CONSORTIUM NEWS: Harris, Trump & the Race to Oblivion

 

Harris, Trump & the Race to Oblivion

September 16, 2024

The next administration will be confronted with distinctly ominous decisions about the already monstrous U.S. nuclear arsenal, writes Michael Klare.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris during the Sept. 10 presidential debate. (C-Span screen shot)

By Michael T. Klare
TomDispatch.com

The next president of the United States, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will face many contentious domestic issues that have long divided this country, including abortion rights, immigration, racial discord, and economic inequality. 

In the foreign policy realm, she or he will face vexing decisions over Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, and China/Taiwan. But one issue that few of us are even thinking about could pose a far greater quandary for the next president and even deeper peril for the rest of us: nuclear weapons policy.

[See: The Dangerous Silence on Nuclear War]

Consider this: For the past three decades, we’ve been living through a period in which the risk of nuclear war has been far lower than at any time since the Nuclear Age began — so low, in fact, that the danger of such a holocaust has been largely invisible to most people. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of agreements that substantially reduced the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles eliminated the most extreme risk of thermonuclear conflict, allowing us to push thoughts of nuclear Armageddon aside (and focus on other worries). 

Checking out the rise and fall of nuclear warheads over the years of the nuclear arms race at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in South Dakota, 2017. (Wayne Hsieh, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

But those quiescent days should now be considered over. Relations among the major powers have deteriorated in recent years and progress on disarmament has stalled. The United States and Russia are, in fact, upgrading their nuclear arsenals with new and more powerful weapons, while China — previously an outlier in the nuclear threat equation — has begun a major expansion of its own arsenal.

The altered nuclear equation is also evident in the renewed talk of possible nuclear weapons use by leaders of the major nuclear-armed powers. Such public discussion largely ceased after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when it became evident that any thermonuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would result in their mutual annihilation. 

However, that fear has diminished in recent years and we’re again hearing talk of nuclear weapons use. Since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to employ nuclear munitions in response to unspecified future actions of the U.S. and NATO in support of Ukrainian forces. 

Citing those very threats, along with China’s growing military might, Congress has authorized a program to develop more “lower-yield” nuclear munitions supposedly meant (however madly) to provide a president with further “options” in the event of a future regional conflict with Russia or China.

Thanks to those and related developments, the world is now closer to an actual nuclear conflagration than at any time since the end of the Cold War. And while popular anxiety about a nuclear exchange may have diminished, keep in mind that the explosive power of existing arsenals has not. 

Imagine this, for instance: even a “limited” nuclear war — involving the use of just a dozen or so of the hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) possessed by China, Russia, and the United States — would cause enough planetary destruction to ensure civilization’s collapse and the death of billions of people.

And consider all of that as just the backdrop against which the next president will undoubtedly face fateful decisions regarding the production and possible use of such weaponry, whether in the bilateral nuclear relationship between the U.S. and Russia or the trilateral one that incorporates China.

The US-Russia Nuclear Equation

Putin announcing the plans to suspend Russia’s participation in the New START treaty in February 2023. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

The first nuclear quandary facing the next president has an actual timeline. In approximately 500 days, on Feb. 5, 2026, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining nuclear accord between the U.S. and Russia limiting the size of their arsenals, will expire. 

That treaty, signed in 2010, limits each side to a maximum of 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads along with 700 delivery systems, whether ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), or nuclear-capable heavy bombers. 

(That treaty only covers strategic warheads, or those intended for attacks on each other’s homeland; it does not include the potentially devastating stockpiles of “tactical” nuclear munitions possessed by the two countries that are intended for use in regional conflicts.)

At present, the treaty is on life support. On Feb. 21, 2023, Vladimir Putin ominously announced that Russia had “suspended” its formal participation in New START, although claiming it would continue to abide by its warhead and delivery limits as long as the U.S. did so. The Biden administration then agreed that it, too, would continue to abide by the treaty limits. 

It has also signaled to Moscow that it’s willing to discuss the terms of a replacement treaty for New START when that agreement expires in 2026. The Russians have, however, declined to engage in such conversations as long as the U.S. continues its military support for Ukraine.

[Related: SCOTT RITTER: On Horseradish & Nuclear War]

Accordingly, among the first major decisions the next president has to make in January 2025 will be what stance to take regarding the future status of New START (or its replacement). With the treaty’s extinction barely more than a year away, little time will remain for careful deliberation as a new administration chooses among several potentially fateful and contentious possibilities.

Its first option, of course, would be to preserve the status quo, agreeing that the U.S. will abide by that treaty’s numerical limits as long as Russia does, even in the absence of a treaty obliging it to do so. Count on one thing, though: such a decision would almost certainly be challenged and tested by nuclear hawks in both Washington and Moscow.

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Of course, President Harris or Trump could decide to launch a diplomatic drive to persuade Moscow to agree to a new version of New START, a distinctly demanding undertaking, given the time remaining. 

Ideally, such an agreement would entail further reductions in the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals or at least include caps on the number of tactical weapons on each side. And remember, even if such an agreement were indeed to be reached, it would also require Senate approval and undoubtedly encounter fierce resistance from the hawkish members of that body. Despite such obstacles, this probably represents the best possible outcome imaginable.

The worst — and yet most likely — would be a decision to abandon the New START limits and begin adding yet more weapons to the American nuclear arsenal, reversing a bipartisan arms control policy that goes back to the administration of President Richard Nixon. Sadly, there are too many members of Congress who favor just such a shift and are already proposing measures to initiate it.

In June, for example, in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025, the Senate Armed Services Committee instructed the Department of Defense to begin devising plans for an increase in the number of deployed ICBMs from 400 of the existing Minuteman-IIIs to 450 of its replacement, the future Sentinel ICBM. The House Armed Services Committee version of that measure does not contain that provision but includes separate plans for ICBM force expansion. (The consolidated text of the bill has yet to be finalized.)

Should the U.S. and/or Russia abandon the New START limits and begin adding to its atomic arsenal after Feb. 5, 2026, a new nuclear arms race would almost certainly be ignited, with no foreseeable limits. 

No matter which side announced such a move first, the other would undoubtedly feel compelled to follow suit and so, for the first time since the Nixon era, both nuclear powers would be expanding rather than reducing their deployed nuclear forces — only increasing, of course, the potential for mutual annihilation. 

And if Cold War history is any guide, such an arms-building contest would result in increased suspicion and hostility, adding a greater danger of nuclear escalation to any crisis that might arise between them.

Three-Way Arms Race

Chinese DF-17 glider launcher on exhibit in Beijing in 2022. (Yiyuanju, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Scary as that might prove, a two-way nuclear arms race isn’t the greatest peril we face. After all, should Moscow and Washington prove unable to agree on a successor to New START and begin expanding their arsenals, any trilateral nuclear agreement including China that might slow that country’s present nuclear buildup becomes essentially unimaginable.

Ever since it acquired nuclear weapons in 1964, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursued a minimalist stance when it came to deploying such weaponry, insisting that it would never initiate a nuclear conflict but would only use nuclear weapons in a second-strike retaliatory fashion following a nuclear attack on the PRC. 

In accordance with that policy, China long maintained a relatively small arsenal, only 200 or so nuclear warheads and a small fleet of ICBMs and SLBMs. 

In the past few years, however, China has launched a significant nuclear build-up, adding another 300 warheads and producing more missiles and missile-launching silos — all while insisting its no-first-use policy remains unchanged and that it is only maintaining a retaliatory force to deter potential aggression by other nuclear-armed states.

Some Western analysts believe that Xi Jinping, China’s nationalistic and authoritarian leader, considers a larger arsenal necessary to boost his country’s status in a highly competitive, multipolar world. Others argue that China fears improvements in U.S. defensive capabilities, especially the installation of anti-ballistic missile systems, that could endanger its relatively small retaliatory force and so rob it of a deterrent to any future American first strike.

Putin and Xi in Moscow in March 2023. (Vladimir Astapkovich, RIA Novosti)

Given the Chinese construction of several hundred new missile silos, Pentagon analysts contend that the country plans to deploy as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035 — roughly equivalent to deployed Russian and American stockpiles under the New START guidelines. 

At present, there is no way to confirm such predictions, which are based on extrapolations from the recent growth of the Chinese arsenal from perhaps 200 to 500 warheads. Nonetheless, many Washington officials, especially in the Republican Party, have begun to argue that, given such a buildup, the New START limits must be abandoned in 2026 and yet more weapons added to the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile to counter both Russia and China.

As Franklin Miller of the Washington-based Scowcroft Group and a former director of nuclear targeting in the office of the secretary of defense put it, “Deterring China and Russia simultaneously [requires] an increased level of U.S. strategic warheads.” 

Miller was one of 12 members of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, a bipartisan group convened in 2022 to reconsider America’s nuclear policies in light of China’s growing arsenal, Putin’s nuclear threats, and other developments. 

In its final October 2023 report, that commission recommended numerous alterations and additions to the American arsenal, including installing multiple warheads (instead of single ones) on the Sentinel missiles being built to replace the Minuteman ICBM and increasing the number of B-21 nuclear bombers and Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines to be produced under the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion nuclear “modernization” program.

Concept rendering of the U.S. Air Force’s LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile. (U.S. Air Force, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

The Biden administration has yet to endorse the recommendations in that report. It has, however, signaled that it’s considering the steps a future administration might take to address an expanded Chinese arsenal. 

In March, the White House approved a new version of a top-secret document, the Nuclear Employment Guidance, which for the first time reportedly focused as much on countering China as Russia. According to the few public comments made by administration officials about that document, it, too, sets out contingency plans for increasing the number of deployed strategic weapons in the years ahead if Russia breaks out of the current New START limits and no arms restraints have been negotiated with China.

“We have begun exploring options to increase future launcher capacity or additional deployed warheads on the land, sea, and air legs [of the nuclear delivery “triad” of ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers] that could offer national leadership increased flexibility, if desired, and executed,” said acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Policy Vipin Narang on Aug. 1. 

While none of those options are likely to be implemented in President Biden’s remaining months, the next administration will be confronted with distinctly ominous decisions about the future composition of that already monstrous nuclear arsenal.

Whether it is kept as is or expanded, the one option you won’t hear much about in Washington is finding ways to reduce it. And count on one thing: even a decision simply to preserve the status quo in the context of today’s increasingly antagonistic international environment poses an increased risk of nuclear conflict. Any decision to expand it, along with comparable moves by Russia and China, will undoubtedly create an even greater risk of instability and potentially suicidal nuclear escalation.

Citizen Advocacy

No Nuclear War protest in London in March 2022 — the fear of total annihilation returns. (Alisdaire Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

For all too many of us, nuclear weapons policy seems like a difficult issue that should be left to the experts. This wasn’t always so. During the Cold War years, nuclear war seemed like an ever-present possibility and millions of Americans familiarized themselves with nuclear issues, participating in ban-the-bomb protests or the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign of the 1980s. But with the Cold War’s end and a diminished sense of nuclear doom, most of us turned to other issues and concerns. Yet the nuclear danger is growing rapidly and so decisions regarding the U.S. arsenal could have life-or-death repercussions on a global scale.

And one thing should be made clear: adding more weaponry to the U.S. arsenal will not make us one bit safer. Given the invulnerability of this country’s missile-bearing nuclear submarines and the multitude of other weapons in our nuclear arsenal, no foreign leader could conceivably mount a first strike on this country and not expect catastrophic retaliation, which in turn would devastate the planet. Acquiring more nuclear weapons would not alter any of this in the slightest. All it could possibly do is add to international tensions and increase the risk of global annihilation.

As Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan research and advocacy outfit, put it recently: 

“Significant increases in the U.S. deployed nuclear arsenal would undermine mutual and global security by making the existing balance of nuclear terror more unpredictable and would set into motion a counterproductive, costly action-reaction cycle of nuclear competition.”

A decision to pursue such a reckless path could occur just months from now. In early 2025, the next president, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will be making critical decisions regarding the future of the New START Treaty and the composition of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. 

Given the vital stakes involved, such decisions should not be left to the president and a small coterie of her or his close advisers. Rather, it should be the concern of every citizen, ensuring vigorous debate on alternative options, including steps aimed at reducing and eventually eliminating the world’s nuclear arsenals. Without such public advocacy, we face the very real danger that, for the first time since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, nuclear weapons will again be detonated on this planet, with billions of us finding ourselves in almost unimaginable peril.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

This article is from TomDispatch.com.

Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Putin: Disastrous but indispensable for the system he created? - Responsible Statecraft

 
TOM DISPATCH:

At the Responsible Statecraft website, Anatol Lieven offers an interesting assessment of Putin in the wake of the Wagner semi-uprising. Tom

"President Putin has emerged strengthened from whatever it was exactly that may or may not have happened in Russia this weekend; strengthened, that is, compared to his situation of ten days ago – which is not saying a great deal. For months now, the open public dispute between Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group, and the leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry had escalated to the point where Putin’s inability or unwillingness to end it was undermining his authority.

Three weeks ago, Prigozhin began to extend his criticism from Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov to the regime and the elites in general; and, although he was careful not to attack Putin himself, the implications of his remarks were clear enough. Prigozhin’s attacks were so damaging to the regime both because of the prestige that Wagner amassed in Russia as a result of its fighting record in Ukraine, and because his criticisms have been essentially true.

Not only did Shoigu and Gerasimov plan and conduct the invasion of Ukraine with monstrous incompetence, recklessness and indifference to civilian deaths and suffering, but since they have both held their present positions since 2012, they bear direct personal responsibility for the logistical chaos, lack of coordination, and generally lamentable condition of the Russian armed forces. Equally true have been Prigozhin’s attacks on elite corruption, the evasion of taxes and military service by the rich, and finally – and most strikingly of all – the lies about Ukraine told by the regime (and above all by Putin himself) to justify the invasion.

Prigozhin’s abortive rebellion this weekend seems likely to have been what is called in German a Flucht nach vorn – an “escape forwards,” driven not by considered hope of success but fear of the alternatives and the existing situation. Prigozhin had good reason to fear that unless he acted first, Shoigu and Gerasimov would use the vastly superior power of the Russian armed forces to destroy him; or perhaps just to have him assassinated, something that is always easier on a battlefield. Above all, the precipitating factor may have been Putin’s announcement on June 14 that Wagner was to be brought under the full control of the Defense Ministry. This indicated that Putin was finally coming off the fence and siding with Shoigu and Gerasimov against Prigozhin.

Given the extent to which Wagner is outnumbered and outgunned by the Russian military, Prigozhin had only two (overlapping) chances of success: that enough of the Russian regular army itself would mutiny and join Wagner, and that Putin’s own nerve would crack and that he would surrender to Prigozhin’s demands or even resign. Neither occurred.

From the point of view of Russian military loyalties, a key moment came Saturday when General Sergei Surovikin condemned the rebellion and called on Russian soldiers to resist it and Wagner fighters to return to their duty:

“The enemy is eagerly awaiting a worsening of our internal disputes. In these difficult times for our country, you must not play into the hands of our enemies. Before it is too late, it is urgently necessary to obey the orders of the elected President of the Russian Federation.”

This was important both because of Surovikin’s personal stature as the former commander in Syria and the only really successful Russian general in Ukraine; and because in remarks three weeks ago, Prigozhin had called for him to be appointed to replace Gerasimov. Prigozhin must have assumed that Surovikin’s removal as commander-in-chief in Ukraine by Shoigu and Gerasimov in January would have inclined him to support Wagner (to which he was believed to have been close since his time as commander in Syria). Once he refused, it was very unlikely that any other Russian generals would do so.

As to Putin, his nerve seems as strong as ever. If his address on Saturday condemning the rebellion as treason lacked the rhetorical and moral force of de Gaulle’s in response to the coup of French generals in Algeria in April 1961, it was still sufficiently tough and resolute to show his determination to remain in power, rally the doubtful, and re-establish a measure of personal authority:

“We are fighting for the lives and security of our people, for our sovereignty and independence, for the right to remain Russia, a state with a thousand-year history,” he said.

However, the background (and perhaps also the solution) to the Wagner revolt have displayed some key features of Putin’s approach to the exercise of power. By training and instinct he is a secret serviceman, not a soldier. His preference has always been when possible to opt for ruthless but indirect, semi-covert and quasi-deniable methods over direct military force. Hence his hesitation to invade Ukraine, something long urged on him by hardliners within his regime. Hence, too, his sponsorship of Wagner, which as a “private military company” could pursue Russian goals in the Donbas, Syria and Africa while allowing the Russian government to maintain official distance from its actions.

Secondly, while Putin is regarded in the West and is presented in his own domestic propaganda as an absolutist autocrat, he has in fact often functioned more like the chairman of a squabbling collection of state oligarchs. He has even encouraged their feuds as part of a strategy of “divide and rule”, and he has only stepped in to resolve them – in this case, very belatedly – when they have risked breaking out in public and threatening his own authority. Putin has also been a master in the distribution of state patronage, making sure that as long as they remain loyal to him, the losers in intra-regime disputes have still been compensated with considerable wealth.

Can this regime and this form of government continue? Everything still depends on what happens on the battlefield in Ukraine. If the Russians can hold their present line, Putin’s rule will most probably survive. Another major defeat would probably finish it. Concerning his personal authority, an early question will be whether having suppressed Prigozhin, Putin can now act to replace Shoigu and Gerasimov, as so many Russian soldiers would wish – or whether he is still inextricably bound to these and other cronies (of whom Prigozhin was previously one), irrespective of their manifest failures and crimes. For a key factor in the disastrous decision to invade Ukraine and the general decline of the Putin regime’s competence has been his increasing tendency to surround himself with an ever-smaller group of close associates and rely exclusively on them for advice.

Finally, the Wagner revolt, however brief and unsuccessful, will inevitably renew speculation about whether Putin’s prestige has been so badly damaged that he will decide not to stand again for president in the elections due (according to the constitution) early next year, and instead hand over to a chosen successor (as President Yeltsin handed over to him in 1999). However, while the revolt has been a bad blow to Putin, it may also have underlined once again his vital personal importance to the political system that he has created – which could lead his associates in that system to beg him to stay on, for fear that without him they would be incapable of peacefully mediating their own rivalries.

For if Putin was instrumental in the rise of Wagner to the point that it became a menace to the Russian state, it also seems likely that only he could have brought the Wagner revolt to an end quickly and without bloodshed and possible civil war. At the start of the Cold War, George Kennan wrote presciently that if Communist Party authority faltered, “Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.” It is possible to wonder whether that may be true today of Putin’s authority, however diminished."

RESPONSIBLESTATECRAFT.ORG

Putin: Disastrous but indispensable for the system he created? - Responsible Statecraft

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In the Gun Law Fights of 2023, a Need for Experts on the Weapons of 1791

 

Ah, yes, mass killings and the like proliferate and the courts return to the weapons of 1791 to make "new" gun laws, as Shawn Hubler reports at the New York Times. Tom

"Saul Cornell’s corner of academia has historically been sleepy. So few scholars share his specialty that the Fordham University professor jokes that he and his colleagues could hold a national convention “in an English phone booth.”

But in the months since a landmark Supreme Court decision upended the standards for determining the constitutionality of gun laws, Dr. Cornell has been booked solid. An authority on the history and laws around American weapons, he has served as an expert witness in at least 15 federal cases on gun control laws, which is roughly 14 requests more than he used to get in a busy year.

Gun historians across the country are in demand like never before as lawyers must now comb through statutes drafted in the Colonial era and the early years of the Republic to litigate modern firearms restrictions. From experts on military gun stamping to scholars of American homicide through the ages, they have been called — many for the first time — to parse the nation’s gun culture in court.

Cases now explore weapons bans in early saloons, novelty air rifles on the Lewis and Clark expedition, concealed carry restrictions on bowie knives and 18th-century daggers known as “Arkansas toothpicks,” and a string-operated “trap gun” that may or may not be comparable to an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

“This is what the courts have unleashed upon us,” said Darrell A. H. Miller, a Duke University law professor and faculty co-director at the Duke Center for Firearms Law. “Suddenly everyone is looking for early Republic scholars to tell them what the culture and norms around firearms law were in the 18th century.”

In a 6-3 decision last June, the Supreme Court dramatically shifted the standard for firearm restrictions. Writing for the majority in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas found that gun laws should be judged not by the longstanding practice of balancing gun rights against the public interest, but according to the Second Amendment’s text and the “historical tradition” of gun regulation.

The constitutionality of gun constraints, he suggested, would hinge on whether the government could show a “historical analogue” in the law, either in 1791 when Americans ratified the right to bear arms, or around 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment extended protections against federal infringements on gun rights to the states.

That originalist view has been celebrated by gun rights advocates for strengthening a constitutional right and presenting a wide-open opportunity to erase gun control laws. Many others, seeking stricter controls against a crushing epidemic of gun violence, say that it is dangerous and absurd to base modern public safety on the 1700s and 1800s when a gun can be built with a 3-D printer and plans shared on the internet.

Lawyers on both sides say it is unclear how Bruen will be interpreted in the long term; it seemed to leave some room to account for “unprecedented” societal concerns, new technology and sensitive places, such as schools.

In the near term, however, the decision has set off an explosion of legal challenges to gun laws and a scramble by government lawyers to find historically analogous regulations in centuries-old traditions and statutes.

The stakes are high. In just the first 10 weeks of this year, there have been more than 100 mass shootings, and gunfire has claimed the lives of more than 8,100 people and injured more than 6,000, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a research group that tracks public reports.

In West Virginia, a federal judge in October struck down a prohibition aimed at “ghost guns” that are untraceable and often built through at-home kits because, in 1791, privately owned firearms were not required to have serial numbers. In Texas, another federal judge recently ruled that it was unconstitutional to take guns from domestic abusers in part because men who beat their wives rarely were prosecuted, let alone forced to relinquish their firearms, until the 1970s.

The Bruen decision and subsequent federal rulings have provided momentum to gun rights groups across the nation, particularly in Democratic-led states.

“We are going to defeat virtually every gun control on the books — assault weapons bans, large capacity magazine bans, ammunition registration, rosters of approved handguns for sale, limitations on how many guns you can buy in a month,” Sam Paredes, the executive director of the Gun Owners of California, said. “The courts have held that these laws don’t have an analogous law to 1791 when the Second Amendment was written, so they are by definition unconstitutional.”

Some judges have bristled at the new rules. In a Mississippi challenge to a law prohibiting felons from carrying firearms, U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves last fall wrote in a blistering order, “This Court is not a trained historian,” adding, “And we are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791.” Judge Reeves wondered if the court should hire a neutral history consultant; both sides objected, preferring experts of their own.

Other judges have demanded encyclopedic briefings. In California, a federal judge who is weighing challenges to several key gun laws ordered lawyers to draw up a compendium of laws on lethal arms from Colonial times through the post-Civil War era. The 56-page list submitted to U.S. District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez included dueling pistols, muskets, trick “cane guns” and a custom-made instrument of mass murder known as “the infernal machine.”

Traffic on online archives is surging. Since the Bruen decision, views have risen to 1,000 per month, from 200 or 300, of a searchable repository of some 1,700 historical gun laws hosted by the Duke firearms law center, according to its executive director, Andrew Willinger.

Demand has similarly boomed for scholars who can put gun technology and law into context, particularly among Democratic attorneys general defending restrictions.

Jennifer Tucker, who directs the Center for the Study of Guns and Society at Wesleyan University, said lawyers have reached out to seek experts on topics as disparate as weapon restrictions on stage coaches and the contested history around an 18th-century attempt at an extended capacity firearm — which supposedly would fire round bullets at Christians and square ones at “heathens” — known as the “Puckle gun.”

Robert J. Spitzer, a retired political science professor at SUNY Cortland who has written a half-dozen books on the history of gun rights, has consulted on at least 10 gun law cases. “The typical image of every adult white male owning a gun, using it to defend hearth and home, the wild West being tamed by the Colt and the Winchester — basically none of that stuff is true,” he said, adding that some of the first laws in Colonial America were gun controls.

In Oregon, where gun rights groups are challenging controls passed by voters in November, the court file features dueling historians. For the plaintiffs, Ashley Hlebinsky, the former curator of the Cody Firearms Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Wyoming. For the government, Brian DeLay, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert in the history of early American arms.

A highlight is the discussion of a novel, multishot air rifle that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark brought on their continental expedition. The plaintiffs mention the gun as an indication that high-capacity firearms were common, even in the early 1800s, and yet were unregulated by the nation’s founders who presumably could have restricted them.

But Dr. DeLay writes that commercially feasible guns capable of firing multiple rounds were far beyond the technological reach of the era, and that those in existence were little more than “expensive curiosities” for collectors. Writing laws for them in 1791, he writes, would be like implementing regulations for “personal jetpacks” today.

Most of the scholars tapped by the states say they are both honored to serve and deeply unsettled. Some said they feared that partisan judges were co-opting history itself and larding the law with culture war myths and politically useful distortions; others that, in an anti-intellectual era, historians simply will be ignored.

In a December hearing on the constitutionality of California’s ban on large-capacity magazines, Judge Benitez — an appointee of former President George W. Bush who has repeatedly ruled against gun restrictions — said he saw no need for well-known historians. “We’re not looking for truffles,” the judge said, adding: “The history and tradition is what it is.”

And gun rights experts contend that history does not belong to academics alone.

Ms. Hlebinsky said in an interview that gun collectors, in particular, have done “a lot of research” that courts should consider, even though “you don’t have the peer review system within the academic university structures.” Her own neutrality recently was questioned in a Rhode Island gun law ruling by a federal judge who was appointed by a Democrat.

“I see a lot of scholarship that is nontraditional,” said Ms. Hlebinsky, who does not have a doctoral degree and who recently co-founded a firearms research center that she said was largely funded with donations from the firearms industry.

How the law will ultimately view history remains to be seen.

On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta cited 19th century laws to uphold a Florida age limit on gun purchases, rejecting a challenge by the National Rifle Association. But last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans struck down a Texas prohibition on guns for people who have domestic violence restraining orders against them.

Adam Winkler, a University of California, Los Angeles, law professor who has written widely on gun rights, said that inconsistency in the way the appellate courts interpret history will likely force the Supreme Court to eventually clarify or revise the Bruen test, but the bar will be high for firearm restrictions. “The fact of the matter is, a large number of our gun laws are 20th century inventions,” he said."

NYTIMES.COM

In the Gun Law Fights of 2023, a Need for Experts on the Weapons of 1791