Not to Praise Arms Control, But to Bury It Posted by Heather Hurlburt

It's August, so all the best news is quietly released on Fridays, while most of us are plotting our weekend escapes.  For last week, kudos to Sam Nunn and his band of hell-raisers over at the Nuclear Threat Initiative for highlighting the State Department's proposal to consolidate/abolish most of its arms control offices.

NTI's story notes some of the complexities involved.  Yes, the world has changed, as Dr. Rice said back in March.  NTI even gets John Isaacs of Council for a Livable World to say that

I don’t know that it makes that much difference. Whether the administration is good or bad on arms control or proliferation doesn’t depend on how they organize the State Department but how the top leaders are thinking and what they plan to do.

But much as I agree that some radical thinking is due on arms control, I'm with Darryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association when he says that "form does affect substance."

It's not that I think that the soon-to-be-eliminated Special Negotiator for Chemical and Biological Weapons was going to change President Bush's mind about the merits of inspections to search for bioweapons in the next three years, for example.

But, if there's no path for smart people to make careers thinking about arms control, where are new ideas going to come from?  And the next time we need regional arms control to end, diffuse or prevent a conflict, where's the reservoir of expertise going to be?

You don't need a huge arms control bureaucracy for this.  But you do need to see arms control as more than an anti-terror tactic, which is the mindset these changes convey to me.   

And how bizarre/cynical is it to to combine the office that promotes missile defense (here, buy/borrow/host our anti-missile missiles) with the office in charge of preventing the dissemination of missile technology?

Senator Lugar says that this reorganization will result in more funds for Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction programs.  But c'mon, these programs keep 40,000 weapons scientists fed, working and less likely to sell their expertise to the highest bidder.  They verifiably dismantle weapons and safeguard vulnerable materials.  AND they get 1-for-1 matching funds from our G-8 partners.  And State has to hold an arms control fire sale to fund them? 

I'm with Rep. Allan Mollohan, who agreed that our arms control establishment had problems, but said of the proposed changes that "the prescription amounted to killing one of the patients."

Now back to our regularly-scheduled August daze.  But watch to see whether Nunn-Lugar funding really rises, or just flatlines.  And when the weather cools down, and we need arms control regimes on the Korean Peninsula post-agreement, or after a Kosovo-Serbia final status agreement, or maybe one day around Kashmir; or we decide that maybe the 104 countries that have accepted the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty are on to something; or decide that maybe inspecting for bioweapons is a good idea after all, don't go ask State for help.

That's so 20th-century.

Comments

[rosignol]

And how bizarre/cynical is it to to combine the office that promotes missile defense (here, buy/borrow/host our anti-missile missiles) with the office in charge of preventing the dissemination of missile technology?

...ah, the point of missile defense is to make missile techology obsolete (well, the big city-killing stuff, at least).

It's the same goal (keep people from using missiles), the offices just have different ways to accomplish it.

[figo]

Please note that the Global Security Newswire, where the story on the State Department reorganization appeared, is a separate entity from Sam Nunn's Nuclear Threat Initiative, although the GSN does appear on the NTI website. The GSN is an independent news publication -- it covers arms control and nonproliferation developments, but does not seek to "highlight" particular stories. Sam Nunn had nothing to do with this story.

[Amyfw]

I guess people have short memories. This is just the next step in Jesse Helm's attempt to eliminate arms control from U.S. national security policy. First he eliminated ACDA (and held the Foreign Relations Committee and the START II Treaty hostage until the Democrats agreed.) He made it clear that he thought non-proliferation was OK, but not arms control. Of course, the Bush Administration has altered our non-proliferation policy from one where we sought to keep the bad stuff from spreading anywhere to one where we only seek to keep the bad stuff away from bad nations or bad terrorists. If you're a good guy (maybe India), you can have it.

Also, Lugar's comment is pure wishful thinking. The Bush Administration not only plans to keep threat reduction and nonproliferation programs funded at a flat $1 billion per year, it plans to divert a greater portion of this budget each year to programs outside the former Soviet Union. Lugar's OK with this diversion, but I don't think he's going to see any budget increases on the central programs any time soon.

[rosignol]

...speaking of short memories...

Amyfw, did you know that Senator Helms retired back in 2003? The Senate seat he used to occupy is currently held my Mrs. Dole.

[amyfw]

Umm, yeah, I know Helms retired, and his attack on ACDA was back in the mid-1990s. But his attack on arms control lives on. If he had never eliminated ACDA, the arms control bureaus would never had been in the State Department, instead of ACDA. And, his point about nonproliferation being the appropriate focus, and arms control being bunk, is still high on the minds of many in this Administration. Claiming that he started this is not the same as claiming that he's doing it now. My memory extends back more than one or two election cycles.

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