Month: August 2016

NATO expansion and the US-Russian relationship

But [Richard] Holbrooke was irrepressible and his proposal [to invite Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states to join NATO in 1996] moved forward. I went to President Clinton, explaining my concerns, and asking for a full meeting of the National Security Council to air my concerns and my arguments for a delay. The president called a meeting of the NSC dedicated to the issue, and I made my case for delaying NATO membership for a few years. I was amazed by the dynamics of the meeting. Neither Secretary of State Warren Christopher nor National Security Advisor Anthony Lake spoke out. The opposing arguments were made instead by Vice President Gore, and he made a forceful argument in favor of immediate membership, an argument more persuasive to the president than mine. The president agreed to immediate membership for Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic but delayed the membership of the Baltic states for later consideration. Vice President Gore’s argument was based on the value of bringing Eastern Europe into the European security circle, with which I fully agreed. He believed that we could manage the problems this would create with Russia, with which I disagreed. I continued to connect the maintenance of a positive relationship with Russia with the delaying of NATO expansion for several more years. And again and most fundamentally: when I considered that Russia still had a very large nuclear arsenal, I put a very high priority on maintaining that positive relationship, especially as it pertained to any future reduction in the nuclear weapons threat.

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p. 128-9 (paperback)

Op-ed diplomacy

During those tense days [of trying to stop North Korean reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel for weapons], an op-ed in the Washington Post caused considerable excitement. Brent Snowcroft, the former national security advisor, and his colleague Arnie Kanter (both long-time friends), wrote a column essentially stating that the United States would strike the Yongbyon reactor if North Korea did not verifiably stop its reprocessing. The key sentence was: “It either must permit continuous, unfettered IAEA monitoring to confirm that no further reprocessing is taking place, or we will remove its capacity to reprocess.

Not surprisingly, that op-ed attracted a lot of attention both in the United States and in Korea. In reality, while we had a contingency plan, we were not planning to make such a strike. (Indeed, the strike would have required authorization from President Clinton and concurrence from the South Korean president, which had not yet been sought.) But I have always believed that the public call for a strike by Snowcroft and Kanter played a positive role in the crisis because it focused the minds of North Korean officials on the stakes in play. It is likely that North Korean officials wrongly thought that Snowcroft was speaking for the US government; indeed, even some Americans mistakenly imagined that I had encouraged Snowcroft to write the piece. For whatever reason, North Korea moved quickly to diminish the crisis, inviting former president Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang, where they proposed a resolution that Carter could relay to the American administration (there being no official channels of communication).

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p. 107-8 (paperback)

Interdependence between conventional and nuclear arms

This principle of the interplay between conventional and nuclear forces is fundamental to deterrence in the nuclear era. The dangerous example today of the consequences of failure to maintain strong conventional forces is Russia. Given the decline in their conventional arms, the Russians are embarked on a major nuclear buildup and leaders have starkly stated that they plan to use those nuclear forces if faced with a security threat, even if that threat is not nuclear.

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p. 81 (paperback)

Urban growth

In an interesting recent article on urbanization, The Economist noted:

A huge and growing number of people live somewhere like Mikwambe [“on the edge of Dar es Salaam”]. Between 2005 and 2015 the world’s cities swelled by about 750m people, according to the UN. More than four-fifths of that growth was in Africa and Asia; specifically, on the fringes of African and Asian cities. With few exceptions, cities are growing faster in size than in population. Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, is typical: it doubled in population between 1990 and 2010 but tripled in area. In short, almost all urban growth is sprawl.

Among other things, this suggests environmental and climate change implications. Urban sprawl, whether of the kind experienced in America in the middle of the 20th century or the sort taking place in today’s newly emerging cities, essentially depends on cheap transportation. Furthermore, low urban density is a poor match with public transport.

Countries all over the world may be persisting with urban design choices which will make decarbonization more difficult. As a corollary, if we succeed in fighting climate change, it may make large parts of these sprawling cities economically unviable.

Arms control and MIRVs

President George H.W. Bush followed up these arms control initiatives. In 1991, he signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which called for reducing the number of ICBMs and warheads on both sides; ICBMs were reduced to 1,600 and deployed warheads to 6,000. In January 1993, just before President Bush left office, he signed another Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II), of enormous significance for strategic stability because it banned MIRVs on ICBMs. Considering the well-known theory that a MIRV might “invite” a surprise attack because of the economy-of-destruction of one attacking Soviet warhead taking out a US missile (still in its silo) armed with ten warheads, the ban on MIRVs was seen as enhancing strategic stability by eroding any incentive for an “out-of-the-blue” attack. Hence this treaty solved the problem that all the MX mobile-basing modes [including missiles on airplanes; trains; trucks; submerged on the continental shelf; or always moving between a huge number of shelters (p. 49-50)] of the past had eventually been judged incapable of solving. (Unfortunately, START II is no longer in effect. As I will discuss later, the Russians withdrew from the treaty and began building a new class of MIRVed ICBMs after the George W. Bush administration withdrew the United States from the ABM Treaty with the Russians.)

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p.72-3 (paperback)