Since 1945, American nonproliferation policies have relied on a combination of international agreements, alliance systems, and security commitments. In the jargon of international relations theorists, this means that for most of the nuclear age policies and programs have been based on a liberal internationalist view of the world, coupled with a realist understanding of national behavior and the importance of military force.
Liberal internationalists believe that conflicts between states can be permanently reduced through international institutions and democratic alliances. This view, shared by most U.S. presidents in the twentieth century, provides an explanation for why democratic states do not go to war with each other, a tendency that scholars call the “democratic peace.”1 Unlike realism’s unending conflict, liberal internationalism holds that relations between states can be regulated such that one state’s gain is not another’s loss; all can prosper together through international cooperation. Philosopher Immanuel Kant imagined a world of “rational beings who together require universal laws for their survival.”2 Woodrow Wilson is the U.S. president most often associated with promoting this vision. Today, liberal internationalists would point to the sixty years of peace enjoyed by modern Europe after centuries of bloody strife as a model of the prosperity and tranquility that can be achieved through democratic political and economic integration.
Few governments implement policies guided purely by any one international theory, however. Instead, they combine approaches. The European peace, of course, is backed by formidable military assets, both European and American. German writer Josef Joffe has called the U.S. military “Europe’s pacifier.”3 Nonproliferation treaties are similarly bolstered by a commitment to enforce their rules. American nonproliferation strategy has historically been part liberal internationalist—relying on institutions and agreements that regulate, restrict, and prevent the spread of nuclear weapons—and part realist—emphasizing defense assets, alliances, and commitments.
Despite the overall success of this approach, its failures have been heavily criticized in recent years. For these critics, the 183 countries that do not have nuclear weapons are outweighed by the few nations that are trying to acquire them. They argue for new, more aggressive policies directed against these selected states. This is more than merely shifting the emphasis between the two components of the combined approach described above.
For example, in 1998 a group of experts wrote to President Clinton to urge him to take direct action to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power. The group included Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and William Kristol. They described what they saw as the failure of traditional international approaches and in the process ran down a list of the various institutions they no longer found to be reliable instruments of U.S. policy:
The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. . . . [W]e can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam [Hussein] when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. . . . As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.4
Most of these thinkers were associated with the “neoconservative” school. Neoconservatives have combined different elements of realism, liberal internationalism, and idealism to develop a new direction for U.S. foreign policy. They believe in the “democratic peace” espoused by liberal internationalists but substantially mistrust international institutions. In pursuit of freedom and security, they favor a more assertive use of military force than traditional realists. Rather than simply manage the world, they favor using the U.S. military as a tool to transform it. Thus, the experts argued in their letter:
The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.5
Though many of these thinkers assumed high government positions after the elections of 2000, it was not until the attacks of September 11, 2001, that they were able to profoundly change the course of American anti-proliferation policy. In the wake of the attacks, the Bush administration reassessed proliferation threats to U.S. security. In early 2002, Assistant Secretary of State for Non-Proliferation John Wolf noted, “The President has said that halting proliferation is not one of many objectives of U.S. foreign policy; it is a central framing element.”6 But the new strategy to combat these dangers emphasized fundamentally different methods from the past.
ELIMINATING REGIMES, NOT ARSENALS
Many officials in the Bush administration believed that the entire process of negotiating and implementing nonproliferation treaties was both unnecessary and harmful to U.S. national security interests. They argued that some of the treaties, such as the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Landmine Treaty, restrict necessary armaments, thus weakening the principal nation that safeguards global peace and security. Other treaties, such as the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention, promote a false sense of security as some nations sign, then cheat on the agreements. Multilateral meetings were often seen as opportunities for the global Lilliputians to gang up on the American Gulliver.
For example, John Bolton, then a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said in 1999 that the Clinton administration suffered from a “fascination with arms control agreements as a substitute for real nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”7 Gary Schmitt, an analyst at the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, said more directly, “Conservatives don’t like arms control agreements for the simple reason that they rarely, if ever, increase U.S. security. . . . The real issue here, and the underlying question, is whether the decades-long effort to control the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them through arms control treaties has in fact worked.” He contended that it was no longer “plausible to argue that our overall security was best served by a web of parchment accords, and not our own military capabilities.”8
The perceived failures of the treaty regime led the Bush team to demand more flexibility in its options to combat proliferation. Although the administration remained committed to export controls and strengthening the IAEA, the core strategy became using direct military means to eliminate threats they believed obvious. This view held that preventive war, even waged unilaterally, must be considered a valid and necessary response to certain threats. The United States must, in other words, “defend against the threat before it is unleashed” (emphasis added).9
This action-oriented approach was detailed in two key documents—The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 2002) and National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction (December 2002).10 The latter, detailing the new plan, called it “a fundamental change from the past.”11 The National Security Strategy emphasized the direct application of U.S. military, economic, and political power: “The United States possesses unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in the world. . . . The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom.” Thomas Donnelly, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, explains, “The task for the United States is nothing less than the preservation and expansion of today’s Pax Americana, the extension of the ‘unipolar moment’ for as long as possible.”12
Proliferation was seen as part of this larger, global struggle, not as an end in itself. The primary challenge to continued American supremacy, they argued, was the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to states or groups hostile to the United States. In this view, there was bad proliferation and good proliferation. Whereas previous presidents treated the spread of these weapons as the core problem and sought their elimination through treaties, the Bush administration saw the threat as a small number of states, particularly the nexus of these states, weapons, and terrorists. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons in the hands of responsible states, that is, the United States and its allies, were seen as necessary instruments for preserving peace and security. Whereas previous presidents would cite, as President Bill Clinton did, the grave threat to the nation “from the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons,”13 President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address, “The gravest danger facing America and the world is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons” (emphasis added). Bush in effect changed the focus from “what” to “who.” The new strategy sought the elimination of regimes rather than weapons, in the belief that the U.S. could determine which countries were responsible enough to have nuclear weapons and which ones were not. American power, not multilateral treaties, would enforce this judgment.
Strategy documents and speeches detailed “three pillars” of anti-proliferation policy: traditional nonproliferation agreements, counter-proliferation (including anti-missile systems and military action), and consequence management (responding to the use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons).14 Yet most of the effort and funding flowed to the second pillar. In 2001, the government spent approximately $9 billion on counter-proliferation efforts (mostly for antimissile weapons), compared to $1.5 billion each for nonproliferation and consequence management efforts. By the end of 2005, counter-proliferation funding had increased astronomically with programs to try to intercept ballistic missiles funded at $9–10 billion annually and the war in Iraq, launched in an effort to disarm Saddam Hussein, climbing over $300 billion. Funding for traditional nonproliferation efforts, including all diplomatic activity and cooperative threat reduction programs, remained steady at $1.5 billion.
THE SUCCESSES OF THE NEW POLICY
The new approach had been expected to yield dramatic results. Under Secretary of State John Bolton said in 2004, “The Bush administration is making up for decades of stillborn plans, wishful thinking, and irresponsible passivity. After many years of hand-wringing with the vague hope to find shelter from gathering threats, we are now acting decisively. We will no longer accept being dispirited by difficult problems that have no immediate answer.”15
By 2006, the Bush administration had achieved a number of nonproliferation successes. Libya’s announcement in December 2003 that it would abandon decades of work on nuclear and chemical weapons and missile programs was an unqualified triumph. This diplomatic victory was a net plus for the administration even though it actually differed from the preferred U.S. strategy. With Libya, the United States changed a regime’s behavior, not the regime. America agreed to guarantee Libya’s security, restore full diplomatic relations, and drop all sanctions against the country in exchange for the end of its nuclear weapon, chemical weapon, and long-range-missile programs. Although Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi undoubtedly considered U.S. military actions in Iraq, economic and prestige factors appear to have been the dominant forces in his decision to abandon decades of largely fruitless efforts to acquire nuclear weapons (see chapter 4).
There were other significant successes that supporters of the new approach point to as indicators of its viability. Information provided by Libyan officials (and Iranian admissions to IAEA inspectors) led to the public disclosure of the A.Q. Khan network.16 Led by the United States, the United Nations Security Council in 2004 adopted UN Resolution 1540, committing all nations to adopt laws to strengthen their export control regimes and to criminalize illegal trade in biological, chemical, and nuclear weapon–related technologies. U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals continued to decrease and relations between the two former adversaries remain constructive. In 2002, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty to draw down U.S. and Russian deployed, strategic nuclear arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 by the end of 2012. Furthermore, progress had been made on efficient implementation of nuclear security and nonproliferation programs in the former Soviet Union, even if those programs could still use more attention and funding.17 In 2004, the U.S. Department of Energy established the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), an umbrella program to unite ongoing efforts to secure and remove highly enriched uranium from research reactors and other civilian nuclear facilities around the world.
Many countries began cooperating in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) to interdict illegal trade in weapon components. According to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, PSI has already been responsible for at least eleven interdictions of goods related to nuclear and ballistic missile programs.18 In November 2005, Robert Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security stressed the importance of PSI, telling a Washington conference, “PSI has transformed how nations act together against proliferation. . . . [It] is not a treaty-based approach involving long, ponderous negotiations that yield results only slowly, if at all. Instead it is a true partnership.”19 There is also greater willingness on the part of some states to enforce nonproliferation commitments. The right combination of force and diplomacy could yet result in negotiated solutions to the North Korean and Iranian programs. And prospects for peacefully resolving regional conflicts may have increased with the growing movement for democracy in the Middle East and Central Asia.
THE FAILURES OF THE NEW POLICY
The most significant and direct application of the new approach to nonproliferation was the war with Iraq. It was the world’s first nonproliferation war, a battle fought primarily over the perceived need to prevent the acquisition or transfer of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. More than anything else, the war with Iraq would determine the fate of the new strategy. By the end of 2005, it had become clear that the war had failed to accomplish the administration’s objectives.
The war in Iraq manifested three key problems. First, the premise of the war was wrong. Postwar analysis has proved that the war was unnecessary. Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons that could have threatened America. The administration itself concluded by the end of 2004 that Iraq had ended all its nuclear, chemical, and biological programs between 1991 and 1995 and did not have stockpiles of these weapons.20 Second, the war demonstrated the naïveté of the underlying strategy. Intended to be the prototype for a new, assertive policy that would eliminate bad proliferation at its source, the war proved to be many times more difficult and costly than predicted. Though there was heady talk in Washington in the spring and summer of 2003 of moving on to Tehran, Damascus, and even Pyongyang,21 as the Iraqi insurgency grew and reconstruction faltered, few believed that the United States should undertake other preventive wars.
Third, in order to rally support for the invasion of Iraq, administration officials presented the public with a false choice: war or acceptance of a growing Iraqi threat. While this framed the issues to the benefit of those who sought war, there was an effective alternative. International mechanisms were working and could have thwarted the limited threat posed by Saddam’s regime. With a UN Security Council united by President Bush’s diplomatic efforts in the fall of 2002, an intrusive inspection regime was showing results. Although senior U.S. officials belittled the United Nations inspectors before the war and discredited their work, UN sanctions and inspections, in fact, had been more effective than most realized in disarming Iraq after the 1991 war. In 2002 and 2003, the inspectors were finding what little there was to find.22 If they had been allowed to continue their work for just a few more weeks, inspectors believe, they could have shown that Iraq did not have active weapons programs.23 This is particularly true of the nuclear program, the hardest program to hide and the one most used to justify the need for immediate military action.
U.S. officials had justified the war as necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein, establish a new model for counter-proliferation, and replace existing international security mechanisms. But by March 2006, 57 percent of Americans had concluded that the war was a mistake, according to a Gallup poll. Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski summarized the ripple effect many saw from the Iraq invasion and the selective approach to nonproliferation:
America’s ability to cope with nuclear nonproliferation has also suffered. The contrast between the attack on the militarily weak Iraq and America’s forbearance of the nuclear-armed North Korea has strengthened the conviction of the Iranians that their security can only be enhanced by nuclear weapons.”24
In addition to the war in Iraq, there were ten key failures of the new proliferation policy:
• The danger of nuclear terrorism may have increased. U.S. intelligence officials concluded in February 2005 Senate testimony that American policy in the Middle East has fueled anti-U.S. feeling and that the Iraq War has provided jihadists with new recruits who “will leave Iraq experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism.”25 After the Iraq invasion, terrorist attacks rose globally and al Qaeda grew in influence and adherents.26 At the same time, weapons and materials are being secured more slowly than expected. The amount of nuclear material secured in the two years after 9/11 was at best equal to the amount secured in the two years before 9/11.27 Former CIA Director Porter Goss said in his February 2005 Senate testimony that he could not assure the American people that some of the material missing from Russian nuclear sites had not found its way into terrorist hands.28
• Iran accelerated its nuclear efforts—whether peaceful or not—and the United States lacked a coherent plan for how to stop the program. Most of the construction and development of Iranian nuclear facilities has occurred since 2000, including the opening of plants to produce uranium gas, the first successful operation of a centrifuge cascade to enrich uranium, and the construction of a vast facility to house over 50,000 centrifuges.
• North Korea also accelerated its program, possibly increasing fivefold its amount of bomb material. Since 2002, North Korea ended the freeze on its plutonium program, claimed to have reprocessed the plutonium into weapons, withdrew from the NPT, and tested a nuclear device.
• Though the A. Q. Khan nuclear black market was disrupted in 2004, failure to do so earlier had allowed Iran, Libya, and possibly North Korea to acquire key components for nuclear weapons production. The failure to get more cooperation from the government of Pakistan (which used the network for its own nuclear imports) made it difficult to determine if the network had been shut down completely or simply had gone further underground.
• More nations declared their intentions to develop the ability to enrich uranium for nuclear reactor fuel—the same technologies can be used to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs.29 U.S. proposals to curtail these technologies failed to win any significant support.
• The process of negotiating reductions in U.S.-Russian nuclear arsenals came to a sudden end with the 2002 Moscow Treaty. The administration declared that it would not negotiate any further reductions in Russian long-range, strategic weapons and would not begin negotiations to reduce Russian short-range tactical weapons planned by the Clinton administration. The reductions themselves proceeded at a slower pace than previous administrations had planned.30
• Administration proposals to research and possibly develop new nuclear weapons coupled with new doctrines justifying nuclear weapons use against even non-nuclear targets, encouraged other nations, such as Russia and France, to develop similar plans and encouraged the view that nuclear weapons should be an essential component of a nation’s security program.
• Concern grew that the entire nonproliferation regime was in danger of a catastrophic collapse. The NPT Review Conference of May 2005 ended acrimoniously, failing to act upon the consensus of the majority of states for stronger nonproliferation and disarmament efforts or to adopt any of the dozens of useful suggestions proposed by many of the nations present.
• President Bush’s decision to reverse U.S. policy toward India and begin selling sensitive nuclear technology seemed to reward India’s nuclear proliferation. The action seemed a de facto recognition of India as a nuclear-weapon state, with all the rights and privileges reserved for those states that have joined the NPT. This raised concerns that other states, such as Pakistan and Israel, might demand the same status and that others might opt out of the NPT to pursue their own nuclear plans.
• A core part of the counter-proliferation strategy realized little progress. From 2000 to 2005, the United States spent almost $50 billion on anti-missile systems without realizing any substantial increase in military capability. The anti-missile system under construction in Alaska is widely regarded as ineffective.31
By the beginning of 2006, a broad, bipartisan consensus had developed that the failures of the new approach outweighed the benefits. Georgetown University School of Foreign Service Dean Robert Gallucci eloquently summarized the benefits of the previous nonproliferation strategies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 2006:
Most analysts believe that fifty years of non-proliferation policy has something to do with explaining why the spread of nuclear technology has not led to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, why we live in a world of eight or nine nuclear weapons states, rather then eighty or ninety. A key part of that policy has been our support for an international norm captured in the very nearly universally adhered to Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The norm is simple: in the interest of international security, no more states should acquire nuclear weapons. . . . Certainly the fact that we have eight or nine states with nuclear weapons rather than only the original five, means that the norm has not held perfectly well. But it has had substantial force in the face of widespread acquisition of critical nuclear technologies, and that has been of vital importance to America’s security. Simply put, the Administration now proposes to destroy that norm.
Gallucci focused on the drawbacks of the U.S.-India deal, and the damage the deal could do to global nonproliferation efforts:
The damage will be done to the non-proliferation norm by legitimatizing India’s condition, by exempting it from a policy that has held for decades. And we would do this, we assert less than honestly, because of its exceptionally good behavior. . . . [I]f we do this deal, ask how we will avoid offering a similar one to Brazil or Argentina if they decide on nuclear weapons acquisition, or our treaty ally South Korea. Dozens of countries around the world have exhibited good behavior in nuclear matters, and have the capability to produce nuclear weapons but choose not to, at least in part, because of the international norm against nuclear weapons acquisition reinforced by a policy we would now propose to abandon. . . . If we do this, we will put at risk a world of very few nuclear weapons states, and open the door to the true proliferation of nuclear weapons in the years ahead.32
Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass, the former State Department director of policy planning for President Bush, criticized the reliance on regime change: “The uncertainties surrounding regime change make it an unreliable approach for dealing with specific problems such as a nuclear weapons program in an unfriendly state. . . . Regime change cannot be counted on to come quickly enough to remove the nuclear threat now posed by [North Korea and Iran].”33
For some, the greatest failure of the new approach was its belief that it could indefinitely maintain a global double standard. This, they felt, tainted American credibility. Representative John Spratt (D-SC), a leader on defense issues in the Congress, said, “My greatest concern is that some in the administration and in Congress seem to think that the United States can move the world in one direction while Washington moves in another; that we can continue to prevail on other countries not to develop nuclear weapons while we develop new tactical applications for such weapons and possibly resume nuclear testing.”34
Similarly, former assistant secretary John Wolf, after leaving the State Department, said that he while he supported many administration policies, he was worried by the current U.S. approach to nonproliferation. “The [Non-Proliferation] treaty fails if it differentiates or if members try to differentiate between good states who can be trusted with nuclear weapons and all others. We have never been further from the treaty’s goals and we are moving in the wrong direction. . . . It’s been fashionable recently to talk a lot about counter-proliferation, but that’s really a defensive concept. Nonproliferation done right is bigger. . . . In the end, I think you get a better result.”35 Wolf shared Spratt’s concerns about programs for new nuclear weapons and new nuclear missions: “One set of concerns relates to the Department of Energy’s program to research a new penetrator warhead,” he said. “Far more worrisome though is the proposed change in weapons doctrine that envisions using nuclear weapons for WMD pre-emption.” Pointing to the risks of preemptive attack illustrated by the Iraq War, he noted that many officials believed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, “Suppose instead some had argued to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively, and suppose we had. What would have been the implications of doing so and being wrong? Whoops is not a good enough response.”36
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei believes that the American emphasis on nuclear superiority and military force may, in fact, increase insecurity: “In the wake of the Cold War, many of us were hopeful for a new global security regime, a regime that would be inclusive, effective, and no longer dependent on nuclear weapons. But regrettably, we have made little or no progress.” ElBaradei argues that a main objective for international security in the twenty-first century should be to establish a system “that would make the use of force—including the use of nuclear weapons—less likely as a means of conflict resolution.”37
CONCLUSION
Some believe that the current strategy, or some modified variation, could still prove its worth. However, a combination of approaches would seem to offer the best chance of success—a comprehensive strategy that combines the best elements of the U.S.-centric, force-based approach with the traditional multilateral, treaty-based approach.
The European Union is moving in this direction and has crafted a joint nonproliferation strategy that includes tying all EU trade agreements to the observance of nonproliferation treaties and norms:
The EU policy is to pursue the implementation and universalisation of the existing disarmament and nonproliferation norms. . . . If the treaty regime is to remain credible, it must be more effective. The EU will place particular emphasis on a policy of reinforcing compliance with the multilateral treaty regime. . . . We have a wide range of instruments available [to fight proliferation]: multilateral treaties and verification mechanisms, nationally and internationally-coordinated export controls, cooperative threat reduction programmes; political and economic levers (including trade and development policies); interdiction of illegal procurement activities and, as a last resort, coercive measures in accordance with the UN charter. 38
But this integration is incomplete. The United States must still play the leading role in these efforts, and it may sometimes be necessary to resort to military force outside the United Nations. Such enforcement mechanisms should be in support of the treaty regime, not a replacement for it. The final chapter of this book details how this synthesis could be achieved. But first, the next chapter takes stock of the substantial gains made over the past few decades, giving some confidence that publics and policy makers can build on these successes, fortify the nonproliferation regime by taking the steps necessary to prevent nuclear terrorism, restrain potential new nuclear states, and secure and reduce existing state arsenals.