A Looming Nuclear Catastrophe

esident Biden’s administration has refused to enter such an expanded dialogue, which is a major failure in its national security strategy.  It is essential for the three major nuclear powers to discuss arms control, risk reduction, and the importance of nonproliferation; the United States is primarily responsible for the failure to begin a dialogue.  Instead, Biden and his national security team have been preoccupied with ways to interfere in the broader China-Russia relationship, which has never been stronger.  In fact, it has been Washington’s opposition to Sino-Russian relations that has led Moscow and Beijing to bolster their ties.

The United States has been lacking serious disarmament specialists at the highest levels of the government since the Obama administration when John Kerry was secretary of state and Rose Gottemoeller was undersecretary for arms control and international security and assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation.  Kerry and Gottemoeller were fighting an uphill battle because of President Bill Clinton’s decision in 1997 to abolish the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which seriously weakened the entire arms control community in the United States.  ACDA’s demise as an independent voice for arms control weakened national security by narrowing arms control options for presidential decision making.

Unfortunately, we’re in an election season with both candidates battling over who would create a more lethal military force and increase military spending,  The campaign thus far has featured no reference to arms control and disarmament.  The United States is already responsible for half of the global spending on the military, and is the world’s only country that has power projection capabilities that involve every corner of the globe.  Our nuclear inventory contains more warheads than there are strategic targets, and this is certainly true for the other nuclear powers around the world.  There is no greater shared irresponsibility in the international community than the secret decisions that led to the overkill capabilities in the nuclear inventories of the nine nuclear powers.  It will take a serious act of statesmanship to stop the fear-mongering delusions that could once again shape our nuclear weapons policy.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.