Transcript
MARTIN INDYK: Good morning, ladies and gentleman. I am Martin Indyk, the director of the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to introduce and moderate our panel of Foreign Policy at Brookings experts who are going to discuss the publication that I hope you all have in your hands which was released today, "U.S. Nuclear and Extended Deterrence: Considerations and Challenges." The principal author of this new paper in our Arms Control Series is Steve Pifer, who brought us all together not in an edited volume but in a paper in which all of us contributed our particular areas of expertise, and this morning we're going to all again contribute in the discussion in terms of the expertise that we bring to it. I want to thank Steve for doing a great job of steering this effort which is an example of the way in which we can take experts with such diverse experience and knowledge from across our Foreign Policy Program and put them together on a subject of common interest.
U.S. nuclear deterrence and the concept of extended deterrence is a complicated issue, made more so today by the fact that in April 2009 in a very important speech that President Obama made in Prague, he declared the objective of reducing dependence on nuclear weapons with the aim of eventually moving to a world without nuclear weapons. That noble objective is inevitably complicated by that fact that so much of our national security and the national security of our allies in problematic parts of the world, in particular the Middle East and East Asia, their security is dependent on extended deterrence which in turn is dependent on our nuclear strategy.
In addition, in the world we face today in the 21st century, the challenges of nonconventional nonnuclear threats particularly biological warfare threats and more immediately the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of nonstate actors, i.e., al-Qaeda-type terrorists, really concentrates the minds of our officials responsible for the defense of the realm and they have elevated it, particularly the latter issue of the challenge of dealing with the threat from nonstate actors with nuclear weapons, to the highest priority in U.S. nuclear strategy and U.S. national security strategy I should say. So it's in that context that the whole question of the future of nuclear deterrence and extended deterrence becomes particularly important and pressing.
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