Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons

Some say that the world is more dangerous now than it was during the Cold War. Most often these statements are made by political figures seeking to promote a new policy or by journalists eager to grab attention before anyone can flip the page or channel. But it is not true. Most military and political leaders of the past half century would likely have traded the threats of global war they faced for the challenges we face today. A moment’s reflection is enough to help us realize that as serious as the current dangers are, they pale in comparison to the dangers we have just escaped.

There was arguably a much greater chance of an American city being destroyed by a nuclear explosion during the Cold War than there is today. During most of that earlier period, long-range bombers and long-range ballistic missiles threatened to bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Nevil Shute vividly portrayed these fears in his 1957 book, On the Beach (later made into a movie by Stanley Kramer, starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner). His story accurately captured the destruction of the Northern Hemisphere that would have resulted from a global thermonuclear war. He described the last few months of life of several survivors on the shores of Australia as they awaited the clouds of deadly radioactivity that would inevitably circle the globe to even their remote location. At the time the movie premiered in 1959, the Soviets deployed approximately 360 nuclear bombs on longrange planes and missiles; the United States fielded over 7,000.

By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown even worse. President Reagan’s anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5,000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world with a destructive force equal to roughly 20 billion tons of TNT, or 1,000,600 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. “These bombs,” Schell wrote, “were built as ‘weapons’ for ‘war,’ but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man.”¹

The threat of a global thermonuclear war is now near zero. The treaties negotiated in the 1980s, particularly the START agreements that began the reductions in U.S. and Soviet strategic arsenals and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement of 1987 that eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons (intermediate-range missiles that can travel between 3,000 and 5,500 kilometers), began a process that accelerated with the end of the Cold War. Between 1986 and 2006 the nuclear weapons carried by long-range U.S. and Russian missiles and bombers decreased by 61 percent.² These reductions are likely to continue through the current decade.

The dangers we face today are very serious, but they are orders of magnitude less severe than those we confronted just two decades ago from the overkill potential of U.S. and Russian arsenals. We no longer worry about the fate of the earth, but we still worry about the fate of our cities.

At the Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference in November 2005, National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan asked a panel of top experts how they thought the nuclear risks today compared to those of the past decades. He wanted to know whether the famous Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists clock that depicts the world as just a few minutes from the “midnight” of a nuclear catastrophe should be moved forward or back. National Nuclear Security Administration director Linton Brooks said,

I think you have to distinguish very sharply between the threat we faced of the annihilation of societies and the threat we face that somebody may steal enough for a crude device. I don’t mean to minimize the importance of nuclear security—I’m spending my life trying to improve it—but the nuclear threat that we faced in the Cold War dwarfs anything we face today.

Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) said, “I have to agree with Linton that we are not talking about annihilation of the world. We are talking about a serious event in which a lot of people could be killed, and that would be an enormous tragedy.” Former Senator Sam Nunn added,

I believe that the clock is further from midnight than it was during the Cold War. I would agree with Linton certainly in terms of any kind of all-out confrontation that would involve nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union. . . . The chances of a nuclear explosion by terrorists is greatly increased with the proliferation of weapongrade material all over the globe . . . but the chance of an all-out nuclear attack has gone down very considerably.³

As these experts indicated, there are still very serious nuclear dangers. Despite its long record of success, the nonproliferation regime today is unstable. Early in the twenty-first century we face four nuclear threats:

• Existing nuclear arsenals pose a second serious challenge. Even as the stockpiles continue to decline, Russia and the United States still maintain thousands of warheads on hair-trigger alert, ready to launch within fifteen minutes, and they and some of the other nuclear weapon powers are actively researching options for new nuclear weapons. After nuclear terrorism, this is the most likely threat to American cities.

• Finally, there is the real risk that the entire nonproliferation regime could collapse, leading many states to reconsider their nuclear options. Indeed, some seem to be doing so already as they begin to construct plants to enrich uranium for fuel rods, a process that could easily be used to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs.

None of these dangers is unstoppable, however. Each can be diminished, if not eliminated entirely. Harvard’s Graham Allison calls nuclear terrorism “the ultimate preventable catastrophe.”⁴ Just as the policy choices made in the early days of the nuclear age shaped the Cold War nuclear threats, the decisions we make in the next few years will determine whether we continue to roll back these four threats or launch instead into a new wave of proliferation.

To confront today’s nuclear challenges effectively, it is important to recognize that developments in one of the threats will influence the others. For example, the emergence of new nuclear states will present terrorists with more sources from which they could acquire weapons or materials and is likely to halt decreases in existing nuclear arsenals. Likewise, if the nuclear weapon states continue to be seen as dragging their feet on disarmament commitments or if new states acquire and test nuclear weapons without significant consequences, the Non-Proliferation Treaty would be seriously weakened and could collapse. The end of the regime and the subsequent spread of nuclear weapons and their related technology could quickly usher us into the frightening world of 15, 20, or 25 nuclear states that John F. Kennedy warned of in 1960. As Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to both Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, wrote in 2004,

The world may be on the verge of a major breakdown of the non-proliferation regime. . . . We are at a critical moment. Are we serious in our efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation, or will we watch the world descend into a maelstrom where weapons-grade nuclear material is plentiful and unimaginable destructive capability is available to any country or group with a grudge against society?⁵

While states can be deterred from using nuclear weapons by fear of retaliation, terrorists have no fixed assets to protect and are more difficult to deter. Fortunately, the vast majority of terrorist groups around the world are not trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Harvard’s Matthew Bunn writes:

Most terrorist groups have no interest in threatening or committing large-scale nuclear destruction. Focused on local issues, seeking to become the governments of the areas now controlled by their enemies (and thus not wanting to destroy those areas), and needing to build political support that might be undermined by the horror and wanton destruction of innocent life resulting from a nuclear attack, all but a few terrorist groups probably would not want to get and use a nuclear bomb even if they could readily do so.⁶

The danger comes from apocalyptic or messianic groups that believe that mass destruction can bring about the global conflict they seek, helping them achieve their day of reckoning either in this world or the next. “Rather than inspire terror for the sake of achieving limited political objectives,” scholars Charles Ferguson and William Potter note in their 2004 study The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism, “today’s terrorism is often fueled by extremist religious ideologies that rationalize destruction, vengeance, and punishment as both necessary ends in themselves and as tools to achieve a better world.”⁷ The two prime examples are al Qaeda and the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo (which experimented with biological weapons and tried to buy components of nuclear weapons before settling for an attack with sarin nerve gas on the Japanese subway system that killed twelve people and injured hundreds).

A terrorist group with nuclear aspirations would prefer to acquire an intact nuclear warhead rather than try to construct it themselves. Russian officials “confirmed four incidents in 2001–2002 of terrorist teams carrying out reconnaissance on Russian nuclear warheads—two on nuclear warhead storage facilities and two on nuclear weapon transport trains.”⁸ Stealing (and later detonating) an intact warhead, however, would be extremely difficult. Nuclear expert and former National Security Council staffer Jessica Stern has written, “Stealing a warhead would require overcoming security at a site where weapons are stored or deployed, taking possession of the bomb, and bypassing any locks intended to prevent unauthorized detonation of the weapon.”⁹

Nor can terrorist groups build a bomb from scratch. They cannot manufacture the highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium necessary for the bomb’s core. This requires substantial industrial facilities beyond the capabilities of any such group. But they can steal the uranium or plutonium, or buy it from corrupt officials. If terrorists could buy or steal 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, a well-organized group could probably also obtain the necessary technical expertise to fashion a gun-assembly type bomb, similar to the Hiroshima bomb.

In 1987, a group of U.S. nuclear weapons designers was commissioned to determine if this assumption was true. They concluded that such a task was achievable for “terrorists having sufficient resources to recruit a team of three or four technically qualified specialists.”¹⁰ Graham Allison finds:

Given the number of actors with serious intent, the accessibility of weapons or nuclear materials from which elementary weapons could be constructed, and the almost limitless ways in which terrorists could smuggle a weapon through American borders. . . . In my own considered judgment, on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.

The danger of terrorist theft or purchase of weapons or material is often linked to so-called outlaw states. President George W. Bush most prominently did this in his 2002 State of the Union address: “States like [Iran, Iraq, and North Korea], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.”¹¹

In fact, these countries are not the most likely sources for terrorists since their stockpiles, if any, are small and exceedingly precious, and hence well guarded. Iran does not and Iraq did not have nuclear weapons or significant quantities of fissile materials. Nor is North Korea, a state that probably does have weapons-grade material, likely to give away what its leadership almost certainly sees as the most precious jewel in its security crown.

How can we determine where terrorists are likely to steal nuclear materials? When they asked the famous 1930s thief Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, he replied, “That’s where the money is.” If today’s terrorists think like Willie Sutton they will not care about a state’s geopolitical orientation; they will go where the material is. The largest, most accessible supply is in Russia and other former Soviet states. Other states, particularly Pakistan, have a volatile mixture of weapons, instability, and radical fundamentalism that make them attractive targets for terrorists hunting the bomb. And there are over forty states with civilian research reactors fueled by highly enriched uranium–perfect for a bomb, but still guarded as if they were library books.

Are terrorists really trying to get these materials? According to the IAEA Illicit Trafficking Database, there have been eighteen confirmed incidents involving HEU or plutonium through the end of 2004.¹² Osama bin Laden’s best-documented attempt to acquire the material necessary for a nuclear device came in late 1993, when al Qaeda operatives reportedly tried to purchase $1.5 million of uranium in Sudan. Other reported incidents include efforts by bin Laden’s aide Mamdouh Mahmud Salim to obtain HEU in the mid-1990s and al Qaeda contacts with a man in Kazakhstan who promised bin Laden a suitcase bomb in two years or less. This Kazakhstan deal evidently never went through.¹³ It is not clear to what extent al Qaeda has dealt with actors well placed to follow through on their promises as opposed to scam artists looking to cash in on bin Laden’s desire for a nuclear capability. Either way, two things are clear: some terrorists want this material, and there are too many avenues through which they could get it.

Russia today has thousands of nuclear weapons at approximately 150–210 sites and hundreds of tons of nuclear material at approximately 49 sites.¹⁴ The actual amount of weapon-usable nuclear material in Russia may not even be known by the Russian government. Reliable estimates indicate that Moscow holds 180–185 tons of separated plutonium and about 1,100 tons of highly enriched uranium.¹⁵ Roughly half is thought to be in existing weapons with the remainder in storage. The only thing between this material and a nuclear terrorist capability is the quality of security at storage sites across Russia. This means both physical security and human security: the quality of physical protection and the commitment of the insiders and guards who work at and protect each site.

If Russia is the state of primary concern when it comes to nuclear terrorism, then Pakistan is a close second. Terrorist organizations and radical fundamentalist groups operate within Pakistan’s borders. National instability or a radical change in government could lead to the collapse of state control over nuclear weapons and materials and to the migration of nuclear scientists to the service of other nations or groups.

In November 2001, USA Today reported that the Taliban and al Qaeda had contacted at least ten Pakistani nuclear scientists since 1999.¹⁶ The magnitude of this problem is uncertain, but a few Pakistani experts might be all that al Qaeda or other Islamist groups need to take stolen fissile material and make an effective nuclear device. Pakistani nuclear experts may have already helped al Qaeda. In August 2001, just weeks before the September 11 attacks on the United States, two senior Pakistani nuclear physicists held a series of top-secret meetings over two or three days with Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, at a compound in Kabul, Afghanistan. At these meetings, the Pakistani scientists, Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mahmood and Chaudiri Abdul Majeed, answered detailed questions about nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. According to a 2001 White House fact sheet, “In one meeting, a bin Laden associate indicated he had nuclear material and wanted to know how to use it to make a weapon. Mahmood provided information about the infrastructure needed for a nuclear weapon program and the effects of nuclear weapons.”¹⁷ According to the Washington Post, Mahmood gave bin Laden detailed information on the construction of nuclear weapons.¹⁸ Neither Mahmood nor Majeed have been incarcerated. As is nuclear black marketer and fellow countryman A.Q. Khan, they are under house arrest in Pakistan.

The other point of concern in Pakistan is the possibility that extremist groups within the country could gain control of Pakistani nuclear facilities, including fissile material. Not once, but twice in 2003, President General Pervez Musharraf escaped death by a matter of inches. Assassination attempts against the Pakistani leader raised the scary specter of a government in shambles and a country in chaos. What would become of Pakistan’s reserves of highly enriched uranium—enough to make 50 to 110 bombs? Who would take control of the facilities where this material is stored? How would the Pakistani military react? A destabilized Pakistan with Kashmiri militants to the northeast and al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents to the northwest would be a global security nightmare.

While Russia and Pakistan are the states of primary concern when it comes to nuclear terrorism, groups determined to wreak havoc on an atomic scale will not limit their efforts to only two states. They will look for the weakest link. There is a substantial risk of terrorist theft from the civilian nuclear stockpiles in more than forty countries around the world. It only takes about 25 kilograms of HEU or 8 kilograms of plutonium to make a nuclear weapon.¹⁹ There is enough fissile material in the world for 300,000 bombs. There are 1,850 metric tons of HEU and plutonium in civil stockpiles. Nine countries have at least 1 metric ton of HEU and 32 countries have at least 1 metric ton of plutonium.²⁰ Many do not have adequate protection measures in place. These civilian facilities designed for academic research or production of medical isotopes could become the source for a bomb that vaporizes a city.

There are grave dangers inherent in countries such as the United States and Russia maintaining thousands of nuclear weapons and others like China, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, India, and Pakistan holding hundreds of weapons. While these states regard their personal nuclear weapons as safe, secure, and essential to security, each views others’ arsenals with suspicion.

Note: Military stocks include all material in weapons, in reactors and in storage. All bomb equivalents are calculated using the official IAEA estimates of 25kg of HEU or 8kg of Plutonium for each nuclear weapon and then rounded to the nearest 100. Many experts believe these estimates are conservative and that sophisticated nuclear devices can use as little as 15kg of HEU or 4kg of Plutonium. Calculations based on these smaller fissile material amounts lead to much higher estimates of bomb equivalency, up to 584,200 total possible weapons.

Though the Cold War has been over for more than a dozen years, Washington and Moscow maintain thousands of warheads on hair-trigger alert, ready to launch within fifteen minutes. This greatly increases the risk of an unauthorized launch. Because there is no time buffer built into each state’s decision-making process, this extreme level of readiness also enhances the possibility that either side’s president could prematurely order a nuclear strike based on flawed intelligence.

Sam Nunn argues, “We are running the irrational risk of an Armageddon of our own making. . . . The more time the United States and Russia build into our process for ordering a nuclear strike the more time is available to gather data, to exchange information, to gain perspective, to discover an error, to avoid an accidental or unauthorized launch.”²¹ We came close to such a disaster in January 1995, when Russian forces mistook a Norwegian weather rocket for a U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missile. Russian President Boris Yeltsin had the “nuclear suitcase” open in front of him for the first time in the nuclear age. He had just a few minutes to decide if he should push the button that would launch a barrage of nuclear missiles, but concluded the alert had to be a mistake. As Russian capabilities continue to deteriorate, the chances of accidents only increase. Limited spending on the conventional Russian military has led to greater reliance on an aging nuclear arsenal, whose survivability would make any deterrence theorist nervous. Moreover, Russia’s early warning systems are “in a serious state of erosion and disrepair,”²² making it all the more likely that a Russian president could panic and reach a different conclusion than Yeltsin did in 1995.

Existing regional nuclear tensions already pose serious risks. The decades-long conflict between India and Pakistan has made South Asia the region most likely to witness the first use of nuclear weapons since World War II. An active missile race is under way between the two nations, even as India and China continue their rivalry. And though some progress toward détente has been made, with each side agreeing to notify the other before ballistic missile tests, for example, quick escalation in a crisis could put the entire subcontinent right back on the edge of destruction.

^a All data, unless otherwise specified, is derived from the NRDC Nuclear Notebook, available at a http://www.thebulletin.org/nuclear_weapons_data/. For more detailed information, including nuclear deployment policy, delivery capabilities, etc., see Joseph Cirincione, Jon B. Wolfsthal, Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005.

Note: North Korea exploded a nuclear device on October 9, 2006, with an estimated yield of 0.5 kilotons. North Korea may have enough plutonium for as many as 12 nuclear weapons. Without further tests, it is unlikely that North Korea could build weapons small enough and sturdy enough to be delivered by missiles or perhaps even by airplanes.

For some, nuclear weapons can act as a stabilizing force, even in these regions. There is some evidence to support this view. Relations between India and Pakistan, for example, have improved overall since the 1998 nuclear tests. Even the conflict in the Kargil region between the two nations that came to a boil in 1999, and again in 2002 (with over one million troops mobilized on both sides of the border) ended in negotiations, not war. Kenneth Waltz argues, “Kargil showed once again that deterrence does not firmly protect disputed areas but does limit the extent of the violence. Indian rear admiral Raja Menon put the larger point simply: ‘The Kargil crisis demonstrated that the subcontinental nuclear threshold probably lies territorially in the heartland of both countries, and not on the Kashmir cease-fire line.’ ”²³

It would be reaching too far to say that Kargil was South Asia’s Cuban Missile crisis, but since the near-war, both nations have established hotlines and other confidence-building measures (such as notification of each side’s impending missile tests), exchanged cordial visits of state leaders, and opened transportation and communications links. War seems less likely now than at any point in the past. Some experts worry, however, about the consequences of war, should it occur. It would not be thousands that would die, but millions. Michael Krepon, one of the leading American experts on the region and its nuclear dynamics, notes:

Despite or perhaps because of the inconclusive resolution of crises, some in Pakistan and India continue to believe that gains can be secured below the nuclear threshold. How might advantage be gained when the presence of nuclear weapons militates against decisive end games? Pakistan has previously answered this question by resorting to unconventional methods. If Indian press reports are to be believed, New Delhi is now contemplating the answer of limited war. Each answer reinforces the other, and both lead to dead ends. If the means chosen to pursue advantage in the next Indo-Pakistan crisis show signs of success, they are likely to prompt escalation, and escalation might not be easily controlled. If the primary alternative to an ambiguous outcome in the next crisis is a loss of face or a loss of territory, the prospective loser will seek to change the outcome.²⁴

Many share Krepon’s views both in and out of South Asia. Indian scholar P. R. Chari, for example, further observes:

[S]ince the effectiveness of these weapons depends ultimately on the willingness to use them in some situations, there is an issue of coherence of thought that has to be addressed here. Implicitly or explicitly an eventuality of actual use has to be a part of the possible alternative scenarios that must be contemplated, if some benefit is to be obtained from the possession and deployment of nuclear weapons. To hold the belief that nuclear weapons are useful but must never be used lacks cogency.²⁵

A quickly escalating crisis over Taiwan is another possible scenario in which nuclear weapons could be used, not accidentally as with any potential U.S.-Russian exchange, but as a result of miscalculation. Neither the United States nor China is eager to engage in a military confrontation over Taiwan’s status, and both sides believe they could effectively manage such a crisis. But crises work in mysterious ways—political leaders are not always able to manipulate events as they think they can, and events can escalate very quickly. A Sino-U.S. nuclear exchange may not happen even in the case of a confrontation over Taiwan’s status, but it is possible and should not be ignored.

Recent advocacy by some in the United States of new battlefield uses for nuclear weapons and for a program to replace all existing nuclear warheads with a new design could lead to fresh nuclear tests, and possibly lower the nuclear threshold, i.e., the willingness of leaders to use nuclear weapons. The five nuclear weapon states recognized by the Non-Proliferation Treaty have not tested since the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in 1996, and, until North Korea’s October 2006 test, no state had tested since India and Pakistan did so in May 1998. If the United States again tested nuclear weapons, then political, military, and bureaucratic forces in several other countries would undoubtedly pressure their governments to follow suit. Indian scientists, for example, are unhappy with the inconclusive results of their 1998 tests. Indian governments now resist their demands for new tests for fear of the damage they would do to India’s international image. It is a compelling example of the power of international norms. New U.S. tests would collapse that norm, trigger tests by India, then perhaps China, Russia, and other nations. The Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, widely regarded as a pillar of the nonproliferation regime, would crumble, possibly bringing down the entire regime.

For some scholars and officials, the addition of new nations to the nuclear club is as natural and inevitable as population growth. Kenneth Waltz argues that “nuclear weapons will nevertheless spread, with a new member occasionally joining the club. . . . Someday the world will be populated by fifteen or eighteen nuclear-weapon states.”²⁶

Monterey Institute expert William Potter says this view is shared by many in the Bush administration. “Principle one” for many officials, he says, is “that nuclear proliferation is inevitable, at best it can be managed, not prevented.”²⁷ Currently, however, there are only two countries of serious concern. If the nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran can be checked, then prospects for halting and reversing proliferation globally improve dramatically. If they are not checked, then they may start a momentum that tips neighboring countries over the nuclear edge.

The danger is not that either North Korea or Iran would use nuclear weapons to attack the United States or other countries. These states, like others before them, likely view nuclear weapons as a means to defend themselves, as symbols of national pride and accomplishment, or as bargaining chips to accomplish other goals. (For more on why countries want nuclear weapons, see chapter 3.) Their leaders, like the leaders of other states, would be deterred from using nuclear weapons in a first strike against the United States or its allies by the certainty of swift and massive retaliation. Nor are new nuclear states, as discussed above, likely to consciously proliferate to terrorists, even if such states are in dire need of hard currency exports, like North Korea, or if they have aided terrorist groups in the past, as in the case of Iran.

But what a state like Iran might see as a defensive move would provoke dangerous reactions from other states in the region. A nuclear reaction chain could ripple through a region and across the globe, triggering weapon decisions in several, perhaps many, other states. Such developments would weaken Iran’s own security, not increase it. The spread of nuclear weapons to multiple states throughout an already tense region could bring increased rivalry, greater friction, and quite possibly nuclear catastrophe.

This is the danger President Kennedy warned of in 1963:

I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world. There would be no rest for anyone then, no stability, no real security, and no chance of effective disarmament. There would only be the increased chance of accidental war, and an increased necessity for the great powers to involve themselves in what otherwise would be local conflicts.²⁸

Several countries in the Middle East that are capable of pursuing their own nuclear weapon programs or otherwise acquiring nuclear weapons might decide to do so if Iran “goes nuclear.” These states include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey. Saudi Arabia might seek to purchase nuclear weapons from Pakistan, whose nuclear program Saudi money helped finance. Or Saudi leaders could take a nuclear shortcut by inviting Pakistan to station nuclear weapons on its territory. This would be completely legal under existing treaties in the same way that the United States bases several hundred nuclear weapons at air bases within the territory of non–nuclear weapon states in Europe.

Other countries have at least the basic facilities and capabilities to mount a nuclear weapons program, albeit not without significant political and economic consequences. Egypt and Turkey could probably manufacture enough nuclear material to produce a nuclear weapon within a decade of launching such an effort. It is possible that the Middle East could go from a region with one nuclear weapon state (Israel), to one with two, three, or five such states within a decade—with all the tensions of the existing political and territorial disputes still unresolved.

This is not an inevitable outcome, however. Iran’s continued pursuit of nuclear fuel cycle (particularly uranium enrichment and plutonium separation) capabilities does not need to end with nuclear dominos falling. The ongoing diplomacy involving Iran, the European Union, the IAEA, and increasingly the United States, Russia, and China likely holds the key to the region’s nuclear future. If a creative compromise can be struck and diplomacy wins out, then the reaction chain might work in reverse, encouraging negotiations on the long-standing U.S. goal of a Middle East free of nuclear weapons—including Israel.

Northeast Asia has also had long-held regional animosities—between China and Taiwan, China and Japan, North Korea and South Korea, North Korea and Japan, and Japan and South Korea. Only China currently has an established nuclear capability in the region. The United States’ nuclear umbrella—the promise that the United States would come to the defense of South Korea and Japan—has helped to convince those states to forgo nuclear weapons for now.

North Korea’s October 2006 test plunged the region into crisis, prompting fears of an arms race. Two paths opened up. One would reverse the program, building on progress in the six-party diplomacy between North Korea, the United States, South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia, most notably the September 2005 joint statement that the North would give up its nuclear program in exchange for security assurances and nuclear and non-nuclear energy aid. If, however, North Korea joins China in the nuclear club, then the other states may sense that the nonproliferation momentum in the region has shifted. If they then begin to question America’s commitment to their security, each would feel enormous pressure to “go nuclear.” As Vice President Dick Cheney said in March 2003, “the idea of a nuclear-armed North Korea . . . [will] probably set off an arms race in that part of the world, and others, perhaps Japan, for example, may be forced to consider whether or not they want to readdress the nuclear question.”²⁹ Whereas in the Middle East it might take a decade or more to reach five nuclear states, Northeast Asia could see five nuclear-armed adversaries in half that time.³⁰

South Korea and Taiwan are both technically advanced societies with the infrastructure necessary to launch a fullscale nuclear effort. Both flirted with nuclear weapon programs (South Korea in the 1970s and Taiwan once in the late 1960s and 1970s and again in the late 1980s). Japan, meanwhile, would have to amend its constitution to pursue a nuclear weapons program. Still, Tokyo’s civilian stockpile of weapon-usable plutonium, currently enough to make hundreds of nuclear warheads, could be converted to military uses in a matter of weeks or months. Ariel Levite of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission has argued that Japan’s “standby nuclear capability” allows it “to remain within a few months of acquiring nuclear weapons.”³¹ South Korea has long referred to Japan as an “associate member of the nuclear club.”³²

The longest-term, but most severe, nuclear threat we face today is the prospect that the entire international nonproliferation regime could collapse. This set of treaties, cooperative efforts, and international commitments has held for over thirty-five years and performed better than almost anyone would have predicted in the 1950s and 1960s. Its disintegration would be devastating.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to convince other states to give up nuclear weapon ambitions or adhere to nonproliferation norms when immensely powerful nuclear weapon states reassert the importance of nuclear weapons to their own security. The United States and the NATO alliance, for example, routinely issue declarations asserting the vital role that nuclear weapons play in U.S. and European security. If the most powerful military nations in the world say that nuclear weapons are necessary for their security, why should a weaker military power conclude that they are not? It is a bit like parents trying to convince their children not to smoke, when they each have a two-pack a day habit and are constantly extolling the pleasures of smoking.

The UN secretary-general’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, which included international security experts from around the world, including Brent Scowcroft, emphasized the threat of regime collapse in 2004:

Almost 60 states currently operate or are constructing nuclear power or research reactors, and at least 40 possess the industrial and scientific infrastructure which would enable them, if they chose, to build nuclear weapons at relatively short notice if the legal and normative constraints of the Treaty regime no longer apply. . . . The non-proliferation regime is now at risk because of lack of compliance with existing commitments, withdrawal or threats of withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to escape those commitments, a changing international security environment and the diffusion of technology. We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.³³ (emphasis added)

The health of the regime depends on the performance and resolve of the key state supporters of the regime. If U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals remain at disproportionately high levels, if they and other nuclear weapon states modernize their arsenals with new weapons and expensive missiles, submarines, and bombers, then many nations will conclude that the weapon states’ promise to reduce and eventually eliminate these arsenals has been broken. Non-nuclear states may therefore feel released from their pledge not to acquire nuclear arms.

The example and performance of the nuclear weapon states is one—but not the major—factor threatening the regime. Pressures are also rising from “below,” from new states trying to get these weapons. If the nuclear crises in Iran and North Korea go unresolved and regional arms races commence, then states that would not otherwise consider a nuclear option may begin to do so. Non-nuclear states may feel that the protection provided to them under the NPT is eroding and that the only effective path to self-defense is through nuclear arms.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty is also severely threatened by the development in several states of facilities for the enrichment of uranium and the reprocessing of plutonium. Although each state asserts that these are for civilian use only, supplies of these materials potentially put each of these countries “a screwdriver’s turn” away from weapons capability. This greatly erodes the confidence that states can have in a neighbor’s non-nuclear pledge. While the political commitments of Japan not to develop nuclear weapons, for example, are accepted now, tensions in the region could change how its neighbors view the “virtual arsenal” that Japan’s stocks of plutonium provide.

Additionally, there appears to be growing acceptance of the nuclear status of Pakistan and India, with each country accruing prestige and increased attention from leading nuclear weapon states, including the United States. When President Bush proposed in 2005 to bolster U.S.-India ties by overturning treaty and legal bans on sales of nuclear reactors, fuel and technology to India, a bipartisan group of experts, in a letter to Congress, warned,

Non-nuclear-weapon states have for decades remained true to the original NPT bargain and forsworn nuclear weapons and accepted full-scope IAEA safeguards in return for access to peaceful nuclear technology under strict and verifiable control. Many of these states made this choice despite strong pressure to spurn the NPT and pursue the nuclear weapons path. They might make a different choice in the future if non-NPT members receive civil nuclear assistance under less rigorous terms.³⁴

Some now say, “So what?” Even a nuclear Iran or North Korea, they argue, could also be absorbed into the international system without serious consequence. Kenneth Waltz says, “In asking what the spread of nuclear weapons will do to the world, we are asking about the effects to be expected if a larger number of relatively weak states get nuclear weapons. If such states use nuclear weapons, the world will not end.”³⁵

For example, if a state like Brazil, which has developed and recently expanded its uranium enrichment capability and which aspires to great power status, sees the acceptance of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India (and perhaps eventually in North Korea and Iran), then it may come to believe that its international position would not be harmed, but in fact helped, by possession of nuclear weapons.

Then-CIA Director George Tenet warned of this ripple effect in his 2003 testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: “The desire for nuclear weapons is on the upsurge. Additional countries may decide to seek nuclear weapons as it becomes clear their neighbors and regional rivals are already doing so. The ‘domino theory’ of the 21st century may well be nuclear.”³⁶

This is not just an academic argument. Most nations would continue to eschew nuclear weapons, if only for technological and economic reasons, but countries as diverse as Turkey and South Korea, Egypt and Ukraine, Japan and Syria, Saudi Arabia and Brazil, or South Africa and Indonesia could decide that nuclear weapons are necessary to improving their security or status. There is a real possibility, under these conditions, of a system-wide collapse of the nuclear nonproliferation regime. If it were to occur it could bring the world back to the brink of annihilation for the first time in some twenty years.

The Bush administration came into office in 2001 with high hopes that a dramatic change in U.S. policy could reduce all these risks. They brought with them policies they believed would chart a fundamentally new direction in U.S. nuclear policy and in so doing would increase national security and decrease the chances of new states or terrorist groups threatening the country with nuclear weapons. The next chapter examines the consequences of their policy choices.

NUCLEAR TERRORISM	EXISTING NUCLEAR ARSENALS
Some terrorists seeking to acquire nuclear weapons	27,000 nuclear weapons in eight or nine states.
Substantial risk of theft or illegal purchase	96 percent in U.S and Russia.
Russia and Pakistan are of greatest concern	Thousands of missiles on hair-trigger alert increase risk of mistaken launch
Civilian nuclear material stockpiles also at risk	Unstable double standard created by states retaining nuclear weapons for security, prestige, and diplomatic leverage
Programs are in place to reduce risk
Progress is too slow

NEW NUCLEAR STATES	NONPROLIFERATION REGIME COLLAPSE
New nuclear states could trigger regional chain reaction	Confidence eroding in treaties
A nuclear Iran could lead to nuclear programs in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey	Nuclear states not living up to disarmament obligations
North Korea could push Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to develop nuclear weapons	States cheating on treaties
Additional arsenals increase risk of terrorist access and use. More states acquiring facilities for fuel that could be used for bombs	Acceptance of states outside the NPT as legitimate nuclear powers