among those men in those days, they were men, now that's a generic term, but those people that were controlling those and contemplating as we inventoried the execution plans, the consequences of actually executing. i thought about that many, many times. and of course, it was heightened by movies such as "seven days in moi" and "dr. strangelove." and many of you lived through every bit of that. the fact is, we are extremely fortunate. later as a commander in the 1980s my units were receiving new platforms, platforms that were capable of carrying more nuclear weapons at such a rapid rate that we often thought of it

as the cat in the caster oil. you had to have one going and one covering up. it was really an accelerated period. 6 and the dialogue of deterrence in those days is there was no escape for the enemy. if we go to war, they will suffer. and people did talk about winning a nuclear war in spite of the fact that the consequences would be so extreme as to make winning kind of a ludicrous term. i did know in those days that i and my crew members, all of the people that i just described, would follow orders. and if the president said "go" under the extremely tight constraints that a president would have to make a decision like that, they would -- they

would carry out the orders. there's no doubt in my mind, but the enemy of those days is gone. it no longer exists. this is a new time. the soviet union with its massive capabilities, no longer exists. the deterrent's calculus that has been with us, maybe as long as pointless are some of the art periods were exi tent in those days, no longer applies or it shouldn't. it should be rethought. we don't be have that massive offensive capability of the soviet union and an ideology which was to dominate and to dominate us. and if people argue that that exists, they're wrong.

we need to -- we need to convince them that it's not the same. so 21st century deterrence in my mind has much to do with our conventional capabilities, with emerging technologies, and a russia that is bound with us. and a carefully negotiated treaty to reduce and verify these weapons. and i remember when we were concerned with new s.t.a.r.t. ratification, that my growing concern and that of many of my fellow retired -- my grandson says retarded general officers, flag officers was that the period of time that we no longer had very capable inspectors on the ground in russia was extending, that the ability to gather data was being extended

to the point where it was -- it didn't make sense. this process of arms control that i give such credit to people way back, you know, who when we were merving and doing things that seemed to make sense under the theory of deterrence had the courage to say, wait a minute. making the robo bounce is no exaggeration. none whatsoever. few people, but i include myself as one of them, have had the opportunity to review the war plan all the way and to look at individual targets and to see what -- what we were doing with the production of our development capabilities. so it's a new time, but the u.s. and russia do hold 90% of the world's nuclear weapons. i think with my experience with the russians, and i have had a considerable amount, that we

and they really understand how much the utility -- the operational utility of nuclear weapons has been overstated and we need to somehow preserve this arms control process. the good work that's been done in verification and data exchange that i'm sure that secretary gutman will talk about today. so, again, it's our good fortune that we have made it to june 2012 in my mind. the revised calculus of deterrence that i talked about needs to be fleshed out. it's not really, i don't think, going to be a civilian audience that does this, but there is much to highlight in dialogue with the american people and with our elected officials. i hope that it can be

nonpartisan. i'm still hopeful that the political process will allow this preservation of long developed arms control approach to continue. and that clearly a new deterrent calculus will allow us and the russians to posture -- to secure and posture our nuclear weapons with further reductions and less danger. i'm confident we can do that. i would say that as we update our thinking that i don't at all go away from what ronald regan said about trust but verify, and i think we continue to put big

emphasis on verify as we expand not only the discussion of our nuclear enterprise but the other issues that others on the panel will discuss and including, i hope, all of the -- all of the nuclear holders in the world and the issue of proliferation. thank you very much. >> thank you, general. now we'll turn to jon wolfsthal for your perspectives on nuclear weapons and deter rents in a changed world. thank you for being here. >> thank you very much for inviting me. thank you all for coming. of course, i would have been happy to accept the invitation having been locked inside the white house for the last three years. getting out in the daylight is nice. i attended the meeting in 1990 when spurnlgen announced they would be creating a position, which i got. because i was the least expensive candidate and it's

been downhill ever since. as daryl said, i spent the last three years in the white houseworking as the vice president's advisor on nuclear issues and really fortunate for that experience, but for a nuclear waft like myself to be given that access and to understand for the first time really what goes into all of these different questions that we're dealing with. as the general knows very, very well, the minutia can really overwhelm you, but you have to understand the general questions before tackling the larger questions, calculus and stability. not to worry about single shot kill probability and change ratios, but to really understand the thinking of different services and different constituents before you pick a number at say where you're feeling you should come out and i think one thing i would like people to take away is that the administration's been very care testimony to take the

advice most of us were given years ago. which is don't tell the operators how to operate. don't say, we only need four submarines at sea. what we had the opportunity to do with a tremendously open process involving state department, defense department services, intelligence, department of energy for the production, uniform military is to think through the big questions that were laid out in the president's strategy documents. the nuclear posture review. the prague speech. where do we want to go? what are the threats that we're trying to address globally and then to figure out what are the questions that nuclear weapons are necessary for hoping then to move the other questions out of the nuclear arena. because as the president has said many times, he, and i would argue correctly, believes that it is very much in the security interest to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons and to reduce the roles in a very much more nonaggressive proliferation policy. one that has as much, even more

of a bearing on our security position than some outdated cold war mentality than russia or any other country. i'm sure many of you are pretty steeped in those documents of the npr, but i would encourage you to go back and take a look at those, particularly the five criteria that are enumerated in the npr. those are very much the criteria that we put against how many icbms do you need to have to ensure that they're survivable or submarine or which countries can be on the list. those five questions are the ones that got to us. throughout this process and the vice president was very much involved in this, is is to understand that regardless of what number you come out at, if that is one or a million and one, you're still going to need a nuclear complex capable of

supporting the maintenance of that capability. if it's one, you still need a bunch of scientists and engineers that can take it apart and understand how it works. you're still going to need production facilities that can remake it if necessary or can build back up or at the very least dismantle the thousands of nuclear weapons that we're still dealing with in the after math of the cold war. i'll touch on that briefly, needing to get to this bipartisan consensus, although i don't think anybody's ever going to get consensus on anything in washington, at least some general agreement, whether you believe we need more nuclear weapons, less nuclear weapons, there's a certain amount of investment that's necessary. i don't mean every bell and whistle. having gone through this in detail, everybody else throughout the process, omb, the nuclear weapons council, understand there's the perfect and then there's the necessary and there's a whole bunch of cutting that will go on at the top. you'll still need some level of investment in order to maintain

any type of nuclear activity. for many of the people in this room that are concerned about these issues, several of whom called me over the past three years, hey, make sure you do this, have you thought about that, i can now tell you, you should take heart in the sense that we were wrestling with the same questions that you all talk about, now we all talk about on a regular basis. what are the threats that we face that absolutely require some sort of nuclear capability to address. how many nuclear weapons are really necessary to deter enemies and reassure friends and what does deterrence mean in the 21st century? how does that compare with what deterrence meant 20 or 30 years ago? the nuclear guidance as it exists is still pretty much a reflection of the deterrence policy in the late department of the cold war. stan norris and others have written about this, talking about the different category sets.

we wrestled a lot with how can we reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons in waste that not only ensure our security, but advance it. for those that watch this, new s.t.a.r.t. was about getting a lot of things. about getting the verification capabilities back on the ground in russia and providing that insight into what's going on. but it was also very much about the review conference coming up, about needing to refocus the international community's attention on iran and not to allow this gap in u.s.-russian arms control to become a distraction from what everybody recognizes is the next set of security challenges. we also dealt very steadily with the question of how do we deal with the aging triad. what do we need in terms of strategic delivery vehicles and how much is that going to cost us? we didn't let numbers, either the level of nuclear weaponry that we thought might be useful or how much money we had available drive the system. we had to be aware of what it

was going to cost to try and implement these things in a budget constrained environment. but as we got through this process and only after we looked at what the strategy needed to be, then we talked about numbers. i know people have read a lot of reporting. write me a strategy for this. i can tell you plainly, that's just not true. that's not true because i helped write that part of the guidance. don't believe it. if there are reporters here in the room, i'll be happy to talk to you afterwards. so in terms of what's going to come out, my expectation is that this is going to be rolled out in some way, shape or form in the next couple of weeks or a month or two, i'm not sure how it's going to be rolled out. in terms of the way this is going to impact on the future of arms control negotiations, i'll tell you planly that i argued against a rollout that included a number. i do favor a new set of negotiated set of reductions

with russia. if you come out with a number you're opening yourself up to giving away your negotiating position. i argued that we should talk about what the framework is, what the strategy is, how we're reducing our reliance on nuclear weapons but leave the numbers for the negotiations in the hopes that we could actually get russia come with us down to a lower number. i will tell you plainly that i am a pessimist when it comes to what's going to come over the next year or two with reductions. i wish that were the case but the thinking in russia isn't the same as the thinking in the u.s. this issue, senator kyle and i agree. i don't want to give the russians a veto over what we do with our strategic capabilities. knowing that we can go lower, that we don't need to be spending money in the nuclear complex that we need to be spending in other areas, i don't want to delay that process of going down to other numbers. as the general was alluding to, it's clear that unlike the cold war when it was the soviet

union, conventional capability, and the risk of conflict that was the threat, today the threat is the weapons themselves. nobody -- very few people reasonably believe that we're going to have a nuclear conflict because of some deliberate decision to try to preempt or disarm the united states of their nuclear capability or vice versa. whereas, during the cold war very reasonable people, senior government officials actually worry day to day, if there's a symmetry and instability, this might be a real risk. today i think most people recognize if there's a nuclear exchange, it will be because of miscalculation or accident. that's the threat we have to address. if we can go to lower numbers through negotiations, great. i don't want to delay that day when we're addressing this challenge. in large part because i don't think russia's prepared to go to much lower numbers. they might be prepared to go down incrementally. they're already below the new s.t.a.r.t. numbers so they might be willing to have some

adjustment, but if we really want to break the back on cold war thinking, then we have to go to much lower numbers. this might be my second to the last point, that -- and this administration i think is guilty of this as many other administrations. we talk as if the nuclear strategy has changed and that as president clinton said, we've rid the nightmare of nuclear war from our grandchildren's dreams. the fact is, we still size our nuclear capabilities to fight nuclear wars. we call it deterrence or what happens if deterrence fails, but we're still sizing our forces to make sure we can blow up a whole lot of what russia or other enemies might need to fight us. what we need is a force that's fundamentally sized and based on deterrence. that number is much, much lower than what it takes to blow up a lot of stuff many foreign countries. at least for the united states' perspective and in russia and china, that number is very, very

low and i would say that number is more than one, but less than 20, that the united states deterred by the reasonable threat that 20 nuclear weapons or less can land on u.s. soil. therefore, the numbers need to come way down because anything above that is really unnecessary. as long as it's secure and reliable and technically we know that it will work, then i think we're still able to pursue a very stable set of deterrent calculations. quite frankly, the idea that we need to go down in some sort of parity or symmetric reductions is also outdated. during the cold war, reasonable minds could argue if there was a 20, 30, 40% delta in what russia had, we had, china had, what the europeans had, then you could argue that somebody might get in their head that now is the time. but does anybody think that a 40% difference between what we have and russia is going to lead president putin to say, now is

our opportunity. it's hard to imagine any scenario where that crepes into the thinking. again, that's just my personal view, but i think it's one set of arguments that went very much into the debate for where the nuclear guidance review is going to come out. last point -- that's, again, on the nuclear complex. the general said hopefully that we could try and at least establish some areas of nonpartisan agreement on this. if you look back the at strategic posture commission before the administration came into office, if you look at what was discussed very early on in the nuclear posture review, the one area where we really didn't have much of a disagreement and actually where very conservative planners on nuclear forces and very progressive voices on nuclear issues came to some agreement during the new s.t.a.r.t. process was to understand that regardless of what size nuclear weaponry or arsenal we need, we're going to have to have some re-investment in the nuclear complex.

the people, the delivery vehicles and the science and technology and industrial base supports it. we can debate whether you need the facility in new plex i could he to do plutonium, the facility in tennessee to do uranium, we recognize we'll need some level of that. this budget cycle has shown us we're very far away from getting that type of agreement. if we want to have any set of reducts, we're going to have to really work very carefully on what that set of investment's going to be. the flip side is true. if we intend to get any real sustainable investment plan, we're going to have to have reductions to support that. because you're not going to be able to convince the broad parts of the congress you need to convince to spend money on this unless you show some of them that it's a path down. so if we don't have both pieces of that puzzle, i worry that we're going to end up with a very underfunded complex, very unreliable nuclear arsenals and much larger nuclear arsenals than we need to support our security. that's a loser. i went on a little long.

i look forward to your questions. thank you very much, jon. now we'll turn to another facet of the nuclear weapons question focusing on some of the issues relating to nato policy and europe and the tactical european questions. trina flockheart, thank you for being with us. the floor is yours. >> thank you. first of all, thank you for inviting me. i'm really honored to speak to such a distinguished audience. i'm pleased to be in washington. it's always a treat to come to washington. in my studies, it seems nato is nuclear addicted, so the question that i've asked myself after the publication of the deterrence and defense posture review is, is nato still nuclear addicted? i'm afraid that the simple question or the simple answer to that question is, yes, although

now with the promise that nato is now willing to consider not to have any of the drugs lying around at home in europe as long as its co-dependent fellow addict russia is willing to do the same. unfortunately, i suspect this is not a position with great prospects. okay. so daryn has asked me to give a brief review of the ddpr. now perhaps i should say even though i know this is a very knowledgeable audience, if the ddpr somehow has slipped your attention, then don't blame yourself because you could actually say that since the announcement of the ddpr at the lisbon summit about 18 months ago, in november 2010, it has turned into a secret review process. it started out being something that was agreed to save the strategic concept because germany had launched the question of nuclear weapons and no one could agree to that to

get into the strategic concept. the agreement was then to launch, and i quote, a major review of nato's overall deterrence and defense posture. that was then going to be presented at the chicago summit just a few weeks ago. what happened after that was that it started out being quite a public affair but after a few months i think nato realized that they had actually bitten off more than they could chew. the process turned into being an almost secret process. it has rarely been referred to since in public. a few months into the process no one in nato would go to gatherings like these and talk about ddpr and it was published at the chicago summit without even as much as a press briefing. so not surprisingly, therefore, ddpr has only had sporadic public interest. i think the knowledge about ddpr is quite limited within gatherings like these. now when the ddpr was announced

at lisbon, many, including myself, welcomed the process as an opportunity to get a proper discussion about nato's deterrence and defense posture, and particularly the future of the forward deployed nonstrategic nuclear weapons that are still based in five countries. perhaps naively i also thought that the ddpr in light of the changes in the international context, in nato's role and in light of the additional nato capability in missile defense might also discuss alternative ways of commitment, reassurance, and sharing of risks and burdens. unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case. i have to agree with former u.s. senator sam nun that the ddpr at best deserves a grade of incomplete. okay. so what's in the document?

i think you're already guessing what i'm going to say. there's not a lot in there. it's mostly hot air. despite the really complicated and conceptual issues, the document is less than 3,000 words long which includes long prose about the lessen tral issues that the allies could actually agree on. moreover, the document is written in a complex and convoluted language that seems to be detracted from rather than adding to clarity about these very complex and hugely important issues. most importantly, the document effectively dojs the main issues and it fails completely to answer some of the most essential questions, most notably, what is the purpose of nuclear weapons, especially the forward deployed nuclear weapons, how has that changed since the end of the cold war, what is the effect of the new missile defense capability for the old defense and deterrence posture. it doesn't address these questions at least not in any

depth. the document never asks what the implications are to elevate cooperate at that security to core tasks along with the original collective defense. despite the significant changes brought about by the strategic concept, the ddpr reads as if none of these changes matter. so this is puzzling and it is also disappointing because the re-thinking of nato's core tasks and the new missile capability clearly opens up for new possibilities on how to show commitment and cohesion in the alliance. the ddpr has been completely unable to show nuclear sharing and possible alternatives to nuclear sharing, missile sharing and the value of burden sharing through practical participation in the other two core tasks that i mentioned, crisis management and cooperative security. so sadly overall the document

constitutes a victory for france and though central and eastern allies that maintains russia as the main concern. they joined nato in 1990 rather than a nato that is ready for the security challenges of the 21st century. so if i was to draw a score sheet, list pros and cons, then i would suggest the following positive aspects. first of all, it's positive that the document was made public. this was by no means a certainty and it was only agreed shortly before sig. secondly, it's positive that the document makes rhetorical reference to the possibility at least of reducing or withdrawing nonstrategic nuclear weapons. thirdly and this i may be stretching it here, but it's positive that the weapons of mass destruction control and disarmament committee which was established as part of the process, will be replaced with a new committee that can function

as a consulttative and advisory forum because nato needs to have that. however, this may turn out to be a victory as the committee mandate has to be agreed, which could take a very, very long time because france is basically against this committee. it's also positive that the ddpr contains a commitment to maintaining transparency vis-a-vis russia and it's positive that the review does not close the process but rather appears to be open for a continuation of internal debate about the issues raised. in fact, i have to say that i think this is the most positive aspect of ddpr. now unfortunately it seems that on the negative score she had there are much more substantial and ironically, although the document -- well, a substantial issues, and ironically although the document ens doors the status quo, the reality is that

the status quo simply cannot be maintained, and i list five problems in additions to the ones that i've already talked about. the first problem is that even if no agreement can be reached on changing nato's nonstrategic nuclear weapons posture, it will change. however, without an agreement the change will come through as a disorderly internal nato process of national nuclear disarmament when some deployment countries will decide not to replace the aircraft with nuclear capabilities. germany certainly seems certain to do that and once there's a german decision decision to withdraw then holland is likely to follow. the likely outcome is disarmament by default. the other invisible change that is endorsed surreptitiously in the document is modernization of the b-61 bombs. the ddpr says it will