Significant developments in the proliferation of nuclear weapons took place in late 2006 and 2007, after this book was finalized for publication. This afterword, added for the paperback edition, surveys these events, both perilous and promising. Overall, the trends since the publication of the original edition confirm the basic concepts developed in the preceding pages:
• The proliferation of nuclear weapons is not inevitable.
• The spread of nuclear weapons increases the risks of catastrophe rather than providing security or stability.
• The current strategy focused on regime change as the cure for proliferation has failed to solve the core problems and has made many problems worse.
• The best solutions are ones that systematically reduce proliferation drivers and increase proliferation barriers.
• A consensus to adopt such a comprehensive new strategy is developing.
THE PERILS OF PROLIFERATION
As if to highlight the dangers of a strategy that narrows the proliferation problem to one of hostile regimes seeking nuclear weapons, the assassination of former prime minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 and the intensification of the political crisis in Pakistan brought into sharp relief the fact that the most immediate nuclear threat facing the United States and other countries comes not from Iraq, Iran, or North Korea, but from unsecured nuclear arsenals in any country, with Pakistan at the top of the list. With an unstable military dictatorship, enough material for 60–120 nuclear bombs, strong Islamic fundamentalist influences in the military and intelligence services, and armed Islamic fundamentalist groups—including Al Qaeda—operating within its territory, Pakistan is arguably the most dangerous country on earth.
Despite the Bush administration’s intense focus on Iraq and Iran over the past six years, it is in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden may have his best chance of getting a nuclear weapon. Pakistan could turn overnight from a major, non-NATO ally of the United States into the world’s worst nuclear nightmare. Pakistani officials say the weapons and weapon materials are secure, guarded by the most trusted military units. Most experts assume that these claims are correct, but they cannot independently verify the number of nuclear weapons in Pakistan, their locations, or their security. Increased unrest could split the military or distract the troops guarding the weapon materials, providing an opening for a raid by an organized radical group, perhaps with inside help.
Even before the Bhutto assassination, Jihadists had stepped up their attacks on Pakistani military facilities. Ominously, these include several of the military bases housing nuclearrelated facilities. On November 1, 2007, a suicide bomber killed eight Air Force personnel and wounded 40 others at Sargodha Air Force Base in the Punjab region, home of Pakistan’s Air Force Central Command and the military headquarters for control of their nuclear arsenal.1 On December 10, 2007, another suicide bomber attacked a bus filled with 35 children of Pakistani Air Force officers at the Kamra Air Force Base in Peshawar province that includes facilities and an ordnance complex likely associated with the storage and maintenance of Pakistani nuclear weapons.2
This dangerous situation developed over years and goes beyond the mistakes of the current nonproliferation strategy (discussed below). Past Democratic and Republican administrations have constantly placed proliferation and democracy concerns second to other geopolitical aims. Officials who regarded Pakistan as an ally needed to rout Soviet troops (and later the Taliban) from Afghanistan, or wanted the country as a balance to India or China, then looked the other way as Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan developed a network to import technology and materials for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, even when he began exporting the technology to other countries. The nuclear chickens may be coming home to roost, reminding everyone that nuclear weapons are a danger wherever they exist and terrorists who are intent on acquiring them will go to the most vulnerable sites, regardless of the political orientation of the state.
Chaos in Pakistan also counters the argument that nuclear weapons are a stabilizing force, as discussed in the preface to this book and on pages 100–102. Whatever role nuclear weapons may play in discouraging war between India and Pakistan would be more than offset by terrorists stealing nuclear materials from Pakistan’s nuclear laboratories or a radical Islamic fundamentalist regime coming to power and gaining control of Pakistan’s entire nuclear arsenal. The latter does not seem likely, but then few predicted the 1979 Iranian revolution. As former Soviet president Michael Gorbachev wrote in January 2007, “It is becoming clearer that nuclear weapons are no longer a means of achieving security; in fact, with every passing year they make our security more precarious.”3
The year 2007 also dramatically demonstrated the danger of accidental or unauthorized use of weapons in existing state arsenals. On August 29, 2007, the U.S. Air Force lost track of the equivalent of 60 Hiroshima bombs for 36 hours as a B-52 bomber flew across the country with 6 nuclear missiles tucked under its wings. Unknown to the air crews, the missiles were each armed with a 150-kiloton nuclear warhead, ten times the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The Air Force has not flown nuclear weapons on bombers for 40 years and has not even practiced loading these weapons on them for 17 years. The live bombs were put on by accident. Most experts had thought it impossible that anyone could get past the half-dozen security checks designed to prevent the unauthorized use of the most dangerous weapons on earth.
Yet Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick disclosed that the loaded bomber “sat on the tarmac overnight without special guards, protected for 15 hours by only the base’s exterior chain-link fence and roving security patrols.”4 To its credit, the Air Force disciplined the officers and crews involved. But if the country with the most sophisticated nuclear security system in the world could lose six hydrogen bombs, what could happen in other countries? How secure are the estimated 15,000 weapons in Russia? Or the highly enriched uranium and plutonium—enough for hundreds of thousands of weapons—scattered in hundreds of buildings in over 40 countries?
The United States made significant cuts in its nuclear stockpile in 2007, but through accounting, not actual dismantlement. On December 18, 2007, the administration announced plans to reduce the nuclear stockpile by “nearly 50 percent” by the end of 2007. Officials did this by declaring that 5,150 warheads would no longer be part of the reserve force. They have been tagged for eventual dismantlement, though it is not clear when this will be accomplished. The United States took apart approximately 1,800 warheads a year during the 1990s, but the process has slowed to a crawl with only an estimated 100 warheads disassembled in 2007.
Thus, at the beginning of 2008, the United States maintained an estimated 5,400 nuclear warheads. Of these, 4,075 were operationally deployed—3,575 on strategic delivery vehicles (missiles, submarines, and bombers) and 500 for nonstrategic missions (cruise missiles and bombs)—with about 1,260 additional warheads held in reserve.5 Several programs to improve the capabilities of the nuclear force continued. The entire Minuteman III missile force is undergoing a multibillion-dollar overhaul focusing on replacing the aging warheads with even more powerful ones. Production of new nuclear weapons also began for the first time in 15 years, with Los Alamos National Laboratory producing replacement cores for the W88 warhead used on the submarine-launched Trident II missiles.6
REVERSING PROLIFERATION IN NORTH KOREA
Some of the most hopeful news of the year came from an unlikely source—North Korea. At the beginning of 2008, despite delays and disagreements, U.S. scientists were in North Korea taking apart the reactor that had produced enough plutonium for an estimated 6–12 bombs, most of it during the past five years.
It has been a long and difficult road. The agreement that had frozen North Korea’s plutonium production program for eight years and suspended its missile tests for four years unraveled in 2002. This was partially the result of the disclosure that North Korea had likely cheated on the agreement by secretly importing equipment for uranium enrichment but primarily the result of a decision by U.S. officials to use the cheating as justification for killing a deal they never liked. As Vice President Cheney summed up the policy, “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.”7
As the failures of this approach grew evident (North Korea restarted its reactor and began pumping out plutonium), pragmatists in the administration led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice slowly nudged the policy back into negotiations, culminating in a September 2005 agreement in the six-party talks to end the nuclear program in exchange for economic assistance and security assurances. Hard-line officials immediately torpedoed the deal by imposing sanctions on North Korean bank accounts. The North Koreans reacted by walking out of the talks and then in July 2006 tested a long-range missile—that exploded soon after launch—and in October its first nuclear weapon, which fizzled but sent shock waves around the world (see pp. 137–138).
After an extensive struggle among his officials, President Bush shifted to direct negotiations with a despised foe. It worked. By February 2007, the renewed six-party talks had reinstated the September 2005 agreement, supplemented by a step-by-step implementation sequence. U.S. scientists joined teams of international experts in Yongbyon to disable the plutonium production reactor. The year 2008 could see the full disclosure and dismantlement of the nuclear program and the beginning of normalization of U.S.-North Korean relations.
The shift was part of an overall swing in the administration (and in the country as a whole) toward a centrist pragmatism. The Washington Post concluded “the fist-shaking that characterized much of the first six years of the Bush administration’s North Korea policy has been replaced by a dogged insistence on negotiations and by offers of aid and other concessions—contingent on verified moves to get rid of nuclear facilities.”8 Opponents of the negotiations tried to derail the agreement throughout the year. Former UN ambassador John Bolton called it a “bad deal,”9 while the editors of the National Review asked: “When exactly did Kim Jong Il become trustworthy?”10 and the editors of the Wall Street Journal dubbed it “Faith-based nonproliferation.”11
In part, the split on the North Korean deal and its implications reflect ideological positions. Liberals see negotiated agreements as the preferable way to resolve even the most intractable disputes. Conservatives, and their more aggressive neoconservative allies, tend to see arms control treaties as a trap, promoting the illusion of security that can only be guaranteed by American military might. Some feared it would also set a precedent for negotiations with Iran, upsetting their plans for military action to topple the regime in Tehran.12 A closer look at the various elements contributing to this apparent nonproliferation success with North Korea provides a clearer understanding of both the policy reversal and the broader policy trends.
The first element was the situation of North Korea itself. A poor, isolated country that produces little save fear and tyranny, it was in a weak strategic position. The multilateral sanctions and economic incentives clearly played a part in the decision of the Korean leadership to compromise.
Second was the unanimity of the other five nations in the six-party talks. All five wanted to stop a nuclear-armed North Korea from emerging. Their tactics differed, but they were united in their efforts to stop Pyongyang from trying to perfect the flawed nuclear device it tested in October 2006. That unity extended to the unanimous declaration of the Security Council condemning North Korea and imposing sanctions on the regime after its October nuclear test.
The third element contributing to the shift was the more assertive role played by China. The October 9 test surprised and angered China, upsetting its greater strategic plans. China does not want North Korea destabilizing its borders or provoking Japan, and that is just what happened after the test. Japan started a public debate over whether they should get their own nuclear weapons—the last thing China wants. State Counselor Tang Jiaxuan, China’s third-highest ranking official, quickly visited Pyongyang to deliver a message asserting China’s displeasure directly to North Korean leaders. China cannot dictate North Korea’s actions, but the pressure brought a halt to North Korean nuclear tests and an agreement to return to negotiations. China also convinced the United States to come to the table, choreographing talks in Beijing that produced the first of several breakthrough bilateral sessions.
Fourth was the power shift in Congress as a result of the November 2006 elections. The Democratic control of Congress flipped the pressures on the Bush administration, with immediate effect. Shortly after the elections, at a November House International Relations Committee hearing still under Republican rule, members led by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) hammered Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns over the failed administration policy, cajoling him into engaging in direct talks with North Korea.
Fifth was the change in Defense Department leadership. Donald Rumsfeld, an ardent opponent of direct negotiations with North Korea, resigned as defense secretary, and was replaced by pragmatist Robert Gates, who is more inclined to engage in the direct negotiations previously seen as appeasement. Vice President Dick Cheney alone among the senior ranks remained opposed to dealing with Pyongyang—and he was distracted with the trial of his former aide Scooter Libby, which threatened to implicate him in a scandal that had exposed a covert CIA agent’s identity.
Sixth, the political fortunes of the president of the United States had deteriorated. In the end, it was the president’s call: deal or no deal. Formerly, President Bush lined up with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and UN Ambassador Bolton, but with these officials gone and badly in need of some success for his beleaguered administration, the president tilted toward pragmatism. North Korea was one of the few possibilities for a foreign policy victory during the remainder of his term.
Finally, the intelligence agencies also retracted a bit of false intelligence that had seemed to justify breaking the agreement with North Korea in 2002. North Korea was not operating a factory to enrich uranium or as intent on acquiring weapons as once claimed. A CIA report to Congress of November 19, 2002, asserted the agency had “recently learned that the North is constructing a plant that could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more nuclear weapons per year when fully operational—which could be as soon as mid-decade.”13 This finding, according to one press report, appears to have been made only after senior officials, including former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, intervened to overrule dissenting views and presented the sketchy evidence as conclusive proof.14
On February 27, 2007, Joseph DeTrani, the North Korea coordinator for the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that while they still had “high confidence” that some procurement had taken place (parts for an estimated 20 centrifuges), the assessment that North Korea was constructing a plant to pump out dozens of weapons was made at only the “mid-confidence level.”15 In other words, disagreement existed among the agencies. Imported aluminum tubes, U.S. officials now believe, were intended for other purposes (the tubes Iraqis imported before the war, turned out to be for rockets, not centrifuges); and there was no evidence of plant construction, operation, or enrichment.16
All these events led to an agreement that overcame the considerable difficulty of dealing with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il’s “hermit kingdom.” Suspicions still run high on both sides, full North Korean compliance is not assured and there are delays, but the overall progress is encouraging. Responding to a personal letter from President Bush in December 2007, North Korean officials confirmed that they would stick to the deal if America did the same. Despite efforts by neoconservatives to derail the agreement by using everything from the September 2007 Israeli attack on Syria to the December election of Lee Myung-bak as South Korea’s new president, all signs are that Bush is staying on the negotiations track. With persistence and the steady pressure provided by converging strategic realities in Northeast Asia, this time the deal might hold.
THE DEATH OF THE BUSH DOCTRINE
The success of the North Korea negotiations was part of a broader movement away from the regime change policy of the previous years. At the end of 2007, Newsweek summed up the conventional wisdom on U.S. nuclear policy with an arrow pointing down and the tag line “Busy with no-nukes Iraq and Iran, while nuclear Pakistan melts down.” Crude but correct, this was magazine-speak for the consensus view of proliferation experts: the policy of preventative war that began with the invasion of Iraq and that some wanted to continue to Syria and Iran had diverted attention and resources to secondary dangers while exacerbating existing nuclear threats. By focusing on and ineffectively dealing with states that someday might develop nuclear weapons, officials had allowed crises to develop that could put nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists in weeks.
The year 2007 may come to be viewed as the year the Bush Doctrine died. This policy, described in chapter 6, held that the greatest danger to U.S. national security came from the nexus of hostile regimes, terrorists, and nuclear technology. It posited that regime change was the answer to proliferation and that the military should be the leading tool of statecraft. Few believe that to be true today, given the experiences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the failures of intelligence in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, and the turmoil in Pakistan.
The decisive end to this doctrine may have come not in the streets of Baghdad but from the conclusions of a stunning National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) examining Iran’s nuclear program released in November 2007.
Just a month before, President George Bush had warned that the continuation by Iran of its nuclear weapons program could trigger a global war: “So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”17 The president’s policy, begun nearly six years earlier when he had declared Iran part of the “axis of evil,” seemed alive and well. His comments fanned the hopes of neoconservatives and the fears of pragmatists that the president would support a military attack on Iran.
On December 3, however, a new assessment representing the unanimous opinion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran had ended its dedicated nuclear weapons work four years earlier, in 2003. In an abrupt reversal of previous estimates (most recently in 2005), the intelligence agencies concluded that “Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005,” adding, “We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”18
The NIE presented a far more nuanced picture of both the nuclear program and the Iranian government’s intentions than previous estimates, directly contradicting the one-dimensional portrait painted by many conservatives, including those in the White House. The estimate conformed to the views of many independent experts. I concluded in early 2006 that Iran did not have a crash program to build a nuclear bomb19 and wrote later that year:
Based on what we now know, it is unlikely that Iran has a large, secret nuclear weapons program, though U.S. officials and many journalists talk as if they do. Rather, most evidence indicates that Iran has now embarked on a significant effort to acquire legally and openly all the technologies necessary for a nuclear power program, technologies that would enable it to also produce a nuclear weapon sometime in the next decade were it to decide to do so.
While it seems very likely that Iran did conduct weapons-related activities in the past, including possible acquisition of weapon designs and some limited research experiments, it also appears that the weapons work has ended, or, at least been suspended. . . . The evidence of past weapons work is largely circumstantial, but compelling. . . . This research seems to have slowed after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, proceeding in fits and starts during the 1990s. The major efforts seem to have turned to the publicly acknowledged programs, including resumption of construction of the reactor at Bushehr . . . and the construction of the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan with Chinese help.
With the exposure in late 2002 of Iran’s third major effort, the secret construction of uranium-enrichment facilities at Natanz, Iran was forced to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors access to most facilities and records. The IAEA work has now given us an extensive look at both the history and extent of the program. It may also have led to Iran’s current strategy: Cooperate with the inspections enough to provide information on current efforts, block investigations that could expose past, embarrassing weapons work, negotiate limits on the program that allow the assistance the country needs to both build power reactors and develop enrichment and reprocessing capabilities.20
The most significant finding in the NIE was not its judgment on the nature of the nuclear program but its judgment on the nature of the regime. After years of persistent arguments for war with Iran, the intelligence community now made the case for diplomatic engagement.
The case for military strikes was based in large part on the idea that Iran was lead by mad mullahs that could not be deterred and that posed as grave a threat as that of Nazi Germany. “If Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal,” argued Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, “there is no alternative to the actual use of military force—any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938.”21 Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said Iran was led by “religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days. The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age.”22 John Bolton warned, “When you have a regime that would be happier in the afterlife than in this life, this is not a regime that is subject to classic theories of deterrence. Retaliation for them, which would obliterate their society, doesn’t have the same negative connotations for their leadership.”23
The Iran NIE destroyed that caricature. “Tehran’s decisions,” according to the report, “are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.” The assessment pointed the way to a new U.S. policy: “Some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might—if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible—prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program.” 24
Similarly, with Center for American Progress senior analyst Andrew Grotto, I had argued in a March 2007 report on Iran, Contain and Engage, that current U.S. policies “fall short of fundamentally changing Iran’s cost/benefit calculus.”25 The report concluded:
The international community must constantly remind Iran of the potential benefits as well as the continued and escalating costs of its failure to comply with its nonproliferation obligations. Rather than pursue the faint hope that the organization of coercive measures will force Iran’s capitulation, our contain and engage strategy couples the pressures created by sanctions, diplomatic isolation and investment freezes with practical compromises and realizable security assurances to encourage Iran onto a verifiable, non-nuclear weapons path.26
Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative analyst and a fierce proponent of the war with Iraq, was quick to adjust to the post-NIE realities. He argued that with the military option gone and the ability to impose sanctions weakened, the time had arrived to talk directly to Tehran.
The Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran during its remaining time in office, or credibly threaten to do so, unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action. A military strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities was always fraught with risk. For the Bush administration, that option is gone. . . . With its policy tools broken, the Bush administration can sit around isolated for the next year. Or it can seize the initiative, and do the next administration a favor, by opening direct talks with Tehran. 27
Finally, the NIE represented a significant move toward reestablishing the professionalism and integrity of the threat-assessment process. This process had been badly warped by the establishment of alternative intelligence operations in the Department of Defense by former senior officials Donald Rumsfeld, Steven Cambone, and Douglas Feith, with the support of Vice President Cheney. Bypassing the established intelligence agencies, their Office of Special Plans and related groups had fed alternative—and false—intelligence directly to the White House in support of coercive policies directed toward Iraq, North Korea, and Iran. These officials brought great pressure on the agencies to agree with their views.
The report may signal that the conservative new directors of national intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency are insulating their analysts from the political pressures responsible for the previously distorted assessments. The report will also allow U.S. policymakers and the American public to engage in realistic debate over Iran’s uranium enrichment program, which without a doubt poses a significant challenge to U.S. interests in the Middle East and elsewhere.
A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH
Reversing the spread of nuclear weapons cannot be achieved in a vacuum. As we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, any serious policy approach must start with an appreciation for the difficult situation confronting such an effort. The New York Times concluded on the last day of 2007:
Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.28
But it is not all bleak. Although strong anti-American currents are swirling around the world and real enemies will use them to harm the United States, there remains, says Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naim, an equally strong international demand for the United States to play a larger role in world affairs:
Of course, the America that the world wants back is not the one that preemptively invades potential enemies, bullies allies or disdains international law. The demand is for an America that rallies other nations prone to sitting on the fence while international crises are boiling out of control; for a superpower that comes up with innovative initiatives to tackle the great challenges of the day, such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and violent Islamist fundamentalism. The demand is for an America that enforces the rules that facilitate international commerce and works effectively to stabilize an accident-prone global economy. Naturally, the world also wants a superpower willing to foot the bill with a largess that no other nation can match.29
The next president will have to marshal all the international help possible. George Perkovich, vice president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was one of the authors of Universal Compliance (cited on pp. 136–137 and 153–154), a study published in 2005 that argues for a strategy based on the principle that nations that possess nuclear weapons must show that tougher nonproliferation rules not only benefit the powerful but also constrain the powerful. He updated the report in June 2007, saying:
Events of the past two years have deepened this conviction. Terrorists and hostile regimes attempting to acquire or use nuclear weapons can be stopped only by coordinated international efforts to strengthen and enforce rules. To obtain this cooperation, the states that hold nuclear weapons for status and security must provide much greater equity to those that do not.
This strategic imperative is difficult for the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel to accept, but they will face a much more dangerous world if they do not. If their intentions are not clearly to seek a world without nuclear weapons, a number of other states will seek equity through proliferation, while a greater number will look the other way, thinking that the original nuclear weapon states deserve the competition.30
One example is the race that has now begun among Arab countries to match Iran’s nuclear capabilities. In 2007, almost a dozen Muslim nations declared their interest in developing nuclear energy programs. This unprecedented desire for nuclear power is all the more disturbing because it is paired with the unseemly rush of salesmen to supply the coveted technology.
While U.S. officials were reaching a new agreement with India in 2007 that dismantled nuclear-proliferation barriers in order to sell nuclear technology to that nation, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France signed a deal with Libya on nuclear cooperation between the two countries and agreed to help the United Arab Emirates launch a civilian nuclear program that will begin with the construction of two nuclear power reactors in the tiny state. Indicating that this could be just the beginning of a major sales-and-supply effort, Sarkozy declared his interest in helping both Saudi Arabia and Egypt build nuclear reactors and said that the West should trust Arab states with nuclear technology.31 Sarkozy had a point: no one can deny Arab states access to nuclear technology, especially since they are acquiring it under existing international rules and agreeing to inspections by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency. But is this new interest really about meeting demands for electric power and desalinization plants?
There is only one nuclear power reactor in the entire Middle East—the one under construction in Bushehr, Iran. (Israel has a research reactor, as do several other Middle Eastern states.) In all of Africa, there are only two, both in South Africa. Suddenly, after multiple energy crises over the 63 years of the nuclear age, the countries that control over one-fourth of the world’s oil supplies are investing in nuclear power programs. This is not about energy; it is a nuclear hedge against Iran.
King Abdullah of Jordan admitted as much in a January 2007 interview: “The rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. . . . After this summer everybody’s going for nuclear programs.” He was referring to the war in Lebanon during the summer of 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah, perceived in the region as evidence of Iran’s growing clout. Other leaders are not as frank in public, but convey similar sentiments in private.
Egypt and Turkey, two of Iran’s main rivals, are leading the nuclear surge. Both have flirted with nuclear weapons programs, and both have announced ambitious plans for the construction of nuclear power reactors. Not to be outdone, Saudi Arabia and the five other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates) at the end of 2006 “commissioned a joint study on the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.” In January 2007, Algeria and Russia signed an agreement on nuclear development, with France, South Korea, China, and the United States also jockeying for nuclear sales to this region. Syria announced that it, too, wants to explore nuclear power, as did Jordan and Morocco. In early 2008, Abu Dhabi solicited bids from several large French companies to buy two modern, third-generation nuclear reactors.32 In early 2008, Turkey gently dropped the other nuclear shoe, quietly sending feelers to gauge American reaction to its planned construction of a uranium-enrichment center—the same type of operation that the United States opposes in Iran.33
Finally, the Arab League provided an overall umbrella for these initiatives when, at the end of its summit meeting in March 2007, it “called on the Arab states to expand the use of peaceful nuclear technology in all domains serving continuous development.” Perhaps these states are truly motivated to join the “nuclear renaissance” promoted by the nuclear power industry and to counter global warming. But the main message to the West from moderate Arab and Muslim leaders seems political, not industrial or ecological. “We can’t trust you,” they are saying. “You are failing to contain Iran and we need to prepare.”
To counter this surge, nations that sell nuclear technology should be just as energetic in promoting the resolution of regional conflicts as they are in promoting their products. They should work seriously to create a guaranteed source of fuel for any new reactors, if they proceed, either by the construction of multinational uranium-enrichment facilities in the Middle East (favored by Saudi Arabia), or another area (suggested by Russia) or by the establishment of a “virtual fuel” bank, an idea proposed by Mohammad ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA. This would require building the unity of the United States, western Europe, Russia, and the regional states to effectively contain the Iranian program. Finally, it means that engaging with Tehran is even more crucial to halt not only the Iranian nuclear program, but also those that will soon start to materialize to counter it.
MOVEMENT TOWARD A
NEW STRATEGY ACCELERATES
Prospects for the adoption of policies aimed to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons increased during 2007, as the world entered a period of rapid political transition. By early 2009, four of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia) will have new leaders who were elected since mid-2007. Other key states, including Iran and Israel, may as well, while Germany, Italy, Australia, South Korea, and Japan have already elected new executives. International organizations, too, will refresh their leadership, with a new secretary general now installed at the United Nations and possibly a new director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2009.
Rarely have the political stars realigned so dramatically. The photo of the participants in the G8 summit in 2009 will likely not include a single leader who was present at the 2006 summit, save for Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada. This is a unique opportunity to advance new policies that can dramatically reduce and even eliminate many of the dangers that have kept political leaders and security officials worried about a nuclear 9/11.
Stepping up to the challenge, several leading candidates for the presidency of the United States offered sweeping proposals for nuclear security in 2007 and 2008. On the Republican side, former governor Mitt Romney had the most to say on the issue. Before suspending his campaign, he promised he would appoint a senior ambassador to lead efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism, including accelerating and expanding efforts to secure global nuclear stockpiles to the “gold standard.” He also favored creating an international fuel bank to back up commercial supplies and criminalizing nuclear trafficking to equate it with genocide and war crimes. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) devoted just one paragraph to proliferation in a Foreign Affairs article that focused on stricter export controls, harsher punishments for proliferators, and increased budgets for nuclear inspections.34
On the Democratic side, former Senator John Edwards (D-NC), Governor Bill Richardson (D-NM), and Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) promised to lead efforts not just to reduce but to eliminate nuclear weapons. Obama had the most developed plan, based in part on his work with Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) and a bill he introduced with Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE). In a speech delivered in October 2007, he endorsed a plan to secure all loose nuclear materials during his first term as president; negotiate dramatic reductions in U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles; negotiate a verifiable global ban on the production of fissile materials; create an international nuclear fuel bank; increase funding for IAEA inspections and safeguards; seek a global ban on all intermediate-range missiles; and increase the current warning time that keep thousands of nuclear warheads ready to launch within 15 minutes, reducing the risk that the weapons would be used by accident or misperception.
Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) promised similar presidential attention to preventing nuclear terror and to shrinking global arsenals. In an article published in Foreign Affairs at the end of the year, Clinton lamented the failure to build on the profound international unity created after the 9/11 attacks. She promised that she will not let her opportunity slip away, pledging to negotiate an end to the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea; secure all loose nuclear materials during her first term; establish a nuclear fuel bank; negotiate an accord to verifiably reduce U.S. and Russian arsenals; and, significantly, seek Senate approval of the nuclear test ban by 2009, the tenth anniversary of the Senate’s initial rejection of the treaty. This last step, Senator Clinton said, “would enhance the United States’ credibility when demanding that other nations refrain from testing.”35
Summarizing this trend among the Democratic candidates, former National Security staff member Ivo Daldaar and former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency director John Holum, two top advisors to Obama, wrote that the key was for the next administration to make the commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons the “organizing principle of [its] nuclear weapons policies”:
There is much that the United States can do to lift the dark nuclear shadow over the world. It can sharply reduce its nuclear stockpile to 1,000 weapons or less, if Russia agrees to go down to the same level. It can eliminate tactical nuclear weapons to underscore that it understands that a nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon, no matter its size, yield, range, or mode of delivery. It can agree never to produce highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons purposes, and accept the need for intrusive verification if other states agree to end such production as well. It can commit never again to test a nuclear device, and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Compared with existing policies, this set of initiatives would be like night and day. There is and likely will be some conservative opposition to these plans. In October 2007, in reaction to an effort by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to condition the production of the so-called Reliable Replacement Warhead on a sense of the Senate provision that the nuclear test ban treaty should be ratified, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) circulated a letter, signed by 38 senators, who successfully opposed the provision.36 Republican presidential candidates did not address these issues in detail in 2007, but seem to have kept their positions close to this conservative line, with several candidates during the Republican debates endorsing the possible use of nuclear weapons against Iran.
However, in Congress there was some Republican support for these new policies, as demonstrated by the legislation (SR 1977) introduced by Senators Obama and Hagel, which would authorize the policies detailed by Obama in his speech, plus others. Most significantly, the bill would continue “the United States moratorium on nuclear test explosions, initiating a bipartisan process to achieve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, working to secure ratification by other key countries, and fully supporting United States commitments to fund the international monitoring system to help detect and deter possible nuclear explosions by other countries.” The legislation also specifically endorsed “pursuing and concluding an agreement to verifiably halt the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons.”
Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) also cooperated on SR 1914, the Nuclear Policy and Posture Review Act of 2007, requiring that a comprehensive nuclear weapons policy and posture review be submitted to Congress by the administration and prohibiting funding for any new nuclear warhead development until such reviews were completed. Their bill would require that the review examine “the role of nuclear forces in United States military strategy, planning and programming” and the “policy requirements and objectives for the United States to maintain a safe, reliable and credible nuclear deterrence posture,” among other issues. Similar legislation passed in the House and was added to the defense authorization bill by the chairwoman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-CA). It includes a provision creating an independent commission to examine U.S. nuclear policy.
The year 2007 ended with bipartisan congressional actions that generally had the effect of blocking the production of new types of nuclear weapons and the construction of antimissile bases in Europe, reducing funding for these antimissile programs overall, mandating a new nuclear policy review, and providing funding for an international fuel bank.
The final factor in the movement toward a new policy is the critical role of nongovernmental organizations. Many groups in 2007 were working to provide the policies that new national leaders could adopt. “With this leadership change,” former United Nations under-secretary-general for disarmament affairs Jayantha Dhanapala told a February 2007 conference in New York, “it is for us in civil society to try to urge new perspectives and new opportunities for them to seize so that we all make the right choices at the right time.”37
Analysts at over a dozen institutes at the beginning of 2008 were perfecting just such proposals and promoting their ideas at conferences and in reports, testimonies, blogs, interviews, and films. There is broad agreement in progressive and moderate policy circles on what must be done, as demonstrated by the report “Reducing Nuclear Threats and Preventing Nuclear Terrorism,” released in October 2007 by a group of former officials and military officers. The group was composed of more than 30 senior experts, including Madeleine Albright, Graham Allison, Samuel Berger, Wesley Clark, Thomas Daschle, Michèle Flournoy, Robert Gallucci, William Perry, John Podesta, Susan Rice, John Shalikashvili, Wendy Sherman, and me. The report proposed a consensus strategy for reducing all the nuclear threats—one that would work seriously and systematically to prevent a nuclear 9/11, stop new states from going nuclear, deter any state from launching a nuclear strike on the United States, and restore American leadership to the broad network of nations willing to work toward reducing nuclear perils.38
Key recommendations include many of the steps noted earlier, plus developing conventional weapons that would eliminate any need to resort to nuclear weapons in response to nonnuclear attacks, delaying the production of any new types of nuclear weapons until there is a comprehensive nuclear policy review, determining that any antimissile systems actually work before deploying them, and postponing plans for antimissile bases in Europe until there is a reliable assessment of the threat and the technology.
All these efforts are propelled by a bipartisan appeal from Republicans George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and Democrats William Perry and Sam Nunn that was published in their January 4, 2007, Wall Street Journal op-ed, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” During 2007 and 2008, these four veteran Cold Warriors developed their article into an ongoing campaign with conferences, testimonies, publications, and efforts to enlist the support of all former secretaries of state and defense. They want the United States to recommit to the vision of eliminating nuclear weapons and marry that vision to an action plan that includes steep reductions in nuclear arsenals, the ratification of the test ban treaty, and taking all weapons off hair-trigger alert. They thus created substantial political space for many officials to embrace more ambitious agendas than they had.
Nancy Reagan sent a personal letter of endorsement to the group’s conference in October 2007, and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger provided a dramatic speech, read by former secretary of state Shultz when the governor was prevented from attending by a wild fire emergency. He said, in part:
The words that this audience knows so well, the words that President Kennedy spoke during the Cold War, have regained their urgency: “The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.” Here in California we still have levees that were built a hundred years ago. These levees are an imminent threat to the well-being of this state and its people. It would be only a matter of time before a disaster strikes. But we’re not waiting until such a disaster.
We in California have taken action to protect our people and our economy from devastation. Neither can this nation nor the world wait to act until there is a nuclear disaster. . . . You have a big vision, a vision as big as humanity—to free the world of nuclear weapons. . . . I want to help. Let me know how I can use my power and influence as governor to further your vision. Because my heart is with you. My support is firm. My door is open.
On January 15, 2008, the four published a new op-ed, announcing that their initiative had garnered the support of seven former secretaries of state, five former secretaries of defense, and five former national security advisers—almost everyone still living who had served in these posts since the Kennedy administration. The list includes Madeleine Albright, Richard V. Allen, James A. Baker III, Samuel R. Berger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, Warren Christopher, William Cohen, Lawrence Eagleburger, Melvin Laird, Anthony Lake, Robert McFarlane, Robert McNamara and Colin Powell. (Kissinger and Powell served as both national security advisers and secretaries of state.)
Thus, for the first time since the initial efforts of the Truman administration in the 1940s and the nonproliferation programs of the Kennedy administration in the 1960s, a serious movement to eliminate nuclear weapons has developed not from the political left but from the bipartisan, moderate middle. This promises to give the movement greater political importance and policy relevance than previous efforts—even the broad-based Nuclear Freeze Movement of the 1980s—had. It may be possible for the first time since the beginning of the Cold War to move seriously toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. It is not clear if the goal can be reached, but the process alone could secure long-sought nuclear security goals.
CONCLUSION
These reports and efforts are harbingers of a new policy moment. There is a greater chance to achieve dramatic, historic change in global nuclear policy now than at any other time in the past 15 years. Those involved in these policy initiatives believe that a world with an increasing number of nuclear weapon states is not inevitable. Neither is a nuclear attack by terrorists. Both can be prevented, but only if their prevention becomes an overriding national priority and only with strong U.S. leadership in international threat reduction and nonproliferation efforts.
The prospects of that developing over the next few years are already encouraging. The next president of the United States—whether a Republican or Democrat—will likely have a decidedly different nonproliferation policy than the failed strategy attempted over the past few years. There are already signs that other governments are willing to develop and promote new initiatives, such as the remarkable speech delivered in June 2007 by Margaret Beckett, then the British foreign secretary, at the Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference—at that time the most dramatic reaffirmation of the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons presented by any senior official of a state that possesses nuclear weapons. This speech was approved by incoming prime minister Gordon Brown and provided both vision and practicality. Beckett said, in part:
When it comes to building this new impetus for global nuclear disarmament, I want the UK to be at the forefront of both the thinking and the practical work; to be, as it were, a disarmament laboratory. As far as new thinking goes, the International Institute of Strategic Studies is planning an in-depth study to help determine the requirements for the eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons. We will participate in that study and provide funding for one of their workshops focusing on some of the crucial technical questions in this area. The study and subsequent workshops will offer a thorough and systematic analysis of what a commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons means in practice.39
Achieving a world free from nuclear weapons is—as even the most ardent proponents admit—a daunting task. By marrying this vision to pragmatic steps, however, it should be possible to implement measures that can restore the lost momentum of previous years; concretely reduce the risks of nuclear terrorism, nuclear war, and nuclear use; and both rebuild the global consensus to prevent the emergence of nuclear weapon states and drastically reduce the arsenals of the current weapon states. As Foreign Secretary Beckett said: “My commitment to that vision, truly visionary in its day, of a world free of nuclear weapons is undimmed. And although we in this room may not see the end of that road, we can take those first further steps down it. For any generation that would be a noble calling. For ours, it is a duty.”
Beckett’s call was picked up by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a January 21, 2008, address in India:
We must send a powerful signal to all members of the international community that the race for more and bigger stockpiles of nuclear destruction is over. The expiry of the remaining US-Russia arms deals, the continued existence of these large arsenals, the stalemates on a fissile material cut-off treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty must all be addressed.
And let me say today Britain is prepared to use our expertise to help determine the requirements for the verifiable elimination of nuclear warheads. And I pledge that in the run-up to the Non Proliferation Treaty review conference in 2010 we will be at the forefront of the international campaign to accelerate disarmament amongst possessor states, to prevent proliferation to new states, and to ultimately achieve a world that is free from nuclear weapons.40
At the beginning of 2008, the outlines of a transformational nuclear policy were emerging. To many it seemed that the policy deadlocks of the past few years could be broken. Few of those engaged in the efforts were certain of success, but all were committed. Some were veterans of previous campaigns; others, new recruits. They were all ready to follow the entreaty of Shakespeare’s Henry V, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”