http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28sun1.html

Editorial

New Think and Old Weapons

Published: February 27, 2010

Every four years the White House issues a “nuclear posture review.” That may sound like an anachronism. It isn’t. In a world where the United States and Russia still have more than 20,000 nuclear weapons — and Iran, North Korea and others have seemingly unquenchable nuclear appetites — what the United States says about its arsenal matters enormously.

President Obama’s review was due to Congress in December. That has been delayed, in part because of administration infighting. The president needs to get this right. It is his chance to finally jettison cold war doctrine and bolster America’s credibility as it presses to rein in Iran, North Korea and other proliferators.

Mr. Obama has already committed rhetorically to the vision of a world without nuclear weapons. But we are concerned that some of his advisers, especially at the Pentagon, are resisting his bold ambitions. He needs to stick with the ideas he articulated in his campaign and in speeches last year in Prague and at the United Nations.

These are some of the important questions the posture review must address:

THEIR PURPOSE: Current doctrine gives nuclear weapons a “critical role” in defending the United States and its allies. And it suggests they could be used against foes wielding chemical, biological or even conventional forces — not just nuclear arms. Mr. Obama’s aides have proposed changing that to say that the “primary” purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack against the United States or its allies. This still invites questions about whether Washington values — and might use — nuclear forces against non-nuclear targets.

Given America’s vast conventional military superiority, broader uses are neither realistic nor necessary. Any ambiguity undercuts Washington’s credibility when it argues that other countries have no strategic reason to develop their own nuclear arms. The sole purpose of American nuclear forces should be to deter a nuclear attack against this country or its allies.

HOW MANY: President George W. Bush disdained arms control as old think, and Washington and Moscow have not signed an arms reduction treaty since 2002. Mr. Obama launched negotiations on a new agreement that would slash the number of warheads each side has deployed from 2,200 to between 1,500 and 1,675. The talks are dragging on, but there is hope for an agreement soon. Both sides should go deeper.

The review should make clear that the United States is ready to move, as a next step, down to 1,000 deployed warheads — military experts say half that number is enough to wipe out the assets of Russia, which is no longer an enemy. China, the only major nuclear power adding to its arsenal, is estimated to have 100 to 200 warheads. The treaty being negotiated says nothing about the nearly 15,000 warheads, in total, that the United States and Russia keep as backups — the so-called hedge. And it says nothing about America’s 500 short-range nuclear weapons, which are considered secure, or Russia’s 3,000 or more, which are chillingly vulnerable to theft.

The review should make clear that there is no need for a huge hedge, and that tactical weapons have an utter lack of strategic value — as a prelude to reducing both. Certainly no general we know of could imagine exploding a warhead on a battlefield. Today’s greatest nuclear danger is that terrorists will steal or build a weapon. That is best countered by halting proliferation and securing and reducing stockpiles and other material.

NEW WEAPONS: The United States built its last new warhead in 1989. So when aides to President George W. Bush called for building new weapons, with new designs and new capabilities, it opened this country to charges of hypocrisy and double standards when it demanded that North Korea and Iran end their nuclear programs.

Mr. Obama has said that this country does not need new weapons. But we are concerned the review will open the door to just that by directing the labs to study options — including a new weapons design — for maintaining the arsenal. The government has a strong and hugely expensive system for ensuring that the stockpile is safe and reliable. Mr. Obama has already vastly increased the labs’ budgets. The review should make clear that there is no need for a new weapon.

ALERT LEVELS: The United States and Russia each still have about 1,000 weapons ready to fire at a moment’s notice. Mr. Obama has rightly described this as a dangerous cold war relic. The review should commit to taking as many of those forces off hair-trigger alert as possible — and encourage Russia to do the same.

In April, Mr. Obama will host a much needed summit meeting on the need to better secure nuclear material from terrorists. In May, Washington will encourage a United Nations-led conference to strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the bedrock, and battered, agreement for curbing the spread of nuclear arms

President Obama will also have to persuade the Senate to ratify the Start follow-on treaty, and we hope he will quickly press the Senate to approve the test ban treaty. He is also working with allies to revive nuclear talks with North Korea and to impose tougher sanctions on Iran. Getting the nuclear posture review right is essential for moving all of this ahead.

The Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) is the overarching U.S. policy regarding nuclear weapons.  In the drafting of a new NPR there is an intense struggle between the White House and the Pentagon and the National Security Council over fundamental issues such as the “first use” option.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/28/barack-obama-nuclear-review

Barack Obama orders new nuclear review amid growing feud

President’s hopes for reform create bitter tensions with National Security Council and Department of Defense

Peter Beaumont

The Observer, Sunday 28 February 2010

President Barack Obama has ordered the rewriting of the draft new US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), amid frustration in the White House that the document fails to reflect his aspirations for a nuclear-weapons-free world and an end to “cold war thinking”.

The review, drawn up by each administration, sets the doctrine justifying both the retention of nuclear weapons and the circumstances in which they might be used. It also determines more practical issues, including nuclear force readiness, targeting and war planning.

The rejected draft – described in its present form as merely a “tweaked version of George Bush’s NPR” – has become the subject of a bitter tug of war between the Department of Defense, the National Security Council and a White House that is determined that it should more closely reflect Obama’s Prague speech last year. In the speech, Obama put the issue of nuclear disarmament at the centre of his foreign policy. On Friday, an administration official told Atlantic magazine: “There are intense internal divisions over the core thrust of the NPR.”

At present America’s proclaimed policy on nuclear weapons is that it reserves the right for first use to deter an attack on the US or one of its allies.

President Obama and his allies are understood to want a new policy that is much closer to a declaration of no first use, making clear that the United States would not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.

According to sources familiar with the process of producing the review, Obama is meeting resistance from the National Security Council – which does not share his view that a nuclear-weapons-free world is an achievable objective – and the Department of Defense.

The consequence has been a split in the administration among those involved in writing the review into two fiercely opposed camps – one led by the vice-president, Joe Biden, who is lobbying for Obama’s position, and the other clustering around the secretary of defense, Robert Gates. Hillary Clinton has so far resisted joining either camp.

The deliberations over NPR – now not expected to be published until April at the earliest – come at a crucial moment in international nuclear disarmament negotiations. The next four months will see the issue of nuclear weapons catapulted to the top of the foreign policy agenda. A new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – Start – is up for renewal between the US and Russia, while the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference will also take place in the spring. Then, nuclear powers will come under renewed pressure from non-nuclear states to demonstrate they are serious about disarmament.

Separately, the issue of removing some 200 US freefall bombs, deployed in Europe, is increasingly expected to be raised at the Nato defence ministers’ summit, a position strongly backed by Germany, Norway and the Netherlands.

“The next four months are going to be very important,” says Joseph Cirincione, of the anti-nuclear foundation the Ploughshares Fund and a former director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“We are going to see the major policy product of this administration unveiled. We should see the new Start treaty unveiled. Then we have the Non-Proliferation Treaty Conference. It will determine US nuclear policy – and the world’s – for the next 10 years.”

At the centre of that will be the NPR. “My understanding,” says Cirincione, “is that the president and vice-president are unhappy with the draft that has been produced. Nothing has been settled on the key issue: what is the use for our nuclear weapons? This is an issue that the president cares deeply about.”

At the centre of the continuing arguments among those involved in drafting the policy are whether the US should move against maintaining a targeting policy against non-nuclear targets defined as weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological weapons and very large conventional weapons. “It is about numbers,” adds Cirincione. “The doctrine tells you how many tactical nuclear weapons you need.”

The sense of optimism that the US might deliver on its promises to make substantive moves towards a deeper disarmament is shared by former British defence secretary Des Browne, who chairs the cross-party Top Level Group on Nuclear Disarmament.

“A president prepared to take this issue on comes along once in a lifetime. I’m not naive about this. But he has the real potential to lead on this.”

The National Security Archive has released recently declassified documents from the CIA pertaining to the 1974 Project Azorian, a secret expedition to retrieve a sunken Soviet nuclear sub 250 miles northwest of Kaua’i.  The cover story for the Glomar Explorer, the strange ship searching the deep sea was that it was looking for manganese nodules on the ocean floor.   Only part of the sub was recovered including the bodies of several Soviet submariners and two nuclear weapons. The sub was brought back to Hawai’i for analysis.

Tom Blanton, Director of the National Security Archive said “To me, Glomar resembles the Bay of Pigs more than U-2 or Corona. On the latter, they brought in the best people, Ed Land and the Skunk Works, on the former, they only talked to themselves.”  The expression “neither confirm nor deny”, now the policy of the military related to the presence of nuclear weapons, was coined by the CIA when asked about its involvement with the Glomar mission.  This was one of the strangest episodes of the Cold War.

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http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb305/index.htm

Project Azorian

The CIA’s Declassified History of the Glomar Explorer

Posted – February 12, 2010

Edited by Matthew Aid with William Burr and Thomas Blanton

For more information contact: 202/994-7000

The Hughes Glomar Explorer (U.S. Government photo)

Glomarization The name of the CIA ship Hughes Glomar Explorer is infamous in the world of FOIA requesting and litigation. In the wake of the exposés on the Glomar Explorer by Jack Anderson and Seymour Hersh, journalist Harriet Ann Phillippi filed a FOIA request asking for documents on the Agency’s attempts to discourage reporting on the CIA’s salvaging project.  Rejecting Phillippi’s request, the Agency declared that it could “neither confirm nor deny” its connection with the Glomar Explorer. Phillippi filed a lawsuit, but the U.S. District Court of Appeals upheld the CIA’s position in 1976. Since the Phillippi v CIA decision, the term “glomarize” or “glomar response” have become terms of art to describe the circumstances when the CIA or other agencies claim that they can “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of requested documents. No doubt the CIA will continue to make “Glomar” responses to some declassification requests, but in light of this new release, it is unlikely to “glomarize” the Glomar Explorer.

A Soviet Golf class submarine, the type of ship that “Project Azorian” was trying to recover from the bottom of the Pacific. (Photo used with permission of Federation of American Scientists)

Excerpt from Seymour Hersh story, The New York Times, March 19, 1975

Inconsistent Secrecy? On January 24, 2010, the Washington Post’s letters to the editor’s section included a communication from retired CIA officer David Sharp, who served on the crew of the Hughes Glomar Explorer. Sharp has written a book-length account of the Glomar Explorer project but has tried in vain to get the CIA’s Publication Review Board to declassify his manuscript in its entirety. According to Sharp’s letter, the Board continues to insist that one-third of the manuscript cannot be published. Perhaps the decision by the CIA FOIA office to declassify the 1985 Studies in Intelligence article on “Project Azorian” will give Mr. Sharp some leverage in his negotiations with the Review Board.

Washington, D.C., February 12, 2010 – For the first time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified substantive information on one of its most secret and sensitive schemes, “Project Azorian,” the Agency codename for its ambitious plan to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in order to retrieve its secrets. Today the National Security Archive publishes “Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer,” a 50-page article from the fall 1985 edition of the Agency’s in-house journal Studies in Intelligence. Written by a participant in the operation whose identity remains classified, the article discusses the conception and planning of the retrieval effort and the creation of a special ship, the Glomar Explorer, which raised portions of the submarine in August 1974. The National Security Archive had submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the CIA for the document on December 12, 2007.

National Security Archive director Tom Blanton commented that “the Navy alternative to the Glomar Explorer–investigation by a deep sea submersible–sounds more convincing than the claim in the Studies in Intelligence article that Project Azorian advanced the cutting edge of deep sea exploration the way the CIA did on aerial and satellite reconnaissance. To me, Glomar resembles the Bay of Pigs more than U-2 or Corona. On the latter, they brought in the best people, Ed Land and the Skunk Works, on the former, they only talked to themselves.”

Also published today for the first time are recently declassified White House memoranda of conversations from 1975 which recount the reactions of President Ford and cabinet members to ongoing news of press leaks about the Glomar Explorer, including Seymour Hersh’s exposé in The New York Times on March 19, 1975.

Project Azorian
The CIA’s Declassified History of the Glomar Explorer
By Matthew Aid

For the first time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified substantive information on one of its most secret and sensitive schemes, “Project Azorian,” the Agency codename for its ambitious plan to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in order to retrieve its secrets. Today the National Security Archive publishes “Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer,” a “Secret” 50-page article from the fall 1985 edition of the Agency’s in-house journal Studies in Intelligence. Written by a participant in the operation whose identity remains classified, the article discusses the conception and planning of the retrieval effort and the creation of a special ship Glomar Explorer, which raised portions of the submarine in August 1974. The National Security Archive submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the CIA for the document on December 12, 2007.

Also published today for the first time are recently-declassified White House memoranda of conversations from 1975 recounting the reactions of President Ford and cabinet members to ongoing news of press leaks about the Glomar Explorer, including Seymour Hersh’s exposé in The New York Times on March 19, 1975.

The first sketchy details of the program were published by the Los Angeles Times in February 1975 and by columnist Jack Anderson in a March 18 radio program, and were further developed in Hersh’s March 19 article in the New York Times. Since then the CIA has been so adamant in its refusal to declassify any material related to “Project Azorian” that it will neither confirm nor deny that the operation ever existed. This doctrine changed slightly in the 1990s, when the Agency declassified a videotape given previously to Russian president Boris Yeltsin showing the burial at sea of the Russian crewmen who were found in the portion of the submarine that the CIA raised to the surface. But other than this videotape, for the past 35 years the public has had to rely for everything that it knew about the project on a very small number of books and articles written without access to the classified records. (Note 1)

This newly-released CIA document vastly expands what we know about this poorly-understood operation. Despite significant redactions made by the CIA, the article contains a detailed chronological history of the program from its inception until Jack Anderson published the first hard details about the program in April 1975. Internal evidence suggests that the article was written in 1978, but it was prepared at such a high level of classification that it was apparently unpublishable until the Agency made decisions in 1985 to downgrade it to “Secret.”

The story of “Project Azorian” began on March 1, 1968, when a Soviet Golf-II submarine, the K-129 (the CIA history refers to the submarine by its pendant number – 722), carrying three SS-N-4 Sark nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, sailed from the naval base at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula to take up its peacetime patrol station northeast of Hawaii. If war had broken out, the K-129 would have launched its three ballistic missiles, each carrying a one megaton nuclear warhead, at targets along the west coast of the United States. But something went terribly wrong, for in mid-March 1968 the submarine suffered a catastrophic accident and sank 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii with the loss of its entire crew. Interestingly, the CIA history is silent on the cause of the accident, mentioning neither how the agency came to learn of the sub’s demise nor the exact location of its resting place 16,500 feet below the surface of Pacific. It is quite likely that this information was Top Secret, and could not be included in the article at the Secret classification level, despite the fact that books and articles about the project back in the 1970s mention that the U.S. Navy’s SOSUS underwater sonar system detected the location of the sunken submarine.

The article traces in detail the trials and tribulations of “Project Azorian” over the next six years, culminating on August 8, 1974, when the commercial vessel specially modified to perform the secret mission, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, raised a portion of the K-129 to the surface and took it to Hawaii for detailed examination.

The declassified article is replete with information that has never been made public before now:

• On July 1, 1969, the CIA established the Special Projects Staff within its Directorate of Science and Technology to manage “Project Azorian.” The head of the unit was John Parangosky, a senior official in the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology who had previously managed the development and operation of a number of highly-classified CIA aerial reconnaissance systems. His deputy, and the man who ran the day-to-day operations of Project Azorian for the next six years, was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and World War II submarine officer named Ernest “Zeke” Zellmer. President Richard Nixon personally approved the creation of the special task force in August 1969. (pp. 4-5)

• With President Nixon’s approval in hand, on August 19, 1969, CIA director Richard Helms placed all information concerning the work being done by Parangosky and Zellmer’s staff in a special security compartment called “Jennifer,” thus restricting all knowledge of what these men were doing to a very small and select group of people inside the White House and the U.S. intelligence community, including President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. It should be noted that in the 1970s, a number of books and articles claimed incorrectly that “Jennifer” was the name of the operation. (p. 5)

• It was not until October 1970 that a team of CIA engineers and specially-cleared contractors determined that the only technically-feasible way to lift the huge 1,750-ton Soviet submarine off the sea floor was to slip a specially-made sling made out of pipe-strings around the submarine, then slowly raise the sub to the surface using heavy-duty winches mounted on a specially-modified ship built for this purpose. (p. 9, 15)

• Initially, senior intelligence officials were not particularly optimistic about the chances of success for the operation, believing that there was only a 10 percent chance that the operation would succeed. (p. 11)

• In August 1971, during the early research and development stage of the program, “Project Azorian” came within inches of being cancelled because of huge cost overruns. According to the article, the only thing that saved the program from being terminated was the potential intelligence bonanza that would accrue if the project succeeded. Despite deep concerns about rising costs on the part of the officials overseeing “Project Azorian,” on October 4, 1971 the CIA was authorized to proceed with the program. (pp. 13, 15)

• Work began immediately building a ship specifically designed to conduct the operation. On November 16, 1971, the keel was laid at the Sun Shipbuilders yard in Chester, Pennsylvania of what would become the Hughes Glomar Explorer. The initial schedule called for the ship to be launched on October 5, 1972, and delivered to the CIA on April 20, 1973. (p. 15)

• The developing U.S.-Soviet détente, symbolized by the cordial meetings between President Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the May 1972 Moscow summit, threatened to derail Azorian. In July 1972, the special Executive Committee, which oversaw the project, asked the high-level and top secret 40 Committee, which oversaw all sensitive intelligence operations, to review the project due to the possibility that, by the time it was ready for deployment in 1974, “the developing political climate might prohibit mission approval.” The views of other senior government officials cleared for access to “Project Azorian” were also solicited. The response was far from positive. The Deputy Secretary of Defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Intelligence), and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) all recommended that “Project Azorian” be terminated because, in addition to the rapidly rising costs of the program and the political risks involved, the value of the anticipated intelligence gain from the operation was probably less than what the CIA believed. Despite the impressive heft of these negative assessments of “Project Azorian,” on December 11, 1972, President Richard Nixon ordered that the program be continued. This proved to be the last major bureaucratic obstacle that “Project Azorian” had to clear. (pp. 16-19)

• While docked at the port of Long Beach, California between October 1973 and January 1974, 24 vans containing the classified equipment needed to perform the mission were loaded aboard the Hughes Glomar Explorer. (p. 25)

• In November 1973, a strike by union members belonging to the Marine Engineers Benevolent Association (MEBA) disrupted the completion of the fitting out of the Hughes Glomar Explorer for its mission at Long Beach. Because the mission could only be accomplished during a ten week “weather window” between July and mid-September, CIA officials were concerned that the delay could cause the ship to miss its deployment date. If that had happened, the mission would have been delayed for an entire year until the next period of favorable weather conditions occurred. (pp. 27-28)

• On June 7, 1974, President Nixon personally approved launching the “Project Azorian” mission, with the stipulation that the Hughes Glomar Explorer not begin its work until after he had returned from a summit meeting in Moscow scheduled to last from June 27, 1974, to July 3, 1974. The Glomar Explorer arrived at the recovery site 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii on July 4, 1974, the day after Nixon left Moscow. Recovery operations commenced immediately to attach the pipe-string collars around the Soviet submarine. (pp. 36-37)

• The Hughes Glomar Explorer’s recovery operations were greatly complicated by almost 14 days of near-continuous surveillance of the ship’s work by two Soviet naval vessels. Despite the presence of the Soviet surveillance vessels, recovery work did not stop. But fearing that the Soviets might try to land personnel on his ship by helicopter, on July 18, 1974, the CIA mission director on the Glomar Explorer ordered crates stacked on his ship’s helicopter deck to prevent the Soviets from landing on it. According to the article, orders were given to “be prepared to order emergency destruction of sensitive material which could compromise the mission if the Soviets attempted to board the ship. The team designated to defend the control room long enough to destroy the material… was alerted, but guns were not issued.” (p. 39)

• The Hughes Glomar Explorer began lifting the K-129 off the sea floor on August 1, 1974, more than three weeks after the ship arrived at the recovery site. It took eight days to slowly winch the remains of the Soviet submarine into the massive hold of the Glomar Explorer, with the sub finally being secured inside the ship on August 8, 1974. The next day, recovery operations were completed and the ship sailed for Hawaii to offload its haul. (pp. 43-46)

Unfortunately, the CIA made significant deletions from the text of the article, which makes it extremely difficult to accurately gauge just how successful “Project Azorian” was. For example, the CIA refused to declassify any information concerning the massive cost overruns, which threatened to shut down the program during its early stages. Subsequent reports estimate that as much as $500 million (in 1974 dollars) were spent. Nor did the declassified portions of the CIA article answer the critically important questions of how much of the submarine the Hughes Glomar Explorer managed to bring to the surface, or what intelligence information was derived from the exploitation of the portions of the sub that were recovered. Unfortunately, this material apparently was either redacted from the text or not included because of the high classification assigned to this material.

So what can we surmise about what “Project Azorian” accomplished? Because the CIA article provides no answers to this critical question, the prevailing school of thought maintains that the project failed to accomplish its primary goals. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s March 1975 New York Times article reported that the mission was, in the opinion of senior U.S. Navy officials, a failure, because the CIA did not recover any of the K-129’s SS-N-4 nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew’s 1998 book Blind Man’s Bluff reported that only a 38-foot long forward section of the K-129 was recovered, including the sub’s torpedo compartment and its store of Russian nuclear torpedoes. Ninety percent of the highly-fragile submarine, including the conning tower, missile compartment, control room, radio shack and engine room, broke free and fell back to the ocean floor, disintegrating on contact. “Back to the ocean floor went the intact [SS-N-4] nuclear missile, the codebooks, decoding machines, the burst transmitters. Everything the CIA most wanted to reclaim.” And because only small fragments survived the disintegration of the submarine when it hit bottom, the CIA decided not to make a second attempt to retrieve what was left. Sontag and Drew argue that a Navy proposal to use a deep-sea submersible to probe the sunken vessel was never properly vetted, although it may have produced better results. (Note 2)

There apparently were some tangential benefits that accrued from the project. In June 1993, a panel of Russian experts prepared a report for President Boris Yeltsin, using only information made available to them by the Russian intelligence services, which concluded that the CIA recovered at least two nuclear-armed torpedoes from the portion of the K-129 that it managed to bring to the surface. According to the report, the level of plutonium radiation the CIA team on the Hughes Glomar Explorer encountered was consistent with two nuclear warheads. (Note 3) This conclusion is partially confirmed in the surviving text of the CIA article, which reported that Glomar Explorer’s recovery crew had to deal with plutonium contamination once the sub was raised to the surface caused by the one-point detonation of the high explosive components of one or more of the K-129’s nuclear torpedoes. (p. 46)

So was “Project Azorian” a waste of time and taxpayer money? We will not know for sure until the CIA declassifies the remainder of this article and other documents relating to this operation.

Read the Documents

Another view of the Glomar Explorer (U.S. Government photo)

Document 1: [Author excised], “Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer,” Studies in Intelligence, Fall 1985, Secret, Excised copy

Document 2: Memorandum of Conversation, February 7, 1975, 5:22-5:55 p.m., Confidential, Excised copy
Archival source: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; National Security Adviser–Memoranda of Conversation, box 9, February 7, 1975 – Ford, Kissinger, Schlesinger, Colby, General David C. Jones, Rumsfeld

Calling his national security team together, President Ford expressed his worries about leaks to the press, such as reports on recent National Security Council discussions of the SALT [Strategic Arms Limitations Talks]. During the course of the discussion, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI)William Colby interjected that he had been in touch with the Los Angeles Times, whose editors were going to publish an article about the Glomar Explorer. He said that he called Franklin D. Murphy, the chief executive officer of the Times-Mirror Company, which published the Times, but his call was to no avail. The next afternoon, February 8, 1975, it ran a story entitled “U.S. Reported After Russian Submarine/Sunken Ship Deal by CIA.”

Document 3: Memorandum of Conversation, “[Jennifer?] Meeting,”March 19, 1975, 11:20 a.m., Secret, Excised copy
Archival source: Ford Library, National Security Adviser–Memoranda of Conversation, box 10, March 19, 1975 – Ford, Schlesinger, Colby, Buchen, Marsh, Rumsfeld

The day that Seymour Hersh’s story appeared in The New York Times, Ford also met with top advisers. Secretary of Defense (and former Director of Central Intelligence) Schlesinger recommended acknowledging the “bare facts” because it was implausible to deny the story. DCI Colby, however, thought otherwise and his advice prevailed. Remembering that President Eisenhower’s admission of the downed U-2 exacerbated the 1960 crisis, he suggested that confirming the story would put Moscow under “pressure to respond.”

Notes

1. Two books have been written about the project: Clyde W. Burleson, The Jennifer Project (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977); and Roy Varner and Wayne Collier, A Matter of Risk (New York: Random House, 1977). See also Seymour Hersh, “C.I.A. Salvage Ship Brought Up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise Atom Missiles, The New York Times, March 19, 1975; “The Great Submarine Snatch,” Time, March 31, 1975, pp. 20-27; Seymour Hersh, “Human Error Is Cited in ’74 Glomar Failure,”  The New York Times, December 9, 1976, pp. 1, 55. See also the CIA’s review of Clyde Burleson’s book in John Milligan, “The Jennifer Project,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring 1979, p. 45.

2. Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), 83-84, 180, 198.

3. Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (NY: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 352n, citing William J. Broad, “Russia Says U.S. Got Sub’s Atom Arms,” The New York Times, June 20, 1993, p. 4; “CIA Raising USSR Sub Raises Questions,” FBIS-SOV-92-145, July 28, 1992, pp. 15-16.

http://www.zcommunications.org/full-court-press-by-darwin-bondgraham

Full-Court Press

The “Four Horsemen” Call For a Nuclear Weapons Spending Surge

February 02, 2010

By Darwin Bondgraham and Will Parrish and Nicholas ian Robinson

In the December edition of Z Magazine we published a lengthy feature examining the new politics of “anti-nuclear nuclearism,” a rhetoric whereby hawkish elites vaguely tout the goal of “disarmament” in order to actually boost nuclear weapons spending and advance a long-term, militarized, pro-nuclear vision. We focused in on the Hoover Institution’s pivotal role in shaping US nuclear weapons policies to the advantage of particular corporations and conservative political constituents, especially the nation’s two nuclear weapons design labs: the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in northern California.

Hoover has been the home base of an ongoing, ostensibly anti-nuclear campaign led by former US Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former US Defense Secretary William Perry, and former US Senate Armed Forces Committee Chairman Sam Nunn. The two single most effective vehicles of this effort to shape public opinions and political possibilities have been a pair of widely circulated op-eds in the Wall Street Journal in January 2007, and January 2008, in which the “Four Horsemen” called for policies to reduce “nuclear dangers” and invoke a vision of eventual nuclear disarmament.

In a major political and moral blunder, many nuclear abolitionists and anti-war organizations immediately rallied behind the Four Horsemen, heralding their essays as a signal that the US national security state was poised to pursue an enlightened course of de-escalation toward eventual disarmament. A marginalized contingent of anti-nuclear activists and critics warned, however, that association with this elite-driven “disarmament” campaign was counterproductive, that it ceded the moral high ground to men personally and institutionally invested in the nuclear weapons establishment, and that the four horsemen’s plan would ultimately prove antithetical to the actual goal of nuclear abolition.

Then in the Wall Street Journal’s January 19th, 2010 edition, Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn published a third and drastically different op-ed, tellingly entitled “How to Protect Our Nuclear Deterrent.” In this essay they not only lay to rest any doubt about their long-term support for a nuclear-armed American empire, but have gone so far as to call for a surge in nuclear weapons spending at the national laboratories.

The Four Horsemen endorse the view of a recent Congressional committee on nuclear weapons policy (conveniently co-led by Perry), which concluded that “investments are urgently needed to undo the adverse consequences of deep reductions over the past five years in the laboratories’ budgets for the science, technology, and engineering programs that support and underwrite the nation’s nuclear deterrent.” That’s in spite of the fact that the labs’ budgets for weapons have held steady throughout that period. The labs’ overall budgets, in fact, remain fixed at nearly 1.5 times their Cold War average, adjusting for inflation.

The Hoover quartet’s very public, and very pro-nuclear about-face has been strategically timed, just as their earlier feel-good words in praise of disarmament were calculated to elicit a specific political response from the military establishment, Obama administration, and pesky anti-nuclear and arms control organizations. For the latter their earlier essays were mostly designed to outflank and neutralize groups working to reduce spending on nuclear weapons.

The White House’s Nuclear Posture Review -the nation’s guiding framework on the role of nuclear weapons in its overall military strategy- is now in the midst of being drafted. Due for release in March, the document will affirm the nuclear weapons complex’s activities for the remainder of Obama’s term in office. Additionally there are three major treaties concerning nuclear weapons currently being negotiated, considered for ratification, or reviewed for further implementation. Many disarmament-inclined government officials and activists who are trying to shape a less militarized and costly US nuclear weapons policy have mistakenly assumed that the NPR document and arms control treaties will create a policy trajectory to guide spending and infrastructure costs in the nuclear weapons complex. Disarmament and demilitarization, in other words, are thought of as occurring at the level of presidential declaration and international diplomacy.

The reality of nuclear weapons policy formation is much more complex and political, however. Rather than allowing a neat policy process carried out at the executive level to determine the future of the nuclear weapons complex, forces with financial and political stakes in nuclear weaponry, working through think tanks like Hoover, or corporate entities like Bechtel and the University of California, are actively attempting to lock in a de-facto set of policies by building a new research, design, and production infrastructure that will ensure nuclear weapons are a centerpiece of the US military empire far into the future. Their ability to accomplish this is dependent on the anti-nuclear nuclearist strategy concocted by Shultz, Perry, Kissinger and Nunn. In turn, this strategy is being ably served by naïve embraces of disarmament rhetoric, as well as the illusion, strongly held among arms controllers, disarmament activists, and allies in foreign governments, that the future will ultimately be shaped by what the Nuclear Posture Review says, and whether negotiation of arms control and nonproliferation treaties result in reducing arsenal counts.

The Four Horsemen’s most recent pro-nuclear op-ed is a negotiating posture: part of a larger process of political deal-making that will play out in the months to come. President Obama has indicated that the cornerstone of his nuclear arms control agenda will be a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II). Successful ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which narrowly eluded the Clinton administration in 1999, is likely to be hoisted to the top of the current president’s international agenda in advance of the 2012 election as well. The Obama administration is seeking these treaty accomplishments primarily because they will provide for political “wins,” not because they will meaningfully reduce the United States’

reliance on nuclear weapons. Lest it be forgotten, many of the White House’s current foreign policy advisors are firm believers in nuclear weaponry, having no desire to phase them out through international accords.

At the core of any likely deal will be a surge in nuclear weapons spending. This surge will be requested in the February 1st budget request. The surge will build a multi-billion dollar infrastructure for manufacturing plutonium bombs. The deal might also possibly involve the expansion of programmatic authority and facilities at the weapons labs to pursue new warhead designs. How much the weapons complex wins depends mostly on how many abstract or irrelevant arms control treaties the Obama administration wants to sign, or how far the administration wants to push its idealistic talk about eventual nuclear abolition, in the distant, not foreseeable future.

The technocratic corps of LANL and LLNL have long been known as powerful bulwarks against international treaties that limit nuclear arms development, and they will undoubtedly try to extract the greatest concessions possible from Obama as part of agreeing on any new treaties.

With their direct links to the corporations that manage the weapons labs (at a hefty profit) the Four Horsemen are the chief negotiators working through public forums to limit the extent of arms control treaties and extract the biggest pro-nuclear lab concessions

At the top of the weapons labs’ wish list is a new plutonium bomb core (“pit”) manufacturing facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, called the Chemical and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) project.

Costing at least $2 billion, the CMRR, which would be he largest single construction project in the history of the State of New Mexico (excepting perhaps the interstate freeways), would be capable of manufacturing more than 200 plutonium pits per year. Plutonium pit manufacturing is the pivotal, messy step in creating a new generation of nuclear bombs. Therefore the CMRR is the centerpiece of the nuclear establishment’s plans to renew the nuclear weapons complex. William Perry’s Congressional commission admitted as much. A new multi-billion dollar uranium enrichment facility at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is also high on the weapons complex’s wish list.

Not only would these facilities help enable a new generation of nuclear arms development, they would reinvigorate the esprit de corps of the entire US nuclear weapons complex, which has been plagued by a sort of existential crisis during the last decade in particular. The Four Horsemen acknowledge as much in their latest op-ed, citing a report by the national security science advisory group JASON in 2006; “expertise is threatened by lack of program stability, perceived lack of mission importance, and degradation of the work environment.” New pit manufacturing and uranium enrichment may be the last, best chance the nuclear weapons complex has of turning back into something like the hive of single-minded determination it often was during its Cold War glory days. Should Obama render these sorts of concessions, it would make whatever “arms control” achievements his administration achieves far worse than useless since it would reinvigorate the biggest obstacle to the pursuit of nuclear disarmament – the weapons labs in all their bureaucratic depth, ideological fervor, pork barrel riches, and jingoist prestige.

The final team player in this full court press is none other than Obama’s own undersecretary of Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. State Department, Ellen Tauscher. Charged with crafting the international treaties that will be exchanged for domestic nuclear weapons spending increases, it would be impossible for the nuclear weapons complex to have a better ally in the administration. During her tenure in Congress, Tauscher represented California’s conservative 10th Congressional District which includes the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Lockheed Martin’s Sandia Lab campus in Livermore, Travis Air Force Base, and a cluster of Bay Area military-industrial firms that contract at these sites. Tauscher’s entire career has been characterized by her magnanimous efforts to bring home the bacon for Livermore Laboratory and the wider nuclear weapons complex. When all is said and done, her role as a US Rep. and now State Department official is to boost nuclear weapons spending at the labs. As Tauscher told the U.S. Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium in late 2009;

“The Obama administration and key stakeholders must address the serious need to bolster the human capital and infrastructure necessary to maintain a credible, safe, secure, and effective nuclear stockpile. As our nuclear arsenal is reduced to its appropriate level, these capabilities will become even more critical. A loss of the skilled engineers, technicians, planners, and operators, increases the risks and uncertainties we could face in the years to come.”

That there is the essence of anti-nuclear nuclearism: massive investments in the nuclear complex under the guise of arms control and nonproliferation. Tauscher is clear about the deals to be made. The START follow-on treaty will be exchanged for the nuclear weapons funding surge to come in February, as well as support for the CMRR, and UPF facilities. The CTBT, when and if it comes time, will be exchanged possibly for authorization at the labs to design and build a new warhead. Years ago when the Bush administration proposed the RRW, a new warhead, Tauscher explained to an audience at Los Alamos Laboratory; “The ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty should be the logical end-result of a successful RRW program.”

With the Nuclear Posture Review brewing, the START follow-on treaty talks still underway, talk of pushing for CTBT ratification, and the upcoming Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, pro-nuclear forces, informed by the Four Horsemen’s anti-nuclear nuclearist strategy, are making a full court press to ensure increases in nuclear weapons spending. Thus far this rhetorical strategy has served to fix the attention of disarmament and antiwar activists on abstract levels of policy declaration and international negotiation. This has unfortunately blinded them to the political deal-making process at hand, one that is influenced more by the concrete that is being poured right now at Los Alamos and Y-12, and the dollars being spent at Livermore and Sandia this year, than by the hopeful and idealistic statements of politicians and elder statesmen about “a world free of nuclear weapons.”

From: Z Net – The Spirit Of Resistance Lives

North Korea Calls for Peace Treaty Talks With U.S.

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Monday proposed talks with the United States to reach a formal peace treaty that would replace the truce that halted the Korean War 57 years ago, indicating that it would not give up its nuclear weapons until Washington signed such an accord.

North Korea said peace talks should be held either as part of the six-nation talks that focus on ending its nuclear weapons program or as a separate negotiation. But the North also warned that it would not return to six-nation talks — from which it withdrew last April — unless the United Nations lifted sanctions imposed after the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests last year.

The North had previously proposed peace negotiations with the United States and South Korea. But its latest overture came as it was trying to shift the focus of the six-nation talks, where a peace treaty had been set aside until North Korea made significant progress toward dismantling its nuclear weapons program.

“If a peace treaty is signed, it will help resolve hostile relations between North Korea and the United States and speed up the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the North’s state-run news agency, K.C.N.A.

After years of unsuccessful talks with Washington, North Korea said it concluded that all agreements were bound to collapse unless the two sides built mutual “trust.” To build such confidence, the statement said, “It is essential to conclude a peace treaty for terminating the state of war, a root cause of the hostile relations.”

The statement reiterated North Korea’s contention that it would not have built nuclear weapons if the United States had assured it of peace.

Stephen W. Bosworth, President Obama’s special representative on North Korea, who visited the capital, Pyongyang, last month, said the United States could discuss a peace treaty and other incentives only when the process of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula had gained “significant traction.”

Last week, Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan of South Korea denounced what he called the North’s “unrealistic” demand that the United States negotiate a peace treaty before the North considers relinquishing its nuclear weapons.

“That’s like saying it will never give up its nuclear programs, or it is a delaying tactic” to buy time to further its nuclear programs, he said.

On Monday, North Korea suggested that peace talks be held among the signatories of the Korean War armistice: the American-led United Nations Command in Seoul, China and North Korea. South Korea refused to sign the truce, but Seoul and Washington insist that any peace talks include the South.

Between 1997 and 1999, the two Koreas, the United States and China held six rounds of peace talks that produced no agreement because the North insisted on the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea and an end to joint United States-South Korean military exercises.

“With its peace proposal, North Korea is trying to gain the initiative as it prepares to return to six-nation talks,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea analyst at Dongguk University in Seoul. Mr. Kim expected some haggling between the governments in Pyongyang and Seoul over whether South Korea should be included.

Earlier Monday, Robert R. King, Mr. Obama’s envoy on North Korean human rights issues, said during a visit to Seoul that the North’s “appalling” human rights situation would impede any efforts to normalize ties.

He also called Monday for the release of Robert Park, a Korean-American missionary who crossed into North Korea last month to demand the release of an estimated 160,000 political prisoners held in labor camps, according to his supporters in Seoul.

North Korea has confirmed that it has detained an American citizen but has not identified him by name.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/091229/world/international_us_russia_usa_treaty

U.S. missile shield holding up nuclear deal-Putin

Tue Dec 29, 4:33 PM

By Gleb Bryanski

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia (Reuters) – Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Tuesday U.S. plans for a missile defense system were the main obstacle to reaching a new deal on reducing Cold War arsenals of nuclear weapons.

The two largest nuclear powers say they are close to agreeing on a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), although U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have yet to clinch a deal.

Asked by a reporter what the biggest problem was in the talks, Putin said: “What is the problem? The problem is that our American partners are building an anti-missile shield and we are not building one.”

Speaking to reporters in the Far Eastern Russian city of Vladivostok, Putin said the U.S. plans would fundamentally disrupt the Cold War balance of power and Russia would thus be forced to develop new offensive weapons.

The comments, from Russia’s most powerful politician, showed the seriousness of the problems hampering talks on a replacement for START I and illustrated the deep unease still felt in Moscow over Washington’s missile defense plans.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly rejected any attempt to broaden the START negotiations to cover defensive weapons systems, although another senior U.S. official voiced optimism over the talks.

“We have made substantial progress in the negotiations and remain confident that when talks resume in January that we’ll be able to finalize an agreement,” the senior official said.

In September, Obama said the United States would scrap parts of George W. Bush’s missile defense plans, a step seen as an attempt to allay Kremlin fears that the system was a direct threat to Russia.

Cutting the thousands of nuclear weapons accumulated during the Cold War is the centerpiece of Obama’s efforts to “reset” relations with Russia, which the United States is pressing to offer more help on Afghanistan and Iran.

OFFENSIVE WEAPONS SYSTEMS

Russia’s leaders have remained wary about Obama’s revised missile defense plans, which are based on sea- and land-based missile interceptors in Europe.

“If we are not developing an anti-missile shield, then there is a danger that our partners, by creating such ‘an umbrella,’ will feel completely secure and thus can allow themselves to do what they want, disrupting the balance, and aggressiveness will rise immediately,” Putin said.

“In order to preserve balance … we need to develop offensive weapons systems,” Putin said, echoing a pledge by Medvedev last week to develop a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons.

Putin said Moscow wanted more information about the U.S. plans in exchange for details about Russia’s deployed nuclear offensive missiles.

“The problems of anti-missile defense and offensive weapons are very tightly linked to each other,” he said, adding that talks on a new treaty were moving in a generally positive direction.

The State Department’s Kelly said the new START agreement would “break no new ground” on defensive weapons systems.

“While the United States has long agreed that there is a relationship between missile offense and defense, we believe the START follow-on agreement is not the appropriate vehicle for addressing it,” Kelly said in a statement.

“We have agreed to continue to discuss the topic of missile defense with Russia in a separate venue,” he said.

Russia and the United States failed to agree on a successor to START I by December 5, when the treaty was due to expire, and have extended it as they try to work out a new agreement.

Obama and Medvedev failed to clinch a deal when they met on the sidelines of the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen earlier this month. No reason was given, although they said they were close to an agreement.