As we have seen in the previous chapter, nuclear force levels in the world are likely to decline steadily over the next decade and these reductions may well accelerate. As these numbers go down, it is likely that senior officials will be more willing to take weapons off hair-trigger alert, thus reducing the chance of accidental or unauthorized launch. The general movement of policy seems to be in that direction. There are three problems, however, that are more difficult to resolve. They require forging a consensus of expert opinion, focusing the attention of senior officials, securing the necessary funding, and, above all, securing presidential leadership. None of these problems can be solved from the bottom up. The president of the United States and leaders of the other nuclear weapon states and other key countries must be committed to working together on these core issues. If they are so committed, then the lessons learned from the sixty-year history of nuclear weapons and theories developed from that history provide us with a robust set of policy options for solving the three most difficult nuclear threats: terrorism, technology, and new weapon states.
SOLVING PROBLEM NUMBER ONE:
PREVENTING NUCLEAR TERRORISM
It is common sense that national security policy should be oriented toward the main danger to the United States and other nations. Today, that does not come from a nation intentionally attacking with nuclear weapons. Even a nuclear-armed North Korea or Iran would know that the use of any weapon would be regime suicide. The most urgent threat is a terrorist attack, and the number one goal should be to ensure that any such attack is non-nuclear.
Given the difficulties of a terrorist acquiring or making a nuclear bomb, the actual risk of such an attack is still low.1 But it is not zero, and the consequences would be enormous. Hurricane Katrina provided some idea of what it would mean to have a U.S. city disappear from the national grid. Many, in fact, compared the storm to Hiroshima. But Hiroshima was much worse. The bomb, small by today’s standards, killed 140,000 people and destroyed or damaged 70,000 of the 76,000 buildings in the city.
As with the known risk to New Orleans, the government response to the nuclear threat has been inadequate. Former Senator Sam Nunn says, “American citizens have every reason to ask, ‘Are we doing all we can to prevent a nuclear attack?’ The answer is ‘No, we are not.’”2 Congressman David Hobson agrees: “If we really believe a nuclear 9/11 is the most serious thing facing us, then we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.”3 The danger was obvious to many even at the very beginning of the nuclear age. Historians Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin write, “Asked in a closed Senate hearing room ‘whether three or four men couldn’t smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow up the whole city,’ [Manhattan Project Director J. Robert] Oppenheimer responded, ‘Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York.’”4
It is now possible to shore up the nuclear security dams and levees that can prevent this ultimate disaster. A broad expert consensus already exists on the core elements of such a plan: secure all weapon-usable materials (highly enriched uranium and plutonium) against theft or diversion; end the production of these materials; end the use of these materials in civilian research, power reactors, and naval reactors; and eliminate the large surplus stockpiles of these materials held by the United States, Russia, and other nations.5
This is why most experts agree with Sam Nunn:
The most effective, least expensive way to prevent nuclear terrorism is to secure nuclear weapons and materials at the source. Acquiring weapons and materials is the hardest step for the terrorists to take, and the easiest step for us to stop. By contrast, every subsequent step in the process is easier for the terrorists to take, and harder for us to stop. . . . That is why homeland security and the defense against catastrophic terrorism must begin with securing weapons and fissile materials in every country and every facility that has them.6
Theft of Russian nuclear material is not just a theoretical threat. As Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier write, “. . . broken alarms still do not get fixed, security forces often go without adequate body armor and communications equipment, and more.”7 As of the end of 2004, only some 26 percent of nuclear material outside of weapons had been protected with “comprehensive” security upgrades.8
Many of the programs to secure these materials are now in place. Lacking is the high-level political commitment and adequate funding to fully implement them. That is, though these are tough problems and there are often national bureaucratic obstacles to overcome, these programs work. As numerous independent studies have found, they need presidential leadership to energize them.
For example, since 1991, Congress has funded significant technical and financial assistance to Russia under the Nunn-Lugar programs to help Moscow secure stored nuclear warheads, to guard warheads in transport, and to improve tracking and accounting procedures. Two of these are a joint program between Russia and the United States to dispose of 34 tons of plutonium (enough for more than 6,000 nuclear bombs) and a program to convert highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium for sale to an American nuclear energy corporation. This latter program, dubbed “Megatons to Megawatts,” now powers one out of ten lightbulbs in the United States. The U.S. has bought 500 tons of highly enriched uranium from Russia, extracted from disassembled warheads. Half of the this amount has been mixed with natural uranium in Russia, and shipped to the United States, where it is converted into fuel rods that account for half the nuclear power produced in this country, or 10 percent of the total electricity generated every year. It works, it is free to the American taxpayer, and it could quickly be accelerated. The program could fairly easily quickly convert and ship the remaining tons of weapons-grade uranium and buy up an additional 500 tons from Russian warheads, rather than continue at its current pace.
There are also programs under way to eliminate or secure all the dangerous nuclear material outside of Russia. The program could achieve a global cleanout of these vulnerable sites in dozens of nations in the next four years, instead of the ten years currently planned, if the president so desired. Most of the work is fairly straight forward, but often it requires maneuvers worthy of Mission: Impossible. Here are three examples:
• November 1994: 581 kilograms of weapon-usable uranium were secreted out of Kazakhstan to the United States in a top-secret operation codenamed “Project Sapphire.” Racing against the impending winter blizzards and possible attempts by terrorists or Iranians to obtain this highly valuable material, U.S. and Kazakh technicians repackaged the HEU into 1,300 steel containers.9 All materials were then loaded onto two Air Force C-5 transport planes and whisked away to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.10 This massive undertaking was the first operation of its kind under the Nunn-Lugar program and was only possible because Khazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev trusted the United States enough to call for help in removing the fissile materials, having built up this level of trust through a host of cooperative projects.11
• August 2002: Two bombs worth (48 kilograms) of weapon-grade uranium were repatriated from a research reactor at the Vinca Institute in Serbia to a Russian processing plant. The secret nighttime operation was funded jointly by the United States and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a private organization started by Sam Nunn and CNN founder Ted Turner. While the United States funded the actual material transport, NTI provided $5 million for environmental cleanup, without which Serbia refused the transfer.12 The cooperation between government and private organizations holds promise for future progress. Project Vinca could become a prototype for future cooperative efforts.
• September 2005: After midnight, a heavily armed special police force led a cargo truck from the Czech Technical University in Prague to a waiting Russian cargo plane. The truck carried 14 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium.13 The Prague airlift was the eighth successful repatriation of fissile material to Russia from low-security civilian facilities under the recently created U.S. Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI). Its mission is to specifically “identify, secure, recover and/or facilitate the disposition of high-risk, vulnerable nuclear and radiological materials around the world that pose a threat to the United States and the international community.”14 Approximately 122 kilograms of HEU, enough to make about five bombs, have been safely transferred from Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Libya, Uzbekistan, the Czech Republic, and Latvia.15 GTRI continues its work towards complete repatriation of Russian- and U.S.-origin fissile material and is also working to upgrade security at targeted facilities and support conversion of research test reactors from running on highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium.16
With increased funding and presidential commitment, all these efforts could be accelerated to secure or eliminate the vast majority of nuclear weapons and materials by 2010.17 The final report of the 9/11 Public Discourse Project (an extension of the 9/11 Commission) gave the U.S. government failing grades in this area. Commission Chairman Thomas Kean questioned why more high-level attention hadn’t been given to preventing nuclear terrorism: “Why isn’t the President talking about securing nuclear materials? . . . The President should make this goal his top national security priority.”18 This would make it nearly impossible for a terrorist group to threaten any nation with the “ultimate catastrophe.”19 As former Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter puts it, “We can envision the eradication of nuclear terrorism.”20
SOLVING PROBLEM NUMBER TWO:
PREVENTING NUCLEAR FUEL RODS
FROM BECOMING NUCLEAR BOMBS
The core problem with the spread of nuclear technology is not nuclear reactors; it is what goes into and comes out of the reactors. The same facilities that enrich uranium to low levels for fuel can be used to enrich uranium to high levels for bombs. The same facilities that reprocess spent reactor fuel rods for disposal can be used to extract plutonium for weapons.
Over forty countries have nuclear reactors. Very few of them make their own fuel. They purchase it from one of the six countries that make the fuel or from the one existing international consortium, the Uranium Enrichment Company (URENCO). China, France, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, and United States are the only countries that currently enrich uranium in significant quantities. Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom together produce fuel in facilities owned jointly by URENCO.
Today, the fuel problem is growing more serious as several new nations seek fuel production capabilities and as the technological barriers to acquiring them shrink. Iran is the most urgent example of this larger problem. The Iranian government insists that Iran needs to develop nuclear power and indigenous fuel cycle capabilities. Many countries are understandably suspicious that the program is a cover for obtaining the technologies needed to make nuclear weapons. As several experts point out, it does not make economic sense for any nation to build its own indigenous enrichment and reprocessing facilities if its national nuclear power output is less than 25,000 megawatts.21 Iran, however, insists that it must forge ahead with enrichment plants even though it has yet to put its first 1,000-megawatt reactor into operation.
In addition to Iran, Brazil plans to open an enrichment facility in this decade and other countries, such as South Korea and Ukraine have indicated interest in developing their own facilities. Japan’s new reprocessing plant at its $20 billion Rokkasho-mura facility will add to the mountains of plutonium it has already reprocessed in European plants.
From the very beginning of the nuclear age, scientists and policy makers tried to control the production of fuel. Scientists believed in 1945 that the rationing of uranium ores could be the simplest way to control nuclear technology (see chapter 1). Under an international agreement, uranium would be accounted for, and there would be a check on the conversion of natural uranium into fissile material, they argued. Thus, the plan Bernard Baruch presented in 1946 sought to establish an International Atomic Development Authority that would own and control all “dangerous” elements of the nuclear fuel cycle, including all uranium mining, processing, conversion, and enrichment facilities.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower picked up parts of these ideas in his Atoms for Peace Program in 1953. In the decades that followed, there were several major efforts that either studied or recommended the creation of multinational fuel supply centers. These included the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation, the United Nations Conference for the Promotion of International Co-operation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, and the Committee on Assurances of Supply.
There is again today broad agreement that a comprehensive nonproliferation solution must include the reform of the ownership and control of the means of producing fuel for nuclear reactors. Proposals for doing so have been advanced by President George Bush, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and by leading nongovernmental experts.
All these proposals seek to end the further production of materials for use in nuclear weapons and stop—at least temporarily—construction of new facilities for enriching uranium or separating plutonium. Some propose that all such enrichment or separation take place only in facilities owned and operated by multinational entities, others seek tougher export controls to prevent the development of new fuel factories, others propose new contractual and commercial means of control. But all recognize that preventing new nations such as Iran or Brazil from entering the uranium enrichment business will require more than a country-specific approach.
On February 11, 2004, President Bush said:
The world must create a safe, orderly system to field civilian nuclear plants without adding to the danger of weapons proliferation. The world’s leading nuclear exporters should ensure that states have reliable access at reasonable cost to fuel for civilian reactors, so long as those states renounce enrichment and reprocessing. Enrichment and reprocessing are not necessary for nations seeking to harness nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.22
Little progress has been made in furthering President Bush’s proposed reform, in part due to a lack of U.S. follow-up, and in part to wide resistance to the needed changes. There are concerns among developing nations that a supplier cartel would unduly restrict their access to nuclear technology and a broader reluctance among non–nuclear weapon states to accept more stringent nonproliferation obligations when nuclear weapon states are seen as failing in their commitments to disarmament.
For example, while the Bush proposal would stop nuclear production capabilities from being built in new states, his plan would not stop the continued production of weapon-usable materials by states that already have such plants. This seems to perpetuate an unfair two-tier system. In addition to the existing divide of states that have nuclear weapons and states that do not, it seems to add a new distinction between states allowed to have fuel facilities and states that are not. Iranian officials have seized on this apparent discrimination with some success. They insist that they—and all states—have a right to this technology.
ElBaradei agrees with Bush’s assessment of the problem. “The wide dissemination of the most proliferation-sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle . . . could be the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of the nuclear non-proliferation regime,” he warned in March 2004. He disagrees with Bush, however, in how the problem could be solved: “It is important to tighten control over these operations, which could be done by bringing them under some form of multilateral control, in a limited number of regional centers.”
ElBaradei offered a three part solution:
First, it is time to limit the processing of weapon-usable material (separated plutonium and high-enriched uranium) in civilian nuclear programmes, as well as the production of new material through reprocessing and enrichment, by agreeing to restrict these operations exclusively to facilities under multinational control. . . .
Second, nuclear-energy systems should be deployed that, by design, avoid the use of materials that may be applied directly to making nuclear weapons. . . . This is not a futuristic dream; much of the technology for proliferation-resistant nuclear-energy systems has already been developed or is actively being researched. . . .
Third, we should consider multinational approaches to the management and disposal of spent fuel and radioactive waste.23
An expert panel on the nuclear fuel cycle reported back to the IAEA director-general in 2005, identifying possible multilateral approaches to fuel cycle reform and analyzing the benefits and difficulties of each arrangement.24 ElBaradei is committed to advancing this agenda but has yet to attract the support needed to implement any of these suggestions.
A first step to building the needed consensus could be a new international arrangement that would guarantee fuel cycle services (supply and disposal of fuel) to states that do not possess domestic capabilities. Such a mechanism would have to provide a credible international guarantee of fresh reactor fuel and removal of spent fuel at prices that offer an economic incentive to the recipient state. Such an arrangement would reduce, if not eliminate, the economic or energy security justification for states to pursue their own fuel cycle facilities, and in so doing would test states’ commitment to a non-weapons path. States that turn down reliable and economically attractive alternatives to costly new production facilities would engender suspicion of their intentions, inviting sanctions and other international pressures. The EU proposed such an arrangement as part of the solution to the Iranian crisis. This could serve as the prototype for a new global deal.
In January 2005, Russian President Vladmir Putin proposed the creation of a global infrastructure “to offer nuclear fuel cycle services, including [uranium] enrichment under the control of the IAEA” to all countries, provided that they observe the nonproliferation regime.25 “Its backbone element will include a network of centres providing services in nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment, and they will be controlled by the International Atomic Energy Agency and will operate on the basis of nondiscriminatory access,” Putin said.26
Promising non–nuclear weapon states access to nuclear technology was critical to forging the grand bargain that allowed the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enter into force. Today, any efforts to restrict or deny access to that technology (especially when many in the West are calling nuclear power essential to solving the world’s energy shortages and reducing the greenhouse effect from carbon emissions) are resisted by states unwilling to cede any ground on their access to nuclear technology, particularly when they believe that other existing nonproliferation obligations, including those associated with disarmament, are going unimplemented. Meanwhile, states with nuclear fuel capabilities are reluctant to place them under international control.
An innovative possibility for bridging the gap was advanced by John Deutch, Arnold Kanter, Ernest Moniz, and Daniel Poneman in a 2005 Survival article. They have proposed perhaps the most developed commercial idea, what they call an “Assured Nuclear Fuel Services Initiative”:
Countries that do not currently possess uranium enrichment or plutonium-reprocessing facilities would agree not to obtain any such facilities or related technologies and materials for an extended period of time. By the same logic, countries that do possess such facilities would agree not to provide them, or related equipment or technology, to countries that do not. In exchange, during this period they would receive, on attractive terms, guaranteed cradle-to-grave fuel services—specifically, fresh nuclear fuel supply and spent fuel removal—under an agreement signed by all those governments in a position to provide such services. The IAEA would apply safeguards to any fuel-cycle activities covered by the agreement in addition to its traditional safeguard duties on the reactors in the user states. Fuel-service transactions themselves, however, would be between commercial entities negotiating commercial contracts.27
The authors believe their proposal could work because it is based on economic incentives, not strictly political ones. They appeal to the nuclear power industry to realize that failure to reform the fuel cycle will lead inevitably to a country making the leap from civilian nuclear power to military nuclear weapons—with devastating consequences for the industry:
The Assured Nuclear Fuel Services Initiative offers something for everyone. Nuclear supplier states would obtain revenues and increased confidence in avoiding a proliferation incident in a third country whose actions could put the large and potentially growing fleet of nuclear power stations in operation around the world at risk (a “proliferation Chernobyl”). User states would obtain cost-effective, guaranteed access to nuclear fuel and guaranteed relief from the burden of dealing with nuclear waste management. And the world would gain an added measure of safety from the risk of weapons proliferation that the spread of inherently dangerous fuel-cycle facilities would bring.28
Only high-level attention to this difficult issue can forge the international agreement necessary to pick among these various options. The United States should be the natural leader of this effort, but this will require a departure from current priorities. It will mean placing reform of the fuel cycle as a top national security priority, joining with the urgent task of securing weapon-usable fissile materials.
SOLVING PROBLEM NUMBER 3:
PREVENTING NEW STATES
Most of the news, debate and discussion of nonproliferation problems have focused in recent years on the two or three states suspected of developing new weapon programs. In part, this is because the overthrow of these governments, particularly in the Middle East, has overlapped with other political and security agendas. The war in Iraq was only partially about eliminating Saddam Hussein’s weapons capability, though that was the major justification for the war. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz famously admitted, “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”29
The crises with Iran and North Korea are serious, but proliferation problems cannot be solved one country at a time. As the Carnegie study notes:
Attempting to stem nuclear proliferation crisis by crisis—from Iraq, to North Korea, to Iran, et cetera—ultimately invites defeat. As each deal is cut, it sets a new expectation for the next proliferator. Regime change by force in country after country is neither right nor realistic. The United States would bankrupt and isolate itself, all the while convincing additional countries that nuclear weapons would be their only protection. A more systematic approach that prevents states within the NPT from acquiring the nuclear infrastructure needed to produce nuclear weapons is the only real sustainable option.30
While the specifics and politics vary from country to country, a comprehensive, multidimensional approach is needed for all the threats we face from new nations acquiring weapons. Iran, by far the most difficult of the cases, can serve as a model of how such an approach could work.
Think for a moment about what it will take to convince the current or future Iranian government to abandon plans to build between six and twenty nuclear power reactors and all the facilities needed to make and reprocess the fuel for these reactors. Plans to do so predate the Islamic Republic. The United States, in fact, provided Iran with its first research reactor in the late 1960s (it is still operating at the University of Tehran) and encouraged Iran in its nuclear pursuits. In the 1970s this encouragement included agreement by senior officials such as Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Cheney that Iran could develop indigenous facilities for enriching uranium and for reprocessing the spent fuel from nuclear reactors. Then-ruler Shah Reza Pahlavi developed plans to build 22 nuclear power reactors with an electrical output of 23,000 megawatts. Iran’s current leaders say they are merely continuing these plans.
Whatever its true intentions, it will not be easy to convince Iran that while it could proceed with construction of power reactors, the country must abandon construction of fuel-manufacturing facilities. It will likely require both the threat of sanctions and the promise of the economic benefits of cooperation.
This is the package of carrots and sticks that made up the negotiations between the European Union and Iran. Calibrating the right balance in this mix is difficult enough, but the package itself is probably not sufficient to seal a deal. In 2005 and early 2006, the hard-line government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad further complicated the issue with its harsh rhetorical insistence on proceeding with the nuclear plans and pointed threats to Israel. While the rhetoric may eventually fade, at the core, Iran or any country’s reasons for wanting its own fuel cycle capabilities are similar to the reasons some countries want nuclear weapons: security, prestige and domestic political pressures. All of these will have to be addressed in order to craft a permanent solution.
Part of the security equation can be addressed by the prospect of a new relationship with the United States that ends regime change efforts. Iran would need some assurances that agreements on the nuclear program could end efforts by the United States and Israel to remove the current regime. The United States has told North Korea that it has no hostile intentions toward the state and that an end to that country’s program would lead to the restoration of diplomatic relations. Similar assurances will be needed for Iran. But there is also a regional dimension. Ending the threat from an Iranian nuclear program will require placing the Iranian decision in the context of the long-standing U.S. goal of a Middle East free of nuclear weapons. It will be impossible for a country as important as Iran to abstain permanently from acquiring the technologies for producing nuclear weapons—at least as a hedge—if other countries in the region have them (the dynamic noted by the 1961 National Intelligence Estimate decades ago). Iran’s leaders will want some assurances that there is a process under way that can remove what they see as potential threats from their neighbors, including Israel. For domestic political reasons, they will want to present their nuclear abstinence as part of a movement toward a shared and balanced regional commitment.
Many readers might throw up there hands at this point. “Israel, give up its nuclear weapons? Impossible!” But such nuclear-free zones have been created in other regions which, though not as intensely contested as the Middle East, still had to overcome substantial rivalries and which saw the abandonment of existing programs (in South America) and the dismantlement of actual weapons (in Africa and Central Asia). Little diplomatic effort has been put behind the declared U.S. policy in recent years—certainly nothing on the scale of the effort Republican and Democrats needed to create the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its support mechanisms in the 1960s and 1970s.
Ridding the region of nuclear weapons will, of course, be difficult, but it is far better than the alternative of a Middle East with not one nuclear power (Israel) but two, three, or four nuclear weapon states—and with unresolved territorial, religious, and political disputes. The latter is a recipe for nuclear war. The key issue is to get the process going, so that states in the region can have some viable alternative to the pessimistic view that the Middle East will never be nuclear free. A distinguished group of twenty nuclear experts representing a cross-section of national and political views recommended in 2005 that part of the solution to a “nuclear-ready Iran” was to encourage Israel to initiate a “Middle East nuclear restraint effort” that would begin by shutting down the Israeli production reactor at Dimona. Israel, the group convened by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center said, should then show that it was willing to take further steps, including dismantling all its fissile-producing facilities and handing over control of its weapons-usable fissile material to the IAEA, as long as other states in the region did the same.31
In order for this plan or any similar plan to succeed, there will have to be a concurrent effort to change fundamentally the way nuclear fuel is produced and reprocessed. Doing so would satisfy a nation’s security considerations that it does not have to build its own facilities in order to have a secure supply of fuel for its reactors. Some Iranians see the current negotiations as a new effort by the West to place them, once again, in a dependent relationship. This time the West would not control their oil, they say, but the energy of the future, nuclear fuel. Iran, indeed any nation, will not permanently acquiesce to a discriminatory regime that adds to the existing inequality—allowing some countries to have nuclear weapons while others cannot—by now allowing some countries to make nuclear fuel while others cannot.
As detailed in the previous section, reforming the current system will require overcoming billions of dollars worth of corporate and national investments and core national commitments to the present methods of producing and disposing of nuclear fuel. Thorough reform, however, is the only sure way to prevent more and more nations from acquiring the technology that can bring them—legally—right up to the threshold of nuclear weapons capability.
The key is to begin moving in this direction. A first step could be crafting with Iran a compromise agreement that would allow some processing of uranium to take place inside Iran, for example converting uranium to the gas used in centrifuges, but shipping the gas to Russia for enrichment and fabrication into fuel rods.32 The Iranian government could declare that it was using Iranian uranium to fuel Iranian reactors, but the world would have kept Iran from constructing the facilities that would bring it close to weapons capability. This interim step could hold for several years as a more permanent fuel supply regime was constructed.
Finally, these discussions must take place in a world where nuclear weapons are being devalued as measures of security, status, and technical achievement. Just as it is fruitless for parents to try to convince their children not to smoke while they are reveling in a two-pack-a-day habit, it will be impossible for other nations to refrain permanently from acquiring nuclear weapons while they remain the currency of great power status. As the Carnegie authors concluded, “The core bargain of the NPT, and of global nonproliferation politics, can neither be ignored nor wished away. It underpins the international security system and shapes the expectations of citizens and leaders around the world.”33
Breaking the nuclear habit will not be easy, but there are ways to minimize the unease some may feel as they are weaned away from dependence on these weapons. The United States and Russia account for over 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. The two nations have such redundant nuclear capability that it would not compromise any vital security interests to quickly reduce down to General Habiger’s recommended level of 600 total warheads each. Further reductions and the possibility of complete elimination could then be examined in detailed papers prepared by and for the nuclear weapon states. If accompanied by reaffirmation of the ban on nuclear testing, removal of all weapons from rapid-launch alert status, establishment of a firm norm against the first use of these weapons, and commitments to make the reductions in weapons irreversible and verifiable, the momentum and example generated could fundamentally alter the global dynamic.
Such an effort would hearken back to the early Truman proposals that coupled weapons elimination with strict, verified enforcement of nonproliferation. Dramatic reductions in nuclear forces could be joined, for example, with reforms making it more difficult for countries to withdraw from the NPT (by clarifying that no state may withdraw from the treaty and escape responsibility for prior violations of the treaty or retain access to controlled materials and equipment acquired for “peaceful” purposes).34 It would make it easier to obtain national commitments to stop the illegal transfer of nuclear technologies and reform the fuel cycle. The reduction in the number of weapons and the production of nuclear materials would also greatly decrease the risk of terrorists acquiring such materials.
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, reducing the risks from nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century cannot be just a military or nuclear energy strategy. At the beginning of the nuclear age, it was already clear that unless we solved the underlying political conflicts that encourage some states to seek security in nuclear arms, we would never prevent nuclear competition. Oppenheimer said, “We must ask, of any proposals for the control of atomic energy, what part they can play in reducing the probability of war. Proposals which in no way advance the general problem of the avoidance of war, are not satisfactory proposals.”35
Thus, nuclear-weapon-specific efforts should be joined by focused initiatives to resolve conflicts in key regions. A quick look at the map should make clear that nuclear weapons have not spread around the world uniformly. It has not been like a drop of ink diffusing evenly in a glass of water. Vast areas of the world—entire continents—are nuclear-weapon free. There are no nuclear weapons in South America, Africa, Australia, or Southeast Asia. Rather, the states of proliferation concern are in an arc of crisis that flows from the Middle East through South Asia up to Northeast Asia. In other words, the concern is in regions where unresolved territorial, political, and religious disputes give rise to the desire to gain some strategic advantage by acquiring nuclear weapons.
Countries have given up nuclear weapons and programs in the past only when these disputes have been resolved. The pattern of the past should be the template for the future. Avoiding nuclear war in South Asia requires continuing the progress in normalizing relations between India and Pakistan, achieving a permanent resolution of the Kashmir issue, and assuring that China’s rise is, indeed, peaceful. Ridding the Middle East of nuclear weapons and new nuclear programs requires normalization of relations between Israel and other regional states and groups based on a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ending all war may be a utopian dream, but we have made more progress in the past two decades than most people realize. Since the end of the Cold War, and in large part because of the end of the surrogate struggles that competition engendered, there has been a steady decline in regional conflicts. The 2005 Human Security Report, an independent study funded by five countries and published by Oxford University Press, recorded a 40 percent decline in deadly conflicts from 1992 to 2003.36 The report noted that there was an 80 percent decline in both the deadliest conflicts—those with 1,000 or more battle deaths—and in the number of genocides and other mass slaughters of civilians. How did this happen? “In the late 1980s, Washington and Moscow stopped fueling ‘proxy wars’ in the developing world, and the United Nations was liberated to play the global security role its founders intended,” Andrew Mack, the director of the project, concluded. “Freed from the paralyzing stasis of Cold War geopolitics, the Security Council initiated an unprecedented, though sometimes inchoate, explosion of international activism designed to stop ongoing wars and prevent new ones.”37
As this record of success becomes more widely recognized, it may become possible to convince national leaders to devote more effort to resolving the conflicts in Korea, South Asia, and the Middle East. Resolution of some of these may come more quickly than most imagine. Others will take more time, but as history teaches us, it is the direction in which we are moving that informs national attitudes and shapes each state’s security decisions. The more arrows we can get pointed in the right direction, the easier it becomes to make progress on all fronts.
Former U.S. State Department official Robert Einhorn and former Defense Department official Kurt Campbell note that the wisdom of societies and states that have gone without nuclear weapons is reinforced by “a world in which the goals of the NPT are being fulfilled—where existing nuclear arsenals are being reduced, parties are not pursuing clandestine nuclear programs, nuclear testing has been stopped, the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is being strengthened, and in general, the salience of nuclear weapons in international affairs is diminishing.”38
There is every reason to believe that in the first half of this century the peoples and nations of the world will come to see nuclear weapons as the “historic accident” Mohamed ElBaradei says they are. It may become clearer that nations have no need for the vast destructive force contained in a few kilograms of enriched uranium and plutonium. These weapons still appeal to national pride but they are increasingly unappealing to national budgets and military needs. It took just sixty years to get to this point in the nuclear road. If enough national leaders decide to walk the path together, it should not take another sixty to get to a safer, better world. We may finally be able to correct the one mistake Einstein thought he made.