“The thing that keeps me up at night? Pakistan,” White House Coordinator for WMD Counterterrorism and Arms Control Gary Samore. “This is a country that is facing very serious internal and external security threats, has a dysfunctional political system [and] is seeking to expand its nuclear weapons program.”

…

Samore later admitted his nightmare scenario is a “toss-up” between Pakistan falling into political chaos and North Korea selling its nuclear material and expertise to other countries.

I would add that the real nightmare is that you can imagine both countries suffering from both sets of problems, perhaps at the same time: Pakistan’s proliferating days may not be behind it, and the collapse of the North Korean regime is a real and frightening possibility. But notice that central to both concerns is the state—unstable and unpredictable, but a state all the same.

By contrast, here’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy at the CNAS conference this summer (exchange begins at about 46:45).

Question: “What are the real existential threats that you’re focused on in the senior leadership at the Pentagon, what are the things that keep you guys awake at night, if any?”

Flournoy: “Oh they’re many, but the thing that keeps me awake at night is the nexus between terrorism and WMD—the possibility that a terrorist organization could either acquire a ready-made weapon or fabricate something improvised that would nevertheless have a catastrophic effect on us if employed skillfully. That would be truly catastrophic—could potentially be truly catastrophic.”

Nuclear terrorism is a kind of stimulant in the Obama White House. It’s keeping all kinds of people awake, including President Obama, who said in April that nuclear terrorism is “the single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term and long-term.”

That’s some serious stuff. I don’t have a security clearance, so I don’t know what the President and Secretary Flournoy are reading every morning. But I’m tempted to believe the outgoing National Security Adviser when he says that the Obama administration is really concerned about proliferation, broadly construed.

So why frame proliferation as nuclear terrorism? Why bring out a bogeyman? The bogeyman framing is easy to explain if you imagine nuclear terrorism to be a salient and luculent focal point through which to make some progress on the less sexy arms control and nonproliferation agenda. But if we’re talking about real threats to American and global security, nuclear terrorism is a problem of unstable states and rogue officials, like A.Q. Khan but without, you know, the state backing. In other words, 21^st century problems remedied by 20^th century arms control and nonproliferation, with some facilities and materials security thrown in.

The likelihood of nuclear terrorism happening depends on whether the 38 states with weapons-usable materials secure them effectively.  Even if you expand the club of key states to include the 56 countries with research reactors, you’re talking about a fraction of the countries in the UN General Assembly, of countries party to the NPT. Think about it: securing all nuclear materials is politically easier than gaining universal support for the Additional Protocol at the NPT review conference. It is not by any means easy. But it is surmountable, in part through ad hoc efforts like the Nuclear Security Summit that bypass the ossified Conference on Disarmament and the NPT Review process.

On the other hand, terrorism is an inherently insurmountable problem. We just don’t know what causes ordinary people to become “radicalized,” so it’s difficult to imagine a preventative solution. Killing or capturing them all is a just stop-gap, and some evidence suggests that attacking them might convince more people to take up arms. Obviously, counterterrorism isn’t the only element of the nuclear security agenda. But framing matters, and framing nuclear security as a nuclear terrorism problem implies that if we just kill all the terrorists, the problem goes away. And it’s easier to justify killing Anwar al-Awlaki if you imagine him nuking New York.

Much the same can be said about cybersecurity (Deputy SECDEF William Lynn said “the cyber threat” is what keeps him tossing and turning). Most of what people are worried about is securing critical infrastructure from any and all attacks. The challenge is unprecedented, born of a world that depends on critical networked infrastructure. The international security implications are stickier. Consider attacks on networked infrastructure perpetuated by civilians (i.e. non-state actors) but that appear to serve state aims. Remember those guys who attacked Georgian servers during the 2009 August War? How do you deter nationalistic civilians from prosecuting real and harmful attacks on state assets? How do you even establish that they were state supported? Do you hold responsible the state their attacks originated in? And what if, through some kind of technological legerdemain I can’t begin to understand, you can’t identify where the attacks originated?

Clearly, nuking any state that cyber-attacks isn’t an option. It’s not clear to me either that conventional kinetics are ethically or politically justifiable responses to cyber-operations. We just haven’t evolved the toolkit—the norms—to deal with a world in which security can be influenced by the traditional bystanders in such an immediate and harmful way.

Brian

Reading through Ivan Oelrich and Steve Fetter’s excellent contribution on verification standards under a hypothetical disarmament regime to Barry Blechmann and Alex Bollfrass’ Elements of  a Nuclear Disarmament Treaty, it occurred to me that the most important events with regard to the feasibility of verifiable disarmament may well occur while the Convention is under negotiation or even before. Oelrich and Fetter stress the fact that it is the more advanced countries that are more difficult to disarm because the small error rate for the tracing of these countries’ vast supplies of fissile material represents hundreds of weapons rather than dozens or handfuls. These countries are also the ones better able to circumvent the strictures of a verification regime through the manufacture of false warheads, dummy plutonium pits or subassemblies, parallel weaponization programs, concealed facilities, and so forth.

The result is that it ought to be more difficult for established nuclear weapons states to credibly commit to a robust verification regime, and so difficult to bring non-nuclear weapon states to the table in the first place. Though Oelrich and Fetter do not quite say so, the best opportunity for a country to slip the noose of a disarmament treaty would be to prepare to do so before they sign the treaty and submit themselves to initial inspection. This means that the process of convening a disarmament treaty drafting convention could be expedited by taking steps now to establish a reputation for cooperation, a base of data upon which to build, and facilities that simplify the inspection process (like the new Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant). Nuclear weapons countries could:

• compile data from existing arms control treaties and databases;
• expand voluntary IAEA inspections;
• unilaterally divulge information about the size and character of their nuclear arsenals (as the United States and Britain recently did);
• renovate existing mining, reprocessing, research, and civilian power facilities to promote inspection, or construct new ones to these standards;
• refrain from producing weapons systems that could be easily converted from conventional to nuclear delivery, or renovate or retire old ones that meet this description;
• develop uniquely conventional systems to assume the roles plausibly occupied by nuclear systems;
• rewrite nuclear and military doctrine to deemphasize nuclear deterrence and warfighting.

It might be thought that there is nothing nuclear weapon states can do to facilitate disarmament short of disarming. In fact, the path to disarmament can start well before; it can start now.

a.j.m.

1. Large-Scale Undergraduate Test Bed (LSUTB)
2. Waziristan University Plutonium Production Reactor (WUPPR)
3. The Paul Nitze Center for Orbital Radiological Research
4. Nigerian National Uncooled Supercritical Reactor (NNUSR)
5. GWU Advanced Pebble Bed Tester
6. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh Memorial Fast Breeder Reactor
7. Sarah Palin Mendenhall Glacier Nuclear Power Station
8. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station

a.j.m. + Brian

Accomplished properly, it has another benefit, too, which Leonhardt only hints at with the following thought experiment.

Imagine the year is 2020, and a major financial firm is collapsing. The financial regulation bill that President Obama signed back in 2010 was meant to deal with just such a problem. It gave regulators something called “resolution authority.” They could seize a dying firm, wipe out its shareholders, fire its top executives and keep it operating until its surviving parts could be sold off in an orderly fashion. Now, in 2020, the regulators are preparing to use that authority for the first time.

But as they dig into the details, they realize they are facing a raft of problems. One of the biggest is that the firm has 70 percent of its assets abroad (roughly the share of Citicorp’s business that was overseas in 2009). Washington can’t simply seize assets held in London, Shanghai or Moscow.

An international financial system requires international regulation. The prospects for tax evasion and hiding risky assets are too lucrative for large financial institutions to ignore, and these behaviors pose not only a risk to a national economy but to the international economy. Just like seizing and liquidating dangerously over-leveraged firms requires international resolution authority, disincentivizing dangerous behavior requires international disincentives. As Leonhardt makes clear, the global economy moves faster than national government—to say nothing of global governance structures; compelling globalized financial firms to behave responsibly means proving that irresponsible behavior is impermissible everywhere.

Expect to see more such talk in coming years.

a.j.m.

Nowhere recently has Beinart’s former tendency been on brighter display recently than in his recent New York Review of Books piece called The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment.

In it, Beinart argues that the American Israel lobby makes common cause with only one segment of Israeli society—one that is prominent, growing, illiberal, and increasingly extremist. As this segment is ascendant in Israeli society, it is in decline in American society among the total population of young Jews, who, he says, tend to be liberal, sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, skeptical of Israel’s commitment to human rights, and increasingly disinterested in the domestic politics of the Jewish lobby. As a result, Beinart expects that the growing population of American Orthodox Jews will increasingly control this country’s Israel lobby, pushing it further to the right. Beinart himself wants to find some middle ground between them—fully outraged at Israeli extremism but optimistic about the prospects for a better Israel. In short, Beinart wants a sort of liberal Zionism.

The article is well-written and appropriately furious at the extremism that is blighting Israeli society, but it makes one wonder: if the demographic trends in Israel and in the United States are steadfastly against liberalism, peace, and democracy, what warrant have we for optimism in a better Israel? And how, indeed, ought we as Americans to go about encouraging one?

It seems to me that the proper lesson of Beinart’s piece is not optimism but pessimism. In the United States I think we tacitly assume that the arc of the moral universe is long and that it bends toward justice—that social and political pressure is perpetually arrayed behind those who would build a more just world. Not so for Israel, says Beinart, and not so for the Israel lobby. It seems clear that it will be more difficult for an American President to negotiate a stable and equitable peace five years from now than it is today. We might say that if there is to be peace, it must be now—but, truthfully, it seems that this could only be said five years ago. The current Israeli governing coalition and its treatment of the United States is evidence enough that such a statement cannot apply today. The efforts made by the Obama administration have been utterly without force or momentum; partially this is because they have been poorly formulated, arbitrarily timed, and backed by little more than the pleas of distinguished American diplomats, but partially it is because Israeli leaders have reacted with disdain.

Even without take a position the human rights record of the Israeli government or situation in Gaza, it is clear that this situation is unacceptable for the United States. No country, anywhere, is owed an unconditional commitment from a liberal democracy—and if George H.W. Bush was willing to leverage more pressure on Israel than is President Obama

Beinart ably demands a justification from the Israel lobby.

The heads of AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference should ask themselves what Israel’s leaders would have to do or say to make them scream “no.” After all, Lieberman is foreign minister; Effi Eitam is touring American universities; settlements are growing at triple the rate of the Israeli population; half of Israeli Jewish high school students want Arabs barred from the Knesset. If the line has not yet been crossed, where is the line?

Because Beinart never presents the case for optimism about Israel’s future, one has to wonder: what would it take for Beinart to lose faith? Why shouldn’t we?

a.j.m.

That said, because the gas tax is so wildly positive sum, disapproving of the uses to which gas tax money will be spent in no way obviates one’s support for the initiative. In short, a gas tax creates so many benefits, that the specific beneficiary of the resulting revenue is less important than that it was enacted at all. The broader point is that radical policies like gas taxes will become more and more attractive in the coming years; though lawmakers may not always have their sights on transitioning this country away from fossil fuels, the myriad ways that oil negatively impacts our society mean that there will be more and more excuses to do the right thing. When the harms caused by a social fact are so plentiful, countervailing policies have plentiful benefits.

a.j.m.

The interesting thing is that the White House seems to be moving toward a similarly absolutist position. This was posted to Barack Obama’s facebook page a couple of days ago describing his weekly radio address:

We need to take a comprehensive look at how the oil and gas industry operates and how we regulate them. We can only pursue offshore oil drilling if we have assurances that a disaster like the BP oil spill will not happen again.

While I wouldn’t be content with assurances from these people, it’s clearly a step in the right direction.

There’s been more news regarding dispersants, by the way—or more lack of news. I want to quote these from a Times story from this afternoon that has since deleted the information. (I don’t know why or when they were removed, but their removal explains the incongruous headline.)

At the same time, BP was locked in a tense standoff with the Environmental Protection Agency, which had ordered the company to end its use of a toxic chemical dispersant called Corexit by Sunday.

The oil giant continued spraying the chemical on Monday, despite the E.P.A.’s demand that it use a less toxic dispersant to break up the oil.

[...]

The original E.P.A. order instructed BP “to identify a less toxic alternative — to be used both on the surface and under the water at the source of the oil leak, but it also said that if BP were “unable to identify available alternative dispersant products,” it could instead provide the Coast Guard and the E.P.A. with a detailed description of the dispersants it had investigated and the reason it did not believe they met the required standards.” On Thursday night BP invoked that latter option.

BP’s behavior is well beyond the bounds of propriety here. It’s brazenness in defying the E.P.A. is just too disgusting. But one has to wonder about how E.P.A. director Lisa Jackson is conducting herself here: if the E.P.A. wants a different dispersant sprayed, why not pick the best option, order BP to cease and desist under heavy financial penalty for spraying toxic chemicals, and have the National Guard spray the correct dispersant (or don’t, given that there is no scientific consensus on the matter)?

Requiring BP to pick a different option? When your toddler tells you she’s going to bed at midnight, you don’t politely ask her to please pick another time.

a.j.m.

Now that we know all but definitively that North Korea was responsible for the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan, the real question is how the United States should respond. South Korea’s approach to the North has thus far been pretty reactive: the North tests the limits of peace, and the South responds with incremental sanctions and by systematically breaking ties. But the South under the administration of Lee Myung-Bak hasn’t demonstrated that it has a strategy for improving relations or making any progress on denuclearization.

You can’t really blame them. The U.S. has settled into a strategy of “strategic patience” indistinguishable from containment. In light of the North’s intransigence and insistence on extracting further rewards before it returns to the Six Party talks, this isn’t the worst of approaches. However, there have been signs lately that Kim Jong-Il is preparing to hand over power to his son, the slightly-older-than-your-humble-blogger Kim Jong-Un. It’s quite possible that by this time next year, North Korea will be led by an inexperienced twenty-something.

Some have suggested, therefore, that Cheonan incident is a prelude to a regime change, a way of shoring up domestic support by declaring a small victory over the richer guys down south. Ruediger Frank at 38 North disagrees, raising the possibility that the attack was not ordered by the top leadership.

Here’s the thing: who did it and why doesn’t matter.

Even if this particular event was not a prelude to a transfer of power, the possibility that the transfer of power could get really ugly really quickly demands that the U.S., China, and South Korea rethink their approach. The total collapse of Kim’s regime would result in a massive humanitarian crisis. Refugess would pour into South Korea and Southern China. Even if Kim succeeds and handing the reins to his son, it’s not clear whether the new boy king would be able to hold the state together. Military leaders sick of a career mired in obsequiousness could attempt to seize power, and a civil war marked by massive suffering and more attacks on the South aimed at gaining popular support is not out of the realm of possibility.

By all means should the South continue to patiently and deliberately build its case against the North on the international stage, but at the same time the U.S. and China need to start a serious and frank conversation about life after Kim. China needs to realize that it is much better to plan for a post-Kim North Korea than to blindly and irresponsibly focus on sustaining the Kim regime indefinitely. If for the United States this means softening the penalties on the North for the Cheosan incident then so be it.

(China has been hesitant to take a tough line against the North because it fears the humanitarian consequences of a total collapse of the Kim regime. In addition to a rush of refugees, China may feel compelled to intervene militarily to bring about a new government that can control the borders while refraining from provoking another all-out war on the peninsula. China is also afraid of the geopolitical implications of a unified Korea in which the government in Seoul becomes the de facto authority. A unified Korean peninsula protected by the United States’ extended deterrent and dominated by a market economy could exert a good deal of cultural and economic influence on China’s southern provinces and make life hard for the Chinese leadership, which has already had some troubles with the restive southern provinces, so China has tried to err on the side of propping up Kim Jong-Il’s regime.)

A Security Council meeting should be convened, the evidence presented and scrutinized, and some punitive measures taken. South Korea’s patient and deliberate behavior is a vote of confidence in the ability of global institutions, including to the United Nations, to respond to aggressive behavior in a just and satisfactory way, and the Security Council should rise to the occasion. But it is more important for China to be on board than for the sanctions to bite. There are few tangible options left anyway.

But isn’t the deliberate sinking of a military vessel an act of war? Ordinarily yes, but the Western media has also failed to point out that skirmishes along the maritime boundary between North and South Korea—which Pyongyang disputes, by the way—have been fairly common over the past decade.

On the eastern coast of the Korean peninsula, the maritime border between North and South is just a continuation of the land border defined by the 38^th parallel. But on the Western coast, in the Yellow Sea, the border is demarcated by the curvilinear “Northern Limit Line” (NLL). North Korea rejects this border, which was set by the South and the U.S. led United Nations Command. This is where the attack on the Cheonan took place, and it is where, over the years, clashes have taken place between North and South.

Incursions across the NLL often happen during the spring crab fishing season, such that the clashes are termed “the Crab Wars.” CSIS’s Brad Glosserman called attention to these relatively low-level probes in 2003.

The blue crabs are an important source of food and foreign exchange for the impoverished North, and they are equally coveted by the fishermen in the South. Unfortunately, the sea border – the Northern Limit Line, or NLL – is disputed and fishing boats from both sides, escorted by warships, cross the boundary daily, raising tensions and risking a clash. Plainly, there is a need for a confidence-building regime in these waters.

Some of these clashes have been as serious as anything that happened during the Korean War.

• In 1999, several North Korean ships provoked a confrontation along the NLL. When the standoff ended on June 15, one North Korean torpedo boat sank with all hands, while two South Korean vessels sustained minor damage. A similar incident occurred in December 1998. Following the incident, the North pledged further incursions and bloodshed unless the South and the U.S. withdrew “all its ships” from disputed waters.

• In 2002, North Korean patrol boats allegedly crossed the NLL and opened fire on a South Korean patrol boat that eventually sank. Curiously, North Korea eventually “regretted” the incident, which may have something to do with the mounting international pressure on Pyongyang around this time.
• And six months ago, in November 2009, North and South traded fire once again in the Yellow Sea when a South Korean warship shot across the bow of a Northern vessel.

Invoking history of skirmishes along the line gives Lee the political cover he needs to deflect domestic public opinion away from this incident and reframe it not as an act of war but as a sign that a new approach is needed.

Minxin Pei suggests that the sensitivity of this issue means that the U.S. should start by encouraging Track II talks—exchanges between experts and eminent former statespeople—to establish a vocabulary and a rhythm. He’s the expert, so I won’t disagree. But the folks in the West Wing have had the foresight to bring about a relatively good period in U.S.-China relations. They should look past this specific incident and look toward the endgame, because it will probably be here sooner than we think.

Brian

First, I should post a correction of sorts. Recent estimates of the quantity of oil spilling into the gulf have been revised upward by at least an order of magnitude. That means that BP’s oil spill now outpaces that of Ixtoc I, meaning that if it is uncapped it could easily become the worst accidental oil spill in history. The New York Times has more on the differing estimates on its interactive map.

The ways in which BP’s response has been insufficient are too many to count, but this week’s discussion of the company’s choice of dispersants has been particularly infuriating. The Times summarizes:

BP PLC continues to stockpile and deploy oil-dispersing chemicals manufactured by a company with which it shares close ties, even though other U.S. EPA-approved alternatives have been shown to be far less toxic and, in some cases, nearly twice as effective.

The EPA issued BP a directive on Thursday giving them 24 hours to identify a less toxic alternative to Corexit, and 48 more to begin using it. On Friday, BP—well, “demurred” would be the diplomatic term, but diplomacy isn’t warranted here—gave the EPA the finger for no apparent reason. The New Orleans Times-Picayune has an excellent discussion of this and other issues relating the dispersants—including responses from environmental groups who argue that the cleanup effort should forego using dispersants altogether. Dispersants cause surface oil to split into smaller particles and sink to lower strata of the ocean, the environmental impact of which is not at all clear.

EPA data shows that 12 of 18 approved dispersants are more effective than Corexit, and all twelve are less toxic (some ten to twenty times less toxic). To sum

Let’s hope Obama’s EPA doesn’t take “Fuck you” for an answer.

a.j.m.