My Blog Posts

• Enhancing U.S. Security Through Treaties
  08/16/2011 05:01:30 PM EST
  Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller spoke to the U.S. Strategic Command 2011 Deterrence Symposium on August 4, and her comments regarding progress on the New START treaty were encouraging. Gottemoeller stated that the Treaty, which entered into force on February 5, has been “very successful,” and she likened its implementation to a “fast moving train.” To date more then 1,000 notifications have been passed between Washington and Moscow, tracking movements and changes in the status of each country’s strategic offensive arms and delivery vehicles. Gottemoeller noted that U.S officials and their Russian counterparts have been “constantly in communication,” strengthening mutual understanding and confidence.
• The Cost of Maintaining the Nuclear Status Quo
  06/27/2011 01:22:37 PM EST
  The group Global Zero recently released a report assessing nuclear weapons spending worldwide. Their findings indicate that over the next decade, governments will significantly increase their nuclear weapons spending, eventually surpassing $1 trillion over the next decade. While this figure is significant, it must also be taken with a grain of salt. First, the trillion dollar figure is what Global Zero calls the “full cost” of nuclear weapons, as opposed to the “core cost.” Core costs refer to "researching, developing, procuring, testing, operating, maintaining and upgrading the nuclear arsenal." Full costs are derived from a more holistic approach, including "unpaid/deferred environmental and health costs, missile defenses assigned to defend nuclear weapons, nuclear threat reduction, and incident management". The report’s figure for the core cost of nuclear weapons over the next decade rests at about $670 million, therefore falling short of the $1 trillion dollar figure. Another concern is that the report’s figures have a wide margin of error. Quantifying even broad defense spending for countries like Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea is problematic, and as such, speculating about their total nuclear spending is near impossible. Global Zero admits this, but fairly argues that these programs are “small enough that inaccuracies in estimates would have negligible effect on the general conclusion." At current levels, "the nine nuclear weapons countries are spending approximately one trillion dollars per decade." Methodological concerns aside, what the report succinctly expresses is that world-wide investment in nuclear weapons is greater than ever.