Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

36th Annual IFPA-Fletcher Conference on
National Security and Policy
Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Forces in 21st-Century Deterrence: Implementing the New Triad

December 14-15, 2005
Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel
Washington, D.C.

Session 6 - Responsive Infrastructure and Reassurance/Dissuasion

Address by Dr. John Harvey, Director, Policy Planning Staff of the National Nuclear Security Administration, U.S. Department of Energy

Thank you very much. I want to take a somewhat different track today on this issue of infrastructure. I want to expose you to some thinking about how we might operationalize some of the concepts articulated yesterday by Ryan Henry, Brian Green and others about two of the defense policy goals; assurance and dissuasion. Specifically, I pose the following question: how can the nuclear weapons enterprise itself act to assure friends and dissuade potential adversaries? I should add this thinking is at a relatively early stage of maturity, it’s not an NNSA policy, Ambassador Brooks hasn’t been briefed on it. [laughter] So therefore, he can disown it.

But the ideas I want to address with you today would benefit from discussion and feedback from this group, provided either at this meeting or subsequently. I'm particularly interested in feedback from my colleagues at the national laboratories who would be a key part of this concept that I want to talk to you about today. As a government official, I usually don’t footnote my work, but the ideas that I talk to you about today have the benefit from discussions and feedback from Elaine Bunn, Keith Payne, Brad Roberts, others.

Let me go to the next chart. My basic approach over the next ten minutes or so is to recall for you how the defense R&D and manufacturing base of which the nuclear weapons enterprise is a key component has communicated important messages in the past, as well as into the present. And then I want to address some of the opportunities and risks in connection with seeking ways to do this in the future on a more systematic and day to day basis. Recall, we assure allies and friends by demonstrating the United States’ steadiness of purpose and capability to fulfill military requirements. We dissuade adversaries, among other things, by discouraging them from undertaking military programs or related activities that could threaten U.S. interests or those of allies and friends.

Perhaps more so than in any other defense review, the concept of the New Triad as articulated in the nuclear posture review reflects a broad recognition of the importance of a robust and responsive defense R&D and industrial base in achieving our overall defense strategy. Indeed, it elevates within the triad, the R&D and manufacturing base, to a level that’s on the same plane as the forces themselves. Indeed, it’s the demonstrable capabilities of this base, its people, its ability to bring advanced defense technology to the field, its ability to adapt to new or emerging threats that engenders great respect internationally among both friend and foe. These features have had an impact on U.S. national security in numerous cases, including the end of the Cold War.

Let me just cite a few of the examples. The breadth and scope of the U.S. strategic modernization program of the early ‘80s including the potential of the strategic defense initiative, then in the very early stages of R&D, was key, I believe, to causing President Gorbachev in the late ‘80s to seek an end to strategic competition with the west and an end to the Cold War. The U.S. defense R&D and industrial base including the nuclear weapons complex of national laboratories, production plants, test sites that supported the development of sophisticated warheads with build rates exceeding 1,000 weapons per year, permitted the modernization program to take place and was a major factor in both assuring allies who depend upon the U.S. nuclear umbrella and convincing the Soviet Union that an arms race with the United States was futile, which I call persuasion.

The demonstration during Desert Storm, Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and then Iraq again of advance U.S. conventional capabilities in precision munitions and command and control, and stealth has been a wakeup call to the Russian and Chinese militaries that the U.S. has left them far behind in defense technology. For potential adversaries with military forces less capable than those of Russia and China, the effect has been sobering, to say the least. The realization by these states of our awesome capabilities coupled with a demonstrated will of the United States to use them when vital interests are at stake have no doubt instilled caution in potential aggressors and strengthened deterrence and dissuasion.

These capabilities may have been a major factor of Libya’s decision to give up its WMD and terrorist support programs, and begin to reengage the west. I would call this a good asymmetrical response. Perhaps for almost the same reason, the concern over these capabilities, perhaps the DPRK has taken a more aggressive route towards achieving nuclear weapons, which would be a bad asymmetrical response.

Many modern military capabilities evolved from the legacy of the Manhattan Project, characterized by the massive application of science and technology to the problem of developing and producing the atomic bomb and leading to later efforts across a range of military systems. It was not only the forces, both nuclear and conventional, that during the Cold War dissuaded and deterred, but this latent potential reflected in this R&D in manufacturing base to design and develop even more advanced and capable military systems and the ability to produce them in great quantities that I would argue has had a major factor in stabilizing security situations.

Now that the Cold War is over, how can the nuclear weapons enterprise act to both reassure our allies, or assure allies, dissuade or deter future adversaries? A future competitor seeking to gain some nuclear advantage would be forced, given our capabilities to conclude that its buildup could not occur more quickly than the United States could respond.

Alternatively, an ability to innovate and produce small builds of special purpose weapons characteristic of a smaller but still vital nuclear infrastructure, could act to convince an adversary that it could not expect to negate U.S. nuclear weapons capabilities. The development and sub-term modification of the B6-7 bomb converting a few of them into B61 11 earth penetrators is a case in point. Let me get a little further into details next slide. First, what do we mean by a responsive nuclear weapons infrastructure? And how can we tune it or tune its activities, or report on its activities in a way to operationalize assurance and dissuasion?

First of all, what are the elements of the response of nuclear infrastructure that we’ve talked about? Well, it’s the work force, it’s the enhance science and technology base, including facilities, modern research facilities. It’s a right size manufacturing base and facilities. It’s revamped business practices that will enable us to carry out our mission more effectively and efficiently. And also permit a rapid and flexible response to emerging needs. And basically, and most importantly, it would be the frequent end to end exercise of key capabilities, both to remain highly responsive and to train the next generation workforce. And I can’t argue to you that our nuclear weapons infrastructure is responsive today, but we hope to be, as Ambassador Brooks noted, be setting out on a track to make it more responsive in the future.

Let’s talk about what the goals are. Well, job one is to assure the stockpile safety reliability and performance. A second important characteristic is to be able to respond rapidly to surprise, to an unintended, unexpected surprise in the stop representing, for example, a technical problem. It’s also to respond in time to changes in the international security environment.

Finally, and I credit George Allen, who was our responsive infrastructure guy in the NNSA, George raise your arm so people know where you are, who basically has added to this goal of a responsive infrastructure basically how do we reinforce assurance and dissuasion by conveying, for example, by conveying these capabilities to friends and potential adversaries. This is not typically a stated goal of an infrastructure, but how do we get our arms around this issue?

Let me speak to the next chart. The basic approach I want to lay out for you is strategic communications. What I mean by this is a context-specific, targeted effort of the enterprise to convey information to allies, to friends, potential adversaries that for example we’re paying attention to sustaining our deterrent, that we will seek if need to be, to modernize that deterrent, to assure we can hold high value facilities or targets at risk, and that we have the capabilities and commitment to do both. By context specific, the purpose is to basically influence specific decisions in specific countries. The caution I would raise is that we must be consistent in thinking through this program with U.S. national values and law. If we’re going to have a communications effort, we want the source of the information to be clear because information that we direct towards another country or a set of countries, may not—May also be communicated to our public. This is not a public deception campaign, it would not be disinformation; rather, the idea would be to bring some enhanced transparency to some of the things that we do day to day within the nuclear weapons enterprise, and particularly at our national laboratories and production facilities.

Should we be seeking—I raise this as a question because, again, this is unfinished and really thoughts that I want to lay out today—Should we be seeking to identify opportunities, to convey the excellence of our scientific and technical personnel, the commitment to achieve the tools of stockpile stewardship, for example? Efforts to restore the capacity and capability of our manufacturing base, the commitment to the life extension programs, to RRW, to advance development work, and the commitment to achieving the stockpile transformation and a responsive infrastructure.

We go about these tasks day to day, we do them as part of our jobs, but we have not been thinking much about how to convey that and to use it to convey messages. Increased transparency in nuclear posture and programs, Congressional testimony, associated debate, public presentations to diverse and foreign audiences. Access of foreign media to witness major programmatic events like rocket sled tests. Activities at our U1A sub-critical facility which is 600 meters underground at the Nevada test site. Test readiness exercises. Some of the rad. chem. exercises we do, and I’ll talk a little bit about that later. Nuclear forensics and attribution capabilities. I’ll talk a little bit about that later. And finally, should we be thinking about some selected declassification of information?

Let me give you an example about nuclear attribution. Let’s say our problem, the problem is we want to avoid nuclear detonation on U.S. soil with no clear origin. One of the goals to achieve that is to dissuade—I mean, we don’t feel, once a terrorist gets his hands on a nuclear explosive, we don’t necessarily believe we can deter them from using it because for obvious reasons. But we may be able to deter or dissuade rogue states from transferring nuclear warheads to terrorist groups. Let me issue a fact. The national labs have developed as a result of nuclear test programs, when we were testing, and also as a result of monitoring foreign nuclear tests, when foreign nuclear tests were conducted in the atmosphere, we had developed extensive radiological and chemical forensics capabilities and fissile material databases. As a result of the vision from the Threat Defense Reduction Agency, Jim Tegnelia and his predecessors, the DTRA has invested in this capability as part of their domestic nuclear event attribution program.

This work started five years ago, well before 9/11, and it’s been a really visionary effort by the folks over in DOD and DTRA on this. If I was then to say, well what are the elements of a dissuasive strategy, one of the elements would be well let’s provide some selected insights into the capabilities of our forensics program so that we can convey an effective capability to be able to pin it on a particular—That we could pin a nuclear weapon on a particular adversary. Couple that with a declaratory policy that says retaliation will be directed at the source of the new. Or as Keith Payne might say, you lose a weapon, you better tell us. The risk in this is inadvertent release of sensitive information about how well we can attribute.

This is an example that I got into with Elaine Bunn yesterday on RRW, and I'm not going to reiterate it here, but if there was a concern about the long-term safety and responsibility of the stockpile, should we be thinking about how to assure allies that we intend to sustain nuclear weapons capabilities and reliable nuclear weapons into the future? And an ambitious RRW program that we appropriately communicated could serve as part of that assurance. Of course, what the risk is, by heralding the program, you could stimulate opposition to it.

Let me now talk about some of the risks of this approach. Information is a blunt instrument, not easily directed. There's a good outcome that can come about that that which dissuades adversaries could also assure friends, but there's a bad outcome also. You could be stimulating in some what you're seeking to dissuade in others because information cannot be targeted easily. There's the concern about the compromise of sensitive information. There's the susceptibility that you could be accused of spin or news management by your communications campaign.

This one was written late at night when I wasn’t thinking too clearly, you could ruffle the feathers of the Article VI crowd. [laughter] Well, I'm part of the Article VI crowd because every administration since the NPT was signed has adopted and is committed to the Article VI eventual, eventual, elimination. The question, though, is what I'm talking about, is the crowd that every five years attacks U.S. nuclear weapons programs as being impediments to nonproliferation programs, when in fact we have an outstanding Article VI record. And it could facilitate counterintelligence targeting of programs and personnel.

Let me conclude with the last chart, what's next. What should we be doing about these, thinking about these things through more clearly? We develop these ideas more clearly. One of the goals, possibly, no decisions have been made, but this is one of my ideas, we should be establishing within our nuclear weapons laboratories and our production facilities and at the test site a center of folks who are thinking about conveying messages and are interacting with the policy community in Washington on what would be important in connection with assuring allies and dissuading other countries from certain—From specific activities. The challenge will be getting our scientists and engineers and indeed our federal managers in an assay to be sensitive to the broader defense policy and locations of their day to day activities; and a second challenge is finding the right balance between transparency and operational and information security.

With that, let me conclude. And as I say, I’d be very pleased for not only comments back during this meeting, but after via email, so thank you very much. [applause]

Questions and Answers

Audience: Thanks a lot, I’m John Rudquist from the Swedish Defense Research Agency. And I guess I have a question for Dr. Harvey, and I’ll pick up your invitation to make a comment. Seems to me, I’m one of the people who think it’s a great mistake and it’s very unfortunate that there are bits and pieces in the open source community that you can get the details of a nuclear device construction, and so my question to you is what you communicate now, you say transparent communication and all of that, how will you know that you want that out there in 20 years? I mean, considering that when those bits and pieces came on, say in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I don’t think people were thinking about terrorists might use them. So that's my question basically, thanks.

Dr. Harvey: I think you have to pay attention to that and think it through as part of the overall strategy. But I’ve been out to a lot of our sites and one of the things, as even an inside guy within an assay, there is a whole host of really exciting things that demonstrate an incredible amount of talent and capability, both in the pure science area as well as in the defense related applications of science. And I'm convinced that we could do a better job at acceptable risk of being more transparent in some of our activities and as a result would communicate an even stronger message in connection with our abilities to sustain our capabilities and modernize them if necessary over the long term. I think the question you pose is one that we have to address very carefully, but I think we can get by it.