Public debate on nuclear-weapons policy is relatively rare these days. Two developments nevertheless pushed the topic back into the limelight last week. On June 19th, President Obama delivered a wide-ranging foreign-policy speech in Berlin that touched briefly on nuclear-arms control. Later that same day, the White House released a summary of new presidential guidance resulting from a lengthy interagency review of what’s needed for nuclear deterrence. Criticism quickly followed from both ends of the political spectrum—but for very different reasons.

Arms-control advocates, on the one hand, felt that the president had passed up an opportunity to aggressively advance his nuclear agenda. They had anticipated that he would use the Berlin speech to rekindle interest in steps he had proposed four years earlier in Prague to eventually bring about “a world without nuclear weapons.” They had also hoped that new presidential guidance would direct the Pentagon to take actions that would more dramatically reduce the role of nuclear weapons in national security policy. They were disappointed on both counts. The New York Times editorial board reflected this mood, describing Obama’s proposals as “a disappointing example of what happens when soaring vision collides with the reality of obstructive Republican senators, a recalcitrant Russia and a convergence of regional crises.”

Conservative critics, on the other hand, lambasted the president’s call for further reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. The GOP chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, “Buck" McKeon, stated that “desire to negotiate a new round of arms control with the Russians, while Russia is cheating on a major existing nuclear arms control treaty, strains credulity.” The ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker of Tennessee, asserted that additional limitations of the U.S. nuclear arsenal without first modernizing existing forces could amount to “unilateral disarmament.” Twenty-four Republican senators signed a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry arguing that “any further reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal should only be conducted through a treaty subject to the advice and consent of the Senate.”

Despite these sharply contrasting reactions, the approach taken by President Obama and his administration actually represents a relatively moderate and measured effort to reconcile two dominant, but different themes in current American thinking about nuclear weapons. The first is the belief that the United States should continue to lead international efforts to limit and reduce nuclear arsenals, prevent nuclear proliferation, and secure nuclear materials. The second is the belief that appropriately sized nuclear forces still play an essential role in protecting U.S. and allied security interests.

The Berlin speech addressed the first; the summary of the new guidance largely spoke to the second. Taken together, they represent a pragmatic and workable basis for forging a sustainable, bipartisan consensus on nuclear weapons and arms-control policy.

What the President Said

The biggest news from the Berlin speech was President Obama’s announcement that the United States could reduce its “deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to one-third” and still maintain a strong and credible deterrent. (Given that the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, sets a limit of 1550 deployed strategic nuclear weapons, a one-third reduction translates to 1000-1100 weapons.) He also stated that he intended to “seek bold reductions in U.S. and Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.”

Other than defining the magnitude of possible cuts, the president said little else that was fundamentally new. Following the completion of the New START in 2010, senior American officials had hoped to pursue even further reductions in long-range nuclear forces and, for the first time, to set limits on tactical and nondeployed weapons. However, profound differences between Washington and Moscow on missile defense—and a host of other bilateral issues—essentially blocked further negotiations. At the same time, the highly partisan atmosphere inside the beltway left little space or appetite for seriously debating arms-control matters.

Not much has changed on both accounts in recent months, and the prospects for renewed arms control talks in the immediate future are far from bright. Thus, it is not surprising that the president’s language on nuclear issues in Berlin was decidedly more tempered and subdued than the soaring rhetoric of his 2009 Prague speech. Arms-control advocates were clearly disappointed; they had expected more.

The new presidential guidance also indicated that reductions up to one-third could also be made in strategic nuclear forces. In many other respects, it exhibits a fair degree of continuity with the approach taken by previous administrations. For example, the publicly-released summary states that the United States will continue to maintain a “triad” of long-range nuclear forces, consisting of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), ballistic-missile submarines, and nuclear-capable, long-range bombers. It also states that the United States will continue to base nuclear forces in Europe, “until such time as NATO has agreed the conditions are right to change the Alliance’s nuclear posture.”

While many in the defense community no doubt took heart with these particular conclusions, some arms-control advocates were critical, arguing that the new guidance reflects a “Cold War mindset” and a continuing failure to adjust to the new security environment.

It Really Isn’t About the Cold War Any More

Recent history, however, belies this oft-repeated assertion. The United States has in fact made rather dramatic changes to its nuclear forces since the early 1990s, both in numbers and composition. In 1967, the United States had more than 31,000 nuclear weapons. By 2009, it had just over 5,000.

The composition of nuclear forces has also changed. As the Soviet Union was in the final stages of collapse in the fall of 1991, George H. W. Bush unilaterally ordered all U.S. ground-force tactical nuclear weapons be returned from overseas bases and dismantled. Nuclear-armed bombers were taken off alert in the United States. Several nuclear-modernization programs were cancelled.

Similarly, long-range nuclear forces have been dramatically reduced in number by successive U.S.-Russian arms-control treaties. When this author first performed missile duties in the early 1980s, the United States had 1,054 ICBMs located at nine major bases. Today, there are 450 ICBMs at three bases. Additionally, the huge Titan II missile and the multiwarhead Peacekeeper missile have both been deactivated. The Obama administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review further mandated that all remaining Minuteman ICBMs be armed with a single, rather than multiple, nuclear warheads.

To suggest that a “Cold War mentality” prevails in the formulation of American nuclear policy is to turn a blind eye toward the significant steps successive administrations have already made to adjust to new security realities. By the same token, to take President Obama to task for pursuing further nuclear reductions ignores the fact that that he is following a well-established precedent set by his predecessors. It is worth remembering that George W. Bush negotiated a treaty with Russia that would reduce the number of operationally deployed U.S. strategic nuclear weapons by nearly two-thirds—and he was initially prepared to make those cuts unilaterally.

The Basis of a Nuclear Consensus

Nuclear weapons are not going away anytime soon. The other nuclear-armed states show little inclination to engage in multilateral arms control, much less to reduce their stockpiles to zero. Several countries—China, France, India, Pakistan and Russia—are in fact pursuing substantial efforts to modernize, diversify and, in some cases, expand their existing nuclear forces. North Korea and Iran seek to develop both nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Given this sobering reality, the United States still needs to maintain modern, survivable and effective nuclear forces to deter the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies, however improbable that may now appear.

While President Obama's Berlin speech and new guidance for U.S. nuclear forces have been criticized for not breaking new ground or, alternatively, pushing too fast on further reductions, they represent a reasonable and measured approach to the realities of being a major nuclear power. They also provide the basic elements of a broad consensus on what needs to be done to sustain our nuclear forces in an uncertain world populated by other nuclear powers. They can and should be used to advance an agenda that combines necessary modernization and reductions tailored to serve American and allied security interests.

Lt Gen Frank G. Klotz, USAF (Ret.) is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC, and the former commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, which has responsibility for all U.S. nuclear-capable bombers and land-based missiles.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Sven Gross-Selbeck. CC BY-SA 3.0.