Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons

After wading through the history, theory, dangers, challenges and failures of proliferation policy, most readers could be excused for feeling a bit depressed. Don’t be. There is quite a bit of good news about the prospects for reducing the threats from nuclear weapons. Many experts and political officials substantially underestimated the success achieved by previous officials working with the formidable tools provided by the nonproliferation regime. While today’s threats are serious, wise policy choices in the past have contained and even eliminated similar threats. Prudent policy choices in the future can do the same. Most importantly, we have a pretty good idea of what those government policies should be.

The policies should follow two guiding principles. First, focus the greatest government resources on the most serious threats: preventing nuclear terrorism, blocking the emergence of new nuclear states, reducing the dangers from existing arsenals, and fortifying the nonproliferation regime. Second, our policies should minimize the proliferation drivers while maximizing the proliferation barriers.

Policies to minimize the drivers would reduce the security factors driving states to acquire nuclear weapons, reduce the prestige associated with these weapons, weaken the domestic nuclear proponents and the salience of the issue in domestic politics, and reduce the scientific appeal of nuclear technology. Policies to maximize the barriers would increase the political cost of violating the global nonproliferation norm, increase the difficulties of getting the requisite nuclear technology, and raise the direct and indirect costs of acquiring nuclear weapons. Nonproliferation policies should have positive incentives that increase the barriers by, for example, increasing the prestige and status of states that have chosen not to build nuclear bombs, providing security guarantees to states eschewing nuclear programs, and committing the leading states to greater efforts in those regions where unresolved conflicts give rise to proliferation imperatives.

Often the biggest obstacle to solving a problem is convincing one’s self that a solution is possible. At a time when there is tremendous nuclear pessimism in the world, it is heartening to realize that there is also a great deal of good news. This chapter summarizes some of the positive trends discussed in the book and adds a few more. It then turns to policy in greater detail.

The number of nuclear weapons in the world has been cut in half over the past twenty years, from a Cold War high of 65,000 in 1986 to about 27,000 today. These stockpiles will continue to decline for at least the rest of this decade. There are now far fewer countries that have nuclear weapons or weapon programs than there were in the 1960s, ’70s, or ’80s. In the 1960s, 23 countries had weapons, were conducting weapons-related research, or were discussing the pursuit of weapons, including Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and West Germany. Today, 8 countries have weapons (China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States) with North Korea a possible ninth. Iran may be pursuing a weapons program under the guise of peaceful nuclear power, but no other nation is believed to be doing so.

More countries have given up nuclear weapons or weapons programs in the past 15 years than have started them. These were not easy cases:

• The apartheid government in South Africa, on the eve of transition to majority rule in 1993, announced that it had destroyed its six secret nuclear weapons. Nelson Mandela could have reversed that decision, but he concluded that South Africa’s security would be better served in a region where no state had nuclear weapons than in one with a nuclear arms race.

The NPT itself is widely considered one of the most successful security pacts in history, with every nation of the world a member except for Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Most of the 183 member states that do not have nuclear weapons believe what the treaty says: we should eliminate nuclear weapons. Most of the American public agrees. An Associated Press poll in March 2005 showed that 66 percent of Americans believe that no country should be allowed to have nuclear weapons, including the United States. In fact, when asked if the United States and its allies should be allowed to have nuclear weapons and all other nations prevented from doing so, only 13 percent agreed—though that is essentially what U.S. policy is today.

In September 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, finally concluding the work Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy had begun. Clinton called the treaty “our commitment to end all nuclear tests for all time—the longest-sought, hardest-fought prize in the history of arms control. It will help to prevent the nuclear powers from developing more advanced and more dangerous weapons. It will limit the possibilities for other states to acquire such devices.”¹ Even though the U.S. Senate declined to ratify the treaty, since its signing only Pakistan and India had broken the new norm, testing weapons in May 1998. They then pledged to refrain from tests. Over 176 nations have now signed the treaty and 132 have ratified it as of April 2006. For eight years—the longest period in the atomic age—no nuclear weapons had exploded anywhere on, above, or below earth, until North Korea’s October 2006 test. Restoring this moratorium will make it more difficult for any other nation to shatter it.

• There are also far fewer intermediate-range missiles that could threaten our allies. Thanks to Reagan-era arms control treaties, these missiles have been all but eliminated. The United States and Russia no longer deploy them, and with only 12 Chinese missiles of this range left in the world, the global stockpile has declined by a remarkable 98 percent from Cold War levels.

• There are regional threats from the programs that remain, largely in the Middle East, South Asia, and Korea, but even here there is some good news. The number of states with ballistic missile programs has decreased from the number with such programs during the Cold War. By 2005, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, and, most recently, Libya, had all abandoned their efforts.

• Even with the medium-range missile programs of Iran, Israel, India, North Korea, Pakistan, and Syria, the threat today is a limited one that is confined to a few countries whose political evolution will be the determining factor in whether they emerge as, or remain, threats to global security.³

In just over three decades biological and chemical weapons moved from essential components of major powers’ national defense programs to evil weapons that no civilized nation should possess. Though still a serious terrorist threat, these weapons have been largely eliminated from state arsenals.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon began the unilateral dismantlement of the U.S. biological weapons stockpile, which then had enough viruses, bacteria, and toxins to kill every man, woman, and child and most food crops in the world. Nixon negotiated the Biological Weapons Convention banning these weapons, now signed by 171 nations. While some significant nations remain outside the treaty and some nations may retain biological weapons despite their signature on the pact, we are down to a handful of countries of concern.⁴

In the late 1980s, a U.S. Army program to begin a new generation of chemical weapons prompted one of the most divisive national security debates of that era. The plan was to add to the existing arsenal a new weapon—the so-called Bigeye bomb—that would combine two chemicals in flight to form a deadly nerve agent that would kill on contact. The Army said it was essential to national security; if they did not have a response in kind to the chemical warfare capabilities of the Warsaw Pact, soldiers would die. Votes on whether to produce this weapon split the Congress in half.

In 1991, President George H. W. Bush resolved the debate by declaring that no one should have chemical weapons. He began negotiations for the Chemical Weapons Convention, banning all such weapons. The treaty now has 180 members, and most adhere to its rules. The United States is destroying the 30,000 tons of chemical weapons built during the Cold War, while Russia is destroying its 40,000 tons. A few significant countries, including Israel, Syria, and Egypt, remain outside the treaty and likely still have chemical weapons.⁵ But, importantly, no country admits to having these weapons. There is no national pride or international prestige associated with chemical or biological weapons. They are taboo.

Today the sense that nuclear weapons are illegitimate is fundamental to the future of the nonproliferation regime. A prohibition regime cannot be sustained over the long haul by sheer force or coercion or physical denial. It requires an internalized belief among its participants that the prohibited item is illegitimate and abhorrent and that the prohibitions must apply to all.⁶

We may be seeing the beginning of just such a trend. Many political and military leaders recognize the limited military utility of weapons whose use would kill thousands of innocent civilians. “I think the time is now for a thoughtful and open debate on the role of nuclear weapons in our country’s national security strategy,” Congressman David Hobson (R-OH) said in February 2005. “It’s been 15 years since the end of the cold war, and in my opinion, the Department of Energy’s weapon-complex decision making is still being driven by the nuclear weapons structure put in place over the past 50 years.”⁷ Hobson’s point is supported by the research of Federation of American Scientists’ expert Ivan Oelrich. “If we search for missions for nuclear weapons, we can always find them,” he says, “but if we search for weapons to fulfill military missions then we will only rarely light upon nuclear weapons as the best solution.”⁸ Of the fifteen missions currently proposed for U.S. nuclear weapons by the administration’s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review (the document that provides overall guidance and direction for the nuclear forces and doctrine), Oelrich concluded that only one mission requires keeping U.S. strategic nuclear forces near their present levels: “The U.S. arsenal today looks much as it would if a disarming first strike against Russia were still its dominant mission.”⁹ (The Nuclear Posture Review is discussed in more detail below.)

Hobson, a solid Midwest conservative, chaired the subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee that funds nuclear weapon programs. He led the effort to block funding for the administration’s proposed “nuclear bunker buster,” a new nuclear weapon designed to go after conventional targets such as underground shelters. He convinced the House and Senate to eliminate the funding to research this new weapon in 2004 and 2005, essentially ending the program.

General Eugene Habiger told an international conference in November 2005 that the United States and Russia could quickly reduce their enormous arsenals to 600 total warheads each.¹⁰ Habiger was commander in chief of the U.S. Strategic Command in the 1990s—a man who had his finger on the buttons that could have launched thousands of warheads. Former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, sitting next to Habiger on the same panel, went further. He called the current U.S. and NATO nuclear policies “insane.” He said they were “illegal, immoral, militarily unnecessary, and destructive of the nonproliferation regime—it’s time to change them.” McNamara advocates greatly reducing the arsenals and then working to eliminate the weapons completely, just as countries have done with chemical and biological weapons.¹¹

Several expert studies recommend quickly reducing the U.S. force down to a total of 1,000 warheads, with 500–600 deployed and the remainder held in reserve.¹² There is, in fact, broad agreement across the political spectrum that U.S. nuclear forces could be reduced from thousands to hundreds without harming national security. Former National Security Council and Defense Department official Franklin Miller (who played a key role in U.S. nuclear policy for the past two decades) said in November 2005, “It’s my personal belief that the levels of U.S. strategic weapons can and should decline further than those allowed in the Treaty of Moscow. I would hope that the administration takes steps in the next year or so to produce that.”¹³ Former Reagan and Bush administration official Richard Perle said, “I see no reason why we can’t go well below 1,000. I want the lowest number possible, under the tightest control possible. . . . The truth is we are never going to use them. The Russians aren’t going to use theirs either.”¹⁴

The bureaucratic and political obstacles to implementing these changes are formidable; not just globally but nationally. They will require not just a change on the part of other nations, but changes in U.S. policy as well. A change in U.S. policy, in fact, may be the prerequisite to implementing a global transformation. At the risk of sounding like a self-help book, we cannot change the world until we change ourselves. For it is in the United States that the prestige, security, and domestic drivers for nuclear weapons remain the strongest and the barriers the weakest.

In the United States, perhaps more than in any other country, the atom is tied directly to the national ego. For many political leaders, it is inconceivable that the United States would give up the weapon we invented. With a heightened sense of security threats, diminishing any military program smacks some as unilateral disarmament—even though nuclear weapons have nothing to do with preventing terrorism and no proposal requires the United States to reduce alone.

National intelligence estimates no longer seem to examine the connection between U.S. policy and other nations’ proliferation. If one were to do so, analysts would almost certainly find the same relationship today that intelligence agencies found in the 1950s and 1960s. As the 1961 NIE concluded, while most countries still have powerful international and domestic reasons for not pursuing nuclear weapons, “growing pessimism as to the likelihood of any realistic disarmament agreement could in some cases . . . tend to undermine opposition to the acquisition of a national nuclear capability.”¹⁵ In the twenty-first century, the findings of the 1961 study still apply: “many of these countries will probably continue to improve their overall capabilities in the nuclear field and develop their present peaceful programs with one eye cocked to the future possibility that they may eventually decide to develop an operational nuclear capability independently.”¹⁶

With the end of the Cold War, many officials and experts thought the two superpowers would and could rapidly dismantle their now-obsolete nuclear war-fighting capabilities. However, even though many senior officials in the Clinton administration shared Habiger’s perspective, there was little change in the U.S. nuclear posture. Georgetown University professor Janne Nolan said that during the 1994 Nuclear Posture Review,

There was no high-level, sustained commitment given to considering, let alone implementing, fundamental change. It started out as a very ambitious effort to scrub all of the assumptions of both declaratory and operational doctrine, to examine whether we needed a triad [nuclear weapons on bombers, missiles, and submarines], why we needed to continue to rely on prompt counterforce, and so on. For many reasons, the review ended up as a pallid, little document that was not briefed around for very long and that essentially ratified the status quo.¹⁷

Officials meant well, but they were not prepared for the resistance they encountered. They floated serious reform proposals, says Nolan. “In the end, however, the NPR collapsed from bureaucratic inertia and the absence of presidential leadership.”¹⁸

In this century—just as in the last—the issue is still a political football that some use to buttress their own security credentials or to attack others as “weak on defense.” Democrats are particularly vulnerable to such attacks and often, as during the Clinton administration, try to adopt policies that will shield them from political damage.¹⁹ This dynamic is unlikely to change. Frances FitzGerald, in her penetrating study of the Reagan presidency and the Star Wars program, Way Out There in the Blue, notes, “For those who made their careers as defense experts it was never totally safe to be on the left of a strategic debate, and in a time when the country was in a conservative mood, it was downright dangerous.”²⁰

During the Bush administration, a heightened sense of national insecurity and the rise into key policy positions of experts with decidedly hawkish views on nuclear weapons produced a Nuclear Posture Review in 2002 that closely mirrored recommendations produced by neoconservative think tanks before the election. In summary, the highly controversial new posture, still in effect today,

The review reversed the general deemphasis on nuclear weapon of the previous decade and reasserted the necessity and desirability of nuclear weapons for a broad range of existing and possibly new missions. The review explicitly discussed planning for using weapons on China, North Korea, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and other countries.²²

Positions endorsed by this review have since been adopted by other states, including Russia, which reasserted its policy of using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear threats, and France, whose president, Jacques Chirac, said in January 2006 said his country would use its nuclear weapons to counter any state that might resort “to terrorist means.”²³ The United Kingdom, with the smallest arsenal of the five nuclear weapon states recognized by the NPT, is beginning a debate on the future of its submarine-based force. It will cost over a hundred billion dollars to replace the current fleet. Officials seem to be influenced by U.S. views and favor preserving the prestige and security the weapons seem to offer. It is possible, however, that budgetary realities and disarmament sentiment could tip the debate the other way and the country could be the first of the five to give up its arsenal, setting a model for the rest of the world.

With the United States politically divided, with the Western alliance split between the U.S. neoconservativism and European liberal internationalism, and with international institutions either weakened by these divisions or, like the European Union, still too new to assert their authority, it is unlikely that any single approach to international relations will determine policy in this decade. More realistically, officials can strive for a combination of approaches that would balance enforcement of nonproliferation commitments with implementation of disarmament commitments.

In 2005, the Carnegie Endowment published Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security, an ambitious report detailing the theory and practical applications of such a comprehensive approach.²⁴ The experts (including this author) argued, “The new strategic aim of nonproliferation policy should be to achieve universal compliance with the norms and rules of a toughened nuclear nonproliferation regime.”²⁵ After a two-year process incorporating the best ideas from experts and officials from over twenty nations, the authors presented over 100 recommendations to undermine the drivers and strengthen the barriers to proliferation.

Like the scientists and officials of the 1940s, they understood the magnitude of this task. Carnegie Endowment President Jessica T. Mathews, in presenting the report she coauthored, said:

What we’re urging here is not easily done; we know that. It is not incremental change and it will not come for a low political cost. It is very simply a strategy that recognizes that nuclear proliferation is the greatest security threat the world faces, and which asks and expects the United States government and other governments, nuclear and nonnuclear, to act as though that were indeed true. President Bush has said that we must, in his words, do everything we can to control the spread of nuclear weapons. This is an everything-we-can-do strategy.²⁶

The report analyzed how to end the threat of nuclear terrorism by implementing comprehensive efforts to secure and eliminate nuclear materials worldwide and to stop the illegal transfer of nuclear technology. The strategy would prevent new nuclear weapon states by increasing penalties for withdrawal from the NPT, enforcing compliance with strengthened treaties, and radically reforming the nuclear fuel cycle to prevent states from acquiring dual-use technologies for uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing. The threat from existing arsenals would be reduced by shrinking global stockpiles, curtailing research on new nuclear weapons, and taking weapons off hair-trigger alert status. Finally, greater efforts would be devoted to resolving the regional conflicts that fuel proliferation and to bringing the three nuclear weapon states outside the NPT (India, Pakistan, and Israel) into conformance with an expanded set of global nonproliferation norms.

The key to implementing these and other innovations will be convincing each side in the current proliferation policy divide to accept parts of the other’s approach. Those who believe that international security is best achieved through multilateral institutions must accept that they have to spend as much time enforcing treaties as they do collecting signatures on them. Those who believe that maintaining absolute U.S. superiority is the only reliable defense strategy must recognize that international institutions and laws are essential to U.S. legitimacy and security. As Weekly Standard contributing editor Robert Kagan says, “The United States can neither appear to be acting only in its self-interest, nor can it, in fact, act as if its own national interest were all that mattered.”²⁷ British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it more directly: “If America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda, too.”²⁸

Some elements of this compromise approach began creeping into U.S. policy in 2005, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice slowly but steadily changed the strategy toward North Korea to take into consideration the positions of South Korea, China, and Russia and began actual negotiations with the North Koreans within the structure of the six-party talks. This was a quiet, but dramatic reversal. As the New York Times somewhat caustically editorialized, “[F]or four years, the Bush administration put more creative energy into name-calling than into serious talks. The main result was that the North moved four years further along toward being able to threaten its neighbors with nuclear weapons.”²⁹ In mid-2005, U.S. rhetoric toward North Korea softened, the U.S. initiated several bilateral meetings, and U.S. officials were allowed to depart from prepared texts and engage in a genuine give-and-take with their Korean counterparts.

The new approach resulted in a September 2005 breakthrough when the government of North Korea formally committed to give up all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and to return to the Non-Proliferation Treaty in exchange for a nonaggression pledge from the United States and economic and energy aid. The chief U.S. negotiator at the talks, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, praised the agreement as a “win-win situation.” (Indeed, all successful negotiations have to be so. The parties must be able to leave the table declaring victory and return to their countries and peoples with tangible achievements.) The declaration was only a partial victory, however, and tough negotiations remained, including assuring that North Korea, after breaking previous pledges, would honor this one, and negotiating the verification and sequencing of the dismantlement of the North Korean facilities and provision of aid. It was possible that hard-liners in both capitals could kill the deal with a reversion to the posturing of the previous four years. By February 2006, this appeared to be exactly what transpired, when new demands from Washington piled resolution of North Korea’s counterfeiting operations on top of an already overloaded negotiating cart. The results were apparently what these officials sought—the talks collapsed. By October 2006, the talks were still in limbo when North Korea exploded its nuclear test.

The failure of a U.S. policy with both North Korea and Iran underscores the need for a new, synthesized approach to resolve the three most difficult problems confronting us today: the risk of nuclear terrorism, the thin line separating the production of civilian nuclear power and the production of nuclear weapons, and the emergence of new nuclear states. The final chapter details what such a strategy would look like.