Hagel supports nuclear arms cuts and elimination
Defense chief nominee looks to do away with the weapons gradually
WASHINGTON—Chuck Hagel, the likely next secretary of defense, would be the first to enter the Pentagon having publicly advocated for sharply reducing the number of U.S. nuclear weapons, possibly without equivalent cuts by Russia. He supports an international movement called Global Zero that favors eliminating all nuclear weapons.
That puts him outside the orthodoxy embraced by many of his fellow Republicans but inside a widening circle of national security thinkers—including President Barack Obama—who believe nuclear weapons are becoming more a liability than an asset, less relevant to 21st century security threats like terrorism.
“Sen. Hagel certainly would bring to office a more ambitious view on nuclear reductions than his predecessors,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “While he would likely take a less dramatic position in office, it might not be a bad thing to have a secretary of defense question what nuclear deterrence requires today.”
Pentagon press secretary George Little said Tuesday that Hagel does not support unilateral nuclear cuts “and, if confirmed, would not as secretary of defense. Suggestions to the contrary are inaccurate.”
The customary stance of defense secretaries in the nuclear age has been that the weapons are a necessary evil, a required ingredient in American defense strategy that can be discarded only at the nation’s peril.
Hagel, 66, takes a subtly different view— one shared by Obama but opposed by those in Congress who believe disarmament is weakness and that an outsized American nuclear arsenal must be maintained indefinitely as a counterweight to the nuclear ambitions of anti-Western countries like North Korea and Iran.
Hagel argues for doing away with nuclear weapons entirely, but not immediately and not unilaterally.
In a letter to Obama two months after his former Senate colleague entered the White House in 2009, Hagel wrote that Global Zero was developing a step-by-step plan for achieving “the total elimination of all nuclear weapons,” but with a “clear, realistic and pragmatic appreciation” for the difficulty of realizing that goal.
Dozens of prominent politicians, diplomats and retired military leaders signed the letter. One month later Obama spoke in Prague of “a world without nuclear weapons,” while saying it might not happen in his lifetime. Obama declared that “as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.”
Hagel, a Republican whose nomination has drawn heated criticism for his past statements on Israel, Iran and gays, is likely to also face questions on nuclear issues at his Senate confirmation hearing scheduled for Thursday. A Vietnam War veteran, he served in the Senate from 1997 to 2009.
The questions actually began last week at the confirmation hearing for John Kerry, Obama’s nominee for secretary of state. Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican, said he found Hagel’s affiliation with Global Zero “very concerning,” and he worried that Hagel’s views appeared to make him “very different than previous defense leaders.”
Kerry said he believes Hagel is a realist on the topic of nuclear arms reductions. But he also acknowledged that when he first heard about Global Zero’s central vision—the elimination of all nuclear weapons - “I sort of scratched my head and I said, ‘What? You know, how’s that going to work?”’ But then he came to see this as nothing more than a long-range goal—“it’s not something that could happen in today’s world.”