Stanford University

Russia's Challenge to the West:  The Perspective from Berlin

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/7uGcI3qswDw

 

About the Event: As relations between the West and Russia have sharply deteriorated in recent years, Germany has taken a leading role in shaping Europe's policy response, particularly that of the European Union.  That has included a tougher approach toward Kremlin misbehavior, such as various economic and other sanctions.  At the same time, Berlin has sought to keep an open line of communication with Moscow.

Amb. Thomas Bagger will discuss how Berlin views the challenge posed by Russia and how the West should respond.

 

About the Speaker: Thomas Bagger holds the rank of ambassador and is Diplomatic and Foreign Policy Advisor to the President of the Federal Republic of Germany.  He joined the German diplomatic service in 1992 and has served abroad in Prague, Ankara and Washington.  Before taking up his current position, he headed the Foreign Ministry's Policy Planning Office.    

Thomas Bagger Ambassador Federal Republic of Germany
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US nukes in Poland are a truly bad idea

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Steven Pifer
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On May 15, the U.S. Ambassador in Warsaw, Georgette Mosbacher, suggested relocating U.S. nuclear weapons based in Germany to Poland. One hopes this was just a mistake by a political appointee unfamiliar with NATO nuclear weapons issues, not a reflection of official U.S. government thinking. Moving nuclear weapons to Poland would prove very problematic.

The U.S. Air Force maintains 20 B61 nuclear gravity bombs at Buchel Air Base in Germany (as well as B61 bombs on the territory of four other NATO members). Kept under U.S. custody, the bombs could, with proper authorization in a conflict, be made available for delivery by German Tornado fighter-bombers. This is part of NATO’s “nuclear sharing” arrangements.

The Tornados are aging, and the German Ministry of Defense is considering purchasing F-18 aircraft to continue the German Air Force’s nuclear delivery capability. That has reopened debate within Germany about the presence of U.S. nuclear arms there, with Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary leader Rolf Mützenich calling for their removal.

On May 14, U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell wrote an op-ed expressing concern about not “eroding the solidarity that undergirds NATO’s nuclear deterrent” and calling for the SPD to affirm Germany’s commitment to nuclear sharing. The next day, Ambassador Mosbacher entered the fray, with a tweet suggesting that U.S. nuclear weapons could be relocated to and housed in Poland.

If Germany wants to diminish nuclear capability and weaken NATO, perhaps Poland - which pays its fair share, understands the risks, and is on NATO's eastern flank - could house the capabilities here: https://t.co/VIzpHIgoUN

— Georgette Mosbacher (@USAmbPoland) May 15, 2020

This is a truly bad idea.

First, moving U.S. nuclear weapons to Poland would be expensive. Relocation would require constructing special infrastructure, such as WS3 underground storage vaults, and other equipment to ensure their security. The vaults normally are located within specially hardened aircraft shelters. While not a budget-buster, U.S. and NATO militaries have far more pressing needs to shore up the alliance’s deterrence and defense posture.

Second, deploying the B61 bombs in Poland would make them more vulnerable to Russian preemptive attack in a crisis or conflict. Russia has deployed Iskandr-M ballistic missiles in Kaliningrad. With a range of up to 500 kilometers, these missiles could strike targets in almost all of Poland within a matter of minutes and with very little warning.

Buchel, by contrast, would have longer warning time of an attack, and aircraft flying from there at least begin their flights out of range of Russian air defenses. The two major Polish air bases — which host Polish F-16s that are not, in any case, nuclear capable — are located within range of Russian S400 anti-aircraft missiles deployed in Kaliningrad and their radars.

Third, placing nuclear weapons in Poland would be hugely provocative to Russia. This is not an argument against provoking Russia in general — given its provocative behavior, including a military build-up, bellicose rhetoric, and use of military force against Ukraine. (Indeed, I called in 2014 for Washington to provide lethal military assistance to Ukraine and for U.S. and NATO forces to deploy to the Baltic states, steps that Moscow deemed “provocative.”)

But there is provocative and there is provocative. Putting U.S. nuclear arms so close to Russia would be the latter. Recall the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviet Union placed nuclear weapons 90 miles from American shores. President John F. Kennedy imposed a naval blockade, which allowed time to work out a settlement with Moscow. In doing so, however, he set aside the recommendation of many of his advisers for air strikes and a full-scale invasion of Cuba.

Fourth, a U.S. proposal to relocate its nuclear weapons to Poland would prove very divisive within NATO. The members of the alliance stated in 1997 that “they have no intention, no plan, and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new [NATO] members.” They incorporated that into the “Founding Act” that established relations between NATO and Russia.

The security circumstances in Europe have changed dramatically and, unfortunately, for the worse over the past 23 years. Despite that, many NATO members still support the “three no’s” regarding nuclear weapons that the alliance adopted in 1997. A U.S. proposal to move the bombs to Poland would divide allies, cause some to question U.S. judgment, and prompt a broader nuclear debate within the alliance at a time when NATO should strive to show a firm and united stance toward Russia.

Relocating U.S. nuclear weapons to Poland would be expensive, militarily unwise because it would make the weapons more vulnerable to preemptive attack, unduly provocative, and divisive within NATO. This was a tweet best not sent. The one thing it does do, however, is give Mr. Mützenich a new talking point for removing the bombs from Germany; citing Ambassador Mosbacher, he can claim: “We can send them to Poland.”

Originally for Brookings

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On May 15, the U.S. Ambassador in Warsaw, Georgette Mosbacher, suggested relocating U.S. nuclear weapons based in Germany to Poland. One hopes this was just a mistake by a political appointee unfamiliar with NATO nuclear weapons issues, not a reflection of official U.S. government thinking. Moving nuclear weapons to Poland would prove very problematic.

Germany, Europe and Russia

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/BGjRsO0fKds

 

About this Event: Germany plays a key role in shaping European and Western policy toward Russia.  Berlin is a leading voice within the European Union on Russian issues, and Chancellor Angela Merkel co-chairs with the French president the "Normandy" effort that seeks to broker a setttlement between Ukraine and Russia to the conflict in Donbas.  Emily Haber, the German ambassador to the United States, will join us for a conversation on how Berlin sees the Russian challenge and how the West should respond.

 

About the Speaker: Emily Margarethe Haber has been German Ambassador to the United States since June 2018. 

Immediately prior to this, Haber, a career foreign service officer, was deployed to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, serving as State Secretary overseeing security and migration at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe. In this capacity, she worked closely with the US administration on topics ranging from the fight against international terrorism to global cyberattacks and cybersecurity. In 2009, she was appointed Political Director and, in 2011, State Secretary at the Foreign Office, the first woman to hold either post. 

Emily Haber is married to Hansjörg Haber. The couple has two sons. 

Emily Margarethe Haber German Ambassador to the United States
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European Security Initiative

Workshop Report: The Transatlantic Dialogue on Military Cyber Operations-Amsterdam

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Max Smeets
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In Aug. 2019, Bobby Chesney (from Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin) and Max Smeets (from ETH Zurich and also Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)) convened a workshop in Amsterdam focusing on military operations in the cyber domain, from a transatlantic perspective. The “Transatlantic Dialogue on Military Cyber Operations—Amsterdam” gathered experts from military, civilian, and academic institutions hailing from a range of countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, and France.

 

Read the Rest at Lawfare Blog

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Michal Smetana

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Michal Smetana is an Associate Professor at the Institute of International Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Director of the Peace Research Center Prague (PRCP), and Head Researcher at the Experimental Lab for International Security Studies (ELISS). Previously, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). His main research interests lie at the intersection of security studies, international relations, and political psychology, with a specific focus on nuclear weapons in world politics, arms control and disarmament, contestation of international norms, and the use of experimental survey methodology to study public and elite attitudes towards foreign policy. His articles have been published in International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Review, Contemporary Security Policy, Survival, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and many other scholarly and policy journals. He is the author of Nuclear Deviance. In addition to his academic work, he is frequently invited to talk about international security matters in the media and conducts policy analyses for NATO, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Czech Ministry of Interior. 

 

Selected publications:

Michal Smetana. 2023. Microfoundations of Domestic Audience Costs in Nondemocratic Regimes: Experimental Evidence from Putin’s Russia. Journal of Peace Research. Forthcoming in 2023.

Ondrej Rosendorf, Michal Smetana, and Marek Vranka. 2023. “Algorithmic Aversion? Experimental Evidence on the Elasticity of Public Attitudes to ‘Killer Robots’” Security Studies. Forthcoming in 2023.

Michal Smetana, Marek Vranka, and Ondrej Rosendorf. 2023. “The “Commitment Trap” Revisited: Experimental Evidence on Ambiguous Nuclear Threats.” Journal of Experimental Political Science. First view: March 2023, 1–14.

Michal Smetana and Michal Onderco. 2023. “From Moscow with a Mushroom Cloud? Russian Public Attitudes to the Use of Nuclear Weapons in a Conflict with NATO.” Journal of Conflict Resolution. 67(2–3), 183–209.

Michal Smetana, Marek Vranka, and Ondrej Rosendorf. 2023. “The Lesser Evil? Experimental Evidence on the Strength of Nuclear and Chemical Weapon “Taboos.” Conflict Management and Peace Science. 40(1), 3–21.

Michal Onderco, Michal Smetana, and Tom Etienne. 2023. “Hawks in the making? European public views on nuclear weapons post-Ukraine.” Global Policy. 14(2), 305–317.

Michal Smetana and Michal Onderco. 2022. “Elite-Public Gaps in Attitudes to Nuclear Weapons: New Evidence from a Survey of German Citizens and Parliamentarians.” International Studies Quarterly. 66(2), 1–10.

Michal Smetana and Joseph O’Mahoney. 2022. “NPT as an Antifragile System: How Contestation Improves the Nonproliferation Regime.” Contemporary Security Policy. 43(1), 24–49.

Michal Onderco, Tom Etienne, and Michal Smetana. 2022. “Ideology and the Red Button: How Ideology Shapes Nuclear Weapons Use Preferences in Europe.” Foreign Policy Analysis. 18(4), 1–20.

Ondrej Rosendorf, Michal Smetana, and Marek Vranka. 2022. “Autonomous Weapons and Ethical Judgments: Experimental Evidence on Attitudes towards the Military Use of ‘Killer Robots.’” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. 28(2), 177–183.

Ondrej Rosendorf, Michal Smetana, and Marek Vranka. 2021. “Disarming Arguments: Public Opinion and Nuclear Abolition.” Survival. 63(6), 183–200.

Michal Smetana and Carmen Wunderlich. 2021. “Forum: Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons in World Politics: Toward the Third Generation of ‘Nuclear Taboo’ Research.” International Studies Review. 23(3), 1072–1099.

Kamil Klosek, Vojtech Bahensky, Michal Smetana, and Jan Ludvik. 2021. “Frozen Conflicts in World Politics: A New Dataset.” Journal of Peace Research. 58(4), 849–858.

Michal Smetana, Michal Onderco, and Tom Etienne. 2021. “Do Germany and the Netherlands Want to Say Goodbye to US Nuclear Weapons?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 77(4), 215–221.

Michal Onderco and Michal Smetana. 2021. “German Views on US Nuclear Weapons in Europe: Public and Elite Perspectives.” European Security. 30(4), 630–648.

Michal Smetana and Marek Vranka. 2021. “How Moral Foundations Shape Public Approval of Nuclear, Chemical, and Conventional Strikes: New Evidence from Experimental Surveys.” International Interactions. 47(2), 374–390. 

Michal Onderco, Michal Smetana, Sico van der Meer, and Tom Etienne. 2021. “When do the Dutch Want to Join the Nuclear Ban Treaty? Findings of a Public Opinion Survey.” The Nonproliferation Review. 28(1–3), 149–163.

Hana Martinkova and Michal Smetana. 2020. “Dynamics of Norm Contestation in the Chemical Weapons Convention: The Case of ‘Non-lethal Agents.’” Politics. 40(4), 428–443.

Michal Smetana. 2020. “(De-)stigmatising the outsider: nuclear-armed India, United States, and the global nonproliferation order.” Journal of International Relations and Development. 23, 535–558.

Michal Smetana and Jan Ludvík. 2019. “Theorising Indirect Coercion: The Logic of Triangular Strategies.” International Relations. 33(3), 455–474.

Michal Smetana and Jan Ludvík. 2019. “Between War and Peace: A Dynamic Reconceptualization of ‘Frozen Conflicts.’” Asia-Europe Journal. 17(1), 1–14.

Sumit Ganguly, Michal Smetana, Sannia Abdullah, and Ales Karmazin. 2019. “India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Dispute: Unpacking the Dynamics of South Asian Frozen Conflict.” Asia-Europe Journal. 17(1), 129–143.

Michal Smetana and Michal Onderco. 2018. “Bringing the Outsiders in: An Interactionist Perspective on Deviance and Normative Change.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs. 31(6), 516–536.

Michal Smetana. 2018. “A Nuclear Posture Review for the Third Nuclear Age.” The Washington Quarterly. 41(3), 137–157.

Michal Smetana. 2018. “The Prague Agenda: An Obituary?” New Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Journal of Central & East European Politics and International Relations. 26(1), 16–22.

Michal Smetana and Jan Ludvík. 2017. “Correspondence – Nuclear Proliferation, Preventive Strikes, and the Optimist-Pessimist Divide.” The Nonproliferation Review. 23(5–6), 535–536. 

Michal Smetana. 2016. “Stuck on Disarmament: The European Union and the 2015 NPT Review Conference.” International Affairs. 92(1), 137–152.

Michal Smetana and Ondrej Ditrych. 2015. “The More the Merrier: Time for a Multilateral Turn in Nuclear Disarmament.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 71(3), 30–37.

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Sergey Sanovich

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Sergey Sanovich is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University and a Cyber Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Sanovich received his Ph.D. in political science from NYU and continues his collaboration with the Social Media and Political Participation Lab (CSMaP). His research is focused on disinformation and social media platforms governance; online censorship and propaganda by authoritarian regimes; and elections and partisanship in information autocracies. It was published and is forthcoming at the American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Research & Politics, Big Data, and as a lead chapter in an edited volume on disinformation from Oxford University Press. Sanovich has also contributed to several policy reports, particularly focusing on protection from disinformation, including “Securing American Elections,” which was issued at its launch by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center.

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Anna M. Weichselbraun

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Anna Weichselbraun is a former Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-2018). She is a research and teaching postdoc at the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna. Her research examines the governance of technologies as well as technologies of governance.

In her book The Nuclear Order of Things: Making Safeguards Technical at the IAEA, Anna provides an intimate view of the practices and activities of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and connects these quotidian practices to the geopolitics of nuclear governance.

Her current project explores problems of Anthropocene governance, that is, the social mechanisms and technological infrastructures by which humans attempt to mitigate the uncertainty emanating from each other and their environments. In 2022-23 she is a USC-Berggruen fellow looking at how experiments in blockchain-based organizational forms can inform new visions of global governance.

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Anna Péczeli

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Dr. Anna Péczeli is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She is also an affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University, and an affiliate at the Institute for Strategic and Defense Studies (ISDS) at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary.

From 2019 to 2022, Anna was a postdoctoral research fellow at CGSR. Prior to that, she worked at Stanford University: in 2018-2019 she was a visiting postdoctoral research scholar at The Europe Center, and in 2016-2017 she was a Stanton nuclear security fellow at CISAC. In Hungary, she was a senior research fellow at ISDS, an assistant lecturer at Corvinus University of Budapest, and an adjunct fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. During her PhD studies, she held a visiting research fellowship at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, and a visiting Fulbright fellowship at the Nuclear Information Project of the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, DC.

She earned a PhD degree in International Relations from Corvinus University of Budapest. Her research focuses on U.S. nuclear posture, in particular the changes and continuities in U.S. nuclear strategy since the end of the Cold War. Her research areas also include the future of arms control and strategic risk reduction in a multi-domain environment, extended nuclear deterrence in Europe, and NATO’s defense policy. Anna is a member of the CSIS Project on Nuclear Issues mid-career cadre, the European Defence and Security Network, the EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium, and former chair of the Executive Board of the International Student/Young Pugwash group.

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Nuclear Weapons and the Cold War in Europe (essay)

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The Cold War began in Europe in the mid-1940s and ended there in 1989. Notions of a “global Cold War” are useful in describing the wide impact and scope of the East-West divide after World War II, but first and foremost the Cold War was about the standoff in Europe. The Soviet Union established a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s that later became institutionalized in the Warsaw Pact, an organization that was offset by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led by the United States. The fundamental division of Europe persisted for forty years, coming to an end only when Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe dissolved. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana, consists of cutting-edge essays by distinguished experts who discuss the Cold War in Europe from beginning to end, with a particular focus on the countries that were behind the iron curtain. The contributors take account of structural conditions that helped generate the Cold War schism in Europe, but they also ascribe agency to local actors as well as to the superpowers. The chapters dealing with the end of the Cold War in Europe explain not only why it ended but also why the events leading to that outcome occurred almost entirely peacefully.

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David Holloway
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