

Unsurprisingly, Project 2025 was also bullish on missile defense (MD), lamenting that MD had been “underprioritized and underfunded in recent years,” whereas it should really have been “a top priority.” In terms of missile defense specifics, Project 2025 urged that we “buy at least 64 of the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI)” systems for our homeland-defense Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI) program, “prioritize procurement of more regional defense systems such as Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), Standard Missile-3, and Patriot missiles,” [p.126] and improve means for protecting our homeland against cruise missiles. [p.127] The blueprint also called for investing in “future advanced missile defense technologies like directed energy or space-based missile defense,” and for accelerating “the Glide Phase Interceptor, which is intended to counter hypersonic weapons.” [p.127]

All that sounds pretty good to me, I’ll admit, and the nuclear weapons elements of the Project 2025 proposal fit well with many points I myself have made . It is still far from clear, however, how much of the Project 2025 recommendations on U.S. nuclear posture will resurface as Second Trump Administration policy.

After all, the Heritage blueprint also urged that the NSC “take a leading role in directing and thorough review of all formal strategies: the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, the Nuclear Posture Review, the Missile Defense Strategy, etc.” [p.52] It also emphasized the threats we face from Russia due to its war of aggression against Ukraine. [p. 93] Yet we have now seen the NSC actually be dismantled , as well as what might be charitably described as an ambivalent approach to the Ukraine crisis by the Second Trump Administration. (In another divergence, there is also little sign in the fairly careful Project 2025 recommendations of the extravagant promises of a homeland missile defense “ success rate … very close to 100 percent ” that President Trump has made for his “Golden Dome” project.) How congruent Project 2025’s agenda for America’s nuclear posture is with actual “T2” policy, therefore, still remains to be seen.

Moreover, even where it did address the future of our nuclear weapons posture, the Project 2025 blueprint hedged quite a bit – never quite taking a position on things that one might think are really important. It did declare that in order to “ensure its ability to deter both Russia and the growing Chinese nuclear threat, the U.S. will need more than the bare minimum of nuclear modernization.” But it didn’t say h ow much more, or of what .

The Project 2025 document, for instance, urged officials to “ consider ” procuring “more modernized nuclear systems (such as the Sentinel missile or LRSO) than currently planned,” and that we “[i]mprove the ability of the U.S. to utilize the triad’s upload capacity in case of a crisis.” [p.124] But as to whether we should actually be procuring or uploading more – and how many, and of what – the document remained curiously silent. Similarly, Project 2025 simply urged that U.S. officials “ [r]eview what capabilities in addition to the SLCM-N (for example, nonstrategic weapons or new warhead designs) are needed to deter the unique Chinese threat” [p.124], without suggesting what might actually be needed.

In this sense, therefore, Project 2025 didn’t go much beyond the December 2023 report of the Strategic Posture Review Commission (SPRC), which made clear – and on a unanimous, bipartisan basis – that current U.S. modernization program of legacy strategic nuclear delivery systems was necessary but not sufficient , thus signaling that at least some expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal was needed. Neither the SPRC nor Project 2025, however, offered any clarity about just what might be needed. And that’s just what all of us are still looking to the Second Trump Administration to decide.

So far, in fact – in its public pronouncements at least - the Second Trump Administration does not itself seem yet to have moved beyond the nuclear weapons policies of the Biden Administration. After all, as evidenced by speeches given last summer by Pranay Vaddi of the NSC staff and Vipin Narang of the Defense Department , even Biden political appointees had come around to making it fairly clear that at least some expansion of U.S. nuclear capabilities would likely be necessary. (No, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to say so, but to my eye they were clearly “softening up” audiences such as the Arms Control Association for the long-overdue bad news!)

I myself am delighted that the traditionally more anti-nuclear Democrats have come around to strategic reason in that way in response to the grim security environment of nuclear threats we face today – a shift that one could see foreshadowed in the fact that the SPRC’s important findings in December 2023 were both bipartisan and unanimous . But if the “T2” Republicans now in power are serious about their strategic stewardship, it’s now time to stop beating around that push and get down to the serious business of figuring out how much more of what it is that we need.

Such clarity may well be coming, in the form of a new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) at some point. So far, however, no one has signaled any sense of overall direction, few Trump political appointees are in place, and it seem to be primarily only Defense Department and NNSA career civilians who are on the case at the moment. So a lot remains up in the air.

The Challenge of Europe

But from your perspective here in London, I can certainly see that the question merely of what the U.S. nuclear force posture is likely to be is only part of your concern. What is one to make of the “T2” team’s approach to the NATO Alliance and to “extended” deterrence? And what can be done to buttress deterrence in these challenging times?

Let me start by pointing out that despite what one often hears in the press, these are not just problems relating to Second Trump Administration policy. Europe would have some reason for concern about the conventional aspects of the U.S. alliance commitment even were diehard, Europhilic Atlanticists in power in Washington right now – which of course they aren’t.

This is no longer the early post-Cold War period when America enjoyed such relative military might that we could easily and plausibly promise to stand firm against aggression everywhere, all the time. With the growth of Chinese military power and aggressiveness – and Russia’s military revival and resurgent territorial expansionism – it seems increasingly likely that in the event of a conflict somewhere , we’d have to economize on our commitments of critical conventional assets elsewhere . As a result, if there were (for instance) a conflict with China in the Far East, we’d likely have little choice but to surge various types of mobile platform – capabilities, I should think, such as strike aircraft, aerial tankers, ISR assets, logistics platforms, electronic warfare assets, mobile air defense systems, and long-range precision fires platforms – to the Indo-Pacific no matter how committed we were in our hearts to the Atlantic Alliance.

Accordingly, there might quickly develop a serious conventional deterrence deficit in Europe – and a warfighting deficit in the event that deterrence failed, such as in the case of opportunistic aggression by Russia during a Sino-American spat. This gap, I should stress, would thus need to be filled by Europeans in the event of U.S. problems in the Far East even if present-day Washington liked Europe.

Of course, that does not necessarily mean that we would be unable or unwilling to hold up our end of the NATO bargain when it came to the nuclear aspects of deterrence or (God forbid) warfighting. According to the Project 2025 blueprint, at least, the United States should remain committed to the nuclear aspects of extended deterrence even as our allies pick up more and more of the burden of their own conventional defense.

There are still, however, at least some reasons for concern on the “extended” U.S. nuclear deterrence front. The first reason is political, for, frankly, it is not at all clear that the rulers of present-day Washington actually like Europe. Quite the contrary, I’m afraid.

As I’ve noted elsewhere , there are powerful portions of President Trump’s “MAGA” movement that really don’t like Europe much at all – people who look at the world through the prism of our own current poisonous and polarized domestic politics, and who view most of the liberal democracies of Europe as being little more than extensions of Trump’s domestic political opposition in the Democratic Party. This is why, for instance, Vice President J.D. Vance has said that the biggest threat to Europe comes not from terrorist madmen, Russian invaders, fanatical nuclear-armed Iranian clerics, or Chinese neo-imperialists, but rather “ the threat from within ” presented by Left-leaning politics and social mores. For MAGA folks who believe that – possibly excepting some weird future scenario in which most countries of Europe end up being ruled by Right-wing Viktor Orban, Georgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, or Alice Weidel types – it’s hard to see why the United States would be particularly interested in the nuclear defense even of a Europe that had somehow managed finally to take its own conventional defense seriously.

To be sure, it’s not a given that President Trump’s personal views would necessarily correlate completely with that ideologically illiberal and resolutely anti-European aspect of MAGA ideology. Trump is, after all, an “instinct” operator rather than an “ideas” guy, and he seems perfectly happy changing his policies dramatically and repeatedly on the basis of what feels like tactical and transactional opportunity, and without obvious concern for conceptual consistency. He also lives in abject terror of ever being taken to be “weak” or “a loser,” and this, too, could affect his approach to nuclear deterrence in Europe. (Is it conceivable that in a crisis, for instance, his obsession with reputational social media optics might prompt him to act the Churchill more than the Chamberlain? One can hope.)

And indeed, Trump already seems to be growing increasingly impatient and frustrated with Vladimir Putin – who with his determination to press forward for a blood-soaked victory in Ukraine, isn’t playing into Trump’s fondly imagined scenario of effortless peacemaking followed by a Nobel Prize – and has already countermanded initial efforts by his appointees in the Pentagon to halt weapons supplies to Kiev . (President Trump’s bold strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June was also a very interesting step, and obviously a defeat for neo-isolationists within the MAGA movement.) I am moderately optimistic about “T2” policy in these regards, and certainly more so than I was a few months ago.

Nevertheless, if you’re counting on extended U.S. nuclear deterrence while Trump is in office, you should at least be aware that some parts of his political coalition like and wish to protect Europe no more than they like or would wish to protect Joe Biden or Kamala Harris .

Another reason still to be uneasy about extended U.S. nuclear deterrence in the present context, I fear, is a game-theoretical one that would be familiar to any nuclear strategist from the Cold War. I refer, of course, to the intrinsic challenge of convincing an adversary (and reassuring your allies) that you’d really be willing to risk nuclear attack on your own homeland in order to protect distant friends.

During the Cold War, we developed a number of at least partial answers to this “credibility conundrum.” And indeed, I’d venture to say that U.S. extended nuclear deterrence for Europe did remain reasonably credible during the years in which three things remained the case:

We had large numbers of U.S. troops deployed in Europe who would be directly in the line of fire in the event of an invasion by Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces;

U.S. nuclear weapons were also stationed in Europe, both making them subject to attack or being overrun in the event of a Soviet invasion and giving American leaders the capability to mount a nuclear response to aggression on a “rung” of the proverbial “escalation ladder” that still remained below that of a full strategic exchange; and

We had, under NATO’s “nuclear sharing” construct, forward-deployed U.S. nuclear gravity bombs prepared for delivery in wartime by Dual-Capable Aircraft (DCAs) from partner countries who, in the event of a Soviet invasion, would presumably be less squeamish about starting to nuke Russians than might American leaders sitting in relative safety back home in Washington.

But you can see the problem, of course. Today, the second of those two factors has not been the case for some years in any significant way (relative to Russian deployments, at least), while many in the MAGA movement apparently very much want to take the first factor off the table as well by pulling us entirely out of the conventional defense of NATO.

The third factor of “nuclear sharing” remains in place, I suppose, but with both of those other factors attenuating, one might well wonder whether that will be enough to carry the burden of extended nuclear deterrence alone, without an awkward-to-defend theory of immediate escalation to strategic use. So it’s not hard still to feel somewhat uneasy about this.

So What Might Help?

Given Britain’s strong interest in maintaining close relations with the United States and ensuring the continuation of deterrence in Europe at a time in which Moscow seems aggressive and dangerous in ways unprecedented for a very long time, then, what might be done?

Unfortunately, I can’t claim to have any miraculous answers for you. The collective security commitment articulated by Article V of the NATO Treaty has always been a fundamentally political thing. It is a bond not strictly mandated by any provision of legal text, but that always derived its considerable power and credibility not only from the clarity with which we both viewed our adversaries, but also from the strength, depth, and sheer obviousness of the political, social, cultural, economic, military, and indeed civilizational ties that linked the United States to its alliance partners. Everyone knew we’d probably be there for you, as it were, because it was clear to everyone both that we were, in some loose sense, family , and that this figurative family faced a grave threat.

In that sense, broad trends and dynamics in that international connective tissue may be more important, at the end of the day, than the details of anyone’s actual nuclear force posture, doctrine, or declaratory policy. (Such connective tissue, moreover, is much more easily damaged than it is rewoven.) This makes the seeming ephemera of “politics” and “culture” hugely important in what most people assume is the very concrete business of deterring aggression, and makes current trans-Atlantic “culture war” frictions doubly worrying.

That being said, there are perhaps some things that could still help bolster deterrence in Europe, both in the conventional and in the nuclear weapons arenas.

Improved U.S. Capabilities

In terms of unilateral U.S. capabilities, I believe we need more theater-range systems to be arrayed against the destabilizing overmatch of Russian capabilities we currently face. (And, yes, this is absolutely true in the Far East as well.) That’s why, for instance, it was so discreditable for the Biden Administration to have tried to cancel the SLCM-N program, thereby ensuring its delay even though Congress sensibly stepped in to countermand that unwise decision.

Beyond just the sea-based SLCM-N, however, I think it might help to have U.S. nuclear systems deployed in Europe once again. That is something, after all, that certainly helped force the Kremlin into much more reasonable arms control negotiating positions the last time we took such a step with the famous “Euromissile” deployment in 1983. Nevertheless, I’m not sure that even with today’s bellyful of Putin provocations, the Europeans are really ready for that , nor do we yet have any such deployable system in hand and ready for the job.

Arguably even better and more flexible than such a “bespoke” Euromissile-style nuclear delivery system, however, might be some kind of small nuclear warhead package capable of being fitted into one or more (or several?) existing or planned long-range precision strike systems on a swap-in/swap-out (SI/SO) basis, thus allowing those systems to be optionally converted to nuclear delivery. This would allow us to leverage existing or already-planned precision delivery programs for the benefit of nuclear deterrence, too; it would also greatly increase the range of possibilities available for “nuclear sharing” within the NATO Alliance.

Enhanced NATO “Nuclear Sharing”

And speaking of NATO “nuclear sharing,” I’d love to see us work together to “upscale” the system a bit. That would mean more U.S. bombs in more vaults, and in more countries – including in (or at least involving DCA assets and trained-up pilots from ) partner countries further East.

Indeed, in addition to having some additional weapons in play, I’d also like there to be a lot more vaults than needed to store those weapons – as well as a cycle of relatively frequent logistics movements between them, involving both real weapons and “dummy” units. (I am also intrigued by the new mobile, containerized, semi-clandestine vaults now being developed by the Sandia National Laboratory , which are apparently, and surely not by coincidence, perfectly sized for the B61-series gravity bombs that form the basis of the NATO “nuclear sharing” program.) This would confront the Russians with a “shell game” that would reduce their ability to develop a high-probability theory of victory, greatly problematize the Kremlin’s targeting in wartime, and increase Allied options in a crisis – to include sending additional weapons to Europe to fill up more of those vaults, either surreptitiously or openly, as a strategic signal.

Even when DCA variants of the F-35 come online in Europe, however – and kudos to His Majesty’s Government, by the way, for recently deciding to buy some – I’m still not sure it’s a terrific idea actually to fly your plane right over a really well-defended target. For that reason, if “nuclear sharing” with aviation assets is to have a solid future, I would think we need to give DCAs some kind of stand-off delivery capability. I’m not sure that any existing air-launched missile systems carrying a nuclear weapon can fit inside an F-35, so this could perhaps be a bit tricky – but that small “SI/SO” nuclear warhead package idea I mentioned earlier might come in rather handy.

I admit, however, that even the NATO “nuclear sharing” construct is still dependent upon America’s willingness to at least support allied nuclear strikes against invading Russian forces or other Russian targets by granting permission for U.S. weapons to be employed. Accordingly, in an era when worrying questions have been raised about U.S. alliance commitments, this means that Europe’s own nuclear and conventional capabilities will be more important than ever. So let’s talk about your capabilities over here on this side of the Atlantic.

European Conventional Defense

With respect to non-nuclear arms, it should go without saying that Europe finally getting truly serious about its conventional defenses would help the credibility of extended U.S. nuclear deterrence, for it would decrease Europe’s degree of relative need for deterrence that draws upon capabilities beyond what conventional arms can provide.

To be sure, a Europe that was able to defend itself against Russian threats “perfectly” without any U.S. assistance would obviate the need for American extended deterrence at all , of course. Nevertheless, there’s no chance of that in the foreseeable future, and the primary danger today lies in NATO being able to do so little on its own that an exasperated and increasingly disinterested Washington concludes that you simply lack seriousness and don’t want to be secure enough to make it worth the American cost, effort, and risk of defending you.

I’m encouraged by the recent Hague Summit Declaration , which commits most of America’s NATO allies in Europe – with the rather shameful exception of Spain , which appears to revel in being a national security free rider – to meeting a defense spending target of 3.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2035, coupled with an additional 1.5 percent for a variety of nominally defense-related expenditures. If this new target is really taken seriously and our allies manage to forego embarrassing gamesmanship in sliding lots of random and unjustifiable things into the loose category of that 1.5 percent in “defense-related” spending, this should help a great deal.

Most importantly, augmented spending should actually help improve European defense capabilities . I hope our allies will have the good sense to coordinate their approaches along lines of mutually-supportive and deeply interoperable comparative advantage, rather than just building cookie-cutter forces that will end up being collectively inadequate, hamstrung by being unable to provide the right assets, in the right numbers, in the right place, and at the right time in the operational and logistical complexities of a real European fight. If they do, however – and perhaps recent steps like the recent UK-German Kensington Treaty will mark a start of new efforts – the new NATO spending targets are very promising.

To put it frankly, moreover, the new spending targets also help President Trump with one of his most important objectives: doing things that he can portray in social media as him “winning” at something. Policymaking in Washington these days is only partly about policy outcomes, for assessing those can be complicated and time-consuming, and in any event takes expertise, expertise, and careful evaluation.

Instead, a key focus of policymaking seems now to be the creation of ideological performance art . That is, it is about making claims and issuing pronouncements that achieve memetic virality in the social media attention economy – dominating the discourse, thrilling one’s political base, rattling one’s political opponents, and conveying at least the momentary impression that one is doing bold and important things – before everybody moves on to paying attention to something else. (What actually happens later, in terms of policy outcomes, often seems to be of merely secondary or tertiary importance. Dealing with eventual outcomes is at most a problem for another day’s attention economy, or better yet something for someone else to worry about entirely.)

In this context of policy-performative theatricality – and admitting that the real-world actions of Vladimir Putin surely have even more to do with NATO’s boost in defense spending than does the rhetoric of Donald Trump and his team – it is very important that our president can now say he pushed Europe into finally taking its own defense seriously. There is real truth in this, and this narrative reduces the odds of American backsliding on its alliance commitments, giving Trump a stake in preserving the metric of the ”win” by not undermining or sabotaging “his” own NATO spending bump by cutting back American involvement before that spending starts to produce results.

That said, of course, this naturally means NATO allies actually have to follow through on the pledge. U.S. presidents of all political stripes have been urging NATO to spend more for the last quarter century, and the former NATO defense spending target of two percent GDP goes all the way back to an oral pledge made in connection with the Riga Summit in 2006 . NATO more formally ratified that target in 2014 at the Wales Summit , just after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine. Yet by 2021 – just before Putin’s second , now full-scale invasion – only six countries had met that target. Even last year, ten years after Wales and nearly two decades after Riga, nine countries of the alliance remained short of two percent . That’s a pretty poor track record, to say the least. A great deal rides on NATO being able to do much better now with its new target.

If NATO defense investments do pan out, however, that will be very good news both for European defense and for the U.S. alliance relationship.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but it’s not entirely beyond imagining that the alliance could eventually end up stronger than it has been in a long time.

A Europe better able to defend itself – especially in circumstances in which all those “low-density, high demand” American assets in Europe might suddenly have to be moved to the Indo-Pacific – might also be a Europe capable of playing a much more Trump-congenial role in a true two-way partnership with the United States. Indeed, if for some reason the threat of opportunistic Russian aggression in Europe were not too great – such as if Moscow remained bloodily bogged down in Ukraine or otherwise preoccupied – one might even imagine that some European assets of this sort could perhaps be deployed to the Indo-Pacific to help us somewhat with our highest security priority in a crisis.

Surely that would surely be an attractive alliance from Washington’s perspective! Under Secretary of Defense Bridge Colby has reportedly said, rather inexplicably, that “ we don’t want you ” to help us in the Indo-Pacific, but his bosses would surely have a different view if things got really dicey out there. In the event of crisis, help from our friends would surely be welcome in what Washington now considers the most important theater.

NATO Nuclear Weapons

With regard to NATO nuclear weapons, I’m not persuaded it’s time to condone “friendly” proliferation to a country that is not today already a nuclear weapons possessor. I’m realistic enough to acknowledge that given trends in today’s increasingly problematic multipolar environment , I cannot rule out future circumstances of worsening Russian and Chinese threats and growing American isolationism in which I might be won around to such an argument. But that is not today.

The Second Trump Administration has not yet proved quite as isolationist as it initially seemed to signal – and as our allies feared and our adversaries hoped – and it’s premature to declare the demise of U.S. extended deterrence, especially if NATO allies continue to show Washington that they are committed to being resolute defense partners and these efforts are bolstered by a more robust Anglo-French approach to nuclear deterrence.

On the issue of Europe’s indigenous nuclear deterrent, the recent Anglo-French Northwood Declaration proclaiming a joint commitment to responding to extreme threats to Europe and deepening nuclear weapons-related cooperation and coordination – for instance, through the establishment a UK-France Nuclear Steering Group – strikes me as a good sign. Nevertheless, given Russia’s willingness to use nuclear threats in coercive bargaining and its huge advantage in theater-range nuclear forces, Europe’s current indigenous arsenals still don’t seem large or flexible enough to be particularly effective from an escalation-management perspective.

To be sure, the French have commendably retained an air-launched missile that would indeed seem to represent a rung of the escalation ladder below firing salvoes of Submarine-Launched Ballistic missiles (SLBMs). But Britain and France could still use additional national nuclear capabilities of more intermediate range and flexibility. I don’t know what the odds are of London and Paris actually cooperating on such a program, but whether they act jointly or severally, it is time for those countries to get back in the business of increasing the size of their arsenals – not necessarily by a lot, but in ways that help fill dangerous gaps and provide more deterrent flexibility.

As for what the best ways might be to do this, it’s not at all clear to me what the “realm of the possible” is in British and French nuclear weaponeering from the perspective of technical feasibility and infrastructure capacity, nor what might be politically imaginable for them in terms of direct cooperation. I know nuclear weapons issues have more domestic political salience and sensitivity over here than they do back in America.

Nevertheless, in the interest of stirring the intellectual pot in order to stimulate discussion here in this study group, at least, let me offer some imaginative and perhaps provocative speculations to get our discussions going.

First of all, if the stand-off range were good enough – as it likely would indeed be for the French ASN4G scramjet-powered hypersonic system currently under development – a new capability for non-stealthy external carry of an air-breathing nuclear standoff system on F-35 DCAs might be an effective way to add to a collective nuclear deterrent. Another might be to put some American SLCM-N missiles in the Vertical Launch System (VLS) batteries of British nuclear-powered attack submarines – though this might perhaps require they be fitted with British warheads, which could be challenging for the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston. (That’s a question for another day’s lawyering.)

Second – and even farther “outside the box,” perhaps – I find myself wondering what the United States will do with its current fleet of 1993-vintage B-2 “Spirit” strategic bombers once the new B-21 “Raider” comes online.

I suppose my first preference – and a step arguably more consistent with an “America First” defense policy, it must be said – would be for Uncle Sam simply to undertake life-extension programs for those big stealthy birds in order to keep them in service longer, not unlike what we’ve done with our truly ancient B-52s since they transitioned into stand-off nuclear delivery service. (The Spirits would also remain handy in other ways, not least because they can carry a huge conventional bomb load, and because I’m still not entirely sure the smaller B-21s can carry our enormous GBU-57 “bunker buster” munitions.)

If the United States didn’t want to keep all of the old B-2s, however – and current U.S. assumptions are that we will not keep them in service – perhaps we might consider selling them to Britain, the nuclear-armed NATO ally with whom we have had an enormously close and cooperative nuclear deterrence relationship since 1958. (Another scholar of these issues has alternatively urged that we give our old B-2s to Australia , though presumably not for nuclear uses. That’s not a bad idea either, but in both cases I fear our allies would struggle with the cost and effort of maintaining those finicky aircraft.) In British service, I assume the Spirits would have no physical trouble carrying large – French? – standoff missiles for nuclear delivery, and they could likely still overfly some targets directly to drop nuclear gravity bombs.

Conclusion

Anyway, it’s time for me to stop speculating – and time for us to begin what I am sure will be some really interesting discussions. I hope that I’ve been able to provide some useful perspectives and some interesting, and perhaps provocative, “food for thought” to get things going here.

Thank you for having me back to London, and thanks for listening.

— Christopher Ford

Nonproliferation and Geopolitical Structure: Conjunctive Polarities and the Challenges of a Doubly-Multipolar World

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 19:15:01 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks on July 22, 2025, to a conference sponsored by the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Good afternoon, and thank you for having me here to the Livermore Lab once again. The topic of this conference, “nuclear order and global disorder,” is certainly timely, and though I’m naturally able to offer only my personal views – which won’t necessarily represent those of anyone else – I’d like to offer some thoughts on the relationship between the nonproliferation regime and the broader structure of international order.

Introduction

I’d like to walk through the ways in which I think the general structure of the international system affects the “realm of the possible” for nonproliferation. Specifically, I’m in interested in how its varying polarities (i.e., unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar) help shape nonproliferation possibilities and challenges.

When I speak of “polarities,” however, I mean this in two senses: not just in the general geopolitical one based upon the aggregation of military, economic, and political might, but also with respect to how nuclear weapons capabilities are distributed. Over time, of course, those separate polarities have shifted, but they have shifted differently , and their varying conjunctures have had important implications for nonproliferation.

I offer this analytical as a way of explaining why I think we are now in transition to – or perhaps already in – an entirely new era for nonproliferation policy: a doubly-multipolar time in which the challenges nonproliferation faces are likely to be perhaps greater than ever.

In focusing upon the polarity of system structure, of course, I don’t mean to make the relationship between structure and nonproliferation dynamics sound monocausal, for I do not think it is. Nevertheless, I think system structure is important, and that different conjunctures of geopolitical and nuclear polarity have historically had notable implications for nonproliferation.

To offer a bit more about how I think this works, I’d like to walk you through the history of the nuclear age, which I divide for these purposes into four different eras, each of which represents a different combination of geopolitical-versus-nuclear polarities – with each combination helping give rise both to different nonproliferation possibilities and to different nonprolfieration challenges. Some combinations, I’d argue, are (or were) more congenial than others from a nonproliferation perspective.

This I know I’ll be generalizing a lot, and glossing over some things that certainly aren’t unimportant – including the emergence of the dangerous nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan, as well as the small but significant British and French nuclear weapons programs. That said, I think here’s enough in my “conjunctive polarities” analysis to permit us to learn something about the new nonproliferation era we seem increasingly to be in.

The Nuclear Dawn – Geopolitical Bipolarity but Nuclear Unipolarity

Back at the “nuclear dawn” immediately after the end of the Second World War, the global system had become fundamentally bipolar, with the United States and the Soviet Union emerging as superpowers who would divide and shape the postwar world between them. Nonetheless, the global system remained, in nuclear terms – for a brief while, at least – unipolar , for Uncle Sam was the only player with “The Bomb.”

This was good for nonproliferation in that it opened up an opportunity for a bold attempt at nonproliferation-related institution-building, but this structure also put sharp limits on what that institution-building could actually achieve. On the plus side, this was the era in which the United States proposed quite a radical answer to nuclear proliferation risks. With their articulation of the Baruch Plan at the United Nations in 1946, the Americans urged the creation of a system of international control of nuclear technology centralized in a United Nations-based “Atomic Development Authority.” After the creation of that authority, the United States proposed to relinquish its small arsenal of atomic weapons to the Authority, so that no state would ever be permitted ever to build them again. Or at least that was the idea.

The Baruch Plan was doomed, of course. But it was also doomed, in some sense, precisely by the very conjunction of circumstances that made this ambitious proposal possible. On the one hand, it was the world’s nuclear monopolarity that gave the Americans their opportunity to propose such a radical nuclear solution all on their own: at the time, theirs were the only nuclear weapons that needed to be disposed of.

Yet if it was nuclear unipolarity made the idealism and boldness of the Baruch Plan possible, it was geopolitical bipolarity and the emerging Cold War competition that doomed it, for that bipolarity made the then-American nuclear monopoly intolerable to the other geopolitical bipole. There was approximately zero chance that Stalin – then sprinting to get atomic weapons himself – was ever going to accept a system of international control proposed and designed by the Americans, nor trust that his great rivals would ever make good on their promise to dismantle the U.S. arsenal.

Nuclear Cold War – Doubly Bipolar

After the Soviets detonated their first bomb in 1949, of course, the nuclear arms race was on. Yet for all its fraught dangers of escalation and catastrophe, the Cold War – occurring in a world now bipolar in both the geopolitical and the nuclear senses – was a period remarkably conducive to nonproliferation institution-building, and which indeed saw a good deal of nonproliferation success. In a “double-bipolar” system, as it turned out, the two big alliance leaders found themselves to share an interest in nonproliferation.

This shared interest was not just for the more abstract reason that more nuclear players necessarily means more potential relational axes along which nuclear crises could occur. Additionally – and perhaps, in that doubly bipolar context, more importantly – this shared U.S.-Soviet interest in nonproliferation also resulted from the fact that the emergence of additional nuclear weapons powers might threaten the relative degree of dominance (and control) each superpower enjoyed over its alliance partners, and indeed other players too. In fact, it might even lead to the rise of a third-party power that would present a new, direct nuclear threat to one or both of them.

The rival nuclear superpowers might not agree on much else as they jockeyed to see whose system of order would prevail in the world, but they could thus agree that it would be best if there weren’t more nuclear-armed powers. And, as it happened, they did agree – even to the point that Washington and Moscow cooperated effectively in co-drafting and co-sponsoring the text that ultimately became the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1968.

The United States, moreover, was very successful in using alliance relationships and security guarantees – all of which relied heavily upon America’s military might and centrality within the bipolar cluster of the non-Communist world – as an enormously powerful nonproliferation tool . An environment of geopolitical and nuclear bipolarity, therefore, turned out to be a pretty congenial one for nonproliferation institution-building, and for its institutional success.

To some extent, to be sure, the very bipolarity of the Cold War era created some proliferation pressures , not all of which could be managed in the interests of systemic stability by America’s offering security guarantees for its friends or Soviet domination of Warsaw Pact client states. China’s own development of nuclear weapons, in particular, seems to have been driven in part by a strong distaste for the “superpower monopoly” that was otherwise conducive to that era’s relative degree of nonproliferation success. (And China’s arrival as a nuclear power in 1964 indeed greatly perturbed the superpowers, with Beijing under Mao Zedong becoming, in a sense, the prototypical nuclear “rogue regime.” At different points, in fact, both of the superpowers each briefly entertained the idea of a prophylactic nuclear strike against China.)

Yet, on the whole, the nuclear capabilities of the U.S. and Soviet Union – as well as their conventional military power – remained so great throughout this period, relative to those of other countries, that I think it’s still fair to regard the Cold War as being an era that was indeed fundamentally bipolar both in the broader geopolitical sense and in the more specifically nuclear one. And, as far as nonproliferation was concerned, anyway, these years weren’t such a bad time. The resulting global nonproliferation regime was pretty successful in fending off the cascade of proliferation that had been expected.

Post-Cold War: Geopolitical Unipolarity but Nuclear Bipolarity

From a structural perspective, the post -Cold War period was quite different, being generally unipolar in its geopolitical structure during America’s time of unquestioned global supremacy, while yet remaining bipolar in nuclear terms, with both Washington and Moscow each retaining – despite steep negotiated reductions – a nuclear arsenal of much greater size and potency than that of any other state.

In this new environment, nuclear proliferation emerged as an issue of much greater relative importance than it had enjoyed before. I don’t mean that nonproliferation had been unimportant during the Cold War, of course. But nonproliferation had then been a second-order concern when ranked next to the core challenges of deterrence and superpower rivalry – and of preventing the kind of all-out nuclear conflagration that could have resulted from a failure of deterrence. Significantly, however, those first order concerns related to the superpowers’ Cold War contest for power did not run at cross-purposes to that second-order emphasis upon nonproliferation, leaving the doubly-bipolar system of the 1949-1991 years a comparatively stable one from a nonproliferation perspective.

But after 1991, with that core competitive dynamic having attenuated hugely due to the collapse of Soviet communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons proliferation to third-party states emerged as a much greater relative threat than ever before. As a result, nonproliferation did not remain merely a secondary concern, but now rose to the status of a first-order concern for international security policy.

Post-Cold War nuclear arms reduction by the former superpower rivals were responsible for some of this, because as the size and scope of the U.S. and Russian stockpiles plummeted, the relative destabilizing impact even of a small third-party nuclear arsenal increased – and hence the importance of preventing proliferation. Movement toward nuclear disarmament after 1991, in other words, inherently had the effect of making strict adherence to nonproliferation more systemically critical because it increased the “marginal value” of a nuclear weapon (and therefore, presumably, the attractiveness of proliferation).

Nonproliferation also increased in importance in the post-Cold War era because the U.S. monopole took up special systemic policing responsibilities even beyond nuclear affairs. This entangled nonproliferation in broader hopes for international peace and justice, too, for it is clearly much harder to intervene to stop ethnic cleansing or genocide by a heinous tyrant somewhere in the world if he has nuclear weapons!

For these reasons, nonproliferation moved up in status to become a truly first-order priority for the United States and other Western powers in the post-Cold War environment. Nonproliferation was, in a sense, structurally essential to then-prevailing system of order.

But there were clouds on the horizon. Some of the very factors that made nonproliferation important created tensions, giving rise to additional proliferation pressures that the system needed to manage. Those tensions may not have reached their full disruptive potential in those post-Cold War years of geopolitical monopolarity, but they nonetheless represented seeds that would be more free to sprout dangerously thereafter.

For one thing, nuclear weapons proliferation’s augmented potential to upset the systemic applecart made such proliferation especially attractive to those who didn’t like that prevailing applecart of nuclear bipolarity and geopolitical monopolarity. If you were one of those rogue regimes that wanted to do things to your citizenry that might tempt humanitarian-minded outside powers to intervene against you during the “ responsibility to protect ” era, for instance – or if you simply wished to invade or destabilize your neighbors with impunity – getting nuclear weapons to deter such outside intervention had a strong appeal. The geopolitical unipolarity of the post-Cold War era thus increased proliferation pressures by giving disruptive smaller states reasons to seek asymmetric advantages from nuclear weaponry precisely because “The Bomb” seemed to offer their only military hope vis-à-vis the American geopolitical monopole.

This additional proliferation pressures were real, but nonetheless remained relatively manageable during the years in which U.S. military power reigned supreme and there was hence still a pretty good chance of someone being able to intervene before a new player got nuclear weapons. This certainly didn’t work every time, of course, and we let the DPRK set a truly terrible precedent in this regard. Nevertheless, on the whole, the persistence and degree of U.S.-centric geopolitical unipolarity allowed the system nonproliferation “enforcement” opportunities with which it was able – more or less – to handle the proliferation pressures engendered by its structure. These proliferation incentives would cause further problems later in a new environment of multipolar near-peer great power competition, but they remained manageable during most of the post-Cold War years.

Another problem with its roots during the post-Cold War period but that remained manageable for a while was that, in this era of de facto unipolar systemic nonproliferation enforcement by the United States, the other former Cold War superpower lost its traditional focus upon and interest in nonproliferation enforcement as systemic policing roles passed to the dominant Americans. Over time, this left leaders in Moscow – whose predecessors had helped create the NPT regime – with little institutional memory of or commitment to nonproliferation, and no willingness to commit any special effort, blood, or treasure to its vindication.

As for China, it began the post-Cold War era committed not to nonproliferation but instead to proliferation , being deeply involved in helping Pakistan develop its own nuclear weapons capabilities. Both China and Russia, moreover, seem to have sensed that precisely because the United States was so committed to nonproliferation, permitting or even encouraging the emergence of proliferation threats would be an effective way to distract and preoccupy American officials in ways that reduced the degree to which they were willing or able to contest the emergence of Russian and Chinese geopolitical revisionism as those powers worked to shift the system away from U.S.-centric monopolarity toward a more multipolar structure.

In this way did the structure of the post-Cold War era – unipolar in geopolitics but still bipolar in nuclear affairs – lay the seeds for its own erosion, and for that of the nonproliferation regime with it.

A Great-Power-Competitive, Doubly-Multipolar Present

Today, the structure of the international system is already quite multipolar in both the geopolitical and – increasingly, as a result of China’s huge nuclear build-up – the nuclear senses. This is likely to have great nonproliferation consequences.

To begin with, the proliferation pressures created by lesser powers’ desire to provide themselves asymmetric advantages vis-à-vis possible attack by one or more of the great powers remain strong – indeed, arguably, stronger than ever. As noted, during the post-Cold War era this mostly involved the desire of “rogue regime” autocrats to protect themselves from American-led intervention in the name of preventing various domestic or regional ills (including proliferation). In the increasingly doubly bipolar environment that began to emerge in the last handful of years, however, proliferation pressures now also began to arise in states that faced growing threats from of Russian or Chinese revisionist aggression. More states thus felt some temptation to develop nuclear weaponry than before.

The current era seems to be characterized by such extra-strong proliferation pressures, moreover, even as the international community’s ability to turn to and rely upon a robust and effective nonproliferation regime seems to be at a modern nadir. Today, concerted collective action in response to proliferation threats is harder than ever to achieve thanks to distracting competitive rivalries between the United States, China, and Russia, to the lack of any serious commitment to nonproliferation exertion in Moscow and Beijing, and, in particular, to Russia’s emergence as an active and willful “spoiler” within international institutions as it seeks to browbeat the rest of the world into condoning Vladimir Putin’s brutal wars of territorial expansion.

Nor, in today’s more multipolar circumstances, is it as easy for U.S. allies to be confident in American alliance guarantees of conventional military support in a crisis. In an increasingly multipolar world, the United States will unavoidably find it increasingly difficult to hold the line in using its military might to confront and hence deter aggression everywhere, at the same time. And this, in turn, has begun to increase the incentives felt by U.S. allies to develop their own nuclear weaponry.

After all, there are only so many platforms to go around, and if things got really bad in the East, it’s hard to see any U.S. administration not surging to the Indo-Pacific a lot of “low density, high-demand” military assets that are currently quite important to European defense. (To the degree that Washington remains firmly committed to NATO, the same logic applies in reverse: in a multipolar context, allies in the Indo-Pacific will find it harder to imagine America standing by them as effectively against Chinese aggression if Russia is at war against NATO in Europe.) Geopolitical multipolarity thus inherently stresses the nonproliferation regime by reducing the ability of U.S. allies to rely upon American firepower to defend them against aggression, thereby increasing those allies’ incentives to make up that security deficit through indigenous nuclear weaponization.

To shift from system-structure dynamics to more particularistic variables of policy and personality, moreover, it is worth noting that present-day Washington’s apparent ideological distaste for European liberal democracy and desire to reduce overseas U.S. military commitments and expenses increases the problem, by casting further doubt upon the solidity of American alliance guarantees to allies who have hitherto depended upon the United States for extended nuclear and conventional military deterrence. In this context, it is even conceivable that at some sufficiently threatening point, American officials might in even be willing to condone or encourage proliferation to one or more friendly states as the “least bad” remaining way to prevent them falling to Chinese or Russian predation once a strong forward-deployed U.S. conventional military presence had been ruled out.

As I have outlined, in both the Cold War and (especially) the post-Cold War era, nonproliferation was a high priority for the most important countries in the international system, as well as a priority the pursuit of which was consistent with maintaining the stability of the prevailing system structure. In a contemporary “double-multi” environment that is now multipolar not just in the geopolitical sense but increasingly also in the nuclear one, however, nonproliferation has fallen back to being merely one important priority among other competing important priorities.

Some of these other priorities, moreover, may now actually exist in tension with nonproliferation for more countries – not merely for those who now feel increasing incentives to consider nuclear weaponization in the face of Russian and Chinese aggression from which it is ever more challenging for the Americans to defend them, but also for the United States itself, the power upon whose energy, resources, and dedication to nonproliferation the global nonproliferation regime has previously come to depend. From a nonproliferation perspective, this conjuncture does not bode well.

What to Make of This?

I don’t mean to be wholly pessimistic, for I do believe that nonproliferation retains a compelling logic for systemic stability reasons, and that many countries still understand this. Nor, despite recent perturbations, have I entirely given up hope that the United States will effectively make good on its alliance commitments.

Nevertheless, from a nonproliferation perspective, today’s doubly-multipolar world is clearly an unprecedentedly challenging place. Precisely because I think these problems are to some extent structural in derivation, moreover, it may be that they are not entirely soluble by “ordinary” policy choices within that system, even if we Americans and our allies work together impeccably.

That’s precisely why conferences like this are so important, as we seek the “least bad” way to manage the slow-motion proliferation crisis that is being created by the conjuncture of geopolitical and nuclear multipolarity. Our leaders badly need wisdom right now as they confront these issues, and it’s our job to provide them with as much as we can. So thanks, again, for pulling this group together.

-- Christopher Ford

Diplomatic Dialogue Around Existential Risk: The Intellectual Architecture of the “CEND” Initiative

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 11:37:30 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his oral remarks at a conference sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge University on June 17, 2025.

Good afternoon, and thanks to Paul Ingram and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) or inviting me.

Paul has encouraged me to talk a bit about the “Creating an Environment for Nuclear Disarmament” (CEND) initiative that I began at the U.S. Department of State back during the First Trump Administration, and I’m happy to do so.

The Origins of CEND

Pre-CEND Disarmament Policy, Politics, and Performance

My bureau hosted the first CEND meeting at the U.S. Department of State in July 2019. Its institutional origins, however, lie somewhat earlier, in work we did when I ran the WMD and Counterproliferation Directorate at the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) staff in 2017.

It’s important to remember the nuclear disarmament-related context here.

When I first arrived at the NSC to take the helm of the WMD directorate, we were taking over from the Obama Administration – which had gone to great lengths to encourage the global belief that we were moving inexorably toward nuclear weapons abolition. As you may recall, President Obama made this idea quite central to his political “brand,” if you will, by emphasizing it in a famous speech he gave in the Czech Republic – at Hradcany Square in Prague – in April 2009 . There, he pledged that “the United States will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons … [and] begin the work of reducing our arsenal.”

To be sure, the U.S. nuclear arsenal was by that point already down to only a small fraction of its Cold War size. In fact, by the end of the George W. Bush Administration, our arsenal had been reduced by a stunning 90 percent from its Cold War peak, having come back down to its smallest size since the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950s .

But rhetoric and symbolism apparently sometimes mean more than action to the disarmament community, and no previous U.S. president had leaned into the rhetoric and imagery of nuclear abolition like Obama’s team did with such flair. And indeed he was rewarded for this with the Nobel Peace Prize later in 2009.

Some of this rosy glow had faded by the end of 2016, of course. The Obama Administration had indeed set in motion further reductions in the size of the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals with the New START agreement of 2010 , but the disarmament community – its expectations raised to what was surely a wholly unrealistic fever pitch by Obama’s own rhetoric and antinuclear atmospherics – nonetheless squirmed as his administration also set in motion a very expensive program to modernize the United States’ ageing strategic nuclear delivery systems for the first time since early in the Reagan Administration.

Before long, commencement of the first phase of Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine in 2014, and Russia’s violation of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty , also dampened hopes for more progress by making new arms control negotiations more politically challenging and reducing American faith that Putin would actually keep any new deal that might be agreed.

Accordingly, the bloom had indeed somewhat left the Obama disarmament rose by the time I arrived at the NSC in January of 2017, and the policy community’s disarmament discourse felt confused and fractured.

Having worked on such issues since my first tour at the State Department during the George W. Bush Administration, however, I had long since developed the impression that global disarmament discourse had become deeply dysfunctional. I hope this won’t sound overly harsh, but to me it seemed that disarmament discourse was at risk of becoming little more than a form of anti-American and anti-Western political performance art alarmingly divorced from any real concern with the practical challenges of actually achieving nuclear weapons reductions – much less eventual abolition – in the real world in which statesmen and security professionals lived and operated.

These pathologies were driven home to me with particular clarity in a discussion I recall having at a conference in the French town of Annecy in March 2007 with Sergio Duarte – a Brazilian diplomat who shortly thereafter was appointed to be the United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, thus becoming in a sense the world’s highest-ranking disarmament official. In my remarks to the conference on behalf of the George W. Bush Administration as U.S. Special Representative For Nuclear Nonproliferation , I had stressed how large the U.S. nuclear reductions had been since the end of the Cold War.

In discussions with Sergio afterwards, I pressed him, in light of these facts, on how he – and others in the disarmament community – could keep on insisting that the United States had consistently “failed” to make any meaningful progress on nuclear disarmament. His reply was enlightening.

As he explained it to me, the United States deserved no credit for scrapping all those weapons because we no had longer needed them on account of the end of the Cold War and the evaporation of our nuclear rivalry with the Soviet Union. Because these weapons had simply become surplus to requirements, he argued, we deserved no real credit for having gotten rid of them.

This was eye-opening to me, for it brought home the degree to which the prevailing disarmament discourse had become a surreal exercise willfully divorced from reality. Rather than being at least pleased that so much dismantlement had already occurred and simply urging that this process continue, Sergio told me it only “really” counted as “disarmament” for a country to relinquish nuclear capabilities that it still needed for its national security . Getting rid of nuclear weapons was therefore not per se creditable. It was only by a performative act of strategic self-harm that one could apparently be accepted as actually making progress toward disarmament.

This logic seemed to suggest, in turn, that the disarmament community’s actual objective was not actually to see nuclear weapons go away than simply to undermine the security of the hitherto nuclear weapons-possessing states. It also clearly signaled to me that major portions of the global disarmament community had reached an advanced state of intellectual and moral bankruptcy.

Sergio’s comments indicated that the disarmament discourse of that period essentially precluded genuine engagement with nuclear weapons possessors on precisely the real-world security challenges on which progress would need to be made if movement towards were to be able to continue. (The point wasn’t about about how to allocate any “credit” for disarmament progress, but if there was to be a future for disarmament dialogue and diplomacy, it did matter for the future of disarmament dialogue, what was actually being demanded of nuclear weapons possessors!)

That conversation with Sergio Duarte is the point to which, in my own mind, I really date the birth of the CEND idea – though of course as an actual institution it didn’t emerge until more than a decade later. That was when I started thinking about what could be done to redirect disarmament discourse in a less patently stupid direction, and onto a path along which countries might actually have real conversations about the kind of security conditions that it might be necessary to create in order for real-world leaders to make real-world decisions to reduce their nuclear arsenals.

Rather than simply sneering at a country for getting rid of nuclear weapons that it no longer needed, I thought, why not acknowledge that not needing so many of them was actually a good thing? And, if that were the case, what could the diplomatic community do to encourage more countries to reach such conclusions?

If there was indeed any hope of disarmament, I felt, it clearly did not lie in the sterile posturings of the performative antinuclear moralism that seemed to have taken over the disarmament community. Rather, the better path surely lay in actually trying to ameliorate adverse conditions in the security environment, so that more and more countries felt less and less need for such weaponry.

And that’s why, while CEND was formally “born” at the State Department in 2019, I would argue it was “conceived” in France in 2007.

The 2017 Nuclear Vision Review

In its specifics, CEND grew out of a review that I undertook at the National Security Council staff over the summer of 2017. Having arrived in the wake of the Obama Administration’s pro-disarmament atmospherics, I felt it was important for us in the First Trump Administration to have something coherent and constructive to say on these issues for ourselves, one way or the other.

So we conducted what I myself thought of – though it really had no official name – as the “2017 Nuclear Vision Review.” In the most basic sense, this was an after-action report on the entire Obama disarmament undertaking.

We gathered up all the available U.S. intelligence reporting then available on how other counties had actually – that is, privately, in their own deliberations and policymaking – interpreted Obama’s “Prague Agenda,” with a particular focus upon its impact upon problem states of the international community such as our strategic adversaries and rogue state proliferators.

We also quietly brought together a small but perspectivally diverse group of think tank scholars and academic experts for roundtable discussions on what factors seemed to lie behind the stalling of nuclear weapons reductions in recent years, what might help restart them, and what challenges would have to be met in order to envision a plausibly stable, nuclear-weapons-free world.

I can’t pretend that we definitively answered all these questions, of course, but these discussions were very thoughtful and very helpful to our deliberations. They fed into an internal document I drafted for National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, summarizing what I believed this exercise had taught us.

I no longer have access to that document, of course, it being quite highly classified on account of all that intelligence information on how various world leaders seemed really to view and respond to Obama’s disarmament agenda. Nevertheless, I do recall that the conclusions were somewhat demoralizing, at least from a disarmament perspective. The Prague Agenda may have gotten Obama a nice medal, but apart from New START – which was an important agreement, but one that was admittedly merely evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and in no way genuinely transformative – the “Prague” initiative achieved remarkably little. Indeed, it actually made some important powers more distrustful of the United States, and more wedded to their own nuclear weaponry, rather than less so.

On the whole, Obama’s Prague initiative seemed by 2017 to have quite run out of intellectual steam. Nor, in fact, did it seem to have any real vision of how it would (or even could ) achieve its ultimate ends, apart from muddling forward with the ever-harder problem of negotiating gradual reductions in a context in which major players still felt keeping some nuclear weapons was essential to their security and increasingly feared that reductions would bump up against whatever “minimum” level of capability it was that they required.

And, speaking analytically, it’s not hard to see why things would indeed inevitably get increasingly difficult as reductions continued. I can see at least three problems.

First, even as possessor states’ security sensitivities over making further cuts increased, the requirements for timely verification of such cuts would become ever more demanding while at the same time the incentive to cheat would grow, for the game-theoretically unavoidable reason that the relative potential military advantage to be gained from any given quantum of new or retained nuclear weapons capacity would tend to increase as overall arsenals shrank .

After all, having a few nuclear weapons that your adversary doesn’t know about isn’t that big a deal if your respective arsenals are still quite large. (If I have 2,000 and you have 2,100, this isn’t thatbig a threat to me.) But if overall arsenals are small, a few weapons one way or the other could have huge implications.

This means that as you get toward “Zero” – and particularly at “Zero” – both cheating by prior possessors and proliferation to new ones would become vastly, even geometrically, more attractive. And this would in turn require any disarmament regime to develop extraordinarily intrusive verification protocols, while simultaneously allowing such protocols essentially no margin for error. This would make it devilishly hard to fashion a really good abolition agreement. So that’s a first problem.

Second, one would also have to ensure – in a world in nuclear knowledge and materials could not be un-invented – that the first major crisis between reasonably sophisticated powers did not quickly produce a “ reconstitution race ,” in which both parties would rush to rebuild a nuclear arsenal, and in which whomever builds new weapons first would feel a powerful incentive to use them on its adversary before that country acquired them too. That risks making “Zero” dangerously game-theoretically unstable. And that’s a second problem.

Third, even if you did manage to figure all this out and make nuclear weapons disappear, moreover, there would still remain the challenge of how to ensure continued avoidance of large-scale conventional war between the great powers once the deterrent effect nuclear weaponry had been removed.

If you couldn’t ensure that a world of nuclear weapons abolition wasn’t one wracked by large-scale conventional great power war, this might make abolition seem worse for humanity than some possible world stabilized by a deterrence standoff with nuclear arsenals of small-to-modest size. So that would be a third challenge.

I am not saying that these problems are necessarily insoluble. That might, or might not, be the case.

My point is merely that these difficulties seem logically inherent in the nature of the disarmament enterprise when it is viewed through the prism of how to make disarmament work as an effective, real-world policy choice .

We never surfaced the full set of findings and information behind the “NVR,” but I did get the opportunity to use it as the basis for my remarks in October 2017 to a conference sponsored by the disarmament activists of the Ploughshares Fund .

I began this de facto rollout of our findings by arguing that “the conventional wisdom of the disarmament community” that “treats nuclear weapons primarily as a cause, rather than a symptom, of insecurity” – that is, those who focus upon “weapons, rather than upon conditions” – had basically gone bankrupt, and that President Obama’s disarmament agenda had run out of steam.

Nonetheless, I suggested, it was “still possible to speak realistically and constructively about nuclear disarmament,” and it was “time to explore alternative approaches.”

“But it may be[, I said,] that the answer isn’t something entirely new, but rather a wisdom that has been hiding in plain sight all along – and in a form with which most of the countries of the world have professed agreement for nearly as long as I have been alive. … [T]he NPT Preamble points out the need for the ‘easing of international tension and the strengthening of trust between States … in order to facilitate’ disarmament. This – and the causal ordering it signals about how to advance disarmament – is the conceptual key to understanding what ‘effective measures relating to nuclear disarmament’ we should pursue in accordance with Article VI [of that Treaty].

“… If there exists a viable road to disarmament in the current security environment … it surely must run through the amelioration of such adverse geopolitical conditions [of tension and distrust]. If we can successfully address those conflicts and rivalries, reducing or even eliminating the weapons themselves may be possible; if we cannot, it’s hard to see how any [primarily] weapons-focused agenda could succeed.”

In concluding, I stressed to the Ploughshares meeting what I argued were some basic truths that needed to be acknowledged:

how far we are today from the conditions that would actually make elimination possible, and how addressing those underlying conditions is really the rub of the challenge, without which no approach that focuses solely on arms could succeed;

how little we really know about the future and the threats we might face therein;

the degree to which a full flowering of the world envisioned by Article VI of the NPT must necessarily await a strategic environment quite different from our world today; and

the danger that unrealistic expectations about nuclear disarmament, combined with overstated linkages between disarmament and nonproliferation, could put international commitments to nonproliferation at risk.

There would be many, I said, who wouldn’t like hearing these truths.

“But such a vision would not give up on the possibility and the long-term goal of disarmament, either – nor on the hope of negotiating incremental downward steps over time when, and to the degree that, real-world conditions permit. Indeed, if it could escape the conceptual ruts of the current conventional wisdom and devote itself instead more effectively to addressing the conditions of conflict and insecurity that are the real problem inhibiting such progress, such an approach has the potential to end up being a better way to work toward a disarmament-facilitating ‘easing of international tension and … strengthening of trust between States’ (in the words of the NPT Preamble) than any other path available today. After all, Article VI obliges us to pursue effective measures, not ineffective ones. Why not explore new possibilities when what has been tried isn’t working?”

And that speech, in an admittedly lengthy nutshell, was the intellectual foundation of what emerged as CEND a few months later.

CEND Gets Going at the State Department

After I moved from the NSC to the State Department in January 2018, therefore, it was only natural to try to see if we could take this theory and turn it into some kind of diplomatic reality. Hence we started working to establish a new diplomatic dialogue, open, in principle, to any country serious about disarmament-related engagement.

And in fact, a remarkable group of countries actually responded to our invitation. Our first plenary meeting in July 2019 brought together, as I recall, some 40-odd national delegations, coming from

“a wide range of diverse countries — nuclear weapons possessors and non-possessors, industrialized and developing nations, nuclear alliance members and ‘Ban Treaty’ adherents, and key players from both sides of political and ideological fault lines in the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and East Asia alike — to set this process in motion and identify broad sets of issues that need to be addressed.”

As I put it at that first meeting , our objective was to engage in “exchang[ing] perspectives and brainstorm[ing] ideas” in three general topic areas:

“Reducing perceived incentives for states to retain, acquire, or increase their holdings of nuclear weapons[;]

“Multilateral and other types of institutions and processes to bolster nonproliferation efforts and build confidence in, and further advance, nuclear disarmament[; and]

“Interim measures to address risks associated with nuclear weapons and to reduce the likelihood of war among nuclear-armed states.”

The conceptual touchstone of the effort, we made clear , was

“the insight that disarmament can and will move forward only to the degree that the international community is able to address the security issues that underlie States’ rationales for retaining nuclear weapons.”

Lessons and the Future?

Having resigned from the State Department in early January 2021, of course, I have much less visibility into how the CEND initiative has fared since then. Under the Biden Administration, they moved the CEND coordinating role from my former Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation (ISN) to the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability (ADS), and they redirected one of the CEND working groups to look at the impact of emerging technologies upon nuclear disarmament issues.

The cycle of CEND diplomatic engagement, however, survived at least through 2024. As recounted on the Department’s website , in fact, CEND Subgroup 3 issued a report in June 2024 that discussed nuclear risk-reduction measures.

That June 2024 document wasn’t a consensus report agreed by all delegations, and I cannot claim to agree with all that’s in it myself. (It may actually be that nobody agrees with every word in it; as I said, it wasn’t a consensus document.) Nevertheless, the report did represent the fruits of a great deal of quite serious and wide-ranging discussion about the deteriorating security environment and the ways in which various delegations felt that unilateral, bilateral, and/or multilateral risk-reduction measures could help improve things.

Since my ambition for CEND centered not upon trying to drive disarmament dialogue toward any specific conclusion but rather – as a critical but antecedent step – simply upon trying to rescue disarmament discourse from the abject silliness and sterility into which it had fallen, I think this all counts as something of a success.

It remains to be seen, of course, what the Second Trump Administration will do with CEND – or, in the event that the new team is not interested, whether the other CEND stakeholders will continue this dialogue without the United States.

Given President Trump’s professed commitment to a “ Peace Through Strength ” approach to international relations even while also clearly loathing the nuclear arms race and apparently still hoping to create for himself some kind of grand legacy as a peacemaker, however, it is not beyond imagining that the Second Trump Administration will continue – and perhaps even will advance – the CEND dialogue that the First Trump Administration began.

We shall see. It remains my hope that these diplomatic engagements on which I spent so much time several years ago will be able to contribute constructively to future progress in helping mankind figure out how to meet the challenges of managing existential risk in the nuclear arena.

Thanks for listening.

—Christopher Ford

Transatlantic Turbulence in Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:11:24 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford drew in delivering his remarks at a conference on "Transatlantic Turbulence: What Next for European Defence?" held at the University of Birmingham on June 13, 2025.

Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me.

You certainly don’t need me to describe the security threats facing the Atlantic Alliance from Russian aggression today. As someone who has spent my career in the U.S. national security and foreign policy community, however, let me focus more on the “transatlantic” piece of the problem – which is to say, the remarkable period in which we find ourselves in terms of U.S. policy . So with the usual caveat that I can only offer my personal views, which will not necessarily represent those of anyone else, let me offer a few thoughts.

The “American Question”

There is little question that, whatever it actually is today, the United States commitment to supporting the countries of Europe and the NATO alliance is no longer quite what it once was. But the reasons for this go far beyond just the problem of Europe’s still lackluster defense and security policies. (After all, U.S. presidents have been calling upon Europe to spend more on its own defense since at least 2002 , and even Barack Obama – no Republican security hawk he – felt it necessary to call out the Europeans for being “ complacent ” about their own security.)

The additional wrinkle today stems from the way that “Europe” appears to resonate in current U.S. domestic politics to some of the people in under the Second Trump Administration. When I say “Europe” in this context, however, I mean it not in a strictly geographic sense, but rather in a broader and more figurative one that lumps together all the relatively politically progressive developed Western democracies, not excluding Canada.

From the standpoint of many in the modern American populist Right, this socio-cultural “Europe” appears to be understood primarily through the prism of U.S. domestic politics. Indeed, the countries of “Europe” are seen as de facto extensions of America’s domestic politics. Specifically, those countries are seen as being essentially clones, or at least siblings or allies, of the domestic political opposition to President Trump in the Democratic Party.

With the exception of European countries where right-wing parties have managed to win power, in other words, the democracies of Western Europe are thus assumed to be inherently hostile to the MAGA movement, and hence also axiomatically hostile to the United States. Thus, for example, could President Trump declare even back in 2018, that “ the European Union is a foe .”

These attitudes hardened after Trump’s election loss in 2020, and today they seem to represent a powerful current within the Second Trump Administration’s foreign policy thinking.

This shift has been most obvious in things such as Vice President Vance’s famous speech to the Munich Security Conference, where he decried the role of European governments and EU “commissars” in suppressing disfavored speech, comparing them explicitly to what he said were the policies of the Biden Administration in the United States. According to Vance, in fact, the biggest threat in Europe is not Russia, China, or “any external actor,” but rather “ the threat from within ” he said was posed by those seeking to enforce progressive political norms upon the European population. (It should perhaps not have been surprising, then, that on that same trip, Vance chose not to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Shultz but did meet with the leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party . In fact, then-Trump senior official Elon Musk had actually publicly urged Germans to vote for the AfD .)

These dynamics are also visible elsewhere. Today, for instance, the U.S. Department of State under Marco Rubio – written by someone named Samuel Samson, who is described as a “Senior Advisor for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor” – emphasizes the importance of building and maintaining relationships with “ civilizational allies ” in Europe. Who these allies are and what civilization is referenced are not clearly specified in Samson’s paper, but that same document defends the AfD and far-right French politician Marine LePen as being victims of progressive leftist suppression. It also also defends “ Christian nations like Hungary ” against charges that their politics have turned authoritarian and self-avowedly “ illiberal ” under rulers such as Viktor Orbán .

These perspectives may also help explain the sympathies that some in the MAGA ecosystem seem to show toward Vladimir Putin and his vastly more illiberal and authoritarian regime in Russia. Putin, after all, has himself rather leaned into political narratives that outdo even MAGA partisans in their hostility to modern Western progressivism. To hear Putin tell it, for instance, the values of the modern West represent nothing short of “ Satanism .” He says he believes the West to be a hotbed of “ paedophilia ,” and his regime persecutes the Russian LGBTQ community under sweeping laws that criminalize “extremism .”

Accordingly, if a figurative “Europe” is America’s foe due to its commitment to progressive political values, it’s not too hard to imagine right-wing Americans assuming that Russia must therefore be something not unlike our friend . The media has widely reported President Trump’s ambivalence on this score, but such thinking may also help explain why then-Trump senior advisor Elon Musk could call one U.S. Senator a “traitor” merely for having visited Ukraine .

Since the U.S. Code specifies that the crime of treason consists of levying war against the United States or adhering to its enemies, for an American to be a “traitor” for supporting Ukraine, it must therefore be the case that Musk thinks Ukraine our enemy – making us , one might infer, Russia’s ally . Musk being Musk and an inveterate social media troller, it may be that this particular comment was not – how to put it? – carefully thought through, but it is at least suggestive of an attitude quite different from prior U.S. views of Moscow.

At the very least, there seems to be a remarkable lack of any feeling of threat from Russia. Just yesterday, in fact, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State described NATO as being “ a solution in search of a problem .”

It is also true, of course, that – apparently surprised by the Russian dictator’s entirely unsurprising refusal to stop attacking Ukrainian civilians – Trump has more recently called Putin “ CRAZY ” (in all-caps). This may be somewhat more reassuring to Europeans, but it also still underlines the more basic point: our allies may feel that they haven’t the foggiest idea what to expect from American policy from one day to the next. And that’s got to be somewhat worrisome from the perspective of a U.S. ally whose security relies upon the United States absolutely being there in a pinch, when things are really tough.

For present purposes, I will myself take no position on the merits or demerits of current U.S. policy but such apparent sentiments unquestionably present novel challenges to America’s traditional international security partnerships, including –especially – the transatlantic community and the NATO alliance.

Is China Different?

For those of us who focus, in particular, upon strategic competition with China, one key question is whether – or to what degree – this new strain in U.S. foreign policy thinking will have spillover effects upon deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. I could see this going one or the other of two very different ways.

On the one hand, it is easy to imagine that U.S. allies in Asia would find it deeply disturbing to see the Americans backtracking on their longstanding commitment to NATO for what purport to be principled reasons. This would go notably beyond simply acknowledging the obvious strains being placed upon both our nuclear and conventional force posture from having to deter territorial aggression by two near-peer nuclear great powers, in two theaters, at the same time. If this really is, instead, about issues of principle, if we cannot be trusted to support our allies in one theater, how could they trust us to stick with them in another?

On the other hand, however, it may be that the Indo-Pacific is “different.” To be sure, U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific are no paragons of high defense spending and national security seriousness either. Nevertheless, the governments of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan do not map onto American domestical political narratives and culture war disputes as clearly as the democracies of Western Europe might seem to do. (Australia may be a more complicated case, especially under the current Labour government of Anthony Albanese, which recently surged back into power on a wave of political anger at Donald Trump’s tariff policies , much like Mark Carney’s Liberals did in Canada .) Perhaps the political dissimilarity of most of our Asian allies makes American commitments in the Indo-Pacific less politically problematic in MAGA eyes.

From the MAGA perspective, it may also be that China itself is different. Very different. The People’s Republic of China, after all, is not, like Russia, an authoritarian regime claiming to ground its politics in traditional Christian religiosity, supported by a cadre of militant Christian clerics , and taking strident “culture war” positions against Western progressive political values and woke identity politics . China is, on the contrary, a much more culturally and racially “alien” dictatorship – and one, quite significantly, that officially adheres to the “godless” theories of atheistic Communism.

For both of these reasons, it may therefore not follow inexorably from the weakening U.S. commitments to NATO that our allies should also count us out in the Indo-Pacific. Perhaps Asia really is “different.”

Even if this were the case, of course, our Asian allies may not see things that way, and may still find it disturbing to think we might be willing to abandon even the region of the world out of which our deepest American traditions actually grew. Nor would there be any guarantee that China would understand this distinction either, perhaps concluding from the Second Trump Administration’s distaste for our European allies – whom our Secretary of Defense has described in all-caps as “ PATHETIC ” – that we wouldn’t really be willing to defend our allies in the Indo-Pacific either. (Such misunderstandings in Beijing, of course, could lead to a failure of deterrence.)

I also recognize that even if our alliances in the Indo-Pacific remain today just as strong as ever, this would be small consolation for Europe.

Nuclear Weapons Pressures

So what of Europe, then? From the perspective of nuclear weapons policy and deterrence, what might all his mean for the transatlantic relationship?

Well, one obvious challenge stems from the ways in which all this is putting pressure on the nonproliferation regime. In particular, they may be giving new incentives to the countries of Europe to consider building up their own nuclear weapons capabilities, not merely in terms of an enlargement and diversification of the existing British and French arsenals, but potentially even through proliferation to additional states.

After all, even before the arrival of the Second Trump Administration signaled the beginning of a period of reduced U.S. commitment to NATO, the mainstream American national security policy community, at least, was already coming around to the idea that the United States once again needs to be building more nuclear weapons systems. On this, the traditional “Doves” in the Democrat Party seem to have ended up reluctantly agreeing with traditional Republican “Hawks.”

It isn’t too surprising, of course, for hawks like me to be calling for a stronger U.S. nuclear force posture in response to China’s shocking nuclear buildup and the advantages we have allowed both Russia and China to develop in theater-class nuclear systems . Nor is it surprising for other conservative American think tank scholars to be advocating uploading more warheads onto U.S. strategic delivery systems .

But things have moved far beyond that. In 2023, the bipartisan Strategic Posture Review Commission (SPRC) reached the unanimous conclusion that the existing U.S. nuclear delivery system modernization program, while necessary, was no longer sufficient to meet our nuclear force posture needs. More remarkably still, by the time it left office, even the Biden Administration had begun hinting rather openly that the United States would likely need more nuclear weapons in order to respond to today’s threats and deter tomorrow’s – a message that Biden officials conveyed in both June and August of 2024.

Agreement had certainly not yet crystallized on exactly what (and how many) new things might be needed, but it is clear that by late 2024, a consensus had indeed formed among mainstream national security experts on both sides of the political aisle in Washington that stable deterrence today requires more Western nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

To the degree that this is the case – and if the burden of deterring Russia, at least, now needs to fall more and more on European shoulders in light of the policies of the Second Trump Administration – this obviously begs all sorts of questions not just about America’s future nuclear posture, but also about that of Europe. Such questions are a long way from being answered, but already we have seen the President of Poland call for the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons to Polish soil , the President of France speculate about the possibility of extending a French “nuclear umbrella” to other countries in Europe , and British officials reportedly consider once again acquiring dual-capable aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons .

All this should make our discussions on this panel very interesting.

Where Will (or Can) All This Go?

Speaking as someone who has worked on strategic competition and nuclear weapons issues for most of my professional career in Washington, moreover, I find it striking how little the MAGA movement seems so far to have focused upon nuclear weapons and deterrence policies at all. (They have clearly had other priorities, such as immigration and what they describe as “ deconstruct[ing] the administrative state ” and its “ woke and weaponized bureaucracy .”) Where their nuclear weapons thinking will end up going thus seems to be still somewhat up in the air.

On the one hand, President Trump seems to be fiercely devoted to the idea of a “ Peace Through Strength ” approach to international relations. To the limited degree that his administration can be understood based upon precedents and principled consistency , moreover, it’s worth remembering that in Trump’s first term, he moved quickly to deploy a new, lower-yield warhead (the W76-2 ) and began work on a new, submarine-launched nuclear-armed cruise missile (the SLCM-N ) in order to provide new U.S. nuclear capabilities to at least partially counteract and deter threats from existing theater-level systems in both Russia and China.

On the other hand, President Trump also seems to hate and fear nuclear weaponry, feelings he seems to have held since the 1980s . As a self-proclaimed master of the “ Art of the Deal ,” moreover, Trump has spoken about his desire for what he (somewhat confusingly) calls “ denuclearization” talks with both Russia and China, which he hopes could lead to significant reductions in all three countries’ arsenals .

Trump’s recent advocacy for the so-called “ Golden Dome” missile defense system only deepens the mystery of where MAGA nuclear thinking is headed. That idea, of course, has riled our strategic adversaries in China and Russia, who claim – as of course they would, especially if it ever works – that Golden Dome will be “ deeply destabilizing .”

Yet in Trump’s new plan it is impossible not also to see resonances of President Ronald Reagan’s famous “ Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI) effort of the early 1980s , which horrified and infuriated the Soviets but also helped lead to what was ultimately a tremendous Reagan breakthrough in arms discussions with Moscow – and even to some quite unprecedented (albeit unfruitful) speculation between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev about possibly abolishing nuclear weapons altogether . Nor should one forget that our pursuit of the SLCM-N system in the First Trump Administration was expressly predicated in part upon the hope, as the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review put it, that the new SLCM-N system

“may provide the necessary incentive for Russia to negotiate seriously a reduction of its non-strategic nuclear weapons, just as prior Western deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe [in response to Soviet deployments of SS-20 systems ] led to the 1987 INF Treaty.“

So what is one to make of all this?

I certainly cannot claim that the volatility and inconstancy of Second Trump Administration policies do not still represent a daunting “wild card” in all debates about the possible nuclear future. Nevertheless, it may yet be that as we stand on the verge of seeing the last existing strategic arms treaty evaporate upon New START’s expiration in February 2026 , some essential conceptual ingredients may already exist for a weird sort of constructive convergence between the more traditional elements of the U.S. nuclear weapons and deterrence expert policy community – including both deterrence hawks and arms control doves – and elements of the MAGA ecosystem concerned with maintaining deterrence and responsibly managing nuclear risks in a “Peace Through Strength” era.

If it were to concern only nuclear weapons posture and policy, of course, such an intellectual convergence would not necessarily answer all the mail, as it were, with respect to the challenges of deterring conventionally-armed aggression by Russia or China. To handle that , even were a new era of negotiated nuclear restraint to reduce the salience of nuclear weaponry in such disputes, we and our allies in both theaters would need to find new and better ways of building up our collective strength and divvying up the burdens of the deterrence that remains in all our interests.

My point, however, is that when it comes to possible nuclear futures, we really are at an extraordinary point in which a broader range of potential scenarios – some good, and some bad – are becoming more conceivable than ever before. And that makes this a fantastic point at which to have the kind of discussions we are having here today.

Thanks again for inviting me to the University of Birmingham.

—Christopher Ford

Nuclear Risks in the Indo-Pacific

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 12:00:04 GMT

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered (virtually) to a conference in Beijing on June 12, 2025, sponsored by the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network (APLN) and the Grandview Institution .

Good day, everyone. I am pleased to have the chance to speak with you, though of course disappointed that I wasn’t able to get a visa in order to travel to Beijing in person. While I can only offer my personal perspective – and you certainly shouldn’t take anything I say here as necessarily representing the views of anyone else – I am glad we can have this discussion.

It is certainly the case that nuclear risks in the Indo-Pacific are considerable, and I fear they are growing. Let me mention three of the sources of such risk, and then suggest four things that might help reduce these risks.

Growing Threat of Great Power Aggression

I think the most likely scenario for a nuclear war is not the kind of bolt-out-of-the-blue preemption scenario that Cold War strategists worried so much about. Instead, it’s the escalation to nuclear use from a conventional conflict involving nuclear-armed powers.

And in that sense, the major risk of nuclear conflict stems from the fact that after some decades of relative strategic stability, two of the three great power nuclear-weapons possessors of the 21 ^st Century are once again preparing for – or are already engaged in – 19 ^th -Century-style games of regional military aggression, intimidation, and territorial expansion .

Russia has led the way in this respect, of course, but China is also creating similar risks in the Indo-Pacific as it expands into – and militarizes – areas claimed by other countries in the South China Sea, as it gradually expands the territory it controls in the Himalayas, and as it prepares for the possibility of invading and conquering the thriving democracy in Taiwan next door. It is this apparent thirst for expansion and regional control that I believe creates the greatest risk of multi-party conventional war in the region, and hence also the greatest risk of nuclear escalation with the United States.

Nuclear Build-Up

The second – related and overlapping – factor increasing nuclear risks in the Indo-Pacific is the scope and scale of China’s huge nuclear weapons build-up. Beijing still doesn’t publicly admit that it’s doing this, but China is now on track to have around 1,500 operationally deployed nuclear warheads by 2035 . That means approximate nuclear parity with the United States, and also with Russia, and it would represent a huge proportional increase in the number of nuclear weapons in the world.

This nuclear build-up, moreover, seems not just destabilizing but needless.* Thanks to Beijing’s ongoing build-up of its conventional military power, this nuclear buildup is occurring at a time in which China faces the lowest level of relative military threat that it has seen since the early 19 ^th Century. In fact, China’s conventional forces are probably today more powerful, relative to any conceivable outside power, than they have been at any point since the years of the Qianlong Emperor .

Thanks to decades of post-Cold War nuclear reductions by the United States and Russia, moreover, the specifically nuclear threats China arguably faces are also now at their lowest, relatively speaking, than at any other point in the PRC’s history. The ratio of Chinese nuclear weapons to non-Chinese nuclear weapons has never been higher, and this was true even before Beijing’s huge new nuclear buildup began several years ago.

China’s nuclear weapons building spree is increasingly presenting both the United States and the Russian Federation with an historically unprecedented “two-peer problem” of having to posture for deterrence against two nuclear-armed great power challenges at the same time.** This increases nuclear risks directly, and it is also accelerating pressures upon both Washington and Moscow to build and deploy more nuclear weaponry themselves.

Proliferation Pressures

And it is probably not just Washington and Moscow that feel such pressures, for a third nuclear risk factor stems from the pressure that China’s military buildup and territorial expansionism is placing upon the nonproliferation regime, by giving China’s neighbors increasing incentive to develop their own nuclear weaponry. These pressures are particularly acute today in light of the Second Trump Administration’s weakened commitment to America’s alliance with NATO, which may be confronting our Indo-Pacific allies with what probably feels like an unprecedented incentive to suspect that indigenous nuclear weaponization could be their last, best hope to deter being coerced into becoming vassal states of the Middle Kingdom.

Historically, after all, U.S. military strength and alliance relationships have been powerful nonproliferation tools because they have served to obviate any perceived need by a number of America’s friends and allies to develop nuclear weapons themselves. Ironically, U.S. strength and alliance relationships have thus tended also to be in the interest of America’s strategic adversaries, because that U.S. strength and those alliances prevent our adversaries from having to face additional nuclear-armed opponents in their respective regions.

And, as any student of history will know, this is not at all a merely hypothetical point. U.S. security relationships and diplomatic pressure are what persuaded Taiwan to stop its own nuclear weapons program in the late 1980s . They are also what persuaded South Korea to abandon such efforts in the 1970s . Chinese strategists forget these lessons of history at their peril.

As you will all know, were leaders in Tokyo and Seoul, for example, to decide that proliferation pressures had become intolerable, it would hardly be difficult for them to take the kind of nuclear weapons path that we Americans talked a number of our friends and allies out of taking in the past.

Japan, for example, owns a staggering quantity of separated plutonium that as of 2023 amounted to 44.5 tons of material altogether, of which 8.6 tons were stored on Japanese territory . I’m no math whiz, but using the IAEA’s “significant quantity” figure of eight kilograms of plutonium per weapon, that 8.6 tons of plutonium on Japanese territory alone sounds like it could be turned into more than 975 bombs .

For its part, South Korea has a large and sophisticated nuclear power industry that in 2019 was the fifth-largest producer of nuclear energy in the world . South Korea has for years been requesting U.S. permission to develop plutonium reprocessing capabilities – in the form of so-called “pyroprocessing ” – and South Korean scientists were also caught in undeclared small-scale enrichment experiments in 2004 . So Seoul has, therefore, certainly not been entirely without interest in producing its own fissile material. To my knowledge, South Korea has not yet developed any local capacity to produce it, but it would surely not be too hard for it to separate plutonium from spent reactor fuel to produce weapons-usable material if it wished.

Moreover, both Japan and (especially) South Korea are developing increasingly sophisticated long-range missile capabilities. I can’t imagine that either of them would have trouble effectively delivering a nuclear weapon to China or North Korea if they possessed such devices.

The Common Denominator

So what is the common denominator of all these problems? I fear it is China . Between its expanding conventional military power, its threats against its neighbors, its nuclear buildup, and its continuing refusal to implement U.N. sanctions on the notably nuclear-risky regime in North Korea, Beijing’s policy choices lie at the center of nuclear risks in the Indo-Pacific.

What Can Be Done?

So what might be done to reduce nuclear risks most effectively? As noted, I’ll suggest four things.

The first and most obvious solution to these problems would be to remove the common denominator of these nuclear risks by having China curtail its military and nuclear buildups and abandon its ambition to dominate its neighbors .

Short of that ideal solution, one can really only hope for much less effective, smaller measures. Such steps, however, might still be enormously valuable.

Second, China should finally stop shunning arms control discussions with the United States, and should work with U.S. and Russian officials to develop a way forward in “trilateral” arms control, for which we in America have been calling for years .

Third, all the powers of the Indo-Pacific should renounce the use of force to settle regional disputes – including forswearing any use of force to decide the future status of Taiwan – and they should take meaningful practical steps to demonstrate the sincerity of that pledge.

Fourth, the United States and China should engage in broad risk-reduction talks in order to reduce the danger of unwanted or accidental escalation, and should develop and implement some modern analogue of some sort to the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Incidents at Sea agreement – a construct that it might also be very helpful, in light of China’s so-called “Grey Zone” provocations against several of its neighbors, to expand to include other countries as well.

That, at least, is my thinking at any rate. Thanks for listening.

—Christopher Ford

Notes:

* An additional complicating factor is that China is also quietly abandoning its longstanding pretense of having a “No First Use” (NFU) nuclear weapons policy, increasingly moving some of its forces into “ combat readiness duty ” (which seems effectively to be a Launch-on-Warning status) even while Chinese strategic writings signal Beijing’s willingness – as outlined in the 1994 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) document The Science of Second Artillery Operations – to “lower the nuclear threshold” and “actively carry out strong, forceful nuclear coercion” in response even to conventional attacks by a strong adversary. (If you’re willing to use nuclear weapons in response to a purely conventional attack, of course, you certainly don’t have a “no first use” nuclear policy.)

** This “two-peer” problem is most acute for the Americans, particularly because at the moment Russia and China seem to feel more antipathy towards us than toward each other. Nevertheless, such an alignment is historically anomalous, and no Russian can forget that Chinese nationalists still consider the Russian lands of Primorsky Krai – where Chinese penetration and influence is already growing fast – to be Chinese territory stolen from the Qing Dynasty during the 19 ^th Century , during China’s so-called “Century of Humiliation.” Today, in fact, China’s vast population and resource-hungry economy sit across a long and poorly-defended border from the sparsely-populated and resource-risk expanses of the Russian Far East – even as China builds up both its conventional and nuclear military power to unprecedented levels and while the decaying Russian Federation struggles even to deal with the military problems presented it by Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s war of conquest. Moscow and Washington thus obviously both face formidable “two-adversary” challenges indeed.

Thinking About Russian Nuclear Weapons Thinking

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 16:09:07 GMT

The National Institute for Public Policy published Dr. Ford's article "Thinking About Russian Nuclear Weapons Thinking" in volume 5, number 2, of the Journal of Policy & Strategy (2025). You can find the whole issue on the NIPP website here , or use the button below to download a PDF of the article.

Cybernetics and Comprehensive National Power: The Grand Strategy of China’s “National Rejuvenation”

Thu, 29 May 2025 17:36:23 GMT

In this article in Volume 1, Issue 3 of the Missouri State Univeristy's online journal Defense & Strategic Studies Online (pp. 1-89), Dr. Christopher Ford, John Schurtz, and Erik Quam offer a detailed analytical account of how cybernetic theories of social control developed by the scientist Qian Xuesen and his disciples were adopted by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and are today critical to understanding the Party’s domestic governance and foreign relations.

You can see the whole issue on DASSO's website here , read the Ford/Schurtz/Quam article here , or use the button below to access a PDF of the article.

Christopher Ford, John Schurtz, & Erik Quam, “Cybernetics and Comprehensive National Power: The Grand Strategy of China’s ‘National Rejuvenation,’” Defense & Strategic Studies Online , vol. 1, no. 3 (Spring 2025), pp. 1-89 .

Arms Control Challenges in Strategic Technology Competition

Sat, 24 May 2025 12:51:12 GMT

Below are the prepared remarks upon which Dr. Ford based some of his contributions on a panel on “Tech for War or Tech for Peace? Science, Innovation, and Emerging Technologies in a New Geopolitical Era” at a conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, on May 22, 2025, sponsored by the Arms Control Negotiation Academy (ACONA) and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF).

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for inviting me here to Reykjavik for this event. Thanks also to Christopher Daase, PRIF’s deputy director, for moderating our opening panel discussion today. Whatever I offer today will only be my personal opinion, of course, and won’t represent the views of anyone else, but I’m pleased to be able to offer a few tentative thoughts for you today.

As a way of trying to get your attention, let me first address the importance of science, innovation, and technology in strategic competition. (Spoiler alert: I think it’s very important.) After that, I’ll address what changing technology might mean for the future of arms control verification and compliance.

Technology in Strategic Competition

I think it’s pretty clear now that key emerging technology areas are becoming increasingly important to (and in) strategic competition, especially in the U.S.-China relationship Think, if you will, about Artificial Intelligence (AI), quantum computing, big data analytics, and bioengineering.

To be sure, the role of technology in such competition isn’t an entirely new phenomenon.

Allied advantages in new technologies such as radar, machine-based cryptography, the proximity fuse, and of course the atom bomb, for example, played a significant role in determining the outcome of the last great global war. It was also pretty important that that the Nazis weren’t quite able to capitalize on some rather impressive new technologies that they developed in that conflict and that were going to be significant later (e.g., the jet engine, remote-guided bombs, drone vehicles, and ballistic missiles).

Military-technological competition was obviously also a major part of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War – especially in aerospace, as epitomized by the Sputnik shock and the Space Race of the 1960s – just as the relative lack of military-technical competitors for the United States was a critical factor in creating geopolitical “unipolarity” for a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The centrality of technology in strategic competition, however, strikes me as being a fairly modern phenomenon. New technologies have given their possessor some degree of military or even geopolitical advantage throughout much of history, and powers have long tried to control access to technologies felt to provide such rewards, but the last few generations still seem special.

Access to iron mines, for instance, was at least part of strategic competition between powers in the Ancient Near East as the world shifted from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age. In their early, abortive foray into the New World, the Vikings also recognized how iron weapons gave them advantages over the Native American tribes they called Skraelings, and duly imposed what were basically national security export controls upon their settlements by forbidding trading such items with the natives.

Ancient China analogously tried to control the export of iron-wrought crossbow trigger mechanisms from flowing to the peoples to its West, even while seeking to preserve its own access to the fine cavalry horses that were apparently bred only out there. And when, in turn, the stirrup made its way out of Central Asia to Western Europe, it made possible the fearsome heavy armored cavalry of Europe’s medieval knights. Some historians, moreover, have described the domains of the Russian tsars in Central Asia, the Mughal Empire in South Asia, and the Qing Dynasty in China as being – in some sense – “gunpowder empires” as a result of their rulers’ ability to employ that technology in wars of imperial expansion against less well-equipped foes.

For most of history, however, technological change didn’t feel as central to strategic competition as it appears to have become in the modern world – a world in which competition in technology is quite explicitly a primary object of strategic rivalry. In today’s pervasively technologized world, there seems to be a widespread assumption that advantages in the latest technology translates directly and quickly into geopolitical power.

Indeed, this dynamic seems to be accelerating. Technology did not feel nearly so central, for instance – and indeed, arguably wasn’t really perceived as important at all – even as late as the Napoleonic Wars. By the end of the 19 ^th Century, however, Britain and Imperial Germany were engaged in a fierce technology-based competition as each worked furiously to out-build the other in the naval arms race of the Dreadnought era, while the United States and Japan were investing heavily in their own high-tech battleship fleets as they made their way onto the geopolitical stage as great powers. And the curve just seems to have been getting steeper ever since.

If you ask me, such assumptions about the centrality of technology in strategic competition are in some sense an outgrowth of the world’s experience with the Industrial Revolution of the late 18 ^th and early 19 ^th Century, and the era of European imperialism that it helped make possible. I think, at least, that this is very much the case when it comes to contemporary Chinese approaches to technology competition.

I’ve spoken and written about this elsewhere , so I won’t get into the details today, but it is worth remembering the degree to which technological innovations growing out of the Industrial Revolution came to give the European powers – and especially Britain, which could be said to have possessed “first-mover” position in that Revolution – huge advantages over other powers by the middle years of the 19 ^th Century. In 1750, for instance, the Qing Dynasty in China was arguably a far more impressive and powerful kingdom than any of the ones in Western Europe, and indeed Western intellectuals such as the Enlightenment philosophes looked at what little they thought they knew of China with respect, awe, and some envy . By 1850, however, the Qing had already embarrassingly lost the first of a string of conflicts with Britain and the Europeans that Chinese nationalists have remembered ever since as the onset of their “Century of Humiliation.”

Asymmetrically-possessed improvements in technology were critical to this huge geopolitical shift. It was not just that advances in coal mining, iron smelting, the steam engine, factory-based production, railways, and the telegraph “supercharged” Europe’s early industrial economies. It was that such improvements also led to a “Revolution in Military Technology” (RMA) based in things such as steam powered armored warships, mass-produced and accurate rifled firearms with smokeless powder, and vastly improved artillery.

Modern Chinese leaders seem, in fact, to have built what is almost a whole theory of history around this. As Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials including Xi Jinping seem to see it, the geopolitical history of the 19 ^th , 20 ^th , and early 21 ^st Century was basically decided by whoever was fortunate enough to possess “first-mover” advantage in the Industrial Revolution of the time. As I have described, the First Industrial Revolution made the 19 ^th Century “Britain’s century.” Thereafter, it was the United States that acquired pole position in a Second Industrial Revolution grounded in modern, mass industrial production, as well as in a Third Industrial Revolution based upon computers and Information Technology (IT). It was U.S. first-mover advantages in those Revolutions that made America the dominant global power in the 20 ^th Century and into the 21 ^st .

In the CCP’s view of technological history, therefore, whomever has first-mover advantage in the Industrial Revolution of the day more or less gets to reshape the global order around itself. So when you hear CCP officials declare that they plan to use industrial and technology policy to seize the “commanding heights ” of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that Xi Jinping has proclaimed is now dawning – one built upon Artificial Intelligence, big data analytics, quantum computing, and the like – you should not misunderstand what they are saying. They means to acquire for China the same sort of global role that Britain took upon itself in the 19 ^th Century, and America in the 20 ^th .

In this view, technological advantage isn’t just a “nice-to-have” element of strategic competition. To some extent, it’s actually the whole game. The point is certainly not just about making profits and winning market share in producing the coolest widgets for a world of eager consumers; it’s a world-historical question of who has global power.

And all this isn’t even counting the now apparently quite widespread belief that current progress toward ever-improving AI may before long produce an Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) – as discussed so interestingly a provocatively in a recent paper published by Daniel Kokotajlo and his colleagues at the AI Futures Project . I won’t even begin to speculate about that here, but it is worth noting that another recent paper by Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexandr Wong observed recently that “[a] nation with sole possession of superintelligence might be as overwhelming [to its rivals] as the Conquistadors were to the Aztecs.” If that sounds to you like it’s a pretty compelling argument for a kind of ASI arms race, it may well be.

But whatever you make of the fraught question of ASI, I think it’s beyond argument that emerging technology has become of enormous importance in strategic competition.

Emerging Tech and Arms Control Verification and Compliance

So what should a group like ACONA make of this from the perspective of arms control?

I spoke last year at an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) about the potential impact of new technologies on arms control . Rather than just recapitulating those remarks, however, I’ll focus today a bit more specifically upon the challenges of arms control verification and compliance – that is, of detecting when another party is doing things that seem inconsistent with an arms control treaty and making a formal compliance assessment about whether or not that activity indeed constitutes a violation.

On the positive side, it might be that some of the technologies we see emerging today might allow arms control verifiers important new insights into non-compliant activity that such a violator might wish to conceal. Quantum sensing, for instance – especially when combined with sophisticated data analytics and AI – might be able to peer through or work around adversary denial and deception (D&D) efforts, allowing some sorts of illegal activity to be detected far better than at present.

Such a revolution in transparency might well be rather bad news for strategic stability and deterrence as a whole, of course – such as if it opened a window into the depths of the seas that might finally allow adversaries to hold at risk each other’s hitherto survivable submarine-based second-strike ballistic missile deterrent capability. But merely from an arms control perspective, it might well be that such new technology would make the “verifier’s” task much easier, and the “concealer’s” task much harder, with an impact upon arms control verification possibilities as great as the advent of overhead satellite-based overhead reconnaissance (e.g., the CORONA spy satellite ) had from the early 1960s, enabling subsequent U.S.-Soviet arms control to do a good deal of verification through what came to be known as “National Technical Means” (NTM).

(During the Obama Administration – when people still seemed to think that the explosion of ubiquitous, modern social media connectivity would be a good thing for the world rather than an all but unmitigated political, psychic, and sociological disaster – there was also a good deal of enthusiasm for the idea of enlisting an army of netizens to police their own governments’ compliance with arms control agreements. In today’s environment of pervasive online disinformation and conspiracy theorizing, however, people don’t really talk about that much anymore. I didn’t think it made a lot of sense to begin with, primarily because that kind of verification would work best only for the arms control parties you’d probably worry about least – that is, liberal democracies with free citizenries who have freedom of expression – and worst in the predatory authoritarian regimes historically most likely to break the rules. So I’ll leave that idea aside.)

On the whole, however, I worry that today’s environment of accelerating and technology-focused strategic competition – and the nature of the technologies that seem most “emergent” today – are likely to make arms control verification harder.

As suggested by our efforts during the First Trump Administration to explore new agreements with Russia and China, even in the realm of relatively traditional nuclear arms control, we are likely to need a whole suite of new verification approaches that don’t really exist yet. We were working then, for instance, upon the challenge of how to move beyond prior efforts simply to count and limit nuclear delivery systems – past approaches that dealt with actual nuclear warheads only indirectly and obliquely, through bomber counting rules and a limited sort of “spot-check” inspection protocol for ICBM load-out under the START agreement – into a new era of arms control that limited (and could verify) the total size of a party’s nuclear warhead stockpile . Because countries like Russia and China are pretty darn big, and individual nuclear warheads can be fairly small, this was a challenging task. We had ideas about how perhaps to do this in 2020, but I think this is still an area where the verification methodologies and technologies aren’t nearly where an arms controller would really want them to be.

I’m also aware of no good answer yet to the verification challenges presented by dual-capable ballistic and cruise missile systems that can swap nuclear warheads in and out with conventional warhead packages fairly easily. The arms control community seems so far largely to have ignored this problem from a verification perspective, notwithstanding the fact that the Russians and Chinese have fielded such things for years. That was probably a mistake, for such dual-capable systems may become increasingly important in future arms control diplomacy, especially if we in the United States also start to acquire them to counter our adversaries’ destabilizing current overmatch in theater-class nuclear systems.

The growing migration in military technology from “bespoke” military-specific systems to the much more widespread utilization of Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) technology is also likely to create growing headaches for arms control verifiers, for that will likely to reduce the distinctiveness of military applications and the specificity of the technical weaponization “tells” that a verification regime might seek to detect. As the world discovered a quarter-century ago when efforts to negotiate a Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) Protocol collapsed, it can be all but impossible to design an effective verification regime for a type of weapon the essential facilitating technologies for which are already massively proliferated across the global civilian techno-economy. (If you wished to verify compliance with some kind of future arms control treaty on weaponized AI, for example, how would you do that in a world the private sector of which remained as effervescently and ubiquitously obsessed with commercial AI development and scaling as is ours today? I really have no idea.)

The increasing “software-ization” of military innovation is also likely to make life much harder for arms controllers, especially if one wished to move arms control more into the realm of non-nuclear arms. With Cold War strategic weapons, most of the things you might want to limit (e.g., the range, throw-weight, or re-entry vehicle capacity of an intercontinental missile) were comparatively easy to see, and the signatures of possessing them (e.g., digging big missile silos into the ground or launching SLBM-equipped submarines) were comparatively visible. (Even chemical warfare agent production in those days was approached on an industrial scale, with large, dedicated facilities that weren’t too hard to identify.) In the age of software, however – and especially with things like cyberspace capabilities and AI tools – the capabilities of a system that are the most militarily relevant, and hence of most interest to arms controllers, may lie only deep in the coding of a system’s computer brain.

Such a radical “interiorization” of relevant capability is likely to be hugely challenging, if not preclusive, for the verification community. Even if some kind of “inspection” protocol could technically be envisioned – which seems to me to be rather a stretch – the relevant details of code-related capabilities are surely not the sort of thing that anyone is going to let anyone else see.

Exposing the existence of a cyberspace “zero-day” exploit, for instance, is likely to destroy its utility as an exploit, while revealing AI model weights would in some sense be the equivalent of gifting the AI “weapon” to the inspector. In the AI context, moreover, even revealing details about one’s set of training data could open up possibilities for adversary data-“poisoning” of the sort that Russian cyber-spies are reportedly already attempting in the West . Good luck asking countries to sign up to those verification protocols!

I am not myself a technologist, but even to my eye this all suggests that strategic competition in advanced technologies is going to be a really challenging environment for arms control verifiers.

(Even) More Need for Compliance Assessment Integrity?

But that’s verification. What about compliance assessment – the “other half” of the arms control “verification and compliance” mission?

If things are going to be getting even harder for arms control verifiers in a future environment of rapid and transformative technological change, the increasing complexity and ambiguity of verification-relevant information – espeicially in a political environment many have lost their trust in institutions and people seem as willing to disbelieve the obvious as they are to believe the fantastical – is likely also to place strains upon compliance assessment In response to these strains, I would argue that it is crucial for arms control compliance analysts to maintain their intellectual integrity and moral courage.

A key point to remember here is that compliance assessment isn’t “science” in the sense that it proceeds from relatively objective data inputs to almost mechanically defensible conclusions. In the arms control verification and compliance context, we’re not talking about collecting measurements of tensile strength, mass, temperature, or wind velocity and using them to calculate the load-bearing capacity of a bridge or maximum height of a tower.

Instead, we’re talking about collecting what are often only very fragmentary or ambiguous pieces of information about seemingly anomalous phenomena or activities from a variety of sources of varying reliability, perhaps combining them with a few genuinely “scientific” tidbits of the sort that might be provided by Measurements and Signatures Intelligence (MASINT). You then need to use the resulting blob of data inputs to make what are basically judgment-derived probabilistic inferences about things that crafty adversaries are working quite hard to conceal.

A true compliance assessment, moreover, isn’t just about assessing “facts” you think you see somewhere “on the ground,” but also of analyzing them in comparison to a specific set of legal requirements set forth in a treaty text the relevant provisions of which may not always themselves be a brilliant model of conceptual and textual clarity. Compliance assessments are thus ones that simultaneously combine factual and legal analysis, which adds to their complexity and the degree to which they unavoidably rely upon the subjectivities of human judgment.

Compliance assessments also depend – explicitly or implicitly, but always somehow – upon policy determinations about how and when to draw inferences. How much verification certainty, for instance, is “enough”? How risk-averse should we be given the subject-matter of the treaty? How militarily significant would a violation be? Should we be more afraid of “false positives” or of “false negatives,” what would the consequences be of each type of error, and in which direction should this push us as we interpret ambiguity?

I should emphasize, of course, that the inherent role of human judgment and subjectivity in making compliance determinations does not make them “pure” policy choices. Quite the opposite, I would say.

Truth is not a policy choice, or at least it bloody well shouldn’t be. (In the arms control compliance business, the stakes are too high for anybody to be permitted “ alternative facts .”) If compliance assessment is to have any actual meaning – that is, if it isn’t just to become a theatrical exercise useful for protecting unscrupulous friends or for impugning those you dislike irrespective of the facts – the process must place a special premium upon the ethics and integrity of the compliance analyst.

This doesn’t mean that we should expect verification and compliance efforts always to produce “correct” answers. Humans aren’t capable of that, and one cannot ensure that any such judgment-based process is always right in an environment of inescapable ambiguity. As we have seen from famous failures such as U.S. analysis related to Saddam Hussein’s supposedly huge WMD arsenal before the Second Gulf War, moreover, sometimes conclusions can indeed be quite terribly wrong, even without bad faith. But maintaining the ethics and integrity of the process is critical: one may sometimes be wrong, and data inputs or methodologies may turn out to be flawed, but it is incredibly important that trust not be lost in the intentionality of the analysis. Even if it happens to be wrong, it must not be deliberately or recklesslywrong, or else it is no process at all.

As I put it in an paper published in 2010 when I was at Hudson Institute,

“one must … prevent compliance assessment from degenerating into a sort of postmodern relativism of axiomatically equivalent assertions. Instead of treating compliance assessments merely as bare exercises of will – against which, presumably, one may simply counterpoise opposing assertions without regard to anything like veracity – it is essential to be clear that some assessments clearly are better than others.”

The need to preserve this core commitment to intellectual integrity makes the job of the compliance analyst an especially difficult one. Not only is he or she struggling with an often highly challenging intellectual problem to begin with, but the analyst must also have great moral courage. The compliance analyist must not only to speak truth to power when senior leaders do not wish to see an inconvenient truth, but also be willing not to find a problem, if indeed that’s what the evidence indicates, even when there’s pressure to do so.

And make no mistake: there are sometimes pressures from “outside” the formal compliance analysis process that need to be resisted, in both directions. I have seen political pressure attempt to affect compliance analysis several times and in various ways.

I recall President Clinton admitting in 1998, for instance, that he felt pressure to “ fudge” intelligence assessments of other countries’ bad behavior where finding a problem to exist might be diplomatically or politically awkward.

And indeed, a few years later, when we in the State Department’s Verification (VC) Bureau began to work in 2003 on a formal assessment that Iran had violated Article II of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – remarkably, a decade after U.S. officials had first started publicly warning that Iran was indeed seeking nuclear weapons and had a “rudimentary” nuclear weapons program – we got quite a lot of pushback from parts of the Department’s career bureaucracy, who feared that President George W. Bush would use our painstakingly methodical compliance conclusion (which we did publish in 2005, including a detailed exegesis of how we came to our conclusions ) to justify another war.

In 2004, moreover, the VC Bureau also experienced pushback on an NPT Article II compliance assessment on North Korea from the State Department’s own Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which seemed dead-set against admitting that Pyongyang had essentially never not been cheating on the NPT and the diplomatic deals it had reached with South Korea and the Clinton Administration. That our conclusions about North Korea’s extensive uranium program were quite correct became painfully clear thereafter, such as when it revealed its possession of a large uranium centrifuge cascade in 2010 . INR, however, had been persuaded to join the Department’s East Asia Pacific (EAP) Bureau and the Office of Policy Planning (S/P) in opposing our analysis, because if we admitted that the DPRK had an extensive uranium program, we would then have to ask North Korea for a very intrusive verification protocol in order to achieve “denuclearization” – and this would have made the EAP negotiators’ job harder in the then-ongoing Six-Party Talks.

Fast forward to the First Trump Administration, when I was back at the State Department, and I was involved in extensive discussions with British, French, and German counterparts on Russia’s violation of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty . In those debates – and with our allies, no less – it became quite clear to us that the French and Germans were highly resistant to admitting that Russia were indeed in violation because if they admitted that, they would have to admit that we Americans were right to wish to pull out and one more precious arms agreement had collapsed. All of NATO eventually came around to admitting the Russian violation, but for months the French and Germans seemed determined to “protect” the INF Treaty by turning a blind eye to Russia’s violation. (As one account from the European Council on Foreign Relations put it, “Berlin considered a renewed missile debate to be toxic for domestic politics ….”) That wasn’t a proud moment for arms control.

I also got to see the other side of the coin when I was involved in internal debates in 2018 over Iran’s adherence to the terms of Barack Obama’s “ Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ” (JCPOA) with Iran. Iran did subsequently break with the restrictions in that deal , but for a while before that some of my colleagues had been absolutely convinced that Tehran must somehow be cheating (“That’s just what they do! We’re just missing it!”), and they took it rather ill when I refused to clear on finding an Iranian violation when we still had no evidence to that effect. This was politically costly for me inside the administration, but I didn’t feel like I had any choice.

Finally, in late 2020, I was also involved in some very unpleasant internal debates at the State Department over whether or not the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused COVID was the result of Chinese biological weapons work. Some colleagues had come to me asking me to sign off on declaring China to be in violation of the BWC for developing this alleged COVID weapon, but I refused to do so without solid evidence. Since it turned out they didn’t have any such evidence, this led to an impasse, and it got rather ugly – as I later detailed publicly after some of them came after me in the press in 2021 for supposedly having “suppressed” their efforts to expose China.*

Certainly, no system is perfect, but I remain a passionate believer in the importance of insisting upon compliance assessment integrity. We “verifiers” – as my boss used to describe our little cadre back at State/VC – can actually be pretty fanatical about this. As I put it after the COVID fight ,

“honesty, accuracy, and intellectual integrity are the strongest weapons that an arms control verifier has. These things need to be safeguarded carefully, for they are priceless. They are what separates the truth-teller from the ideological crank.”

So even though the booming strategic technology competition may place unprecedented strains on arms control verification and compliance, I would urge all of you aspiring arms control practitioners at ACONA to remember to keep both your head and your heart in the right place as you struggle with these things.

Thanks!

—Christopher Ford

Notes:

* Remember that this dispute was over whether or not China had violated the BWC, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the question of whether or not COVID resulted from an accidental leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). On that, at least, we were in agreement that such a leak was indeed very possible – though even there the evidence was still inconclusive. We also cleared, and the Department subsequently released, a declassified summary of intelligence information collected about biosafety problems at WIV , thus helping preserve the “lab-leak” hypothesis against what was then some pretty shameful pervasive mainstream pooh-poohing. (It is my own feeling that not letting unsubstantiated claims about a supposed BWC violation come out over the Administration’s signature also helped keep the lab-leak hypothesis from being entirely smothered. It is very much alive as a possibility today in ways that it might not have been had the Trump Administration had tied itself to such arms control quackery in 2020.)

NATO Multi-Domain Operations: Full Time, not just Wartime

Thu, 22 May 2025 23:17:55 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his opening remarks on May 21, 2025, when moderating the opening panel – entitled “NATO and Allied Perspectives on Multi-Domain Operations: A Common Understanding or Diverging Views?” – at the conference on Multi-Domain Operations sponsored by NATO’s Supreme Allied Command Transformation (ACT) in Ankara, Türkiye. (His remarks consisted only of his personal views, and do not necessarily represent those of anyone else.)

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our opening panel for the conference.

My name is Chris Ford, and I’m a professor with Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies who spent many years in the U.S. foreign policy and national security world, ending up as a Senior Director on the National Security Council staff and then as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State. It’s a delight to be here to get this conference discussion going on the important topic of NATO Multi-Domain Operations (MDO).

MDO, of course, is a concept toward which the Alliance describes itself as making a “pivotal shift.” It envisions that actions “across all operating domains and environments” will be “synchronized with non-military activities and enable the Alliance to create desired outcomes at the right time and place.”

MDO is thus quite holistic in its vision, as it seeks to create “tailored options that build an advantage in shaping, contesting and fighting and present[] dilemmas that decisively influence the attitudes and behaviours of adversaries.” The aim is to “empower the Alliance to strategically influence events, synchronize efforts with external stakeholders, and present formidable challenges to adversaries.”

While NATO’s enthusiasm for effective multi-domain integration is certainly welcome, however – indeed, I might venture, somewhat overdue – the basic concept of cross-cutting integrative synergy in some respects quite ancient. Naturally, it has meant different specific things in different eras of conflict. Nevertheless, you can see rough conceptual antecedents developing across many centuries, at progressively greater and greater levels of complexity and sophistication, and involving more and more domains.

One can see such coordination, for instance, at least as early as Alexander’s coordination of the Macedonian phalanxes and cavalry in his first great encounter with the Persian King of Kings, Darius III, at the Battle of Issus in 333 B.C.E. Add a new element to the coordination of infantry and cavalry – specifically, artillery – and you can see a much later example of synergistic coordination at Waterloo. Fast forward a century and a half, and you have the extraordinary symphony of air, land, and sea combined arms activity on D-Day in 1945. More recently, we have continued the progression by trying to work cyber and space operations into the mix.

So the aspiration to integrate and coordinate has always been there – as have both the potentially huge rewards for getting it right, and the potentially huge penalties for getting it wrong, or at least when the other guy does such coordination better than you do.

But to my outsider’s eye, at least, NATO’s current push into MDO seems unprecedentedly ambitious, for at least three reasons.

To begin with, NATO – with a remarkable 32 members – is more multi-national today than any other alliance I can think of, ever in human history. That is in many ways a strength, as a result of all the diverse capabilities Alliance members bring to the table. But it also presents a huge challenge, because – as all of you know so well – coordination across such a broad collection of separate national communities is hard .

Second, even if you’re just talking about outright warfighting, we must today integrate more domains than ever before. The list is formidable, and far beyond the comprehension of any historical Alexander. It now involves infantry, armor, artillery, air, surface, subsurface, electronic warfare, information operations, cyberspace activity, outer space operations, and special operations, at the least – and it needs to do this well at a time when unmanned and increasingly autonomous systems also seem to be revolutionizing how wars are fought, with unclear implications for the future.

Third, and most importantly for present purposes, NATO MDO is also not just a wartime concept but a full-time concept. As NATO sees it , MDO aspires to “synchroniz[e] the capabilities of the … member nations’ Nationally Integrated Instruments of Power with the Alliance’s existing military capabilities,” and it explicitly includes such things as “economic sanctions, information campaigns and diplomatic activities.” MDO thus also aims to create better results not only in war, but in peacetime – as well as in that murky, ambiguous zone that we’re now discovering actually lies in between outright war and genuine peace.

Altogether, these three factors present a hell of a challenge.

Nevertheless, that challenge is an appropriate one to set for ourselves at a time in which the Alliance faces threats – unprecedented in a generation, at least – from predatory great power revisionists in Russia and China who also now view strategic competition in quite ruthlessly holistic and multi-domain ways that do not seem sharply to distinguish between peacetime and wartime.

As thoughtfully studied in the work of scholars such as Dima Adamsky, present-day Russian strategic concepts look less like Western approaches to “deterrence” than they do simply a general theory of coercive bargaining, focused upon gaining advantage in either offensive or defensive situations, and envisioning complex multi-variable gradients of escalatory force. In this conception, “when Russia is maneuvering from one domain to another, all tools of influence should merge and then move as one organic whole into the sphere where the main engagement is taking place.” [1] The Russian aim seems to be to “synthesize nuclear, conventional, and nonkinetic forms of influence” into one overall, holistic framework usable in both peacetime and conflict. [2]

Indeed, both of our major strategic adversaries are clearly “leaning in” to holistic integration of all the military and non-military instruments of state power – and against us! – for China, too, has a notably holistic and “systemic” concept of competitive strategy, which can be seen in concepts such as the People’s Liberation Army’s “ three warfares ” theory and “ systems confrontation ” concepts, as well as broader Chinese Communist Party theories of social control and strategic management informed by cybernetics and complexity science .

Our Alliance clearly needs to be improving its MDO capabilities as rapidly as possible. Hence NATO/ACT’s focus upon promoting MDO, hence this conference graciously hosted by our Turkish allies, and hence this topic for us for the opening panel discussion.

To set the stage for our first panel today, let me quickly share with you the results of an informal survey the organizers conducted with our attendees here today. There’s a lot in the slide, but for present purposes, I’d would like to flag two major things that jump out at me overall:

First, the survey suggests to me that many Alliance members still see MDO as only being the functional equivalent of what we Americans might describe as merely “joint” operations. But that’s not what MDO means, and that’s not enough. The results suggest that there’s not yet enough appreciation for the need for broader integration and coordination of effects in the national and civilian arenas too – such as economic sanctions, information operations, strategic trade policy and export controls, and diplomacy. Nor, apparently, is there enough appreciation for the utility of MDO in shaping the environment and altering adversary behavior in circumstances short of outright conflict.

Second, I think the results show there is still important work to be done in harmonizing approaches to MDO across the Member nations. Perspectives still vary a lot, and we don’t yet seem to share the strong common vision we need.

To me, this highlights that NATO has a lot of work to do. And that’s why it’s such a pleasure that we’ve got such a terrific first panel for you this morning.

Joining me here on stage for this discussion, we have five wonderful panelists: (1) Major General Johan Axelsson , Deputy Chief of Joint Operations for the Swedish Armed Forces; (2) Brigadier General Kadir Çelik , Chief of the Strategy Department at the Turkish General Staff; (3) Major General James Smith , of the U.S. Space Force, who is Vice Director for Joint Force Development, in the J7 shop at the U.S. Joint Staff; (4) Air Vice Marshal Simon Strasdin , Director for Joint Warfare at the UK Strategic Command; and (5) Mr. Reha Ufuk Er , himself a retired Major General and now Senior Advisor to the Turkish SSB, the Defense Industry Agency.

I’m really looking forward to hearing from these fantastic panelists, so I’d like to ask each of you to get things started with some brief opening comments offering your particular personal or institutional perspective on the challenges and opportunities for NATO MDO today.

—Chistopher Ford

Notes:

[1] Dmitry Adamsky, The Russian Way of Deterrence: Strategic Culture, Coercion, and War (Stanford University Press, 2024), 38.

[2] Ibid., 39.

Opportunistic or Coordinated Adversary Aggression and the Nuclear Force Posture Problem of “Numbers and Types”

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 02:20:09 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks on a webinar organized by the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) on April 28, 2025.

Thanks for inviting me. Matt Costlow has done great work in his most recent NIPP Occasional Paper in providing a valuable look at the problem of opportunistic or coordinated aggression and putting it in historical context. My fellow panelists have also made excellent points drawing out various aspects of the problem and how we can help mitigate or manage these dangers, especially in connection with building a stronger conventional force and working with our allies.

For my contribution to this discussion, I’d like to offer a few thoughts about the aspect of this broader challenge that relates to our own nuclear posture: what I call “the problem of numbers and types.” As always, I can only offer my personal opinions, which won’t necessarily correspond to those of anyone else. But let’s give it a go.

The Need for a Larger Arsenal

With respect to what we need to deter aggression and to limit damage in the event that deterrence were to fail, the potential for opportunistic or coordinated aggression between our adversaries clearly confronts us with huge challenges. In light of that challenge, is our arsenal big enough? If not, what do we need to have more of?

The Washington policy community has finally come around to understanding that we do have a numbers-and-types problem. The 2023 report of the Strategic Posture Review Commission took a huge stride in declaring – unanimously, on a bipartisan basis – that the current U.S. nuclear modernization Program of Record (POR) was “absolutely essential” but at the same time “not sufficient to meet the new threats posed by Russia and China.” (We had hoped to say a bit more on such topics in the already-drafted report of a similarly bipartisan senior study group convened by the U.S. Institute of Peace [USIP], but our consensus document remains in limbo as a result of USIP’s recent DOGE-ification.)

So while the problem of numbers and type has been raised, it remains to be squarely addressed. It is increasingly understood that we do need more, but there is no broad agreement yet on exactly how many and of what.

In his paper, Matt urges that we start uploading more warheads on our Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), purchase “at least four” additional Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines beyond the POR, and increase our planned buy of B-21 Raider bombers. He also suggests we speed up deployment of the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N), develop a nuclear-armed variant of the U.S. Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, and develop “a mobile, land-based, short- to medium-range, ballistic or hypersonic system, with a low-yield warhead that is deployable in theater.” There’s a lot to be said for taking those steps, but we’re still some ways from circling in on broad agreement on a new, “beyond-the-POR” agenda.

How Many Do We Need?

Take, for instance, the question of how many weapons we need. We’ve felt reasonably comfortable for years vis-à-vis Russia with the U.S. arsenal at its current New START level of 1,550 operational strategic weapons. Even there, however – and assuming the Kremlin doesn’t start up-arming after that treaty expires next year, or even before – we face a growing problem due to the asymmetry in theater-level forces.

That asymmetry is destabilizing, with the Kremlin using its advantage in lower-yield and shorter-range systems for coercive diplomacy as it implements what I call an “ offensive nuclear umbrella ” strategy of invading its neighbors under what the Biden Administration called a “ shield ” of nuclear escalatory threats. This was a problem we recognized in the First Trump Administration, and which we at least tried to begin answering by deploying the W76-2 lower-yield weapon and by starting work on SLCM-N. But that problem is still worsening as Russia continues to develop its sub-strategic arsenal, and this has been exacerbated by the Biden Administration having dragged its feet on SLCM-N. Accordingly, even if we didn’t have a China problem at the same time – which, of course, we do – the United States would still need new nuclear systems that we presently do not have.

When you add in the challenge presented by China’s sprint toward what is likely to be at least nuclear parity in a decade, of course, the problem gets much worse. (And don’t forget the additional complicating factors of nuclear-armed North Korea and potentially soon also Iran, though I won’t address them here.) The number of targets we would we need to be able to hold at risk in a few years’ time will presumably be significantly greater than the number we did when New START was ratified 15 years ago.

To be sure, it doesn’t necessarily follow that if 1,550 warheads is needed to deter one near-peer adversary then you need 3,100 to deter two of them, though conceivably it might. The question of numbers is actually a very challenging one, involving as it does questions not just about force size and the targeteering science of holding at risk specific types of asset or facility, but also about what targets we want to hold at risk in the first place.

Deterrence vs. Damage Limitation

So what does each adversary care about enough that threatening that thing would help deter aggression? And what would we need to be able to strike if deterrence failed , and we thus needed to minimize that adversary’s capacity to hit and hurt us in the fight?

Perhaps significantly, those two questions may well yield divergent answers, for the potential target set threats to which would best deter the bad guy from starting a war in the first place might actually be a somewhat differentset than you would want to destroy for purposes of damage limitation once fighting had begun.

What the adversary most prizes is an essentially empirical question – one that in principle should be decided on the basis of deep study of his thinking and circumstances, so that your deterrent signaling can be “tailored” to the minds one wishes to influence. If it turns out that he cares most about protecting his nuclear weapons, then I suppose a pure “nuclear-on-nuclear” counterforce approach would suffice for both deterrence and for damage limitation.

But if the thing he most cared about protecting isn’t his nuclear arsenal, the targeting requirements for deterrence and for damage limitation would tend to diverge. If they do – and if you still want to be capable of meeting both objectives – you might need to be able to cover both sets of targets. If you didn’t maintain the ability to cover more than what you’d need to target for pure damage limitation, after all, you would be less effective in deterring your adversary, since actually executing your deterrent threat would bring you below the number of weapons you want for damage limitation. This would make your deterrent threat less credible, and presumably thus also make aggression more likely. Accordingly, unless you were quite confident that the requirements of deterrence and damage limitation are exactly the same, you’d have reason to bump up your numbers to be able to handle both target sets – additively rather than alternatively .

In the short-term, our response to such numerical challenges can presumably only come through uploading, as both Matt and I have advocated. That wouldn’t really get us too much vis-à-vis Russia, of course, because the Russians could easily upload too (though just adding warheads to already-deployed delivery systems doesn’t necessarily drive up the number of aim-points you’d need to cover). At the least, however, uploading would at least delay the point at which China reaches parity, buying us a little more time in which to pursue better longer-term answers.

New Types of Weapon?

Beyond the stop-gap of uploading, such longer-term answers would surely involve complex trade-offs between capability, cost, and timing. In this respect, I suspect we still have a lot of intellectual spadework to do – not just on numbers but also with respect to questions about the potential long-term need for new types of nuclear weapon or delivery system.

What new capability, for instance, would give us the most deterrent and potential warfighting value most inexpensively and rapidly? Do we need to shift more to cruder “Willys MB Jeep” or “VW Bug”-type nuclear devices that can be produced more quickly and cheaply in response to future needs than our current “Ferrari”-type designs?

To best deter our adversaries, should we develop new devices that can better do things that “normal” nuclear weapons have difficulty doing – such as destroying hardened and deeply-buried targets (HDBTs), or producing neutron-bomb-style area effects that would be handy against invading Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) on land, or Chinese amphibious flotillas at sea?

For maximum flexibility in responding rapidly and cost-effectively to the problem of theater overmatch and the need for quick and relatively unobvious force generation in a crisis, do we need some kind of smaller nuclear device that can be swapped in and out on a modular basis with the non-nuclear warhead packages in a range of existing or planned conventional precision systems?

There’s clearly a lot of complex trade-space here. In light of that complexity, however, have our leaders ever really even been given a soup-to-nuts “menu” of potential future options – including potential “out of the box”-type possibilities – in the first place? If not, shouldn’t they be? U.S. leaders have not had the chance to set a genuinely new course in nuclear force posture for several decades, and once set in place, programs of record develop enormous path-dependencies that make even modest alterations slow and costly. We are at a threshold moment, and our leaders deserve to be able to consider a broad range of possible choices – and rapidly.

That’s why I ‘m so glad this webinar is calling attention to the possibility of opportunistic or coordinated aggression, for that threat greatly expands the range of nuclear tasks that our force posture might at some point need to handle at the same time, thus highlighting the need for such a serious rethink.

It’s past time to limit ourselves simply to implementing the POR from 2010. We need to move out rapidly in figuring out what the next POR needs to be and setting it promptly in motion.

—Christopher Ford

Challenges Facing an Iran Nuclear Deal

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 22:29:17 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford drew in making his informal remarks on April 21, 2025, at the biennial nuclear policy conference held by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. You can find a video of the panel discussion here .

Good morning, and thank you for inviting me. Naturally, I can only offer my own personal views here, which won’t necessarily represent those of anybody else. With U.S. and Iranian officials now apparently starting to meet in hopes of perhaps finding a way to reach agreement on the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, however, this is indeed a good time to talk about the prospects for a deal.

Let me start by saying that Carnegie seems to have gotten a good taste of Iran’s negotiating style over the last 24 hours, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s disingenuous bait-and-switch game in which he tried to browbeat you into changing your position on the conditions for his participation after the two sides had already come to terms. That kind of thing, I’m afraid, is very much to be expected from Iran – which naturally makes it all the harder to reach a deal with them on anything.

On the whole, it’s safe to say that I’m pretty pessimistic about the likelihood of reaching an Iran nuclear deal … or at least of getting a good one . It’s not that I don’t still hold out at least some hope of a decent diplomatic solution. (Earlier this year, in fact, I published a paper with the Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on how I think we might be able at least to set the best possible conditions for such a negotiation.) But I do think the chances of success at this point are pretty slim.

The Imperative of “Snap-Back”

Diplomacy has a little time in which to work, but not much.

The October 2025 deadline set by the pending expiration of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 is crucial here, because once the option of full sanctions “snapback” disappears, U.N. sanctions are likely to be entirely off the table, because the Russians (and perhaps the Chinese) would surely veto any new resolution to impose them, pretty much no matter what Iran actually does.

To my eye, the way to ensure the best possible chance for negotiations is to put Iran in the position of having to negotiate its way out of snapped-back sanctions. It is not to saddle the West with having to undertake the fool’s errand of persuading a veto-paralyzed Security Council to pressure Iran to agree to reasonable terms after the option of unilaterally-triggered sanctions “snap-back” is lost.

Iran’s game in the current diplomacy will therefore naturally continue to try to drag things out – stalling for time and making talks seem not entirely hopeless for just long enough that they get across the October 2025 deadline without somebody pulling that snapback trigger.

To be sure, as I understand it from various discussions with European interlocutors, the Europeans are basically ready to invoke snapback. I fear they will continue to be reluctant to do so, however, unless the Trump Administration convinces them it has a negotiating strategy. If they perceive Washington as being feckless and out of its league in handling the seasoned professional nuclear negotiators on the Iranian side – and if the United States continues to fly solo and send signals of disdain for the help Europe can provide in making negotiations work, most obviously through invoking U.N. sanctions snapback – I fear the Europeans won’t belly up to that bar.

So far, Europe doesn’t seem convinced – not least because U.S. officials have said inconsistent things, most of all by both seeming to suggest that Iran could continue to enrich uranium to 3.67 percent U-235 and subsequently insisting that it give up all enrichment capability . But as long as Europe thinks we lack an actual plan or vision for the way forward other than just saber-rattling with B-2 bombers at Diego Garcia , Europe may drag its feet on snapback. And if in turn the West lets the October 2025 deadline pass without snapback – and Iran thus gets de facto permanent immunity from a full return of U.N. sanctions – we will have squandered what is probably our best negotiating leverage.

Nuclear Restraint?

It’s also worth noting that even if we did get Iran to consider something meaningful, a decent deal would be a much heavier lift today than it was when Brian Hook and I tried in late 2017 and early 2018 to get the Europeans to join us in supporting a proposal to demand that Iran freeze its enrichment capability and stockpile at the low levels then permitted under the JCPOA and limit its aggressive missile development program. From both a technical perspective and a political one, asking Iran to cut back – or, better yet, eliminate – today’s Iranian nuclear infrastructure is obviously more challenging than asking it to limit or eliminate the much smaller one it had back then.

Establishing some kind of passably effective protocol for verifying that Iran is not working on nuclear weaponization would be an additional challenge, since regular safeguards don’t address that problem and the JCPOA’s notably tepid attempt to address that issue was a flop. We’ve known for years that for a country with Iran’s track record of violations and deception – as even IAEA Director-General Mohammed El Baradei (no Iran hawk him!) was forced to admit in 2005 – the inspection provisions of the Additional Protocol are quite inadequate. (Officially speaking, the IAEA doesn’t normally even have jurisdiction to look for weaponization activity at all, at least where fissile material is not involved.) The lamentable fate of the JCPOA’s “Section T” of Annex I of the JPCOA (“ Activities Which Could Contribute to the Design and Development of a Nuclear Explosive Device ”) shows that if we are to have some kind of no-weaponization verification we’re going to have to get both creative and rather intrusive in the verification department.

Yet precisely to the extent that Iran is permitted to retain any meaningful stockpile of enriched uranium and an enrichment capability with which to bump it up to weapons-grade purity – or it is permitted (God forbid) to resume its efforts to acquire a plutonium-production capability such as its old reactor project at Arak – the dangerous proliferation incentives facing other countries in the region will continue, as also will the dangerous preemption incentives facing Israel. An enduringly pared-back Iranian capability might represent an improvement over how things stand today if such restrictions didn’t evaporate over time as did the restrictions imposed by the JCPOA, but a Middle East still ripe for both nuclear proliferation and military preemption doesn’t sound like much of a solution.

Missiles and Terrorism

To make things more complicated, you should also remember that the nuclear program isn’t the only problem. In the First Trump Administration, after all, we sought to negotiate less provocative and destabilizing behavior from Iran on other fronts as well. Most prominently, this included putting some kind of cap on its ballistic missile program and its sponsorship of terrorist and regional militia groups, both of which featured prominently in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s comments at the Heritage Foundation in May 2018 setting out U.S. objectives.

Iran’s ongoing efforts to destabilize the Middle East by supporting terrorist groups and proxy militias – as well as through the activities of the IRGC’s Qods Force – remain a threat today. To be sure, Iran’s regional provocations may represent a somewhat easier target for our negotiators today, now that the Iran-allied Assad regime in Syria has fallen and the Israelis have so successfully dealt grievous blows to Hezbollah and Hamas. In principle, this might make some kind of Iranian restraint somewhat more negotiable, because such restraint would today require less of an Iranian climb-down than it did before. Nevertheless, it’s not clear whether the current U.S. team is actually trying to bring those issues within the scope of the negotiations – or, if so, how.

Moreover, the missile challenge also remains grave – and it’s no longer hypothetical now, either. We’ve seen Iran’s missile program show its teeth over the last couple of years, with multiple direct attacks having been carried out against Israel, and with an escalation in Iranian-supplied missile attacks on international shipping (and on Israel) from the Houthis. U.S. officials have suggested that the current negotiations do need to cover missiles in some way – though they haven’t been at all clear about how – but while this would be excellent indeed, this just emphasizes the point that getting to a good “yes” will be very challenging indeed.

For its part, Iran claims to have flatly ruled out talking about missiles or about terrorism, describing this as a “ red line ” for them. At the same time, Israel – which reportedly intended to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities already, only to be talked out of it by the Americans in favor of the current negotiating effort – has made clear that both terrorism and missiles must be in such a deal. To say the least, therefore, it’s far from obvious how all this moves forward.

Don’t’ get me wrong. I’m not saying that agreement upon and successful implementation and effective verification of a deal on these various issues is impossible . I do think, however, that it will be harder to get there today than it was when I was last wrestling with those issues in government – and the United States couldn’t get even the Europeans (let alone Iran) to agree on the conceptual framework for a tolerable JCPOA replacement deal even then.

Conclusion

So let me conclude with final comment. My former boss Mike Pompeo made a good point the other day when he observed that if a genuinely good deal with Iran turns out not to be available right now, there may also exist another option that doesn’t necessarily involve war with Iran.

If Iran starts working to weaponize its dangerous stockpile of nuclear material, I fear we might indeed not have any choice but to work with the Israelis to preclude that with military action. But short of Iran provoking a war like that, there is perhaps the option of what I described in 2023 – in the rather different context of North Korea (a country that has already weaponized) – as a “ pain box” strategy . Namely, nothing would preclude a coordinated international campaign of ongoing, relentless pressures on Iran that at least somewhat constrain the resources it has available to devote to destabilizing activities, strain the economy and staying power of the ruling regime, and provide Tehran with a continuing incentive to finally get serious about working out some kind of more or less constructive solution.

If Iran really is weaponizing, of course, the “pain box” wouldn’t be a particularly good option, because such a pressure strategy wouldn’t deal with the Iranian threat in any clear or definitive way, just as it certainly hasn’t solved the North Korea nuclear problem either. (Moreover, officially adopting a “mere” pressure strategy in the face of weaponization might in some vague way be taken to represent a quasi-acceptance of Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons, which we should think about very carefully before offering.) Nevertheless, Pompeo is right that such a pressure campaign is, at least, logically available – and it doesn’t involve blowing things up.

Nevertheless, even in order to tee up such a “pain box” strategy, I think we would have to have U.N. sanctions “snap-back” in place. This makes invoking “snap-back” essential to any serious diplomatic approach short of war – which brings me back to my earlier comments about the importance of a sound and clear U.S. negotiating strategy, and of leveraging European assistance.

Accordingly, I wish the U.S. negotiators the greatest success, but we shouldn’t pretend that the odds of such success are very high. I hope we don’t actually need to use those B-2s in any way other than signaling, but perhaps we will.

And we only have a few more months before we find out.

—Christopher Ford

What is the Future of Arms Control … Now?

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 15:18:59 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford drew in making his informal remarks to a March 13, 2025, workshop as part of the “Future of Arms Control Project” sponsored by the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding (CCDP).

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this event. Truth be told, I am somewhat unsure what to make of the Second Trump Administration’s policies insofar as they bear on the possible future of arms control. In providing you my personal perspectives on this, I can only offer the perspectives of an outsider, of course, and there are surely things behind the scenes that I’m not seeing.

T1 versus T2

Yet the look and feel of the policy process – if indeed that’s the right word at all – are today very much unlike what I experienced in the First Trump Administration, and there’s little sign in “T2” at this point of the degree or kind of interagency policy development and coordination we used when I ran the WMD Directorate at the NSC and then served at the State Department during “T1.” So let’s do a little comparison.

Most Republicans don’t seem to have expected to win the 2016 election, and as I remember well from serving on the NSC transition team, there was a good deal of improvisation as we prepared to come into office. Nonetheless, I feel like there was a good deal of actual strategy and vision that ended up tying the various elements of our policy together on arms control and related international security topics.

In fact, it turned out to be a really seminal time for U.S. national security policy, as we worked to redirect American policy clearly and unapologetically into strategic competition for the first time since the Cold War – finally trying to address U.S. policy to the great power competition challenges that previous leaders had ignored or downplayed for decades. We didn’t exactly start with a plan, but we had a general idea of where we were going and built approaches that had – I would submit – a reasonably coherent strategic vision behind them, which was expressed in the 2017 National Security Strategy, the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, and the 2018 National Defense Strategy.

Crucially, in developing and implementing policies in support of this vision, many of us in the T1 administration recognized that if they know what they’re doing, competent political appointees can usually succeed in leveraging the skills and professionalism of the federal workforce to steer the ship of national policy in new directions – even if not all of that workforce happened to like us. (We knew they didn’t!) We didn’t throw the institutions and mechanisms of the U.S. national security bureaucracy into chaos and disarray, but rather worked with and through those institutions to make them support our policy goals. And things didn’t go so badly.

In moves with which I had some involvement, for instance, we took a number of steps that grew out of this sense of vision.

We developed a responsive strategy to Russian violations of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that involved commencing treaty-permissible initial R&D on countervailing U.S. systems in an effort finally to move beyond impotent Obama-era finger-wagging into giving Russia a more concrete incentive to change course, and we similarly began to impose lawful countermeasures in response to Russian violations of the Open Skies Treaty.

We conducted a sweeping review of Obama’s disarmament policy, thus officially abandoning the naïve and ineffective virtue signaling of his so-called “Prague Agenda” while yet laying out a vision for potential future progress through efforts such as the “Creating an Environment for Nuclear Disarmament” (CEND) initiative I began at the State Department.

We imposed sanctions against the Russians for using a banned novichok chemical weapon in the Sergei Skripal assassination attempt in the UK.

On President Trump’s instructions, we negotiated with the EU-3 – unsuccessfully, alas – to find a way to prevent then-current JCPOA restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program from “sunsetting.”

We commenced work on a new nuclear-armed submarine-launched cruise missile – the SLCM-N – to replace the system Barack Obama had unilaterally scrapped in 2010, and we brought into service the new lower-yield W76-2 weapon as part of an effort to start providing at least some re-stabilizing counter to the array of lower-yield weapons Russia and China were already fielding in connection with their strategies of theater-level nuclear coercive bargaining.

We drew the world’s attention to China’s “Military-Civil Fusion” strategy and other such moves, and we began to move U.S. national security policy (especially national security export controls) into a new technology-denial agenda to support competition – a move that, to my surprise and pleasure, even the Biden Administration recognized was of vital importance and continued aggressively.

By late 2019, moreover, we were developing concepts for what I called “next-generation arms control” on a “trilateral” basis with Russia and China, and we began pressing China to engage with us on what such a future might look like. President Trump then brought in my colleague Marshall Billingslea to make a high-profile push for this around the world.

Beijing didn’t respond to our arms control overtures, of course, and indeed embarked upon a staggeringly large and rapid nuclear weapons build-up. Nor did Russia cease its multiple arms control violations, and President Trump thus pulled out of both the INF Treaty and Open Skies. But one certainly cannot say we didn’t try, or that there was no strategic vision behind U.S. policy.

(In other areas, moreover, the First Trump Administration took further important steps to revise Obama Administration policies that badly needed changing – such as loosening overly restrictive conditions placed on counter-terrorist strikes and certain types of cyber operation. And we stood up to Russian extraterritorial aggression by overturning Obama’s ban on “lethal” assistance to Ukraine and providing it with badly-needed Javelin anti-tank missiles and other support. We also wiped out a large group of Russian Wagner Group soldiers who rather unwisely attacked a small American anti-ISIS outpost in eastern Syria. Given recent events, it’s useful to remember some of this backstory from the “T1” days.)

I dwell on events from that period simply to point out that there is nothing inherently incompatible between a Trump Administration and having a solid, sound, and coherent national strategy that protects and advanced American security interests in a challenging world. We know how to do this.

But what is one to make of things now from the perspective of the potential future of arms control? I can’t sit here and tell you that there is no plan or coherent vision that ties policy inputs together with specific desired policy outcomes in a genuine strategy, but neither can I really point to what such a plan might be. A mere two months in, it is perhaps too early to tell anyway. We’ll just have to wait and see.

A Vision for the Future of Arms Control?

That said, what might we see going forward? Well, as I have repeatedly suggested over the last few months – including here , here , and here – I think it would be quite consistent, both with President Trump’s desire for nuclear weapons negotiations and with his desire to pursue “peace through strength,” for the United States to: (1) once again very actively seek arms control with Russia and China; but at the same time also (2) rapidly work to augment the United States’ nuclear capabilities and weapons production infrastructure.

Those two policies are not in tension with each other, but would in fact be highly complementary. Augmenting our capabilities is needed to provide Russia and China with concrete reasons to negotiate meaningfully with us, forestalling an accelerating arms competition that a more robust American posture would make clear is not in their interest. A more robust posture – especially with respect to the infrastructure, with U.S. leaders long neglected – would also provide us with a “hedge” both against possible Russian or Chinese cheating, and also against the possibility that negotiations could fail to reach a good conclusion. Such a two-pronged approach is precisely how “strength” can serve “peace.”

Challenges to Overcome

Threat Perceptions

As I noted in a recent article , although there’s little need for arms negotiating when relations between two would-be counterparties are extremely good, having reciprocal views and threat perceptions that are too poisonously antagonistic can make agreements much more difficult.

Remember that at the same time that Putin was referring to the West as being “Satanic ,” Joe Biden announced in his 2022 National Security Strategy that there was pretty much no way to ever to negotiate with Vladimir Putin. (Biden declared that Putin had spurned all U.S. efforts at constructive engagement and, crucially, that “ he will not change .”) Such reciprocal threat assessments pretty much ruled out talking.

But while President Trump’s unaccountable warmth toward Putin and adoption of Kremlin propaganda talking points about Putin’s brutal war of aggression and annexation against Ukraine is shocking and disturbing for all sorts of reasons, it certainly represents a way out of the kind of reciprocal antagonisms that I talked about in my early 2024 article as presenting an obstacle to arms control engagement. So perhaps the arms control community can find a small sliver of hope there, at least.

Russia’s Legacy of Arms Control Cheating

That said, any prospect for new negotiations would still have to overcome the trust-corrosive legacy of the Putin regime’s woeful history of violating its arms control-related promises. If you’ve been following such issues, the list of arms control-related promises that Russia has broken is truly impressive, in a demented sort of way: the INF Treaty, the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, New START , the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs), the Budapest Memorandum, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and even Russia’s own nuclear testing moratorium. If indeed there were new arms control talks, it’s thus not obvious to me how the Kremlin would persuade any serious American interlocutors – or the Chinese, for that matter – that “next time will be different” and the Kremlin would actually keep its promises.

The “China Shadow”

More importantly, speaking of the Chinese, nothing has yet happened to point to a solution to the problem of the “China shadow” that hangs over arms control – that is, the ways in which China’s massive conventional and nuclear build-ups cast a dark pall over what it is possible to imagine us being able to agree upon with Russia on future arms control when it comes to limitations, let alone reductions. If China were not sprinting toward what seems likely to be at least nuclear parity, I might imagine a number of possible approaches to arms control between Washington and Moscow. But with both the United States and Russia having to both also now be looking over their shoulder at threats from China – our most challenging strategic competitor and Russia’s ancient enemy – it’s far from clear what arms control limits would today be viable.

Perhaps the U.S. Government’s current remarkable embrace of Putinism is in fact intended – as some in the Washington policy community are trying to encourage others to believe – to “peel Russia away” from China. (If so, I suppose that could indeed have potentially important implications for future arms control negotiating.) Nevertheless, I see no sign of that happening as yet – and it seems rather unlikely. After all, we are hardly in a position to replace Beijing in providing massive support to Russia’s defense industrial base and war effort, and we shouldn’t want to be. Nor are we in a position to replace China as a purchaser of Russian fuel and mineral resources. I see little reason for even the slightest chance that Russia will change its foreign and security policy in any way that diminishes its structurally and inherently anti-American partnership relationship with China.

Rather than this U.S. shift representing a “ reverse Nixon ” strategy in which we seduce one big adversary into cooperating with us against a second, bigger one, it is more likely that this will turn out to be no more than a kakistocratic exercise in us being ourselves “peeled off” from our longstanding alliances with states with which we actually share powerful common interests and values. Rather than representing a feat of brilliant statesmanship, that would make the world less peaceful and secure, also consigning to grim futures of vassalage a number of peoples who are no less free and sovereign in their national liberties than we Americans ourselves.

Nor am I very comfortable with the argument one sometimes hears that the United States simply needs to “pause” its posture confronting Russian aggression in order to “prioritize” facing down China in the Indo-Pacific because we are too weak to deal with both challenges. Being able to prioritize is certainly a crucial part of strategy, and as I made clear last year n my contribution to a CSIS project exploring a warfighting scenario that involved simultaneous nuclear weapons use by both Russia and China, I have little difficulty prioritizing the Indo-Pacific. Nevertheless, as I emphasized,

“Prioritizing one thing need not mean euthanizing the other. Indeed, any failure to stand by NATO would likely have significant adverse consequences in the Indo-Pacific, whose leaders would be watching the war in Europe [in that scenario] carefully as a window into their own ability to rely upon the United States when things become difficult. Just as the United States prioritized defending Europe from the Nazis in World War II without backing off in the war against Japan in the Pacific, even if the United States must now prioritize East Asia in certain ways, it should not abandon Europe.”

The idea that we are too weak to deter two revisionist aggressors at the same time is an assertion about American decline that seems to be being oversold in order to rationalize decisions made for other reasons. To be sure, I don’t rule out the possibility that we could make such declinism come true by willfully enfeebling ourselves – such as, perhaps, by slashing defense budgets, sacking our country’s national security professionals, veering wildly between inconsistent policy positions, undermining the U.S. economy through counterproductive trade policies and gob-smackingly high levels of federal indebtedness, destroying America’s scientific and technological competitiveness by dismantling the U.S. research and development base, disestablishing the assistance and capacity-building programs and institutions that can help us win friends elsewhere in the world and strengthen them against adversity, closing the offices and research programs that help American leaders understand strategic trends and refine U.S. defense strategy, and prizing performative posturing in the social media attention economy over reaching meaningful agreements and building resilient relationships. Nevertheless, unless we Make America Weak Again through mad fanaticisms or just strategic inattention, it does not have to be that way.

Today’s emerging, reinvigorated, and more security-focused Europe should be neither a competitor nor a replacement for the United States in that region. It can and should be, rather, a powerful partner – allowing us to maintain our own interests and position in Europe while actually strengthening defense and security in the Indo-Pacific vis-à-vis China by demonstrating that America’s commitments to our friends actually mean something and that revisionist aggressors cannot push us around.

This is vital to the future of arms control, too, inasmuch as America will surely do far better in any future arms negotiations if our adversaries do not see us as weak, capricious, and easily manipulable chumps.

Nuclear Weapons Proliferation

As a final note, it’s worth pointing out that current events are also putting enormous pressure on the global nonproliferation regime. As I pointed out to another Track 2 dialogue with Russians the other day, today’s coincidence of events – specifically, Russia’s war of of territorial aggression in Europe, the growing threat of more such warfare in Asia by China, and the clear erosion of America’s commitment to its allies and security partners – creates huge incentives for nuclear weapons proliferation among those allies and partners. American alliances have proven the world’s best nonproliferation tool for as long as I have been alive, but frankly, under current circumstances, it’s hard to blame the would-be victims of such territorial aggression for entertaining the thought of nuclear weaponization. In their shoes, so would I.

Accordingly, unless we in the United States either hugely shore up our commitments and capabilities to stop the current self-inflicted hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility, or we somehow see the end of the threats of Russian and Chinese aggression that are currently driving those proliferation pressures, the “future of arms control” might have to include a great many new players before too long. Those dynamics, alas, are important to the future of arms control too.

—Christopher Ford

Struggling with The Bomb: Competing Discourses in the Nuclear Disarmament Movement

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 18:54:43 GMT

The National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) published Dr. Ford's paper " Struggling with The Bomb: Competing Discourses in the Nuclear Disarmament Movement" in February 2025, as the second paper in Volume 5 of its Occasional Papers series. You can find Dr. Ford's paper on NIPP's website here , or use the button below to download a PDF.

Rebutting Sino-Russian Political Discourse and Getting Rights Right

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 02:23:42 GMT

Dr. Ford and Lord Nigel Biggar published their essay on " Rebutting Sino-Russian Political Discourse and Getting Rights Right" in the Winter 2025 issue of Defense & Strategic Studies Online (DASSO). You can find the DASSO homepage here , read the full second issue of DASSO here , access the Ford/Biggar essay online here , or use the button below to download a PDF of the essay.

Meeting the Challenges of “Dark Quad” Aggression in the “Gray Zone”

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:02:09 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to a conference at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on February 20, 2025.

Good morning, and thanks for inviting me to participate on this panel. The destabilizing dictatorships of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – a dangerous and disruptive grouping that Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine have termed the “ Axis of Upheaval ,” and which I have called the “ Dark Quad ” – clearly present huge challenges to international peace and security.

This comes not merely from the so-called “ no limits” partnership between Beijing and Moscow, but also now in the military alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang and the expanded and heavily security-focused “ strategic partnership ” between Moscow and Tehran. Those countries’ increasing defense industrial base cooperation, their contempt for the global nonproliferation regime, and the potential for not merely opportunistic aggression but in fact deliberately coordinated warfare present major challenges to U.S. and allied defense and security planning.

I’d like to say a few words here about the broader political context of these challenges, especially in the context of so-called “ Gray Zone ” provocations, disinformation, and political subversion. My comments here represent only my personal thoughts and do not necessarily represent the views of anybody else, but I’m pleased to have the chance to provide them.

We are Frogs Being Boiled

Let me start by saying a couple of words about the psychological dynamics of Gray Zone competition. In that liminal zone between what is clearly peace and what is clearly warfare, the Dark Quad is working to put us in the position of the proverbial frog that is being boiled . That is, they seek to put us in a situation in which the (figurative) water temperature increases slowly enough that we don’t actually fully realize that we are being cooked until it is too late.

Their coercive bargaining strategies revolve around a constant effort to engage aggressively and provocatively with the West in ways that create destabilizing challenges on an unceasing basis. As Dima Adamsky has described it in his excellent book on The Russian Way of Deterrence , for instance, Russian thinking on such topics is highly active and deliberately destabilizing, aiming to confront us with what is in effect a steady drumbeat of improvisational, and opportunistic provocations in ways design to unsettle, and disorient. Russian theorists feel that such efforts to create “operational friction” generate “deterring potential,” which can thereafter be leveraged and exploited for purposes of coercive bargaining. Crucially, this applies equally in both peacetime and wartime contexts, and indeed – in contrast to Western thinking – seems to envision little real distinction between the two.

This can be a disturbingly effective way to gain incremental advantage, as we are acclimatized to seeing ongoing outrages as simply a sort of steadily-creeping “new normal.” In this way, we are conditioned into notreacting to any given additional increment of provocation – or at least into not reacting enough to each such incremental offense to make its commission not worth our adversary’s while.

This dulling of our sensibilities and our sense of outrage is not merely an incidental result of the strategy: it is part of the point. The gradual de facto “granting of permission” we thus impliedly give to such provocations allows our adversaries not just to accumulate advantage over time and inflict growing costs upon us, but also to pre-condition us against being able to marshal an effective and immediate response to whatever they might choose to do in the lead-up to actual war. (In the parable of the “boy who cried wolf,” for instance, imagine that it is actually the wolf that has deliberately triggered repeated prior alarms!)

And you can see much of this already happening, especially with the Russians. Any number of the things to which we have become accustomed to the Russians doing, for instance – provocations such as subversion of elections in Western countries, placing bombs on Western aircraft , wars of territorial aggression, massacres of civilians and other war crimes , assassination and sabotage campaigns in Western countries , chemical weapons use on NATO territor y and on the battlefield in Ukraine – might easily in more “normal” times have represented all but a casus belli. Iran, too, seems to have been trying to boil our collective Western frog, with things such as direct missile attacks on Israel , assassination plots against U.S. officials , and sponsoring terrorism in Western capitals .

Today, it would appear, such provocations seem to be almost tolerated as “just what those folks do.” We might see such actions as revealing a wholly uncivilized brutishness, of course, but we seem to dismiss so much of this now with what amounts merely to a sneer of condescension: “Sure, what else do you expect from the likes of them ?”

But our lack of outrage at such things is itself outrageous.* This is a mark of how good the Dark Quad has been at “boiling” us Western “frogs” without serious response or consequence. And these problems of frog-boiling are compounded when our adversaries accompany their provocations – as they do – with sustained campaigns of propaganda and disinformation intended specifically to divide us from each other and make it harder for us to recognize the nature of the challenge, to formulate and agree upon effective responses, and even to trust each other in the course of public policymaking at all.

The Vulnerabilities of Modern Democracy

And it may indeed be that modern Western democracy is particularly susceptible to such tactics. This is perhaps true to some extent for any democracy, for in such a system – by definition – large swathes of the population and a great many disparate sub-communities play an inherently significant role in public policymaking as a result of the democratic political process itself. This makes what a cybersecurity specialist might call the “attack surface” for subversion and manipulation inherently large. We have long seen democratic politics as one of the inherent strengths of Western society and one of the secrets to our resilience, and this is true. But very little in this world comes for free, and honesty also requires admitting that this strength has its downside too.

That said, while this problem of vulnerability to subversive and disorienting tactics is to some extent an inherent challenge for any democracy, I fear that in recent years we’ve made ourselves unusually susceptible. This is the case for at least three reasons.

The Hyper-Democratization of Democracy

First, we do not today have just a democracy per se, but we have a particularly “democratic” one. Indeed, we’ve worked quite hard over the years to make it so, and not without reason. I suspect, for instance, that few people today mourn the eclipse of a polity in which an affluent, semi-aristocratic White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant (WASP) elite called all the shots – in loco parentis , as it were, for the rest of America’s diverse population.

With the extension of political participation to previously marginalized groups, however, we have also created a much larger and more diffuse political community, with more diverse cross-currents and internal tensions, and which finds it more difficult to generate sustained political and policy coherence over time. Again, this decentralization and disaggregation of the relevant demos in our democracy is in many ways a profound strength. Nonetheless, it, too, does not come without a downside – such as our greater modern vulnerability to the kind of tactics our adversaries are employing against us.

The Poison of Social Media

Second, modern democracy has become much more vulnerable to adversary coercive manipulation and subversion as a result of the disappearance of yesterday’s comparatively small and curated information space, and its replacement by a massive explosion of expressive content dominated by hyperscaled social media. There is certainly much to like about this. The Internet, for example, has made possible a truly extraordinary leap in human access to knowledge and ease of communicative engagement that is no parallel at least since the rise of mass printing and paper-based publishing and distribution several hundred years ago. In many ways, this has surely been very good for humanity.

Yet the downsides are also huge. This downside lies, I would argue, not so much in the Internet per se, as in the rise to dominance of communicative engagement styles enabled and encouraged by social media business models and algorithms that deliberately maximize screen “engagement” time by compartmenting users into insular information microenvironments that reinforce biases and presuppositions, reward and encourage extremity of views without challenge or self-reflection, and encourage performative outrage and vicious social “swarming” behaviors by reciprocally-antagonistic ideational monocultures.

To be sure, social pressure dynamics within and between relatively insular societal sub-communities have always played a major role in human society. Such dynamics inevitably help shape what members of a society find permissible or even conceivable, and it is a natural human tendency to reinforce communal boundaries with some degree of ostracism, exclusion, and suppression of the “Other.” Historically, however, we engaged far more directly with our fellow humans in the flesh – and in the complexity and inescapable nuance of real-world daily life – and only on a relatively modest scale, typified by village- or clan-level interactions.

The rise of print capitalism expanded this scale to the level of large urban populations or even that of nation-states, with all sorts of important socio-political and geopolitical implications. Even then, however, humanity had seen nothing like the hyperscaled dynamics of today’s truly globalized social media environment, which penetrates society as nothing before, both “down” to the very hands and eyeballs of billions of individual humans and “out” across the breadth of human civilization.

At social media hyperscale– and, significantly, without the feedback mechanisms and incentives for humane moderation provided by face-to-face engagement and personal interactive nuance – the modern social media information space generates a metastatic toxicity: a universe of fractious, hermetically-sealed bubbles of hypertrophic ideational conformity, shortened attention spans, and intellectual shallowness that reinforces existing biases and nourishes all manner of imagined grievances and grudges, while rewarding and encouraging reflexive out-group antagonisms. In these ways, one might say, we have primed the pump for our own susceptibility to adversary propaganda, disinformation, and Gray Zone destabilization.

The Metastasis of Self-Criticism

Third, I fear we have become more vulnerable to such tactics as a result of what might be termed the “metastasis of self-criticism.” For centuries, it has been Western culture’s genius for self-criticism that has helped both permit and indeed drive vast human progress. Historically, Western societies have had an apparently unique ability to articulate compelling normative frameworks and then – and here’s the impressive part – to turn the mirror of those vales back upon themselves (often lamentably slowly, and sometimes quite painfully, but eventually) for purposes of constructive self-criticism and improvement.

The classic example of this, of course, is the way in which our own Founders articulated and tried to build a system grounded in a compelling vision of American liberty – values that were of world-historical importance and that provided a beacon of inspiration for the rest of the world. We sinned rather egregiously against those values in important ways for many years, of course, by denying basic political rights to portions of our country’s population on the basis of raw prejudice.

In time, however, we were able to muster both the honesty and the self-awareness to recognize the gap between our principles and our practice, and we eventually had the moral courage to do something about that gap by living up to those values better – even when such gap-closing cost the nation dearly in terms of lives and treasure in our Civil War.

I am aware of no other culture that has ever displayed the kind of constructive self-criticism and self-improvement the West has done so often and so well. We should be endlessly proud of this.

Like many good things, however, such an instinct for self-criticism, in excess, can become a problem. And I fear has. Over the last few decades – in a development pioneered by the academic Left, to its disgrace, but which has subsequently been embraced by extremes on both the Left and the Right – our instinct for constructive self-criticism has metastasized. It evolved first into a chronic and paralyzing form of hand-wringing and apologetic self-doubt, and then into intellectual vandalism and a caustic and destructive form of oddly narcissistic civilizational self-hatred. Through this oikophobic prism, despite the manifest and worsening threats and challenges we face in the world, it is reflexively assumed – in different ways on the Left and on the Right, but nonetheless disturbingly so for both – that we are always the problem, that things are always our fault, and that it is our country, our leaders, and indeed our fellow citizens who present the real and worst dangers in the modern world. Such conclusions are absurd, even grotesque, but they seem today to be disturbingly common.

So this is, as I see it, our third point of modern democratic weakness. It is easy to see how this ugly worldview makes us easy fodder for adversary manipulation – and they, our adversaries, know it.

Fighting Back

As for fighting back against such adversaries, that is, of course, rather more easily said than done. I have certainly argued in this regard for the importance – to make us “harder targets” in the face of disinformation and manipulation – of trying to rediscover something of the old confident and optimistic narrative we once had of ourselves and our civilizational value. (This is especially important as our adversaries try to manipulate and prey upon the very principles and moral integrity that have historically helped make us special .) I think we need to do more remembering , if you will, of just why the revisionist autocracies hate us and fear our political and social values as much as they do.

Why do they feel that way? Well, it is most certainly not as a result of these our being in any sense problematic or discredited. Quite to the contrary; it’s precisely because these ideals are worthy – and indeed inspiring – and because of the vision encoded in them of liberty and self-government by a sovereign, self-constituting, and rights-bearing people. That vision is one which dictators loathe. We should revel in their fear, and be proud of ourselves once again for embodying that which terrifies the monsters so.

The path to getting our heads right by returning to such a sense of self-confidence – while also, at the same time, protecting that sense of self-worth from the sin of pride, and from morphing into arrogance – is not easy. It is a path to and through healing and collective renewal that will require more than I am in any position to describe here, even if I pretended to know exactly what is needed.

Nonetheless, with respect to near-term policy choices, I suspect there is more we can do in pushing back against those who are working so hard to stir the pot and to weaponize our society’s vulnerabilities against us today. And since the kind of psychological and cultural renewal I’m talking about – and the self-confidence that would come with it – won’t happen tomorrow morning, we need to buy ourselves some time. And that may mean getting our knuckles a bit bloody.

We can surely, for instance, do more to make our adversaries’ strategies of imposing “operational friction” on us more challenging and more costly to them . As I argued recently to NATO colleagues, when an adversary employs Gray Zone-type provocations against us, we can and should do more to ensure that he gets his “ fingers burned ” in the attempt.

Our adversaries in the Dark Quad are operating on the basis of the “principle of the bayonet” often attributed to Lenin: “ Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed. If you encounter steel, withdraw .” And our adversaries will continue thus to “probe” as long as they still “encounter mush.” Why not show them some steel?

In theory at least, such approaches are to some extent already being employed in the cyber domain, under U.S. doctrinal concepts such as “ defend forward” and “persistent engagement ,” though I’d wager we have still been far more reticent, even timid, than we need to be there. I would urge us not just to step things up but also to generalize the principle. We need to display less “mush” and more “steel” everywhere.

Moreover, though we have hitherto been very reluctant to consider such things, it may also be worth going on the socio-political offense in other ways as well.

The paranoid dictatorships of the Dark Quad have long assumed that Western powers are engaged in an ongoing, full-spectrum campaign of socio-political subversion aimed at regime change and “Color Revolutions” in their countries. This, for instance, is very much what the Chinese Communist Party believes – and fears . Vladimir Putin also complains loudly about this , and while the so-called “ Gerasimov Doctrine ” of Gray Zone competition and subversion certainly does well describe what Russia has been attempting to accomplish vis-à-vis the West, on its face and on its own terms it is also a description of what Russia believes the West has been doing against it for years.

The funny thing, of course, is that systematic domestic subversion of the dictatorships that array themselves against us isn’t U.S. policy – nor that of our allies. Nonetheless, those dictators blame us for it anyway, and seem sincerely to believe that it is our policy.

In keeping with my “fingers burned” suggestion, therefore, perhaps the real question for us is this: Why notrespond to our adversaries’ threats and challenges by actually starting to do a bit of what they think we’ve been doing all along?

To be sure, we would need to remember – and perhaps even wish to signal – that such a policy of actually working to undermine their political systems is likely more useful as a tool than necessarily as an objective. While I would be happy to see some healthy regime change in any or all of the members of the Dark Quad, there are obvious potentially escalatory downsides when a competition is framed in truly regime-existential terms and when the bad guys have nuclear weapons.

Accordingly, subversive ruthlessness on our part is probably best thought of as a means rather than an end – and we might need to be willing to scale such efforts back down to the degree that our adversaries abandoned their own subversion and provocations against us. But why not give ourselves some competitive leverage – and put themon the back foot for a change – by taking the figurative fight to their home turf?

After all, if they truly believe we’re already doing it, it wouldn’t really be too “provocative” to take this step. We’re blamed for taking it already, so their anger over this would seem to be basically baked into their approach already. In a sense, by not doing what they attribute to us already, we’re just foregoing a costless way to exact a price from them for their belligerence, to penalize them for their geopolitical aggressiveness, and to gain bargaining leverage. So if we’re indeed serious about fighting back, why not stop passing up such an opportunity?

Anyway, that’s some food for thought from me to get some discussion going here this morning. Thanks for listening!

—Christopher Ford

Notes:

* Frankly, the civilizational contempt that such tactics engender in Western observers is discreditable. If anything, precisely because some of our adversary dictatorships are the heirs to ancient and sophisticated cultures, one should arguably hold them to a higher standard than one might a country with less of a long and proud tradition. (We should respect these worthy ancient cultures enough to understand how much their peoples deserve better, more humane, and different rulers today!) But that’s a discussion for another day.

Nuclear Doctrines and Prospects for P5 Dialogue

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 17:54:37 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks on February 18, 2025, to a Track 2 dialogue with Russia on Military Risk Reduction in Europe.

Thank you for inviting me to be here – and my apologies in advance for the background noise, as I’m attending a conference here in London this week. Also, please accept my condolences upon Sergey Rogov ’s death. I did not really know him myself, but he was certainly a major name in the field, and to many of you an important and clearly beloved colleague. I am sure it is an exceedingly difficult loss.

On the topics at hand, I’d like to start by quickly summarizing my recommendations for U.S. nuclear doctrine and nuclear posture, and then address the prospects for P5 diplomacy. In that latter respect, I’ll say a word first about the idea of some kind of P5 declaration on “no-first-use” (NFU) policy, and then about the P5’s 2022 “nuclear war must never be fought” declaration. Finally, I’ll mention the other issue about which we’ve been asked today: Artificial Intelligence (AI) in nuclear decision-making.

U.S. Doctrine and Posture

Time being limited, I won’t spend too much time on my thoughts about what United States nuclear posture should be, since I have offered a number of specific recommendations on that topic elsewhere . But my comments on U.S. nuclear doctrine and posture may not be exactly what most of you in this audience wish to hear, but they proceed from the observation that we in the West have what is at least a threefold problem.

First, we must maintain a deterrence posture robust enough to deter aggression by Russa against us, our allies, or our interests at a time in which the Putin government has returned wars of conquest and annexation to the European agenda for the first time since Hitler was alive. And we have to do this while Russia – thanks in part to breaking its “Presidential Nuclear Initiatives” promises and violating the INF Treaty – is building up its shorter- and theater-range nuclear forces in ways we cannot presently match.

Second, China is now sprinting toward at least nuclear parity, thus confronting us in the near future with the challenge of deterring two hostile nuclear peer powers at the same time.

Third, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – all countries deeply hostile to the West and to rule-of-law democratic self-governance in general – are increasingly collaborating (and even forming alliances!) amongst themselves to reshape the international system in their own dark and lawless image.

In response to this, I thus argue the United States needs to do nine things with regard to nuclear weapons:

Complete the now-underway recapitalization of U.S. strategic delivery systems and their associated command-and-control architectures;

Develop a new conceptual framework for handling the unprecedented problem of deterring and dealing with two nuclear near-peer adversaries at the same time;

Begin “uploading” warheads from the U.S. nuclear reserve stockpile onto operational delivery systems in modest numbers as soon as the New START agreement expires next year, to buy us a bit more time – in the face of China’s massive nuclear build-up – to find better answers to the “two-peer problem”;

Conduct new research and development on new nuclear weapons design and delivery concepts;

Augment U.S. and allied theater-range nuclear delivery options in response to long-deployed Russian and Chinese threats and coercive bargaining strategies;

Develop and implement a plan to restore U.S. strategic forces’ ability to hold at risk hardened and deeply-buried underground targets;

Make some specific tweaks to U.S. declaratory policy that I won’t bore you with here;

Reinvigorate the U.S. nuclear weapons infrastructure to finally create the resilient and responsive complex we’ve talked about for years without building – which will also help us with strategic “hedging” as uploading draws down our existing reserve stockpile; and

Relax our so-called “zero-yield” policy on very small nuclear explosive experiments in response to – and in order to permit us to conduct activities analogous to – those we understand Russia (and perhaps China) to have been conducting for some time.

I should emphasize that I’m not against – and actually support – trying to engage Russia and China on negotiated restraint before we’ve accomplished all these nine tasks I’ve just mentioned. I just doubt we’ll get any meaningful out of them until we’ve started to make real progress in bolstering deterrence through such steps.

Anyway, so much for my own recommendations to America. What about “no-first-use”?

No First Use

To my eye, a NFU declaration by the P5 would be at least useless, and perhaps even dangerous. As I have emphasized for years – beginning at least as early as 2011 , continuing when I served in the First Trump Administration , and continuing to the present day – NFU is inherently implausible in just the kind of crisis in which it would seem to be needed most.

At the most charitable, NFU is a distraction that keeps us from talking about real issues. But worse, if a NFU promise by the United States were truly believed , it could undermine that U.S. extended nuclear deterrence that for decades has simultaneously helped prevent aggression and promoted nonproliferation by reassuring our allies that they do not themselves need nuclear weapons to deter Russia and China.

It’s worth remembering, also, that nobody currently actually has a real NFU policy in the first place, or perhaps ever has. China pretends to have an NFU policy, of course, but nobody believes them. Indeed, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military publications contradict its diplomats’ bloviations on the topic – perhaps most obviously the 2004 PLA manual on The Science of Second Artillery Operations , which discusses using nuclear weapons in response merely to “strong conventional attacks.” The Chinese Communist Party has been lying to us for decades about China’s supposed commitment to “no first use,” so let us please stop wasting valuable time and energy on this sterile debate.

Nuclear War Declaration

So what about the P5 “nuclear war” declaration? Well, I’ll probably annoy this audience there as well.

For reasons similar to why I think NFU a foolish idea, I would also caution against too rigid an interpretation of the declaration made by the P5 under the Biden Administration that “ a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought .” That statement may sound uncontroversial, even obvious, but that’s only if you don’t think about it too hard or read it too literally.

To be fair, of course, that was also phrasing upon which Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed many years ago. Nevertheless, too rigid a reading of that declaration could actually be strategically destabilizing.

This isn’t a new insight, but there needs to be at least some chance that you actually will use nuclear weapons in order for nuclear deterrence to work. If your adversaries believe you genuinely think your nuclear weapons literally “ must never ” be employed, those weapons won’t deter anybody.

If it were up to me – which it isn’t, of course – I’d clarify that this formulation represents our earnest hope that no nuclear exchange will ever occur, but that it does not in any way diminish our determination to use nuclear deterrence to protect ourselves, our vital interests, or our allies from aggression.

Such a clarification would seem quite commonsensical, I would hope, but if it’s indeed what the P5 really meant all along, why not offer this clarification? (If, on the other hand, clarifying clear and continued support for deterrence is controversial, then that P5 declaration is problematic.)

Artificial Intelligence

On the topic of AI in nuclear weapons decision-making, I’ll just repeat a point I made at a CSIS event last year :

“If there is any area in which national leaders would refuse to countenance handing over their own most existentially critical trigger-pulling authority to a computer, after all, [actual nuclear launch decision-making] is presumably it. In that sense, it may be that AI-type applications are more likely to take over human functionality, if they do at all, in areas merely supporting nuclear weapons release authority – such as time-urgent indications-and-warning (I&W) analysis, battle management decision-support tools, or other data-management and modeling applications supporting nuclear deterrence, war fighting, and force posture planning – than in the weapons-release decision itself.”

It’s worth remembering, of course, that Russia apparently still maintains its creepy and apocalyptic automated Perimeter(a.k.a. “Dead Hand”) system – which is basically a crude AI system that, if it is activated and certain decision criteria are met, will launch all Russian nuclear weapons. Perhaps prohibiting that Russian system is a topic to discuss among the P5?

Beyond Perimeter , however, I think the main AI questions with nuclear decision-making go primarily to the issue of how to keep AI decision support to humans from bleeding over into decision-dependence by humans as we try to ensure that there is a “person in the loop” at all times.

Conclusion: Strategic Stability in P5 Dialogue

One potential benefit of Trump-style disruptions of the status quo is that they can sometimes offer an opportunity to go back to first principles and re-think some of the lazier habits and more shopworn conventional wisdoms we may have inherited from our predecessors.

In the context of P5 diplomacy, that may mean dropping the charade that all five of the nuclear powers perceive themselves to have a shared interest in strategic stability. They clearly don’t. In fact, two of those powers – most obviously Russia, but to some extent China as well – make strategic instability an essential element of their grand strategy, for they seek not to stabilize but rather to upend and reorder the existing international system for their own benefit. (That what it means to call them revisionists, after all, as we did in the First Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy in 2017 .)

Accordingly, an honest P5 discussion on nuclear doctrine would focus directly upon the damage to global security being done by the Russian (and to a lesser extent Chinese) strategies of nuclear weapons-facilitated strategic coercion in support of territorial aggression. By way of tempering expectations about such diplomacy, moreover, candor requires that we consider the possibility that Moscow and Beijing simply don’t want the kind of stability-focused risk-reduction engagement that we in the West have consistently sought with them. (Worse, they may use such dialogue – or the prospect of it – to distract, dissuade, and delay us, so that we fail to take the steps needed to respond to their threats to restore strategic stability.)

As I have said many times, the path back to negotiated nuclear restraint between the United States, Russia, and China most likely runs through a robust countervailing nuclear posture by the United States and its allies. Only such an approach is likely to persuade Moscow and Beijing that they have an interest in serious negotiations with us.

Notwithstanding the happy slogans he might have agreed upon with Gorbachev, President Reagan understood this in his bones. We need to remember it today ourselves.

Thank you.

—Christopher Ford

Snapping Back and Looking Forward: A New Old Approach to the Iran Nuclear Crisis

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 16:38:46 GMT

On February 6, 2025, the Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory published a new edited volume on nuclear weapons challenges in the Middle East. Dr. Ford's paper "Snapping Back and Looking Forward: A New Old Approach to the Iran Nuclear Crisis" appears in that volume. You can find the whole book on CGSR's website here , or use the button below to download Dr. Ford's chapter.

Evaluating Contemporary Nuclear Risks

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 16:34:58 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford drew in his panel discussion for an even sponsored by the New York State Bar Association on "Nuclear Weapons and International Law" on January 30, 2025.

Giving good answers to the questions the organizers have asked us to discuss would probably take an entire book, so I doubt we’ll do full justice to them here this morning. That said – and with the caveat, of course, that these are solely my personal views, and don’t necessarily represent those of anyone else – I’m happy at least to offer a few thoughts.

In general, I think you’ll find a consistent theme running through my contributions here. That theme is that in our current strategic circumstances, nuclear risks are indeed rising, but that in order to manage these risks – and ultimately reduce them through some form of negotiated restraint, or perhaps even eventual reductions – we need first and foremost to counter our adversaries’ nuclear advances with by augmenting our own nuclear and conventional capabilities, thus buttressing deterrence and restoring strategic stability.

Measuring Nuclear Risk

But let me first say a word about nuclear risk assessment. As far as I can tell, there is no truly systematic process in place in government for that. This isn’t exactly a criticism, however, for I doubt it is actually possible to evaluate nuclear war risks in anything remotely as rigorous and objective as one might assess, say, the danger of a suspension bridge collapsing under certain physical conditions of load, temperature, cross-winds, or whatever.

Let’s take as an example the famous (or infamous) “Doomsday Clock” publicized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , which has shifted over the years but is currently supposedly set at a highly dangerous “ 89 seconds to midnight .” (The number was just reduced this week from 90 seconds.) I have no doubt the editors of the Bulletin would like us to believe – because they are “atomic scientists,” after all – that determination of the clock’s setting is, well, in some meaningful sense “scientific.”

But it isn’t, of course. It is a subjective choice made by a small group of people who have an explicit policy agenda and who make no bones about using the clock’s supposed settings as part of a public relations and lobbying campaign in favor of that agenda.

The Doomsday Clock was dreamed up in 1947, and until 1973 its “time” was apparently set at the discretion of one man, the editor of the Bulletin, a scientist and disarmament activist named Eugene Rabinowitch . Nowadays, it’s set by the Bulletin’s “ Science and Security Board ,” but the settings are still a fundamentally political choice, one explicitly intended to be a spur to activism. (As the University of Chicago quotes one member of that board, “ Agitate for change !”)

This doesn’t mean that their choices are necessarily “incorrect” – whatever that means – but there is clearly something inherently unrealistic and problematic about trying to distill an entire planet’s worth of complex and interacting human and geopolitical variables into a single arbitrary metric of “seconds before midnight,” especially when this metric is set by anti-nuclear activists who work for a an organization explicitly founded in order to oppose nuclear weapons , and who openly use these settings as part of an annual public relations campaign. I certainly, wouldn’t quarrel that we are in a very dangerous time right now, but intellectual honesty requires admitting that the “Doomsday Clock” is basically “PR.”

Fortunately, I’ve never come across anything like that kind of pseudo-quantified and pseudo-objective risk assessment in government. It has been reported that at one point early in the current phase of the Ukraine war, the CIA assessed that – in the New York Times ’ apparent paraphrase – “ the likelihood of nuclear use might rise to 50 percent or even higher .” Even then, however, the Times carefully notes that, in truth,

“[n]o one knew how to assess the accuracy of that estimate: the factors that play into decisions to use nuclear weapons, or even to threaten their use, were too abstract, too dependent on human emotion and accident, to measure with precision.”

That alleged assessment, moreover, only concerned the likelihood of using perhaps even a single weapon on the battlefield by the much-studied Vladimir Putin under certain very specific circumstances of what were then significant Russian battlefield reverses. So even if that claim really somehow represented a solid metric, I certainly wouldn’t put a lot of stock in anybody’s overall, generalized risk assessment.

That said, U.S. officials clearly do pay a lot of attention to nuclear risks. In fact, for many of them in the strategic deterrence, arms control, and nonproliferation worlds, managing those risks is precisely their job . Risk is thus is taken very seriously indeed, but in my experience, at least, risk evaluation remains qualitative, fuzzy, and subjective – and unavoidably so, I fear. It’s probably to the government’s credit that it has not played “Doomsday Clock”-type public relations games with the serious business of defense, deterrence, and strategic stability, but it is probably also the case that we will wait in vain for a truly “scientific” answer.

Nuclear Risks Today

So acknowledging my own subjectivity here, of course, what can be said about nuclear risks today?

As noted, I would agree that they are pretty high right now. Unlike disarmament activists, however, I don’t believe the crux of the problem is the mere existence of nuclear weapons, much less the growing interest in U.S. policy circles – as evidenced, for instance, in the unanimous bipartisan conclusions of the Strategic Posture Review Commission report in 2023 – in augmenting American nuclear capabilities in order to respond to dangerous trends in the strategic environment. To my eye, the core of the problem lies elsewhere.

Specifically, I believe the biggest risk of nuclear use arises out of the potential escalation of a conventional conflict between nuclear-armed states and/or their allies. And there is no small likelihood of such a conflict today, because the revisionist powers of Russia and China, each with ambitions of territorial expansion against its neighbors, are both expanding their nuclear arsenals and have been developing increasingly formidable conventional forces capable of acting on their dreams of aggression. (In Russia’s case, of course, this is already happening.) Accordingly, the risk of nuclear war is unquestionably higher than it was a few years ago, before those two powers began to bare their territorially-acquisitive teeth as they do today.

Worse still, Russia is demonstrating how such aggressive territorial ambitions can be facilitated by nuclear saber-rattling, as Putin employs threats of potential use not to deter aggression but rather to deter anyone from trying to impede his aggression. I call this phenomenon the “ offensive nuclear umbrella ,” and it is profoundly destabilizing. Indeed, it is destabilizing by design, for the whole point is to use nuclear threats and risks as tools of offensively-oriented coercive bargaining.

Russia used years of arms control violations to help position itself for such destabilizing gamesmanship, and we now see the result. With China now sprinting toward a posture of at least numerical parity with the United States within the next ten years , moreover, I fear Xi Jinping is learning from Putin’s Ukraine playbook as the People’s Liberation Army prepares for a possible invasion of Taiwan.

So where do the biggest nuclear risks come from? Right there: from Russian and Chinese nuclear-facilitated revisionism, and from the potential failure of defensive deterrence against one or both of them if more is not done to shore up Western military postures.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also flag the risks that have arisen from nuclear weapons proliferation – both in the past, to North Korea, and potentially also soon to Iran. There is no strategic stability upside to having nuclear weapons in the hands of a volatile and unstable dictatorship that thrives on threatening and destabilizing its neighbors, and it’s easy to imagine things in both of those regions going rapidly downhill fast.

Let me emphasize, however, that I don’t see significant nuclear risk – or at least not significant risk relative to the other ones I’ve just mentioned – coming merely from the existence or nuclear weapons or even from a nuclear arms race, though I’d dearly like to avoid the latter. If anything, given that both Russia and (especially) China are now currently “racing” to augment their own capabilities and build up their nuclear numbers even while we Americans don’t – and given Russian and Chinese threats against their neighbors – I see the greatest nuclear risks coming about if we in the West fail to respond to the challenges they present.

I would certainly love to avoid an arms race, but a nuclear competition between adversaries whose relative positions do not thereby dramatically change is likely to be more stable – that is, less risky – than allowing a situation of decisive strategic or theater overmatch to develop. This is especially true if such overmatch were to advantage a revisionist power inclined toward using nuclear threats as a tool to support its territorial self-aggrandizement, as is the case with Russia today and perhaps also China in the near future.

As I see it, the most important way to reduce nuclear risks right now – and to avoid the worst implications of nuclear arms “racing” as well – involves augmenting both the nuclear forces and the conventional military power of the United States and its allies in order to shore up deterrence in the face of systematic Russian and Chinese efforts to undermine it. Arms competitions are highly undesirable, but a failure of deterrence would be immeasurably worse. We forget this at our collective peril.

Given the role of nuclear weapons in Russian and Chinese strategy – and or own need to preserve deterrence in part with nuclear weapons in response to their challenges – I see little prospect for arms control , much less for arms reductions, at the moment. Nevertheless, I hold out hope that we can do better in the years ahead.

As I have emphasized recently , if there is a way back into arms control – and especially numerical arms control – it probably leads through the statecraft of deterrence:

“…[I]f there is a pathway to a future of negotiated restraint, it will require changing the incentive structures perceived by our collective geopolitical adversaries. At the moment, those adversaries clearly don’t feel any need to talk, for they would seem to be doing quite well by building up their arsenals and intimidating their neighbors while we [in the United States], for the most part, sit placidly on our hands and resign ourselves to early-1980s force posture concepts and a late-1990s approaches to infrastructure capacity [and force sizing] that are entirely inadequate to the times.”

“Unless the Western powers shift emphatically back into ‘compete’ mode after a generation of nuclear shrinkage, those adversaries will feel no need to change course – and in that case, you can forget about meaningful arms control, much less some future return to reductions. If they do, however, I think it may well be possible to work our way back to meaningful arms control, and perhaps even to more forward progress on disarmament.”

Laws and Norms

Let me conclude with a word about laws and norms, since that is a topic I am sure is of great interest to you at the New York State Bar Association. Frankly, I wish laws and norms were of more importance in these contexts, but one of the reasons we face the nuclear risk problems we do today is the Kremlin’s willingness to ignore such niceties.

Russia continues to flout international law in its quest to extinguish the sovereign existence of its neighbor Ukraine, it commits all but daily war crimes there , and it has broken almost every arms-related treaty is has ever signed , the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, the New START agreement , the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Biological Weapons Convention. Indeed, as I mentioned, it is in part Russia’s willingness to break arms control agreements such as the INF Treaty that has helped Vladimir Putin acquire the advantage in theater-range nuclear forces that he has made such an important piece of his “offensive nuclear umbrella” strategy .

Putin’s ability to violate that treaty while trusting that we would scrupulously abide by its terms – coupled with our unwillingness to do anything beyond merely wagging our fingers at him about it over the better part of a decade while he took his illegal INF-class cruise missile from its first flight test into full production and then deployment – shows that asymmetric interest in and commitment to arms control is part of the problem. I wish it could be said that laws and norms offered even the slightest way to help curb the Russian behavior that is doing so much to destabilize Europe and raise nuclear risks, but there’s no sign of it.

As for Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) – that provision so beloved of the disarmament community – the contempt for arms control shown by our great power revisionist rivals makes Article VI all but useless here too. That article obliges all States Party to the NPT to “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”

As I have been pointing out for years , however, “pursuing negotiations in good faith” is doomed to be fruitless if one’s would-be counterparty either rejects negotiations entirely or displays bad faith. And that is, alas, the case with China and with Russia. Since neither one of those powers particularly cares about arms control in the first place, moreover, it also doesn’t do much good to point out that their conduct is a violation of Article VI – as has been persuasively argued with China, for instance, by my former State Department colleague Thomas Grant . They just don’t care.

For reasons similar to what I outlined earlier, therefore, if there is a pathway back to arms control – and to actually achieving negotiations on disarmament as Article VI encourages – it probably lies through the statecraft of defense and deterrence. Our strategic adversaries need to be made to perceive concrete incentives to negotiate with us, and to keep the promises they make therein, that they clearly do not presently see. And that won’t happen just because a bunch of lawyers sign documents denouncing those countries for their lawlessness. Remember: unscrupulous and even lawless risk-manipulation is not a “bug” but rather a “feature” of revisionist grand strategy.

As for China’s almost humorously disingenuous idea of a multilateral nuclear “no-first-use” (NFU) treaty, it doesn’t even pass the snicker test. As I’ve been pointing out since at least 2011 and as I explored more extensively in the Chinese connection just a year ago , NFU promises of any sort are something of a joke: they are really reliable only with the counterparties and in the circumstances where one needs them least (i.e., with countries you trust), and they are least reliable where they would seem to be most necessary (i.e., with adversaries, especially in a crisis).

Even if an NFU convention could actually be trusted, moreover, it is as likely to be a destabilizing invitation to conflict as it is to lower nuclear risks, for NFU would risk sending the signal to a powerful regional aggressor such as China or Russia that it could invade a small U.S. ally with nuclear impunity. NFU, in other words, would be a death-knell for the “extended nuclear deterrence” upon which the United States and its alliance partners have relied for generations to deter aggression. (As such, it would also likely be a powerful driver for proliferation, by giving such would-be victim countries incentives to engage in nuclear weapons development themselves to replace the American nuclear protections of which NFU would have robbed them.) It’s easy to see why China might wish to entice us into the silliness of an NFU treaty, but it’s equally clear why that would be a terrible idea – not just in general, but specifically from the perspective of reducing nuclear risks.

Conclusion

So this brings us back to my central theme: the dire need, in response to the rising nuclear risks presented by Russian and Chinese behavior, to buttress deterrence and pursue the statecraft of strength. Such strength is in no way inconsistent with pursuing arms control and even disarmament, and indeed may be the only way to persuade our strategic rivals to re-engage on such topics.

These are not pleasant times, and these are surely not pleasant truths for the disarmament community to hear. But truths, I submit, they are.

— Christopher Ford

What Next from Washington on the Iranian Nuclear Problem?

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 17:31:49 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to the workshop on “Enhancing Regional Security and Addressing WMD Threats in the Middle East,” held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, on January 23, 2023.

Good morning, everyone, and greetings from Washington. I should make clear at the outset that I claim no special insight into how the Second Trump Administration will handle the Iranian nuclear problem. What I will offer here today are just my own personal views, and they do not represent those of anyone else. With those caveats, however, I’m happy – as a professor of international relations and a former official who worked on such issues when I was last in government – to offer some speculative thoughts.

Many are certainly wondering what to expect as Washington decides how it wishes to try to handle the worsening problem of an Iran that has been relentlessly expanding its fissile material production capabilities and enriching ever more uranium at higher and higher levels of weapons-adjacent purity . Everyone remembers the “ maximum pressure ” campaign against Iran adopted during President Trump’s first term, and journalists and think tank scholars have noted that President Trump has named numerous officials who have hitherto expressed hardline positions on Iran – among them Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and Secretary of Defense-designate Pete Hegseth.

For such reasons, many seem to expect that we’ll just see a return to “maximum pressure” without much prospect of a negotiation, and perhaps even with a real chance of conflict if Iran opts finally to try to turn its large stockpile of enriched uranium into nuclear weapons. Since it takes two to Tango, as the saying goes, such a pathway is indeed possible: if Iran chooses not to respond to U.S. diplomatic overtures seeking an enduring answer to the nuclear problem, then that’s on them.

For his part, however, President Trump has signaled that he is open to negotiations . Moreover, Brian Hook, an architect of “maximum pressure” at the State Department last time and who was reported to have been a key figure in the transition team for Rubio’s State Department , has just been fired by President Trump from a government position at the Wilson Center, and Trump has said that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will not be part of his administration this time . Where this leaves Iran policy in the new administration remains to be seen.

At the same time, in Masoud Pezeshkian Iran now has a new president who at least sounds like he may be a man of more moderation and pragmatism than many of his predecessors . To be sure, it will of course be Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – and not Pezeshkian – who will call the shots on any major security issue such as limiting Tehran’s nuclear program, Iran’s missile program, or its foreign adventurism.

Nevertheless, Iran is in an interesting position right now. It has been gravely weakened by the catastrophic loss of is Syrian ally, and by the devastation so impressively wrought by Israel against the terrorists of Hezbollah and Hamas. It is also in a terrible situation economically, and its restive population is clearly thoroughly tired of the intolerant brutalities, corruption, and mismanagement they suffer from the clerical regime. It is also true that, as the Stimson Center’s Mohammed Mazari reminds us, “ [i]n the past and under extreme duress, Iran has negotiated with mortal adversaries, including Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein .”

The real question is thus more about Iran than about U.S. policy. Will the ayatollahs choose weaponization and war, or will they choose to work out a deal? It’s hard to handicap those odds.

At least with respect to Washington’s approach, however, what I’d wager we won’t see from the Second Trump Administration is a continuation of the Biden Administration’s failed Iran policy. In their enthusiastic virtue-signaling against President Trump for his having pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated with Iran by the Obama Administration, the Biden team was so obviously desperate to get a new JCPOA that it’s no surprise that Iran became more intransigent.

After it became clear that reviving the JCPOA was impossible, moreover, the Biden Team turned to basically ignoring the Iran issue and hoping nobody would notice while they relaxed enforcement of U.S. sanctions , apparently in the vain hope that this might make Tehran more willing to talk. All this, then, is the kind of silliness that one can be confident that the Second Trump Administration will not emulate.

But what will the United States do? And what progress might actually be possible with Iran? It’s obviously hard to say at this point, but the optimist in me sees a real chance for negotiation.

Some observers have suggested that the United States might simply choose to soften its policy vis-à-vis Iran in order to prioritize containing China . Short of a situation actual war, however, it’s not clear that America’s Iran policy actually burdens our China policy in the first place. So while I suppose such a pathway is possible, I doubt it’s very likely.

More likely would be a new push for negotiation – but one done Trump-style, not Biden-style. That is, it would use a “peace through strength” approach that makes clear the United States is indeed interested in a deal, but which starts by taking emphatic steps to establish a firm position of U.S. and Western negotiating advantage before talks begin. That would probably mean that it begins with a return to “maximum pressure,” as indeed some in the media have been forecasting , but the point would be to leverage this pressure for diplomatic ends.

In this respect, you should also remember, as I emphasized last spring at a conference on the Iran problem at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , President Trump’s direction in October 2017 to solve what was known as the “sunset clause” problem of in the JCPOA. He said then that

“I am directing my administration to work closely with Congress and our allies to address the deal’s many serious flaws so that the Iranian regime can never threaten the world with nuclear weapons. These include the deal’s sunset clauses that, in just a few years, will eliminate key restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. The flaws in the deal also include insufficient enforcement and near total silence on Iran’s missile programs. … [I]n the event we are not able to reach a solution working with Congress and our allies, then the agreement will be terminated.”

And indeed, on these instructions, we in the First Trump Administration did for a time try to explore the parameters of deal that would have capped Iran’s nuclear program at a low level , permanently – thus solving the “sunset clause” problem that had been baked into President Obama’s JCPOA. The Europeans rejected this, however, thus ensuring that we never had the chance to raise anything like this with Iran. The Europeans’ rejection of the U.S. overture therefore also doomed the JCPOA, for President Trump certainly wasn’t going to remain in a deal that accepted Tehran having as large a fissile material production capability as it wanted – as the JCPOA, rather shamefully, would have permitted once the “sunset clauses” had “sunsetted.”

That precedent, I would submit, offers something of a hopeful note. But let me make two further points.

The first point is to emphasize that I am not arguing that reviving such a concept is necessarily the right answer now. (But who knows? One could do worse.) Rather, I point out merely that there is ample precedent for President Trump being open to the idea of a negotiated solution with Iran, provided that the terms of any new agreement actually benefit American security and enduringly address the problem. He was very clear that the JCPOA did not check both those boxes, but some future deal might.

In 2017, President Trump understood that the merely temporary nature of the JCPOA’s restrictions on Iran were that deal’s fatal flaw. He also clearly understood how problematic it was that the JCPOA did nothing to rein in Iran’s destabilization of its neighbors through proxy militia groups and terrorist sponsorship, and that it did nothing to stop the endless expansion of Iran’s missile capabilities. (In fact, the deal seemed to have emboldened Iran in such misbehavior even as President Obama’s sanctions relief gave it access to more funds for those activities.)

Today, however – at least if one squints a bit – it is almost possible to imagine the parameters of a possible deal that addresses these issues. Such a deal, moreover, would arguably be easier for the mullahs to accept today than it was in 2019 or 2020 precisely because Iran’s position as an aspiring Middle East hegemon has been so dramatically weakened. As a result of its recent strategic reverses, there is less outside the strictly nuclear domain that Tehran would have to agree to give up in order to see a lifting of sanctions and at least a partial repair of its longstanding poisonous relationship with the United States and the West.

My second point, however, is that if any such deal is the objective, we are all now on a rapidly-moving time clock. As I pointed out last spring , perhaps the most important remaining arrow in the West’s quiver for incentivizing Iran to agree to just such a deal is a tool that will itself “sunset,” as it were, with the expiration of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 in October 2025 – just a few months from now.

If “snapback” is formally invoked – by the Europeans, necessarily, because we did so already in 2020 and everybody ignored it – this would set in place the incentive structure needed to give Iran a reason to negotiate with us to lift the litany of full U.N. sanctions that would be re-imposed by snapback. By contrast, if snapback is not triggered before Resolution 2231’s expiration next October, U.N. sanctions probably cannot ever be used in this way, for re-imposing them later would take a new Security Council resolution that I cannot imagine that Russia (perhaps joined by China) would fail to veto.

Accordingly, the next few months give us one remaining chance to use this powerful instrument of diplomatic leverage for good. I dearly hope we use it.

This is mainly a challenge for the Europeans – and specifically, for the “EU-3” group of Britain, Germany, and France. I hope they will not again pass up the opportunity, as they did in early 2018, for a chance at crafting a more serious and enduring agreement with Iran.

I should note also, however, that there is also still an important role to be played for the states of the Middle East, including the Gulf States. If you believe media accounts, a number of governments in the region have of late been softening their stances toward Iran. (The New York Times reported recently , for instance, that some Arab leaders have urged President Trump to go easy on Iran.)

I’ll grant that such a softening may have seemed expedient when the Biden Administration was signaling U.S. weakness and desperation, and when Iran was still riding high in its seeming regional strength and defiance. But such softness makes much less sense now. Arguably, in fact, a stronger regional posture vis-à-vis the Arab world’s belligerently revolutionary and terrorism-sponsoring Shi’a neighbor would very helpfully complement snapback-facilitated U.S. negotiations aimed a real and enduring solution to the problems presented by Iran’s behavior.

To my eye, at least, Tehran seems to be in a position where resolute engagement to press it into an unaccustomed degree of reasonableness might conceivably actually work. Fence-sitting, either in Europe or in the Middle East, would just worsen the problem, of course, but forward-leaning regional cooperation with the United States might just help solve it.

That is, at least, my instinct. I look forward to our discussions.

—Christopher Ford

Ford's 2024 Round-Up

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 19:39:10 GMT

With 2024 hours from being over, here’s a handy compilation of my public work product from the last year. As you can see from the list of seven papers or articles and 20 presentations below, it’s been a big year for nuclear weapons policy and arms control topics – but as always there’s a good helping of strategic competition with China.

Keep checking New Paradigms Forum for new material as we move into 2025. And Happy New Year, everyone!

Papers and Articles

Christopher A. Ford, “ Call it by its Name: Communist Chinese Imperialism ,” National Institute for Public Policy Occasional Papers , vol. 4, no. 11 (November 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/call-it-by-its-name-communist-chinese-imperialism

Christopher A. Ford, “ The Weaponization of Integrity: How the West’s Enemies Try to Leverage its Ethics Against It ,” Defense & Strategic Studies Online [Missouri State University], vol. 1, no. 1 (Autumn 2024), pages 47-65

https://irp.cdn-website.com/ce29b4c3/files/uploaded/DASSO_Volume_1_Issue_1_Ford.pdf

Christopher A. Ford & Alex Memory, “ The Ties that Bind: A Data-Driven Analysis of Oceania’s Dependency on China , ” Defense & Strategic Studies Online [Missouri State University], vol. 1, no. 1 (Autumn 2024), pages 5-30

https://irp.cdn-website.com/ce29b4c3/files/uploaded/DASSO_Volume_1_Issue_1_Ford_and_Memory.pdf

Christopher A. Ford, “ Challenges of Deterrence and Security Upon Nuclear Use ,” in Project Atom 2024: Intra-War Deterrence in a Two-Peer Environment (CSIS, November 2024), pp. 19-32

https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2024-11/241118_Williams_Project_Atom.pdf?VersionId=XGCLkaKa7nEt9MV1Jn4W8jV2y1dsD5F5

Christopher A. Ford, “ Dead or Deferred? Nuclear Arms Control in the Age of Revisionism ,” in Aligning Arms Control with the New Security Environment (Livermore, CA: Center for Global Security Research, 2024)

https://irp.cdn-website.com/ce29b4c3/files/uploaded/Ford_in_CGSR_Arms_Control_Book.pdf

Christopher A. Ford, “ The Substructures of Chinese Grand Strategy, and Why Resolute U.S. Engagement Matters ,” Commentary , Hoover Institution Press (May 9, 2024)

https://www.hoover.org/research/substructures-chinese-grand-strategy-and-why-resolute-us-international-engagement-matters

Christopher A. Ford, “ Nuclear Posture and Nuclear Posturing: A Conceptual Framework for Analyzing China’s Nuclear Weapons Policy ,” National Institute for Public Policy Occasional Papers , vol. 4, no. 2 (February 2024)

https://nipp.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Vol-4-No-2-final.pdf

Remarks and Presentations

Christopher A. Ford, “ Critiquing the ‘Irreversibility’ of Nuclear Disarmament ,” remarks to a CSIS/PONI workshop at Wilton Park, United Kingdom (December 18, 2024),

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/critiquing-the-irreversibility-of-nuclear-disarmament

Christopher A. Ford, “ Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and the New Washington, D.C. ,” remarks at Wilton Park, United Kingdom (December 16, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/nonproliferation-disarmament-and-the-new-washington-d-c

Christopher A. Ford, “ Nuclear Latency and its Discontents ,” remarks at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (December 13, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/nuclear-latency-and-its-discontents

Christopher A. Ford, “ Deterrence in National Strategy: Critique and Recommendations ,” remarks at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (December 11, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/deterrence-in-national-strategy-critique-and-recommendations

Christopher A. Ford, “ Looking Ahead in Nuclear Weapons Policy, Arms Control, and Nonproliferation ,” remarks to the European Leadership Network (December 10, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/looking-ahead-in-nuclear-weapons-policy-arms-control-and-nonproliferation

Christopher A. Ford, “ Recommendations for the Next Nuclear Posture Review ,” remarks for a roundtable at the National Defense University (December 6, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/recommendations-for-the-next-nuclear-posture-review

Christopher A. Ford, “ Restoring Strategic Stability in the Euro-Atlantic Area , ” remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (December 4, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/restoring-strategic-stability-in-the-euro-atlantic-area

Christopher A. Ford, “ Leveraging Strength into Peace: Arms Control Isn’t (Quite) Dead, and Here’s How to Revive It , ” remarks to the Bicameral Bipartisan Member Briefing on Arms Control, Russell Senate Office Building (November 21, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/leveraging-strength-into-peace-arms-control-isnt-quite-dead-and-heres-how-to-revive-it

Christopher A. Ford, “ Threats to NATO Resilience ,” remarks to the NATO Resilience Summit, Bratislava, Slovakia (November 12, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/threats-to-nato-resilience

Christopher A. Ford, “ Some Musings on Making Deterrence Policy ,” remarks to students at Purdue University (October 16, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/some-musings-on-making-deterrence-policy

Christopher A. Ford, “ Security, Proliferation, and Preserving Sovereign Independence in the Indo-Pacific ,” presentation to the Dialogue on the U.S.-Vietnam Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, Hanoi, Vietnam (September 12, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/security-proliferation-and-preserving-sovereign-independence-in-the-indo-pacific

Christopher A. Ford, “ Russia, China, and the Challenge of Asymmetry in Nuclear Ethics ,” presentation to the Forum on Nuclear Strategy, Albuquerque, New Mexico (September 6, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/russia-china-and-the-challenges-of-asymmetry-in-nuclear-ethics

Christopher A. Ford, “ Thinking About China’s Nuclear Weapons Policy ,” remarks to an event organized by the National Institute for Deterrence Studies (August 9, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/thinking-about-chinas-nuclear-weapons-policy

Christopher A. Ford, “ Four Warnings About the ‘Dark Quad ,’” remarks at a symposium organized by the National Institute for Public Policy (July 23, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/four-warnings-about-the-dark-quad

Christopher A. Ford, “ Equipping Leaders for Strategic Competition Against China’s ‘Leverage Web ,’ ” remarks at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (July 18, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/equipping-western-leaders-for-sustained-strategic-competition-against-communist-chinas-leverage-web-strategy

Christopher A. Ford, “ New Old Wisdom on Nuclear Deal with Iran ,” remarks at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (May 22, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/new-old-wisdom-on-a-nuclear-deal-with-iran

Christopher A. Ford, “ Emerging Technologies and the Nuclear Weapons Arena , ” remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (March 28, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/emerging-technologies-and-the-nuclear-weapons-arena

Christopher A. Ford, “ Outbound Investment and China’s ‘Leverage Web ,’” remarks at the American Enterprise Institute (February 13, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/outbound-investment-and-chinas-leverage-web

Christopher A. Ford, “ Weaponized Interdependence, U.S. Economic Statecraft, and Chinese Grand Strategy , ” remarks at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (February 8, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/weaponized-interdependence-u-s-economic-statecraft-and-chinese-grand-strategy

Christopher A. Ford, “ Some Thoughts on Targeting, the Law of Armed Conflict, and Morality ,” remarks at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (January 12, 2024)

https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/some-thoughts-on-targeting-the-law-of-armed-conflict-and-morality

-- Christopher Ford

Critiquing the “Irreversibility” of Nuclear Disarmament

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 01:28:27 GMT

Below is an edited and revised version of the remarks Dr. Ford prepared for a CSIS/PONI Workshop on “Irreversibility in Nuclear Disarmament” at Wilton Park, in the United Kingdom, on December 18, 2024.

Thank you for asking me to offer some thoughts on the idea of “irreversibility” in nuclear disarmament. I offer these comments purely as my own opinion, and I fear my thoughts may not be exactly what this group will want to hear, but I’m nonetheless grateful for the opportunity to provide.

The Challenge of “Irreversibility”

You might say that we’ve struggled with the idea of whether or not to make disarmament “irreversible” for thousands of years. Famously, the ancient Israeli prophet Isaiah seems to have had a vision of some kind of “irreversibility” in mind:

“And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” [Isaiah 2:1]

Yet his pronouncements about this also need to be set against the less well-known words of the prophet Joel, who took somewhat a different view:

“Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.” [Joel 3:10]

Rather more recently, a more Isaiahan notion of “irreversibility” seems in some quarters to have acquired an all but totemic importance in the nuclear disarmament community. It was, of course, the fifth listed of the infamous 13 “practical steps for the systematic and progressive efforts [sic] to implement article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” (NPT) called for in the Final Document adopted by the 2000 NPT Conference (RevCon). That document made clear its drafters’ view that “[t]he principle of irreversibility” should “apply to nuclear disarmament, nuclear and other related arms control and reduction measures.”

These policy recommendations from the year 2000 were endorsed anew by the NPT RevCon in 2010, which “ reaffirm[ed] the continued validity of the practical steps agreed to in the Final Document of the 2000 Review Conference .” Indeed, the 2010 document articulated a rather ponderous 64-point “ Action Plan ” for disarmament, under which all parties committed to applying the principle of irreversibility to their treaty negotiations. Many countries at that 2010 meeting, moreover, declared irreversibility to be “ a fundamental principle for nuclear disarmament ,” and the idea has also been endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly .

The fact that the aforementioned 13 “Practical Steps” toward which the disarmament community still continues to genuflect also include full implementation of the START II arms control agreement , conclusion of START III , strengthening the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty , and implementation of the Trilateral Initiative between the United States, Russia, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – all efforts that collapsed or were abandoned decades ago, and indeed well before they were, remarkably, reaffirmed as objectives in 2010 – may tell you what you need to know about the intellectual seriousness of such politically-driven and committee-drafted documents. Yet irreversibility, at least as a concept, apparently still continues to carry great weight.

“Irreversibility” … Isn’t

I hope you won’t take it wrong, however, if I channel my inner Prophet Joel and say that I think “irreversibility” quite problematic. To begin with, I dislike it as a term because it seems dishonest. In the strong sense, after all, “irreversibility” is simply a fiction. A Wilton Park report observed in 2022 that the only way to achieve irreversibility of nuclear disarmament would be somehow to completely eliminate all existing fissile materials and abandon nuclear fission, but even that assessment seems overly generous. As I noted in an event at the Wilson Center last week ,

“If nuclear weapons can be built entirely from scratch once, they can be built from scratch again – and it would be vastly easier that second time because everyone now knows this is possible and many understand at least the basics of how to do it.”

To be sure, there might be many analytically interesting questions surrounding how desirable continued disarmament could be made to feel, how difficult it would be for a country to rearm, how long rearmament would take, and how expensive such reconstitution would be. Yet these are all matters of degree , and irreversibility – on its face – seems fundamentally hostile to “it depends” answers.

Since you can’t ever really have irreversible disarmament, it seems – to be charitable – at least confusing to insist upon it as a priority. “Ought,” after all, implies “can,” and it is not morally compelling to demand the achievement of an impossible objective. As perhaps with the challenge of avoiding sin, if one accepts that “never rearming” is indeed desirable, the game is surely more wisely and sustainably played if you have the honesty, self-awareness, and moral courage to admit that perfection isn’t really an option.

In Praise of “Reversibility”

But my dislike of “irreversibility” goes deeper than just overweening syntactical ambition. More fundamentally, I’m not entirely persuaded that irreversible disarmament is actually a per se good in the first place.

The acquisition of nuclear weapons, after all, does not simply occur by accident; rather, the question of armament arises in response to perceived need . Nor is such need necessarily an illegitimate or unworthy one. As even the International Court of Justice rather grudgingly acknowledged in its advisory opinion of 1996 , the threat or even the use of nuclear weapons may be permissible “in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”

In a context in which possession of nuclear weaponry is needed to deter such aggression, the very idea of nuclear disarmament loses moral force, and surely in no case more so than where such disarmament becomes “irreversible.” Nobly forswearing the option of re-arming where there remains the possibility of facing existential threats that cannot feasibly be countered by any other means would seem a sort of madness. Nuclear disarmament is supposed to be a good thing because it conduces to greater safety and security for all, but if in fact it amounts to a suicide pact in the face of geopolitical predation, it is surely neither a good idea nor a morally compelling objective. Hence my deeper problem with irreversibility as a canonical objective for the disarmament movement.

Indeed, preserving the ability to reverse disarmament has already contributed in important ways both to achieving disarmament and to preserving deterrence. As the United States began rapidly drawing down the size of its nuclear arsenal and dismantling thousands of weapons after the end of the Cold War, for instance, it deliberately maintained a modest reserve stockpile of devices that had been removed from service but that were not dismantled. These out-of-service weapons were kept in storage as a sort of insurance policy in case the security situation suddenly deteriorated again. (As Defense Secretary Bill Perry described it in 1994, the idea was to “ balance … showing U.S. leadership in responding to the changed international environment and hedging against an uncertain future .”) Without the degree of reversibility represented by the option of uploading delivery systems once again from that reserve stockpile if needed in response to unforeseen future threats, the United States surely would have drawn down its deployed arsenal much more slowly, and might have had to stop its dramatic post-Cold War reductions much sooner.

More recently, American officials have also emphasized the role that the U.S. nuclear weapons production infrastructure can play in supporting deterrence if we can use our capacity to produce new weapons if needed to signal to our adversaries that it is not in their interest to have an arms race with us. Even if it is not used, in other words, the capacity to build more can contribute to deterrence.

By the same token, lacking the capacity to build more – that is, irreversibility – can invite trouble. It may be, in fact, that we are today seeing how a high degree of irreversibility can encourage adversaries to build up their nuclear arsenals and rely more heavily upon nuclear coercion. The United States deliberately reduced the size of its nuclear weapons infrastructure after the end of the Cold War to such an extent that this infrastructure is today sized only for maintaining the status quo of our current arsenal and cannot presently support any effort to produce significant numbers of additional weapons.

Thankfully, the last two U.S. administrations have started to turn this around, but reinvigorating our nuclear weapons infrastructure is difficult, slow, and expensive – and our adversaries are well aware of this. I fear that he degree of irreversibility inherent in our having emasculated our weapons infrastructure in the post-Cold War era can hardly but be contributing to the current eagerness of Russia and China today to confront us with dangerous nuclear weapons build-ups, with which they know we will struggle to compete. So from that perspective, I’d say reversibility has a lot to be said for it.

Ironically, in fact, some have even championed the idea of being able to reverse disarmament as a way to help achieve a world without nuclear weapons. In 1946, for instance, the Acheson-Lilienthal Report proposed an approach to stabilizing a disarmed world in part through ensuring that any one state’s seizure of internationally-controlled nuclear technology or materials could be countered by similar seizures by other states – thus making a form of nuclear deterrence based upon the assured general reversibility of disarmament into a necessary architectural element of its plan. Jonathan Schell’s 1984 book The Abolition also relied upon such “weaponless deterrence,” the centerpiece of which was having each of the former nuclear weapons possessors retain the ability to reconstitute its arsenal if any other one did. I have myself critiqued this approach to trying to stabilize a world of “Zero” as likely being unworkable – as also, more importantly, has Thomas Schelling – but my point here is that even portions of the disarmament community have (at least impliedly) found “irreversibility” counterproductive.

Far from irreversibility being a per se good, therefore, a degree of reversibility in nuclear disarmament can actually be stabilizing, by contributing to deterrence, strategic stability, and the avoidance of arms races. By tilting at the windmill of “irreversibility,” therefore, the disarmament community may actually be discouraging nuclear weapons possessors from thinking more seriously about disarmament possibilities.

From these insights, I would argue that any effort to do something constructive with the wrongheadedness embedded in the “irreversibility” portions of the 2000 RevCon Final Document and the 2010 “Action Plan” will need to start with figuring out how to discern when and to what degree irreversibility is good , and when and to what degree it isn’t . (Depending upon the circumstances, it could be either one.) This would require a taste for nuance and complexity that the drafters of NPT documents are unaccustomed to providing, but perhaps it will be possible.

The Challenge of Geopolitics

Adding to the difficulty, I would also think that the few historical examples we’ve already seen of reasonably durable nuclear disarmament suggest that the biggest challenge in making things “irreversible” will relate not to drafting clever treaty provisions and creative verification protocols – which is what so many of us nuclear nerds like to do – but rather to messy questions of politics and geopolitics.

Argentina and Brazil, for instance, seem to have done a pretty impressive job in accomplishing exactly what the Preamble to the NPT makes clear that we really need to do “in order to facilitate” disarmament – namely, ease international tension and strengthen trust between states. Yet this salutary journey wasn’t just about ending their embryonic nuclear weapons programs and then setting up the Argentina-Brazil Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC). Crucially, it also required much bigger, antecedent muscle movements, as both of those countries ousted their prior military dictatorships and democratized in the 1980s.

South Africa moved even farther on its own, dismantling a small arsenal of existing nuclear weapons. This too, however, occurred in the context of regime change – the transition from the apartheid -era National Party government to universal suffrage and the election of the ANC – as well as the evaporation of the regional Communist threat that had preoccupied ancien régime security planners in the White minority government there for decades. For their parts, Ukraine , Belarus , and Kazakhstan joined the NPT and relinquished the nuclear weapons that had been stranded on their soil by the collapse of the USSR, but these countries did so in circumstances in which they lacked any ability to maintain or effectively use such devices anyway, and on the strength of international reassurances given that purported to guarantee their security and territorial integrity at a time in which their former imperial overlord had just utterly imploded.

Ukraine, at least, might be forgiven for some ambivalence about that move today , of course. My point, however, is that it seems to take quite major political and geopolitical shifts in order for nuclear-related disarmament to become possible at all – much less for it to be so in ways that seem more or less “irreversible.”

And that’s the rub. If theorists and advocates for irreversible global nuclear disarmament under the “Thirteen Steps” and the 2010 “Action Plan” are to be taken seriously, their agenda needs to start very, very far “upstream” of the bare fact of nuclear weapons possession. First and foremost, that agenda must involve figuring out how to heal the world’s myriad divisions, rivalries, antagonisms, and existential fears enough that all the formerly oppositional nations of the planet will look upon each other as placidly as one imagines and hopes Brazilians and Argentines do today.

That’s one hell of a tall order, I’m afraid. And, though I dearly wish the “irreversibility of disarmament” crowd were focused upon at least trying to answer this geopolitical mail, I’m not holding my breath.

— Christopher Ford

Nonproliferation, Disarmament, and the New Washington, D.C.

fordchristoph@gmail.com (Dr. Christopher Ford) — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 16:23:59 GMT

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered to the annual so-called “Nukes at Christmas” nonproliferation conference at Wilton Park, United Kingdom, on December 16, 2024.

Good day, and thank you for having me back here to another lovely “Nukes at Christmas” event at Wilton Park.

In light of President-elect Trump’s victory in our elections last month in the United States, I’ve been asked to offer some thoughts on what one might perhaps expect out of Washington over the next four years on nonproliferation and disarmament issues. Just to be clear, however, please know that I can claim no special insight, and I am certainly not speaking for anyone other than myself. So you’re just getting my personal opinion – but let’s give it a go.

Diplomatic Wonkery

In the spirit of diplomatic wonkery, let me start with a quick comment about nuts and bolts of dealing with U.S. officials from what you might call the “T2” administration on nonproliferation diplomacy.

In terms of the negotiation of nonproliferation-related multilateral diplomatic statements, I think those of you in the NPT diplomatic community should expect even more of the kind of pushback you got from me, when I did this for a living, against efforts to pretend that felicitously progressive rhetorical box-checking in multilateral diplomatic pronouncements are worth the time and effort diplomats spend agonizing over them. There will be, I would imagine, approximately zero appetite for performative virtue-signaling in agreed statements, and there will certainly be no patience for the idea that such statements can be any kind of consolation for a lack of substantive progress in addressing growing and very concrete threats in the security environment.

Not being nearly so afraid – as diplomats sometimes are – of the disapproval of fashionable people, or of slipping out of the good graces of the arms control and disarmament civil society organizations, the T2 team will presumably not be particularly rattled by the idea of America being left “isolated” if they fail to join a diplomatic statement larded up with what they will see to be distastefully politically-correct phraseology and aspirational exhortations to recommit ourselves to what they will see as naïve approaches that failed years ago. Nor will they be particularly deterred by the prospect of the supposedly catastrophic failure of not having an agreed consensus statement issue from any given diplomatic meeting.

Accordingly, I recommend against trying to browbeat the Americans into more diplomatic and rhetorical flexibility in this way, as other diplomatic delegations frequently attempt to do. If you do try, the incoming T2 team – whomever they end up being, which is still far from clear – will probably be delighted to demonstrate their “America First” bona fides by calling your bluff and walking away.

This will give them considerable negotiating leverage against you, because you will want a deal much more than they are likely to; you’ll have to understand that, and moderate your expectations accordingly. In the wake of the “anti-wokequake” that has overturned received wisdoms in Washington, in other words, my recommendation is that if you want to see U.S.-inclusive multilateral statements, you’ll need to be a lot more flexible with the Second Trump Administration even than you were last time with little ol’ me.

Disarmament and Arms Control

When it comes to nuclear disarmament, I’m afraid this group isn’t going to like my prognosis either.

It almost beggars belief to think that anyone actually thinks that it will be possible in the foreseeable future to resume the forward movement that was possible after Cold War rivalries had dissolved and great power competition seemed to be forever behind us. Frankly, thinking that this is a good time to double-down on pushing for “Zero” seems essentially insane, but I suspect there will be those who will try.

Such persons, however, will be very disappointed. I should stress, however, that despite all the apparent hand-wringing in conferences like this about what our most recent American election may mean, it’s clear that the real problem from a disarmament perspective is emphatically not the incoming Second Trump Administration, or indeed anything to do with the United States at all.

The real obstacle to having any kind of coherent and intelligible conversation about nuclear disarmament today results instead from the conjuncture of several grim dynamics: (a) territorial aggression by great power authoritarian revisionists in Russia and China; (b) nuclear arms buildups by those revisionists to which the Western nuclear powers have not yet responded effectively; (c) those revisionists’ efforts to use nuclear overmatch in theater-range systems vis-à-vis the West for coercive bargaining and to deter resistance to their regional aggression; and (d) Russia’s systematic betrayal of pretty much all of its arms control-related promises and obligations, making it difficult to imagine how anyone could trust the Putin regime in any arms control or disarmament context in the future.

So let me be clear. The mood in policy expert circles in Washington right now is hawkish. There seems to be broad agreement that we in the United States – and our nuclear-armed allies – need a more robust nuclear posture than before, and that after a generation of happy post-Cold War shrinkage, and that it’s unfortunately time to explore expanded and/or new capabilities once more.

And please don’t think that this just “a Republican thing,” for it is not. As you can see from the findings of the Strategic Posture Review Commission Report in 2023, such thinking is powerfully bipartisan, and I’d say it represents the “new normal” in the D.C. expert community – precisely in response to Russian and Chinese nuclear policy and their respective nuclear buildups (Russia with theater-range systems especially, and China with – well – everything). Debates are sure to come in Washington over details such as how much new capacity and which types of new system are needed, and of course how much we should spend on expanded capability, but there is not likely to be any serious argument that we should not be augmenting our posture at all.

So you should expect the “T2” Administration to be quite bullish on new U.S. nuclear capabilities, and perhaps also to be open to unorthodox concepts, both in terms of America’s own posture and in terms of possible collaborations with the British or perhaps even the French. We shall see.

But – and here I’ll be bold in challenging this disarmament-focused audience – you shouldn’t actually bemoan this. If there is a future for arms control and disarmament in the years ahead of us, I suspect it actually lies through an augmented Western deterrence posture, rather than existing in spite of it.

All other things being equal, I would of course prefer to still be reducing rather than building. Nevertheless, I’d much rather we be building than face strategic destabilization, deterrence failure, and war. Yet that is what we indeed risk as geopolitical predators continue tp build up their capabilities and whet their territorial appetites while we fail to respond with countervailing postures sufficient to deter them. There is little to like in an arms race, but when one side is already sprinting, sometimes peace and the eventual hope of reductions are best served by building up one’s own capability to recover and preserve the strategic stability the world so desperately needs, and to give that sprinter reason to think negotiated restraint is in his best interest after all.

Accordingly, as I’ve been pointing out a lot recently – again and again – if there is a pathway to a future of negotiated restraint, it will require changing the incentive structures perceived by our collective geopolitical adversaries. At the moment, those adversaries clearly don’t feel any need to talk, for they would seem to be doing quite well by building up their arsenals and intimidating their neighbors while we, for the most part, sit placidly on our hands and resign ourselves to early-1980s force posture concepts and a late-1990s approaches to infrastructure capacity that are entirely inadequate to the times.

Unless the Western powers shift emphatically back into “compete” mode after a generation of nuclear shrinkage, those adversaries will feel no need to change course – and in that case, you can forget about meaningful arms control, much less some future return to reductions. If they do, however, I think it may well be possible to work our way back to meaningful arms control, and perhaps even to more forward progress on disarmament.

— Christopher Ford

Nuclear “Latency” and its Discontents

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 14:46:52 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on December 13, 2024.

The Good morning, and many thanks to the Los Alamos National Laboratory and our hosts here today at the Wilson Center for putting together this workshop on “latent” nuclear weapons status. I can only offer my own personal views, of course, and I won’t be speaking for anyone else, but it’s an important topic – and, alas, all too timely.

Nuclear “latency” is an interesting concept, but also a somewhat slippery one. I don’t doubt that it’s a real “thing,” for to some extent countries do appear to gain at least some deterrent capacity from being poised on that brink of weaponization. President Joe Biden, for instance, clearly is at least somewhat “deterred” by Iran’s near-weaponization status, and this has affected his decision-making in Iran’s favor – such as in his opposition to an Israeli strike upon Iranian nuclear facilities . (One can only hope Xi Jinping is similarly spooked by the idea of regional aggression in the Indo-Pacific in light of Japan’s possession of tons of separated plutonium and development of increasingly sophisticated longer-range strike systems .) But latency is a little tricky, so let’s explore it a little further.

The Ubiquitous Continuum of Nuclear “Latency”

Latency is a challenging concept because it is both a continuum and because it is ubiquitous . It exists along a continuum because we certainly worry more about a country that is more easily able to weaponize in short order than we do about one that isn’t. If there is indeed some kind of deterrent or coercive potential in latency, it is presumably conveyed in direct relation that vague quality of “closeness.”

Latency is also ubiquitous, because it is, in a sense, the baseline or “default” condition of life the nuclear era. I don’t just mean that it can be difficult clearly to identify clandestine nuclear weapons programs, though that’s true. Nor is it just that secret foreign assistance can help jump-start an illicit weapons effort – as, for instance, with the Soviets helping China build its nuclear weapons program in the 1950s , with China helping Pakistan do so in more recent decades, with former Soviet weapons scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko’s assistance to Iran , with North Korea’s work in constructing a secret plutonium-production reactor for Syria , and with the infamous network run for years by the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan that provided nuclear weapons-related know-how to Iran, North Korea, Libya, and perhaps others .

When I say that latency is in some sense the default condition of modern geopolitics, I also mean that, in theory, almost any reasonably sophisticated country could weaponize if it really wanted to. This has been particularly clear at least since inspections after the First Gulf War of 1991 revealed the surprising extent of Saddam Hussein’s prewar weapons program , but it’s a much older truth.

In fact, way back in 1946, at the very dawn of the nuclear age, the Acheson-Lilienthal Report recognized that any country hosting a peaceful nuclear power-generation facility was a potential proliferator, and that there was no way to entirely ensure against such seizure and diversion except by basically deterring it. According to the Report,

“[i]t is not thought that the [then-proposed] Atomic Development Authority could protect its plants by military force from the overwhelming power of the nation in which they are situated. Some United Nations military guard may be desirable. But at most, it could be little more than a token.

“The real protection will lie in the fact that if any nation seizes the plants or the stockpiles that are situated in its territory, other nations will have similar facilities and materials situated within their own borders so that the act of seizure need not place them at a disadvantage.”

That prescription basically amounted to a vision in which countries’ reciprocal nuclear latency deterred each other from weaponization. I’ll come back to this in a moment, but for now just remember this insight from back in 1946 that, at the end of the day, weaponization is something that must be deterred rather than just technically precluded.

Anyway, as long as nuclear technology exists and the know-how associated with weaponization cannot be erased from human minds, some degree of latency always will exist. If nuclear weapons can be built entirely from scratch once, they can be built from scratch again – and it would be vastly easier that second time because everyone now knows this is possible and many understand at least the basics of how to do it. As a result, true “irreversibility” – that fond but naïve dream of the disarmament community – is an illusion; some form of latency will always be with us.

Details Matter

But I don’t want to over-make the point. Clearly some situations of “latency” are more problematic and destabilizing than others. In practical terms, for instance, that vague concept of “closeness” I mentioned earlier is obviously very important. And also matters a lot about whom you’re talking. Details, as they say, matter.

We quite properly don’t worry much about Germany being part of the URENCO uranium enrichment consortium , for it is neither a source of geopolitical instability nor in any real way particularly “close” to weaponization. Yet we do worry a great deal about Iran’s nuclear capabilities, both because Tehran is now disturbingly close to weaponization and because the vicious clerical regime there has had already had an appallingly destabilizing impact upon the entire Middle East.

Nor, to make things more complex, is it quite beyond imagining that in some contexts, more nuclear latency might actually be a good thing. I wasn’t being entirely facetious a moment ago in wondering whether Xi Jinping might to some degree be deterred by Japan’s relatively advanced state of latency. Assuming that latency does provide at least some deterrent effect against aggression, under present-day circumstances of growing Chinese threats in the Indo-Pacific and worries about long-term U.S. alliance commitments, Tokyo’s nuclear latency is presumably preferable both to it not being a latent nuclear power at all and to seeing Japan engage in outright weaponization – just as such outright Japanese weaponization would itself be preferable to seeing China overawe, dominate, and absorb all of East Asia into Xi Jinping’s modernized Sinocentric version of Japan’s old imperialist “ Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere .”

All this contextuality with regard to whether and the degree to which latency is actually a problem in the first place, however, makes thinking about these issues from an arms control and disarmament perspective quite complicated. Institutionally speaking, it’s hard to envision a really effective answer to such a broad, varying, and nuanced challenge.

Structural Challenges of the Modern Security Environment

Most of our existing nonproliferation institutions were built during the Cold War, in a very different strategic circumstances which, in some ways, helped ensure they worked particularly well. In the fairly rigid, dyadic, and alliance-structured world of the Cold War era, the two dominant players – the United States and the USSR – shared a keenly-perceived interest in nonproliferation. The nuclear-armed rival superpowers and alliance-block leaders both understood that even leaving aside broader challenges to international security from proliferation-driven instability, they had a strong and selfish interest in there not being more nuclear weapons possessors in the system.

In those years, nuclear latency was in a way itself less of an inherent problem, too. For one thing, the division much of the world into competing alliance blocks made it much easier to enforce nonproliferation values, for each alliance-leader had both an incentive and a wide array of tools with which to coerce latent nuclear powers within “its” alliance to refrain from weaponization. On top of that, in a world in which the two superpowers between them possessed more than 60,000 nuclear weapons , any other country’s mere latency probably seemed far less problematic and destabilizing than it does today. (Indeed, in the context of those astonishing numbers, even actual possession of an “entry-level” nuclear arsenal might arguably amount to no more than a rounding error.) This relative insignificance also presumably made latency less attractive to those who might seek it, for that context they would gain little advantage from it.

Ironically, however, the superpowers’ degree of disarmament since the end of the Cold War has made the problem of nuclear latency, and its potential relative strategic impact, much greater. Moreover, the world today is also far less dyadic and rigidly structured around alliance systems than it was before 1991. Both more multipolar and more informally organized than before, the contemporary world offers less opportunity for dominant actors to enforce nonproliferation restraint on their subservient allies.

The world’s current basic divisions, moreover – into an informal grouping of those generally devoted to preserving the existing rules-based international order, a gaggle of loosely coordinated authoritarian revisionists fiercely devoted to upending that order, and a broad collection of varied and disparate quasi-bystanders – also reduces the structural incentives all players may have to think that nonproliferation is actually in their strategic interest. Let me unpack this thought a bit further.

Global bipolarity during the Cold War seems to have been good for fighting proliferation and latency precisely because of its alliance-based rigidity and each bipole’s inherent incentive to prevent the emergence of new poles. Early post-Cold War unipolarity may also have been – in its own way – very good for nonproliferation, in that the dominant American “ hyperpower ” had both an incentive and the hegemonic means to help coerce others’ compliance with nonproliferation norms.

Rivalrous, unstructured multipolarity, however, has the potential to be much worse in terms of proliferation-related structural incentives. This is most obvious among the revisionists, of course, with both Russia and China seeming now to have drifted into what is essentially “pro-proliferation” territory in supporting Iran and North Korea against the West. If your geopolitical agenda is to dismantle U.S. global dominance and upend the existing international order, after all, even nuclear weapons proliferation itself – let alone mere latency – may feel like a good thing, or at least not a particularly bad one under the circumstances.

Nor, to be honest, does the potential problem in addressing latency lie only with those willfully disruptive revisionists. In the context of a sharply deteriorating security environment and an upsurge of harsh geopolitical rivalry in a more multipolar context, even free democracies wishing to defend themselves might come to find nuclear latency – or even proliferation itself – “thinkable,” or even desirable, to help meet threats from revisionist aggression at a time in which traditional alliances feel less reassuring than before.

Institutional Responses?

So what kind of institutional responses might we pursue to these challenges? Frankly, I fear there aren’t good institutional answers, for the effectiveness of international institutions tends to derive from the strength and coherence of the communities of nations that care enough to build them, live within them, maintain them, and enforce their strictures. Institutionalism faces great challenges in eras of multi-player rivalry and deliberately disruptive revisionism, and in such circumstances it is especially difficult to create new institutions.

But I do think that to some degree, we already have some of the key institutions needed to help grapple with the challenges of nuclear latency. We have control mechanisms such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG); we have an NPT Article II prohibition on nuclear weaponization and an Article III requirement for nuclear safeguards ; we have International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards mechanisms ; we have the IAEA Additional Protocol as a model of transparency and nuclear safeguards “best practices;” a number of countries now have national-level mechanisms for imposing and enforcing sanctions and other pressures against proliferators, and mechanisms for improved multilateral coordination as well. Defending these institutions and preserving their efficacy is very important.

We should also walk back the pernicious idea that every country has an NPT Article IV “right” to enrich uranium. The international community has made its latency problem much worse by not pushing back against – and indeed, in some quarters, by more or less coming to agree with – the narrative promoted by Iran and its apologists that under Article IV of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) every country actually has a “right” to produce fissile material if they wish. This is a problem I’ve been railing against for the better part of two decades , and condoning the mischievous “right to enrich” interpretation of Article IV has indeed helped “ open the door to the incalculable dangers of a proliferated world .” So while we work to shore up the transparency and accountability mechanisms of the global nonproliferation regime, we should also repudiate the politicized legal narratives that make these challenges worse.

Nevertheless, on the whole, my instinct is that our main problem is less one of not having the right international institutions as much as it is of it having become vastly harder to use those that exist effectively in the current strategic environment. The clearest example of this is the U.N. Security Council itself, which for a brief while seemed well-positioned to impose pressures on countries that seemed to be rushing through latency toward weaponization (e.g., Iran) and to impose punishments on those who crossed the line (e.g., North Korea). One cannot imagine either Russia or China – both veto-wielding permanent members of the Council – allowing such things today, illustrating the fact that the problem now isn’t a lack of institutional mechanisms, but rather their paralysis .

Whether or not the transparency mechanisms of nuclear safeguards and inspections follow the Security Council into revisionist-paralyzed ineffectiveness remains to be seen. I certainly hope that they do not. But the fact of this paralysis helps point to what is surely the most important problem: the challenges created by the underlying security environment in which such institutions are embedded. In the current context, what the international community probably needs more than new institution-building is more effective stronger coordinated action by the global residuum of sensibly like-minded players to make latency and proliferation both as unattractive and as little needed as possible.

In the modern technological context, uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing are becoming ever more “accessible” – not to mention easier to conceal – while even the arcana of nuclear weapons design are probably also easier to master than ever before. Preventing proliferation is thus no longer primarily a “technical” problem of denying means and tools, but a “political” one of influencing policy decisions – either to prevent the emergence of nuclear latency in the first place, or to forestall movement from latency into weaponization.

We should of course continue to restrict the spread of the tools and means as much as we can, but the big lesson here is probably about the importance of influencing political and policy choices related to weaponization. And that means that the geopolitics of incentives and inducements – including, especially, those involved in deterrence – are at least as important to nonproliferation as are the more “technical” questions on which nonproliferation and arms control wonks usually spend their time.

A Return to Incentives – and Deterrence

And in that regard, we may still have something yet to learn from the Acheson-Lilienthal Report. As I flagged earlier, remember that the Report basically concluded that the most reliable way to manage the proliferation risks of the nuclear age was through deterrence. To be sure, what Acheson-Lilienthal had in mind was the deterrence created by multiple countries all knowing that if any one of them weaponized, others would weaponize in response. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, that sounds a lot like the “weaponless deterrence” ideas in Jonathan Schell’s 1984 book The Abolition , and I don’t think generalizing “virtual” deterrence is actually an approach likely to be stable and sustainable at “Zero.”

Nevertheless, it remains a powerful insight that deterrence is a more reliable tool in a divided and rivalrous world than clever treaties, conventions, and international institutions.

It may be, in other words, that the “best available” approach right now is simply getting as broad a range of players as possible to join us in coercive statecraft to discourage – and, if necessary, punish – destabilizing proliferation-related behavior, and to reward those who behave responsibly. Specifically, at the least, we need a twofold deterrence: we need to deter the pursuit of latency “closeness” by those whose status as a “virtual nuclear weapons state” would be most problematic, and we need to deter revisionist aggression enough to ensure that its would-be victims feel less need to develop latency (or even to weaponize) in response.

That may feel unsatisfying for an arms control and nonproliferation community that has grown accustomed in the post-Cold War era to thinking that there ought to be a treaty-negotiation answer to every geopolitical problem, but I think its honest wisdom. And I think it’s likely the best the world can do right now about the problem of latency.

— Christopher Ford

Deterrence in National Strategy: Critique and Recommendations

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 04:48:06 GMT

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered to a conference at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on December 11, 2024, organized by the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR).

Good afternoon, and thanks to Brad [Roberts] and the rest of the CGSR team for inviting me. It’s also a pleasure to see Pranay [Vaddi] again after some years, even if only virtually.

I’m also delighted to see no fewer than three of my former Missouri State University graduate students here among the attendees. I’m delighted you’re here, Garrett, Alan, and James, and pleased to see that our scrappy little defense-and-deterrence-focused program is supporting this community!

For this panel, we have been asked to talk a bit about three things: (1) whether – and, if so, how – U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) documents should address deterrence; (2) what we think of how the Biden Administration tried to address deterrence issues in its national strategy; and (3) what the incoming administration of President-elect Trump should do. With the caveat, of course, that everything I’ll say today are just my own personal views and don’t represent the views of anyone else, I’m happy to give it a try.

Let me start by noting that I do believe there’s value in having the NSS address deterrence. To be sure, deterrence should be treated less as a per se objective and goal of national strategy than as a means for the accomplishment of grander things. Our national leaders ought to be able to articulate higher and nobler goals for America in the world than simply there not being a nuclear war or any kind of aggression against us or our allies.

But it is indeed a good idea to discuss deterrence in the NSS, for that document provides the highest-level sort of “commander’s intent” guidance to the U.S. bureaucracy, as well as serving as a critical explanatory document for Congress, the public, allies, and adversaries alike. If we have useful and compelling things to say about deterrence – and I dearly hope we do, for it is tremendously important – our thinking needs to be clear at every leve, starting with the NSS, for much will be depend upon, and draw its own strength from, the clarity of the guidance given in that document.

This is especially true, moreover, for the next NSS. For all the various threat-driven reasons we’ve been discussing in this conference, President Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy will presumably need to say much more forward-leaning – and, as it were, upward-pointing – things about the nuclear and non-nuclear capabilities we need to ensure deterrence than any NSS has had to spell out for some decades. Re-introducing such ideas and approaches to U.S. national security discourse needs to be done compellingly and authoritatively, and that surely means this needs to start with the NSS.

But it’s also important to treat deterrence well , and clearly , in the NSS. And here’s where I must confess that I have a bone or two to pick with the Biden Administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy .

What Are We Deterring?

For purposes of our discussion today, I went back to look a little at how past NSS documents have addressed deterrence. In this regard, I was struck, in particular, by the contrast between the Biden Administration’s approach and that articulated in Ronald Reagan’s National Security Strategy of January 1987 – which I believe was the first public NSS document published under the statutory requirement established by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 that such things be produced.

So what was that articulation of “deterrence” focused upon deterring?

Well, in Reagan’s 1987 NSS, deterrence is quite specifically focused upon deterring actual military attack by the Soviet Union or its clients or proxies upon the United States, our allies, or our interests. The first priority policy objective supporting U.S. national security strategy, for instance, is described as deterring “any aggression that could threaten [U.S.] security” [p.4].

For the Reagan Administration, the idea was to “deter and contain Soviet military expansion” in Europe and the Asia-Pacific [p.3], whether that aggression was “direct or indirect” [p.16]. Indeed, “deterrence” in some variation of the word is explicitly mentioned more than 100 times in that 1987 document’s 41 pages, almost always in the context of Soviet threats. (The sole exception seems to be a single comment on page 17 about the need also to “deter” state sponsorship of terrorism.)

This makes Reagan’s NSS an interesting comparison to the Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy of October 2022. There, phrasing about the need to “deter” something appears 42 times in 48 pages – that is, less than half as frequently, for whatever that may or may not be worth – but the Biden Administration uses the term in connection with a considerably broader range of threats or problems.

In the Biden Administration’s NSS, beyond simply deterring aggression in the traditional sense of preventing actual military attack, the document also declares that we must “deter” unspecified “threats to regional stability,” “destabilizing activities” by Iran, cyberattacks by both state and non-state actors, hostage taking and the seizure of wrongful detainees, “disruptions to our democratic processes,” and even “domestic terrorist activity and any transnational linkages.” In fact, the Biden Administration says it aims to “deter … aggression and coercion in all its forms” [pp.16, 31-35, 38, & 42]. Wow.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I want to reduce the prevalence of such bad things too. But this all feels a bit promiscuous to me. Such laundry-listing is problematic in a high-level national security guidance document, one of the key purposes of which is presumably to help departments and agencies prioritize their efforts and resourcing against the national security challenges that each president determines are most critical. After all, as the saying goes, if everything is special, then nothing is really special.

Here, as so often elsewhere , the Biden Administration seems too eager to engage in cumulative political box-checking where it should be a bit more focused in giving guidance on prioritization. After all, we are no longer in the “unipolar moment” of unquestioned U.S. global dominance that we enjoyed back when Joe Biden and Donald Trump were about my current age. Our answer to every nice-sounding potential policy initiative cannot always be “yes” anymore.

As I have pointed out elsewhere , the Biden Administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy is also remarkably willing to describe wide swathes of what are surely its domestic political agenda as “national security” priorities. I won’t bore you with the full list, but it’s quite a remarkable collection. Among other things, it includes everything from liberalizing U.S. immigration policy to making investments in clean energy, and from overcoming “inequities in [health] care quality and access” and enacting gun control to “[p]rioritizing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility to ensure [that] national security institutions reflect the American public they represent” and being “responsive to the voices and focus on the needs of the most marginalized, including the LGBTQI+ community.” (I’ve left out a number of additional items but if you want to see the collection in all its woke glory yourself, I’d refer you to pages 15-16, 20-21, 27-28, 31, 34, 40, and 46 of the 2022 NSS. That page listing alone probably tells you what you need to know.)

All these Biden policy ideas are for some reason advanced as “national security” priorities. With such an extraordinary list, I suppose it’s hardly surprising that Biden Administration deterrence policy aims at nothing less than deterring “aggression and coercion in all its forms.”

Nevetheless, I can’t help feeling that it is both intellectually lazy and substantively irresponsible to try to use “national security” discourse as a vehicle for advancing domestic policy equities, and to imagine that one could use “deterrence” to address all bad acts by all bad actors everywhere, all the time. Such intellectual indiscipline does national security a disservice, both by diluting focus and undermining prioritization in an era of dramatically worsening geopolitical threats, and by swamping national security planning with a veritable stadium’s worth of political footballs.

On balance, such domestic political box-checking in national security and foreign affairs policy is surely a mistake. We may no longer, alas, be in an era in which someone like Senator Arthur Vandenberg could proclaim the need to “ stop partisan politics at the water’s edge ,” but surely our leaders can do more to avoid making a consistent and resolute bipartisan approach to national security threats harder .

Are We Really Talking about “Deterrence” at All?

But the NSS also felt a bit intellectually sloppy to me, too, for in its discussion of “deterrence” in national security guidance documents, it’s also not always clear that the Biden Administration was really talking about what should properly be termed “deterrence” at all.

After all, traditionally, deterrence arguably seeks to maintain the status quo , keeping a would-be aggressor state from becoming an actual aggressor by making clear to its leaders that the resulting pain and cost it would face as a result of such an attack would outweigh any potential gain. But this is also generally predicated on the idea that the wrong in question isn’t already happening.

Many of the things that the Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy says it seeks to “deter,” however – e.g. , malicious cyber activity, hostage taking, disruptions to our democratic process, and destabilizing Iranian activities, not to mention “aggression and coercion in all its forms” – are already occurring. Indeed, many of them are happening at scale, and have been for a long time.

I don’t want to be too pedantic, but getting someone to stop something they’re already doing isn’t clearly “deterrence” at all; it seems rather more like what is sometimes called “compellance.” And, by the way, compellance is usually felt to be harder to achieve than deterrence – not least because, as Thomas Schelling once pointed out, forcing someone to stop doing something shifts the burden of action to the one seeking to compel. (Here, that means to us .)

As I noted earlier, the deterrence focus of Reagan’s 1987 National Security Strategy aimed simply to keep the Soviets and their allies inactive against us in terms of direct military attack. Yet once you get beyond the narrow category of direct attack – which the Biden Administration clearly does also seek to deter – the 2022 NSS requires us somehow to act in order to convince a huge array of troublemakers to stop doing a huge array of things that they’ve been doing for a long time.

It seems to me that only some of what is discussed as “deterrence” in the 2022 document is therefore actually deterrence at all. And this, in turn, surely hurts the ability of the NSS to provide the conceptual clarity we need for national security policy in a challenging era.

Moreover, the Biden Administration also sometimes seems to think about “deterring” bad acts in remarkably strange ways. As an example, take biological weapons (BW) threats. By way of comparison, the Reagan Administration’s 1987 NSS spoke explicitly about deterring Soviet use of chemical weapons (CW) by maintaining and modernizing the United States’ own chemical arsenal [p.27]. It envisioned, in other words, deterring Soviet CW use by threatening direct, in-kind retaliation. By contrast, when it comes to BW threats, the Biden Administration said that it aims to “deter state biological warfare capabilities” by “strengthen[ing] the Biological Weapons Convention” (BWC) [p.29]. To my eye this is not obviously a “deterrent” approach to BW threats at all. (And what is actually being claimed here anyway?)

For all the profligacy of its invocation of the word “deterrence” and the emphasis they place upon the idea of “integrated deterrence,” therefore, the Biden Administration’s national security guidance documents sometimes seem to find actual deterrent signaling distasteful. Remember, for instance, that in the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the Biden Administration chose to drop the Trump Administration’s declaration in the 2018 NPR that the United States does not necessarily rule out a potential nuclear response to a sufficiently “significant non-nuclear strategic attack.” Indeed, they abandoned even the Obama Administration’s own analogous comment in its 2010 Nuclear Posture Review about an attack with biological weapons (BW) – a deterrent caveat adopted when Joe Biden was himself Vice President.

Accordingly, at a time when U.S. officials formally assess that Russia and North Korea all have active offensive BW programs – and that China never “eliminate[d] its assessed historical biological warfare program” while Iran continues to wish to work on “biological agents and toxins for offensive purposes” – the 2022 NPR urges us simply to look to the hapless BWC, of all things, for “deterrence.” The Biden Administration apparently likes saying the word “deterrence,” but the thinking behind such verbiage sometimes seems quite unserious.

Improving for the Next Strategy

My recommendations for how the incoming administration should treat deterrence in its National Security Strategy therefore start with avoiding the mistakes of the Biden one.

Don’t , for example, speak sloppily about “deterring” pretty much everything bad. Instead, focus clearly and emphatically on the key challenge of deterring predatory state aggression. And don’t play the shallow and distracting game of box-checking domestic political agenda items in your national security strategy.

But do provide crisp and clear guidance to the national security bureaucracy about what threats it is most critical for us to meet and what opportunities it is most important for us to seize. And, in that respect, do provide as compelling account as you can of what we need to deter, how we plan to deter it, and why this approach represents a genuine and thoughtful tailoring of U.S. policies and capabilities to the specific adversaries whose behavior it is our objective thereby to shape.

Finally, do articulate grander and more noble goals for our country in the world – goals befitting our highest values and most worthy sense of ourselves: inspiring ones for which the achievement and maintenance of deterrence is instrumental and necessary , but which reach well beyond simply the objective “not having a war.”

With the next National Security Strategy, President-elect Trump will have the chance to bring the emerging new U.S. consensus on nuclear weapons policy into the highest levels of U.S. policymaking. He will have the chance to set a tone and direction that will guide government policy – and help shape the policies of our many allies and partners – for many years to come as we reorient ourselves for an era of grim and resolute competition and contestation unlike anything our nation has seen since the early Cold War.

So I would urge the drafters of the next NSS to be clear, crisp, concise, and focused. We no longer have the luxury of using high-level national security guidance documents as vehicles through which to massage key domestic political constituencies in areas only tangentially related – if indeed related at all – to national security. It is time, finally, for strategic seriousness.

— Christopher Ford

Looking Ahead in Nuclear Weapons Policy, Arms Control, and Nonproliferation

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 16:52:53 GMT

Below is the text on which Dr. Ford based his briefing to the European Leadership Network on December 10, 2024.

The Good day, everyone. It’s a pleasure to speak to you at the European Leadership Network (ELN), and to offer my thoughts on what we might perhaps see in the years ahead on issues of nuclear weapons policy, nonproliferation, and arms control.

Please remember, of course, that I have no crystal ball, nor any privileged insight into what is coming from the next U.S. administration now that Donald Trump has so impressively regained the presidency. As usual, my thoughts here represent only my personal views, and I speak for no one but myself.

That said – for whatever they may or may not be worth – I’m happy to offer some speculations about what future there might be for arms control and nonproliferation diplomacy in the years ahead.

Looking Ahead to the 2025 Nuclear Posture Review

So what might we perhaps expect to see in the next Nuclear Posture Review (NPR)? If you want a more detailed, wonky discussion of NPR issue-spotting, I’d refer to you what I offered to a workshop at the U.S. National Defense University earlier this week . For present purposes, let me just hit a couple points that might be of particularly interest to you.

One thing to remember here is that there is – at least traditionally – much more continuity across NPRs than difference, even where U.S. presidential administrations are otherwise hugely divergent in other aspects of foreign and domestic policy. That could conceivably be true again.

That said, how might the next four years under Donald J. Trump differ from the Biden-Harris period?

For one thing, I would expect the next NPR to be notably more bullish about expanding the U.S. nuclear force posture than was that of the Biden Administration’s October 2022 NPR . As you might recall, despite its strong warnings about accelerating nuclear threats, Biden’s 2022 NPR tried hard to demonstrate its Obama-era anti-nuclear bona fides, both by abandoning the B83-1 gravity bomb without any replacement capability in hand, and by trying to scrap the Submarine-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N).

The Biden Administration also made quite the show of pretending – in ways that were simultaneously unconvincing and, frankly, incoherent – to “[e]liminate ‘hedge against an uncertain future’ as a formal role for nuclear weapons.” Such of performative anti-nuclear virtue-signaling, however, is likely to play no part in the drafting of the 2025 NPR, especially because it is quite obvious that just such an “uncertain future” has actually arrived.

Indeed, the current emerging consensus in the Washington, D.C., nuclear weapons policy community points in quite the opposite direction. Already, for instance, we have seen the October 2023 report of the most recent Strategic Posture Review Commission (SPRC) adopt – on a remarkably bipartisan and indeed unanimous basis – a strong conclusion that the current U.S. nuclear force posture modernization plan is both “absolutely essential” and nonetheless also “ not sufficient to meet the new threats posed by Russia and China . ” Even Biden Administration officials, in fact, have grudgingly admitted that “ we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required ,” and that we need to be prepared to expand our arsenal .

The Biden Administration clearly sees the need to do more, but it could never quite muster the moral courage to say so. But it doesn’t take a lot of foresight to predict that the 2025 NPR will be quite open to increasing America’s nuclear force posture, and might well specifically recommend this.

I haven’t heard much argument for trying to match the Russian and Chinese nuclear build-ups on a one-for-one basis, of course, but there does seem to be bipartisan agreement in Washington that something more is needed on top of the existing modernization program that has been in place since 2010 when nuclear threats were far less acute.

Such additional capability might be articulated in terms of numbers ( e.g ., uploading warheads back into Minuteman III missiles, and placing multiple warheads on the new Sentinel system), or in terms of new delivery systems ( e.g. , theater-range weaponry, or dual-capable warhead capabilities for existing conventional strike systems, including hypersonic ones). And such details will surely be much debated. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how American nuclear planners facing the current range of strategic threats could not now recommend some kind of augmentation.

In this context, therefore, the most important NPR-related debates may come to revolve around questions of how to manage – and how to pay for – all of what we unfortunately now need. How, for instance, should we handle the challenges of simultaneously accelerating SLCM-N development, developing new capabilities, andshepherding troubled programs such as Sentinel to completion without further delays and cost overruns? These will be programmatic debates over what we can do, in other words, rather than questions of what we should do.

On the issue of what our nuclear posture should be, however, I suspect there is a growing consensus that the era of post-Cold War nuclear arms reductions is emphatically over, and that it is time, in some form or another and at some rate or another, to begin building again.

Nuclear Testing?

I am also frequently asked about Republican attitudes toward nuclear weapons testing, so I should touch upon that here. This question, of course, been a fraught question ever since the U.S. Senate decisively voted down the resolution of ratification for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1999. Indeed, Donald Trump’s former national security advisor Robert O’Brien wrote an opinion piece earlier this year in which he urged a return to full-scale nuclear weapons testing. So what might the next four years bring?

I suspect the incoming Republican administration will indeed be at least open to the idea of some kind of renewed testing. Especially after President Trump presumably inevitably re-declares the United States’ intent not to be bound by the CTBT, Republicans certainly won’t credit the idea promoted for a time by the Obama Administration that Article 18 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties requires us to refrain from testing because “ a nuclear-weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion would defeat the object and purpose of the CTBT .” (After all, that Treaty is not in force and seems unlikely ever to be, the Senate expressly rejected it in 1999, and multiple U.S. presidents have declared our intention not to be bound. If there ever was a time when we had any international legal obligation under Vienna’s Article 18 not to test, that time is long past and no legally-meaningful intent to be bound can surely be conjured-up now.) So legally, we would feel perfectly free to resume testing if we felt it necessary.

But would we think it necessary? I suppose that would depend upon the circumstances. It’s long been U.S. policy that if some kind of technical issue arose that would create a need to test one of our nuclear weapons to ensure it works as intended, of course, so that’s basically always been on the table.

I’m not aware of any such issues so far, and I believe our national laboratory directors continue to certify that our arsenal is in good shape. We seem to have done a good job so far with the “heroic science” of keeping our Cold War-era weapons operable without testing, and we can presumably continue doing so, at least for a while. I don’t know anybody who would bet on us making those old designs immortal , of course, so perhaps there will indeed come a day when ensuring reliability for our current arsenal would require more testing. But hopefully that day is far off.

A more interesting question would be whether the United States might feel the need to resume nuclear testing if we began developing an entirely new warhead or bomb design in response to the growing nuclear threats presented by Russia and China, and/or the challenges of holding at risk the most formidably deeply-buried targets even in places such as North Korea and Iran. I don’t believe we’ve ever before put a new weapon into service without any testing, and even though our modeling and simulation capabilities are vastly better than in the old days, the need to field an entirely new device could provide the rationale for at least a short testing campaign.

Another possibility might be if it were necessary to test the survivability of our existing designs – or perhaps a new one – against a full-spectrum threat environment of the sort that descending U.S. warheads might encounter under attack from Russian nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic missiles or space-based nuclear devices . It stands to reason that if you want to test a fully-assembled warhead or major sub-systems against realistic shock and radiation effects, you have to create those effects at a scale large enough to affect the equipment whose survivability you want to evaluate. So this, too, could conceivably provide a reason to resume some kind of nuclear explosive testing.

But there are some wrinkles to be aware of here. Resuming full-scale testing would be technically challenging if you wanted to learn much from such tests, because successive Democrat and Republican administrations have let our capabilities atrophy to the point that I doubt we still have much serviceable test instrumentation equipment around anymore.

It was estimated in 2020 that a U.S. nuclear test “with limited diagnostics” – which some have speculated might be “ a very simple test for political purposes ” – could be conducted “within months, probably not years.” To do a properly instrumented test at full-weapon scale, however, might require the re-manufacture or re-invention of some equipment that does not presently exist, and would require more time to prepare. The time to ready “‘ a fully diagnostic’ test that generates ‘lots of data, all the bells and whistles, so to speak, might [thus] be measured in years .’”

Don’t forget, however. If the purpose of a test were simply to make the point that we were willing to defy diplomatic norms and the policy community’s received wisdom by taking such a step – perhaps trying thereby to strengthen deterrence by signaling our resolve or anger in the face of adversary threats – you could certainly do a test without much instrumentation. That’s a possibility to consider as well, particularly should Russia, for instance, carry out a test as part of its ongoing campaign of nuclear saber-rattling against the West.

In another complication, it’s also worth remembering that the population of Las Vegas metropolitan area has grown more than threefold since we stopped underground nuclear explosions at the Nevada test site in 1992 , and has also expanded geographically . If we wanted to resume testing we might therefore have to do some diplomacy with the locals, since past underground nuclear tests did sometimes cause mild tremors to be felt in Las Vegas .

I have no particular insight into what the thinking is on these topics within the incoming Second Trump Administration, but these are the kinds of things you’d expect experts to be considering if the question of testing arose again.

But there’s also another factor in play here, too. The United States has publicly assessed since 2019 that our nuclear adversaries may themselves have been conducting at least small yield-producing nuclear tests. Russia, for instance, “ has conducted nuclear weapons tests that have produced nuclear yield ,” while U.S. officials have also noted that China’s activities “ raise questions regarding its adherence ” to the so-called “zero-yield” no-nuclear-testing standard the United States has been following for the last 32 years.

From a technical perspective, there may be useful things to be learned even from extremely small yield-producing tests, but while we ourselves have foregone learning such things for decades, our adversaries apparently have not. The issue of Russian and perhaps Chinese testing thus raises the possibility, at least, that the incoming U.S. administration might be willing to relax the U.S. “zero-yield” standard in order to permit small yield-producing American tests at least of the sort that we believe our adversaries to have been conducting. Such an approach might represent a sort of “halfway house” answer – a bit of the way along the road toward resuming testing, adding usefully to our nuclear knowledge, but in ways calibrated to be responsive to adversary activity. We shall see.

Nuclear Weapons Infrastructure

More broadly, I would expect the Second Trump Administration to place a high priority on reinvigorating the U.S. nuclear weapons development and production infrastructure. As I recently pointed out in a Congressional briefing , this infrastructure is critical to deterrence in at least three ways:

“First, our nuclear weapons infrastructure is critical to preserving deterrence over time, for it physically maintains the nuclear devices that allow us to hold at risk what our adversary prizes, and hence to disincentivize aggression.

“Second, our nuclear weapons infrastructure enables us to preserve deterrence against future threats. Productive capacity provides a ‘hedge’ against worsening global threats, since if you need more weapons you can make them. (If you need more to deter aggression and you can’t make enough, however – or you can’t make them fast enough – that’s a recipe for deterrence failure ….)

“Third, our nuclear infrastructure is critical to preventing an arms race and encouraging arms control negotiation. If you’re really good at developing and producing nuclear weapons and you are ostentatiously ready and willing to do so if needed, your adversaries are more likely to conclude that having an arms race with you is not in their interest – and that they should thus sit down and talk.”

The First Trump Administration believed strongly in the important contribution to deterrence made by our weapons infrastructure , and it worked to increase funding for this infrastructure ; the Biden Administration also increased these budgets. There remains much work to still to do, however, and I would be surprised if the incoming Trump team did not focus strongly upon expanding our capability to develop and to manufacture nuclear weaponry. To this end, I would also expect them to try to reinvigorate the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories by replacing those institutions’ notoriously ossified and risk-averse institutional culture with the sort of “‘ mission-accomplishment’ psychology that made possible the impressive achievements of their glory years during the Cold War .”

Whither Arms Control?

None of this focus upon restoring American nuclear muscularity in response to growing adversary threats, however, means that the Second Trump Administration will necessarily be against arms control. To the contrary, as I have argued elsewhere , it might be precisely such restored American muscle that makes a resumption of meaningful arms control possible by finally changing the incentives facing Russia and China in ways that give them concrete reasons to come to the table to talk with us about negotiated restraints.

One shouldn’t forget, after all, that Donald Trump seems to have been thinking off and on about arms control challenges for many years – once telling a Washington Post reported in 1984, for instance, that he would love to oversee arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union . He might well, therefore, find it appealing to implement a strategy of building up American capacities in order to entice our adversaries back to the negotiating table, and this would also fit in well with his understanding of himself as a dealmaker.

There were signs of this already in the First Trump Administration. Its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review , for instance, expressed the hope that pursuing a new submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile would “provide the necessary incentive for Russia to negotiate seriously a reduction of its non-strategic nuclear weapons.” The First Trump Administration also initially adopted a strategy in 2017 of trying to pressure Russia into ending its violation of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty by authorizing treaty-compliant research and development (R&D) work on an American system to give Moscow more of an incentive to change course.

Remember, too, that the First Trump Administration also sought a “trilateral” arms control deal with China and Russia that would have involved a de facto “freeze” on nuclear force expansion by means of an “unprecedented overall warhead cap” that would function as “ an enduring way to forestall an arms race between us, or at least as a temporary expedient to slow the bleeding and buy time in which to try to negotiate something more permanent .” Thanks to Russian and Chinese intransigence, of course, neither the INF responsive strategy of 2017 nor the subsequent push for “trilateral” arms control worked. Nevertheless, Trump officials are clearly no strangers to “ leverage strength for peace ” approaches.

It’s very possible, therefore, that the Second Trump Administration will focus intently both upon building up American capabilities and upon pursuing some kind of arms control with both Russia and China. To my eye, there would be a lot to be said for that.

Thinking about Nonproliferation

Let me conclude with a quick word about nonproliferation. I would be surprised if the Second Trump Administration were not quite strong in opposing nuclear weapons proliferation to or by regimes such as Iran and North Korea that hate us and wish us ill.

Based upon the policies pursued during the First Trump Administration, I would generally expect a hard line against Iran and its expanding nuclear program – and perhaps even some interest in leveraging “maximum pressure”-type sanctions into some kind of a deal that would place limits on Iran’s program more enduring than the problematically temporary constraints once embodied in President Obama’s now-defunct Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). It’s a fraught time for Iran, with its Hezbollah terrorist proxy having been mauled by the Israelis and its Syrian ally in Bashar al-Assad having been overthrown.

Things in Iran could, of course, go in a bad direction, if the mullahs opt for further defiance and choose to weaponize, but it’s also possible that in their regime’s manifest fragility, they might find this an expedient point at which to avoid court further calamities – such as “ snap-back” sanctions before U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 evaporates in October 2025 , or even a joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against them if they do weaponize – by agreeing for the first time to serious and permanent constraints on their nuclear program. We shall see.

North Korea having rebuffed President Trump’s efforts personally to negotiate denuclearization in 2018 and 2019 , U.S. policy toward Pyongyang may also remain in “contain and constrain” mode, perhaps with additional American moves to penalize Russia and China for their increasing support for that rogue regime.

More intellectually interesting questions, however, might arise with regard to the issue of potential proliferation to U.S. friends . I don’t think the modern Republican Party in the United States approaches nonproliferation from quite the quasi-theological perspective that the Democratic Party does.

Instead, the Republican attitude seems to be more of a calculating, realpolitikal , security-centric one. And this viewpoint might – at least conceivably – be more willing to accept some “friendly” proliferation if Russian and Chinese threats worsened considerably and could not be met by other means without additional commitments of U.S. lives and treasure that the administration might find unfeasible.

I’ve argued for years that America’s military alliances and security relationships are historically the world’s most successful nonproliferation tools . And that’s true. But if Washington concluded that one or more of them offered more cost than benefit – or represented a “distraction” from more important things – then it stands to reason that nonproliferation equities would suffer.

I can’t imagine that if push really came to shove in the face of escalating adversary threats, the next administration would find itself able, in good conscience, to tell a country facing existential danger – such as South Korea, Japan, Poland, or one of the Baltic states – that nonproliferation is so important that it is an altar upon which they should sacrifice their national sovereignty and autonomous existence as a political community.

That said, there are so many variables involved in such speculation – including the details of who actually ends up managing the details of U.S. policy implementation in this arena – that there’s really no way to make a prediction here. It may well be that the new administration takes quite a conventional approach to nonproliferation policy, supporting the integrity of the global nonproliferation regime with its diplomacy and using a muscular approach to U.S. nuclear and conventional force posture to deter aggression in ways that make it unnecessary ever to face the dilemmas of potential “friendly” proliferation.

It’s also worth remembering that even if events did end up putting pressure on a U.S. ally that cannot be deterred by non-nuclear means, there are also ways to answer such challenges short of condoning indigenous nuclear weaponization. In both Europe and East Asia, for instance, there are longstanding Cold War precedents for deterring revisionist aggression through the forward deployment of American weapons as part of our alliance commitments. And in Europe, there is also the longstanding, and indeed ongoing, example of NATO’s “nuclear sharing” concept – whereby forward-deployed weapons are kept carefully and lawfully under U.S. control in peacetime, but may be made available to NATO allies for delivery in the event of adversary attack. If threats continue to worsen, these options would make a lot more nonproliferation sense than indigenous weaponization, while yet representing effective deterrent responses to the challenge.

Here too, therefore, we shall just have to see.

Conclusion

Anyway, that’s my speculation about the years ahead, for whatever it may or may not be worth. Remember: I have no special insights here, and I am just an outside observer at this point. Especially for an administration so clearly not committed to hewing to the conventional wisdom of Washington’s expert community – nor worried about remaining in the good graces of fashionable people and establishment opinion-shapers – it’s easy to imagine things going in various unconventional directions that I cannot foresee. Nevertheless, I hope I’ve given you some food for thought, and I look forward to your questions.

— Christopher Ford

The Weaponization of Integrity: How the West’s Enemies Try to Leverage its Ethics Against It

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 18:57:21 GMT

As noted in the previous post here on New Paradigms Forum , the inaugural issue of Defense & Strategic Studies Online (DASSO), the online journal of the Graduate School of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University , was published on December 7, 2024. It includes Dr. Ford's essay on how America's adversaries seek to weaponize its moral integrity against it. You can find the whole first issue of DASSO by clicking here , or you can use the button below to download a PDF of Dr. Ford's essay .

The Ties that Bind: A Data-Driven Analysis of Oceania’s Dependency on China

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 18:50:50 GMT

The inaugural issue of Defense & Strategic Studies Online (DASSO), the online journal of the Graduate School of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University , was published on December 7, 2024. It includes an article co-authored by Dr. Ford and Dr. Alex Memory of the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory . You can find the whole first issue of DASSO by clicking here , or you can use the button below to download a PDF of the Ford/Memory article .

Recommendations for the Next Nuclear Posture Review

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 22:25:45 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford drew during his participation in a roundtable workshop at the National Defense University on December 6, 2024.

With the caveat that these points represent only my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of anyone else, I’m pleased to offer some thoughts on how it might be useful to think about the next U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).

Structure and Format

On the question of whether a detailed review and report should be put together in the traditional fashion, or whether some other format should be used, such as a shorter review and an official speech on the topic, my answer is “yes” – namely, that we should do both things.

I do like the idea of doing a detailed review and publishing a fairly comprehensive (and unclassified) report. U.S. nuclear weapons policy issues are complex, their nuances are important, and a full-scale NPR provides an unequalled opportunity for each new presidential administration to spell out its approach clearly and as compellingly as possible, not only for the national security bureaucracy that will be needed to implement the “commander’s intent” spelled out in that document, but also for the broader policy community and the general public, from whom sustained buy-in is essential.

Having a full NPR as a reference document can also be valuable in clearly spelling out U.S. nuclear policies to America’s adversaries, as well as to our allies – so that the former can be deterred, and the latter reassured, by understanding each administration’s commitment to deterrence and responsible national security stewardship as clearly as possible. A compelling and comprehensive statement of U.S. policy is also important to ensuring ongoing buy-in from Congress and the American people, who need to understand the “ why stories ” behind our decisions, in terms both of the threats the United States faces and of the reasoning behind the choices American strategy makes in response.

That said, I also like the idea of promulgating policy in a shorter and more digestible form, such as in a presidential speech. Such a speech, for instance, would give President-elect Trump the chance personally to demonstrate that the policies spelled out in the NPR are America’s national priorities, and not just some document some of the wonkier of his officials crafted in conjunction with career bureaucrats and military officers. (Because implementing any serious strategy would also entail significant financial burdens and require challenging programmatic trade-offs, such a signal of personal Presidential commitment would be hugely valuable in powering through political and bureaucratic obstacles to effective change.)

President Obama tried something like this with his April 2009 “ Prague Speech ” on nuclear disarmament, which laid down a clear conceptual very early in his first term, and was thereafter was followed by a much more detailed NPR in 2010. President Trump could do something analogous by signaling an epochal change of direction in favor of once again building up American strength to ensure we are able to deter our adversaries and reassure our allies in the face of geopolitical threats that have gravely worsened in recent years. And if President Trump were able to put such a clear messaging statement into the public record soon enough to have it help shape decision-making as Congress prepares for the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and appropriations bills next autumn, so much the better.

(As a point of comparison, national nuclear weapons policy in France takes public form in a relatively rare, usually once-per-administration speech by the French president , which gives him the chance to put his personal stamp on such policies. This is particularly important in a French political system that is highly centralized around the office of a quasi-imperial president. Despite our complex U.S. constitutional system’s division of federal governance into separate institutions that share powers, however, American nuclear weapons policy is also highly presidentialized, and it might be very helpful for POTUS to give the world a nuclear-specific speech highlighting key points and thus giving his personal imprimatur to the more detailed reference-document wonkery that will follow in the NPR itself.)

My suggestion, then? Take two bites at the apple: (a) put out a shorter, crisp, vision statement at the highest level; and then (b) publish a more traditional NPR built on a much more detailed working-through of programmatic details of how to make that vision a reality.

Issues to Consider

The obvious starting point for the Second Trump Administration’s NPR is presumably the version published in 2018 during the First Trump Administration. President-elect Trump has a huge advantage here over every other modern president, in that he has already gone through the trouble of articulating a full-fledged nuclear weapons policy and – in theory, at least – merely needs to update his 2018 NPR in order to keep it fit for purpose.

As for what adjustments a possible 2025 NPR might perhaps need, it is useful to start by comparing it with the Biden Administration’s NPR published in 2022 . To be fair, there is traditionally a great deal of continuity in U.S. nuclear weapons policy from one administration to the next, and just as I was surprised to find the Obama Administration’s 2010 NPR to be much better than I had feared , a good deal of the material in the Biden document is likely to be unobjectionable to the incoming administration, and should be retained. In a number of respects, however, it might be useful for the next NPR to correct some of the things the Biden team got wrong in their awkward efforts to reconcile performative anti-nuclear virtue-signaling with the realities and imperatives of deterrence in a worsening threat environment.

So let me offer a sort of issue-spotting list of where the incoming administration might wish to agree with – and perhaps even double down on – what has come before, and where it might be well advised to consider corrective action.

(1) Recommitting to the Program of Record .

The first point to make – because it is such a foundational one – is to agree with the Biden Administration on the critical importance of completing the longstanding U.S. effort to replace and modernize the “legacy” strategic nuclear delivery systems we have had in service since the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan completed the last recapitalization of America’s nuclear force. We must fix the bollixed-up programmatics that have led to increasingly worrying delays and cost overruns for some of these programs, of course, but there is a dire need to complete these legacy modernization programs as rapidly as possible, for our current strategic systems are rapidly approaching obsolescence. This is a truly foundational point for the next NPR, for it we cannot even modernize what we still require but that is today ageing out, then we can hardly expect to be able to meet today’s growing threats with anything new.

And we must modernize and fully recapitalize not merely the delivery systems themselves, but also the U.S. Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) architecture upon which we rely to manage these forces. Robust, resilient, survivable, and utterly reliable NC3 is absolutely essential to deterrence, as well as to managing things as well as possible if – God forbid – deterrence fails. Our current NC3 architecture is as old and creaky as our Reagan-era delivery systems, however. We absolutely must finish modernizing all of these systems.

(2) Reinvigorating our Nuclear Infrastructure .

Another truly foundational, sine qua non aspect of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, I would say, must be to reiterate the importance of – and then greatly to accelerate – efforts to reinvigorate the American nuclear weapons infrastructure. We simply must provide the resources needed on a sustained and long-term basis to recapitalize the American nuclear weapons development and production complex. Being able to respond to security threats by producing more nuclear weapons if needed – and being able to design and validate new weapons if circumstances require – is essential to deterrence.

As I have noted elsewhere , such “[p]roductive capacity provides a ‘hedge’ against worsening global threats, since if you need more weapons you can make them.” It also helps prevent an arms race, for it helps encourage adversaries to conclude that that having such a race with you “is not in their interest – and that they should thus sit down and talk.”

The First Trump Administration understood this , and it worked to increase funding for our weapons infrastructure. The Biden Administration also increased these budgets , for which it is entirely fair to give them credit. If you ask me, however, there’s still a lot more to be done, and the next NPR should commit to continuing this trend, and to accelerating it – a lot.

We must also radically change the organizational culture of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, imbuing them once more with the kind of vigorous, “‘ mission-accomplishment’ psychology that made possible the impressive achievements of their glory years during the Cold War .” This will also require rather a ruthless look at the internal policies, processes, and procedures that today contribute to routine delays and cost overruns in the nuclear enterprise, reforming or jettisoning those that are not truly essential, and retuning the bureaucratic engine more for scrappy “good enough” performance and endurance than for gold-plated perfection.

Research and development work on new or repurposed nuclear weapons concepts and designs – and ensuring the capacity to produce as many new weapons as might be needed in a worsening threat environment – must be seen as a core mission for NNSA and the laboratories, having a priority equal to maintaining the reliability and security of existing U.S. nuclear weapons. Today’s rigid, cost-driving, and delay-producing culture of bureaucratic risk aversion there was born of three decades of post-Cold War shrinkage and of anti-nuclear virtue signaling by national politicians, and it must be resolutely abandoned.

(3) The Two-Peer Problem .

If you ask me, the third foundational element for the next NPR derives from my comments above about the importance of telling the “why stories” that ground the policy and programmatic choices of nuclear strategy. This means offering a clear and powerful articulation of the threats we face – and how, and the degree to which, they have been worsening so dramatically – and a compelling articulation of why these particular policy responses to those threats make sense.

At present, while the last two administrations’ national security guidance documents have been quite effective in spelling out the problems we face from great power competition – including what many are now calling our emergent “two-peer problem” of having to deter aggression by two nuclear-armed great power adversaries at the same time – there is still no clear U.S. Government articulation of the basic contours of how such deterrence challenges can be met. The 2025 NPR would thus do us all a huge service if it were to provide such crisp general narrative as the conceptual backbone for all the policy and programmatic changes that would follow.

(4) Uploading Warheads .

One issue that the drafters of the next NPR will have to wrestle with is how to respond to the “Two-Peer Problem” of soon being confronted by two nuclear adversaries, each with an arsenal comparable to our own, both in terms of delivery capabilities and overall scale. This will clearly create a formidable “numbers problem” for our nuclear planners. As I summarized things last month at a Congressional briefing ,

“Nobody has ever before had to deter two hostile nuclear peers at the same time. Our current nuclear force posture sizing was effectively decided in 2010, when our nuclear modernization program began and both Russia and the United States agreed to New START. Under that treaty, Russia’s arsenal was limited to 1,550 operationally deployed warheads, and at the point it was signed China’s arsenal amounted to a modest 200-300 weapons – for a ‘potential adversary’ total of presumably not much more than 1,850 weapons. If you assume the U.S. stockpile was the right size to maintain deterrence then, however, it can hardly be anything but inadequate in 2035, when Russia and China together will have something more like 3,050 warheads, even assuming Russia doesn’t deploy more after New START expires. I’m not arguing that we necessarily need to match them one-for-one – as if that were even possible – but it really can’t be true that our current plans are enough to ensure deterrence in ten years’ time.”

The Biden Administration actually seems to understand this, but they were never actually willing to admit doing so. Biden officials have conceded that “ we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required ,” and have told the press that we need to be prepared to expand our arsenal , but they could never muster the courage actually to advocate doing so. The drafters of the next NPR, however, won’t have the luxury of pussy-footing around the issue for fear of an unkind word from the Arms Control Association – and they surely won’t be inclined to do so. The next NPR should embrace the opportunity to provide the American people, and the world, with a fierce honesty here.

The next NPR should presumably commit the United States not merely to being ready to upload, but also to a policy of actually doing so to whatever extent is needed to preserve deterrence as Russia builds more strategic systems and expands its current overmatch in theater-range systems, and as China sprints toward parity . The NPR needn’t take a position on just how many more weapons we should deploy – and it probably shouldn’t do so, not only because the precise number needed will need careful study and might change over time, but also because the details of our posture in this respect should presumably remain classified.

Nevertheless, it would be useful to stake out the right conceptual ground here. I dearly wish things were otherwise, but thanks to the growing threats presented by our strategic adversaries, we must be willing to admit that U.S. nuclear policy is now back – more in sorrow than in anger, to be sure, but back nonetheless – in the “build-up” business.

(5) Theater-class Weapons .

Moreover, in an era in which Russia has been showing China how to use theater nuclear forces for coercive bargaining under the “ offensive nuclear umbrella ” of a strategic standoff, we also need to do more to mitigate the increasing overmatch in theater-class systems that both Russia and China now enjoy vis-à-vis the United States and our allies. As I also tried to make clear in my contribution to a recent project on intra-war deterrence challenges at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, I think it clear that we need more flexible and diverse nuclear capabilities to respond to such coercive bargaining at the theater level – for deterrence, for intra-war escalation management, and in restoration-of-deterrence scenarios.

The new Submarine-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N) announced by the First Trump Administration in the 2018 NPR was an important step in the right direction – as was the lower-yield W76-2 warhead also announced in 2018. Though Democrats opposed the W76-2 when Trump Administration adopted it , the Biden Administration subsequently tried to use that warhead’s utility in countering regional threats as their excuse to try to kill SLCM-N. In fact, however, we need both systems – and even that may not be enough. The next NPR should thus commit to doing more to fix the problem of theater overmatch, not merely through somehow accelerating SLCM-N (though doing so will not be easy), but perhaps also by exploring further options such as a small warhead design that could be retrofitted onto existing or planned long-range precision conventional strike weapons, making them into optionally dual-capable systems and creating salutary commonalities of interest between (and programmatic opportunities for) the Defense Department’s nuclear weaponry and conventional arms sub-communities.

(6) Hard-target Kill Capability .

The Biden Administration’s 2022 NPR proudly announced the retirement of the B83-1 nuclear gravity bomb, which up until that point had been the only remaining megaton-class device in the U.S. arsenal. I don’t deny that the B83-1 was an old, awkward, and near-obsolete weapon, but as the 2022 NPR itself acknowledged, we have no replacement available for the hard-target-kill capability that the aged B83-1 provided.

Yet so-called Hardened and Deeply-Buried Targets (HDBTs) have been proliferating around the world, particularly in Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran – that is, the very countries arguably most likely to become our adversaries in a future conflict. In conjunction with improved air defenses that make direct overflight more and more difficult, it is becoming both increasingly difficult to kill such HDBTs and increasingly crucial to deterrence that we remain nonetheless able to hold them at risk. The Biden Administration apparently scrapped the B83-1, however, even before exploring how we could hold such targets at risk in the future , and we presently have an effective alternative neither in hand nor even yet on the horizon.

This was irresponsible, and I would argue that the next NPR should commit to solving the HDBT problem – which presumably still requires employing nuclear rather than just conventional tools. I know of at least two concepts for going after such targets with nuclear weapons even apart from the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) concept explored by the George W. Bush Administration before it abandoned that effort, and it is clearly now well past time to evaluate our HDBT options, pick the best one, and start moving out as fast as we can.

(7) Declaratory Policy .

When it comes to U.S. nuclear declaratory policy, it is probably time to correct the Biden Administration’s 2022 NPR in another way, too: in connection with the so-called “negative security assurances” (NSAs) the United States makes about when it won’t consider using or threatening to use nuclear weaponry. For some time now, it has been customary for U.S. officials drafting a new NPR to offer an NSA stating that we will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon state that is party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and remains compliance with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations.

This nuclear-specific NSA is not intrinsically problematic, but as you might recall, it was said in the Obama Administration’s 2010 NPR that the United States “reserves the right to make any adjustment” necessary in its NSA promise as a result of “the evolution and proliferation of the biological weapons threat.” That caveat represented a way to engage in a little of what is known as “cross-domain deterrence,” trying to leverage some deterrent effect from the U.S. nuclear arsenal against the potential for catastrophic biological weapons (BW) attack. (That’s a fancy way of saying that we do not a priori rule out the possibility that if a state mounted a sufficiently horrific BW attack against the United States, we would choose to respond with a nuclear weapon.)

The First Trump Administration very sensibly expanded upon this “reservation of right” caveat by expanding the category of relevant threats to reach any “ significant non-nuclear strategic attack ” (SNNSA). Such attacks, the 2018 NPR made clear,

“include, but are not limited to, attacks on the U.S., allied, or partner civilian population orinfrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warningand attack assessment capabilities.”

The Trump NPR’s NSA language, therefore,

“reserve[d] the right to make any adjustment in the assurance that may be warranted by the evolution and proliferation of non-nuclear strategic attack technologies and U.S. capabilities to counter that threat.”

All of this made excellent sense. Indeed, given that such critical infrastructure threats from both China and Russia have been increasing , that U.S. officials now publicly acknowledge that both Russia and North Korea have offensive BW programs , and that Russia is reportedly developing a space-based nuclear weapon system – reportedly to be in some kind of development prototype phase with the satellite “ Cosmos 2553 ” – such a SNNSA caveat would seem to make more sense than ever now.

The Biden Administration's NPR did not contain such clear “reservation of right” phrasing. In fairness, it does say (on page 8) that

“[c]onsistent with prior reviews, our nuclear strategy accounts for existing and emerging non-nuclear threats with potential strategic effect for which nuclear weapons are necessary to deter. We concluded that nuclear weapons are required to deter not only nuclear attack, but also a narrow range of other high consequence, strategic-level attacks.”

Substantively, this does not seem to derogate from the Trump policy, but the phrasing here still feels a bit like the drafers were trying to make the point as inconspicuous as possible. (Indeed, in reading the document I myself missed it at first. [Note: A friend did me the favor of pointing out my mistake in criticizing the Biden team for not saying anything on the subject, and this posting has been edited to correct the mistake.]) Yet the point does not deserve to be inconspicuous, and the next NPR should emphasize that just as we also use non-nuclear tools and approaches to help deter nuclear attack, we absolutely do reserve the right – in appropriate circumstances – to respond to a sufficiently significant non -nuclear attack with nuclear weaponry, just as President Trump emphasized in his NPR of 2018.

The next NPR should also drop the Biden Administration’s unwise pledge to continue to try to “mov[e] toward a sole purpose declaration ” – that is, a statement only purpose of nuclear weapons is to respond to the use of other nuclear weapons. Such a “sole purpose” policy would by definition preclude a nuclear response to any other form of attack, which is a terrible message to send – especially in the current strategic environment. By still pursuing “sole purpose,” the Biden team signaled its distaste for using nuclear weapons to deter conventional attack, which feels a bit like inviting disaster at a time when Russia is actively using its conventional forces in a war of territorial aggression against one of its neighbors and China is preparing its conventional forces for a possible invasion of Taiwan. The next NPR should emphatically rectify the Biden Administration’s mistakes in this regard.

(8) Nuclear Weapons Testing .

Though as far as I can tell there is presently no need for full-scale U.S. nuclear weapons testing to ensure the reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the United States should not hesitate to conduct such testing if such a need arises. In order to make such testing possible, however, the United States must resume and accelerate its (re-)development of the effective test instrumentation and diagnostic equipment that would be needed in conducting such tests. This should be made quite clear in the next NPR.

(Such as step, it should be noted, is important whether or not a high-level political decision were made to test a nuclear weapon for non -technical reasons, such as in order to send a signal of political resolve in the face of adversary threats. In theory, we could presumably conduct a more or less non -instrumented test quite quickly if the President made the decision to do so, but why not put proper instrumentation on it – to help permit our weapon modelers and weapon designers to learn as much as possible from it – if we can?)

In the next NPR, the United States may also wish to modify its current “zero-yield” testing policy in order to permit small-scale yield-producing tests akin to those U.S. officials believe Russia and perhaps China to have conducted . From a technical perspective, there may be useful things to be learned even from extremely small yield-producing tests, but while we ourselves have foregone learning such things for decades, our adversaries apparently have not.

The issue of Russian and perhaps Chinese testing thus raises the possibility, at least, that the incoming U.S. administration might be willing to relax the U.S. “zero-yield” standard in order to permit small yield-producing American tests at least of the sort that we believe our adversaries to have been conducting. That might represent a sort of “halfway house” answer, a bit of the way along the road toward resuming testing – adding to our nuclear knowledge, but in ways calibrated to be responsive to adversary activity.

I have no idea whether the Second Trump Administration will be interested in this approach, but given that President Trump’s former national security advisor has publicly called for a return to full-scale nuclear testing – which would be a much bigger deal even than the kind of calibrated small-scale testing I described – one certainly shouldn’t rule this out.

(9) New Weapons Designs .

For a long time, it was almost an article of almost religious faith on the Democratic Party side of the Washington nuclear weapons policy community that we should never develop any new nuclear weapon. Congressional Democrats, for example, fiercely resisted multiple efforts by the George W. Bush Administration to explore new weapons such as the RNEP concept and the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), and the Obama Administration’s 2010 NPR promised to avoid “ the development of new nuclear warheads .”

As you’ll have gathered by now, however, I think this horror at the idea of any kind of “new” nuclear weapon is terribly misguided, especially in the face of current threats. As I’ve suggested, we may well need one or more new designs – whether this is to handle otherwise unmanageable hard-target kill requirements, to allow us to field a more diverse and flexible theater-class nuclear capabilities, or to accomplish some other critical task.

Given the huge importance I think we should place upon improving the production throughput of our nuclear weapons infrastructure, moreover, we might also wish to explore new weapon designs that de-prioritize fancy High Cold War performance metrics in favor of minimizing the expense (and maximizing the speed and ease) with which additional nuclear weapons can be produced. After all, if indeed we do require more weapons in service to deter aggression and need more productive capacity to signal to China and Russia that they can’t win an arms race against us and hence shouldn’t try, we need designs that we can produce quickly and that won’t break the bank if we do. Let’s figure out what they are.

(10) “Hedging” Policy .

The Biden Administration also engaged in some rather silly anti-nuclear virtue signaling in how it addressed “hedging” policy. For years, particularly as we drew down the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal after the end of the Cold War, “hedging” has been an important part of American nuclear policy. As I have recounted elsewhere ,

“‘Hedging’ phrasing dates back to the first NPR under the Clinton Administration, in which the United States sought to ‘ lead and hedge ’ – that is, to lead the way toward nuclear disarmament but hedge against unexpected threats along that path by keeping more nuclear capability than was actually needed at any given time, in case things turn out to be more challenging than expected.”

For many years, this led us to keep a “reserve” stockpile of non-deployed weapons on hand – sort of sitting around gathering dust on a back shelf, if you will – in case our earnest hopes for an ever more benign future didn’t come true and strategic threats increased in ways that would require a somewhat larger arsenal once again.

Despite making exceedingly clear that such threats are indeed now rapidly increasing, however, the Biden Administration’s 2022 NPR declared that “‘[ h]edging against an uncertain future’ is no longer a stated role for nuclear weapons .” The rationale for this change was embarrassingly incoherent even when Biden officials bothered to try to explain it, and to the degree that it meant anything real and could be understood at all, abandoning hedging seems woefully wrongheaded.

(As best as I can tell, however, this declaration was just a cheap rhetorical dodge. All it actually said, after all, that hedging was “no longer a stated role” for U.S. nuclear weapons. Occam’s Razor suggests that the Biden Administration is still doing hedging, but they just don’t want to talk about it anymore and apparently wanted to win anti-nuclear Brownie points for their rhetorical dodge. To be blunt, that’s just juvenile.)

In fact, some kind of hedging remains very important to the long-term durability of deterrence, and the next NPR should remedy this Biden silliness by admitting that fact. We need to be able to preserve deterrence if threats worsen, and at any given point in the future, that might require deploying more capability. Indeed, hedging also helps keep threats from worsening, for maintaining an effective hedge lets the bad guy know that it’s not in his interest to have an arms with you because you’re ready to compete if he tries it.

Accordingly, we need some kind of hedge – and we need to have hedging as a “stated” mission in how we manage our arsenal. That said, however, hedging may have to evolve. As noted, our “hedge” has hitherto been the capability to upload more warheads from the U.S. reserve stockpile. Since we probably need to start uploading at least some warheads in the years ahead in order to meet worsening threats, we will necessarily start to draw down that reserve stockpile. And because we will still require some kind of hedge capability against future threats thereafter, this means that hedging will have to shift toward more reliance upon the production throughput of our nuclear weapons infrastructure – which brings me back to the foundational nature of my second point above.

Conclusion

As you can tell, I think the drafters of the next Nuclear Posture Review have a lot to do. I wish them wisdom, courage, speed – as well s lots of political top cover from President Trump and support from the new Congress.

-- Christopher Ford

Restoring Strategic Stability in the Euro-Atlantic Area

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 21:04:07 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to the Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, on December 4, 2024.

Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to say a few words about strategic stability through the prism of the Ukraine war and the future of arms control engagement. As usual, please remember that I speak here only for myself. With that caveat, however, I hope our discussion will be interesting.

I was asked to address whether the concept of strategic stability has changed in recent years, and what it might look like in 2025. By way of full disclosure, therefore, I should start by confessing that I already have something of a dog in this theoretical fight.

But let me back up for a second. For those of us in the nuclear weapons world, the most common definition of “strategic stability” is quite nuclear-specific. As the former Defense Department representative to the New START strategic arms negotiations once described it , this narrow definition of strategic stability means “the absence of incentives to use nuclear weapons first (crisis stability) and the absence of incentives to build up a nuclear force (arms race stability).” Through this lens, in effect, things are strategically stable if you’re not lobbing nuclear weapons at each other or rushing to out-build the other guy.

I’ve been arguing for years, however, that we’d be well advised to adopt a more capacious definition of “strategic stability.” In a chapter I wrote for an edited volume back in 2013 , I contended that we needed to look beyond just traditional nuclear-centric issues such as first strike stability. Instead, we need to conceive of strategic stability as a broader concept that describes a situation between nuclear-armed adversaries in which they feel no incentives to attack each other (or each other’s allies) by any means, not merely with nuclear weapons. As I put it in that chapter , strategic stability should be seen as

“loosely analogous to a military ‘Nash Equilibrium’ between the principal players in the international environment (i.e., the ‘great powers’) as it pertains to the possibility of their using force against each other. [I] define[] strategic stability as being a situation in which no power has any significant incentive to try to adjust its relative standing vis-à-vis any other power by unilateral means involving the direct application of armed force against it. General war, in other words, is precluded as a means of settling differences or advancing any particular power’s substantive agenda. The environment is thus strategically stable if no player feels itself able to alter its position

by the direct use of military force against another player without this resulting in a less optimal outcome than the alternative of a continued military stalemate and the pursuit of national objectives by at least somewhat less aggressive means.”

While traditional accounts describe strategic stability as an inherent good, moreover, I also argued that strategic stability through that broader lens is not necessarily a good thing, mainly because of the degree to which it privileges the geopolitical status quo. At the very least, I observed, strategic stability will have different benefits or costs “depend[ing] upon who one is in the constellation of players.”

If you’re a status quo power facing revisionist challengers, in other words, strategic stability, in this definition, is presumably your friend. As we are discovering both with Russia and with China, however, if you’re a revisionist power whose geopolitical ambitions run to changing the global balance of power – by force if necessary – strategic stability is undesirable and needs to be prevented or undermined, at least until you try to stabilize things again around a new status quo that represents the way you want the world to work.

I think that approach to thinking about strategic stability holds up pretty well more than a decade later, and that the current world illustrates the problems of thinking about strategic stability from a purely nuclear perspective. Indeed, you might even argue that “stability” in the strategic nuclear realm between the United States and Russia has actually contributed to instability in the broader sense.

In what I refer to as the phenomenon of an “ offensive nuclear umbrella ,” Vladimir Putin has been trying to take advantage of the “mutually assured destruction” nature of our strategic nuclear relationship with Russia and weaponize Western fears of nuclear escalation by using nuclear saber-rattling to deter us from doing anything to stop his aggression against his neighbors, and even to deter us from reacting to what British officials have described as a “ concerted campaign” of Russian-sponsored arson, sabotage, and other mischief in NATO countries. At the same time, with China presently sprinting toward at least strategic nuclear parity with the United States , Beijing would seem to be preparing to play the same game as Xi Jinping readies the People’s Liberation Army to conquer the free people of Taiwan, a vibrant democracy with whom the United States has a security relationship enshrined in U.S. law .

So this all may be “strategically stable” in the purely first-strike sense, I suppose, but it certainly doesn’t feel particularly stable in any common-sense usage of the term. Nor, I suspect, is this a reliably strategically stable situation even in the first-strike sense over time, given that the most likely scenario for a strategic nuclear exchange is not a “bolt from the blue” first strike anyway, but rather escalation from just the sort of regional conflicts that such localized revisionist aggression tends to create.

If sub-strategic dynamics continue to worsen – including the growing East-West mismatch in theater-range nuclear forces that incentivizes destabilizing coercive nuclear bargaining at the regional level under that “offensive umbrella” of a strategic standoff – I thus worry that the odds of an escalation-driven strategic exchange will increase as well. Hence my continued interest in thinking about strategic stability from a “Nash equilibrium”-inspired perspective through a broader geopolitical aperture than just that of nuclear first-strike stability.

So what might we do about these challenges? And how should we try to approach questions of stability and arms control in the Euro-Atlantic area if and when some kind of at least semi-serious “resolution” of the Ukraine conflict were to occur?

Those are certainly not easy questions to answer. For a starting point, however, I would point you back to the emphasis placed – in my “Nash”-inspired approach to strategic stability – upon incentives .

As a general matter, any notion of strategic stability relies hugely upon incentives. In any definition – including in the narrow, first-strike sense – the achievement and maintenance strategic stability does not (or at least should not!) depend upon the parties having any kind of good faith commitment to peaceful coexistence or even to the rule of law at all. Rather, it relies fundamentally upon a steely-eyed calculation of raw interest that, in theory, should be compelling even to a wholly ruthless would-be aggressor. My conception of strategic stability is no exception to this general rule.

What I think we need to focus on, however, is a conception of the interest calculations underlying stability that is broader than just the game-theoretical implications of a strategic-level nuclear balance, though of course that’s relevant too. We in the West – not just in the United States, but particularly in the states of Western Europe – have spent most of the last three decades nobly committed to a grand project of institution-building intended to socialize all states into a peaceable world of harmonious relationships. Encouraged, it would seem, by a sort of bowdlerized constructivism that imagined that we could reliably manage or eliminate geopolitical antagonisms by the open-armed weaving of ever-thickening socio-economic and political connective tissue between states and peoples, we forgot to also be as attentive as we clearly needed to be to more concrete incentive structures related to “hard power” capabilities and stern-willed deterrence.

I submit that we all need both to re-learn some older lessons about confronting would-be troublemakers with concrete incentives to moderate their behavior. And I think it’s clear, too, that we need to do this across a much broader range of domains and issue areas than by pretending that simply maintaining strategic first-strike stability always produces real and enduring stability in this challenging world of revisionist threats.

Through this lens, I certainly admit, the path back to real strategic stability is a fraught one. It passes through a lot of hard work, and through being willing to accept more cost and risk than we became accustomed to in the happy days of the early post-Cold War era when we naïvely imagined that serious strategic competition with dangerous great power adversaries had been put behind us forever.

In his memoirs, Richard Nixon declared that Russian leaders “ believe in Lenin’s precept: Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed. If you encounter steel, withdraw .” If we want to return to more real stability – and indeed to return to a security environment in which Russia and China both feel real incentives to negotiate some kind of arms control restraint – we need both more nuclear and other military muscularity, and more capacity to add further muscularity if circumstances require, than we presently have. We also need to find within ourselves the steel to do more to ensure that when the adversary pushes forward, he gets his fingers burned.

If we in the West do not remember this and act more resolutely upon such insights, the world will continue to be teach us ugly lessons about what strategic instability looks like.

—Christopher Ford

Anything but Simple: Arms Control and Strategic Stability

fordchristoph@gmail.com (Dr. Christopher Ford) — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 22:39:49 GMT

This is not a new publication, but as so many experts in the Washington strategic policy community struggle with how to ensure strat egic stability in the current threat environment, what "strategic stability" even means in the first place, and what kind of future there might be for arms control, the reader might be interested in Dr. Ford's chapter in a 2013 volume on such questions edited by Elbridge Colby and Michael Gerson.

You can find the entire book here , or use the button below to download a PDF of Dr. Ford's chapter.

Leveraging Strength into Peace: Arms Control Isn’t (Quite) Dead, and Here’s How to Revive It

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 19:38:17 GMT

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford drew in his remarks to the Bicameral Bipartisan Member Briefing on Arms Control, in the Russell Senate Office Building on November 21, 2024.

Good morning, everyone. With so much else going on in our national politics and in the Washington policy community, it’s a special pleasure to see a group of Senators, Representatives, staffers, and policy community experts come together to talk about arms control and its possible future. Thank you, Senator Paul, for asking me to speak to the group today.

I’ve been asked to talk about whether or not arms control is “dead,” and I’m happy to oblige. Naturally, these remarks represent only my personal views, as I cannot speak for anyone else. But it is an important topic.

To say that arms control is “dead” would be strong statement, however, and might seem to imply that we should give up hope of seeing it “alive” again. And I’d say that conclusion would be too strong. Arms control may be in a coma right now, but if you bear with me, I’ll try to explain how we can perhaps revive the poor, bedraggled thing.

The Collapse of the Arms Control Enterprise

We really have been on a most remarkable journey. I am old enough to remember the early post-Cold War years of arms control optimism, which gave rise in some quarters of the Western policy community to a remarkably powerful belief in the teleology of “zero” – that is, a belief that we would eventually and inevitably achieve the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons in a peaceful world finally free of the ugly challenges of great power rivalry. (After all, if miracles like the dissolution of the Soviet Empire could happen, why not abolition?) It seemed a heady time.

For all this psychic energy of that period, however – and the rosy glow with which it often seems that people remember it – its worth remembering that things began to fray relatively quickly. The second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) – the follow-on to the original START which set the superpowers’ strategic arsensals on a trajectory that sees them today at a fraction of their Cold War levels – was signed in 1993 and approved by the U.S. Senate in 1996, but it never came into force because the Russian Duma refused to endorse it.

That was, with hindsight, perhaps a sign of problems to come. But some of the early challenges to the U.S.-Russian arms control enterprise did not actually have to do with the United States and Russia at all. Instead, they derived from the growing missile threats to the United States and other Western countries from third-party proliferators, particularly North Korea. The growth of missile threats against U.S. homeland from such rogue regimes – as highlighted in 1998 by the Rumsfeld Commission Report – put growing pressure on Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972 , pursuant to which the United States and the USSR had sharply limited their possession of ABM systems.

For some time, the Clinton Administration negotiated small adjustments in interpretation of ABM Treaty in response to such pressures. Before too long, however, those tweaks became increasingly unviable as long-range North Koran missile capabilities improved , and in the wake of U.S. intelligence assessments that Pyongyang had separated plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, and may indeed have built some . Eventually, driven by such “third-party pressures,” the United States pulled out of the ABM Treaty in 2002 .

It’s important to remember, however, that despite many later claims to the contrary, the impact of that U.S. decision upon arms control more broadly was fairly modest. To be sure, the day after the U.S. withdrawal from ABM became effective, Vladimir Putin formally pulled Russia out of START II . Nevertheless, as noted, that agreement was already moribund, because the Russian Duma had refused to ratify it. One shouldn’t let Putin’s later posturing lead us to forget that Russia was not actually furious over the end of the ABM Treaty in nearly the ways it later claimed to have been. Indeed, Russia was perfectly happy signing a new strategic arms treaty with the United States – the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty (SORT, a.k.a. the “Moscow Treaty”) – just a few months after the United States announced it was pulling out of ABM. So arms control remained reasonably healthy then

That said, clouds were certainly starting to gather on the horizon even in the mid-2000s. U.S. officials revealed in 2006, for example, that Russia had never fulfilled all its promises under the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) of 1991 and 1992 , meaning that Moscow had retained considerable numbers of shorter-range nuclear forces after the United States had fulfilled its own PNI promises by scrapping most U.S. systems. Nevertheless, the Moscow Treaty remained in place until it was replaced – amidst great Obama Administration disarmament fanfare – by the New START agreement of 2010 , which continued the then-ongoing process of post-Cold War strategic reductions.

But Russian behavior was by then already worsening. As we now understand, even before the Kremlin agreed to New START, it had in 2008 begun illegally testing a cruise missile that violated the terms of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987 – the pathbreaking agreement the Reagan Administration reached with the USSR to entirely eliminate that entire class of nuclear delivery system. After entirely unsuccessful private remonstrations with the Russians over this illegal new missile, U.S. officials publicly assessed this INF Treaty violation in July 2014 .

Even after this finding, the United States did little to respond to Russia’s violation for some years except wag its finger; nor did Russia change course. Even after we made clear early in the Trump Administration that we would no longer tolerate Russia violating INF while we refrained from developing INF-range missiles and began research and development (R&D) work on our own (conventionally armed) systems to put pressure on Moscow , the Kremlin refused to return to compliance. By 2019, in fact, Russia had moved from flight testing its illegal missile to having that weapon reach operational capability, moving into full production and even deployment . Accordingly, the United States pulled out of the INF Treaty. (Elsewhere on the nuclar front, U.S. officials also revealed in 2019 that Russia had not adhered to its proclaimed moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, and had in fact secretly been conducting low yield nuclear tests.) After years of negotiated reductions undertaken jointly with the United States, Russia was now clearly beginning to rebuild a more Cold War-style nuclear arsenal.

Nor were nuclear arms treaties the only institutional elements falling apart under the pressure of the Kremlin’s renewed neoimperialist ambitions. In 2007, Russia had “ suspended ” its observance of – that is, began violating – the Conventional Forces in Europe (CTE) Treaty , slipping out of its restrictions on and transparency requirements for large-scale troop movements just in time to mount Putin’s war against Georgia in 2008.

The Open Skies Treaty (OST) also came increasingly under pressure from Russian violations. In fact, Moscow had neverhaving fully complied with it, and eventually also tried to use OST point-of-entry and flight path restrictions in an effort to symbolically validate Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, as well as the proxy-territory spoils of the Georgia war . (In the face of such gamesmanship, the United States pulled out of the OST in 2020 .) Putin’s government also announced in 2012 that it would end its involvement in the Cooperative Threat Reduction program (CTR, a.k.a. “Nunn-Lugar”) with the United States.

As if all this demolition of the post-Cold War arms control framework wasn’t enough, Russia also engaged in multiple violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) of 1997. It not only maintained an illegal offensive chemical weapons (CW) program that included new types of nerve agents (the so-called “ novichok” agents ), but it actually also used these agents – not merely in an attempt to kill Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 , but also in an assassination attempt against a Russian defector (and British citizen) in the United Kingdom in 2018 . More recently, Russia has been using chemical agents in its Ukraine war in ways that are also illegal under the CWC .

Making matters worse, Russia maintains an offensive biological weapons (BW) program in violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention , as revealed by sanctions decisions by Trump Administration in August 2020 , and formally confirmed by the Biden Administration in 2021 . With its attacks on Ukraine beginning in 2014, Russia also broke the pledge to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity it had made in the Budapest Declaration of 1994 —an assurance which had been critical to securing Kiev’s agreement to relinquish the nuclear weapons stranded on its territory upon the USSR’s collapse.

All in all, therefore, the Putin regime’s record of arms control-related compliance has been truly appalling. He has literally kept none of his legally-binding obligations, and under pressure from Putin’s desire to rearm Russia and to turn its energies to recreating a neo-tsarist imperium, almost the entire existing arms control framework has fallen apart.

Today, all that remains – sort of – is New START, though it will itself expire in 2026. Even there, moreover, Putin has for the better part of the last decade also been developing new strategic systems that are not covered by that agreement at all. (These include a bizarre nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed cruise missile and underwater drone torpedo .) Beginning in 2023, moreover, Russia began to violate the terms of New START too, by refusing to permit required missile inspections and convene Treaty-required meetings .

For its part, China hasn’t been ripping apart the arms control enterprise with Putin’s gusto. This is only, however, because China never let itself become involved in arms control in the first place. To this day, Beijing shuns even the idea of talking about arms control with the United States.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party is now building up an increasingly large nuclear arsenal and seems to be on a sprint to achieve at least strategic nuclear parity with the United States and with Russia. Specifically, the Pentagon predicts that Beijing “ will likely field a stockpile of around 1,500 warheads ” by 2035, which closely parallels our own current New START limit of 1,550 operationally deployed weapons . Making matters worse and raising further serious questions about the future, U.S. assessments have also questioned whether China has secretly been conducting low-yield nuclear weapons tests . (Nor, for that matter, has China eliminated its old biological weapons program, even while it has engaged in various activities that raise questions about whether it has an active offensive BW program today.)

After that optimistic start in the 1990s, in other words, post-Cold War arms control has certainly been a pretty grim trajectory.

A Revisionist Agenda

Especially with regard to Russia, by the way, it is not merely that Russia under Vladimir Putin has been revealed as a congenital violator of arms control agreements. It is also that Putin has worked to systematically weaponize arms control institutions – and the United States’ remarkable and sometimes dumbfounding commitment to observing arms control agreements for long periods of time even when Russia isn’t – in service of his agenda of bellicose strategic revisionism.

By not fulfilling its PNI promises to reduce shorter-range systems and by violating the INF Treaty, for example – even while we in America remained faithful to our own commitments and obligations – Russia was able to amass theater-range nuclear assets that it now uses in nuclear saber-rattling and coercive bargaining against NATO in an effort to deter us from providing military equipment to the Ukrainians Putin wishes to conquer and subjugate. Violating the CFE Treaty also helped the Russians accumulate and position conventional forces that it has used in wars of regional aggression, first against Georgia in 2008 and then against Ukraine in 2014 and in 2022. All in all, Putin has used the violation and manipulation of arms control agreements to help him develop and deploy what I have for years called his “ offensive nuclear umbrella ” – that is, a protective shield of nuclear posture and threat-making designed to deter the rest of the world from stopping his efforts to devour his neighbors.

Meanwhile, Russia’s violations of the CWC have given it nerve agents with which it has tried to assassinate Russian defectors abroad and dissidents at home, and other chemical agents it illegally uses in Ukraine today. And its most recent violations of New START have reduced our own ability to understand the state of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, even as the Kremlin continues to build new strategic systems that aren’t covered by New START, and apparently also to conduct secret, low-yield nuclear weapons tests as part of its ongoing nuclear weapons development and maintenance program.

This all bodes exceedingly ill. As also occurred in the 1930s as the authoritarian revisionists of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan – each on their own trajectory toward aggressive war against its neighbors – all gradually turned away from and undermined the multilateral framework for naval arms control that had been established in the 1920s after the First World War , so too has Russia undermined (and China shunned) the architecture of arms control restraints we inherited from the waning years of the Cold War and the heady 1990s period of institution-building.

So this certainly leads raises questions about whether arms control is “dead.”

A Framework for Considering Arms Control Availability

In a paper I published with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory earlier this year , I discussed the prospect of future arms control agreements through a conceptual framework for assessing the availability of arms control. In contemplating the potential “availability” of arms control, I tried to think through how likely it would be that two would-be arms control counterparties would try to reach an agreement with each other, and how likely it would be (if they tried) that they would be able to come to terms.

To make rather a long story shorter, my conclusions were not encouraging – at least not with regard to the short- or medium-term prospects for arms control success.

In that paper, I hypothesized the existence of what I termed a “ continuum of community ” – a sort of sliding scale depicting the degree to which would-be counterparties trust each other, the degree to which see their security interests as being in at least some respect congruent, and the degree to which they generally feel at lesat some sense of shared “community.” The would-be parties’ location along this continuum, I argued, helps shape the de facto availability of arms control.

But I don’t meant that high degrees of trust, shared security interests, and a sense of affinity are requirements for arms control success. In fact, if you have a lot of those things, you don’t need arms control in the first place, since the perceived security interests of the two would-be arms control counterparties won’t fundamentally diverge very much.

So imagine that continuum depicting varying degrees of trust, shared security interests, and sense of affinity. On the left-hand side these factors are high. There, I submit, arms control is unnecessary – and indeed, even suggesting arms control might be problematic. (You only need arms control where you worry about the other side’s capabilities and intentions, after all. I’d imagine that British leaders might find it offensive, for instance, if we urged them to sign an arms control agreement with the United States! Why on Earth would that be needed?)

Arms control comes into its own, however, as one moves “rightward” along the “continuum of community” into zones where security interests are more oppositional and trust declines – that is, where there is much less of a sense ofcommunity at all, and more of a general sense of antagonism. There, the structure and formalities of an institutional arms control framework might indeed be useful in helping to channel dangerous competitive energies and manage nuclear risks between rivals.

As I explained in that paper, in this “arms control zone,” arms control counterparties generally regard each other with considerable worry and concern—which is why arms race and nuclear escalation concerns arise in the first place, making arms control potentially useful. Nevertheless, they still retain at least enough minimal sense of community and trust that they regard it as theoretically possible to make deals with each other. There is no love between such partners, in other words, but this territory in the broad middle of the continuum is where at least some agreement remains possible, at least if it is negotiated carefully and accompanied by appropriate safeguards.

The problem comes on the far right-hand side, however, where there really is no sense of community, where interests are felt to conflict perhaps even existentially, and where trust is almost entirely lacking. Over on that end, I argue, arms control becomes much more problematic, arguably to the point of impossibility, because the parties regard each other with such distrust and antagonism that there is virtually no way that any agreement would really be attempted, an agreement would be unlikely to be trusted, and it would be unclear even that both parties would actually fully comply with it in the first place.

In my paper, I argued that you can basically track the evolution of U.S. and Russian perceptions of each other as movements back and forth along that continuum. There were points in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin in the early years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for instance, when Washington and Moscow looked at each other warmly enough that you almost didn’t need arms control.

Indeed, you might say that for a while, U.S. arms control treaties with Russia didn’t realy need to be “negotiated” at all. The Moscow Treaty of 2002 , after all, just codified strategic arms reductions that both U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin had already and independently agreed to make, and that each had already unilaterally announced . (That agreement only took treaty form because the Russians valued the political symbolism of a legally-binding deal with America . Both sides’ actual arms reductions were going to happen anyway.)

In those days, one could thus say, both we and the Russians still both felt each other to be reasonably comfortably on the “happy” left-hand side of my hypothesized continuum. We weren’t nearly as far over to the left on the scale as we were – and have remained – vis-à-vis Britain, of course, but the two big nuclear powers were certainly not then in bad territory.

Over time, however, as the Putin regime began to violate arms control deals and turned with increasingly aggressive predatory hunger on its neighbors from the late 2000s, that changed on both sides – and by a lot. In my paper, in fact, I speculated that perhaps U.S. and Russian mutual perceptions have today slid so far to the right along the continuum that arms control may not be presently “available” as a policy option for the two sides at all.

Particularly as a result of Russia’s attempt to finish invading, occupying, and annexing Ukraine in 2022 – not to mention the atrocities and abuses associated with its military operations there – the Biden administration came to perceive the Russo-American relationship in almost apocalyptic, existentially conflictual terms. President Biden, for instance, has described the conflict over Urkaine’s fate as demonstrating the existence of an epochal “ battle between democracy and autocracies .” In his 2022 National Security Strategy, the U.S. relationship with Russia (and with China) was similarly depicted as “ a strategic competition to shape the future of the international order .” For him, the conflict is, in effect, structurally systemic, and existential: Russia’s aggression “ sought to shake the very foundations of the free world .”

For Biden, not only was negotiation and cooperative engagement with Russia all but impossible, but it would apparently also continue to be impossible for so long as Putin was in charge in the Kremlin. “President Putin,” Biden has declared, had “ spurned [all prior U.S. efforts at constructive engagement] and it is now clear he will not change. Russia now poses an immediate and persistent threat to international peace and security .”

At the same time, Russian rhetoric and posturing about the United States and the West has become even moreapocalyptic. Trends in Russian depictions of the United States had been worsening for years, but they are incomparably worse today than even a few years ago.

The U.S. leadership role and American influence in the world, Putin has fulminated, is “ simply a means of justifying dictatorship over people and countries ,” and pushing back against malevolent outside pressures orchestrated by the West is Russia’s holy duty as “ a state-civilization, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, [the] Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions .”

This sense of civilizational oppositionalism and inherent conflict with the West – and with the United States in particular – became almost feverish in 2022 as the Kremlin worked to complete the war against Ukrainian sovereignty it had begun in 2014. The West, Putin declared, was “ racist and neocolonial ,” even “ Satanic ,” and it was Russia’s sacred civilizational duty to defend and promote Russian “ traditional values ” – which Putin seems to envison as being more or less synomyous with the “ official nationality” of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality ” propounded by the government of Tsar Nicholas I in the early 19 ^th Century. The creation of his own neo-tsarist imperium, Putin made clear, includes the imperative of simply erasing Ukraine, the very existence of which Putin has described as so offensive that it is “ comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us .”

Both of the would-be U.S. and Russian arms control counterparties, therefore, seem to be quite far out there on the right-hand end of the “continuum of community” – out where where antagonism is so great, trust is so lacking, and interests are perceived to diverge so fundamentally that it’s very hard to imagine them being able to successfully negotiate (or sustain) a viable agreement. This is challenging territory indeed.

Nor, I should add, is it just a question of the current U.S.-Russian relationship being remarkably poisonous. Quite irrespective of whatever appraoch President-Elect Trump will end up taking to Russia, Putin’s track record as a congenital violator of arms control agreements – and of trying weaponize the West’s earnest arms control intentions for strategic advantage – would make it exceedingly hard for American leaders to trust him even if the contours of a meaningful agreement were more apparent.

When it comes to China, moreover, both the fist Trump Administration and the Biden Administration perceived Beijing to present a tremendous threat. With his pivotal National Security Strategy of 2017 , of course, Donald Trump set in motion an official U.S. shift to prioritizing great power competition against revisionist autocrats such as China. For its part, the Biden Administration also sees China as “ the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security .

Neither these U.S. perceptions of China nor China’s rhetoric about the United States presently have the dark tone or intensity of the U.S.-Russian relationship, of course. In my schema of the “continuum of community,” therefore, arms control negotiation may remain theoretically possibile between Washington and Beijing. The problem, however, is that China has actively spurned U.S. efforts even to discuss possible concepts for some kind of arms control relationship with the United States, or trilaterally between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.

As you may remember, when I was sitting in the seat of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and Nonproliferation during the Trump administration, we proposed a “trilateral” arms control deal with China and Russia that would have involved a de facto “freeze” on nuclear force expansion through an “ unprecedented overall warhead cap ” – either as an enduring way to forstall an arms race between us, or at least as a temporary expedient to slow the bleeding and buy time in which to try to negotiate something more permanent. Yet China wasn’t interested, and it remainsuninterested, even in talking about possibilities for arms control. As the saying goes, it takes two to Tango, and at the moment Beijing clearly feels no incentive to negotiate.

A Way Forward

So where does this leave us? Beijing is uninterested in arms control while it sprints for at least nuclear parity with the United States, while Russia hates us with the fire of a thousand suns and seems to feel it’s doing just fine with its own uncontested build-up of theater-range nuclear weapons and development of new, uncontrolled strategic systems. Neither power, clearly, feels any incentive to talk meaningfully with us about anything to do with arms control.

Nonetheless, I wonder whether the solution – if there is to be one at all, of course, which I hardly guarantee – may to some extent lie precisely in that understanding of the problem: namely, that neither Russia nor China feels any incentive to negotiate with us about arms control.

I think we need to change their perceived incentives.

As the bipartisan Strategic Posture Review Commission recently agreed unanimously, our current nuclear force posture modernization plan is “absolutely essential,” but it is nonetheless also “ not sufficient to meet the new threats posed by Russia and China .” To meet the demands of this fraught era, I think we need to be willing to expand our own capabilities.

At the moment, we are badly outclassed in effective theater-range nuclear-capable delivery systems, having at present – for all intents and purposes – almost no such capability, even as our adversaries lean into leveraging their growing overmatch in such systems for coercive bargaining and to deter us from impeding their plans to invade and occupy their neighbors. The Submarine-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N) is a necessary step toward this need, but the Biden Administration tried to cancel it and, even when basically forced by Congress to pursue that system anyway, it has still been dragging its feet.

As noted, we may also need greater numbers of nuclear weapons in the near future, confronted as we soon will be by twonuclear adversaries each having an arsenal comparable to our own both in terms of delivery capabilities and overall scale. As I mentioned, China is expected to have about 1,500 operationally deployed nuclear warheads by 2035, and absent some change in our own posture, that means parity.

Nobody has ever before had to deter two hostile nuclear peers at the same time. Our current nuclear force posture sizing was effectively decided in 2010, when our nuclear modernization program began and both Russia and the United States agreed to New START. Under that treaty, Russia’s arsenal was limited to 1,550 operationally deployed warheads, and at the point it was signed China’s arsenal amounted to a modest 200-300 weapons – for a “potential adversary” total of presumably not much more than 1,850 weapons. If you assume the U.S. stockpile was the right size to maintain deterrence then, however, it can hardly be anything but inadequate in 2035, when Russia and China together will have something more like 3,050 warheads, even assuming Russia doesn’t deploy more after New START expires. I’m not arguing that we necessarily need to match them one-for-one – as if that were even possible – but it really can’t be true that our current plans are enough to ensure deterrence in ten years’ time.

The Biden Administration has grudgingly admitted that “ we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required ,” and officials have told the press that we need to be prepared to expand our arsenal . If that’s the case, however, the time get working on that is now, not a some point “ in the coming years .” (Remember, it takes enormously long to build new systems, and in the face of such forseeable future needs, we’re already far behind schedule.) Precisely because we need to change Russian and Chinese incentives in order to get them to negotiate, moreover – and because they can’t be incentivized by something they don’t know about – we need to be making such preparations not quietly, in the shadows, but instead publicly, and without apology or embarrassment.

Which brings me to the imperative of repairing and augmenting our nuclear weapons development and production infrastructure. As I’ve been trying to make clear for years , a robust infrastructure is critical to deterrence in at least three ways:

First, our nuclear weapons infrastructure is critical to preserving deterrence over time, for it physically maintains the nuclear devices that allow us to hold at risk what our adversary prizes, and hence to disincentivize aggression.

Second, our nuclear weapons infrastructure enables us to preserve deterrence against future threats. Productive capacity provides a “hedge” against worsening global threats, since if you need more weapons you can make them. (If you need more to deter aggression and you can’t make enough, however – or you can’t make them fast enough – that’s a recipe for deterrence failure, which is a fancy way of saying “adversary aggression and catastrophic war.”)

Third, our nuclear infrastructure is critical to preventing an arms race and encouraging arms control negotiation. If you’re really good at developing and producing nuclear weapons and you are ostentatiously ready and willing to do so if needed, your adversaries are more likely to conclude that having an arms race with you is not in their interest – and that they should thus sit down and talk.

That third point is especially important as we talk about the future of arms control. Our ability to build a respectable number of additional weapons if needed and to develop new ones to meet changing threats is precisely what helps give our adversaries an interest in arms control with us. On the other hand, if we foolishly hard-wire ourselves into being unable to do so, we all but invite the adversary to engage in an arms race. If you have only a small productive capacity, you’re basically telling him that he can likely win an arms race with you, which is giving him an excellent reason to try.

The problem, however, is just that: we currently lack both the deployed nuclear capabilities and the production throughput and new weapon development capacity that we need to meet the evolving threats America faces. And that’s why I believe that deterrence “hawks” and arms control “doves” should both support a robust new agenda of “muscling up” in the ways that U.S. security requires.

Fortunately, as the student of arms control history will know, there is a strong precedent for building up nuclear capabilities in response to expanded threats and using such muscularity to incentivize adversary arms control engagement. It was the courageous decision of the United States and all our NATO allies in 1979 to build a new arsenal of intermediate-range nuclear forces (the so-called “Euromissiles”) to counterbalance the Soviet Union’s deployment of hundreds of new SS-20 missiles – and to stick to that decision through deployment in 1983 despite ferocious opposition from the disarmament community – that made possible Ronald Reagan’s huge achievement in negotiating the abolition of all such delivery systems with the INF Treaty in 1987.

Nor did this occur by accident, for such a negotiated abolition of INF-class systems was precisely the point of the so-called “ zero-zero offer ” Reagan announced to the Soviet Union in November 1981. His model of “building up to meet threats but also in hope of negotiating those threats away” worked well for the United States then. It is also a model that we invoked in the Trump Administration when in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review it was expressly said that we hoped our pursuit of the SLCM-N would “provide the necessary incentive for Russia to negotiate seriously a reduction of its non-strategic nuclear weapons, just as the prior Western deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe led to the 1987 INF Treaty.”

To find a future for arms control, I thus think we need to invoke that model once more, and at scale, by augmenting our nuclear posture and expanding our nuclear weapons infrastructure in order – finally – to give China and Russia a real incentive to sit down with us to talk about restraint. In effect, therefore, as I argued in my paper earlier this year,

“we now need to start the arms control enterprise all over again from scratch, beginning not with agreement-seeking but instead with resolute statecraft and counterstrategy. Such an approach would focus less on pursuing arms agreements per se than upon changing the decision calculus in Moscow and Beijing in ways that give them concrete incentives to engage with the United States on these issues notwithstanding their dislike and distrust for Washington, and for reasons of specific security interest in which equally distrustful American leaders can place some reliance even while utterly discounting any notion of Russian or Chinese good faith.”

Conclusion

And that’s where President-Elect Trump comes in. He has, I would argue, a unique opportunity here to make good on the “peace through strength” concept he has propounded at the United Nations and elsewhere. He is well positioned to act resolutely to change the incentive structures facing our geopolitical adversaries in Beijing and Moscow in ways that make it at least possible to evision some meaningful future revival of arms control engagement.

Unfortunately, the modern Democratic party seems all but incapable of the kind of “leverage strength for peace” approach I think is needed here. To their credit, in the face of the huge and growing threats we face today, they’ve come farther than one might have expected back when Barack Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize for his “ vision of a world free from nuclear arms .” And I know from personal discussions that there are definitely some thoughtful people on the other side of the aisle from me – and certainly, I should also add, within our country’s career national security bureaucracy – who very much “get” the points I am making here with you today.

On the whole, however, the Democrats have not come nearly far enough to meet the contemporary challenge, and I’m frankly not sure they’re capable of it. Too many of them, I fear, still seem too intoxicated by memories of the glory days of disarmament movement after the end of the Cold War, too reflexively committed to seeking and sticking to arms control agreements at almost any cost, too anxious about maintaining their anti-nuclear political bona fides, too fixated up on preserving the good opinion of the Arms Control Association and the disarmament community, and too terrified of being thought, well, Reaganesque.

That’s why we need President-Elect Trump to step into the breach. He now has a chance both to confound his critics and – much more importantly – to take the forward-leaning steps America needs to give arms control another chance, by demonstrating to Beijing and Moscow that not having a meaningful arms control relationship with the United States is very much against their interests.

This won’t be easy, of course, nor cheap. It will require skilled arms control diplomats to shape our negotiating strategy and, hopefully, to shepherd eventual negotiations through to their conclusion. But it needs to start with the Department of Defense, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NSSA), and institutions such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and the Sandia National Laboratory (SNL).

It will also require a substantial and sustained influx of resources, and strong and sustained bipartisan support and political “top cover” over time. And this is not just a question of reorienting high-level policy to a new direction. Doing this right will also require a fundamental cultural shift in our national security bureaucracy.

Reinvigorating our nuclear infrastructure in the ways we need will be impossible without dramatic changes in NNSA’s operational culture and that of the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories. In the post-Cold War era of naïvely optimistic assumptions about the teleological inevitability of nuclear weapons abolition, we allowed NNSA and the labs – and indeed, I’m almost ashamed to say, encouraged them – to settle into an “avoid risk at all costs” culture that is light-years removed from the “mission-accomplishment” psychology that made possible the impressive achievements of their glory years during the Cold War.

We need to turn that passive and timid culture around, and to do so ASAP. This will require sustained effort and attention by savvy and resolute political appointees and career professionals who understand the need for change. Right now, such people aren’t in charge.

All of this won’t be easy, but I believe we can do it – and we badly need to. Without such a significant and sustained shift in our approach, I fear we will not be able to interest either China or Russia in arms control again. At present, they calculate that it’s more promising to try to win a nuclear arms race than to negotiate restraint. Let’s see what we can do to change that assessment in the years ahead.

Thanks for listening!

– Christopher Ford

Call it by its Name: Communist Chinese Imperialism

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:22:44 GMT

Dr. Ford's paper on parallels between European imperialism of yesterday and the Chinese Communist Party's behavior vis-a-vis the Global South today was published in November 2024 by the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), as number 11 in volume 4 of its Occasional Papers series. You can find it on NIPP's website here , or use the button below to download a PDF.

Challenges of Deterrence and Security upon Nuclear Use

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 02:13:42 GMT

In November 2024, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published a study of intra-war deterrence in a two-nuclear-peer environment called "Project Atom 2024." In it, contributing experts offered their perspectives on a hypothetical wargame scenario that involved near-simultaneous use of nuclear weapons by Russia and China against the United States and its allies in two concurrent theater conflicts.

Dr. Ford's contribution to this volume was a chapter entitled "Challenges of Deterrence and Security Upon Nuclear Use," and it appears on pages 19-32 of the volume.

You can find the full report on CSIS' website here , or use the button below to download a PDF copy of Dr. Ford's chapter.

Threats to NATO Resilience

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 04:06:13 GMT

Below is the written text upon which Dr. Ford based his oral remarks on November 12, 2024, to the NATO Resilience Summit in Bratislava, Slovakia .

Good morning, and thank you for having me to speak to you at NATO’s Third Resilience Summit . It’s a great pleasure to be here in Bratislava, and especially to follow my friend Angus Lapsley , with whom I had the pleasure of working closely several years ago when I was still in the U.S. Government and he was in Her Majesty’s.

These days, of course, I can only offer my personal views, and have no ability to speak for anyone else, but I’m pleased to have the chance to join my fellow panelists in discussing the resilience challenges that our Alliance faces today.

The Challenge of Adversary Action

Societal resilience is very much on people’s minds right now, of course, driven in part by things like the terrible recent flooding in Spain . I’ll be speaking about resilience from a somewhat different perspective this morning, however, because I would like you to focus very specifically upon resilience threats from deliberate adversary action. This is in many ways is an even more challenging problem, since the threat here has agency .

In this context, unlike with natural disasters, there are actually clever and well-resourced people out there looking for ways to target us in order to cause as much harm as possible – and whose job it is to adapt to what we do, learn from our responses, and adjust their own approaches in order to maximize impact. This willfulness and adaptive behavior makes adversary action an especially grave challenge to our resilience planning.

So let me highlight some aspects of the current adversary-based challenge to NATO resilience.

Collaboration by Rogue Regimes Big and Small

First of all, it’s worth stressing that we have now entered a period in which it is no longer possible to disaggregate the “great power competition” problem set from the seemingly separate “rogue regime” problem sets of Iran and North Korea. Unfortunately, these previously distinct challenges are well along the way to merging.

Both North Korea and Iran have now become deeply entangled in Russia’s revisionist wars of aggression here in Europe. Iran and North Korea both supply Russia with arms, and China supplies it with financial technology and other aid , thus helping make up for the Kremlin’s own challenges of meeting the staggering munitions capacity demands of modern high-intensity conventional warfare. North Korea, in fact, also now seem to be sending troops into the fight as well .

The world of smaller rogue regimes is thus now deeply enmeshed in supporting strategic revisionism not just in political and rhetorical but now also in highly concrete ways.

At the same time, both Russia and China have shifted emphatically from an earlier, vaguely supportive approach to nuclear nonproliferation to what can now only be described as a fundamentally “ pro -proliferation” one. Some years ago, there was at least a fighting chance that Moscow and Beijing might support policies to prevent proliferation because they saw that their interests, too, were served by there not being multiple new sources of potential nuclear war risk in the world. Now, however, Russia is essentially a military ally of the world’s two worst rogue proliferators, while China has stopped even pretending to care about putting any kind of restriction or sanctions on either Iran or North Korea.

So the world’s smaller disruptors and destabilizers are now thoroughly in bed with its big ones, and vice versa – and we in NATO cannot pretend any longer that these are entirely separate issues. We can no longer afford to be divided amongst ourselves in the face of such threats.

Provocation and Risk-Tolerance

This increasingly collaborative group of threat actors, moreover – whom I have elsewhere termed the “ Dark Quad ” – increasingly see their ability to absorb cost and tolerate risk as a source of powerful comparative advantage in dealing with their perceived enemies among the Western democracies. I believe they still fear our military potential, but they see us as politically divided, societally weak, and fundamentally risk-averse, and they assume that by provocative and disruptive behavior and various sorts of saber-rattling they can keep us off-balance and sufficiently afraid of entanglement and escalation that we will be deterred from trying to resist their aggressive and disruptive plans.

This is, in short, a very deliberate effort to exacerbate our political divisions, worries about escalation, and distaste for nuclear risk, and to weaponize these things for coercive bargaining. And this involves much more than just the use of nuclear saber-rattling in what I call an “ offensive nuclear umbrella ” that can deter others from impeding wars of conquest and thus facilitate regional aggression.

More broadly, these increasingly collaborative adversaries are engaged in an ongoing campaign to confront the West with constant challenges from an array of shifting but multi-layered and mutually-reinforcing provocations just below the level of direct armed conflict that may – and are indeed intended to – test our political and psychological resilience in unprecedented ways.

Such a strategy of constant, low-level engagement and operational “friction” does many things at once. It is, of course, intended to distract, preoccupy, disorient, and unsettle Western decision-makers, making effective allied collective action more challenging and sustained attention on coherent Western strategy and counterstrategy more difficult to achieve.

But it is also a tool for collecting intelligence about our reactions, helping the adversaries learn what rattles us, what our reaction times are, and where our strengths and weaknesses lie in responding to their provocations. And it offers the ongoing option to these adversaries of stepping up any given element of this “friction” campaign at will – or perhaps all of them at the same time – either in opportunistic ways for coercive bargaining or in support of (or preparation for) an actual military assault.

And that’s just what happens to stress our collective resilience in peacetime . From the Russians, for example, we already see a constant litany of provocations that includes cyber probes, airspace and maritime domain violations, the use of illegal chemical weapons on NATO soil , political subversion , and attempted assassination and sabotage operations in NATO countries.

In crisis or in war itself, however, we should expect any and all such pressures to accelerate massively – which leads me to another challenge to our resilience: full-scale attacks to cripple and cause cascading failures in Western critical infrastructure.

Infrastructure Attack in Crisis or Conflict

Whereas Western thinkers tend to think of deterrence as a situation in which things don’t happen – that is, in which an adversary chooses to remain passive because you have convinced him that aggression would be prohibitively costly – Russian literature sees what is loosely translatable as “strategic deterrence” in much more active terms. As the Israeli scholar Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky’s compellingly describes in his recent book The Russian Way of Deterrence , deterrence à la Russe sees strategic deterrence as “action itself,” consisting of ongoing, “concrete engagement of the competitor” and “signaling by actual engagement.”

The Russian concept of “strategic deterrence,” Dima writes, is a concept in which military writers there

“perceive strategic interaction holistically, as encapsulating a permanent dialectics between two coercive stratagems: ‘intimidation’ or ‘fear-inducement’ ( ustrashenie ), which refers to declaratory signaling and manifestations of resolve and capability, and ‘forceful deterrence’ ( silovoe sderzhivanie ), which refers to a [swelling crescendo] of limited use of force, on the battlefield or beyond, to coerce the adversary and shape his strategic behavior. Implicitly, both stratagems could and should be employed in tandem during peace time, the period of threat[,] and wartime.”

As I’ve already noted, this mindset clearly involves the creation of ongoing, disorienting operational “friction” even in peacetime. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in wartime, it also highly prizes the capability to inflict crippling – or at least disorienting and functionally disruptive – harm on the adversary at the earliest possible point. And there clearly is a strong emphasis in Russian thinking upon creating and maintaining the capacity to disable and degrade critical infrastructure, communications, and other adversary systems as early as one can.

One important recent conceptual innovation in Russian thinking is thus what has become known as “SODCIT” – an acronym for “Strategic Operation for the Destruction of Critically Important Targets.” SODCIT is part of how Russian strategists imagine being able to seize the advantage early in a conflict with the West, maximizing the Kremlin’s ability not just to successfully conduct operations against a disoriented enemy, but also, more broadly, to facilitate coercive bargaining and maximize chances of achieving war termination on terms favorable to Russian strategic goals. Significantly, this concept seems to include explicit efforts to inflict what is termed “deterrence damage,” not just by hitting military-industrial infrastructure, but also “ countervalue ” critical infrastructure such as civilian power stations, oil refineries, and fuel, water, and gas delivery systems in order to achieve psychological effects.

In open Russian literature, this concept revolves largely around concepts of mass strikes on critical targets at long range with precision-guided conventional missiles, but there is no reason to think that the concept does not – or would not, in certain circumstances – apply equally to nuclear weaponry and to non-kinetic tools such as cyber operations, counterspace weaponry, electronic warfare, sabotage and assassination, disruption of energy supply and undersea communications networks, and perhaps even the actual, small-scale use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weaponry.

With respect to cyberattacks upon both military and civilian critical infrastructure, for instance, we should expect that in a conflict, the Russians – and presumably also China, which has pursued similar technical and operational capabilities – will attack various forms of Western infrastructure and domestic capabilities. Nor is this hypothetical: as many experts and government officials have warned for years , both Russia and China have been methodically developing capabilities to this very purpose, and have been effectively trying to map and pre-position themselves in our networks to this end .

Nor would such attacks necessarily only occur during a conflict. They might actually represent the first move of such a conflict, being undertaken essentially preemptively, before peace has actually broken down. As the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment declared earlier this year about China, for example,

“If Beijing believed that a major conflict with the United States were imminent, it would consider aggressive cyber operations against U.S. critical infrastructure and military assets. Such a strike would be designed to deter U.S. military action by impeding U.S. decision making, inducing societal panic, and interfering with the deployment of U.S. forces.”

All of this, of course, presents us with very grave resilience challenges indeed, most emphatically including the likelihood of various forms of attack undertaken to create catastrophic cascading infrastructural failures, aiming to rattle and disorient Western societies and political leaders precisely when collective resolution is most needed, to disorient Western leaders, and to cripple governmental responses to Russian or Chinese aggression. If NATO is not taking such threats to resilience incredibly seriously, then shame on NATO.

In light of these threats, I’m especially glad to see the Alliance focusing so much more upon the resilience challenge. I suspect we still have some ways to go, but I hope that these comments about the range and severity of the adversary threat will help focus this meeting’s discussions still further.

Thank you.

-- Christopher Ford

Some Musings on Making Deterrence Policy

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 15:44:41 GMT

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered in a lecture on October 16, 2024, to a group of students at Purdue University.

Good day, everyone, and thanks for your kind invitation to talk.

I’ve been asked to speak – from a practitioner perspective, drawing upon my experience as a Senior Director at the National Security Council staff and in performing the duties of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security – about how deterrence policy is made, and I hope I can offer at least a little food for thought. (Remember, of course, that these are only my personal views, and that I speak here only for myself.)

But before exploring how U.S. deterrence policy is made, let’s start with the more basic question: “How does one find out what official U.S. policy actually is on deterrence in the first place?”

We live in a world, after all, in which there exist multiple important high-level U.S. national security guidance documents. We’ve got nuclear posture reviews, national defense strategies, and an array of unclassified and public national security strategy (NSS) documents. But since we don’t have a specific “nuclear deterrence review,” where does one go for an official statement of U.S. policy on deterrence?

In an important sense, the question of “where do you look for the official statement of deterrence policy” is conceptually antecedent to the question of how deterrence policy is set.

After all, as any good bureaucrat will likely tell you, at least part of understanding how policy is made is related to understanding who has the “power of the pen” in writing the first draft of the relevant official policy guidance document, whose approval is needed in the interagency clearance process, and whose final, high-level sign-off is ultimately needed for the document to be considered adopted. But to answer those questions, you need to know what document you’re actually talking about.

Where “Is” Deterrence Policy?

In recent years, the closest thing to a canonical “deterrence” document is usually the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) issued by each presidential administrat ion, though they tend to speak only to specifically nuclear weapons-related issues and U.S. officials – as we shall see – often speak much more broadly about deterrence elsewhere. And I’ll talk more in a few minutes about how such things get drawn up, at least based upon what happened in the Trump Administration with the 2018 NPR.

But there isn’t really a deterrence-specific policy guidance document in the sense of a clear articulation of how the U.S. Government thinks about deterrence as a concept – e.g., what it means, how exactly it works, what will (or won’t deter) specific adversaries, what its strengths and limitations are. NPRs – and indeed all national guidance documents – are very practical things, frequently relying upon assumptions in these respects, but seldom articulating them very directly. While such articulations hopefully reflect clear thinking about deterrence at the level of theory and doctrine, they seldom set such thinking out in clear form.

An unusual exception is Ronald Reagan’s National Security Strategy of January 1987 . There, for instance, it is stated that

“Deterrence can best be achieved if our defense posture makes the assessment of war outcome by the Soviets, or any other adversary, so dangerous and uncertain as to remove any possible incentive for initiating conflict. Deterrence depends both on nuclear and conventional capabilities, and on evidence of a strong will to use military force, if necessary, to defend our vital interests.

“… Nuclear deterrence, like any form of deterrence, requires us to consider not what would deter us, but what would deter the Soviets, whose perceptions of the world and value system are substantially different from our own. Since we can never be entirely certain of Soviet perceptions, it is of the utmost importance that the effectiveness of our strategic capabilities – and our will to use them, if necessary – never be in doubt.

“…[W ]e seek to deter an adversary with a very different strategic outlook from our own – an outlook which places great stress on nuclear warfighting capability. It is essential the Soviets understand that they cannot gain their objectives through nuclear warfare under any conceivable circumstances. To achieve this we must ensure that they clearly perceive that the United States has the capability to respond appropriately to any Soviet attempt to wage a nuclear war, and that we have the means to do this in ways which will defeat Soviet military objectives without necessarily triggering a massive nuclear exchange.” [pp.21-22]

For the most part, however, if you’re looking for an official statement of U.S. deterrent policy from a sort of theoretical and doctrinal perspective, you’re not likely to find such a thing. Our government produces policy guidance documents, not conceptual primers or theoretical exegeses. Moreover, such conceptual frameworks change much more slowly than the practical realities of the policy agenda, with the result that it is usually the case that administrations feel little need to spell out the conceptual underpinnings of the particular policy choices they are recommending.

To some extent, in fact, it may be that deterrence policy not really “made” by anybody in any comprehensive way at all, except in the aggregate. As you will doubtless have seen in your work, there are enough longstanding continuities over time in the U.S. approach that you might view each administration as not too much more than a steward and groundskeeper for deterrence.

Each presidency has the responsibility of maintaining the basic deterrent policy it has inherited from its predecessor-stewards. Administrations try to improve, modify, and shore up specific approaches as needed, but they generally improvise only within broad unwritten conceptual guidelines and understandings about how deterrence works that were established long ago, and which remain generally accepted as received wisdom and common sense in the present day.

The decades-long acquisition timetables and operational lifespans of our nuclear weapons and delivery systems, of course, also contribute to this dynamic. In a purely physical and programmatic sense, senior leaders lack the option of an entirely “Greenfields” approach of rethinking and redoing things from scratch, because it takes so long and costs so much to do anything significantly different or new. Here too, therefore, there’s a lot of path-dependency, and approaches change slowly.

There are, of course, always crucial questions and wrinkles that need to be addressed, and these are hardly minor details. To the contrary, they are absolutely critical, since whether deterrence works in the case of any given adversary at any given point in time depends upon the very specific circumstances with which you confront that adversary. (Deterrence is dynamic, not static, and if you’re not clearly active and engaged in the business of deterring that adversary, he might very well conclude that you’re asleep at the switch – which can mean deterrence failure.) Nevertheless, in the deepest sense, the basic insights, concepts, and assumptions of deterrence policy probably go back a long way and change comparatively little over time.

For this reason, and no doubt others, it is hardly surprising that nobody writes theses on deterrence theory in government guidance papers. Mostly, they just explai n the latest groundskeeping and stewardship strategy within those broad inherited parameters, leaning heavily upon a great many assumptions that aren’t usually articulated.

How Do We Think About Deterrence?

The Biden Administration ’s Nuclear Posture Review of October 2022 is the current document that talks most about deterrence, at least nuclear deterrence. But it’s worth noting that there appears to be a lot more about deterrence, as the Biden Administration sees things, than just nuclear weaponry – and indeed a lot more to deter than just warfare against us.

Whereas Reagan’s 1987 N SS talked almost exclusively about deterring Soviet military aggression, Joe Biden’s 2022 document has a long laundry-list of things tha t it says we must “deter” – up to and including “coercion in all its forms” [p.38 (emphasis added)]. This makes it harder to answer que stions about what our deterrence policy is, who develops it, and who implements it.

If deterrence means keeping all bad actors from doing all bad things, after all, and if every part of the government needs to be “seamlessly integrated” to this end, is anything not part of U.S. deterrence policy? And if such policy pervades everything, who is not involved in making or implementing it? (Moreover, one might even ask, do we actually have a real deterrence policy at all? As the saying goes, if everything is special, then nothing is special.)

But for our purposes today, let’s focus upon the traditional core of deterrence policy: deterring direct military attack on the United States, its allies, and its partners – and especially the role of nuclear weaponry in ensuring such deterrence. How is deterrence policy made there?

Preparing the 2017 National Security Strategy

I canno t speak to how the Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy and Nuclear Posture Review were put together, of course, but I can offer at least some insight into how things worked in the Trump Administration.

I had the good fortune to be involved in the process of crafting the Trump Administration’s NSS when I served on the National Security Council (NSC) staff. The head of the team that produced that document was a friend and colleague of mine, Nadia Schadlow , who had been brought onto the NSC staff for that very purpose.

In bureaucratic terms, at least, the process of actually putting together each administration’s NSS is actually relatively straightforward. NSS documents are each president’s opportunity to express a distinctive “take” on the world and on national security policy, providing a kind of “commander’s intent” signal to the rest of the bureaucracy to guide its various components as they build strategies and implementation plans in their own respective spheres of responsibility. These strategies generally aren’t too long on programmatic details, but they do very self-consciously signal priorities and set tone at the highest levels.

Drafting-wise, the interagency clearance process for NSS documents tends not to be as elaborate as for some other policy documents, primarily because they are the president’s own “signature” national security documents, the president doesn’t formally have to check with or clear such things with anybody else.

In the case of the 2017 NSS, I actually don’t know how much out-of-the-White-House clearance there was when Nadia ran the process. But I do know that the proxy interagency clearance process, as it were, of coordination among the various NSC subject-matter and regional directorates was, to my eye, comprehensive and effective.

Nadia’s small team of drafters was commendably engaged with me and my own directorate during the process, soliciting input and suggestions and clearly listening carefully to what we offered in response – including when I recommended adjustments in substance, tone, or phrasing. If the relationship between the other directorates and her team was anything like how they dealt with us, I’d say the process was a model of coordination across NSC subject-matter areas and experts.

That’s pretty good for a document that, in bureaucratic terms, could perfectly “legitimately” be drafted in secret by a small cabal and then forced upon the rest of us by the National Security Advisor. So kudos to Nadia, her team – and our boss H.R. McMaster – for steering that 2017 process so well. I can’t speak to what edits, if any, occurred as the document was sent “upstairs,” as it were, for President Trump’s final approval, but I don’t recall seeing any significant or problematic changes occurring in that process. It all seemed to work really well.

Preparing the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review

But the NSC is pretty small, and even the entire Executive Office of the President not a lot larger. The mechanism by which high-level policy guidance documents are developed is much more complicated when it comes to texts such as the National Defense Strategy and the NPR, which are Department of Defense (DoD)-led processes and involve a muchlarger cast of characters.

Since all organizations are made up of humans, however, there often tends to be one person or two people who play unusually large roles in the drafting process even for those larger undertakings. This was the case, for instance, with Robert Soofer and Greg Weaver for the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, Elbridge (“Bridge”) Colby for the 2018 National Defense Strategy, and John Rood for the 2019 Missile Defense Review. (Keith Payne is similarly remembered in connection with President George W. Bush’s 2002 NPR, as is Brad Roberts with President Obama’s NPR in 2010.) There are many, many people involved in producing such documents, but a few procedurally central players generally have critical roles.

I myself contributed only in pretty modest ways to the 2018 NPR, primarily through attending a number of working group meetings at the Pentagon on various issues being considered as its drafting progressed. Perhaps my most dramatic personal involvement, however, came near the end, when as a backbencher at an NSC “Principals Committee” (PC) meeting I managed to get into a pretty intense – though thankfully not heated – discussion with Secretary of Defense James Mattis over some of the fine details of U.S. nuclear weapons declaratory policy vis-à-vis the so-called “negative security assurance” offered in the NPR.

From my spot at the NSC, I had been advocating for a particular approach against DoD resistance for some weeks, and at this final meeting, Mattis and I basically debated the issue in front of everybody. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Secretary of Defense proved more influential among his colleagues at the PC than did I, and the group duly opted against my suggestion. Like the true gentleman he is, however, Mattis came up to me afterwards and graciously thanked me for my input.

If I’m going to offer you a useful peek into some of how deterrence policy is made, however, you deserve a more detailed account of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review than just that anecdote about me arguing with a man who’s now a colleague of mine at the Hoover Institution. So thanks to some invaluable input from my former colleague Rob Soofer – himself, as I mentioned, one of two lead Pentagon officials shepherding that NPR through the process, along with Greg Weaver – I’ll offer you as complete an account of the process as I can.

In 2017, as people geared up to begin drafting the 2018 NPR, it was felt that there were two basic possible approaches that could be taken:

to draft the document in a small group and seek thereafter to build support for the document; or
to draft it through a large and comparatively inclusive process, presumably facing correspondingly easier approvals thereafter.

It was decided to take the second path. Although involving a couple of dozen different institutional stakeholders would certainly make the drafting process bureaucratically challenging, the stakeholder “buy-in” that could be created by such early inclusiveness would aid not just in getting final interagency approvals but also in the document’s subsequent actual implementation in practice.

And that was an important decision. Policymakers, and especially political appointees who come into government from the outside, often feel that they’ve “finished” when they have issued an important new guidance document. This, however, overlooks the challenges of actually implementing new approaches in practice and over time.

Many an ambitious administration has fallen down in actually implementing its policy priorities, and not because there’s some hostile “Deep State” always there advancing its own agenda against Republican and Democrat administrations alike. For the most part, it’s really just that implementing policy and being responsible for real-world outcomes in a complex system with a huge number of moving parts – and across a bewilderingly broad range of equities that exist to a great degree in tension with each other – is inherently just bloody hard. Appointees with bureaucratic experience in government understand this better than pure political loyalists without such background, and to their credit, U.S. leaders during the 2018 NPR process were deeply experienced, and took implementation equities very much into account from the outset.

So in the circumstances of 2017, at least, I think it made sense to “go big” early in terms of bureaucratic participation. That initial breadth of stakeholder inclusiveness certainly made the drafting process quite elaborate, of course. The process involved institutional participants from various portions of the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other parts of the military establishment, but also stakeholders such as the NSC, the State Department, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the White House.

There had been some very high-level guidance from the White House itself, which encouraged the drafters to focus on great power competition issues – as indeed presaged by the 2017 NSS itself, which was then in the process of being assembled. Getting this kind of broad advance input from the White House on general themes is common with big guidance document efforts such as the Nuclear Posture Review, but it was sensibly left to those with more direct knowledge and expertise to make recommendations on the NPR details.

Accordingly, a great many expert offices were soon at work, through an organizational process that proceeded from a series of threat analyses to an assessment of strategic needs, and then to an evaluation of the forces needed in order to implement those requirements. At every major juncture point, tentative results would be taken for “socialization” and quality control to a Senior Steering Group (SSG) chaired at the Pentagon at the Assistant Secretary level – which was now I myself first got involved, for I was NSC Senior Director for WMD and Counterproliferation at the time.

Each time the SSG approved a key element of the NPR, it was taken first to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (USD/P) and the Joint Chiefs, and thereafter circulated to the White House and to NSC Deputies’ Committee (DC) and PC meetings for approval. (Interestingly, Secretary Mattis himself also created a sort of bipartisan “greybeard” oversight panel of former senior leaders, then out of government, from which he elicited feedback in some particulars.) By the time Mattis took the completed draft to President Trump, it had been seen by and socialized with a great many stakeholders multiple times – in various pieces corresponding, as I noted, to “threat,” “strategy,” and “forces.”

This coordination process seemed to go quite well, and getting the whole thing approved in the interagency and then by the White House seemed, as far as I could tell from my spot at the NSC, remarkably straightforward. Given that the 2018 NPR called for the addition of two new nuclear systems to the U.S. arsenal in order to make up for gaps vis-à-vis Russia and China in “theater”-type forces – and that it expanded President Obama’s caveat in U.S. declaratory policy about the applicability of nuclear deterrence vis-à-vis biological warfare (BW) alone to cover any “significant non-nuclear strategic attack” – this ease of approval might seem surprising.

My own “ nuclear vision review ” of disarmament policy at the NSC had also made clear, however, the wind had by then quite left the sails of President Obama’s ambitious – if perhaps naïve – policy of seeking to “lead” the world toward nuclear weapons abolition. By the time we were working on the NPR in 2017, we knew Russia had been in violation of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty for years, and that the Kremlin had never complied with its promises from the early 1990s to reduce its shorter-range nuclear forces. We also knew that Russia was building a whole new range of “exotic” and disturbing strategic weaponry – though Vladimir Putin didn’t announce that publicly until March of 2018 , the same month his hit squad tried to kill a British citizen on British soil with chemical weaponry – and that China’s military and nuclear modernization continued apace.

(Interestingly, at that time we didn’t yet know that China would be hugely expanding its intercontinental ballistic missile forces toward what looks now to be at least parity with the United States at “ about 1500 warheads ” by 2035. We would have been more forward-leaning still had that skyrocketing threat been understood in 2017, and it’s very problematic that the Biden Administration – which by 2022 did know about this massive Chinese build-up – nonetheless chose to lean backward rather than forward in its own NPR.)

But even in 2017, we it was also clear that wars of territorial aggression had returned to Europe with Vladimir Putin’s attack on Georgia in 2008 and invasion of the Ukrainian territories of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. It was also clear that Chinese threats against Taiwan and in the South China Sea were rapidly increasing.

The nuclear disarmament-friendly themes of Obama’s famous “ Prague Speech ” of April 2009 had thus gotten us, in the most charitable interpretation, precisely nothing in terms of improvements in adversary behavior. If anything, our adversaries saw Obama’s disarmament push as creating a greater incentive to increase their nuclear capabilities, concluding that America wanted them to eliminate nuclear arms so that we could rely more successfully on conventional power against them. (It also may have signaled to them that Americans were particularly afraid of nuclear weapons and uneasy about relying on nuclear deterrence, thereby giving Russia, China, North Korea, and even Iran more reason to confront us with nuclear saber-rattling as an instrument of coercive bargaining. We are thus perhaps reaping what Obama sowed today.)

With all of us knowing this backstory as we worked on the 2018 NPR – and understanding that the forthcoming 2017 National Security Strategy would quite correctly focus upon great power competition above all other security threats – the U.S. interagency process for the 2018 NPR was impressively non-adversarial and straightforward.

If anything, the toughest decision-making in the Pentagon on these topics – as I understand things, at least – was not on strategy or policy requirements but simply budgetary. Could we afford to pay for a new submarine-launched missile to replace the older variant that President Obama had unwisely scrapped in 2010? And what would the impact of our choices be on resourcing for other programs such as ongoing life-extension programs (LEPs) for U.S. weapons? These budgetary questions were ultimately answered, of course, but on what the necessary strategic choices actually should be in terms of deterrence policy and nuclear posture, all the important players thankfully seemed to agree throughout the process.

Conclusion

So that’s about as good an account of the 2018 NPR process as I can give, and – as noted – I’m grateful to Rob Soofer for helping me with various details I myself would otherwise have missed.

I hope I’ve made clear that in the broadest sense, I don’t really think deterrence policy is actually usually “set” in a crisp and straightforward way. Instead, the conceptual assumptions and analytical foundations upon which it rests remain in some ways more inherited and assumed than directly explored and clearly expressed.

Nevertheless, when it comes to the most relevant institutional articulations of what we are doing to ensure deterrence, the government is capable of organizing itself fairly effectively to build and articulate policy responses to an evolving threat environment. I hope I’ve offered you a useful case study example of how this worked for us in 2017.

— Christopher Ford

Security, Proliferation, and Preserving Sovereign Independence in the Indo-Pacific

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:52:26 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to the dialogue on the U.S.-Vietnam Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in Hanoi, Vietnam, on September 12, 2024, sponsored by the Pacific Forum and the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam.

Good afternoon. It’s a great pleasure to be a part of this dialogue. This is the first time I’ve been to Hanoi since I left government service, and it’s a great pleasure to be back.

When I last participated in a Pacific Forum dialogue with Vietnam, it was back in May of 2021, and – due to the pandemic – we had to keep it a “virtual” engagement, conducted over Zoom. In my remarks to that event, I focused on the great potential that exists for U.S.-Vietnam cooperation in civil-nuclear energy production under the so-called “ 123 Agreement ” signed between the United States and Vietnam in 2014.

From press reports, I understand Vietnam may be restarting its nuclear power efforts after an earlier 2016 decision suspending nuclear power development plans, and that Russia continues to urge Vietnam to purchase Russian reactors. You won’t be surprised to hear that I still think that entanglement with Russia’s nuclear industry would be an unwise, even dangerous decision – hardly less wise than Vietnam allowing Chinato gain such a foothold here.

But there are good reasons for Vietnam to continue on the path of becoming the first country in Southeast Asia with nuclear power generation , and I believe there is excellent potential for the United States and Vietnam to make such cooperation part of our new, upgraded “ Comprehensive Strategic Partnership .” Especially now that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has certified the first of a number of new designs for Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), I think this is a rich arena for cooperation.

Turning to this panel’s topic of preventing nuclear weapons proliferation, I believe there is much we can do to fight proliferation together – not least in areas such as:

cooperation to improve strategic trade controls;
working together to promote International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards best practices, including the Additional Protocol (AP), in the region and more broadly;
improving cooperation in enforcing United Nations proliferation sanctions;
improving cooperation in interdicting proliferation-facilitating transfers in and through Southeast Asia; and
improving the safety and security of nuclear materials and radiological sources in the region.

On the subject of preventing nuclear proliferation, however, what I’d like to focus on in my own remarks here this afternoon is the ways in which nonproliferation is tied to – and in some ways depends quite crucially upon – regional security. People often emphasize the ways in which proliferation can produce problems in regional security and stability, and that’s quite understandable.

What I would also like to flag, however, is the fact that this is a two-way relationship. Specifically, it is also the case that the failure to address problems in regional security can lead to nuclear weapons proliferation.

The Challenge of “Legitimate” Proliferation

Nuclear weapons proliferation, after all, isn’t something that just happens, like bad weather or earthquakes. It’s a path that national leaders choose.

Sometimes countries choose the path of proliferation for discreditable reasons. This could include a dictator’s paranoia and desire for global status (as with North Korea) or the ambitions of a vicious theocratic regime to achieve regional hegemony by overawing and coercing its non-nuclear-armed neighbors (as with Iran).

But though it may be unfashionable to make this observation, it is also possible to choose the path of proliferation – and indeed potentially even to use nuclear weapons – for legitimate reasons – such as in “ an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake ,” as the International Court of Justice put it in 1996.

One thus cannot have an honest discussion about either disarmament or proliferation without acknowledging the fact that, in principle, a state might indeed come to face threats great enough that they indeed justifynuclear proliferation.

That certainly doesn’t mean that nuclear proliferation is a good thing. To the contrary, as I have warned for many years, in most cases it is likely to be profoundly destabilizing. After all, in relationships in which countries face each other with nuclear weapons, the number of potential axes along which nuclear deterrence might break down will tend to increase rapidly, all other things being equal, as the number of players increases.

If there are only two states with nuclear weapons, for instance, there is only one “nuclear axis” that could – potentially – break down into a nuclear war. But in a three-player game there are three axes, and in a four-player game there are six. The number of axes subject to possible breakdown increases faster than the number of additional players.

Not all such nuclear axes are equally problematic, of course. Nobody worries – nor should worry – about nuclear war between the United States and Britain, after all, or France. But the global nonproliferation regime is based upon the very reasonable idea that more axes generally means more danger of nuclear wear.

This helps illustrate, for instance, why the bargain encoded in Article II of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) – in which non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS) promise not to acquire nuclear weapons – is so important to international peace and security. But I’m not referring to some sort of nonproliferation-for-disarmament “bargain” of the sort that some activists claim to exist in the NPT despite all the evidence to the contrary both in its express language and the legislative history of its negotiation . Rather, I am referring to the crucial way in which, in Article II, the NNWS exchange legally-binding and reciprocal security assurances with each other that each will not imperil the national security of its neighbor by developing nuclear weapons.

This “Article II bargain” of reciprocal promises of non-weaponization among the world’s non-possessors may well be the most important single element of the NPT. As noted, as a general matter, keeping the number of nuclear “players” as small as possible is very much in the interest of all.

Nevertheless, implied in this understanding – not to mention flagged in the express language of the NPT itself, which permits a country to withdraw if “ extraordinary events … have jeopardized the supreme interests of [that] country ” – is the idea that it is at least possible that proliferation could be justified, in extremis, as a response to sufficiently grave security threats.

Deterring Regional Threats as a Nonproliferation Tool

So you can see why international security cooperation to deter regional aggression is so important. It is important on its own terms, of course, because deterring aggression is inherently a good thing. But it is also important from the perspective of reducing proliferation incentives and thereby lessening the risk of nuclear war.

The more threat there is of aggression that cannot effectively be met by other means, the more incentives vulnerable countries may feel to engage in nuclear proliferation.

This is why, as I have argued for years, the United States’ alliance networks have long been the world’s most effective nonproliferation tools . Those alliance networks – and indeed, security cooperation efforts in the face of regional threats more generally – help reduce the degree to which our friends might otherwise feel that they face existential threats from great power predators, and hence also reduce the incentive for potential victim states to try to protect themselves with nuclear weaponry.

Over the years, in fact, security relationships with America have helped make unnecessary – and thus lead to the abandonment – of nuclear weapons programs in a remarkable number of countries. In East Asia alone, for example, both South Korea and Taiwan at one point had nuclear weapons programs, threatened as they were by North Korea and China. Both, however, were persuaded to end those programs through a combination of U.S. pressure and American efforts to help them meet their security needs without such a step. (As the Taiwan example shows, moreover, it isn’t even necessary to be a formal U.S. ally in order to take advantage of American help in meeting core security needs.)

To be sure, the growing threats presented both by North Korea’s expanding nuclear weapons and missile program and the enormous expansion of China’s conventional and nuclear capabilities has been making it ever more difficult to provide such proliferation-obviating reassurance. It’s not unimaginable, therefore, that at some point threats from China and North Korea could rise to the point where American leaders could not in good conscience continue to tell counterparts in Seoul or Tokyo that they do not need nuclear weapons.

It has been U.S. policy for decades to do everything we can to ensure that such a tipping point is never passed, but the connection between inadequate security cooperation and proliferation risk is quite clear. Nonproliferation is vitally important, after all, but it is not an altar on which one should ask a friend to sacrifice its existence as a sovereign nation.

That is yet another reason why ensuring adequate security cooperation is so important.

A “Latticework” to Deter Aggression and Prevent Proliferation

To that end, it’s clearly imperative to stability and security in the Indo-Pacific region that we do everything we can to endure that things not continue to progress in the direction they’ve been going for some time now. Without adequate responses to the challenges and threats presented by China’s efforts at neo-imperialist hegemony in the region, East Asia could at some point in the years ahead have to confront not just an even more powerful and aggressive China, but also – and, in fact, for that reason – the return of nuclear weapons proliferation to this area of the world.

To prevent this, a broad and varied response is needed. This includes maintaining and strengthening existing formal security arrangements – as the United States is now doing with longstanding allies such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

But in order to be successful, much of the region’s response, will also need to involve much broader and more informal sorts of cooperation and collaboration, far short of such formal alliances. I’ve called this approach to creating a diverse, cross-cutting, multi-faceted relational network a “ latticework ” approach to regional security, and the Biden Administration has used this phrasing as well.

A latticework approach includes working to improve regional security cooperation, but by no means solely on a hub-and-spoke basis with a single large country such as the United States. Crucially, it also involves building stronger cross-cutting ties between smaller players, and not just in the security arena but in a variety of ways.

In this sense it is quite the opposite of the bilateral, entangling, asymmetric, and manipulative relationships that China builds with smaller states through mechanisms such as its Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure projects. By contrast, a latticework of Indo-Pacific cooperation would also be full of cross-cutting, multi-sectoral connections and partnerships that also operate laterally, between smaller countries, tying the diverse peoples of the region together in ways that are not so bilaterally asymmetric and making the region stronger and more resilient in the face of any effort to curtail the autonomy of the sovereign peoples therein.

The Nonproliferation Value of the U.S.-Vietnam CSP

It is in this context of the need to meet growing threats to the sovereignty and independence of all the countries of the Indo-Pacific – and correspondingly increasing proliferation risks – that I think the new U.S.-Vietnam “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” (CSP) is so important. Friendly cooperation to help ensure that no great power is able to upset things in East Asia and make a play for regional hegemony is essential in three distinct ways: (1) it is essential to regional stability; (2) it is essential to reducing the risk of nuclear proliferation and nuclear conflict; and (3) it is essential to preserving the sovereignty and independence of all the states here.

That is why I’ve been so pleased at the way the United States and Vietnam have been improving their security ties. This includes the more than $185 million in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) aid the U.S. government has provided since Fiscal Year 2017 to support maritime security and domain awareness capacity building in Vietnam, and Hanoi’s effort to maintain its rights and freedoms under the international law of the sea. America has also made available millions of dollars to Vietnam in Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) and Foreign Military Sales (FMS) support .

Through such efforts, we’ve now already seen the transfer of refurbished U.S. Coast Guard cutter vessels , T-6 trainer aircraft , and maritime patrol boats to Vietnam. Vietnam also participated for the first time in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise in 2018, and hosted U.S. aircraft carrier visits in 2018 , 2020 , 2023, and 2024 . The U.S. Department of Defense has made clear that it remains firmly committed to helping Vietnam build up its maritime domain awareness capabilities and help counter Chinese harassment in the South China Sea and to address various other problems such as illegal fishing, and that’s a very good thing indeed.

I fully recognize that Vietnam has no desire for any kind of formal “alliance” with my country. Hanoi seems to continue to prize a carefully calibrated approach to managing relations with both China and the United States, using what I have heard called a sort of “ bamboo diplomacy ” of bending as the winds shift while remaining firmly rooted in place.

Vietnam’s policy of “Three Nos” – that is not aligning with one country against another, not joining any military alliances, and not hosting foreign military bases on Vietnamese territory – clearly remains solidly in place, and in the Washington policy community we certainly understand Hanoi’s continuing commitment to this policy.

But we also appreciate that Vietnam – in a new, fourth “No” dating from its December 2019 Defense White Paper – also rejects “using force or threatening to use force in international relations.” To these “Four Nos,” moreover, Vietnam has also added a caveat that

“depending on circumstances and specific conditions, Vietnam will consider developing necessary, appropriate defense and military relations with other countries on the basis of respecting each other’s independence, sovereignty, territorial unity, and integrity.”

This is a commendable position, especially given China’s undiminished ambitions in this area of the world. Vietnam’s policy of “ Four Nos and One Depend ,” clearly offers important opportunities for us to continue to improve our security relationships without having to talk about things that Vietnam clearly rules out, such as alliances or bases.

It is also very clear that even though our governments do not see eye to eye on issues of politics and political philosophy such as domestic governance and human rights , we share a powerful interest in making sure that all the countries of this region are able to protect their independence, sovereignty, territorial unity, and integrity in the face of China’s rising power.

Vietnam obviously has an acute appreciation for the geopolitical risks of falling once more under China’s thumb. China’s desire to dominate Vietnam – not just historically, but in modern times – has been prodigious, including not just its war of aggression against Vietnam in 1979 , but also the Johnson Reef massacre of 1988, when Chinese forces machine-gunned Vietnamese sailors in the water and sunk a transport ship in the Spratly Islands.

As Vietnam certainly knows better than anyone, Beijing doesn’t give up its dreams of regional hegemony lightly. China is quite practiced – as Deng Xiaoping put it in his famous 24-character maxim – at “ biding its time .” Vietnam knows that China’s ancient hegemonic regional ambitions remain undiminished, and Hanoi has showed great firmness in the face of Chinese territorial self-aggrandizement, such as by forcing Beijing to back down after China sent the oil rig Haiyang Shiyou 981 to undertake oil exploration in Vietnam’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in 2014.

Threats from China in this region are far from over, and indeed seem to accelerating. This is suggested, for instance, by Beijing’s construction of a fourth aircraft carrier . My former colleagues in the U.S. Navy are likely worried about a number of ways in which China is expanding its military power – including its nuclear arsenal – but to my knowledge, China’s aircraft carriers aren’t a huge concern for the U.S. Navy. Instead, those carriers are more likely intended to threaten you here in Vietnam, and others like you in the region. They are ideally suited for imperialist gunboat diplomacy to threaten and to cow China’s regional neighbors.

I also note that in October 2023, Xi Jinping told Vietnam’s president that he should not forget “ the original intention of their traditional friendship ." Far be it from me to discern precisely what is in Xi’s head. However, if I were told by the leader of a country that had colonized my country and ruled my people for a thousand years before we first gained our independence, such a statement about returning to the “original intention” of our historical relationship would make me distinctly uncomfortable! Vietnam clearly still has many challenges ahead as its ambitious neighbor continues to flex its muscles on the international stage.

But this just underlines my earlier point. When it comes to the fundamentally anti-imperialist project of preserving the independence, sovereignty, territorial unity, and integrity of the countries of the Indo-Pacific in the face of China’s ever-growing military power and belligerence , Vietnam and the United States have excellent reasons to be very strong partners indeed.

Vietnam is a country that over its long history has fought for its independence from China under the Trung sisters, kicked out the imperialist overlords of the T’ang Dynasty, repulsed the armies of the Yuan Dynasty, and also fought off the PRC’s invasion in 1979. (We Americans also obviously understand how fiercely and successfully you fought in kicking first the French and then us out of South Vietnam too.) Vietnam is a country that knows how to insist upon its sovereignty and independence in a complex and challenging world.

Conclusion

Looking to the future, I very much hope that the United States and Vietnam will be able to continue to expand our collaboration on regional security issues under the new Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. The more we are able to work together to ensure that China never has the chance to establish hegemonic relationships over the independent sovereign peoples of this region, moreover, the more our security cooperation will also serve the cause of nonproliferation. That, I submit, is a genuinely win-win situation we can all believe in!

Thank you.

—Christopher Ford

Russia, China, and the Challenges of Asymmetry in Nuclear Ethics

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 03:01:29 GMT

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his oral remarks on September 6, 2024, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the Forum on Nuclear Strategy sponsored by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Advance Catholic Studies (IACS) and the University of New Mexico, entitled “Disarmament & Deterrence in a Dangerous World.”

Good afternoon, and thank you for the chance to speak to such an illustrious group today.

From where I sit, it has been both valuable and stimulating to have the chance to listen to our participants here today offer such erudite comments on nuclear weapons ethics from the perspective of the Catholic Church. I myself, of course, am no Catholic theologian – nor even a Catholic at all. As some of you may know, I am in fact a Buddhist, and indeed a lay chaplain trained just up the road from here in Santa Fe a number of years ago.

For what it’s worth, my instinct is that in terms of Christian thinking on these particular issues – and with apologies to the Cardinal and Archbishops sitting across from me here at the table – we can probably learn more that is of use in the world today from St. Augustine and Pope John Paul II than we can from Pope Francis .

To my eye, deterring war, especially nuclear war, is a profoundly moral undertaking, nothing less than a moral imperative. And if nuclear weapons help us do that in the present strategic environment – which I believe they do – then I’m all in, and make no apologies about it. In fact, when it comes to dealing with nuclear-armed revisionist great power predators, forswearing the tools needed to continue deterring aggression would strike me as being rather immoral.

But my own views on the morality of nuclear deterrence – which in any case won’t surprise you – aren’t the main point of what I would like to discuss here this afternoon. For this panel, I’d like to take a slightly different approach, and remind you that as we debate these matters within the Western intellectual and theological tradition, we are not the only players who matter.

If we wish to fulfil the moral imperative of deterring aggression – especially nuclear-armed aggression – we also need to understand how our strategic adversaries think about nuclear weapons, as well as how they think about nuclear weapons ethics.

So with the caveat, of course, that these are only my personal views, let me offer just a few musings about Russian and Chinese thinking about nuclear weapons ethics.

I don’t claim to have magical insight here, and part of my point is that it is very hard to know their real views. In neither country do they usually discuss such things openly as we Westerners do, and in both cases the ruling regime exercises ferocious and heavy-handed authoritarian control over the national information space, making it challenging – if not often impossible – to distinguish between genuine views and government propaganda.

That said, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on why I suspect that Russian and Chinese thinking on these issues might be very different from – and perhaps not even remotely consonant with – the kinds of things said at conferences like this one in Western settings.

The Orthodox Nuclear Fetish

With regard to Russia, I would recommend that you start by reading a 2019 book by my friend, the Israeli scholar Dmitry Adamsky , entitled Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy . In it, Dima recounts in some detail the multiple ways in which the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has been, in effect, co-opted by the Putin regime into playing the role of state-sponsored sanctifier and “cheerleader” for Russia’s nuclear weaponry and its weapons establishment.

(Frankly, it must be noted that the ROC has become so morally unbalanced and corrupted that it now acts as a full-spectrum cheerleader for all Putin’s brutality and aggression both at home and abroad – from expeditionary warfare in Syria to aggression in Ukraine , and from crackdowns on domestic dissent to what is said to be “ Holy War” against the West in general. That said, I’ll only be talking about nuclear weapons issues here.)

Dima calls this ROC nuclear cheerleading the “theocratization of the nuclear complex,” and he recounts some remarkable details. Russia’s nuclear weapons industry, its strategic missile forces, its long-range nuclear bombers, its ballistic missile submarine fleet, and its nuclear high command have all now been provided with their own official patron saints by the Russian Orthodox Church. Individual nuclear bombers are often consecrated with an ROC rite specially developed for this purpose, and an Orthodox monk is apparently even permanently assigned to the Russian nuclear test site at Novaya Zemlya.

Russian Orthodox Church officials such as Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, moreover, have stressed what they describe as “the vitally important role” of nuclear weapons in “preserving an independent and united Russia” and helping Russia combat the “spiritual and psychological violence” represented by Western liberal ideology and its associated hedonistic cultural values. Kirill himself praises Russia’s nuclear weaponry because through it, he says, “our country has preserved great power status.” Upon the 50th anniversary of the first Soviet nuclear weapons test, in fact, the ROC Archbishop of Nizhni Novgorod praised “the nuclear shield, which stopped the aggressive aspirations of the Fatherland’s adversaries” and – he said – had enabled Russia to save the world.

As I understand it, Dima is presently working on a deeper study of what might be the emergence in the Russian Orthodox world of some loose analogue to the Catholic Church’s Just War theory. I don’t know what he’ll conclude, of course, but I suspect it’s safe to say that given the co-opted ROC’s mutually-parasitic relationship with the Putin regime, such ROC theorizing won’t involve the careful and conscientious, even agonized, ethical reticence that characterizes Western nuclear ethics debates.

Ilyinist Ideology and the Putin Regime

To my eye, if you’d like a bit of a taste for what official Russian Orthodox Church morality on issues of the use of force and violence may look like in the age of the shamefully Putin-co-opted ROC, you could do worse than to turn to an old White Russian émigré writer from the early 20 ^th Century named Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin (1883-1954).

I haven’t chosen to discuss Ivan Ilyin lightly. I have not cherry-picked a crotchety White Russian extremist in order to make Russia’s modern spiritualized politics sound grotesque and frightening. Ilyin is actually widely read in Russia today, and is apparently a great personal favorite of Vladimir Putin himself – who has sent copies of Ilyin’s work to Russian government officials , urging them to read it, and who has quoted from Ilyin in several presidential addresses. (Putin also personally played a role in returning Ilyin’s remains to Russia for reburial in the Donskoi monastery in Moscow , making the man almost a kind of national saint.)

Ilyin, in fact, has been described by one historian as the writer “ most often cited as the ‘key’ to Putin’s ideology .” As Laqueur puts it,

“Putin and his colleagues believe that the long search for new doctrine has ended and that in Ilyin they have found the prophet to present their much-needed new ideology.”

According to Russia’s minster of regional development, “[t]he demand for his ideas in today’s Russia is so strong that sometimes there is a feeling that Ivan Ilyn is our contemporary.”

Given this degree of the Putin regime’s approval of the man’s work, therefore, I think it’s worth knowing who Ivan Ilyin was and what he believed.

The answer to this question isn’t very pleasing. Ilyin was essentially a Russian Orthodox fascist. Ilyin openly admired European fascism, though he much preferred the quasi-Christianized versions professed by Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal to the more racialized and paganized German and Italian flavors. He even worked for a time in Germany – in Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, no less! – though they fired him in 1934, perhaps in part for that reason. All in all, as Walter Laqueur has noted, Ivan Ilyin “considered Nazism a positive phenomenon that with some modifications and adjustments could serve as a model for the future of Russia.”

Anyway, Ilyin wrote many things in his years of angry exile after the Bolshevik coup of 1917, but to give you a flavor for the man’s thinking, I’ll draw here primarily upon his 1925 book, On Resistance to Evil by Force . I won’t bore you with all the details, but the key point – for present purposes – is that there is nothing in Ilyin that looks, sounds, or feels anything at all like the kind of anguished moral self-interrogation that is so characteristic of Western debates on nuclear ethics.

For Ivan Ilyin, who absolutely despised the pacifism of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, the reality of the human world was “the black abyss of history and the human heart,” which constituted “the tragic burden of the universe.” To combat this blackness, he idealized what he called the “Orthodox knightly tradition” of “Russian warriors of Christian favour,” and he was all but fixated upon the duty – as he saw it – of such steely-eyed men to fight evil, ungodliness, and spiritual corruption.

For Ilyin, “[a] person who does not observe spiritual hygiene is a hotbed of universal, societal contamination,” and suppressing such vermin was an Orthodox Christian’s moral duty. Not for Ivan Ilyin did Christian ethics require turning the other cheek. In his view,

“[s]piritual love knows that … every man must earn and justify his right to life, that there are people who are better off not having been born, and there are others who are better off being killed than allowed to do evil. … Calling on us to love our enemies, Christ meant the personal enemies of a man himself …. Christ never called us to love the enemies of God, to bless those who hate and trample upon all that is Divine, to assist blasphemous seducers, to kindly sympathise with the obsessive molesters of souls .… The teaching of the Apostles and Fathers of the Church, of course, advanced a completely different understanding.”

Ilyin made this theological point repeatedly, also noting in his 1937 book Foundations of Christian Culture that “Christ nowhere condemned the sword – not the sword of government, nor the sword of the military.”

Ilyin’s conceptual and spiritual model here was thus not the Sermon on the Mount, but rather Jesus throwing the moneylenders out of the Temple:

“In one great and terrible historical moment, the act of divine love, in the guise of wrath and scourge, drove out a sacrilegious crowd from the temple. This act was and will always be the greatest prototype and justification for all spiritually and meaningfully justified manifestations of negative love.”

Ilyin was also rather flexible about the means it was permissible to use in administering such “negative love” to suppress evil and spiritual corruption. He believed that if you were spiritually pure – naturally, in a Russian Orthodox sense – you were justified in using “unrighteous” means for a proper spiritual end. The Orthodox warrior must be willing to “transgress the limits of his moral righteousness,” as Ilyin put it, in service of a higher good. In a fallen world in which Orthodoxy was assailed by evil and corruption, the virtuous man can be, he wrote, “forced to unrighteousness … and accepting this unrighteousness, he is required” to see things through.

“The compromise of the sword-bearer is that he consciously and voluntarily accepts through his will the morally unrighteous outcome as a spiritual necessity; and if every deviation from moral perfection is unrighteousness, then he takes upon himself unrighteousness; and if every conscious, voluntary assumption of unrighteousness by the will creates guilt, then he accepts the guilt of his decision. … He takes up not only the burden of death, but also the burden of killing, and in the burden of killing not only the pain of the act itself, but also the burden of decision, responsibility[,] and perhaps guilt. His spiritual destiny leads him to the sword, he accepts it, and the sword becomes his destiny, and in this outcome, in this heroic resolution to the central tragic dilemma, he is not righteous, but he is right.”

Using the sword for such purposes with a pure spiritual heart “is neither a fall, nor an offense, nor a sin.” Accordingly, Ilyin felt, “a true struggle against evil can and should be conducted precisely in combining spiritual compromise with religious/moral cleansing. It is the process of purification,” and the strong, virtuous warrior bears “the burden of spiritual compromise, the burden of descending to the grave, violent and cunning means of struggle.”

“The warrior is the bearer of the sword, and his world-embracing compromise necessitates a monk as a confessor, a source of living purity, religious wisdom, a moral pleroma [i.e., the fullness of the Godhead as it dwells in Christ]: here he receives grace in the sacrament and receives strength for his actions, here he steels his conscience, confirms the purpose of his service and cleanses his soul. And his sword itself becomes a fiery prayer.”

For Ilyin, moreover, human suffering was not something to be avoided, but rather something almost to be gloried in – at least in pursuit of the righteous cause of destroying evil. It is in suffering, we wrote, “that the soul deepens, grows stronger, and begins to truly see. … Therefore, the vital wisdom consists not in escaping from suffering as from imaginary evil, but in accepting it as a gift and a pledge, in utilising it and wading through it.”

The spiritually righteous man will thus “find in himself the determination and strength to cause suffering to himself and his neighbor in the cause of a higher spiritual need.” Ilyin viewed the many traumas and tribulations of Russia’s 20 ^th Century history as actually having redemptive value, for they

“sweep[] over our souls like a searing and purifying fire. … [I]n this fire our religious and public ministry is renewed, our spiritual pupils are opened, our love and will are tempered. And through this the first thing that will revive within us is the religious and state wisdom of Eastern Orthodoxy and especially Russian Orthodoxy.”

Here we see what might be described as almost a cult of self-exonerating warrior-militancy that exults in the nobility of suffering in an eternal Holy War against evil and spiritual corruption. This is a tradition that surfaces repeatedly in Russian politics, religiosity, and culture. One sees aspects of it, for instance, from the conviction of Ivan IV (“The Terrible”) that he was, in the words of British historian Orlando Figes , “a sword-bearing archangel, an agent sent by God to protect the Orthodox and purge the world of infidels and sinners before the Apocalypse,” all the way up to Vladimir Putin’s much more recent fulminations about the need to resist “Satanic” Western forces of spiritual pollution that threatened Russia’s “traditional values.”

Such glorifications of spiritual conflict and worldly suffering may even trace their roots all the way back to the semi-mythical Boris and Gleb, the first saints of the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian tradition, after all, presents them (e.g., in the 12 ^th -Century Primary Chronicle) as noble “passion-sufferers” (strastoterptsy) who had – as Figes recounts – “willingly laid down their lives for the salvation of the Russian land” and whose sacrifice forced “a covenant between God and the newly baptized Rus, a new Terra Sancta, which was thus endowed with special grace.” In the traditions of such thinking, Ivan Ilyin’s writings do not seem so outlandish.

At any rate, Ilyin clearly had no fear of the horror and destruction of warfare. He even noted pointedly that “the best, bravest[,] and most heroic men die in war, while the sneaky and cunning survive it.” The suffering caused by war was apparently not to be feared. For him, “the essential purpose of Christianity” was “to sanctify every moment of earthly toil and suffering.” Indeed, the entire world “may be rejected … insofar as it is not in God or is against God … insofar as it is a source or weapon of godless lusts.”

So if Ivan Ilyin’s work sounds creepy and sinister to you – especially from the perspective of what such sentiments might mean in the context of nuclear weapons ethics – well, it jolly well should. I, for one, am not too comfortable seeing nuclear weaponry in the hands of a ruler who idolizes Ilyin, and if Ilyin’s Christianized vision of righteously transgressive sword-wielding and embracing redemptive mass suffering is any indication, contemporary Russian Orthodox nuclear weapons ethics may be alarmingly permissive.

Especially in a Russian nationalistic Orthodox context suffused with what has been called a “cult of sacrifice” – in which the Soviet Union’s appalling casualty rates during the Second World War are invoked, as Figes has noted, “ as proof not of Soviet inefficiency and callous disregard for human life, but of Russia’s sacrifice, the price it paid to save humanity ” – the world doesn’t need that kind of Ilyinist “fiery prayer” thinking in the nuclear business.

Communist China

And that’s just Russia, where at least there are religious officials who pronounce publicly on nuclear weapons issues. It is even harder to tell where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is on these matters. It’s not merely that China has no clear analogue to Just War theory in the first place, but also that so much of what its officials do say about nuclear weaponry is so deeply propagandistic and performative – intended, as the saying goes, to influence more than actually to inform.

In its official messaging to the outside world, China does lay claim to a superlative nuclear morality, not least in purporting to take a “minimalist” approach to nuclear deterrence and to have an ironclad nuclear “No First Use” (NFU) policy even while engaging in a massive nuclear build-up and moving its strategic forces increasingly to “launch on warning” status at a time when Beijing faces what is surely the smallest military threat from the outside world, in relative terms, since the late 18 ^th Century. Honesty and candor about sensitive issues aren’t precisely the CCP’s strength, however, and there’s no clear way to separate the chaff of propagandistic virtue-signaling aimed at Western and Global South audiences from the wheat whatever actual beliefs may lie underneath.

The last time a senior Chinese official actually spoke clearly and directly about nuclear war issues, in fact, was Mao Zedong himself, who infamously declared that nuclear proliferation was a “great contribution to the cause of peace.” Indeed, if you believed Mao, nuclear war should almost be welcomed, for it would lead to the “total elimination of capitalism” and thus usher in an epoch of “permanent peace” because “the whole world would become socialist.” I can’t quite imagine anyone in Beijing today believing that, of course, but while we sit around in academic fora debating nuclear deterrence, Just War theory, and Pope Francis’ recent pronouncements against nuclear weaponry, what CCP officials and People’s Liberation Army generals truly think about nuclear ethics is anybody’s guess.

If anything, though modern CCP-ruled China often likes to project a kind of quasi-Confucian moralism, there is some reason to worry that even this framework will not correspond in a recognizable way to the dictates of what we ourselves might deem genuinely moral. After all, back in ancient times, orthodox Confucians only accorded homo sapiens the status of being human by degrees , corresponding to the extent to which they had become Sinicized and conformed to Confucian rituals. In this view, only Chinese people were truly human, and at the outer edges of the empire’s imagined civilizational topography, distant “barbarian” peoples who refused or were incapable of following Chinese norms were quite literally no better than beasts.

No wonder, then, that it was quite proper that, despite Confucians’ general disdain for the military arts within China, what Confucius called “ punitive military expeditions ” could and indeed should proceed from the civilized Sinic core to show such barbarians their place. When you don’t regard the foreign “Other” as being fully human – and in fact regard them as being subhuman or even bestial precisely to the degree that they live by a value system different from your own – I’dimagine that your operational military morality vis-à-vis such foreigners can get pretty permissive.

So how, if at all, do such ancient traditions map on to modern CCP thinking? That’s very hard to say. In terms of basic understandings and deep ethical traditions, however, one suspects that, as I observed a moment ago with Russia, China’s operational nuclear morality may be very different from the doubt-ridden and self-interrogative ethical positions one sees in Western nuclear discussions such as our own here in this conference.

Problems of Ethical Asymmetry

So what are the implications of all this? I do worry that in discussions like this, we spend so much time debating among ourselves whether or not to be in the nuclear deterrence business in the first place, but we gloss over the impact that such largely intra-Western debates may have on real-world issues of deterrence and strategy. As with the civil-society activism of the nuclear disarmament movement – which by its nature is more likely to constrain nuclear decision-making in free democratic societies than in the nuclear-armed authoritarian powers whose revisionism lies at the root of the world’s contemporary nuclear anxieties – I would urge us not to ignore the potentially asymmetric impact of our being, in effect, the only players really focused upon such questions of nuclear morality.

To be sure, it’s certainly worth considering – as an ethical matter – how much such asymmetry of impact should matter. But as a strategist and national security policy professional, I think it does.

Already, for instance, one of our geopolitical adversaries is conducting a war of aggression under what might be called an “ offensive nuclear umbrella .” Vladimir Putin clearly hoped – and to some extent continues to hope – that we will be sufficiently afraid of nuclear escalation and rattled by his brazen nuclear saber-rattling that we will simply stand by while he invades, annexes, and destroys a free, sovereign neighboring democracy. And Xi Jinping is himself now engaged in a massive expansion of China’s nuclear capabilities, perhaps with a similar “offensive umbrella” in mind in support of his desire to subjugate the free citizens of Taiwan.

Both dictators seem to be trying to weaponize our nuclear neuralgias, assuming that the West’s otherwise commendable distaste for nuclear weaponry and our anxious concerns about nuclear ethics will make us more easily coerced and allow our friends to be more easily devoured. In that sense, the asymmetry in nuclear ethics is already having major geopolitical implications, and they’re not good.

From a more philosophical standpoint, however, I could at least imagine an argument that this asymmetry doesn’t matter. A Kantian deontologist, for instance, might not care whether our adversaries bother their strategists and nuclear planners with ethical restrictions. Nor might that deontologist particularly care whether, when they see us debate nuclear ethics so earnestly, our adversaries draw conclusions about us that actually encourage aggression – thus, ironically, making war, and even nuclear war, more likely.

For my part, however, I can’t persuade myself not to care about those things. You don’t have to be Ivan Ilyin to suspect that while “turning the other cheek” is a praiseworthy ethical system up to a point, applying such a simple ethical reflex in the same way both to a mere slap and to a brutal war of aggression and conquest isn’t actually all that ethical.

During my professional career dealing with nuclear weapons issues, I have occasionally heard disarmament activists suggest that due to the potentially species-existential stakes of nuclear warfare, the only moral response to nuclear weapons threats is simply to surrender to the nuclear-armed aggressor. Such claims, however, are uncommon, and most observers probably think such a position would be quite problematic.

While one could reasonably debate the notion that surrender to tyranny might be preferable to a certainty of global extinction, I believe that’s a false choice. In the real complexity of the real world, such simplicity represents only a pseudo-ethical mode of thinking. The world’s vicious authoritarian aggressors may want us conscientious Westerners to adopt such thinking, but we should not.

Ethics, I would argue, indeed does require us to consider the risks of nuclear holocaust, and it would be madness to assert that it does not. But it also requires that we consider the degree of risk that such a horror will occur, and that we consider the moral implications – and the likelihood – of how things might be without nuclear deterrence, especially in a world of predatory states that but for our nuclear weapons posture might well be committing even more great evils than they are today.

I cannot offer a crisp algorithm that lets someone calculate ethical answers to these questions with mathematical certainty, of course, but I feel pretty confident that an ethical system that gives no thought to these complexities is not truly ethical at all.

In reality, just as the Law of Armed Conflict the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) encourages and empowers us to engage in nuanced moral reasoning when weighing military necessity against the principles of proportionality, distinction, and humanity in wartime, I also believe that our ethical traditions give us rich resources with which to struggle with these dilemmas without having to collapse into simplistic cartoon-caricature conclusions that see all nuclear weapons possession and all deterrence as prima facie immoral .

For my part, I remain firmly convinced that nuclear deterrence remains both possible and a profoundly ethical choice.

The challenge for us, both morally and practically, is how to wrestle with these questions and arrive at answers that reflect the fact that while it is of course an ethical imperative to avoid nuclear Armageddon, it is also an ethical imperative to deter aggression and keep evil predators from devouring sovereign polities and enslaving free peoples. I believe nuclear deterrence provides us the real possibility of doing both these things at the same time – though of course not simply or easily, nor without any risk of failure.

In struggling with such challenges, moreover, we cannot avoid factoring into our thinking our strategic adversaries’ ownnuclear morality – or perhaps, by our lights, their lack it. If we wish to deter aggression by such powers, as I believe it is part of our moral duty to attempt to do, we need both to understand how they think about these issues and to appreciate the ways in which our own debates over nuclear morality may affect their calculations.

Thank you.

—Christopher Ford

Thinking About China’s Nuclear Weapons Policy

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 15:17:33 GMT

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered on August 9, 2024, to an event organized by the National Institute for Deterrence Studies (NIDS).

Thanks for inviting me to speak. NIDS Senior Fellow Peter Huessy asked me to say a few words this morning about the nuclear weapons program of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – and, more specifically, about Beijing’s extraordinary nuclear weapons build-up – based on a paper I published earlier this year with the National Institute for Public Policy . Naturally, I can only offer you my personal opinion, and you shouldn’t mistake my remarks as necessarily representing the views of anybody else, but it’s an important topic and I’m delighted to have the chance to talk to you.

China’s stunning nuclear expansion is certainly alarming, but it is also one of the more fascinating aspects of the growing PRC threat. Remember, after all, that for decades it was both the claim of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propagandists and the view of most international observers that China was somehow “different” than other nuclear-armed states by virtue of its “minimalist” approach to deterrence, small arsenal, “No-First Use” declaratory policy, and apparent disinterest in arms racing.

China has now, of course, long abandoned what Deng Xiaoping once called “biding its time and hiding its capabilities,” and it is quite clear that such seemingly benign nuclear weapons policies have also now been thrown overboard. Indeed, it’s quite possible that the “minimum deterrence” approach was always merely a temporary expedient, or perhaps even a smokescreen, part of a campaign of strategic misdirection to lull the rest of the world into complacency while the PRC built up other facets of its power until Beijing could engage with relative impunity in a massive nuclear expansion that was always, at some point, going to be in the cards as part of China’s “national rejuvenation.”

But to make that point, I suppose, is to jump ahead a bit. So what I’d like to do now is to circle back a little. In my NIPP paper last February , I tried to offer a sort of organizing framework for contemplating PRC nuclear weapons policy. I suggested thinking about PRC nuclear weapons issues through the prism of three historical “eras” and four conceptual “framings.”

My “Three Eras” of Chinese nuclear policy correspond loosely to: (1) the early period of nuclear weaponization under Mao Zedong; (2) a so-called “minimum deterrence” period that stretches from Mao’s late years until relatively recently; and then (3) the “national rejuvenation” period that one could say began under Hu Jintao, thereafter accelerating under Xi Jinping, and in which China’s nuclear capabilities have been expanding rapidly.

My “Four Framings” sought to identify dynamics that may explain at least something about PRC nuclear strategy and policy. They’re not necessarily alternative explanations, for they aren’t mutually exclusive, and it may be that each reveals something noteworthy about Chinese policy to some extent.

The first framing is moralistic posturing, in which nuclear weapons policy is depicted by Chinese officials as demonstrating something about Beijing’s supposed moral superiority to its antagonists and rivals in the global security environment.

The second is game-theoretical positioning, in which Chinese strategists seek to match their nuclear force posture in some relatively clear and articulable way to some threat they claim to fear, or in order to achieve some objective they prioritize.

The third framing sounds a bit awkward, but I called it net power aggregation. This is a dynamic in which Chinese officials seem to view nuclear weapons as a key part of their nation’s overall national power and a key to its success both in overall geopolitical competition and (if necessary) in warfighting.

The fourth and final framing has to do with great power status-seeking, in which nuclear weaponry is seen as one of the indicia of global power and status that it would be intolerable for a “rejuvenated” China not to possess.

Let me briefly describe each of the three “eras,” before trying to explain how I tried in my paper to use the four “framings” to conceptualize influences that I think help shape PRC nuclear weapons policy and draw out some of their implications.

Three Eras of Chinese Nuclear Policy

The First Era: Weaponization

China tested its first nuclear weapon in 1964, but the road to weaponization was not smooth. From the outset, foreign technology transfers were critical to the PRC’s bomb program, and China’s main “pro-proliferation” facilitator was the Soviet Union.

In those days before the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s, Moscow agreed to provide “full assistance in the fields of nuclear physics and the peaceful uses of atomic energy.” Chinese nuclear scientists were sent to the USSR to train, and Moscow helped the PRC in its early development of nuclear technology.

In 1957, the Soviets agreed to provide a ballistic missile to China, as well as technical details on nuclear weaponry, and even an actual prototype atomic bomb. The Soviets sent a team to Beijing specifically to tell China how to make nuclear weapons, and Soviet scientists helped build the Chinese nuclear weapons development facility in Haiyan – apparently constructing it as an exact replica of the Soviets’ own nuclear weapons development “closed city” of Arzamas-16 (now known as Sarov).

Not all of this, however, went smoothly for China, for the Soviets soon got cold feet as their overall relationship with the PRC soured. Problems arose out of growing disputes and rivalries within the Communist bloc centered on China’s discomfiture at being geopolitical second-fiddle to anyone, and out of Mao Zedong’s sometimes shockingly cavalier attitudes toward nuclear war at a time in which Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev had begun to take a more cautious approach in the years after the near-catastrophe of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

CCP officials in those years depicted Beijing’s acquisition of atomic bombs as a noble serviceto mankind, for it would break the malign monopoly of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, preventing the rest of the world from having to be the superpowers’ “nuclear slaves.” Nuclear proliferation, therefore, was thus painted as a public service: a “great contribution to the cause of peace.”

Mao thus opposed arms control and even seemed comfortable with the idea of nuclear war itself. He regarded war with the capitalist states as being quite likely, and he clearly felt that a nuclear war would by no means be an entirely bad thing. It would ensure, he suggested, the “total elimination of capitalism,” and thereby usher in an epoch of “permanent peace.” According to Mao, “[i]f the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died [in nuclear war], the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.”

Hearing such things, Nikita Khrushchev came to see Mao as basically being unhinged in this regard, concluding that Mao actually wanted a nuclear war so that both the United States andthe USSR would be devastated, leaving Communist China in the global catbird seat. As Khrushchev put it later, “[e]verybody except Mao was thinking about how to avoid war.” He reportedly said that “Mao Zedong is sick, crazy,” and “should be taken to an asylum.”

So despite his earlier help for Mao’s nuclear weapons effort, Khrushchev held back from delivering the actual prototype bomb he had promised. In fact, by August 1960, all Soviet advisors were gone. Thanks to Soviet help, China was already well along the road to atomic weaponization, but the PRC and the USSR were thereafter bitter rivals rather than allies.

China, therefore, entered the nuclear era with a worryingly nuclear-messianic reputation and in a firmly “pro-proliferation” mode – soon seeking to provide nuclear weapons assistance to Indonesia, and then beginning a long-running nuclear proliferation relationship with Pakistan.

The Second Era: Minimalism

So that’s the first “era.” The “Second Era” of China’s nuclear weapons history can be thought of as starting once Mao passed from the scene in 1976. After his death, the man who remained China’s paramount leader throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Deng Xiaoping, was far more pragmatic.

Where Mao had attempted to build the PRC into a global revolutionary powerhouse and expected a climactic war with capitalism, Deng sought to build up China’s wealth and power through export-led growth, acquiring from the rest of the world the technological and industrial know-how it needed in order to grow stronger through the accumulation of what Deng’s advisors came to call “comprehensive national power” (CNP). CNP was viewed as an aggregation of all the myriad factors that could help make a country powerful – e.g., military capabilities, economic strength, technological sophistication, political influence, cultural strength and self-confidence – and it remains a key concept in PRC strategic planning to this day.

Crucially, this learning period required that Dengist China maintain a relatively un-provocative geopolitical posture, lest alarming Chinese behavior provoke the West to cut off such transfers of technological and industrial knowledge and capability to Beijing. After all, as we have seen, intemperate behavior under Mao had helped provoke the cutoff of Soviet nuclear and other military assistance several years before Beijing actually had the Bomb. Deng’s China might avoid repeating this mistake in a new context of Western knowledge-transfer by simply not talking about its ambitions – or by pretending to have more modest ones than it did.

This , then, was the context for Deng’s exhortation to “bide your time and hide your capabilities.” Beijing was explicitly building up its CNP for some time in the future when it would no longer have to “hide” its capabilities anymore and could act in the world in ways it – impliedly – had always desired to do eventually.

For so long as this cautious Dengism lasted, however, China’s posture in the geopolitical arena needed to seem unthreatening. It needed to seem focused exclusively upon economic reform and upon generally market-based, export driven economic development.

It was during this period that our longstanding conventional wisdom about Chinese nuclear policy developed. It came commonly to be said that China adhered to a “minimum deterrent strategy,” based upon a small nuclear force purely for second-strike retaliation to deter aggression and a “no-first use” (NFU) policy. And indeed, for a long time, its arsenal remained relatively small, and was not obviously structured for warfighting.

This was certainly what Chinese officials told the world – such as in emphasizing, in Beijing’s 2006 White Paper on Defense that “China exercises great restraint in developing its nuclear force. It has never entered into and will never enter into a nuclear arms race with any other country.” And it is what international observers seem generally to have believed.

To be sure, even in Deng’s time there were suggestions that China regarded nuclear weapons as more than just a defensive tool. As I’ll discuss more under the idea of my fourth “framing,” Chinese leaders also saw nuclear weapons as a status symbol and a sign of geopolitical progress. Nuclear capabilities were part of how China could show that it had shaken off what CCP propagandists call their country’s “Century of Humiliation” at Western and Japanese hands and was regaining the “Middle Kingdom’s” traditional place of importance in the world.

As Deng Xiaoping himself put it,

“If it were not for the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb and the satellites we have launched since the 1960s, China would not have its present international standing as a great, influential country. These achievements demonstrate a nation’s abilities and are a sign of its level of prosperity and development.’”

That said, however, as long as China’s force remained relatively small, most observers seemed to believe CCP official “mouthpiece” organs that China had no threatening nuclear weapons ambitions – and that we in the West therefore didn’t need to worry much about countering its nuclear plans.

But let’s take a quick detour into China’s nuclear “No First Use” (NFU) policy. I won’t dwell too much on it here, but it must be mentioned because NFU has long been a critical piece of PRC messaging encouraging us to reach such conclusions. This NFU policy, it is said, demonstrates the fundamentally defensive nature of nuclear weapons in PRC planning, and NFU proclamations have been central to Chinese multilateral diplomacy for decades.

Indeed, it’s hard to overstate how important NFU is in Chinese nuclear-related diplomacy, and in the CCP regime’s official image of itself. NFU is part of how China attempts to posture itself as being uniquely virtuous and geopolitically benevolent and non-threatening.

I won’t go into the details here, because the Washington policy community is these days increasingly aware that China’s NFU policy is riddled with ambiguous caveats and not something one could truly rely upon in a crisis anyway, since it is merely a policy choice from which CCP leaders could depart anytime they like.

Last autumn’s groundbreaking report of the latest U.S. Strategic Posture Review Commission and the U.S. Defense Department’s reports on Chinese military power , for example, make clear that China’s NFU promise has major qualifications. These accumulating caveats are making China’s nuclear weapons policy harder and harder to distinguish from other countries’ declaratory policy – including our own .

Moreover, as I have argued for many years , NFU policies are inherently ephemeral and unreliable. In part this is because, as I noted, NFU is merely a non-binding promise, a statement of policy that – by definition – could be changed on a whim anytime the CCP leadership wants. (It really only means that China promises not to use nuclear weapons first, until it decides to use them first!)

And why should anyone have confidence, anyway, that in a war with a geopolitical rival that was going badly, a country with nuclear weapons would refrain from using them rather than suffer a massive defeat? As I have repeatedly pointed out, including when in government , in strategic terms, NFU pledges are pretty empty and useless, worth little more than the paper they’re seldom even printed on.

When you feel you can really trust a country’s word enough to make potentially existential national security decisions in reliance on such a promise, after all, you probably don’t worry about nuclear attack from that country in the first place. On the other hand, if you distrust a country enough to worry about nuclear attack, you’d be a fool to take it at its word!

Anyway, so much for the feel-good emptiness of NFU. But it was a central plank of China’s second nuclear “Era” of so-called “minimal deterrence approach” for a long while.

The Third Era

Now we’re in the “Third Era” of Chinese nuclear weapons policy. And today, of course, China is engaged in a massive nuclear expansion.

And since we’re looking for insights into what’s behind Beijing’s nuclear decisions, it is worth stressing the context in which this build-up is occurring. Specifically, in terms of relative military capabilities, China today faces less of a foreign military threat than it has at any time since the glory years of the Qing Dynasty in the 18 ^th Century.

Let me repeat that: in terms of relative capabilities, China today faces less of a foreign military threat than it has in centuries.

Yet China followed its so-called “minimum deterrence” approach even back when the United States and Soviet nuclear arsenals were at their Cold War peaks, with scores of thousands of weapons between them. This included years in which Soviet and Chinese troops were shooting each other in the north and the Kremlin was considering preemptive nuclear strikes on the PRC. And yet, all that time, China kept its nuclear arsenal relatively small.

Today, by contrast, China’s build-up of conventional military power gives it the strongest armed forces China has had, relative to the rest of the world, in two centuries. Meanwhile, the potential nuclear threats facing China are the smallest they’ve been since the early 1950s, as U.S. and Russian arsenals have been reduced to fractions of their levels at the end of the Cold War – to the point that today the U.S. arsenal is the smallest it’s been since the Eisenhower Administration, back when China began its nuclear proliferation collaboration with the Soviets. Despite this, however, China is now buying new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) like the proverbial sailor on shore leave orders drinks. (I mean no disrespect to the Navy folks in the audience, by the way: I’m a former naval officer myself!)

China is on track to have about the same number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads we do – that is, about 1,500 of them – by 2035, including those based in several hundred new missile silos , and we have no idea whether it will stop there. The build-up also includes massive new road-mobile ICBMs, missiles with maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), an HGV-equipped fractional orbit bombardment system (FOBS), new ballistic missile submarines capable of targeting the U.S. homeland from “bastions” in the South China Sea, and a vast new nuclear weapons production infrastructure with a throughput that puts our own aging nuclear complex to shame.

All of which raises the obvious question: why all of this stunning and destabilizing Chinese nuclear weapons expansion, and why now?

The “Four Framings”

To help answer this, I offer my “four framings” to help us think about factors influencing Chinese nuclear weapons policy. Remember, they’re: (1) moralistic posturing; (2) game-theoretical positioning; (3) net power aggregation; and (4) great power status-seeking.

Moralistic Posturing

With regard to moralistic posturing, China has clearly long made nuclear weapons policy part of broader messaging campaigns encouraging the belief that China is a uniquely benevolent and virtuous international player whose rise nobody should fear, much less counter.

Indeed, even Mao Zedong’s nuclear recklessness was profoundly moralistic in its own way. (Remember, he portrayed China’s weaponization as a noble mission and service to the world.) And of course, China’s NFU policy has for decades been a key element in the “we are very virtuous and nobody should fear us or do anything to counter our rise” narratives deployed by CCP propagandists since the beginning of the “biding time and hiding capabilities” era. Moralistic posturing remains important in CCP messaging even today, while Beijing is engaged in a massive nuclear build-up.

Despite all the moralizing, however, there is today remarkably little moderation in PRC nuclear behavior. It may be significant that China still doesn’t officially admit to the nuclear build-up that everyone can see is happening, but such posturing certainly isn’t preventing it.

Game-Theoretical Positioning

When it comes to game theoretical positioning – “framing” number two – I think you could at least make the argument that Chinese nuclear policy is responsive to some concept of threats facing China. It’s not a very strong argument, mind you, but I could envision one.

It is at least conceivable, for instance, that modern CCP leaders under control freak and Chairman-for-life Xi Jinping are paranoid enough to believe that the malevolent foreign barbarians who run Washington might launch an out-of-the-blue first strike on China, thereafter relying upon the small U.S. homeland missile defense system to protect America against whatever Chinese forces had survived that attack. If they truly feared such a thing, I could imagine an argument that China needed more ICBM silos to absorb incoming U.S. warheads and increase the odds of enough PRC systems surviving to overwhelm our missile defenses. Maybe, therefore, you could construct a rationale for a PRC nuclear build-up.

But while I can’t rule out some kind of game-theoretical logic applying here, I must say I don’t find it particularly compelling. Not least, the idea seems unpersuasive because the scale and rate of China’s current massive expansion of nuclear capabilities seems so out of line with any nuclear threat China might reasonably feel itself to face.

Indeed, the U.S. nuclear arsenal – arguably the most acute nuclear threat to China in the present geopolitical environment – isn’t presently increasing at all, and hasn’t been. (Quite the contrary: it’s been shrinking for a generation.) While U.S. administrations sometimes talk a good game about expanding our missile defenses, moreover, we’ve done precious little to actually do so.

Moreover, as I already mentioned, relative to the rest of the world, the net military threat to China – in both conventional and nuclear terms – is now smaller than it’s been since the days of the Qianlong Emperor . It’s not impossible that there are North Korean levels of paranoid pathology in the CCP leadership, of course, but it seems rather an extreme interpretation to suggest that China has preemptively reacting over the last few years to a theoretical future expansion of U.S. nuclear capabilities that nobody in Washington has actually planned or budgeted for.

If anything, that argument would get the arrow of causality precisely backwards. In fact, if the United States does finally begin expanding its arsenal in the years ahead, this will be in large part a reaction to China’s, build-up. So that “responding to threats” game-theoretical explanation for China’ current spree of nuclear weapons binge-buying seems to me entirely unconvincing.

If there is any game-theoretical explanation for China’s nuclear build-up, therefore, it surely lies less in perceived threats than in perceived opportunities. Specifically, it is to me veryplausible that Beijing is engaged in its current massive nuclear build-up in order to improve what I call the “ offensive nuclear umbrella ” that strategic deterrence can create, and under which a revisionist would-be aggressor may try to carry out wars of territorial aggression.

We usually think of a nuclear deterrent “umbrella” as defensive, but it could also potentially be employed as an offensive weapon, with a nuclear standoff creating tactical “space” in which an aggressor might be able to devour regional victims without facing counter-intervention. Vladimir Putin, for instance, has been trying to employ such an “offensive nuclear umbrella” by using nuclear saber-rattling to scare the United States and NATO out of providing support for Ukraine as that country battles Russia’s war of conquest and annexation against it.

And it would be in no way surprising if, as Xi Jinping has precisely this kind of “offensive umbrella” in mind vis-à-vis Taiwan. Indeed, I rather think he does.

Net Power Aggregation

When it comes to the third “framing” of net power aggregation, I think Chinese leaders may well view nuclear capabilities as one element of that broader aggregation of power vis-à-vis other players that tends to decide geopolitical outcomes. Through the prism of longstanding CCP theorizing about “Comprehensive National Power” (CNP), this would make perfect sense, just as it would have in Soviet “correlation of forces” thinking.

As I noted earlier, CNP thinking envisions power as an aggregation of many facets, such as military, economic, technological, political, and cultural power. And it assumes that the possessor of the most CNP is essentially destined to prevail in the international arena, at least eventually, becoming its norm-setter.

This has been an important element of CCP beliefs about the geopolitical environment at least since the early days of Deng Xiaoping’s rule when CNP concepts first gained currency in Party writings. And I think it highly plausible that China considers nuclear weaponry an important element of aggregate power that should be, as with other facets of power, maximized as much as one can.

Moreover, it would be quite logical for China, pursuant to Deng’s “bide your time and hide your capabilities” approach, to avoid the provocative strategic optics of a massive nuclear build-up until relatively late in the CNP game, thus minimizing the risk of precipitating foreign countermeasures until Beijing felt ready to handle the consequences. As in, perhaps … now.

Great Power Status-Seeking

Finally, I also find the “framing” of great power status-seeking quite persuasive. As I observed earlier, such a framing already finds support even in Deng Xiaoping’s declaration that nuclear weapons “demonstrate a nation’s abilities and are a sign of its level of prosperity and development.”

Chinese nationalists have long looked for indicia of geopolitical status by which to measure China’s relative position and its “return” to the great power status of which they feel it was robbed in the 19 ^th Century. It would thus surprise me not at all were modern Chinese leaders to conclude, in effect, that China would be unable to feel it had truly achieved its geopolitical “return” and “national rejuvenation” if Beijing did not possess the world’s foremost nuclear arsenal. In fact, it might be almost surprising if a nuclear weapons build-up did not occur sooner or later.

Conclusion

So where does all this leave us? Well, you can add up the pieces as well as I can. Of all the “framings” I have described, only the first – that of moralistic posturing – would seem even potentially to provide a basis for nuclear weapons restraint, and even that clearly doesn’t seem to be happening. Apart from its simply not talking about the build-up that everyone can now see in progress, “restraint” is a word that can no longer be used to describe China’s nuclear weapons policy!

The other three framings I have discussed don’t seem to conduce to nuclear restraint. Indeed, they may be worryingly mutually-reinforcing in helping drive the current build-up. To the degree that Chinese nuclear policies are influenced by game-theoretical positing, net power aggregation, or great power status-seeking, all these influences would seem to point in the direction of more nuclear weapons expansion rather than less.

I fear, too, that the potential implications of such self-reinforcing dynamics of game-theoretical advantage, power-aggregation, and status-seeking are also not hard to see. As I suggested in my NIPP paper, historically-minded observers might be forgiven for seeing echoes here of the status-obsessed, militaristic, belligerent, and geopolitically revisionist Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany – a story of destabilizing ambition that did not end very well for anyone.

The CCP’s ambitions are certainly creating some very dangerous clouds on the horizon.

Thank you for listening.

— Christopher Ford

Four Warnings About the “Dark Quad”

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 01:07:45 GMT

Below appears the text on which Dr. Ford based his comments at a symposium organized on July 23, 2024, on “Emergence of A New ‘Quad’: The Growing Entente Between China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran,” hosted by the National Institute for Public Policy .

Thanks for inviting me to participate in this webinar on the “New Quad” of the brutal dictatorships of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. I myself prefer to think of these four as the “Dark Quad,” for in a sense they do form the perfect malevolently antithetical counterpoint to the valuable work of the real Quad – that is, the important quadrilateral dialogue between the developed democracies of the United States, Japan, Australia, and India.

It would probably be difficult to overstate the potential challenges that the “Dark Quad” presents to international peace and security – not to mention to our own country’s national security interests and those of our allies and partners, and indeed all who prize peace and wish to preserve their political autonomy as sovereign peoples. Time being short, I’ll mention just four big ones.

These remarks offer only my personal opinions, of course, and don’t necessarily represent the views of anyone else. They’re also pretty depressing, I suppose. But let me offer what insights I can.

My four warnings are all related to the fact that the military quasi-alliance of the Dark Quad includes both the world’s only two nuclear-armed revisionist great powers and the world’s two most prominent nuclear proliferators.

Of the two proliferators, North Korea, of course, pursued nuclear weapons for years, signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in bad faith, immediately violated it, got caught, obtained a concessionary deal with the West in return for supposedly freezing its nuclear weapons work, violated that promise too, then pulled out of the NPT, and has since built itself a rapidly-growing and ever more sophisticated nuclear arsenal.

For its part, Iran pursued nuclear weapons for years, got caught, faced international sanctions, obtained a concessionary deal with the West in return for temporarily delaying its nuclear progress, but is today busily at work enriching uranium and cementing its status as a so-called “latent” or “virtual” nuclear weapons possessor able to sprint toward weaponization at the drop of a hat.

And the great power members of the Dark Quad are currently involved in their own nuclear build-ups. This means not just modernizing legacy systems, but more importantly also building entire new categories of delivery system, and apparently conducting secret low-yield nuclear testing. In Beijing’s case, it also means expanding the size and scope of the Chinese Communist Party’s nuclear arsenal at a truly shocking pace despite China already being, in relative terms, the most powerful it has ever vis-à-vis any potential adversary power since at least the 18 ^th Century.

But the problem doesn’t lie just in the capabilities of these four Dark Quad authoritarian dictatorships. They also exhibit grave behavioral pathologies far beyond just the internal brutalities of their ruling regime’s domestic repression.

One of them, (Russia) is actively involved in a vicious war of aggression to capture and annex a neighboring democracy.

Another (China) has been preparing itself for years to invade and destroy one of East Asia’s most vibrant democracies in Taiwan, even while also grabbing at bits and pieces of territory from other neighbors to the south.

A third (Iran) continues to nurse destabilizing dreams of theocratic hegemony in the Middle East, and expresses this by actively subverting and attacking other countries in its region.

And the fourth (North Korea) is ruled by a dynasty of reclusive dictatorial sociopaths who periodically lash out in violent affronts to the sovereignty and security of another vibrant East Asian democracy to their south.

So what, as the saying goes, could possibly go wrong? (A lot, obviously!) So, as a starting point, let me offer four warnings.

The Death Knell for Nonproliferation ?

First, as a longtime nonproliferation diplomat, I should point out that the advent of the Dark Quad may sound a death knell for the nuclear nonproliferation regime. By that I don’t mean that it’s impossible for some rump, denuded shell of that regime to stumble along for a while. I hope it does, and there’s certainly still lots of important nonproliferation work that can still be done.

But with two veto-wielding Permanent Members of the U.N. Security Council and regional aggressors now in a de facto military alliance with the world’s two worst nuclear proliferators, it’s hard to see much real hope for the global nonproliferation regime being effective going forward. After all, the international community did a notably bad job of handling the challenges presented by the two proliferators of North Korea and Iran even back when there appeared to be a consensus among the great powers on the importance of nonproliferation. And now, now that Russia and China are putting the “pro” back into “proliferation”? You can probably forget it.

Pooled Adversary Capabilities

My second warning has to do with the implications of the fact that the four members of the Dark Quad now increasingly have the opportunity to pool their capabilities in various ways against the three things they hate most: the United States, the other countries of the West, and the current rules-based international order.

Part of the Dark Quad threat comes from the possibility of what might in some respects turn into a “pooled” adversary defense industrial base. We have seen from the Ukraine conflict that the requirements of modern, high-intensity conventional war in terms of equipment, materiel, and manpower are simply enormous. After decades of post-Cold War complacency and strategic myopia, however – years in which we assumed that our former strategic adversaries would “ cooperate with us in diplomacy and global problem solving ” and in which we built our national security strategy around the assumption that those powers were indeed “ no longer strategic adversaries ” at all – such productive capabilities are far beyond our current capacity to supply them.

Yet already China is helping equip and bankroll Russia’s war in Ukraine with financial support, technology, and other aid – thus recently eliciting a rare NATO rebuke of Beijing as a “ decisive enabler ” of Putin’s war of aggression – while North Korea supplies Russia with munitions with which to kill Ukrainians, and Iran likewise supplies drones. Russia, meanwhile, has promised to help North Korea with unspecified assistance, China and Russia have both helped Pyongyang evade U.N. sanctions for years , and China also funding Iran’s regional destabilization and aggressive missile program by buying Iranian oil.

We need, therefore, to be keenly aware of – and, if we can, move to counter – the threat that the Dark Quad will increasingly “pool” industrial and military capabilities in ways profoundly dangerous to the United States, our allies and partners, and indeed to any country with the bad fortune to have one or more of these predatory powers as a neighbor. This certainly doesn’t necessarily mean that I foresee some kind of quadripartite analogue to China’s own domestic “ Military Civil Fusion” (MCF) strategy of trying in effect to erase all distinctions between the military and civilian sectors, for I can’t see anything that elaborate or ambitious being possible among the Dark Quad powers.

At the very least, however, the Dark Quad will likely do more in these regards than it ever has before – and potentially a great deal more. We in the United States are no strangers to seeing each of the Dark Quad powers as a threatening problem state in its own right, of course. Nevertheless, we haven’t yet gotten our minds around the possibility that their various different strengths as international malefactors could complement each other and become mutually reinforcing in a deliberately coordinated way.

From a deterrence and nuclear force posture planning perspective, U.S. planners are already struggling with the implications of the unprecedented challenge of facing two nuclear-armed near-peer adversaries at the same time. But the problem is bigger than that, also encompassing broader issues of Defense Industrial Base (DIB) capacity, critical supply chains, military-technological development, and even mobilizable manpower. (Already, for instance, Russian media have claimed that North Korean “volunteers ” are being readied to be sent to Ukraine. How close might Dark Quad cooperation become in the future?)

It is not for nothing, after all, that the great 19 ^th Century Prussian and then German statesman Otto von Bismarck referred in his memoirs to the “ nightmare of coalitions ” (“le cauchemar des coalitions”) when contemplating the possibility that his country’s potential enemies – and at that point he had Russia and Austria particularly in mind – might coordinate against it. As American strategists contemplate a Dark Quad world, we need to keep an analogous cauchemar always in mind.

The Challenge of Coordinated Aggression

But this modern “nightmare of coalitions” goes well beyond simply the problem of aggregate – and potentially “pooled” – capability. Growing Dark Quad cooperation also raises the potential problem of coordinated activity.

U.S. officials have long been worried about the possibility of opportunistic aggression by one or more problem powers if the United States were to end up in hostilities with another of them. (China, for instance, might move against Taiwan in an attempt to take advantage of the Americans being distracted by a campaign against Iran.) Needless to say, from a force posture, asset-allocation, and logistics perspective, this is already a formidable problem for defense planners. There are certainly sound reasons for concern, as my Missouri State University colleague Dave Trachtenberg has pointed out , that the U.S. Defense Department’s traditional “two-war” policy – namely, of being prepared for handle two simultaneous conflicts in different parts of the world – has been allowed to atrophy.

But the “nightmare of coalitions” raised by the Dark Quad goes beyond merely opportunistic aggression. What if there were active coordination? In a merely opportunistic aggression scenario, our various adversaries would implement military plans that had presumably been prepared independently, each according to its own logics. Even worse than that, however, would be a scenario in which our adversaries implement military plans that have been deliberately coordinated, and in which they do this in a synchronized way and with capabilities deliberately chosen in order to present us with the most horrendous challenge possible. That, needless to say, would be a very great threat indeed, and Trachtenberg is clearly right that we are today “ ill-prepared to prosecute a two-war scenario, especially one involving Sino-Russian collaboration ,” and things would be even worse with “three-bad guy” or “four-bad guy” scenarios. We’ve got a lot of work to do.

The Challenge to American Nuclear Weapons Posture

Not incidentally, I’ll also add – and this is my fourth warning – this cauchemar des coalitions also puts paid to some the more persistent shibboleths of post-Cold War U.S. nuclear weapons policy. For decades, since the beginning of the post-Cold War era, U.S. defense planners have relied upon our country’s unparalleled conventional military prowess as our first and best answer to adversary aggression, and president after president has promised to “reduce reliance upon nuclear weapons.”

The possibility of opportunistic aggression by members of the Dark Quad, however – let alone that of coordinated aggression – suggests the conceptual bankruptcy of this longstanding ambition by signaling the possibility that even our vaunted conventional might be unequal to the operational demands of multi-theater conflict against the Dark Quad.

Already, the coercive nuclear threats Russia has been making over Ukraine, grounded in the Kremlin’s huge superiority over NATO in lower-yield, theater-range nuclear delivery systems, have made clear our need to restore some loosely analogous capability of our own. This is why we in the Trump Administration developed the lower-yield W76-2 nuclear warhead and began to build the Submarine Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N), and it’s why Congress has very sensibly prevented the Biden-Harris Administration from foolishly canceling the latter program. And it may well be – especially as China follows Putin’s footsteps in developing ways to use its rapidly-expanding arsenal as an “ offensive nuclear umbrella ” under which to conduct regional aggression – that even these U.S. plans are not enough to restore deterrent stability.

But that’s a nuclear-centric threat. The Dark Quad “nightmare of coalitions” also raises the threat that – for the first time in a long while – the United States may be unable to rely purely upon its conventional military power even vis-à-vis conventional threats. We may not necessarily be there quite yet, but the day may be coming in which we might need theater nuclear weaponry to make up for potential conventional overmatch by a Dark Quad coalition.

Despite this, Biden-Harris Administration officials continue to mouth shopworn platitudes about our aim of “reducing reliance upon nuclear weapons.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but such statements are at this point, tragically, dangerous nonsense.

We some of this as recently as last month [June 2024], when National Security Council (NSC) Senior Director Pranay Vaddi told the Arms Control Association that the Biden Administration remains “committed to seeking … a world without nuclear weapons” and to “reducing the global salience of nuclear weapons.” His speech made headlines for his comment that if other powers are “unwilling to follow” our lead in reducing reliance upon nuclear weapons — and they “instead take steps to increase the salience of nuclear weapons – we will have no choice but to adjust our posture and capabilities to preserve deterrence and stability.” We “may reach a point in the coming years,” he said, “where an increase from current deployed numbers is required.”

Now, Pranay is a friend whom I’ve known for years from his previous service working on arms control issues as a career official at the State Department, and I like him personally. I also appreciate the importance of him giving notice to the Arms Control Association that the disarmament-focused framework around which they have constructed their conceptual universe is falling down around their collective ears.

Yet you may have noted Pranay’s careful conditionalities and his effort still to distance the Biden Administration from the real point. He said that “if” our adversaries don’t follow our lead, we “may” at some point need more nuclear weapons. But what he’s carefully not saying is what is, in fact, unfortunately all too true. Namely: (a) we’ve been trying that for many years, and our adversaries have not followed our lead in reducing reliance upon nuclear weapons; (b) our effort to “lead” a path toward disarmament has been at best wildly unsuccessful and perhaps even counterproductive; and (c) if we are to restore deterrent stability, we need – not “in the coming years,” but in fact now – more nuclear capabilities than we presently have.

These truths have, alas, been apparent for some while. Indeed, when I myself had Pranay’s current role in the Trump Administration NSC in 2017, I spoke to a nuclear disarmament group called the Ploughshares Foundation to roll out the findings of an internal NSC review of U.S. disarmament policy I had led, which concluded that the United States’ post-Cold War approach to disarmament had not produced the results it intended, that it had “run out of steam,” and that new thinking was therefore necessary. All that is even more true today, and the advent of the Dark Quad is simply driving this point home with painful acuteness.

I desperately wish this weren’t the case, but putting our heads in the sand about this during an election year is no way to meet the challenges with which our adversaries confront us.

-- Christopher Ford

Equipping Leaders for Strategic Competition Against China’s “Leverage Web”

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 23:57:14 GMT

Below is the text on which Dr. Ford based his remarks at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory on July 18, 2024.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for inviting me to speak at this showcase event for the Applied Physics Laboratory’s (APL’s) Asymmetric Operations Sector (AOS). It’s been a pleasure to do some work with AOS over the last few months, and I look forward to a continuing relationship.

Naturally, my remarks today are only my personal opinions, and don’t necessarily represent those of anyone else. Nevertheless, knowing AOS’ keen interest in supporting a range of federal sponsors in the critical arena of strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), I thought I’d offer you some thoughts on how I think U.S. and other Western leaders can better equip themselves for such struggles.

I’ll be talking a bit today about network relationships, but before I get too far down that road I thought I’d offer a little perspective on why I think it’s so important to understand the world’s dynamic networks of financial, trade, resource, supply chain, and other dependencies. I’m no complexity scientist, but I have spent my professional career in national security policy and strategy – not least as a student of Chinese policy and strategy – and I do think that a key starting point for American competitive strategy is to understand that of our most important competitor.

And in that respect, I think it’s critical to understand the remarkable degree to which Beijing’s strategy revolves around the systematic creation and manipulation of such networks. Only when that is understood, I would argue, can we really succeed in equipping our leaders for success in developing and implementing an effective counterstrategy.

To that end, what I’ll try to do over the next forty minutes or so will proceed in four steps.

First, I’ll offer you a sketch of what I believe to be the basic model of social control that underlies the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) approach to maintaining its authoritarian and unaccountable power over the Chinese people.

Second, I’ll offer you a glimpse of the ways in which I think the CCP has been trying to export aspects of that model, by degrees, to the rest of the world, in hopes of “training” foreign leaders and societies into stronger and stronger habits of instinctive conformity with what the CCP desires to help reshape the international order into one in which such Sinocentric deference has been generalized into a key organizing principle.

Third, I’ll try to explain the central role that creating and manipulating dependency networks plays in this PRC strategy with reference to some recent academic work on network topography and the ways in which it can potentially be “weaponized” as a coercive tool.

And then, fourth and finally, I’ll suggest at least one way in which I think clever folks such as you bright lights here at APL can help equip Western leaders – and indeed, any other leaders around the world who prize the preservation of their national autonomy and sovereignty in the face of Chinese coercion and manipulation – to be more effective in responding to the China challenge.

That’s a lot to cover, but let’s give it a try.

I. The Cybernetics of CCP Social Control

Let’s start with something known as the “social credit score” system in China. It’s very much still a “work-in-progress” effort, more completely built out in some regions than in others. Nevertheless, it’s a remarkably sophisticated – and sinister – method of elite social control over ordinary citizens, and apparently a fairly effective means of buttressing authoritarian power.

In this vision, citizens’ behavior is monitored and recorded pervasively enough that their everyday socioeconomic privileges and opportunities can be adjusted on an ongoing basis depending upon how closely they conform to CCP expectations in any way the Party feels to be important – and, most of all, in matters of politics and politically-relevant social interactions. If an individual engages in anything that the CCP deems to be disharmoniously “antisocial,” for instance, he or she might start to have problems getting high-speed internet connections to work well, obtaining a loan, getting permission to travel, or even using public transportation or accessing social services. As I pointed out in a law review article last year , the point is not to administer punishment to the offender per se. It is to train “disharmonious” citizens into “harmonious” conformity with Party expectations, and all those around them.

Thus, domestically, the CCP’s tools of discipline and its massive surveillance architecture work together to create social incentive structures that encourage ordinary people always to be policing themselves with an eye to what they understand the CCP would want. Such generalized societal self-policing is more efficient, and more scalable, than traditional methods of direct totalitarian direction and control.

And, as pointed out in a 2022 book by Josh Chin and Liza Lin, this approach has explicit roots in cybernetic theory, going in some ways back to a Chinese scientist by the name of Qian Xuesen who worked in the West for a while and became fascinated by Western scholarship in cybernetics. His disciples in China developed a concept of “social cybernetics,” through which they claimed it would be possible to solve problems in the “open complex giant system” of Chinese society. In some ways, the modern effort to develop a “social credit system” – also inspired in part by financial credit score systems developed by Western banks to assess financial credit-worthiness – is the result.

II. Creating and Manipulating “Leverage Webs”

But this isn’t just a domestic model, in which the CCP aims to “harmonize” away independent thought and dissent. The CCP has also been trying to export aspects of this model to the rest of the world, by degrees, in hopes of shaping China’s security environment increasingly into a reflexively Sinocentric form.

As I argued in my recent law review article, one sees the use of this leverage web approach in the PRC’s employment of economic pressures to impose aspects of its own domestic censorship overseas even against foreign citizens and companies – from airlines to movie studios, and from lawyers to celebrities – who increasingly face CCP “punishment” even for merely saying things CPP leaders find disagreeable. In fact, even entire countries can now face collective chastisement for failing to conform to Beijing’s political demands, as Australia and Lithuania have already experienced.

Already, the lure of profits in the China market – and the risk of being cut off from them should the CCP become unhappy with you – has also long made important segments of the Western business community eager proponents of deeper relationships with the PRC and hence its ruling regime. This eagerness, in turn has encouraged U.S. policies that tend give the CCP even greater leverage over us by making dynamic sectors of our economy more dependent upon maintaining the Party’s goodwill.

You can see how this risks creating something of a “vicious circle” effect of accelerating dependency, which is itself a kind of system effect created by the positive feedback loop of business community greed at the prospects of making money in China irrespective of the strategic consequences. The COVID pandemic and the CCP’s own penchant for too-obviously abusing such relationships – along with the Trump Administration’s success in pivoting American national security policy toward strategic competition with the PRC – seem have slowed this curve, impeding the CCP’s ambition to make China, in economic terms, a loose analogue to the “hyperscaler” technology firms that dominate the Internet for analogous positive-feedback “more success to the successful” network-topographic reasons. But it’s a real dynamic nonetheless, and China hasn’t been shy about trying to exploit it.

Not unlike the ways in which the “social credit system” aims to “train” ordinary Chinese into following the CCP’s commandments, these economic pressures aim to “train” foreign leaders and societies into stronger and stronger habits of instinctive conformity with what the CCP desires. This is a concept I call China’s “ leverage web ” strategy, and it’s a key part of Beijing’s approach to shaping the international environment.

III. Interdependence and its Weaponization

So that’s my take, at least, on the CCP’s ambitious strategy to train all of us into habits of supposedly “harmonious” conformity with the CCP’s wishes. It’s a strategy that has had a great deal of success over the years, and it was employed especially successfully during the period during which the PRC generally followed Deng Xiaoping’s famous admonition to his countrymen to “bide your time and hide your capabilities.”

That is, manipulating “leverage webs” supported the CCP’s strategic plan for China (a) to build up its strength in anticipation of confronting the West and the rest of the world with its power, but yet (b) to carefully conceal that power until the point at which the country was ready to reveal it. Until that time, Beijing needed to conceal both its strength and its global ambitions behind a cloak of misdirection, manipulation, and efforts to encourage strategically myopic motivated reasoning among Western elites and publics. “Leverage webs” were a powerful tool to help achieve this.

Today, China’s “leverage web” approach still supports that grand strategy even as the CCP’s ambitious hopes for Sinocentric world order have become increasingly clear and the country neither “hides its capabilities” nor “bides its time” any longer. Even now that China has outed itself as a strategic predator, there remains value for Beijing in being able to encourage others to believe that acquiescing to its demands tends to be profitable, and that opposing its designs tends to be painful.

But let’s shift, for a moment, from the strategic to the theoretical, for there’s an interesting body of literature that can help us understand the conceptual foundations of this strategy by highlighting the ways in which the topography of a relational network can create opportunities to “weaponize” its structure as a coercive tool.

I’m referring to the phenomenon of “weaponized interdependence” as described by Henry Farrell of Johns Hopkins and Abraham Newman of Georgetown, in a 2021 book they co-edited with Daniel Drezner of Tufts.

To be sure, the phenomenon of exploiting a dominant position in a relational network is hardly new. History buffs, for example, may recall Great Britain’s relative success during the First World War in leveraging London’s centrality in the global financial and commercial networks of the period – not to mention its central position in that era’s underwater telegraph cable network – to craft an economic warfare strategy to isolate and impoverish its military adversaries in Germany and Austria-Hungary. More recently, U.S. leaders were able to take advantage of an analogous degree of network dominance in developing the tools of American financial sanctions recounted by my former George W. Bush Administration colleague Juan Zarate in his 2013 book Treasury’s War , which have been used enthusiastically by every U.S. president since the 1990s.

But Farrell and Newman took the additional step of seeing such power specifically as a network effect. It doesn’t happen just anywhere, in other words, but only where the particular structure of global relationships has acquired a pronounced “hub-and-spoke” character: one huge central hub with innumerable direct connections to essentially all the other nodes in the system, and with relatively few cross-wise connections between those other nodes. One single hub, in other words, dominates the network, and there are very few ways for other nodes to engage with each other that don’t in some way go through that hub.

This helps explain the persistence of such structures over time, as well as the difficulty players on the “spokes” have in escaping such networks – for it is the tendency of certain network topographies to create “lock-in” effects that provides the “hub” with leverage when it tries to manipulate the relationship. The advantages of joining to the hub are high, as are the costs of constructing any kind of alternative network structure, since that would require somehow persuading huge numbers of players to link instead to an alternative hub that will not at first (and potentially not for some time, if ever) provide them with anything like the benefits of connecting to the big existing central hub.

As a result, players tend to get “locked in” by the structure of the network. How many of you, after all, would feel comfortable creating a search engine to compete with Google, no matter how good your coding skills? To a great degree, when networks have a pronounced hub-and-spoke structure, we tend to get stuck with hyperscalers whether we like them or not. As I see it, China wants us to get “stuck” with dependency upon China in very much this sort of way.

But let’s get back to Farrell and Newman. A key conceptual insight for them is that networks such as global finance and the Internet are networks like this, and that if you happen to be in a position to regulate access to those hubs, you have a great deal of potential power because the “exit costs” for other players may leave them no alternatives. As they put it, such an understanding of the potential implications of network architecture offers a “structural explanation of interdependence in which network topography generates enduring power imbalances among states.” The “topography of global networks” structures the availability of coercion, and when such coercive power becomes possible, they call it “weaponized interdependence.”

In their analysis, if you do end up having a dominant position within a network like this, you can use it in at least two key ways. First of all, even without actually coercing anyone, you can use such a position for informational advantage, in the sense that it can basically let you see everything that goes on in that network. You can see all this activity because it all more or less runs through you.

The second potential use of a dominant position is more directly coercive, and consists of using one’s position to exploit the “chokepoint effect” created by everyone else’s network engagement having to run through you. If you have a chokepoint advantage, you can cut off those who displease you, and they can’t do too much about it. Or, of course, you can modulate other players’ access to the network’s benefits to create behavioral incentive structures that will encourage them to act as you wish. Hence my mentioning these dynamics in the context of modern Chinese coercion strategies.

Now, in their book, Farrell and Newman focus upon the extreme case in which a very pronounced hub-and-spoke structure – coupled with a country’s possession of the institutional capacity to manipulate it – can produce considerable “weaponizable” power. As I argued in remarks at Columbia University earlier this year , I suspect that such hypertrophic cases are relatively rare, but I would wager that this kind of analytical framework is still quite useful in intermediate scenarios.

In particular, I’d say that their emphasis upon the need for a coincidence between (a) having some kind of network-topography-based advantage and (b) having the institutional capacity to manipulate that advantage points us to an important possibility. It suggests that actors might – as a matter of policy and in order to support national security strategy – seek both to accentuate leverageable network advantages and to build themselves institutional mechanisms with which to employ such leverage.

Many such advantageous network topographies were doubtless originally unintentional. One can’t really imagine a group of British aristocrats and industrialists sitting around over cheroots and brandy at a posh club in St. James two hundred-odd years ago, for example, plotting how to create a global hub-and-spoke financial network that the Empire would be able to leverage in economic warfare against its continental European adversaries in some future global war.

I’m also pretty confident that U.S. leaders did not set out to make New York the financial hub of the late 20 ^th Century in order to permit the Treasury Department to establish an Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) many years later that could thereafter use financial sanctions against international terrorists and nuclear proliferators in the 21 ^st Century. Most often, I’d reckon, such asymmetric network topographies develop through their own dynamics, and leaders discover only later that they’ve stumbled upon a tool that can be “weaponized” for political and security purposes.

But while many of the asymmetric relational advantages that China weaponizes in pursuit of its grand strategy today doubtless emerged without a lot of planning – being, for instance, a consequence of several decades of export-driven growth and development intended to make China rich, but that had the secondary effect of placing the PRC atop a whole range of global supply chains that it could thereafter manipulate – I believe the CCP has in recent years become much more genuinely strategic about such things. One clear example of this is Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), which is having only very mixed results in terms of providing economic benefits either for China or for China’s partner countries in the Global South, but which is proving very good at creating hub-and-spoke networks of infrastructural dependency that tie those partners’ economic fates increasingly to Beijing’s political goodwill.

To give another example, Xi Jinping’s concept of what’s called “dual circulation” also seems to be, quite explicitly, a strategy for protecting China against economic dependency on other countries while making them as dependent as possible upon China . According to Xi Jinping, “domestic circulation” is intended to be “the mainstay” of the Chinese economy, with industrial production increasingly shifting from export dependency to reliance upon domestic consumption.

At the same time, however, the “domestic and international circulations” are supposed to “reinforc[e] each other,” with continued export production providing what the CCP’s 14 ^th Five-Year Plan described as “a trade powerhouse.” Together they are intended to “form a powerful gravitational field to attract global resources and factors of production … and accelerate the cultivation of new advantages to be used in international cooperation and competition.”

Yes, you heard that last part right. As the 14 ^th Five-Year Plan said directly, the point is to give China “new advantages to be used in international cooperation and competition .” As I noted, this is a concept under which the CCP hopes to gain competitive advantage by minimizing China’s dependence upon foreign trade while still maximizing the rest of the world’s dependence upon Chinese manufactures.

I’m not enough of an economist to tell you whether this would actually work as an economic strategy. Hopefully it won’t! But it does seem clear that the CCP keenly understands the strategic advantages to be had from being able to manipulate others’ economic dependence upon you while keeping your own dependence upon them to a minimum. In effect, that’s how interdependence can be weaponized.

I very much hope it would be too much to see in this some CCP analogue to the efforts undertaken by Nazi officials in the late 1930s to prepare the Third Reich for its wars of territorial aggression by working to immunize Germany against League of Nations sanctions through the cultivation of what Adolf Hitler and Herman Goering – whom Hitler put in charge of this effort – called “blockade resilience ( Blockadefestigkeit )” and “‘raw materials freedom’ ( Rohstoff-Freiheit ).” But I certainly can’t rule it out.

IV. Developing More Effective Responses

So what, then, can we do about all this?

For one thing, we can do more of what we have already been doing. That is, we can keep doing what the Trump Administration began, and the Biden Administration followed, in: (i) adopting policies designed to reduce U.S. vulnerability to CCP coercion by improving supply chain resilience and developing more domestic (or at least non-PRC) sources for critical inputs; (ii) identifying and leveraging the PRC’s dependencies upon the United States, such as in so-called “chokepoint technologies” in the high-technology realm; and (iii) working with our allies and partners to coordinate such approaches across the democracies of the developed world. Whoever wins our election in November, I dearly hope they will continue along these paths we began to develop in 2018.

But I would argue that there’s also more we can do to help equip our leaders for even more effective policymaking and counterstrategy, by improving the quality of the information upon which they can base their decisions in such campaigns. My own impression from working in the State Department during the Trump Administration to put technological pressure on the PRC through U.S. national security export controls is that good decision-support information is critical – but that getting solid data and being able to draw upon good supply chain and trading models is very difficult inside the government.

This isn’t just because such policy agendas can raise challenging questions that require high-stakes equity-balancing on the basis of complex “ground truth” information and sophisticated modeling of complicated real-world trading, financial, and supply chain networks, though that is certainly true. It’s also because government officials contemplating a major move have strong incentives not to signal ahead of time that such a step is coming – lest its would-be targets have time to mitigate its impact – and because reaching outside of government for information and analysis may risk just such a disclosure.

To my eye, that means there’s a real need for some kind of capability that is accessible to the government on a trusted and entirely confidential basis – perhaps even at a level able to ingest classified information – which can draw upon trade flow, commercial transaction, economic performance, and other such data to provide decision-support analysis to U.S. and other leaders seeking to identify trade, resource-flow, commercial, or other dependency relationships relevant to China that are (or could become) subject to coercive manipulation.

This, it seems to me, would hugely assist U.S. decisionmakers in the development of counterstrategy against the PRC’s “leverage web” approach. For one thing, it would help them do more to identify, to understand, and – working with allies and partners – to counter Chinese efforts to build such webs around the world. It might also help us identify, or even create , opportunities to turn the tables on Beijing and use such leverage-web approaches ourselves, as part of our own competitive strategy to preserve the sovereign autonomy of all nations against self-aggrandizing Chinese coercion.

All this makes the development of such a capability sound to me like rather a no-brainer, but as far as I can tell – now from outside government – it is still the case that little such capacity currently exists. That’s why I’m so pleased to be able to talk about these issues with you folks at APL, not only because your skillsets are in many ways exactly what one would need in order to build such a capability and offer such services – including at the classified level – to a whole range of federal sponsors in support of U.S. competitive strategy, but also because you already have a tremendous track record of trusted support to American national security decision makers going back all the way to the Second World War.

V. Conclusion

So that’s Chris Ford’s two cents’ worth, anyway. So, just to recap, I do think China has a coherent and fairly sophisticated theory of social control behind both its domestic repression, and behind its increasing effort also to train the rest of the world to behave in ways more congenial to the CCP and tolerant of the Party’s dangerous global ambitions. This approach builds upon cybernetic concepts, and I think it can be usefully understood through the prism of the growing literature that now exists on the “weaponization of interdependence.”

Most importantly, however, this Chinese approach can perhaps also in many ways be better met and countered through the more sophisticated incorporation of these sorts of concepts into our own national security and foreign policy decision-making and that of our allies and partners. If you ask me, APL can play an important role in helping make this possible.

If you are able to help in these regards, in fact, there ought to be lots of people who will want to look to you for such support, not just in the U.S. Government, but also farther afield. After all, the kind of “harmonious world” that the CCP envisions creating – one explicitly modeled on the so-called “harmony” of China’s domestic system of repressive governance – is a Sinocentric world of CCP-deferential conformity that no self-respecting member of a free, sovereign national people should want to live in. If you can find a way to empower the development of more effective counterstrategy through the development of such a network-analytical decision-support capability, you ought to have many opportunities to use it, and many partners with whom to work.

Thanks!

-- Christopher Ford

Dead or Deferred? Nuclear Arms Control in an Age of Revisionism

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 08:16:29 GMT

In June 2024, the Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory published a book on Aligning Arms Control with the New Security Environment , to which Dr. Ford contributed a chapter entitled " Dead or Deferred? Nuclear Arms Control in an Age of Revisionism ." You can access the book on CGSR's website here , or use the button below to download a copy of Dr. Ford's essay.

New Old Wisdom on a Nuclear Deal with Iran

Fri, 24 May 2024 03:35:13 GMT

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered at a workshop on the nuclear future of the Middle East which was held at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on May 21-22, 2024.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks Livermore for having me here. It’s always a pleasure to be out here at the lab, and the Center for Global Security Research has picked an important and – alas! – all too timely topic in holding this conference.

In any discussion of the role and future of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, of course, the proverbial elephant in the room is Iran and its growing nuclear program. And Iran’s nuclear program is indeed what I’d like to discuss today as we talk about how it might be possible to stabilize and strengthen what existing order there remains in the region.

I’d like to discuss Iran not because so many of you didn’t already say such insightful and compelling things about the Iranian nuclear weapons challenge yesterday – for you did – but rather because there’s at least one wrinkle that we haven’t yet discussed.

It’s that wrinkle I’d like to flag this morning, because before too long an important window of opportunity will close for at least potential progress.

As always, I should make clear that these remarks are just my own personal views, and don’t necessarily represent those of anyone else, but I’d like to walk you through that window of opportunity, for I’d love to elicit your thoughts on how we can best take advantage of it.

Except in expert gatherings like this – of which this is actually the second I’ve attended in the last month or so, after not myself grappling with the topic since I left government – it’s ironic that one hears so little about the Iranian nuclear problem today in U.S. public discourse, given the Biden Administration’s eagerness to restart negotiations with Iran and expiate the Trump Administration’s mortal sin of withdrawing the United States from President Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with that country.

Today, by contrast, there’s lots of news about Iranian President Raisi’s death, Tehran’s direct drone and missile attacks against Israel, and the mischief Iranian proxies or agents are causing pretty much everywhere. But the only news in Washington about Iranian nuclear issues for some time now seems simply to be that the Biden Administration Iran envoy who was supposed to ride to the rescue here is apparently under investigation for mishandling classified information in ways that allowed a hostile foreign power to obtain it.

Yet as all of you know, and as we’ve already discussed quite a bit, Iran continues to expand its nuclear capabilities in truly alarming ways, making it today truly a “virtual” or “threshold” nuclear weapon state, able to sprint to weaponization quite rapidly more or less whenever it wishes to do so. And no one in this audience needs me to tell them how destabilizing that would be.

But let me focus on the window of opportunity that I think still exists – small though it may be – to at least try to address this problem diplomatically. And in this respect, let me emphasize that we are entering an absolutely critical year , and indeed perhaps the critical year in diplomatic terms.

I’m not talking about the U.S. elections, but rather about the fact that United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2231 will expire in October of 2025. At least one of you mentioned that yesterday, but let me add an additional gloss. When UNSCR 2231 goes away, so also does its associated U.N. sanctions “snapback” mechanism for imposing global, legally-binding sanctions on Iran. That point is now less than a year and a half away.

Once UNSCR 2231 expires, the only way to place further U.N. sanctions pressures on Iran to restrain or punish its behavior would be through an entirely new Security Council vote – passage of which would all but inevitably be vetoed by the now essentially pro-proliferation revisionist regimes of Russia and China. That means Iran has only to wait a bit longer until it is given a sort of “get out of jail free card” from the United Nations, pretty much no matter what it does in building up its nuclear program.

That’s naturally a terrifying thought. Nonetheless, this impending October 2025 deadline also means that the proliferation-responsible countries of the world still have at least a little time left in which finally to do the right thing in trying to meet the Iranian challenge.

It’s worth reemphasizing just how critical this window of time is.

You need to remember that it was always structurally baked into JCPOA that we would reach a point at which Iran was free of any restriction on its ability to build up fissile material production and enrich as much uranium as it liked. The key so-called “sunset” provisions of the JCPOA begin to expire on their own terms in 2025, and most of them are to disappear by 2030 – after which Iran would be able, in complete conformity with the JCPOA , to employ as many sophisticated centrifuges at it desired, to enrich uranium to whatever level it wanted, and to hold as large a stockpile of enriched uranium it wished.

This “sunsetting” of nuclear restrictions is often forgotten what little there now is of our lamentably partisan public discussion of JCPOA issues, but it bears emphasis here: the JCPOA itself condoned the eventual emergence of such a destabilizing Iranian “virtual” weapon state. To be sure, the U.S. withdrawal from the deal in 2018 has forced us to deal with this unhappy situation rather sooner than would have been the case had the JCPOA remained in force. But make no mistake: sooner or later, we were inevitably going to confront the kind of nuclear Iran that we face today . The question was whether we would face it within the constraints imposed by the JCPOA or outside that deal.

But that’s why the window of opportunity presented by the next 17 months before the October 2025 expiration of “snapback” sanctions is so important.

The crucial issue here is one aspects of which I have discussed before when I was still in government , and it is one of strategic timing . Had the United States stuck with the JCPOA and Iran complied with its terms, we would still eventually have faced an Iran with a large and growing stockpile of ever-more-enriched uranium, just as we do now. But if everyone had stuck with the deal, this problem would have occurred only after the option of U.N. sanctions “snapback” had disappeared – ten years afterward, in fact.

If everyone still adhered to the JCPOA, moreover, by the very terms of that deal, we and the Europeans alsowould have foresworn the imposition of new national sanctions in Iran for building up its fissile material capabilities. (After all, it would be a violation of the JCPOA to sanction Iran for doing what the JCPOA permitted it to do!) In sticking with the JCPOA and confronting the rapidly expanding Iranian nuclear program of 2035, in other words, we would still face a dangerous Iranian “virtual nuclear weapons state,” but we would have deprived ourselves of the ability to use economic pressures to restrain Iran’s nuclear behavior .

I’m hardly delighted that we face an Iran with an expanding nuclear program today, but since this is 2024 and not 2035, the responsible countries of the world still have options – and better options than we would have had if the United States had not pulled out and it were today 2035. Specifically, the international community still has 17 months in which to use the threat of U.N. sanctions “snapback” to impose a new set of enduringlimitations on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and work to rein in its other destabilizing behaviors.

And if Iran refuses to accept such limits, there still remains time – until October 2025, that is – in which the Europeans could trigger “snapback” to punish Tehran and to cut back the resources it would thereafter have available to support its nuclear program, missile development, and sponsorship of terrorism and proxy militias in the Middle East and farther afield.

With snapback invoked, of course, nothing would preclude giving U.N. sanctions relief to Iran if it finally agreed to enduring limits, but this relief would have to be bargained for and win support of the Security Council. That is, such future relief would need to be earned on the merits of a new agreement, quite the opposite of the indefinite “get out of jail free card” that UNSCR 2231’s expiration and the prospects of Russian and Chinese vetoes would give to Tehran.

The United States, of course, already tried to invoke snapback during the Trump Administration, but the Europeans and almost everyone else rejected the idea, telling us that America’s withdrawal from the JCPOA disqualified us from being able to invoke express language in UNSCR 2231 giving the specified five original JCPOA partners the right to do this. I think we had the stronger legal position, but nobody cared . But none of those irksome debates would prevent the “EU-3” (Britain, France, and Germany) from invoking snapback against Iran’s large and growing nuclear program now.

This is an opportunity that would not exist had the United States stuck with the JCPOA, and it’s one that the international community can still seize in trying to bring the Iranian situation back under control. President Biden now says what we said during the Trump Administration: that what is needed is a deal with Iran that is stronger and lasts longer than the JCPOA. Well, there’s a big tool called “snapback” lying on the ground in front of us waiting for us to pick it up, and it’s a tool designed precisely to impose pressure on Iran to bring its nuclear program back under control. It’s now up to the Europeans to use it, or to squander the opportunity.

To me, there’s an enormous irony here, because imposing new and more enduring limits on Iran is preciselywhat we attempted back in late 2017 and early 2018, before the United States withdrew from the JCPOA. When I was at the National Security Council staff and then in my first months at the State Department as Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation, Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook and I traveled to a number of European capitals for discussions on what to do about the “sunset clauses” in the JCPOA and the problem of Iranian missiles .

Our pitch? We proposed to lock in place what was then a 12-month Iranian “breakout” period for having enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon by securing a commitment from the EU-3 that if Iran built up nuclear capabilities that shrunk that period to less than 12 months, they would join us in imposing powerful sanctions on Tehran. If we could thus lock in a permanent commitment to the then- status quo of a 12-month period, in other words – as well, ideally, as a European commitment to sanction Iran if it pressed ahead with its missile program, which at that point was indeed starting to worry the Europeans greatly – we would have something to bring back to President Trump so that he could say he had fixed what he himself had identified as the biggest flaws of the JCPOA.

The EU-3, of course, rejected this proposal, and the United States duly pulled out of the JCPOA in May 2018 . I mention this “path not taken,” however, because such an approach is perhaps in some sense still available to us today – ironically, in part precisely because the United States left the deal back then.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that if you listen carefully to how some European officials talk about Iran today, you’ll hear them starting to say things that sound remarkably like my talking points to them back in 2017-18. Specifically, they seem to be starting to recognize several critical things about the Iran problem today that they refused to acknowledge before.

First, they now increasingly understand that we must avoid squandering the opportunity to use sanctions to pressure Iran to limit its nuclear program. Back then, that meant not sticking to the JCPOA’s forswearing of all such sanctions into the future. Today, it means not letting October 2025 pass without triggering U.N. sanctions “snapback” in the event that there’s not a new and better deal with Iran in place by that point.

Second, the Europeans seem increasingly now to understand that it really does make no sense to try to isolate the “Iran nuclear file” from other hugely problematic aspects of Iran’s behavior, such as its continuing missile provocations, its destabilization of its neighbors, and its penchant for conducting subversive operations on foreign soil, even in Europe .

Third, the Europeans seem to understand that we need to replace and extend the JCPOA sunset clauses with more enduring limitations on Iranian nuclear capabilities. They didn’t seem to care much back in 2017 that key JCPOA restrictions would evaporate eventually, but they apparently care now – and they realize that it’s actually a terrible idea to condone, as the JCPOA did, eventually allowing Iran to enrich as much weapons-grade uranium as it wants.

Fourth and finally, in order to achieve the abovementioned objectives, the Europeans also now seem to understand that the international community needs to increase pressure on Iran as quickly as possible.

I wish it hadn’t taken seven years for the Europeans to get to these realizations. I also recognize that their realizing these truths is not the same thing as being able or willing effectively to act on them – such as by invoking U.N. snapback. And I certainly don’t guarantee that the EU3 will be able to muster the moral courage and intestinal fortitude to seize this chance to address these long-understood problems.

Nevertheless, I do think these realizations could provide the foundation for a coherent Euro-American initiative to use U.N. sanctions snapback as a tool to restrain Iran before the opportunity to use such pressure itself “sunsets” in October of next year. There isn’t a lot of time left, but this looks to me very much like the last chance anyone is likely to have to manage the Iranian nuclear problem and its associated mess of Iranian behavioral comorbidities before meaningful U.N. Security Council sanctions options fall off the table.

Thanks for listening.

— Christopher Ford

New Paradigms Forum

For a Neo-Legitimist International Law

Arms Control Typologies and Dynamics

Below is the essay of Dr. Ford's that INHR published on April 10, 2026. The essay can be found on the INHR website here , or read the text below.

Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Weaponry

Below is the essay of Dr. Ford's that INHR published on March 27, 2026. The essay can be found on the INHR website here , or read the text below.

US Claims of Secret Nuclear Testing & Implications

Below is the essay of Dr. Ford's that INHR published on March 12, 2026. The essay can be found on the INHR website here, or read the text below.

Negotiating Nuclear Security: A View from the First Trump Administration

The March-April 2026 edition of the Foreign Service Journal published Dr. Ford's article entitled "Negotiating Nuclear Security: A View from the First Trump Administration." You can find the article online by clicking here .

Marxing America Great Again: Marxist Discourse in Right-Wing Populism and the Future of Geopolitics

A Time of Strategic Flux in the Middle East: Possible Implications for Proliferation

Ford's 2025 Round-Up

The year 2025 is ageing fast, and the end of the year is now just around the corner. So here’s a compilation of my public work product from the year. As you can see from the list of 10 papers or articles and 26 presentations below, it’s been a busy one.

The INF Treaty’s Two Ghosts

Below is the text of the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to a reunion at DACOR Bacon House , in Washington, D.C., of former U.S. Government officials involved with negotiating and implementing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987.

Three-Power Nuclear Instability and Possibilities for Diplomatic Intermediation

Root Causes of Instability in the Sino-American Relationship

Geopolitical Risks and the U.S.-China Relationship

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his (much) shorter remarks on a panel on geopolitical risk on November 18, 2025, sponsored by Forward Global and the Oxford University Alumni Network.

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U.S. Perspectives on Nuclear Weapons Deterrence and Use

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks at a conference in China on November 8, 2025.

Whither the U.S. Nuclear Policy Process?

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to the Labs Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS on October 20, 2025.

"The Negotiator Files: A Conversation with Christopher Ford"

In October 2025, the Next Generation Nuclear Network at the Center for Strategic and International Studies released a long recorded interview with Dr. Ford as part of its Arms Control oral history project entitled “The Negotiator Files.” You can find Dr. Ford's interview here .

USIP's Clarion Call on Strategic Stability

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks at an event at Hudson Institute on October 2, 2025, on the U.S. Institute of Peace Senior Study Group on Strategic Stability’s recent report on “ Sustaining the Nuclear Peace .”

“Type A” versus “Type B” Proliferation Risk and the Challenge of This Era

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks at a briefing for Congressional staffers on September 30, 2025, organized by the University of Pennsylvania’s Washington Cente r and the Wilson Center .

An Old Guy’s Advice for Staffers and Emerging Leaders in Arms Control and Nonproliferation

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to the “arms control boot camp” program for young national security professionals organized by the CSIS Project on Nuclear Issues in Washington, D.C., on September 30, 2025.

Showing “Tough Love” in Demythologizing Arms Control

Below are the remarks upon which Dr. Ford based his opening remarks in a webinar on September 23, 2025, sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP).

Opportunities and Challenges for Nonproliferation and Nuclear Governance in Southeast Asia

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered on September 22, 2025, at a conference in Singapore sponsored by the Pacific Forum.

Defense and Strategic Studies at MSU: Security Sensibility and Strategic DNA

24 Years Later: 9/11 in the Rear-view Mirror

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Thinking about Strategy in an Artificial Superintelligence Arms Race

Here’s How to Get a Nuclear Deal with Iran Now

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered to a webinar sponsored by the National Institute for Deterrence Studies on August 29, 2025.

U.S. Institute of Peace Senior Study Group on Strategic Stability

The litigation associated with that effort remains ongoing, but the SSG is pleased to be able now to publish its report. The report is not available on the USIP website, but you can use the button below to download a PDF.

Some Thoughts for my British Friends on Nuclear Weapons Policy and Deterrence under the Second Trump Administration

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford drew in his remarks to and discussions with a nuclear deterrence study group in London on July 28, 2025.

Nonproliferation and Geopolitical Structure: Conjunctive Polarities and the Challenges of a Doubly-Multipolar World

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks on July 22, 2025, to a conference sponsored by the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Diplomatic Dialogue Around Existential Risk: The Intellectual Architecture of the “CEND” Initiative

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his oral remarks at a conference sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge University on June 17, 2025.

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Transatlantic Turbulence in Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford drew in delivering his remarks at a conference on "Transatlantic Turbulence: What Next for European Defence?" held at the University of Birmingham on June 13, 2025.

Nuclear Risks in the Indo-Pacific

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered (virtually) to a conference in Beijing on June 12, 2025, sponsored by the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network (APLN) and the Grandview Institution .

Thinking About Russian Nuclear Weapons Thinking

Cybernetics and Comprehensive National Power: The Grand Strategy of China’s “National Rejuvenation”

You can see the whole issue on DASSO's website here , read the Ford/Schurtz/Quam article here , or use the button below to access a PDF of the article.

Arms Control Challenges in Strategic Technology Competition

NATO Multi-Domain Operations: Full Time, not just Wartime

Opportunistic or Coordinated Adversary Aggression and the Nuclear Force Posture Problem of “Numbers and Types”

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks on a webinar organized by the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) on April 28, 2025.

Challenges Facing an Iran Nuclear Deal

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford drew in making his informal remarks on April 21, 2025, at the biennial nuclear policy conference held by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. You can find a video of the panel discussion here .

What is the Future of Arms Control … Now?

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford drew in making his informal remarks to a March 13, 2025, workshop as part of the “Future of Arms Control Project” sponsored by the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding (CCDP).

Struggling with The Bomb: Competing Discourses in the Nuclear Disarmament Movement

Rebutting Sino-Russian Political Discourse and Getting Rights Right

Meeting the Challenges of “Dark Quad” Aggression in the “Gray Zone”

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to a conference at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on February 20, 2025.

Nuclear Doctrines and Prospects for P5 Dialogue

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks on February 18, 2025, to a Track 2 dialogue with Russia on Military Risk Reduction in Europe.

Snapping Back and Looking Forward: A New Old Approach to the Iran Nuclear Crisis

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Evaluating Contemporary Nuclear Risks

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford drew in his panel discussion for an even sponsored by the New York State Bar Association on "Nuclear Weapons and International Law" on January 30, 2025.

What Next from Washington on the Iranian Nuclear Problem?

Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to the workshop on “Enhancing Regional Security and Addressing WMD Threats in the Middle East,” held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, on January 23, 2023.

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Below is the text on which Dr. Ford based his briefing to the European Leadership Network on December 10, 2024.

Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks to the Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, on December 4, 2024.

Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered in a lecture on October 16, 2024, to a group of students at Purdue University.