In the waning months of his presidency, after having taken several steps to weaken our own nuclear deterrent over the past eight years, US President Barack Obama is signaling interest in continuing the misguided, effectively unilateral nuclear disarmament agenda he first articulated in Prague in 2009, as he considers declaring a "no-first-use" policy for the United States on nuclear weapons, and by possibly circumventing the Senate by seeking some form of United Nations Security Council action to give legal effect to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty's (CTBT) ban on nuclear testing. These maneuvers would have serious implications for international security, and in the case of the CTBT, for American rule of law as well.
The Iran nuclear deal has put Iran on a more solid path than ever before toward achieving a nuclear weapon capability. Middle Eastern nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt have signed deals to develop civilian nuclear energy, and there is good reason to believe that such nations will use these programs as stepping stones to develop a weapon to offset an eventually nuclear Iran. North Korea conducted its fourth announced nuclear test this past January. Meanwhile, already-nuclear capable Russia, with its record of contemplating nuclear strikes on its neighbors and harassing US military assets in international waters and airspace, has accelerated a program of nuclear modernization that U.S. Strategic Command has described as a "crescendo of activity over the last decade and a half."
This is the environment in which Obama is now considering exacerbating the decline of our nuclear deterrent, and by extension the global nuclear proliferation outlook, should he follow through with his latest contemplated policy shifts.
For decades, the United States has retained the option to use nuclear weapons in response to a devastating non-nuclear attack and in response to devastating chemical or biological weapons attacks, in what has been the actualization of the concept of "deterrence." While it has not stopped all wars, our nuclear deterrent has been instrumental in preventing another outbreak of large-scale global conflict since World War II. The bad guys have thus far calculated that it's better not to launch non-nuclear weapons-of-mass-destruction attacks or debilitating cyberattacks on us or our allies, since we are willing to answer them with the most devastating weapon on earth.
Declaration of a "no-first-use" policy, whereby the United States commits to using nuclear weapons only if attacked first with nuclear weapons, would stand this calculus on its head, to the detriment of international stability. If our adversaries believe that we will not retaliate with nuclear weapons for catastrophic chemical or biological attacks on us or our allies, then the risk that goes with carrying out such attacks goes down, and the risk that our allies will develop their own nuclear weapons, rather than rely on our extended deterrence, goes up. In fact, the idea of announcing a "no-first-use" policy is so misbegotten that not only are several US allies expressing concern, but even members of Obama's own Cabinet are strongly advising against it.
As damaging as a "no-first-use" declaration would be, as a statement of White House policy, it is at least something that could be reversed, relatively painlessly, by a new administration. The same cannot be said for going through the UN Security Council to try to commit the United States to something that the Senate, exercising its constitutional authority, has already turned down.
The United States signed the CTBT in 1996, but has yet to ratify it. In 1999, proponents of the CTBT failed to get even a simple majority in the Senate to vote in favor of ratification (let alone the two-thirds majority that the constitution requires for ratification of treaties). The substantial flaws surrounding the treaty that doomed it before the Senate in 1999 — its failure to define a nuclear test, and its lack of verifiability, among others — are still present.
Given these defects and recent history, Obama can see as well as anyone that the outlook for Senate ratification of the CTBT is dim. That reality, and the fact that the window is closing for Obama to further his "Prague agenda" as president, has prompted him to go around the Senate and seek the assistance of the UN Security Council to bind the United States, in some form, to a moratorium on nuclear testing.
An Aug. 12 letter to the president from Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seems to shed light on the administration's specific intentions in this regard, and appropriately raises concerns. Corker's letter states in part:
"A recent State Department letter explains that the administration will support ratification of the CTBT through a resolution in the U.N. Security Council and a 'political statement expressing the view that a nuclear test would defeat the object and purpose of the CTBT' that will be referenced in the U.N. resolution. A political statement invoking the 'object and purpose' language could trigger a limitation on the ability of future administrations to conduct nuclear weapons tests. 'Object and purpose' obligations for countries that have signed and not ratified a treaty are specifically articulated in Article 18 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which the United States also has not ratified; but they have been recognized by successive U.S. administrations as customary international law that present a binding restriction on the United States."
Corker is correct in his assessment, which is what would make this course of action so damaging. Even in the conduct of foreign policy, for which the Constitution generally tips the balance in favor of the presidency, Obama remains obligated to respect the constitutional prerogatives of the coequal branches of the United States government. In the case of the CTBT, the Senate exercised such a prerogative when it voted against ratification in 1999. Ignoring that outcome in order to bind the United States to the obligations of an international treaty by other means would represent a serious affront to the Senate's constitutional role in undertaking international legal obligations, and create a worrisome precedent.
We are entering a period in which the world is getting more dangerous, not less. Dismantling our nuclear deterrent in the face of that reality — whether directly through our own actions or by enabling others to do it for us, at the expense of our own democratic process — would be a major strategic error.
Ben Lerner is a vice president with the Center for Security Policy. This article is adapted from a forthcoming white paper that will soon be available at the think tank's website.
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