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http://chicksontheright.com/posts/item/26677-this-is-the-most-delicious-video-you-ll-see-all-day
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Stella at the beach this past week!
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1) If Iran Says ‘Yes’
A series of articles pertaining to Iran as the deadline date nears. (See 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 1e and 1f below.)
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Gen. Dempsey refutes the press and media mis- characterization of Israel's IDF! (See 2 below.)
Why Obama hates "Bibi." (See 2a below.)
Why if you trust the media and news you do so at your peril. (See 2b below.)
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Is Obama engaged in our nation's unilateral nuclear dis-armament? (See 3 below.)
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You can be lame and still be dangerous. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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Gen. Dempsey refutes the press and media mis- characterization of Israel's IDF! (See 2 below.)
Why Obama hates "Bibi." (See 2a below.)
Why if you trust the media and news you do so at your peril. (See 2b below.)
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Is Obama engaged in our nation's unilateral nuclear dis-armament? (See 3 below.)
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You can be lame and still be dangerous. (See 4 below.)
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1) If Iran Says ‘Yes’
Why should a regime that has paid no price for dishonesty suddenly discover the
By BRET STEPHENS
I am on record predicting that a nuclear deal with Iran will founder on the opposition of the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Iranian diplomats, I wrote in May, “will allow this round of negotiations to fail and bargain instead for an extension of the current interim agreement. It will get the extension and then play for time again. There will never be a final deal.”
I was vindicated on the first point in July, when John Kerry purchased a five-month extension for the talks with $2.8 billion in direct sanctions relief for Tehran. I’d be willing to make a modest bet that I’ll be vindicated again when the Nov. 24 deadline for a deal expires. The latest talks in Oman between Mr. Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif seem to have gone nowhere. As Jimmy Carter discovered during the hostage crisis, the mullahs are especially contemptuous toward those they see as weak.
But let’s say I’m wrong. What sort of deal would we likely get?
Above all, it will be a technical deal. Hyper-technical. If you want to master its details, be prepared to know the difference not just between LEU (low-enriched uranium) and HEU (high-enriched), but also between IR1 and the far more efficient IR2 centrifuges. You’ll need to know what a cascade is, and you’ll have to appreciate the importance of footprints when it comes to M&V (monitoring and verification) mechanisms. You’ll have to appreciate that, as in watches, proliferation resistant is not the same thing as proliferation proof, an important point if Russia is to turn Iran’s enriched uranium into fuel rods for the reactor at Bushehr.
Also, get a handle on PMD (Possible Military Dimensions) of the Iranian nuclear program, a regular staple of reports by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) as well as Iran’s acquiescence to the AP (meaning the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, not the news agency). Meantime, keep a close eye on Arak (the plutonium-breeding reactor near the city by the same name, not the liquor). Examine the feasibility of “snap-back” sanctions.
And so on. The avalanche of fine print will help convey an appearance of meticulousness and transparency. If this were a nuclear deal between the U.S. and, say, Finland, no doubt it would be so.
But we’re talking about Iran, meaning the abundance of detail will serve a more obfuscatory function. The Obama administration will count on a broad measure of public ignorance and media credulity, meaning it can sell a deal by citing experts who happen to agree with its conclusions. Anyone want to have a debate about how much U-235 dances on the head of an Iranian SWU?
As for Iran, a deal with one hundred moving parts also serves it well. “The Iranians will cheat the way they always cheat, which is incrementally, not dramatically,” notes sanctions expert Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Sooner or later, we’ll spot a potential violation and get into a debate about forensics: Are the Iranians complying or not? This will eat up time before we even get to the political debate over what to do about it.”
That’s been the Iranian M.O. ever since their covert nuclear program was first exposed in 2002. We’ve been negotiating their noncompliance ever since. Why should a regime that has paid no price for dishonesty suddenly discover the virtues of honesty in a post-deal world?
Supporters of a deal offer three answers. One is that the sanctions relief the West will offer in the deal can always be reversed in the event Iran cheats. “We can crank that dial back up,” as Mr. Obama said about sanctions last year. They also argue that what Iran seeks is to become, in the Bismarckian sense, a “satisfied power,” one that achieves its goals of diplomatic normalization, economic prosperity and nuclear pride—but also knows its limits.
Finally, as the Economist magazine argued in a recent editorial, time is on the West’s side. Think of China in the early 1970s: Sooner or later, Khamenei, like Mao, will die; sooner or later, public thirst for modernization, led by a Deng Xiaoping-type figure such as Hasan Rouhani, will steer Tehran to a better path.
Maybe so: Dreams sometimes come true. But diplomacy based on dreams usually fails. Iran, under its moderate leadership, executes one person roughly every seven hours. It boasts broad sway over four Arab capitals: Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and, most recently, Sanaa, in Yemen. The President of the Great Satan is all but begging for a nuclear deal. European companies are already salivating at the thought of a piece of the post-sanctions Iranian economy. Try dialing that back.
As for the opposition once known as the Green Revolution, when did you last hear from it?
The Obama administration likes to make much of the notion that Iran, starved by sanctions, is like a beggar at a banquet. If so, this beggar doesn’t settle for scraps. If Iran says no to a deal, Mr. Kerry will soon be back with a better offer. If it says yes, it will take what it’s given and, in good time, take some more.
Al Qaeda on a “path to defeat.” America “out of Iraq.” It won’t be long before a nuclear deal with Iran will join the list of Mr. Obama’s hollow Mideast achievements.
When he met with the press last Wednesday, President Obama gave a vote of confidence to his Iranian negotiating partners as having upheld their end of the interim nuclear deal they signed with the U.S. last year. But as much as the revelations about the president’s secret correspondence with Iran’s supreme leader that were published in the Wall Street Journalon Friday undermined the credibility of his promises about his willingness to get tough with the Islamist regime, it turns out that his assurances about Iranian compliance were also untrue.As Reuters reports, there is now good reason to believe that the Iranians have already violated the deal.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, while U.S. diplomats have spent 2014 offering even more concessions to Iran, the ones Tehran pocketed last year are already worthless:
The IR-5 is one of several new models that Iran has been seeking to develop to replace the erratic, 1970s vintage IR-1 centrifuge that it now uses to produce refined uranium. Unlike other advanced models under development — IR-2m, IR-4 and IR-6 — at a research site at its Natanz enrichment plant, Iran had until now not fed the IR-5 with uranium gas.Western officials were not immediately available to comment on the allegation by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), which closely tracks Iran’s nuclear program. There was no immediate comment from Tehran. ISIS, whose founder David Albright often briefs U.S. lawmakers and others on nuclear proliferation issues, cited a finding in a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about Iran. The confidential document, issued to IAEA member states on Friday, said that since the U.N. agency’s previous report in September, Iran had “intermittently” been feeding natural uranium gas into a single so-called IR-5 centrifuge at a research facility.
“Iran may have violated (the interim accord) by starting to feed (natural uranium gas) into one of its advanced centrifuges, namely the IR-5 centrifuge,” ISIS said in an analysis.
This is significant for two reasons.
The first is that this piece of information uncovered by the IAEA shows that Iran is actively working to circumvent the already loose restrictions on uranium enrichment that were part of the interim deal. Even had Iran kept their word, it wouldn’t have taken much for the Iranians to reverse the measures that rendered their stockpile of nuclear fuel harmless. But if even the IAEA, whose efforts to monitor the Iranian nuclear program have been stymied by Iranian obstructionism, has been able to discover this deception, it’s clear the regime has been working all out to get around even the loose restrictions imposed by the interim deal.
It is true that, as Reuters also reports, advocates of appeasement of Iran are arguing that none of this constitutes a technical violation of the agreement. But their arguments sound like hair splitting. Whether or not Iran has introduced a new kind of centrifuge, it’s obvious that the effort noted by the IAEA is seeking a way around the rules and may well have already found it. The interim deal gave tacit recognition to an Iranian “right” to enrichment that had already been denied by an international consensus that realized Tehran’s goal was to build a nuclear weapon, not provide for their “peaceful energy needs.”
Just as important is that the Iranian effort to get around the interim deal explodes not only the president’s assurances but also calls into question the entire negotiating process. If the Islamist regime can violate the weak interim deal, which only sought ineffectively to freeze the dangerous nuclear program in place, how can anyone possibly expect a new and more far-reaching agreement to be credible, let alone adequately enforced?
We already know that the administration’s zeal for a deal caused it to discard the considerable economic and military leverage it had over Iran before the interim deal began the process of unraveling the international sanctions. Despite the president’s tough rhetoric, the Iranians believe his desire to create a new détente with their despotic, terror-sponsoring government—what Deputy National Security Director Ben Rhodes called the ObamaCare of the president’s second term—has put them in a strong negotiating position. That’s why they’ve spent this year demanding more concessions from the West without fear that the U.S. will call them to account on their violations or their stalling. They are confident that Obama’s lust for an agreement and pressure from Europe to end the concessions will obtain for them an even weaker nuclear deal or the time and leeway to achieve their nuclear ambition without even bothering to sign a deal.
The reaction from the administration and its apologists should confirm them in this belief. But the news about the violation should give Congress even more reason to pass tougher sanctions to increase the pressure on Iran. Iran’s cheating strengthens an already strong case for more sanctions, not more concessions from Obama.
Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of COMMENTARY magazine and chief political blogger.
At yesterday’s post-midterm elections news conference President Obama was also asked about the nuclear negotiations with Iran. His reply was consistent with the rhetoric he has been using about this subject since he first was running for president in 2008. He told the country his goal was to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and that no deal with Tehran was better than a bad deal. As with most everything else he has said on the subject during his presidency, this is an exemplary statement of what America’s policy should be. The only problem is that his actions flatly contradict this pronouncement. While that fact was already no secret, today’s revelations about the president carrying on a correspondence with Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei further undermines his narrative about being tough with the Islamist regime.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama wrote to the Iranian leader in the context of the campaign against ISIS in Iraq, a common enemy of both the U.S. and the Islamist regime. The content of the letters as reported by the Journal is not as much a concern as the fact that the administration has kept its key allies in the Middle East, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates out of the loop on the correspondence much as it did last year when the U.S. conducted secret talks with Tehran in order to facilitate the interim nuclear accord signed last November. President Obama apparently is far more interested in ingratiating himself with Khamenei than with Israel.
This news casts a shadow over the president’s assurances given in his press conference yesterday about Iran. The president said that the U.S. would learn whether a deal could be obtained with Iran sometime in the “next several weeks.” But what Iran has already learned about U.S. policy in the last two years is that the best thing they have going for them in the talks is that the president’s obsession with creating a new détente with the regime always outweighs his supposed commitment to stopping them. Though he boasted of how tough he has been on them—taking credit for economic sanctions that he opposed tooth and nail prior to their adoption—the record of the past six years is quite different. The president jettisoned America’s considerable economic and military leverage over Iran last year when he agreed to tacitly recognize Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium and allowed them to keep their nuclear infrastructure.
In the follow-up talks conducted this year, which have predictably gone into overtime far past the original timeline and may well extend beyond the new November 24 deadline, he has offered even more concessions, including absurd proposals about disconnecting the pipes that link the centrifuges spinning the nuclear fuel. He continues to buy into the lie that Iran seeks nuclear power for its “peaceful energy needs”—a joke considering its oil reserves—and seems more interested in reintegrating the brutal, anti-Semitic regime back into the international economy than in halting their support of terrorism or forcing them to stop building missiles that couldn’t threaten the West as well as Israel and moderate Arabs.
The president has continued to frame opponents of his weak diplomacy as seeking war, a point he alluded to in his remarks. But the real alternative to Obama’s campaign of appeasement was the tougher sanctions proposed by a bipartisan congressional coalition that he expended considerable political capital to defeat last year.
The problem isn’t whether the Iranians will sign a deal either before November 24 or after it. It is, rather, why the U.S. has abandoned the stance the president enunciated in his 2012 foreign-policy debate with Mitt Romney when he said any agreement must result in the end of Iran’s nuclear program. Last year’s interim agreement ensured that its nuclear program would survive. If the leaks coming out of the current talks are right, there’s little doubt that the sanctions will be lifted (by Obama simply ordering them not to be enforced rather than by congressional vote as required by law) in exchange for measures that will do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear threshold state. But, as he did last year, the president will claim victory and count on his press cheerleaders to back up his assertions that critics are warmongers.
As troubling as the letters to Khamenei may be, it is Obama’s diplomatic initiative that is the real threat to America’s Middle East allies as well as to the long-term security interests of the West. What those worried about this threat need are not more hollow promises from the president but transparency about an appeasement strategy.
Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of COMMENTARY magazine and chief political blogger
1c)
Iran's uranium stockpile grows before deadline for nuclear deal
Low-enriched uranium gas stockpile grew by 8% to nearly 8.4 tons in about two months, IAEA says; chief Iranian nuclear negotiator believes both sides determined to reach deal by Nov. 24 deadline.
VIENNA - Iran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium gas has grown by 8 percent to nearly 8.4 tons in about two months, UN atomic inspectors say, an amount world powers probably will want to see cut under any nuclear deal with Tehran.
The International Atomic Energy Agency issued a confidential report on Iran to IAEA member states on Friday, less than three weeks before a Nov. 24 deadline for Iran and six world powers to resolve their stand-off over Tehran's atomic activities.
Iran's holding of refined uranium gas is one of the factors that could determine how much time it would need for any attempt to assemble nuclear weapons. Iran says it has no such goal but the West wants verifiable action by the Islamic Republic to make sure it cannot produce an atomic bomb any time soon.
Iran and the six states will meet in Vienna from Nov. 18 to try to seal a long-term agreement to end a dispute that over the last decade has often raised fears of a new Middle East war.
The IAEA report said Iran's stock of uranium gas refined to a fissile concentration of up to 5 percent stood at 8,390 kg, a rise of 625 kg since its previous report in September. Iran says it produces enriched uranium to make fuel for nuclear power plants. But if processed to a high degree, 90 percent, the material could also provide the fissile core of a nuclear weapon, which the West fears may be its ultimate aim. Iran halted its most sensitive enrichment work - of 20 percent refined uranium - under an interim deal with the powers last November. But it is still making the lower-grade uranium. Western experts say Iran would now be able to amass enough high-enriched fissile material for one bomb in a few months, if it opted for such a weapon of mass destruction. The United States wants this "breakout time" extended to at least a year. One way to help achieve that, Western officials and experts say, is for Iran to ship out a large part of its stockpile to Russia where it would be turned into nuclear fuel rods, making it much more difficult to process into bomb material. Diplomats said there was as yet no agreement on this issue and that the main sticking point in the talks - Iran's overall enrichment capacity - remained unresolved. "It's a piece of the puzzle," one Western diplomat said. "The Iranians agree on the principle, but it's a point that doesn't resolve everything." Current gaps notwithstanding, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Tehran believes both sides are resolved to reach a deal by the self-imposed Nov. 24 deadline.
"No middle solutions exist and all our thoughts are focused on how to reach a settlement," Araghchi, Iran's chief negotiatior, told the state news agency IRNA.
"No one wants to return to the way things were before the Geneva Agreement. That would be too risky a scenario," he said, referring to the preliminary accord reached a year ago under which Iran has curbed some sensitive nuclear activity in exchange for limited relief from international sanctions. "Both sides are aware of this, which is why I think a deal is within reach. We are serious and I can see the same resolve on the other side," Araghchi was quoted by IRNA as saying. Kerry said on Wednesday the negotiations would get more difficult if the Nov. 24 deadline were missed, and the powers were not - for now - weighing any extension to the talks. His remarks seemed aimed in part at raising the pressure on Tehran to agree to the deal, which would include tougher UN inspections to verify Iran is complying with its provisions. Iran agreed under last year's temporary accord with the United States, France, Germany, Russia, Britain and China to limit its reserve of low-enriched uranium gas by converting new production into a less proliferation-sensitive oxide form, which it started doing a few months ago. The stockpile is now above the defined level but Iran still has time to reduce it before the temporary deal expires this month, when it is supposed to be replaced by a long-term one. Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the non-proliferation program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank, said he believed the powers would want to see the holding sharply reduced in any permanent settlement. "If the stockpile is eliminated, then it may be possible to allow Iran a larger number of centrifuges," he said, referring to the machines that produce enriched uranium.
1d)
Iran Nuclear Talks and North Korean Flashbacks
By Claudia Rosett
With the Iran nuclear talks nearing a Nov. 24 deadline for a deal, U.S. chief negotiator Wendy Sherman is under pressure to bring almost a year of bargaining to fruition. While U.S. policy rests ultimately with President Obama, and the most prominent American face in these talks is now that of Secretary of State John Kerry, the hands-on haggling has been the domain of Sherman. On the ground, she has been chief choreographer of the U.S. negotiating team. The President has been pleased enough with her performance to promote her last week from Under Secretary to Acting Deputy Secretary of State.
The talks themselves have been doing far less well, marked by Iranian demands and U.S. concessions. This summer the U.S. and its negotiating partners agreed to extend the original July deadline until November. Tehran’s regime, while enjoying substantial relief from sanctions, is refusing to give up its ballistic missile program and insisting on what Tehran’s officials have called their country’s “inalienable right” to enrich uranium. The Obama administration badly wants a deal. This week The Wall Street Journal reported that last month Obama wrote a secret letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, which “appeared aimed both at buttressing the campaign against Islamic State and nudging Iran’s religious leader closer to a nuclear deal.” Speaking to reporters in Paris this week about the Iran nuclear negotiations, Kerry said “We believe it is imperative for a lot of different reasons to get this done.” So, now that crunch time has arrived, what might we expect? If precedent is any guide, it’s worth revisiting Sherman’s record from her previous bout as a lead negotiator, toward the end of the second term of the Clinton administration. Back then, Sherman was trying to clinch an anti-proliferation missile deal with another rogue despotism, North Korea. That attempt failed, but only after then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, together with Sherman, had dignified North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Il with a visit to Pyongyang in late October, 2000. These American top diplomats brought Kim the gift of a basketball signed by one of his favorite players,Michael Jordan. Kim entertained them with a stadium display in which tens of thousands of North Koreans used flip cards to depict the launch of a long-range missile. Less well remembered was the encounter shortly before Albright’s trip to Pyongyang, in which the State Department hosted a visit to Washington, Oct. 9-12 of 2000, by one of the highest ranking military officials in North Korea, Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok. The centerpiece of Jo’s trip was a 45-minute face-to-face meeting at the White House, in the Oval Office, with President Clinton. It was historic, it was the first time an American president had met with an official of North Korea’s totalitarian state. And it was a deft piece of extortion by North Korea, which had parlayed its missile program — including its missile trafficking to the Middle East, and its 1998 test-launch of a missile over Japan — into this lofty encounter in which the U.S. superpower was pulling out all the stops in hope of cutting a deal before Clinton’s second term expired in Jan., 2001. By 2000 (or, by some accounts, earlier) the Clinton administration was also seeing signs that North Korea was cheating on a 1994 denuclearization arrangement known as the Agreed Framework. Eight months before Jo arrived in Washington, Clinton had been unable to confirm to Congress that North Korea had abandoned its pursuit of a nuclear weapons program. Nonetheless, Jo’s visit rolled ahead, with Sherman enthusing in advance to the press that “Chairman Kim Jong Il has clearly made a decision — personally — to send a special Envoy to the United States to improve relations with us.” Officially, Jo was hosted in Washington by Albright. But it was Sherman, then the Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State for North Korea Policy, who orchestrated the events, squired Jo around Washington and briefed the press. It was Sherman who had helped prepare the way while accompanying her predecessor, the previous North Korea policy coordinator and former defense secretary, William Perry, on a trip to North Korea in 1999. Jo arrived in Washington on Oct. 9, staying at the venerable Mayflower Hotel, where Sherman went to greet him. The next morning Jo and his delegation began their rounds with a courtesy call on Albright at the State Department. Then, before heading to the White House, Jo engaged in a symbolically freighted act. According to an account published some years later in the Washington Post by the senior State Department Korean language interpreter, Tong Kim, who was present for the occasion: “The marshal arrived in Washington in a well-tailored suit, but before going to the White House, he asked for a room at the State Department, where he changed into his mustard-colored military uniform, with lines of heavy medals hanging on the jacket, and donned an impressive military hat with a thick gold band.” Perhaps it did not occur to anyone at the State Department that North Korea was still a hostile power, a brutal rogue state fielding one of the world’s largest standing armies, and that this donning of the uniform on State premises was not just a convenience, but an implied threat. Or perhaps the zealous hospitality of the occasion just over-rode any thought at all. In any event, it was in his uniform that Jo went from the State Department to the White House. Following those meetings, Sherman briefed the press. She made a point of mentioning that Jo had worn a business suit to the State Department. but changed into full military uniform for his meeting with the President of the United States. Sherman chose to interpret Jo’s wardrobe change as happy evidence of North Korean diversity under Dear Leader Kim: “We think this is very important for American citizens to know that all segments of North Korea society, obviously led by Chairman Kim Chong-Il in sending this Special Envoy, are working to improve the relationship between the United States and North Korea and this is obviously an important message to the citizens of North Korea as well.” Actually, there were substantial segments of North Korean society whose chief preoccupation was finding enough food to stay alive, toward the end of a 1990s famine in which an estimated one million or so had died — forbidden by Kim’s totalitarian state to enjoy even a hint of the freedom that had by then allowed their brethren in South Korea to join the developed world. This was known at the time, but did not figure in Sherman’s public remarks. On the second evening of Jo’s Washington visit, Albright hosted a banquet for him and his delegation at the State Department. She welcomed the “distinguished group” to the “historic meeting,” and invited everyone to relax and get better acquainted. There was laughter and applause. Jo made a toast — a disturbing toast — in which he said there could be “friendship and cooperation and goodwill, if and when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and our leadership is assured, is given the strong and concrete security assurances from the United States for the state sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” If the State Department’s chief North Korea policy coordinator, Wendy Sherman, noticed a problem with that toast, and its mention of territorial integrity, it seems she did nothing to alert the assembled American dignitaries. The crowd clapped and raised a toast to North Korea’s envoy. It was left to outside observers, such as American Enterprise Institute scholar and North Korea expert Nicholas Eberstadt, to point out, as Eberstadt stressed at an AEI forum in 2008, that North Korea lays claim to the entire Korean peninsula, including South Korea. “Take a look at the maps; take a look at the preamble to the Workers’ Party charter,” said Eberstadt; the real message is, “We can be friends with North Korea if we are willing to subsidize North Korean government behavior and throw South Korea into the bargain too, but that is a pretty high opening bid.” Jo’s visit ended with a U.S.-D.P.R.K Joint Communique, full of talk about peace, security, transparency and access. There was no missile deal. Kim Jong Il wanted Clinton, leader of the free world, to come parley over missiles in totalitarian, nuclear-cheating Pyongyang. Clinton demurred. In late October, Albright and Sherman went instead. As the clock ticked down on the final weeks of the Clinton administration, Sherman reportedly traveled to Africa with a bag of cold-weather clothes, to be ready in the event of a last-minute summons to North Korea. In 2001, President Bush was inaugurated. Sherman left the State Department, and soon afterward she wrote an Op-ed for The New York Times, headlined “Talking to the North Koreans.” Sherman noted that “Some are understandably concerned that a summit with President Bush would only legitimize the North Korean leader” — nonetheless, she urged Bush to try it. Bush tried confrontation in 2002 over North Korea’s nuclear cheating, followed by years of Sherman-style Six-Party Talks, including two agreements, in 2005 and 2007, which North Korea punctuated in 2006 with its first nuclear test, and has followed during Obama’s presidency with two more nuclear tests, in 2009 and 2013. Vice-Marshal Jo died in 2010. Kim Jong Il died in 2011, and was succeeded by his son, current North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un, whose regime carried out the 2013 nuclear test, and threatened earlier this year to conduct another. Wendy Sherman rejoined the State Department under Obama, and has moved on from wooing North Korea to the bigger and potentially far deadlier project of negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran. Considerable secrecy has surrounded many specifics of these talks, while Americans have been asked to trust that this is all for their own good. In a talk last month at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, Sherman said: “As Madeleine Albright once observed — a wonderful Secretary of State, a dear friend, and a business partner to boot at one point in my life — negotiations are like mushrooms, and often they do best in the dark.” Now, in the Obama administration’s increasingly desperate quest for an Iran deal, comes news that President Obama is proposing to Iran’s Khamenei, ruler of the world’s leading terror-sponsoring state, that Iran and the U.S. cooperate to fight the terrorists of ISIS. This has a familiar ring. Back in 2000, the visit of North Korea’s Vice Marshal Jo to the White House was preceded, shortly beforehand, by a “Joint U.S.-D.P.R.K. Statement on International Terrorism,” in which both the U.S. and North Korea agreed that “international terrorism poses an unacceptable threat to global peace and security.” Apparently this was all part of the negotiating process of finding common ground. What could go wrong? Not that anyone should pin all this on Wendy Sherman, who is just one particularly active cog in the Washington negotiating machine. But there’s a familiar script playing out here. It does not end well. Ms. Rosett is journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and heads its Investigative Reporting Project. 1e) Dem Think Tank Secret Email: ‘All Hands On Deck’ to Sell Iran Deal to Public
By Adam Kredo
A leading liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., has begun enlisting its associates in an “all-hands-on-deck effort to support” the Obama administration as it seeks to ink a nuclear deal with Iran by the end of the month, according to emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The Truman National Security Project, a nonprofit think tank with ties to the administration, is assembling a “crack team of writers” to flood national and local media outlets with articles supporting the White House’s efforts before the details of a final nuclear deal have even emerged, according to internal emails sent by the organization to its listserv.
“Our community absolutely must step up and not cede the public narrative to neocon hawks that would send our country to war just to screw the president,” Graham F. West, Truman’s writing and communications associate, wrote in a recent email to the organization’s listserv.
The statement comes from an organization that has long billed itself as an independent voice for “strong, smart, and principled solutions to the global challenges Americans now face,” according to Truman’s mission statement.
“Once again, Truman is gearing up for an all-hands-on-deck effort to support the administration’s goal of securing a nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1,” West wrote in the email. “The core message is the same: a deal is the only way to prevent an Iranian bomb and keep the U.S. out of another war.”
However, the newly elected Republican majority in Congress threatens to stymie these efforts, West warns.
“But this time, with newly-emboldened congressional Republicans out to wreck the negotiations, we have a very real and public fight ahead,” the email states.
West goes on to enlist Truman affiliates in a pro-administration media campaign targeting key states across America.
“I am putting together another crack team of writers to target both local papers and national outlets,” he writes. “In particular, I am looking for folks who are interested in writing for papers in Illinois, New Hampshire, Georgia, Arizona, and New York.”
“Truman was formed to lead exactly this type of fight, so let’s get to work,” West explains. “Shoot me an individual reply if you’re in!”
Several current and former Obama administration officials sit on Truman’s board of advisers, including Colin Kahl, a senior national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, and Michele Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense for policy.
When asked on Tuesday to address the email and its content, Truman communications director Stephanie Dreyer said that the correspondence is private and “off-the-record.”
“Per our discussion, below is the disclaimer language that is on all of our emails sent to our community list serve, thus you are not permitted to use any language or information you received via a Truman Project list serve email,” Dreyer wrote via email.
“Messages posted to this listserv are off-the-record and confidential unless explicitly stated otherwise by the author,” according to Dreyer. “Do not share information with non-members without permission of the author. Questions about the Truman Project’s privacy policy should be directed to chapter directors.
Dreyer also said that “as a community” Truman “will continue to support U.S. diplomats and our allies in their efforts to secure a final deal that prevents a nuclear Iran and keeps us out of another war in the Middle East.”
One senior foreign policy hand at a D.C.-based organization called Truman’s email “reckless.”
“It’s reckless but not surprising,” said the source, who would only discuss the email on background. “The Truman Institute long ago stopped being a real policy shop and instead became a PR machine for the Obama administration’s foreign policy. The White House will take a deal no matter what, so the Truman Institute is pushing a deal no matter what.”
1f)
WASHINGTON -- The United States sent a team of senior officers to Israel three months ago to learn from Israel's tactics in Operation Protective Edge in Gaza over the summer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey said on Thursday.
Dempsey praised the IDF for taking "extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties" in its war against Hamas. The militant organization, Dempsey said, "had become very nearly a subterranean society," burrowing underground and hiding amongst the civilian population. "We sent a team of senior officers and non-commissioned officers over to work with the IDF to get the lessons from that particular operation in Gaza," he told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment. He referred to the group of officers as the "lessons learned team." Dempsey noted Israel's development of new techniques, such as "roof knocking," warning residents of an incoming strike. "They would display leaflets to warn citizens and population to move away from where these tunnels," the general said. "But look– in this kind of conflict, where you are held to a standard that your enemy is not held to, you're going to be criticized for civilian casualties." Roughly 2,100 Gazans were killed in 50 days of fighting, in which Israel was targeting tunnel infrastructure and rocket launchers built and operated by Hamas. Determining just how many of those killed were civilians and how many were operatives is difficult to independently verify. Both Hamas and Palestinian Authority leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas and United Nations envoy Riyad Mansour, accused Israel of committing genocide in the campaign. The PA has threatened in recent weeks to join the International Criminal Court and press Israel on allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, European Union and Israel.
2a) Why Obama Hates Netanyahu!
Obama’s foreign policy was supposed to reboot America’s relationship with the rest of the world. Old allies would become people we occasionally talked to. Old enemies would become new allies. Goodbye Queen, hello Vladimir. Trade the Anglosphere for Latin America’s Marxist dictatorships. Replace allied governments in the Middle East with Islamists and call it a day for the Caliphate.
Very little of that went according to plan.
And then there’s Israel.Obama is still stuck with Europe. The Middle East and Latin American leftists still hate America. The Arab Spring imploded. Japan, South Korea and India have conservative governments.
The original plan was to sideline Israel by focusing on the Muslim world. Instead of directly hammering Israel, the administration would transform the region around it. The American-Israeli relationship would implode not through conflict, but because the Muslim Brotherhood countries would take its place.
That didn’t work out too well. Instead of gracefully pivoting away, Obama loudly snubbed Netanyahu. A photo of him poking his finger in Netanyahu’s chest captured the atmosphere. Netanyahu delivered a speech that Congress cheered. And Obama came to see him as a domestic political opponent.
The torrent of anti-Israel leaks from the administration is a treatment usually reserved for political opponents. The snide remarks by White House spokesmen and the anonymous personal attacks on Netanyahu in the media echo domestic hate campaigns out of the White House like Operation Rushbo.
Netanyahu wasn’t just the leader of a country that the left hated. He had become an honorary Republican.
When Obama met with him, Netanyahu firmly but politely challenged him on policy. He has kept on doing so ever since, including during his most recent visit. At a time when most leaders had gotten the message about shunning Romney, Netanyahu was happy to give him a favorable reception. Netanyahu clearly wanted Romney to win and Obama clearly wished he could pull a Clinton and replace Netanyahu. But Netanyahu’s economic policies were working in exactly the same way that Obama’s weren’t.
The two men hate each other not only on a personal level, but also on a political level.
Netanyahu had successfully pushed through a modernization and privatization agenda that on this side of the ocean is associated with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper or Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. It’s likely what Romney would have done which is one more reason the two men got along so well. Obama’s visible loathing for Romney is of a piece with his hatred for Netanyahu.
He doesn’t just hate them. He hates what they stand for. That’s why Harper and Netanyahu get along so well. It’s part of why Obama and Netanyahu get along so badly.
But the bigger part of the conflict is neither personal nor political. Obama wanted to sideline Israel; instead he’s stuck dealing with it. Hillary’s lack of foreign policy ambition allowed the Jewish State to come through fairly well in Obama’s first term. For Hillary, being Secretary of State was just a stepping stone to the White House by making her rerun candidacy seem fresh. Her relationship with Israel was bad, but her first job was not to make any waves.
John Kerry ambitiously jumped into multiple foreign policy arenas. His bid for a deal between Israel and the PLO was a predictable disaster. And he took Obama along for the ride. It’s unknown if Obama blames Kerry for the mess that ensued when his proposals collapsed into war, but there’s little doubt that he now hates Netanyahu more than ever.
The war dragged Obama deep into the confusing political waters of the region. His attempt to back the Turkish and Qatari empowerment of Hamas in the negotiations ended with Egypt and the Saudis scoring a win. It was hardly Netanyahu’s fault that Obama once again chose to side with a state sponsor of terror, but it’s safer to blame Netanyahu for the humiliation than the leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
And then there’s Iran. Netanyahu remains the loudest voice against an Obama agreement to let Iran go nuclear. No matter how many talking heads defend the deal, he blows away all their hot air.
Not only did Obama fail to sideline Israel, but he’s stuck dealing with Netanyahu. And no matter how much he may view Netanyahu as an Israeli Romney, he can’t quite openly treat him like Romney because there are plenty of Jewish Democrats who still haven’t realized his true feelings for Israel.
Both men are stuck together. Egypt hates Obama more than it did before he overthrew its original government. Iraq and Syria are war zones. The Saudis are actively undermining Obama’s policies. Israel is still America’s best ally in the region and that interdependency frustrates him even more.
Obama wanted to destroy the American-Israeli relationship. Instead he’s entangled in it. He blames Netanyahu for the situation even though the mess is mostly of his own making.
Despite the myths about the vast powers of the lobby, Israel has never been at the heart of American foreign policy. And under Obama, it’s been on the outskirts in every sense of the word. Israel is back to being a major concern of American foreign policy mostly because of Obama’s massive failures in every other part of the region and Kerry’s belief that he could somehow succeed where everyone else failed.
Netanyahu’s presence reminds Obama of his own failures. If everything had gone according to plan, America would be experiencing a new age of amity with the Muslim world. Instead he’s stuck bombing Iraq and reaffirming the special relationship with Israel almost as if he were on Bush’s fourth term.
It’s not the way that the international flavor of Hope and Change was supposed to taste.
Obama hates Israel. He hates Netanyahu. And their continuing presence in Washington D.C. reminds him of his inability to transform American foreign policy. Their very existence humiliates him.
He knows that directly lashing out at Israel would alienate the Jewish supporters he still needs. Despite his effort to displace pro-Israel voices with J Street, the Jewish community is still pro-Israel. And so he resorts to passive aggressive behavior like snubbing the Israeli Defense Minister or anonymous officials in the administration taunting Netanyahu as a “coward” and “chickens__t” in the media.
It takes a courageous administration to anonymously call the leader of a tiny country a coward. It’s childish behavior, but this is an administration of children overseen by a man whose response to his opponent’s accurate reading of the world situation was to taunt him about the “1980s” and “horses and bayonets.”
While Obama’s people anonymously taunt Netanyahu as a coward, it’s their boss who acts like a coward, stabbing Israel in the back, slandering its leader anonymously through the media and then trying to sell himself to Jewish donors as the Jewish State’s best friend in the White House.
2b) Attkisson: CBS Kept Obama Benghazi Clip Secret to Help Re-Election
Former CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson says CBS News executives kept a clip of President Obama refusing to call the Benghazi attacks terrorism secret until after the election in order to help Obama's re-election.
Obama was interviewed by Steve Kroft for "60 Minutes" the Sunday following the attack and said, "Well, it's too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved. But, obviously, it was an attack on Americans." That clip did not air as part of the original interview, but the full transcript was sent to the "CBS Evening News" staff. Mitt Romney brought up during one of their 2012 presidential debates Obama's failure for 14 days to label the attack terrorism. Attkisson said that would have been the perfect time to have brought out the clip.
Appearing Sunday on Fox News Channel's "MediaBuzz," Attkisson said, "That exchange, I believe, should have been pulled out immediately after the debate, which would have been very newsy at the time, It was exclusive to CBS. It would have, it appears to me, proven Romney's point against Obama. But that clip was kept secret."
"And it was only right before the election that somebody kind of leaked out the transcript to others of us at CBS and we were really shocked. We felt that there had been something very unethical had been done to have kept that up," Attkisson said. The "Evening News" executives had access to the complete transcript the day "60 Minutes" sent it over, said Attkisson, citing emails she says she has seen.
"They, in my view, skipped over it, passed it up, kept it secret throughout the whole time when it would have been relevant to the news," she said. "And I think that was because they were trying to defend the president and they thought that would be harmful to him.
HIDING UNILATERAL DISARMAMENT OBJECTIVES
By Author: Peter Huessy
It has been 33 years since the U.S. last embarked on a nuclear modernization program.
Both the Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of Defense have called for a debate over what the future costs of the nuclear deterrent enterprise should be and what investment is needed to keep the peace and prevent nuclear war.
At issue is whether the United States can afford to spend 4% of its defense budget and 0.6% of all federal spending to modernize its nuclear deterrent over the next decade and beyond.
Two widely divergent views are emerging.
The first is that a plan is necessary to modernize the U.S. nuclear capability to keep it a robust and credible deterrent in the face of advances currently being made by China and Russia and North Korea in their nuclear programs
This view is shared by most of Congress and the administration. Congress declared — and the administration concurred — in 2010, in the Resolution of Ratification of the New START treaty with Russia, “that United States deterrence is assured by a robust triad of strategic delivery vehicles”[1] and as such was “committed to modernize… the triad [silo based missiles on land, submarines at sea and bombers in the air][2] … for the long term.”[3]
The U.S. nuclear “triad” consists of nuclear warheads mounted on platforms based at sea, in the air and on land.
In addition, this view is also associated with support for making more defense funds available to protect our security, including for our nuclear deterrent. That point was made in July 2014 by the National Defense Panel, and most recently by Congressman Randy Forbes (R-Va.) and Senator Mark Rubio (R-Fl.).
On the other side, the Ploughshares Fund, a group pushing for zero nuclear weapons globally, claims that planned nuclear spending will be much higher than the Defense Department (DOD) is admitting. Ploughshares claims that fully modernizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent would require between $570-700 billion over the next ten years, more than triple the current DOD projections.
Ploughshares argues that the defense budget spending caps agreed to in 2011 for the subsequent ten years means that nuclear spending should be cut significantly over the next ten years because 1) we cannot afford the full modernization of our nuclear forces, and 2) nuclear weapons are, after all, increasingly obsolete and not needed.
What are the facts?
In four recent highly regarded assessments, below, of the U.S. nuclear deterrent budgets, the current year's expenditures are pegged at $23 billion a year and project future average annual spending at upwards of $27-$35 billion. None comes anywhere close to the “fuzzy math” estimates of Ploughshares.
According to the office of the Secretary of Defense, current nuclear deterrent spending is $23 billion a year. That was also the expert testimony to Congress in 2012 of former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James N. Miller.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO),[4] the U.S. Department of Defense is projected to spend on average $35 billion a year for the next decade as nuclear modernization goes into effect, compared to the $23 billion the CBO agrees we are spending today.
Similar spending estimates were calculated in both a 2009 study by the Mitchell Institute of the Air Force Association[5] and a 2012 Stimson Center study, entitled, “Costing Nuclear Weapons.”
The Mitchell study detailed the costs of a hypothetical future modernization program, but one that turned out to be very close to the U.S.'s actual currently-planned force of submarines, bombers and land based missiles. The study determined that the annual investment costs would average $6.25 billion for replacing or modernizing 450 new ICBMs, 14 submarines (two more than currently planned), and sustaining the bomber force, which includes a new bomber air-launched cruise missile.[6]
The study added into the mix annual operations and maintenance costs of $5.4 billion for the platforms of submarines[7], bombers and land-based missiles, for a total nuclear force modernization cost of $12 billion a year.
To get the full costs of the U.S. nuclear deterrent enterprise, one also has to add to the Mitchell numbers the associated nuclear warhead work at the National Nuclear Security Administration ($7.4 billion) and the command-and-control nuclear related costs, ($4.2 billion).[8] Those additions would bring the total nuclear deterrent enterprise costs to roughly $23 billion a year right in line with other mainstream estimates.
Total costs for a decade, therefore, — using the Mitchell and Stimson Center studies[9] — would be $228-$280 billion — not $570+ billion that Ploughshares estimates. While they are not insignificantly less than the CBO numbers of $350 billion, they are a huge 50-70% less than the Ploughshares spending estimates of $570-$700 billion over a decade.
Nevertheless, it is the grossly exaggerated Ploughshares estimates that are being used by those opposed to the U.S. plan to modernize its nuclear capability.
Based on the large Ploughshares numbers for nuclear expenditures, Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass) in the Senate and Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) in the House introduced in Congress what they call the SANE Act, the Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures. Senator Markey's plan would cut $100 billion from planned nuclear deterrent budgets over the next decade.
The SANE act would cut the new nuclear-armed sea-based fleet from a planned 12 submarines to 8,[10] and stop development of both a new replacement for the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and a new strategic bomber.
Unfortunately, that round of cuts may be only the first being sought by the Senator. Previously, Senator Markey had relied on even bigger estimates for future nuclear deterrent spending from the Ploughshares Fund to support nuclear cuts of $200 billion — not $100 billion — over the next decade.[11]
In 2011, for instance, Ploughshares estimated that the annual cost of US nuclear deterrence was not $57 billion (their earlier estimates) but $70 billion.[12]
Markey had then proposed that nuclear deterrent spending be cut not by $100 billion, but by $200 billion over the next ten years.
That is a cut in the range of 35-70% from future strategic nuclear deterrent funding and upwards of 90% of current spending. Either cut would totally devastate the U.S. nuclear deterrent capability.[13]
What is going on here?
Years ago, Congressman Norm Dicks, a leading defense expert and member of the defense subcommittee of the House appropriations committee, explained how to kill defense programs you do not like. He said, “You have to invent a 'Dragon' to slay.”
So Ploughshares made two dragons to slay. It first designated “nuclear weapons” their “Dragon to Slay.” Then it claimed that this “Dragon” would become a “Trillion” dollar one.
So how did $23 billion a year in nuclear spending all of a sudden get to $57-70 billion a year and then $1 trillion over the next few decades?
First, Ploughshares adopted enough assumptions — however wrong-headed — that eventually got them to the “right” dragon-number.[14]
They adopted, for example, the idea of adding missile defense spending to the category of “nuclear weapons” when in the defense budget it is solely under Defense Wide, Army and Navy conventional forces accounts but not nuclear.
This insertion alone adds upwards of $10 billion year to their “nuclear” number,[15] even though 90% of American missile-defense funding goes to build missile-defenses such as Iron Dome or Patriot, which are designed to protect people against non-nuclear conventional missile strikes. These are not nuclear systems by any stretch of the imagination.
Next, Ploughshares ignored that nuclear bomber costs are relatively small, (the nuclear component of a new dual-capable bomber is only 3% of the total bomber cost).
The U.S. needs a new conventional bomber irrespective of whether is it going to have a nuclear capability or not.
But if you take the entire cost of the new conventional bomber modernization program, as well as the costs of existing bombers — both nuclear and conventional capable — and simply count everything as if it is a nuclear program, that will add tens of billions of dollars to annual “nuclear spending” by a simple rhetorical sleight of hand.[16]
The cook-the-book experts at Ploughshares, however, were not done. Instead of estimating nuclear budget costs for one year, as every administration does when it submits its annual budget to Congress, they adopted various spending estimates for up to three decades.[17]
Redefined “nuclear budget” estimates suddenly grew very rapidly. They in fact reached the “magic” attention-getting “trillion” dollar mark.
Thus, the “Dragon” was born.
Ploughshares then had to invent a way to trash the value of nuclear deterrence, as an argument to “slay” the dreaded “Dragon” it had invented.
Ploughshares argued that since nuclear weapons did not deter the attacks of 9-11, they are obviously no longer useful.[18] But no American military or law enforcement capability of any kind — not just nuclear weapons — stopped the attacks of 9-11.
Then they added to that argument what missile defense expert Uzi Rubin describes as a “fortune cookie analysis”.[19] They argued that as nuclear weapons are relics of the Cold War, “what good are they?”
It is true that many of the weapons systems in our conventional arsenal today were deployed or under development during the Cold War.
But as USAF Lt Gen James Kowalski, the Vice Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, explained about nuclear weapons: “I don't think we're any more a Cold War force than an aircraft carrier, or Special Ops, or the UH-1 helicopter.”[20]
After the end of the Cold War, as USAF General Garrett Harencak argued, the U.S. went on an extended “procurement holiday.” In short, the U.S. did not modernize its forces, nuclear or conventional, for nearly two decades. The U.S. also delayed modernization, a lapse that has led to the current problem of having to modernize most elements of America's nuclear deterrent simultaneously, as well as key parts of its conventional forces.
One example can illustrate how serious this failure is. U.S. Air Force planes now average 26 years of age. When President Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, the “hollow” military that so worried the country had an Air Force whose planes at that time averaged 12 years of age.[21]
As a result, much of the technology and equipment now used in the U.S. armed forces, including nuclear forces, is in fact the same as at the end of the Cold War.
Should these conventional weapons be dramatically cut as well?
In fact, describing the U.S. nuclear force structure as a “Cold War relic”[22] says nothing about whether the force is still needed.
So, having claimed that much of nuclear arsenal is not needed because it is, after all, so much “Cold War” stuff, Ploughshares can now use its fuzzy cost-estimates to advantage.
As Senator Markey has argued, for example, if the U.S. is now spending upwards of $70 billion a year on nuclear weapons,[23] (which if true would be a level higher in current-year dollars than what the U.S. was spending during the height of the Cold War), doesn't it make sense, when faced with serious budget deficits, to cut, say, $20 billion a year from the nuclear enterprise?
But cutting $20 billion a year from the current nuclear deterrent of the U.S. would require killing all modernization of the U.S. triad of nuclear forces, plus all the work extending the life of nuclear warheads.
And that is what the Ploughshares Fund has variously proposed: pushing to delay the strategic nuclear bomber and eliminate the Minuteman land-based missiles. In a recent essay, Ploughshares additionally claimed that the current nuclear submarine force replacement program might not be needed either. Writes Ploughshares, “We have not yet determined whether we will need… any… of the bombs they [submarines] will carry.”[24]
In short, Ploughshares has proposed to either eliminate or delay the modernization of every leg of the nuclear triad even if, as a result, each element risks becoming obsolete in the near term.
This means that in about 20 years, the U.S. would be left with no effective or credible nuclear deterrent, just as China and Russia are modernizing their nuclear deterrents across the board.[25]
If adopted together, all these Ploughshare recommendations would leave America with an aging, obsolete nuclear deterrent, one totally inadequate to meet current or future threats as it “rusts to obsolescence.”[26]
While Senator Markey and his Congressional allies are calling for a “delay” in the bomber and ICBM modernization programs, in Washington a delay often has the same impact as killing a program. Just think of the Keystone pipeline. A decision to delay its approval in order to “review” the pipeline program was made more than 74 months, or six years, ago.
What the proposed Ploughshares budget cuts are actually doing, it appears, is trying to camouflage the objective of permanently disarming America of key parts of its nuclear capability.
Such disarmament would place in jeopardy not only America's own security but also that of the more than 31 nations that rely upon its nuclear umbrella for their security.
Why has the press not seen this disarmament strategy for what it is, and what is the alternative?
The best way forward is the nuclear deterrent roadmap adopted in December 2010 and, since then, supported largely by the administration and overwhelmingly by Congress — so far. As funded in the past five defense bills, the roadmap begins prudently to modernize the triad of forces the U.S. now has, while simultaneously reducing the warheads in its arsenal that eventually it will keep.[27]
To be clear, the U.S. will not be adding thousands of new nuclear bombs to the nuclear force, as Ploughshares claims. Modernizing yes, but while reducing total deployed warheads.
One poll, sponsored by the Stimson Center, found that 67% of American respondents agreed that modernizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent — replacing old systems while also pursuing strategic stability and arms control — made sense as an overall military strategy.[28]
This modernization is a replacement program that will responsibly reduce America's nuclear force structure from 14 to 12 submarines, while keeping 400 operational ICBMs out of 450 silos and 60 strategic nuclear bombers.
Modernization will occur even as the U.S. reduces the number of nuclear warheads to 1550, as allowed by the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) — but down from 2200, the number allowed during the George W. Bush era.
This new, lower, warhead level, last attained during the Eisenhower administration, is significantly down from the more than 13,000 deployed warheads the U.S. maintained at the height of the Cold War.
Such a plan makes sense.
It is appropriate for America's political leaders to see to it that the U.S. is prepared to defend itself and its allies. They must be open with the American people and explain that spending 4-5% of the defense budget and six-tenths of 1% of the federal budget on deterring nuclear war is a prudent, affordable and urgently needed investment in the nation's defense.[29]
Given Russia's recent aggression in Ukraine, further bilateral nuclear reductions between the Russians and the United States are at best a remote possibility.
But as William Broad hinted in the New York Times, a significant reduction of nuclear weapons can always be done unilaterally by the United States, bypassing the need for any arms control deal with Russia.
Oddly, the nuclear cuts being proposed by Senator Markey do not require any reciprocal Russian reductions, such as one would get in a bilateral arms control agreement. The U.S. nuclear cuts would be, as Ploughshares also proposes, unilateral, despite the current massive nuclear build-up by Russia and China.
There thus is a choice before us.
Should the U.S. recklessly make nuclear cuts unilaterally, in search of a hoped-for world, free of nuclear weapons?
Or should the U.S. pause in making further reductions in nuclear weapons, and modernize its nuclear forces to the level of nuclear weapons allowed by the 2010 New START treaty between the U.S. and Russia? And should the U.S. just get on with the task, tough as it is, to keep the peace, maintain the deterrent, “and provide for the common defense”?
As former Congressman Norm Dicks said on July 12, 2012 about America's nuclear weapons: “They are a good deterrent and they have been an effective deterrent. Thank God for that.”
[1] From paper prepared for Senator James M. Inhofe, Ranking member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, November 2013.
[2] Declaration 12, New START Resolution of Ratification, December 22, 2010.
[3] Letter from President Obama to Senators Daniel Inouye,(D-HA) Thad Cochran,(R-MS); Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN), December 20, 2011.
[4] Report – “Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2014 to 2023″ by the Congressional Budget Office. December 2013. (pdf); “Budgets for Operating, Sustaining, and Modernizing the Strategic Nuclear Triad”, “Cost of U.S. Nuclear Forces, by Department and Function”.
[5] “Triad, Dyad, Monad? Shaping the US Nuclear Force for the Future,” Mitchell Institute for Airpower Studies, Mitchell Paper #5, December 2009.
[6] “Triad, Dyad, Monad? Shaping the US Nuclear Force for the Future,” Mitchell Institute for Airpower Studies, Mitchell Paper #5, December 2009, Table #3, p.27.
[7] Data from remarks of General (ret.) Frank Klotz, Maj. Gen. Garrett Harencak, and Lt. Gen Steven Wilson, at the September 18, 2014 Symposium on the Future Roadmap of the Strategic Nuclear Enterprise, held at the Army Navy Club in Washington, D.C. and “Triad, Dyad, Monad? Shaping the US Nuclear Force for the Future”, Mitchell Institute for Airpower Studies, Mitchell Paper #5, December 2009.
[8] Based on Mitchell Study of December 2009 and Stimson Center study of June 2012, and author's own additional analysis.
[9] The Mitchell Study assessed the ten-year costs at $228 billion while the Stimson Center study (adjusted by the author by removing missile defense and other non-nuclear related costs) assessed the ten years costs at roughly $280 billion.
[10] “Legislation to Reduce Nuclear Weapons Spending Introduced”, Mar 3, 2014 – SANE – “A high-profile U.S. Senate critic of nuclear-weapons spending on Friday introduced a bill that would cut $100 billion over the next … and national security,” Senator Markey said in a press release on the SANE Act.
[11] Senator Markey's proposed cut of $200 was announced by the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) as well as the Council for a Livable World on September 29, 2011. They both praised then Representative Markey for sending a letter along with 64 House members entitled “Freeze the Nukes, Fund the Future” to the Congressional Super Committee calling for “a cut of $20 billion a year or $200 billion over the next ten years, from the US nuclear weapons budget.”
[12] “What Nuclear Weapons Cost Us;” Ploughshares Fund Working Paper, September 2012. (Annual estimates of nuclear spending in this paper are $640 billion over a decade while other Ploughshares Fund estimates range from $57 billion to $70 billion annually).
[13] Cutting $20 billion a year from the current nuclear deterrent budget of $23 billion would obviously gut the U.S. strategic nuclear deterrent capability. If that amount were cut from future annual estimated budgets of $30-35 billion, it would still decimate America's deterrent capability.
[14] “What Nuclear Weapons Cost Us;” Ploughshares Fund Working Paper, September 2012.
[15] One of the original studies to include missile defense expenditures in what was termed nuclear deterrent spending was the 2006 “Spending on US Strategic Nuclear Forces: Plans & Options for the 21st Century” by Steven M. Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). Other studies by the Congressional Budget Office, (CBO) in Dec. 2013 and Stimson Center in June 2012 followed suit.
[16] Adding in a notional percent of the bomber costs (25%) to the nuclear accounts was adopted by the CBO in its 2012 study, while higher percentages of the strategic bomber costs were added to the nuclear accounts by both the CSBA and the Stimson studies referenced above and subsequently adopted by Ploughshares among other arms control groups.
[17] One of the first times an anti-nuclear organization estimated the cost of nuclear weapons over multiple decades was the report entitled “The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad” by Jon B. Wolfsthal, Jeffrey Lewis and Marc Quint, of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey, California, in January 2014.
The “Trillion” dollar price tag was then subsequently adopted by the Ploughshares Fund, even as that organization was claiming annual nuclear related spending was variously $57 to $70 billion annually, which would imply a three-decade cost of $1.5 to $2.1 trillion.
One arms control analyst, Kingston Rief of Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation has concluded that a realistic cost-estimate of nuclear modernization over the next three decades could be as low as $600 billion, a not insignificant $400 billion less than the $1 trillion estimated cost often used by opponents of modernization.
[18] See “America's Forgotten nuclear missile crews.” See also “Bombs Away” by Bruce Blair, Brian Weeden, and Damon Bosetti, International New York Times; and from WarScapes by Russ Wellen, April 9, 2019, “The Real Reason Missile Launch Officers Cheat.”
[19] The former head of the Israeli Missile Defense Agency, Uzi Rubin, once quipped that anyone can come up with a snappy “fortune cookie” analysis. “Relic” of the Cold War is one.
[20] Air Force Association, National Defense Industrial Association and Reserve Officers Association Capitol Hill Breakfast Forum, July 31, 2013, with Lt Gen General James Kowalski, Commander, United States Air Force Global Strike Command, on “Nuclear Deterrence, Prompt Strike, and Triad Perspectives.”
[21] “The Nuclear Enterprise,” Maj Gen Garrett Harencak, AFA – Air & Space Conference and Technology Exposition, 16 September 2014. The USAF data is from a personal communication with Gen (ret.) Michael J. Dunn, past President of the Air Force Association and National Defense University.
[22] “Is the Triad Cost Effective?”; and “The Unrealistic Budgets and Nasty Politics of Nuclear Weapons”
[23] LA Times, October 21, 2014 “How big a nuclear arsenal do we really need?” by Joe Cirincione. The $70 billion a year figure was used by then Congressman Edward Markey, quoting remarks by Ploughshares President Joe Cirincione, in a letter the Congressman and 34 of his House colleagues wrote to the Congressional Super Committee, October 11, 2011.
[24] LA Times, October 21, 2014 “How big a nuclear arsenal do we really need?” by Joe Cirincione. Authors note: The need to replace the U.S. submarine fleet in a timely basis is not well understood. Each year after 2027, one U.S. submarine has to be retired: its hull cannot be certified to remain stable with greater service. Even today, the planned service life of the current submarine force is greater than the U.S. has ever previously relied on. In addition, R&D costs for the program remain fixed, whether four, eight or 12 submarines are built. Savings only occur when the program is terminated.
[25] An excellent summary of the strategic nuclear modernization effort of both China and Russia can be found on the Air Force Association website: Steve Blank (AFPC) and Mark Schneider (NIPP), May 23, 2014, “New Trends in Russian Nuclear Defense Strategy; and Russian Nuclear Modernization and Security Challenges;” and Gordon Chang, Rick Fischer, and Ed Timberlake, May 20, 2014, “China's Rise, US Deterrent Challenges: the Realities of the Second Nuclear Age.”
[26] This term was first used by Clark Murdock, the director of the Program on Nuclear Initiatives (PONI) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in remarks to the AFA-NDIA, ROA Congressional Breakfast Seminar Series on Nuclear Deterrence and Arms Control in May 2013.
[27] “Modernizing US Nuclear Forces”, from Senator James Inhofe, Senate Armed Services Committee, November 2013.
[28] Program for Public Consultation, Consulting the People on National Security Spending, May 12, 2012, provided by the Stimson Center.
[29] Here is an excellent summary in chart form published in December 2013 by Senator Gary Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee of the relative level of nuclear deterrent spending and investment from 1962 and projected to 2017, and expressed in terms of the percent of the DOD budget. Note that during the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. was spending 17% of the DOD budget on nuclear weapons, and 11% during the Reagan modernization period. By comparison, projections (see table below) are that nuclear modernization costs might approach 4% of the defense budget.
 Another look at nuclear spending was an August 1996 Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 . Edited by Stephen I. Schwartz, it concluded the U.S. government spent $5.5 trillion in the 57 years from 1940-1966 on all nuclear and nuclear deterrent related programs, implying an average annual expenditure of $100 billion (adjusted to today's dollars).
At the time of its publication, this author discussed the study with Schwartz, to determine what assumptions went into his conclusions. In particular, his view was that current nuclear expenditures at the time were roughly $57 billion a year — the number also used by the 2006 CSBA study referenced above.
Both estimates use the same, possibly faulty assumptions, to come up with the same numbers. As a historical review, this book has much information but its characterization of much spending as “nuclear related” is in this author's view, far too expansive.
4)
Obama the 'lame duck' not so lame
By Thomas Sowell
People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama's competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.
Just what happened last week on Election Day? And what is going to happen in the years ahead?
The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet. Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States.
Such judges -- perhaps including Supreme Court justices -- would have been confirmed by Senate Democrats, and could spend the rest of their lifetime appointments ruling in favor of expansions of federal government power that would make the freedom of "we the people" only a distant memory and a painful mockery.
We dodged that bullet. But what about the rest of Barack Obama's term?
Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past. Despite the Republican sweep of elections across the country last week, President Obama has issued an ultimatum to Congress, to either pass the kind of immigration law he wants before the end of this year or he will issue Executive Orders changing the country's immigration laws unilaterally.
Does that sound like a lame duck president?
On the contrary, it sounds more like some banana republic's dictator. Nor is Obama making an idle bluff. He has already changed other laws unilaterally, including the work requirement in welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration.
The very idea of Congress rushing a bill into law in less than two months, on a subject as complex, and with such irreversible long-run consequences as immigration, is staggering. But there is already a precedent for such hasty action, without Congressional hearings to bring out facts or air different views. That is how ObamaCare was passed. And we see how that has turned out.
People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama's competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs. You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do.
When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.
The president's refusal to protect the American people by quarantining people coming from Ebola-infected areas -- as was done by Britain and a number of African nations -- is by no means a sign of incompetence. It is a sacrifice of Americans' interests for the sake of other people's interests, as is an assisted invasion of illegal immigrants across our southern borders.
Such actions are perfectly consistent with Obama's citizen of the world vision that has led to such statements of his in 2008: "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that every other country's going to say okay."
In a similar vein, Obama said, "we consume more than 20 percent of the world's oil but have less than 2 percent of the world's oil reserves." In short, Americans are undeservedly prosperous and selfishly consuming a disproportionate share of "the world's output" -- at least in the vision of Barack Obama.
That Americans are producing a disproportionate share of what is called "the world's output" and consuming what we produce -- while paying for our imports -- is not allowed to disturb Obama's vision.
Resentment of the prosperous -- whether at home or on the world stage -- runs through virtually everything Barack Obama has said and done throughout his life. You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to find the clues. You have to shut your eyes tightly to keep from seeing them everywhere, in every period of his life.
The big question is whether the other branches of government -- Congress and the Supreme Court -- can stop him from doing irreparable damage to America in his last two years. Seeing Obama as an incompetent and weak, lame duck president only makes that task harder.
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