The New York Times broke the news last night that the Obama administration will release today its Nuclear Posture Review – a congressionally-mandated document put out by each administration outlining America’s approach toward its nuclear arsenal, usually for that President’s entire term in office. The NPR overall seems like a big important step in the right direction, but is one that could have gone further.

The Washington Post ran with the headline “Obama to take middle course in new nuclear policy,” noting that “The document also reflects the continuity in the nuclear establishment, with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates straddling the two administrations.” The Wall Street Journal, led with the headline “U.S. keeps first-strike strategy.” Noting that:

To many arms-control advocates, the review is likely to be a disappointment. “It’s a status quo document, I think, in virtually every respect,” said Bruce Blair, president of World Security Institute and co-coordinator of Global Zero, a disarmament group.

Yet the reaction from the far-right was immediate and revealing. The Times story was linked to on Drudge under the banner headline, “No nukes even in self-defense.” This got the vitriol pumping. Sean Hannity talked about it with his guest David Kupelian who said, “it’s signaling to the enemy. It’s giving them a huge advantage. It doesn’t make any sense.” Jennifer Rubin at Commentary, called his NPR “incomprehensible,” adding that “we are signaling to potential foes that they can take a potshot at the U.S. without risking a nuclear blowback, Obama makes crystal clear just how unserious he is about taking out Iran’s nuclear capability.” CNN’s new reputable pundit Erick Erickson asked “How many Americans are going to die because of the Obama administration’s incompetent handling of our national security?… it is capitulation and waving a white flag for our enemies.”

The right’s claim of “signaling to the enemy” conveniently leaves out mentioning who that enemy actually is. Is it Russia? If so thinking we are “enemies” with Russia is not just right wing amnesia – the Cold War ended after all – it is really dangerous. Are they talking about China? They have less than 300 nuclear weapons. We have over 9,000. Al Qaeda? Nuclear weapons obviously don’t deter a diffuse terrorist network or else terrorist attacks wouldn’t have occurred in the first place.

Claims that this leaves us exposed to Iran and others are just baseless tea-party talking points. At least read the news stories. The NPR’s assertion that the US won’t attack non-nuclear states has a huge caveat. The US pledges not to attack non-nuclear states, as long as they are compliant with the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) – considering that Iran and North Korea are NOT compliant with the NPT means the Obama administration has made a direct point of telling these two countries that we could nuke you! Furthermore, the United States has a really enormous conventional military that the Obama administration is spending more on than any other administration before him. Countries are deterred from attacking us, because, as we have shown over the last two decades, we are quite capable of destroying rogue regimes (rebuilding is another story). This is why many arms-control advocates are calling it a status quo document – this all reflects current reality.

Still, reflecting current reality, represents a massive step forward in moving beyond the legacies of the Cold War. The NPR shifts the focus of the nuclear bureaucracy toward the most acute nuclear dangers of the 21st century – terrorism and proliferation and it will importantly enable the US to significantly cut its number of nuclear weapons in the years ahead by recognizing that these weapons have little military utility. This approach also has the firm backing of the US military. Colin Powell reflected this widely shared view, when he said recently that from a military perspective “nuclear weapons are useless.”

This is hardly radical. The NPR could have gone further and declared that the United States would not use nuclear weapons unless attacked by them. It could have also said that the sole purpose of our nuclear arsenal was to deter attacks against the United States. It could have made unilateral reductions. This would have both reflected strategic realities and would have sent a huge signal to the world that we are indeed going to work to move beyond the nuclear age. It chose instead a middle course.

The right’s reaction to this middle course doesn’t just expose its extreme knee-jerk vitriol, but also demonstrates their attachment to a completely insane and imaginary approach to foreign affairs – where we need to refight the Cold War and where we need to enter a new arms race.

The Nuclear Posture Review was due out on Monday but was delayed once again, with reports that the President is pushing the NPR to go further. The question is how far.

The NPR is shaping up to be an important test of Obama’s commitment to the pledge he made last year in Prague “to put an end to Cold War thinking.” As Julian Borger reports, it is looking unlikely that Obama will live up to this pledge at least in one important area.

A major point of debate is reforming the declaratory policy – the policy that declares why we have nukes and in what circumstances we would use them. This may seem like a fairly wonky theoretical debate of little importance. But stating the reason why the US has nuclear weapons has broader implications, because it impacts the posture of other states’ nuclear forces, namely Russia. The declaratory policy of the United States has been one of intentional ambiguity. In other words, our nuclear weapons are intended to deter and respond to a nuclear attack, but we also don’t discount attacking another country with nuclear weapons before they attack us or using nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear attack. In essence, the current approach gives us a certain flexibility.

But as Ivan Oelrich of the Federation of the American Scientists clearly describes this flexibility also has a very dangerous downside, as it impacts how the Russians posture their forces:

The Secretary of Defense’s job is to imagine these sorts of threats and prepare for them. The problem is that preparing for them creates other dangers. Preparing for this attack on enemy forces requires our nuclear weapons to be ready to launch at a moment’s notice, it requires weapons that are highly accurate, fast flying, and very powerful… Russia, has to counter this capability by keeping its own weapons on alert, ready to launch in case we do. Ironically, keeping alive this option of attacking to reduce the damage from nuclear weapons actually creates much of the danger coming from nuclear weapons.

The crisis that would lead us to consider a first strike, high confidence that Russia is planning an attack on us, is itself very unlikely but also the president’s decision to use his first strike capability is also unlikely because he would be trading a likelihood of nuclear war for a certainty of nuclear war, certain because we would be starting it. Preparing for this potential threat, which may or may not ever arise in the future, exacerbates the day-to-day danger of accidental launch of weapons or of intentionally launching weapons in a crisis. We have to compare this great, but highly unlikely, future threat with the on-going, everyday threat of living in world with simply too many nuclear weapons always ready to launch. The problem is that we tend to become inured to the everyday threat, it becomes the wallpaper that we simply stop noticing. But it is there.

The threat of accidental launch is not some mythical notion. Having nuclear forces on a hair trigger alert is incredibly dangerous, since with the current nuclear set up the President of either country has just minutes to decide whether to launch a nuclear response. In 1995 a nuclear war was almost started because of a bureaucratic oversight. The Russians interpreted a the launch of a Norwegian weather rocket as a western nuclear launch, because the cable alerting them of the weather launch wasn’t sent up the right channels. The Russian military gave their President 10 minutes to decide to launch, fortunately sober Boris Yeltsin refused to launch a nuclear response.

The Nuclear Posture Review will not automatically solve this problem, but declaring a no-first use policy would take a significant step by laying the groundwork for coordinated de-alerting of US and Russian nuclear forces. It is past time to “put an end to Cold War thinking,” as the President declared.

In a reported shift that has the nuclear bureaucracy in the Pentagon up in arms, the President wants the new Nuclear Posture Review – the document that lays out US nuclear strategy to actually focus on the gravest security threat to this country: nuclear terrorism. This would be quite a coup, as the New York Times reported:

The Obama administration’s classified review of nuclear weapons policy will for the first time make thwarting nuclear-armed terrorists a central aim of American strategic nuclear planning, according to senior Pentagon officials. When completed next year, the Nuclear Posture Review will order the entire government to focus on countering nuclear terrorists — whether armed with rudimentary bombs, stolen warheads or devices surreptitiously supplied by a hostile state — as a task equal to the traditional mission of deterring a strike by major powers or emerging nuclear adversaries.

This shift, along with attempting to reduce global nuclear stockpiles, is making many of the Pentagon’s nuclear bureaucrats squirm. See, reducing nuclear arsenals and shifting nuclear strategy away from the Cold War approaches of the past is bad for business. This is not just a strategic debate, it’s a resource debate. The New York Times explains that prioritizing nuclear terrorism in the posture review:

could mean, for example, devoting less money to modernizing bombers, missiles and submarines, and more to surveillance satellites, reconnaissance planes and undercover agents.… So the review is likely to recommend more vigorous intelligence aimed at tracking nuclear smugglers and anticipating terrorist attacks, and more robust actions within the nuclear laboratories to expand abilities to identify nuclear materials in other nations that might be passed surreptitiously to terrorists. All of these efforts could require additional money.

And there is the rub – this “additional money” could be shifted from traditional nuclear weapons programs, leading those entrenched in the nuclear bureaucracy within the Pentagon are pushing back. The Cable reported that the Pentagon’s approach to the NPR amounted to stonewalling, “the Pentagon is said to be against reducing the overall U.S. nuclear arsenal.” The Washington Times quoting a conservative Pentagon source:

The official said nuclear weapons opponents in the Obama administration are seeking to use the NPR to try to advance the president’s goal of making radical cuts in nuclear weapons. Defense and national security officials are advocating a review that will “defend the country,” the official said.

Only to someone so entrenched in a bureaucracy, would an effort to reduce nuclear arsenals and shift our focus to nuclear terrorism constitute “radical.” The only way this would be a “radical” shift is if the President was pushing for unilateral nuclear cuts (which he isn’t) or if it was 1980 and the Soviet Union was still at its zenith. But it is 2010 and the credible threats facing this country don’t involve a nuclear exchange with Russia, but a nuclear terror attack stemming from insecure nuclear stockpiles. 538’s Nate Silver writing in the Wall Street Journal concluded that the hysteria around the underpants bomber was severely misplaced, but that:

a more rational anti-terrorism policy would focus resources heavily, perhaps almost exclusively, on threats of nuclear and weapons of mass destruction terror. The good news is that, because it requires so much coordination to acquire fissile material, build a nuclear weapon, and successfully detonate it, the international community has many opportunities to stop such catastrophes before they occur—although Mr. [Graham] Allison and other experts contend that present efforts are inadequate.