Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons

After the 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin crisis that same year, President Truman ordered an increase in weapons production. By late 1949, the United States had more than 200 atomic bombs. When the Soviets tested their first fission bomb that November, Truman raised the stakes, accelerating a program to build the “Super,” or hydrogen bomb.¹ David Lilienthal, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), wrote in his diary, “More and better bombs. Where will this lead . . . is difficult to see. We keep saying, ‘We have no other course’; what we should say is ‘We are not bright enough to see any other course.’ ”²

Many of the scientists responsible for the first nuclear weapon, including Robert Oppenheimer and James Conant, strongly opposed the “Super.” The AEC had asked for the advice of its General Advisory Committee on the entire nuclear weapons program. Oppenheimer and Conant joined in the unanimous opinion of the eight-member group against the hydrogen bomb. They believed it to be a weapon of genocide: “The use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives; it is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of extermination of civilian populations.”³ Even if the Soviets developed the H-bomb, they argued, the United States could deter its use with atomic weapons.

The scientists’ views did not prevail. Albert Einstein wrote in March 1950, “The idea of achieving security through national armaments is, at the present state of military technique, a disastrous illusion. . . . The armament race between the USA and the USSR, originally supposed to be a preventive measure, assumes hysterical character.”⁴

The Super project inaugurated the design and testing of the advanced weapon that now composes the large majority of modern arsenals. Fission bombs create temperatures equal to those of the surface of the sun, but fusion bombs truly are the equivalent of bringing a small piece of the sun down to earth. The energy of all stars (including our own sun) comes not from the splitting of atoms, but from their fusion. The enormous gravity and high temperatures within stars fuses atoms together by overcoming the electromagnetic resistance that keeps them apart. Each fusion releases enormous energies, including the sunlight that makes possible life on earth.

The smaller the electrical charge of the atom, the lower the temperature needed to fuse the atoms. Thus, the process in the sun and other stars begins with the fusing of the lightest atoms, hydrogen, into helium, then continues crushing heavier atoms together until they can no longer overcome the resistance of the created atoms. For the sun, this process has been continuing for about 4.5 billion years and will end some 5–6 billion years hence when most of the its atoms have been fused up the chain into carbon, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, and sulfur. Massive stars, many times the size of our sun, can synthesize atoms all the way to iron before collapsing in a supernova explosion whose shockwave forges trace amounts of the heavier elements up to and including uranium and scatters all these elements into the universe. Every one of these atoms found on earth was created by this nuclear synthesis. The iron in our blood came from a supernova.

This science was now applied to weapons. Fusion weapons have two or more separate nuclear components in the same device that are ignited in stages—the energy released in the exploding fission “primary” is used to compress and ignite nuclear reactions in the separate fusion “secondary,” vastly increasing the explosive yield. The energy released in these weapons is generated primarily by the fusion of isotopes of hydrogen, hence the name, hydrogen bomb. A hydrogen atom normally has one proton and one electron. The hydrogen isotopes best suited for fusion are known as deuterium (one proton, one neutron, and one electron) and tritium (one proton, two neutrons, and one electron). Fusion devices are also called thermonuclear weapons, because of the high temperature required to fuse these light isotopes together.⁵

The United States tested the first hydrogen device in the southern Pacific Ocean on November 1, 1952. Whereas the first fission nuclear explosion—the Trinity device—had a force of 20,000 metric tons of TNT (that is, 20 kilotons), the first hydrogen explosion had a force of 10,400,000 metric tons of TNT (10.4 megatons).

America’s leaders were enthusiastic about both nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Expert witnesses told Congress that nuclear energy was the miracle power of the immediate future. They predicted atomic-powered cars, airplanes, and homes. They said that nuclear reactors would make electricity so cheap that we would no longer meter it. Winston Churchill, once again prime minister, envisioned atomic energy as “a perennial fountain of world prosperity.”⁶ President Dwight Eisenhower also believed in the promise of nuclear energy, but was more worried than many of his subordinates were about the dangers of nuclear weapons. He sought a way to promote peaceful use of the atom while also restricting military use. On December 8, 1953, Eisenhower stepped to the podium of the United Nations to unveil his Atoms for Peace program. The former general wrote in his diary two days after the speech that he was inspired by “the clear conviction that the world was racing toward catastrophe,” and that he had to act.⁷

At the time of his speech the United States had detonated 42 nuclear test explosions and military leaders were beginning to integrate the much more powerful H-bombs into their operational forces. Eisenhower explained to the General Assembly, “A single air group, whether afloat or landbased, can now deliver to any reachable target a destructive cargo exceeding in power all the bombs that fell on Britain in all of World War II.”

But the Soviet Union was now also testing and deploying nuclear weapons, as was the United Kingdom. Eisenhower warned, “the knowledge now possessed by several nations will eventually be shared by others—possibly all others.”⁸ While countries were already beginning to build warning and defensive systems against nuclear air attack, he cautioned, “Let no one think that the expenditure of vast sums for weapons and systems of defense can guarantee absolute safety for the cities and citizens of any nation. The awful arithmetic of the atomic bomb does not permit any such easy solution.”⁹

Eisenhower proposed the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to promote the peaceful uses of atomic energy while the nuclear powers “began to diminish the potential destructive power of the world’s atomic stockpiles.” By the time the IAEA opened for membership in 1956, the disarmament components of the original vision were gone, as was the idea of the IAEA as a uranium bank that would equitably receive and redistribute fissile material. This hope disappeared with Soviet reluctance to contribute to the uranium bank, with American and Soviet nuclear arms policy, and with the strong views in Congress that the United States should be the one to decide who would receive its fissile material and nuclear technology.

But the promotion of atomic energy remained, now through bilateral agreements between each nuclear power (the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union), and whomever they chose to provide with nuclear assistance (most typically with research reactors, but also with power reactors, fissile material, heavy water, collaborative research efforts, and more). Eisenhower’s initiative has divided historians into two opposing schools of thought.

The first group—the proponents of the program—argue that nuclear technology was already beginning to spread, and that Atoms for Peace was the only way for responsible nations like the United States to regulate that spread in an attempt to ensure that it would remain peaceful. Former chairman of the IAEA Board of Governors Bertrand Goldschmidt believes “the Atoms for Peace policy has contributed to the slowing down of horizontal proliferation . . . The acceptance of a system of safeguards as a normal condition of international nuclear commerce is without any doubt the major achievement of the Atoms for Peace program.”¹⁰

The second group’s view is just the opposite. From their perspective, Atoms for Peace was driven by a budding nuclear industry concerned that it might lose market share to the British, French, and Soviets, and by Cold War strategists who believed that, as a 1955 National Security Council directive put it, sharing nuclear technology would “strengthen American world leadership and disprove the Communists’ propaganda charges that the United States is solely concerned with the destructive uses of the atom.” Atoms for Peace spread nuclear technology too quickly and too recklessly, they contend. Not only was nuclear technology aggressively promoted, but an acceptable safeguards regime was not even put into place until the late 1960s. They point to the countries—such as India, Israel, Argentina, and Brazil—that benefited from the program and used it as a springboard to build, or attempt to build, nuclear weapons. As Leonard Weiss, a former Senate staff expert on the program, put it, “It is legitimate to ask whether Atoms for Peace has accelerated proliferation by helping some nations achieve more advanced arsenals earlier than would have otherwise been the case. The jury has been in for some time on this question, and the answer is yes.”¹¹

While Atoms for Peace was promoting nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, the U.S. military was equipping their troops with thousands of nuclear weapons, adapting them for use in nuclear depth charges, nuclear torpedoes, nuclear mines, nuclear artillery, and even a nuclear bazooka. (This infantry weapon, called the Davy Crockett, would fire a nuclear warhead about half a mile.) Both the United States and the Soviet Union developed strategies to fight and win a nuclear war, created vast nuclear weapon complexes, and began deploying intercontinental ballistic missiles and fleets of ballistic missile submarines.

The effective abandonment of international control efforts and the race to build a numerical and then a qualitative nuclear advantage resulted in the American nuclear arsenal mushrooming from just under 400 weapons in 1950 to over 20,000 by 1960. The Soviet arsenal likewise jumped from 5 warheads in 1950 to roughly 1,600 in 1960. The United States was ahead but afraid. As the atomic scientists had warned in the Franck report, numerical superiority did not bring security. Tensions were high, and confrontations in Berlin (1961) and Cuba (1961 and 1962) put the world on edge.

Baby boomers remember this era vividly. Most towns tested their air raid sirens and civil defense emergency broadcast radio stations at noon every Saturday. Schools conducted regular “duck and cover” drills and brought students down to basements stocked with barrels of water and cartons of crackers. The new shopping plazas opening up in the growing suburbs regularly showed in their parking lots models of prefabricated fallout shelters that could be buried in the backyard. Nuclear fears found artistic expression in books such as On the Beach and movies including Fail-Safe and most famously, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Russia’s launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, in 1957 brought home a chilling new reality: atomic bombs could now be carried by long-range missiles that could destroy cities within thirty minutes of launching. Anyone who was a child of that era can remember at least one moment when they were safely riding a bike or tucked in bed and the sound of a plane or a siren made them suddenly think, “This might be it. The Russians are bombing us.”

Moreover, the threat no longer came from just two states. The United Kingdom had joined the nuclear club in 1952, France in 1960, and China was not far off (they would test their first atomic weapon in 1964). In 1958, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that, if things proceeded as they had over the previous ten years, then as many as sixteen states could have nuclear weapons by 1968.¹²

American leaders were thus faced with the crucial question of how to protect the United States in the face of such a severe threat. Build more weapons or try to climb down? For John F. Kennedy, the answer was clear. In September 1961 the new president said that “the risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race.”¹³

During the presidential campaign, Kennedy had gone after his opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, from the right. He criticized the Eisenhower-Nixon administration for failing to protect American national security from the rising nuclear threats. In their third presidential debate in October 1960, Kennedy said the administration had not done enough to end nuclear testing and stop the spread of nuclear weapons. “There are indications, because of new inventions,” he said, “that ten, fifteen or twenty nations will have a nuclear capacity—including Red China—by the end of the presidential office in 1964.”¹⁴ While offering his support for an increase in conventional forces and production of the new Minuteman and Polaris nuclear missiles, he went on:

One of my disagreements with the present administration has been that I don’t feel a real effort has been made on this very sensitive subject, not only of nuclear controls, but also of general disarmament. Less than a hundred people have been working throughout the entire federal government on this subject. . . . If I have anything to do with it, the next administration will make one last great effort to provide for control of nuclear testing, control of nuclear weapons. If possible, control of outer space free from weapons and also to begin again the subject of general disarmament levels.¹⁵

Kennedy was realistic. He balanced his disarmament proposals with programs that modernized the U.S. nuclear forces (and in the campaign accused his opponent—falsely—of allowing a “missile gap” to develop with the Soviet Union). The combined approach worked. As president, Kennedy kept his promises and worked forcefully for ways to reduce the nuclear threats. He created the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency to pursue his vision and to provide some balance in national policy discussions.

If he had any doubts about the urgency of reducing nuclear dangers, these were dispelled by the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The discovery that the Soviet Union had placed missiles in Cuba capable of hitting the United States set off a diplomatic and military confrontation that terrified the world. Former Kennedy speech writer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled the crisis in 2006:

The Cuban missile crisis was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in all human history. Never before had two contending powers possessed between them the technical capacity to destroy the planet. Had there been exponents of preventive war in the White House, there probably would have been nuclear war.¹⁶

Only decades later, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opportunity for the participants in the crisis to sit down and discuss these events, did previously secret and terrifying information come to light. We now know what Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs did not know then: the Soviet Union had already placed over 100 nuclear warheads in Cuba and that the submarines escorting the cargo ships toward the American blockade of Cuba were armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes.¹⁷ Any attack on either the ships or Cuba would have almost certainly unleashed an atomic reaction.

After the crisis, relieved that the United States and Russia had avoided nuclear war (however narrowly), Kennedy was determined never to come so close to the precipice again. He renewed the stalled Eisenhower administration negotiations for a Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and began pursuit of a global nonproliferation pact. He signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1963, banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater, calling it a “first step” in a series of threat reduction measures he hoped would follow.¹⁸ “The weapons of war must be abolished,” he had told the United Nations in his first year in office, “before they abolish us.”¹⁹ He was now backing up his words with actions.

Richard Nixon had some criticisms of the NPT while campaigning against Hubert Humphrey in 1968, but as president secured its ratification by the Congress and signed it into force in a Rose Garden ceremony in March 1970. “Let us trust that we will look back,” he said, “and say that this was one of the first and major steps in that process in which the nations of the world moved from a period of confrontation to a period of negotiation and a period of lasting peace.”²⁰ The treaty went into effect in 1970 with almost one hundred nations as original signatories.

The treaty has become a mainstay of the international security system, enjoying near universal acceptance, with almost every nation in the world today a member of the treaty regime (India, Pakistan, and Israel remain outside the treaty and North Korea left the agreement). The basic pact is simple: 183 nations have pledged never to acquire nuclear weapons; in addition, the five nuclear powers recognized by the treaty (the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China) are all members and have committed to reduce and eventually eliminate their arsenals. Those states that have nuclear technology also promise to sell it to those states that do not as long as the receiving countries pledge to use it for peaceful purposes only. This system regulates international commerce in nuclear power reactors, nuclear fuel, and nuclear technology for agricultural or medicinal purposes under a system of safeguards and inspections run by the IAEA.

Initially proposed by the Irish delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in 1958 as a way to stem the arms race, the treaty emerged from bilateral negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union on preventing the transfer of nuclear weapons to states that did not already possess them. It was not until the rest of the world got involved with the negotiations that its most contentious provisions—those calling for sharing nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and for the gradual elimination of the nuclear weapon states’ arsenals—were debated and finally accepted. As former Atomic Energy Commission chairman (and discoverer of plutonium) Glenn Seaborg has written, “The nonnuclear countries were not about to accept without resistance a pact that they believed to be highly discriminatory against them . . . the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves in an unaccustomed alliance as they sought to fend off the demands of the nonnuclear-weapon countries.”²¹

The treaty reflected the international realities of the times. Alliance security arrangements, including the promise that the United States would extend a “nuclear umbrella” over Europe and Japan, undoubtedly made it easier for several industrial nations to abandon their nuclear weapons programs and embrace the treaty. The Soviet Union simply enforced nonproliferation on its alliance system. The United States was not averse to using strong-arm tactics to convince, for example, Taiwan and South Korea to abandon nuclear weapons research and join the treaty regime. In many developing nations, nuclear ambitions ran into the formidable financial and technological obstacles to both nuclear power and nuclear weapon development. (These issues are discussed further in chapter 4.)

These financial, technical, and alliance factors were not in themselves sufficient barriers to proliferation. These same factors were present in the 1960s as well as in the 1970s. But before the signing of the NPT, proliferation was on the rise; afterward it was on the decline. The critical importance of the NPT is that it provided the international legal mechanism and established the global diplomatic norm that gave nations a clear path to a non-nuclear future. It captured rather than created the consensus view developing within many nations that their security was better assured without nuclear weapons than with them. Sweden, for example, officially announced its decision to forgo a nuclear weapons program in 1968, not because of the treaty but after an extensive domestic debate about the security impact of an independent Swedish arsenal.

Over time, however, the treaty established an international standard—seeking or selling nuclear weapons has become something done only by pariah states on the periphery of the international system. “The basic purpose of the NPT was to provide another choice,” explains George Bunn, a principal member of the U.S. NPT negotiating team, “to establish a common nonproliferation norm that would assure cooperating nuclear weapon ‘have-not’ countries that if they did not acquire nuclear weapons, their neighbors and rivals would not do so either.”²²

A broadly shared perception that one’s national interest is better served by not possessing nuclear weapons is thus the foundation of the international non-proliferation regime. . . . [T]he former Axis nations had no choice in the matter but since then their enforced renunciation has become firmly embedded in national policy. In some cases renunciation presupposed that the USA would shield them with her nuclear umbrella but even that link has now lost most of its relevance. In many small developing countries nuclear abstention may simply reflect technical inability. But in several countries the decision to forego nuclear weapons came after prolonged internal debate as in Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Egypt, and Spain. Even in Australia there were once powerful voices in favor of nuclear weapons.²³

Within the United States, the NPT was a bipartisan effort that produced a measurable increase in national and international security. The NPT and the test ban proved the substantive link between controlling existing nuclear arsenals and controlling the spread of nuclear weapons to other nations. Though hotly debated today, it was clearly recognized at the time. In 1958, when only three countries had nuclear weapons, a now declassified National Intelligence Estimate noted:

A US-USSR agreement provisionally banning or limiting nuclear tests would have a restraining effect on independent production of nuclear weapons by fourth countries. However, the inhibiting effects of a test moratorium would be transitory unless further progress in disarmament—aimed at effective controls and reduction of stockpiles—were evident.²⁴

Subsequent NIEs reaffirmed this linkage. The first assessment done during Kennedy’s presidency, in September 1961, looked at fifteen countries that might develop nuclear weapons programs during that decade. It judged seven as unlikely to do so in the next few years, but warned, “These attitudes and views could change in the coming years with changing circumstances, e.g., if it became increasingly clear that progress on international disarmament was unlikely. . . .”²⁵

Four years later, President Johnson’s Gilpatric Committee report,²⁶ primarily authored by National Security Council staffer Spurgeon Keeny, concurred with the sentiment of the earlier NIEs: “It is unlikely that others can be induced to abstain indefinitely from acquiring nuclear weapons if the Soviet Union and the United States continue in a nuclear arms race.”²⁷

The collective successes of the test ban, the NPT, and other disarmament efforts had an impact on the likelihood of new nations pursuing nuclear weapons. NIEs in 1963, 1964, and 1966 confirmed a steady decrease in the number of “likely” or “possible” new nuclear states. The danger then (as now) was that increased national arsenals and decisions by new states to “go nuclear” would lead to a cascade of proliferation. For example, the 1958 assessment judged five states as likely to develop weapons, four as possible, and seven as possible but unlikely. But if disarmament efforts faltered and if several states did go nuclear, then the estimate changed. Many more states might take the leap. These were not “outlaw states,” but developed nations including Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, West Germany, and Japan.

By the signing of the NPT, even though France and China did test nuclear weapons, only two other states were of real concern, India and Israel. The arms control efforts of the previous ten years had made a tangible difference. Proliferation no longer seemed inevitable. The diplomatic dam held.

The first and greatest success of the NPT is that only these nine countries are believed to have nuclear weapons: the NPT-permitted P-5 plus India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Without the NPT, I believe that 30–40 countries would now have nuclear weapons. That would have included at least these nine plus Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan (China), Ukraine, the former Yugoslavia—all of which have had nuclear research programs or other nuclear activities. If, without the NPT, these countries had continued their research to the point of making nuclear weapons, some of their neighbors and rivals would no doubt have sought nuclear weapons as well.²⁸

These nonproliferation victories were not so obvious or desirable to some. While popular with the public, they were fiercely opposed by Cold War hawks. The limited test ban was a particularly tough fight, and rhetoric was at fever pitch. Phyllis Schlafly, a strong voice for conservative Republicans, told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1963, “If the Senate approves the Moscow treaty, then America—the last, best hope of mankind—may be at the mercy of the dictators who already control a third of the world.”²⁹ Senator William Fulbright (D-AR) chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that recommended the treaty’s approval. But Senator John Stennis (D-MS) held his own hearings and his subcommittee report opposed the ban on atmospheric and underwater tests, citing the need for nuclear dominance. “Soviet secrecy and duplicity require that this nation possess a substantial margin of superiority in both the quality and quantity of its implements of defense,” the report said. It claimed that the test ban posed “serious—perhaps even formidable—military and technological disadvantages to the U.S.” and further, that it would block the ability to produce “the highest quality of weapons of which our science and technology are capable.”³⁰

A few years later, opponents of the NPT were equally adamant. Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) opposed the treaty because it would “prevent the modernization of armaments in the Western European countries, thereby removing a counterforce to Soviet designs.”³¹ Stennis called it “unilateral disarmament.”³²

Despite the conservative criticisms, the success of the NPT and improving relations with the Soviet Union encouraged other nonproliferation efforts in the 1970s. In addition to the NPT, President Nixon negotiated or initiated many of the other cornerstones of today’s international control regimes. To implement controls over the export of nuclear fuel, materials, and equipment, Nixon established the NPT Exporters Committee (known as the Zangger Committee after its first chair, the Swiss expert Claude Zangger). This group of nuclear supplier nations worked out standards and procedures to regulate their nuclear exports to non-nuclear weapon states. Nixon negotiated and implemented the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) limiting offensive arms and the companion Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty limiting defensive armaments, both signed in May 1972.

Nixon also announced in 1969 that the United States would unilaterally and unconditionally renounce biological weapons. He ordered the destruction of the considerable U.S. biological weapons stockpile and the conversion of all production facilities for peaceful purposes. He reversed fifty years of U.S. reluctance, and sought ratification of the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use in war of biological and chemical weapons (the protocol was subsequently ratified under President Gerald Ford). The president successfully negotiated the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), signed in 1972 and ratified by the Senate in 1974, prohibiting the development, production, stockpiling, acquisition, and transfer of biological weapons.

The nuclear weapons treaties were only partially effective, however, and existing arsenals grew over the course of the decade. Though the SALT treaties set limits on the number of “delivery vehicles” the United States and the Soviet Union could have (bombers, missiles, and submarines), they did not limit how many warheads each country could deploy. Each nation developed the technology to allow individual warheads to be independently targeted. A large missile, therefore, could release in space three, five or even ten warheads, known as multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs).

“We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones,” said George Kennan, a principal architect of U.S. Cold War policy, in 1981. “We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily, like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings headed for the seas.”³³

With the newly MIRV’ed missiles, global nuclear arsenals continued to grow. In 1960, four states had a total of 22,000 nuclear weapons, with 93 percent of these held by the United States. During the mid and late 1960s, the U.S. arsenal leveled off and even began to decline. But by 1970, there were five nuclear powers and global stockpiles had grown to 38,100 nuclear weapons, with U.S. weapons accounting for 68 percent of the total. By 1980 global stockpiles grew by an additional 44 percent to 54,700 total weapons. Although the US stockpile again decreased slightly, the number of Soviet nuclear weapons rose dramatically from 11,600 to 30,000³⁴

During the 1970s, the number of nuclear states also increased. India decided not to sign the 1968 NPT and went against the newly established international norm. In May 1974, India carried out a “peaceful test” of a nuclear device, becoming the sixth nation in the world to test. Most Indians were overjoyed. The Washington Post noted a day after the test that “it was almost impossible today to find an Indian who did not take enormous pride in the government’s achievement.”³⁵ The Soviet Union and China, by not criticizing the test, seemed to give their general approval. Even the United States, as experts noted at the time, “seemed to give . . . official U.S. blessing to India’s new status by calling on India to act responsibly in considering the export of nuclear technology.”³⁶ For others, George Perkovich says in his definitive history of India’s program, “India’s blast amplified the alarms and prompted demand for corrective nonproliferation action by the United States and other nations.”³⁷ These concerns soon prompted a more dramatic U.S. response. Perkovich describes the innovation implemented bySecretary of State Henry Kissinger:

According to then-ACDA Director Fred Ikle, Kissinger hit upon the idea of a multilateral control arrangement instead of the unilateral approach. In April 1975, Kissinger convened a secret meeting in London of what became the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The United States sought additional agreements by nuclear technology suppliers to strengthen the safeguards they would require in importing states. A major aim was to plug loopholes such as those that had allowed India to produce its “peaceful” nuclear explosive. An extensive list of equipment necessary to produce fissile materials and other requisites of nuclear weapons became subject to controls. The Nuclear Suppliers Group became a relatively effective nonproliferation cartel.³⁸

The Nuclear Suppliers Group continues today to set export control guidelines on all items that are unique to the production of nuclear weapons or materials, as well as sixty-five “dual-use” items that have legitimate non-nuclear uses. The forty-four member nations of the group agree not to ship these items to non-nuclear weapon states for use in any unsafeguarded facilities, that is, nuclear installations that are not subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. President George Bush’s 2006 nuclear deal with India would break the barriers Richard Nixon constructed by, for the first time, selling nuclear reactors, fuel, and technology to a state that has not opened all its facilities to inspection. India agreed to put two-thirds of its 22 current and planned reactors under IAEA safeguards, but has kept 8 outside inspections and dedicated to weapons production.

India’s 1974 test also reinvigorated the probability of further proliferation by pushing Pakistan to pursue its own nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto famously remarked, “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own.”³⁹ Pakistan had already started a secret program in 1972, aided by designs and technical information Abdul Qadeer Khan had brought back from his years working in the Netherlands at uranium enrichment facilities operated by the European consortium URENCO (Uranium Enrichment Company). Khan enabled Pakistan to begin production of centrifuges and then of highly enriched uranium. The secret smuggling operations he started to acquire machinery for this effort later formed the basis of his global nuclear black market that provided equipment to Iran, Libya, North Korea and perhaps other nations beginning in the 1980s. (More information on AQ Khan can be found in Chapter 4.)

After almost two decades of arms limitation agreements and an overall increase in global nuclear arsenals the pendulum swung back with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as president in 1981. Treaties were out, and talk of preparing to fight and win a global thermonuclear war was in. Richard Perle, then assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, told Newsweek in 1983, “Democracies will not sacrifice to protect their security in the absence of a sense of danger, and every time we create the impression that we and the Soviets are cooperating and moderating the competition, we diminish the sense of apprehension.”⁴⁰

President Reagan began programs to increase U.S. nuclear and conventional military power, including production of the MX missile (a new ten-warhead intercontinental ballistics missile), the B-1 intercontinental strategic bomber, additional Trident ballistic missile submarines, and, most famously, the elaborate anti-missile program knows as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars.” The private conservative Committee for the Present Danger, which counted Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Nitze, and Eugene Rostow among its leading members, had organized support for these and other military programs to provide what they saw as a needed corrective to the drift and “appeasement” policies of the 1970s. They saw the nuclear trends not as Soviet efforts to catch up to the U.S., but as part of a plan for global domination. “Since the final bitter phases of the Vietnam War,” said Rostow, “our governments have been reacting with the same fear, passivity, and inadequacy which characterized British and American policy so fatally in the thirties and British policy before 1914.”⁴¹

“We now enter one of the most dangerous decades of Western civilization,” Reagan warned in January 1980. The Soviets, he claimed in subsequent speeches, were menacing Iran and the whole Middle East; Hanoi had “annexed” Indochina; Castro, as an agent of the Kremlin, was trying to turn the Caribbean into a “red sea” that would engulf Mexico. As for the United States, the country, he said, had been through an era of “vacillation, appeasement and aimlessness.” . . . Carter, he said, had made a “shambles” of defense. . . . As a result, the Soviets had pulled way ahead. . . . Reagan estimated that the Soviets had spent $240 billion more than the U.S. on defense over the past decade and were now outspending America by fifty billion dollars a year. . . . We were, he said repeatedly, in an arms race, “but only one side is racing.”⁴²

It did not look that way to Reagan’s critics. “The White House carefully cultivated an image of American military weakness and Soviet duplicity,” says University of St. Andrews history professor Gerard DeGroot. “With smoke and mirrors, the administration convinced Congress and the American people of the urgent need for massive increases in military spending.”⁴³

Whether by change of heart, by design, or by the increased influence of the pragmatic Secretary of State George Shultz over the more hawkish Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, President Reagan followed a first term characterized by defense budget increases and new nuclear weapon programs with a second term marked by a flurry of arms control agreements. He had campaigned against President Jimmy Carter’s unratified SALT II treaty, but in office he largely observed the limits it would have imposed. He went further by negotiating and signing the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987, ending the U.S.-Soviet competitive deployment of missiles in Europe by requiring the destruction of all 2,700 U.S. and Soviet missiles and their launchers with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (a treaty some argue should be globalized to prohibit all missiles of this range anywhere in the world). That same year, Reagan initiated the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR)—the first effort to control the spread of ballistic missile technology. He also negotiated the first strategic treaty that actually reduced (rather than limited) deployed strategic nuclear forces. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) cut both U.S. and Soviet-deployed strategic nuclear forces down to an agreed limit of 6,000 warheads each.

Today, defenders of both Reagan’s first- and second-term policies insist the buildup was necessary to encourage Soviet reform and to reach real arms reduction agreements. “It was Ronald Reagan, by his arms buildup and his inability to contemplate anything but an American victory,” says Irving Kristol, “that persuaded the Soviet leaders they were fighting a losing war. And so they folded their tents and stole away.”⁴⁴

Not so, says Anatoly Dobrynin, longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States. “The impact of Reagan’s hard-line policy on the internal debates in the Kremlin and on the evolution of the Soviet leadership was exactly the opposite from the one intended by Washington,” he says. “It strengthened those in the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the security apparatus who had been pressing for a mirror-image of Reagan’s own policy.”⁴⁵ George Kennan agreed; “The general effect of Cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980’s.”⁴⁶

That “great change” was the economic and political collapse of a Soviet empire rotting from within. Popular protests in Eastern Europe, most notably the Solidarnösc (Solidarity) union movement in Poland and the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, exposed the weakness of the Soviet regimes and propelled a breakdown in 1989 few had predicted. The end of the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union in 1991 gave new impetus to arms control efforts.

President George H. W. Bush signed Reagan’s START treaty in 1991 and kept the momentum going by negotiating and signing in January 1993 the START II treaty, the most sweeping arms reduction pact in history. The treaty required that deployed U.S. and Russian forces be no higher than 3,500 warheads each. President Bush also negotiated and signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) prohibiting the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, transfer, or use of chemical weapons. In 1991 President Bush announced that the United States would unilaterally withdraw all of its land- and sea-launched tactical nuclear weapons and would dismantle all of its land- and many of its sea-based systems (thereby denuclearizing the Army and the Navy surface fleet). The president also unilaterally ended the twenty-four-hour alert status of the U.S. bomber force and took a substantial portion of the land-based missile force off of hair-trigger alert (readiness to launch within fifteen minutes). Two weeks later, Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev reciprocated with similar tactical weapon withdrawals and the de-alerting of 503 Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles.

While the process was begun by Eisenhower, inspired by Kennedy, and pushed by Johnson, most of the major diplomatic lifting was actually done by Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, who either negotiated or brought into force almost all the instruments that make up the interlocking network of treaties and arrangements we refer to as the nonproliferation regime. In the 1990s, President Clinton added the Agreed Framework with North Korea that froze that nation’s nascent nuclear program; won Senate ratification of George Bush’s START II treaty and chemical weapons ban; helped denuclearize Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine after the dissolution of the Soviet Union; won the permanent extension of the NPT in 1995; negotiated and signed the long-sought Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which is still awaiting entry into force; and implemented the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction programs to secure and eliminate Russian nuclear weapons and materials.

President George W. Bush signed what he hoped would be the last arms reduction treaty negotiated with Russia on May 24, 2002. Ratified by the US Senate on March 6, 2003 and by the Russian Duma on May 14, 2003, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty commits the two nations to reduce their “operationally deployed” strategic warheads to 1,700–2,200 by December 2012. The treaty has been subject to both praise and criticism; while it establishes the lowest nuclear arsenal levels to date, it does not include provisions for destruction of warheads and delivery systems or for detailed verification of treaty compliance. Both nations will still keep thousands of warheads for tactical use and as reserves.

By 2006, the U.S arsenal had been cut to approximately 9,900 total warheads; the Russians to about 16,000; with the two accounting for all but about one thousand of the estimated 26,900 warheads held by eight or nine nations. This is the lowest the global arsenals have been since 1962 and they are expected to continue shrinking over the rest of the decade. President George W. Bush has also maintained threat reduction programs that assist Russia in dismantling delivery systems, securing nuclear materials and warheads, and redirecting former weapons scientists.

Over time, the nonproliferation regime emerged as an adaptable organism capable of evolving to meet new challenges. The result is a network of agreements to reduce the demand for nuclear weapons, help guarantee the security of those nations that give up the nuclear option, and prevent the unregulated and widespread diffusion of dangerous nuclear technology and know-how. But it is also a regime with serious, built-in flaws, and one heavily dependent on the will of its members to sustain and enforce its rules.

FIGURE 3.3. NUCLEAR STOCKPILES, 1945–2006
For the U.S. (through 1988) and Russia (through 1985), the number of stockpiled warheads is used; from those years to the present, the total intact warheads number is used.
Data used in graph taken from NRDC, Archive of Nuclear Data, available at http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datainx.asp.

The good news is that the nonproliferation regime has worked. The nuclear threat is less severe today than it was in 1970 when the Non-Proliferation Treaty entered into force. The number of nuclear weapons in the world has declined from a peak of 65,000 in 1986 to roughly 27,000 today.⁴⁷ Since the signing of the NPT, many more countries have given up nuclear weapon programs than have begun them. In the 1960s, 23 states had nuclear weapons, were conducting weapons-related research, or were actively discussing the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Today, only 10 states have nuclear weapons or are believed to be seeking them.⁴⁸ Before the NPT entered into force, only six nations abandoned indigenous nuclear weapon programs that were under way or under consideration: Egypt, Italy, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and West Germany. Since then, Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia have all abandoned nuclear weapon programs or nuclear weapons (or both). Now North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan are the only three states in the world that began acquiring nuclear capabilities after the NPT entered into force and they have not ceased their efforts. Interestingly, no new nation has begun a nuclear weapon program since the end of the Cold War. The programs in North Korea and Iran both began in the 1980s.

**** Canada had between 250 and 450 U.S.-supplied nuclear weapons deployed on Canadian delivery systems until the early 1980’s. In 1978, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared that Canada was “the first nuclear-armed country to have chosen to divest itself of nuclear weapons.” See Duane Bratt, “Canada’s Nuclear Schizophrenia,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/ April 2002, 58, no. 2, pp. 44-50.

There is more good news. Today, programs are in place that, if implemented effectively and urgently, would virtually eliminate the looming threat of nuclear terrorism. Moreover, not only is the nuclear threat declining, but so are the threats posed by biological and chemical weapons and the ballistic missiles used to deliver them. Since the entry into force of the Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention, state arsenals of these two weapons have been almost eliminated. They are widely seen as unusable in conflict, and very few states continue to attempt to produce and stockpile them. Over all, there are only fifteen states in the world that have or are suspected of having any nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons or programs.

Lastly, the number of countries with ballistic missiles keeps on declining. In 2002, 36 nations possessed ballistic missiles. In 2005, only 30 had them. And of these 30, only 11 have ballistic missiles that can travel more than 1,000 kilometers in distance.⁴⁹ The embarrassing failure of North Korea’s July 4, 2006, test of its Taepodong medium-range missile and the “fizzle” of its October 9, 2006, nuclear test (which exploded with a much smaller yield than expected) underscored how daunting the technological obstacles to a successful military capability are.

Overall, the twenty-first century has begun with the number of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and ballistic missiles shrinking steadily. The number of states with programs for these weapons is also contracting. The bad news is that we, and the nonproliferation regime, face formidable challenges. If the right steps are not taken to meet these challenges, we could face a new, dangerous wave of proliferation. North Korea has pulled out of the NPT and declared it has nuclear weapons. Iran is pursing advanced nuclear technologies which it claims are for peaceful development but which can be used for decidedly non-peaceful purposes. Determining correctly what these steps should be requires an understanding of what motivates states to build—or not build—nuclear weapons.

16 POTENTIAL NUCLEAR WEAPON STATES
France	Canada
Sweden	East Germany
West Germany	Czechoslovakia
Italy	Poland
Belgium	Japan
Netherlands	China
Switzerland	India
Norway	Israel