Arms Control Wonk

We’ve now passed the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and widely expected acts of nuclear terrorism have yet to occur. One example: Graham Allison predicted in Nuclear Terrorism (2004) that, “In my considered judgment, on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.”

We all know that the most likely form of nuclear terrorism is the use of a “dirty” bomb. There is no shortage of material for these instruments of mass disruption, and much of it is not well secured. As for an improvised nuclear device, we know about successful intercepts of small quantities of fissile material, but not about successful transactions. If there is opportunity – and presumed motive – why hasn’t a dirty bomb attack – or far worse – already happened?

John Mueller’s answer, in Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (2010) is that nuclear dangers are far less than we presume:

Fears and anxieties about them, while understandable, have been excessive, and they have severely, detrimentally, and even absurdly distorted spending priorities while inspiring policies that have often been overwrought, ill conceived, counterproductive, and sometimes massively destructive. And they continue to do so.

Allison, and others who warn of impending disaster, may yet be proven correct. They maintain a well-defended position, whether they are right or wrong: by warning of tragic consequences, they have helped encourage remedial actions. Those issuing stark warnings can always argue that, as a result of their calls for preventative actions, worst cases haven’t occurred. It’s only fair that this line of argument – we’re right whether bad things happen or not – can be employed on behalf of arms-control measures as well as for hawkish remedies.

I periodically return to the subject of dogs that haven’t barked because answering the question, “Why not?” might help with peace of mind, and with peace and quiet, as well.

I’m not sold on the argument that extremists are highly motivated to use dirty bombs or to detonate mushroom clouds, even though there is evidence that Osama bin Laden was interested in acquiring a nuclear weapon. I question this post-9/11 conventional wisdom because I suspect that even extremists have to be cognizant of norms. If they blow by them, producing catastrophic damage, they could also alienate the very audiences they seek to champion. On the other hand, none of us can place too much faith in norms when dealing with those who carry out mass-casualty attacks.

A second possible reason for the absence of dirty bomb attacks – so far – is that they are unlikely to result in many casualties. Extremists have proven time and again that they can produce heavy loss of life with automatic weapons and conventional explosives. Why go to the trouble to acquire the material for a dirty bomb when more deadly instruments are so easily available? Nor do extremists need radiological material to get inside the heads of an entire population. Hell, one man and his surrogate son achieved this result in October 2002 by carrying out sniper attacks in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.

Another possible reason for the absence of dirty-bomb attacks might be their blow-back effects in the locations where they can most easily be carried out. If co-religionists are harmed more than foreign adversaries, extremists can lose followers. This argument would apply far more to bio-weapons and mushroom clouds than to dirty bombs. I’m not sold on this reasoning, either — even though Osama bin Laden seems to have embraced it in his lonely domicile in Abbottabad. The violence in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq has overwhelmingly been directed by Muslims against Muslims. These attacks may well breed resentment and lose potential adherents, but the slaughter continues.

Another possible reason for the absence of our worst, post 9-11 nuclear nightmares to date is that extremist groups may not have all the requisite skill sets, as was evident with Aum Shinrikyo’s failed attempts to employ bio weapons and nerve agents in Japan. The most worrisome case of BW terrorism so far has been the responsibility of a single, highly skilled, twisted individual with security clearances who worked at a US bio-defense laboratory. The problem with the skill-set argument: it doesn’t apply very well to dirty bombs.

Another possible reason for the absence of WMD terrorism or dirty bomb attacks has to do with organizational secrecy. To limit damages from exposure, extremist cells need to be kept separate. If cells and skill sets are separate, it’s harder to pull everything together without compromising operational security.

All of these possible answers have weaknesses, but taken together, they might help explain the absence of worst cases. Other answers seem clear-cut. Improved intelligence collection and sharing have surely helped prevent WMD terrorism, as have US initiatives to lock down dangerous weapons and materials.

Since all but my last two arguments are heavily conjectural, it makes good sense to keep focusing on – and funding – the last two.

Are we winning or losing the battle against proliferation? There are indicators that point in both directions. How you answer this question probably reflects your optimistic or pessimistic nature.

(See the first part of this post.)

Are we winning or losing the battle against proliferation? This simple question does not have a simple answer because bad headlines mask quiet progress.

Since the 1960s, reports on the status of proliferation have almost always been pessimistic. It doesn’t pay to wear rose-colored glasses in this business, since optimistic projections can lead to broken careers. Besides, there is usually ample reason for pessimism because the hardest cases overshadow modest gains. One example: more countries are signing up to the Additional Protocol, but Iran still restricts access at suspect sites.

And yet, deeply pessimistic proliferation forecasts do not have a good track record. The long view usually turns out to be more positive than snapshots of problem cases. A recently declassified State Department cable, courtesy of the National Security Archive and the Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation History Project, is illustrative. This cable, dated June 6, 1979, focuses on Pakistan’s determined, clandestine quest for the Bomb, and its likely repercussions for India and beyond. It warns that US nonproliferation policy “could collapse under the weight of two additional nuclear weapon states” – a common projection back then. The NPT regime has managed to survive negative developments on the subcontinent, thanks to the determined efforts of its protectors and positive trends on other fronts.

True to form, most assessments of the contemporary state of nuclear danger are pessimistic, with worries that the NPT regime could collapse under the weight of unchecked Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. President Obama and Governor Romney have both said that an Iranian bomb will lead to a nuclear cascade. William Walker’s new book, A Perpetual Menace (2012) concludes with a warning that the NPT regime may be “heading for the rocks.” Francois Heisbourg, in a paper written for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (“Nuclear Proliferation – Looking Back, Thinking Ahead: How Bad Would the Further Spread of Nuclear Weapons Be?” dated April 4, 2012), concludes that, “There are strong and mutually reinforcing empirical and logical reasons” that explain why the future of proliferation will be more bleak than the past. He points to “a nuclear arc-of-crisis from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Japan” that would, at best, backpedal the NPT regime to the 1970s and at worst, foreshadow its breakdown. To support his analysis, Heisbourg points to illicit supply networks, technical trends simplifying enrichment, and “black swan” events.

In contrast, Jacques E.C. Hymans offers an optimistic view in “Botching the Bomb: Why Nuclear Weapons Programs Often Fail on Their Own – and Why Iran’s Might, Too” in the May/June 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs. Hymans argues that, “[T]the fact is that since the 1970s, there has been a persistent slowdown in the pace of technical progress on nuclear weapons projects and an equally dramatic decline in their ultimate success rate.” By Hymans’ calculations, the average timeline for programs to seek the Bomb prior to 1970 was around seven years. The average timeline for successful projects after 1970 was about seventeen years. In his view,

The great proliferation slowdown can be attributed in part to U.S. and international nonproliferation efforts. But it is mostly the result of the dysfunctional management tendencies of states that have sought the bomb in recent decades. Weak institutions in those states have permitted political leaders to unintentionally undermine the performance of their nuclear scientists, engineers, and technicians… [long break] The more a state has conformed to the authoritarian management culture typically found in developing states, the more time it has needed to get its first bomb and the higher its chances of failure.

The NPT regime has been important and resilient enough to withstand the demise of the Soviet Union and the nuclear weapon programs of India, Pakistan and Israel. A new, positive element in proliferation equations is state-of-the-diplomatic-art sanctions, which do not substantially figure in the assessments by Walker, Heisbourg, and Hymans. While it’s true that dysfunctional management tendencies retard proliferation, they don’t prevent it. Hymans is, however, right in emphasizing that proliferation has now become a slow-motion affair. The terminology of “cascade effects” is neither helpful nor likely, given this trend. Proliferation doesn’t cascade; hedging strategies do – and hedging strategies at present will depend primarily on what kind of nuclear program Tehran seeks.

So, who’s right – proliferation optimists or pessimists? Are the challenges ahead more severe than before? I don’t think so, but they sure do seem familiar. I’m not nearly as optimistic as Hymans, nor as pessimistic as Walker and Heisbourg. That makes me a cautious, heretical optimist.

(Update, May 13 | See the second part of this post.)

(See also Michael’s Nov. 2009 post on predicting proliferation. -Ed.)

There is a long history of deceptive practices and bogus military displays designed to project greater firepower than is actually available. In my military dictionary, this is known as creative deterrence, or deterrence on the cheap. A classic case in point occurred during the July, 1955 Moscow Aviation Day, which stoked fears in the United States of a bomber gap.

The bomber gap preceded Sputnik; the missile gap would soon follow. President Dwight David Eisenhower took heavy flak for downplaying all three, believing these threats to be inflated and not as important as trying to hold the line against budget deficits. Ike’s public reaction to Sputnik, just six weeks after the Kremlin launched the world’s first ICBM, was purposely low key. The Soviets merely “put one small ball in the air” which did not raise his apprehensions “one iota.” Ike’s popularity plummeted.

As early as 1948, US proponents of air power were issuing warnings of dire consequences over a bomber gap, calling for ramped up production. The January 1948 Report of the President’s Air Policy Commission, “Survival in the Air Age,” better known as the Finletter Report, called for 120 more bombers than President Harry S Truman thought advisable.

The push to increase US production rates went into high gear after the July, 1955 air show, when the Soviets flew the same ten Bear and Bison bombers six times over the reviewing stand. Extrapolations of Soviet production rates, based on the sighting of 60 bombers, had the intended effect of unnerving an anxious country.

Senator Stuart Symington, a Democrat from Missouri with presidential ambitions who previously served as the first Secretary of the Air Force, convened three months of hearings in 1956 that painted an extremely bleak picture. The Airpower hearings concluded that the Soviets possessed more “B-52 class” bombers than the United States. Continuing fiscal constraints would mean the additional loss of qualitative US advantages in three to five years. And unless the Air Force got more money, the Kremlin would achieve strategic superiority in airpower between 1958 and 1960. In sum, “The vulnerability of the United States to sudden attack has increased greatly during the past decade and this vulnerability will continue to increase in the foreseeable future.”

General Curtis LeMay testified at the Airpower hearings that, “The only thing I can say is that from 1958 on, he [the USSR] is stronger than we are, and it naturally follows that if he is stronger, he may feel that he should attack.”

Henry Kissinger wrote in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957) that, “The consensus of Air Force testimony at the Symington hearings was that by 1959 the Soviet Long-Range Air Force would outnumber ours and for this reason we would be in dire peril.”

Columnist Stewart Alsop (brother of Joseph) warned in the New York Herald Tribune that, “The Soviets will soon attain a commanding lead in aircraft capable of operating efficiently at intercontinental ranges.” Alsop had plenty of company.

The bomber gap turned out to as fictitious as the Moscow air show fly-bys.

The summer of love (at least in the San Francisco Bay Area) was in 1967. The summer of arms control was in 1960. Longstanding readers of these posts may recall my ten favorite books on arms control. Two of them – Schelling and Halperin’s Strategy and Arms Control and Arms Control, Disarmament, and National Security, edited by Donald G. Brennan — gestated in a 1960 summer study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when serious brainpower – including Brennan, Schelling, Halperin, Jerome Wiesner, Bernard Feld, Henry Rowen, Victor Weisskopf, Louis Sohn and Hans Bethe — conceptualized the practice of nuclear arms control.

There was a companion volume to Brennan’s book, Summer Study on Arms Control: Collected Papers, which has hardly seen the light of day. It’s a low-budget production published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that includes informal musings, seminar notes, graphics, rough computations and short papers – the raw material for what became known as nuclear arms control.

Here are some excerpts:

“Complete disarmament might yield a situation over which we would have little control. On the other hand, a natural stabilizing of deterrent forces in a continuing arms race is not to be depended upon, although there may be a kind of transitory stability for a time. The more promising approach lies in stabilized deterrence through arms control… The ‘stabilized’ deterrent forces should (1) assure second strike capability, and (2) have punitive, not suicidal capability.” – Presentation by John Phelps

“Schelling remarked that, if each side is developing a preemptive capability, the ‘arms race’ may be unlimited, but if each side is developing retaliatory force, the arms race may level off. Therefore, we should not just look at the question of what would be an ideal arms-control scale of weapons on both sides, but rather ask if we can even agree that the goal is to damp down the arms race and to understand each other’s programs.”

“Many common law restraints, for example, including disorderly conduct, are purposely vague and are more effective precisely because they are vague… A single nation may create a norm by a uniform course of conduct that conforms to that norm, even though the implied rule which it is respecting is never made explicit… If many nations follow a similar course of conduct the rule that is established may affect not only themselves, but all nations. If most nations conduct their military affairs consistent with certain restraints, those restraints tend to turn into custom. And the violation of custom involves, to a lesser degree, the same considerations of external consequences and internal restraints that are involved in breaking a rule recognized as binding.” – Roger Fisher

Hans J. Morgenthau was a heavyweight whose books, including Politics Among Nations (1948) and In Defense of the National Interest (1951), packed a real wallop. Morgenthau also wrote with great clarity about nuclear weapons. Check out his essay, “The Four Paradoxes of Nuclear Strategy,” which appeared in the March 1964 issue of the American Political Science Review.

Here’s what Morgenthau had to say about tactical nuclear weapons and escalation control:

Both tactical nuclear war and graduated deterrence presuppose three capabilities on the part of belligerents: the rational ability to deduce the intentions of the enemy from his use of nuclear weapons, the rational ability to know exactly at every moment of the war what kind of nuclear weapon it is necessary and prudent to use, and the practical ability to impose the limitations so determined upon all nuclear command posts. Both tactical nuclear war and graduated deterrence require a rational interplay of the intentions and actions of the belligerents, an interplay which theoreticians may calculate in the form of ‘models’ but which it is impossible to achieve consistently in reality. That impossibility derives from three factors: the essential ambiguity of the military act (which it of course shares with the political act), uncertainty about the enemy’s intentions, and the enormous and irreparable risks, in nuclear war, of mistakes in interpretation.

Of the countries that possess tactical nuclear weapons, the two that currently seem to place increased value on them are Russia and Pakistan. Pakistan’s program raises more red flags because military friction between Pakistan and India is more likely than Russia coming to blows with NATO or China.

The history of wars on the subcontinent is rife with miscalculation: one side or the other has been surprised by their beginning and prosecution. Tactical nuclear weapons also lend themselves to surprise and miscalculation.

Very short-range delivery systems for nuclear weapons – like the 60-kilometer Nasr (or Hatf IX) missile that Pakistan has flight-tested, and India’s 150-kilometer Prahaar – are not very helpful against tank offensives or fast-moving targets; even if railheads and bridges were suitable targets, they may not be within reach. Very limited use of tactical nuclear weapons by Pakistan might serve to warn India against advances, but the job of Pakistan’s armed forces is to prevent, and not to detonate, mushroom clouds on home soil.

Whatever limited military utility short-range nuclear weapons possess depends on extreme forward deployments, where they would be most subject to attack, where early use would be most likely, and where command and control is most susceptible to breakdowns. Avoiding these pitfalls requires very slow-moving fronts on the subcontinent and the absence of air strikes. The first assumption is not unreasonable; the second is very questionable. In a crisis, there are also significant internal-security and escalation risks associated with the movement and forward-deployment of short-range systems advertised as being nuclear-capable.

After testing nuclear devices in 1998, Indian and Pakistani spokespersons downplayed the value of tactical nuclear weapons, without ruling them out. Pakistani military officers stressed that any use of a nuclear weapon would have strategic consequences — a very sound analysis, and one that greatly undermines the case for tac nukes. Why risk crossing this momentous threshold with hard-to-defend and hard-to-control short-range weapons when more survivable and controllable longer-range nuclear forces are available?

Pakistan, unlike India, does not announce its nuclear doctrine. Instead, those in authority use press releases and the occasional interview to make essential points. The press release after the Nasr’s flight test advertised the utility of tactical nuclear weapons. This statement is probably a rejoinder to India’s growing conventional capabilities and its more proactive military plans. While India, in typical fashion, is moving slowly to implement those plans, Pakistan’s military is methodically filling in perceived shortfalls in nuclear capabilities.

In defense of their perceived need for tactical nuclear weapons, Pakistani interlocutors point to NATO’s strategy during the Cold War of dealing with a conventionally superior foe. Hans Morgenthau’s warnings are again falling on deaf ears.

I am a frequent flier and have a plastic, gold “Million Miler” card from United to prove it. None of my business flights have had more meaning than one I took in 1989 to watch people hammer away at the Berlin Wall. I was somewhere else in Europe at the time and hopped a plane to West Berlin. The customs police looked quizzically at a traveler without luggage, not understanding that I was a day tripper, there to soak up history in the making and to collect pieces of graffiti-stained concrete.

Berlin is once again a muscular, vibrant city, particularly around Potsdamer Platz, where the Wall once divided East from West. Germany’s strength is rooted in its economy and alliance ties, not in nuclear weapons or Panzer Divisions. The powerhouse of Europe now has an Army of less than three divisions — down from 102 at the start of the Second World War.

Awareness of history is essential; being its prisoner is both optional and unwise. Moscow is still imprisoned in Cold War thinking about the Bomb and missile defenses. Some in the United States are, as well.

Russia is understandably and acutely sensitive to German power. The means it now chooses to warn Berlin and the West of adventurism are as outmoded as those it once employed to keep Germany divided. The symbolic use of tactical nuclear weapons to protect Moscow’s western front reeks of the Cold War. These weapons, once integral to offensive plans, are now substitutes for Moscow’s declining power and trading material for a future arms reduction agreement.

The Kremlin’s view of missile defenses is also redolent of the past, rooted in fears of the Strategic Defense Initiative’s second coming. Russia is part of a small number of countries that rely on ballistic missiles and implied nuclear threats to shore up their influence and to compensate for multiple weaknesses.

No good comes from lending credence to the Kremlin’s outdated nightmares, which is why I have parted company with those who warn that Moscow is incapable of discerning the intent behind US ballistic missile defense plans. I don’t buy the argument that the Kremlin will invariably perceive BMD, especially in the hands of a Republican administration, as a means to neutralize the Russian deterrent – especially from those who insist that US missile defense capabilities will forever be deficient at discriminating between warheads and decoys.

I understand these arguments – up to a point. No good can come from the ambitions of BMD enthusiasts who seek an escape from deterrence between major powers. There will, however, be no second coming of SDI. Nothing of the sort happened during the George W. Bush administration – not because of the ABM Treaty, which Bush set aside, but because of legislative checks and balances, the Pentagon’s preferences in dealing with unavoidable budgetary trade-offs, and enduring technological constraints. If another Republican administration, staffed by familiar faces, once again seeks missile defenses that are oriented against Russia and China instead of Iran and North Korea, familiar countervailing checks in the United States will again come into play. And Russia will once again seek low cost counters to BMD deployments. China will, too.

A BMD architecture focused against outliers can be differentiated from missile defenses designed to negate the Russian deterrent, even though there will eventually be some overlap between the two. To oppose regional missile defenses because of this overlap is to invite further proliferation. Countries that feel threatened by the North Korean and Iranian missile and nuclear programs are rightly offended by Cold War-like arguments that BMD is destabilizing and will make their neighbors’ bad behavior even worse. Add the argument that BMD will never work properly, even against unsophisticated threats, and the likelihood grows that states that feel threatened will pursue their own hedging strategies. How far they hedge depends, in part, on whether theater missile defenses are part of the mix.

I propose that we accord Kremlin leaders more credit for their powers of discernment, thereby giving them less power to influence the provision of BMD to reassure U.S. allies and friends in troubled regions. I also propose taking a very hard look at the concurrency of current BMD plans. Some interim deployments are clearly needed to address North Korean and Iranian missile programs, but pushing too hard on deployments while concurrently developing weapon systems usually winds up costing doubly for questionable capability. The proposed scope at the back end of phased, adaptive deployments also requires periodic re-evaluation. These steps would constitute favors to U.S. taxpayers, not to the Kremlin.

Moscow’s concerns over missile defenses are purposely inflated, but are deeply rooted. The Kremlin’s concerns obviously matter, but not as much as the concerns of U.S. partners that are on the warning end of ballistic missile and nuclear programs. The reduction of U.S. and Russian stockpiles will continue. In the near term, horizontal proliferation warrants greater concern than Moscow’s complaints.

Hedley Bull is probably the least well-known founding father of the theory of modern arms control. He’s not very well known because he toiled under three considerable disadvantages. First, he was an Australian based in the United Kingdom, when the primary action was in the United States. Second, his important book, The Control of the Arms Race: Disarmament and Arms Control in the Missile Age (1961), suffered by comparison to Thomas Schelling and Mort Halperin’s Strategy and Arms Control, which was published around the same time. And third, Bull was a dense prose stylist. While Strategy and Arms Control was a model of clarity and concision, Bull made far greater demands of his readers, writing rebuttals before coming around to his conclusions.

The Control of the Arms Race was written under the auspices of the Institute of Strategic Studies, which convened a study group for Bull’s benefit, including among its members Alaistair Buchan, Anthony Buzzard, Philip Noel-Baker, Thomas Schelling, and Albert Wohlstetter. (The ISS subsequently added the word “International” to its masthead).

Bull defined arms control as “restraint internationally exercised upon armaments policy, whether in respect of the level of armaments, their character, deployment or use.” Here are some of Bull’s conclusions, which echo those of Schelling and Halperin:

In general, arms races arise as the result of political conflicts, are kept alive by them, and subside with them….

We cannot expect that a system of arms control will be brought into operation, nor that, if it is, it will persist, unless certain political conditions are fulfilled….

Arms control does not provide a technique of insulating a military situation from the future will of states to change it: it cannot bind, not settle in advance, the future course of politics. There are no technical means of excluding the political factor….

If armaments do not of themselves produce war, certain kinds or levels or deployments of armaments may be more likely to give rise to the decision to go to war than others. If arms races do not necessarily lead to war, there are directions they can take which undermine security against it.

Since the Cold War ended, no region has experienced more shocks or a more significant reorientation in US foreign policy than South Asia. The big shift was enabled by the demise of the Soviet Union and New Delhi’s turn away from Nehruvian economics to market-oriented entrepreneurship. Then came the 1998 nuclear tests, the Kargil War, and the 9/11 attacks on US soil, which served to clarify Washington’s repositioning.

Two of these bell-ringers occurred during the second term of the Clinton administration, when the big shift gained traction. After the 9/11 attacks, the subsequent US military campaign in Afghanistan and the US-India civil nuclear deal during the Bush administration solidified and accentuated Washington’s reorientation.

The end of the Cold War allowed New Delhi and Washington to view each other in a new light, a necessary but insufficient cause for a re-wiring of this magnitude. More consequential was the decisions by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh to launch their market reforms in the early 1990s. With this opening, powerful US interests could be mobilized to support initiatives to improve bottom lines. The rise of China and a far more politically active Indian-American community clearly reinforced economic impulses to improve ties between Washington and New Delhi.

India’s nuclear weapon programs were a major impediment to improved ties with Washington. Until 1998, India was perpetually caught betwixt and between: it couldn’t join global nuclear compacts, but was reluctant to rock the boat. New Delhi’s default position was to champion nuclear disarmament while wishing to join the nuclear club. The indefinite extension of the Nonproliferation Treaty in 1995 and the negotiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty a year later forced a long-delayed choice. A new, determined coalition government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, finally pulled the nuclear trigger. Pakistan followed suit, and Washington had to adapt to new realities.

India remained in limbo after the nuclear tests because it chose not to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and couldn’t rewrite the Nonproliferation Treaty. Washington’s cold shoulder lasted until Pervez Musharraf’s dangerous misadventure in the heights above Kargil. Musharraf may have been seeking to exploit Pakistan’s newly overt nuclear capability as a shield while forcing Indian concessions on Kashmir. Instead, he created a significant opening for US-Indian rapprochement. Desperate for a face-saving exit, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif pleaded with President Bill Clinton to take a more direct interest by visiting the subcontinent. By the time he did so, Pakistan was once again under military rule. Clinton spent five days in India and five hours in Pakistan. He then hosted the Indian Prime Minister and his entourage at a huge gala on the White House lawn. The reversal of Indian and Pakistani fortunes was in full swing, and about to be accentuated by the incoming Bush administration, which was looking for a counterweight to China.

The 9/11 attacks offered a short-term fillip to US-Pakistan relations in the form of a lifting of sanctions and the influx of military and economic aid. But US-Pakistan relations have foundered over Afghanistan, where interests merge at a level of generality that is repeatedly undercut by specifics. The familiar Pakistani story of betrayal now has a companion US narrative.

Washington’s reliance on drone attack in order to salvage bad decisions in Afghanistan has badly damaged relations with Pakistan. At the same time, Rawalpindi’s investments in the Afghan Taliban and outfits to serve as its strategic reserves against India have badly frayed ties with Washington. These tactics have also accentuated Pakistan’s economic decline, domestic divisions and diplomatic isolation. Bilateral US-Pakistan relations can still be patched up, but not in meaningful ways as long as Rawalpindi’s policies mortgage Pakistan’s future, use the United States as a scapegoat, and risk new confrontations with India.

In contrast, US-Indian ties will improve, but in measured fashion. Familiar voices in the United States and India will continue to call on Washington to do more and to pick up the pace, even though New Delhi’s performance falls well short of expectations. It’s very hard for two proud and exceptional nations to forge a strategic partnership, especially given the viscosity of Indian bureaucratic and domestic politics. At the end of the day, New Delhi will refuse to be Washington’s junior partner. A coalition of Indian intellectuals has recently proposed a national security policy of “Nonalignment 2.0.”

After a very eventful two decades, Pakistan feels jilted, while the romance of Washington’s new relationship with New Delhi has become routinized. The big shift in US foreign policy toward the subcontinent will not be reversed. But the upswing in US-India ties, like the downward trajectory of US ties with Pakistan, requires managed expectations.

Back in my youth, before thumbs were essential for home entertainment, some of us played a board game called Chutes and Ladders, where you could zoom way up and down the board, depending on where your piece landed after rolling the dice. Arms control isn’t like that. Big gains only happen when confident, courageous, risk-taking negotiating partners appear. This happens maybe once in a lifetime. Most of the time, gains are hard won, modest, and cumulative. Meanwhile, at any moment, backsliding and losses can be immense. Winning the game of arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation, unlike Chutes and Ladders, depends on securing progressive gains and avoiding steep losses.

This constitutes, in my view, a sound strategy for philanthropy to reduce nuclear dangers: stay in the game, seize opportunities, invest in new talent and policy entrepreneurship, and lay the groundwork for another generation’s worth of progressive gains. Success in arms control, like economic recovery, requires maintaining and building infrastructure.

This strategy of success is losing adherents. Foundations that were once heavily involved in arms control – Ford, Rockefeller and Rockefeller Brothers Fund – have moved on to other hard, worthy projects. The W. Alton Jones Foundation, which once practiced outstanding grant making, fissioned and disappeared. The Big Five that remain in the United States are MacArthur, the Carnegie Corporation, Ploughshares, Hewlett, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

According to preliminary figures compiled by the Peace and Security Funders Group, grant support for nuclear-related programming dropped by 40 per cent between 2008 and 2010 – from $40.1 million to $21.4 million. (This decline may be somewhat overstated because of the economic downturn and the cyclical nature of grant making. The P&SFG is now working on updated data.) To complicate matters further, two of the Big Five are now operating foundations: Ploughshares has joined NTI in seeking funds for their own projects while continuing to make grants to others. This hybrid operating foundation model is relatively new to the field, coming alongside a new philanthropic wave of operating foundations that have dispensed with grant-making altogether.

I acknowledge that there’s always room for new players and new, effective models of philanthropy. Still, I’m old school: I am heavily biased (and obviously self-interested) in favor of traditional grant-making. I’m wary of the operating foundation model, despite my admiration for those who practice it.

“Operational” philanthropy is appealing because it promises greater impact as well as control. The pure operating foundation model is especially risky, because success in making money does not necessarily carry over to successful programming in civil society. The estimable Warren Buffett didn’t set up an operating foundation; instead, the Buffett Foundation has chosen to give large sums to folks who have established a track record of knowing how to spend this money wisely for causes he believes in.

All foundations, like all grantees, seek impact as well as comparative advantage. Since arms control extends over a very broad waterfront, philanthropy will always be spread thin in some issue areas. When operating foundations seek sharper focus for greater near-term impact, more acreage along the waterfront becomes uncovered, as trade-offs have to be made between the pursuit of short-term gains and investing in infrastructure. This trade-off matters, because near-term successes are invariably the result of longer-term investments. A programming focus on immediate gains is occasionally necessary, e.g., in the run-up to a treaty ratification debate, but it’s usually not a sound investment strategy. Hard problems worthy of philanthropy are also worthy of long-term investments.

The more hybrid foundations become operators, the greater the risk they face of having less money available for grant making. To avoid this dilemma, they can ramp up fund raising. Fund raising campaigns, whether by operating foundations or NGOs, are based on increased threats, unusual opportunities, and a track record of accomplishment. Immodest claims of quick successes – whether by funders or NGOs — risk the loss of credibility because accomplishments (like threats) have many antecedents and complex causality.

Another reason for the operating foundation model is perceived weaknesses in the NGO community. NGOs certainly have weaknesses, but in grant-making, as in parenting, taking over usually doesn’t build strengths; instead, it reinforces weaknesses. Policy entrepreneurship, by definition, requires innovation, but in philanthropy, unlike business, it’s not easy to be an innovator when you’re an operator. Another problem when funders become operators is that the programming of their NGO grant recipients can be more easily dismissed as doing the bidding of a high-profile funder.

I grant that there are good arguments for the operating foundation model, especially for programming in parts of the world that have limited NGO infrastructure. In the arms-control field, NTI has proven that a hybrid operating foundation can establish comparative advantage and make valuable contributions. NTI began, as most operating foundation start-ups do, by leaning on existing NGO infrastructure for programming achievements. Now NTI competes with these NGOs for foundation support.

I also grant validity to the argument that money is not a finite resource, and that this pot can grow with more aggressive fund raising by operating foundations as well as NGOs. In all likelihood, however, operating foundations will do better than NGOs in the quest for funds, making win-win outcomes illusive.

My bottom line from these two posts is that philanthropy to promote arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation has been uncommonly successful. And yet, the basis for continued success is far from assured.

[See part I of this post. -Ed.]

Readers beware: The next two posts are ridden with conflicts of interest.

Policy entrepreneurship to reduce nuclear dangers would dry up without foundations. National leaders and bureaucracies are too consumed by their daily calendars to serve as their own think tanks. Instead, they borrow, embrace, implement or oppose initiatives that come from outside their ranks. It’s hard to think of a big success story in arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation that was not previously conceived, nurtured and popularized by nongovernmental organizations or academics working with grant support.

Not many areas of philanthropy can demonstrate more return on investment than in arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation. Grant making supported the Pugwash meetings to foster exchanges across the Iron Curtain and campaigns to end atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s. Philanthropy nurtured the conceptualization of nuclear arms control in the early 1960s, the Stop Where We Are and freeze campaigns to decelerate the arms race in the early 1970s and 1980s, the alphabet soup list of treaties that stigmatize the testing, acquisition and use of weapons of mass destruction. After the Cold War ended, philanthropy helped NGOs and academics to conceive of programs to secure dangerous weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union. Foundation grant support has lately emphasized the goal of completely eliminating nuclear weapons.

Proliferation is now a rare occurrence and global stockpiles of nuclear weapons are drastically smaller. Nuclear testing is now the mark of an outlier rather than a sign of strength. There have been no mushroom clouds on contested battlefields since World War II.

These are remarkable, unexpected results. There are many reasons for them in addition to philanthropy. Where foundations have helped most, in my view, is by supporting new initiatives and counterintuitive habits of mind, especially the notion that it is not a good idea to use the most powerful weapons a nation possesses. Or that national missile defenses can, in some circumstances, result in greater threat than protection. It comes as no surprise that these notions are still strongly contested; what’s surprising is the extent to which they have taken hold.

As I have posted before, arms control is all about duality. Especially now, good news and bad news in this field happen concurrently. Libya and Syria are nuclear nonproliferation success stories, but Syria is imploding with stocks of nerve gas. (Add this to your Israel-Iran scenarios.) There are very few potential worst cases at present, but they are humdingers. The Senate’s consent to treaty ratification comes with conditions that can make the next mountain seem harder to climb. Success generates added resistance, as those threatened by advances dig in their heels. Successes also make it easier for funders to gravitate to other pressing problems, only to come back – usually at less than previous strength – when evidence mounts of increased nuclear dangers.

Given the duality of this field, much work lies ahead. Arms control, like other successful practices, is susceptible to orthodoxy and is in need of creative adaptation. New threats are more complicated than the old ones. Bipartisan support for treaties is a much tougher sell now. Elders who have been instrumental in securing gains have left or are leaving the stage. A rising generation of policy entrepreneurs has yet to take their place. This challenge, on which future success rests, does not seem to be a high priority for current grant making. (To be continued.)

[See part II of this post. -Ed.]