The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as a100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures.
The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.1
The threat of a global thermonuclear war is now near-zero. The treaties negotiated in the 1980s, particularly the START agreements that began the reductions in US and Soviet strategic arsenals and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement of 1987 that eliminated an entire class of nuclear-tipped missiles, began a process that accelerated with the end of the Cold War. Between 1986 and 2006 the nuclear weapons carried by long-range US and Russian missiles and bombers decreased by 61%.2 Overall, the number of total nuclear weapons in the world has been cut in half, from a Cold War high of 65,000 in 1986 to about 26,000 in 2007, with approximately 96% held by the United States and Russia. These stockpiles will continue to decline for at least the rest of this decade.
But the threat of global war is not zero. Even a small chance of war each year, for whatever reason, multiplied over a number of years sums to an unacceptable chance of catastrophe. This is not mere statistical musings. We came much closer to Armageddon after the Cold War ended than many realize. In January 1995, a global nuclear war almost started by mistake. Russian military officials mistook a Norwegian weather rocket for a US submarine-launched ballistic missile. Boris Yelstin became the first Russian president to ever have the ‘nuclear suitcase’ open in front of him. He had just a few minutes to decide if he should push the button that would launch a barrage of nuclear missiles. Thankfully, he concluded that his radars were in error. The suitcase was closed.
Such a scenario could repeat today. The Cold War is over, but the Cold War weapons remain, and so does the Cold War posture that keep thousands of them on hair-trigger alert, ready to launch in under 15 minutes. As of January 2007, the US stockpile contains nearly 10,000 nuclear weapons; about 5000 of them deployed atop Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles based in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota, a fleet of 12 nuclear-powered Trident submarine that patrol the Pacific, Atlantic, and Artic oceans and in the weapon bays of long-range B-2 bombers housed in Missouri and B-52 based in Louisiana and North Dakota. Russia has as many as 15,000 weapons, with 3300 atop its SS-18, SS-19, SS-24, and SS-27 missiles deployed in silos in six missile fields arrayed between Moscow and Siberia (Kozelsk, Tatishchevo, Uzhur, Dombarovskiy, Kartalay, and Aleysk), 11 nuclear-powered Delta submarines that conduct limited patrols with the Northern and Pacific fleets from three naval bases (Nerpich’ya, Yagel’Naya, and Rybachiy), and Bear and Blackjack bombers stationed at Ukrainka and Engels air bases (see Table 18.2).3
Although the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Russian and American presidents now call each other friends, Washington and Moscow continue to maintain and modernize these huge nuclear arsenals. In July 2007, just before Russian President Vladimir Putin vacationed with American President George W. Bush at the Bush home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Russia successfully tested a new submarine-based missile. The missile carries six nuclear warheads and can travel over 6000 miles, that is, it is designed to strike targets in the United States, including, almost certainly, targets in the very state of Maine Putin visited. For his part, President Bush’s administration adopted a nuclear posture that included plans to produce new types of weapons, begin development of a new generation of nuclear missiles, submarines and bombers, and to expand the US nuclear weapons complex so that it could produce thousands of new warheads on demand.
Although much was made of the 1994 joint decision by Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin to no longer target each other with their weapons, this announcement had little practical consequences. Target coordinates can be uploaded into a warhead’s guidance systems within minutes. The warheads remain on missiles on a high alert status similar to that they maintained during the tensest moments of the Cold War. This greatly increases the risk of an unauthorized or accidental launch. Because there is no time buffer built into each state’s decision-making process, this extreme level of readiness enhances the possibility that either side’s president could prematurely order a nuclear strike based on flawed intelligence.
Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman launch officer now president of the World Security Institute says, ‘If both sides sent the launch order right now, without any warning or preparation, thousands of nuclear weapons – the equivalent in explosive firepower of about 70,000 Hiroshima bombs – could be unleashed within a few minutes’.4
Blair describes the scenario in dry but chilling detail:
If early warning satellites or ground radar detected missiles in flight, both sides would attempt to assess whether a real nuclear attack was under way within a strict and short deadline. Under Cold War procedures that are still in practice today, early warning crews manning their consoles 24/7 have only three minutes to reach a preliminary conclusion. Such occurrences happen on a daily basis, sometimes more than once per day…. if an apparent nuclear missile threat is perceived, then an emergency teleconference would be convened between the president and his top nuclear advisers. On the US side, the top officer on duty at Strategic Command in Omaha, Neb., would brief the president on his nuclear options and their consequences. That officer is allowed all of 30 seconds to deliver the briefing.
Then the US or Russian president would have to decide whether to retaliate, and since the command systems on both sides have long been geared for launch-on-warning, the presidents would have little spare time if they desired to get retaliatory nuclear missiles off the ground before they – and possibly the presidents themselves – were vaporized. On the US side, the time allowed to decide would range between zero and 12 minutes, depending on the scenario. Russia operates under even tighter deadlines because of the short flight time of US Trident submarine missiles on forward patrol in the North Atlantic.5
Russia’s early warning systems remain in a serious state of erosion and disrepair, making it all the more likely that a Russian president could panic and reach a different conclusion than Yeltsin did in 1995.6 As Russian capabilities continue to deteriorate, the chances of accidents only increase. Limited spending on the conventional Russian military has led to greater reliance on an ageing nuclear arsenal, whose survivability would make any deterrence theorist nervous. Yet, the missiles remain on a launch status begun during the worst days of the Cold War and never turned off.
As Blair, concludes: ‘Such rapid implementation of war plans leaves no room for real deliberation, rational thought, or national leadership’.7 Former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn agrees ‘We are running the irrational risk of an Armageddon of our own making … The more time the United States and Russia build into our process for ordering a nuclear strike, the more time is available to gather data, to exchange information, to gain perspective, to discover an error, to avoid an accidental or unauthorized launch’.8
As of January 2007, the US stockpile contains nearly 10,000 nuclear warheads. This includes about 5521 deployed warheads: 5021 strategic warheads and 500 non-strategic warheads, including cruise missiles and bombs (Table 18.1). Approximately 4441 additional warheads are held in the reserve or inactive/responsive stockpiles or awaiting dismantlement. Under current plans, the stockpile is to be cut ‘almost in half’ by 2012, leaving approximately 6000 warheads in the total stockpile.
Table 18.2 Russian NuclearForces
As of March 2007, Russia has approximately 5670 operational nuclear warheads in its active arsenal. This includes about 3340 strategic warheads and approximately 2330 non-strategic warheads, including artillery, short-range rockets and landmines. An additional 9300 warheads are believed to be in reserve or awaiting dismantlement, for a total Russian stockpile of approximately 15,000 nuclear warheads (Table 18.2).
There are major uncertainties in estimating the consequences of nuclear war. Much depends on the time of year of the attacks, the weather, the size of the weapons, the altitude of the detonations, the behaviour of the populations attacked, etc. But one thing is clear: the numbers of casualties, even in a small, accidental nuclear attack, are overwhelming. If the commander of just one Russian Delta-IV ballistic-missile submarine were to launch 12 of its 16 missiles at the United States, 7 million Americans could die.9
Experts use various models to calculate nuclear war casualties. The most accurate estimate the damage done from a nuclear bomb’s three sources of destruction: blast, fire and radiation. Fifty percent of the energy of the weapon is released through the blast, 35% as thermal radiation, and 15% through radiation.
Like a conventional weapon, a nuclear weapon produces a destructive blast, or shock wave. A nuclear explosion, however, can be thousands and even millions of times more powerful than a conventional one. The blast creates a sudden change in air pressure that can crush buildings and other objects within seconds of the detonation. All but the strongest buildings within 3 km (1.9 miles) of a 1 megaton hydrogen bomb would be levelled. The blast also produces super-hurricane winds that can destroy people and objects like trees and utility poles. Houses up to 7.5 km (4.7 miles) away that have not been completely destroyed would still be heavily damaged.
A nuclear explosion also releases thermal energy (heat) at very high temperatures, which can ignite fires at considerable distances from the detonation point, leading to further destruction, and can cause severe skin burns even a few miles from the explosion. Stanford University historian Lynn Eddy calculates that if a 300 kiloton nuclear weapon were dropped on the U.S. Department of Defense, ‘within tens of minutes, the entire area, approximately 40 to 65 square miles – everything within 3.5 or 6.4 miles of the Pentagon – would be engulfed in a mass fire’ that would ‘extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else’. The creation of a ‘hurricane of fire’, Eden argues, is a predictable effect of a high-yield nuclear weapon, but is not taken into account by war planners in their targeting calculations.10
Unlike conventional weapons, a nuclear explosion also produces lethal radiation. Direct ionizing radiation can cause immediate death, but the more significant effects are long term. Radioactive fallout can inflict damage over periods ranging from hours to years. If no significant decontamination takes place (such as rain washing away radioactive particles, or their leaching into the soil), it will take 8 to 10 years for the inner circle near the explosion to return to safe levels of radiation. In the next circles such decay will require 3 to 6 years. Longer term, some of the radioactive particles will enter the food chain.11 For example, a 1-megaton hydrogen bomb exploded at ground level would have a lethal radiation inner circle radius of about 50 km (30 miles) where death would be instant. At 145 km radius (90 miles), death would occurwithin two weeks of exposure. The outermost circle would be at 400 km (250 miles) radius where radiation would still be harmful, but the effects not immediate.
Table 18.3 Immediate Deaths from Blast and Firestorms in eight US Cities, Submarine Attack
In the accidental Delta IV submarine strike noted above, most of the immediate deaths would come from the blast and ‘superfires’ ignited by the bomb. Each of the 100 kiloton warheads carried by the submarine’s missiles would create a circle of death 8.6 km (5.6 miles) in diameter. Nearly 100%of the people within this circle would die instantly. Firestorms would kill millions more (see Table 18.3). The explosion would produce a cloud of radioactive dust that would drift downwind from the bomb’s detonation point. If the bomb exploded at a low altitude, there would be a 10–60 km (20-40 miles) long and 3–5 km (2-3 miles) wide swath of deadly radiation that would kill all exposed and unprotected people within six hours of exposure.12 As the radiation continued and spread over thousands of square kilometres, it is very possible that secondary deaths in dense urban populations would match or even exceed the immediate deaths caused by fire and blast, doubling the total fatalities listed in Table 18.4. The cancerdeaths and genetic damage from radiation could extend for several generations.
Table 18.4 Casualties and Fatalities in a South Asian Nuclear War
Naturally, the number of casualties in a global nuclear war would be much higher. US military commanders, for example, might not know that the commander of the Delta submarine had launched by accident or without authorization. They could very well order a US response. One such response could be a precise ‘counter-force’ attack on all Russian nuclear forces. An American attack directed solely against Russian nuclear missiles, submarines and bomber bases would require some 1300 warheads in a coordinated barrage lasting approximately 30 minutes, according to a sophisticated analysis of US war plans by experts at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, DC.13 It would destroy most of Russia’s nuclear weapons and development facilities. Communications across the country would be severely degraded. Within hours after the attack, the radioactive fallout would descend and accumulate, creating lethal conditions over an area exceeding 775,000 km2 -larger than France and the United Kingdom combined. The attack would result in approximately 11–17 million civilian casualties, 8–12 million of which would be fatalities, primarily due to the fallout generated by numerous ground bursts.
American war planners could also launch another of the plans designed and modelled over the nuclear age: a ‘limited’ attack against Russian cities, using only 150–200 warheads. This is often called a ‘counter-value’ attack, and would kill or wound approximately one-third of Russia’s citizenry. An attack using the warheads aboard just a single US Trident submarine to attack Russian cities will result in 30–45 million casualties. An attack using 150 US Minuteman III ICBMs on Russian cities would produce 40–60 million casualties.14
If, in either of these limited attacks, the Russian military command followed their planned operational procedures and launched their weapons before they could be destroyed, the results would be an all-out nuclear war involving most of the weapons in both the US and Russian arsenals. The effects would be devastating. Government studies estimate that between 35 and 77% of the US population would be killed (105-230 million people, based on current population figures) and 20–40% of the Russian population (28-56 million people).15
A 1979 report to Congress by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, The Effects of Nuclear War, noted the disastrous results of a nuclear war would go far beyond the immediate casualties:
In addition to the tens of millions of deaths during the days and weeks after the attack, there would probably be further millions (perhaps further tens of millions) of deaths in the ensuing months or years. In addition to the enormous economic destruction caused by the actual nuclear explosions, there would be some years during which the residual economy would decline further, as stocks were consumed and machines wore out faster then recovered production could replace them…. For a period of time, people could live of supplies (and, in a sense, off habits) left over from before the war. But shortages and uncertainties would get worse. The survivors would find themselves in a race to achieve viability … before stocks ran out completely. A failure to achieve viability, or even a slow recovery, would result in many additional deaths, and much additional economic, political, and social deterioration. This postwar damage could be as devastating as the damage from the actual nuclear explosions.16
According to the report’s comprehensive analysis, if production rose to the rate of the consumption before stocks were exhausted, then viability would be achieved and economic recovery would begin. If not, then ‘each post-war year would see a lower level of economic activity than the year before, and the future of civilization itself in the nations attacked would be in doubt’.17 It is doubtful that either the United States or Russia would ever recover as viable nation states.
There are grave dangers inherent not only in countries such as the United States and Russia maintaining thousands of nuclear weapons but also in China, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, India, and Pakistan holding hundreds of weapons. While these states regard their own nuclear weapons as safe, secure, and essential to security, each views others’ arsenals with suspicion.
Existing regional nuclear tensions already pose serious risks. The decades-long conflict between India and Pakistan has made South Asia the region most likely to witness the first use of nuclear weapons since World War II. An active missile race is under way between the two nations, even as India and China continue their rivalry. Although some progress towards détente has been made, with each side agreeing to notify the other before ballistic missile tests, for example, quick escalation in a crisis could put the entire subcontinent right back on the edge of destruction. Each country has an estimated 50 to 100 nuclear weapons, deliverable via fighter-bomber aircraft or possibly by the growing arsenal of short- and medium-range missiles each nation is building. Their use could be devastating.
South Asian urban populations are so dense that a 50 kiloton weapon would produce the same casualties that would require megaton-range weapons on North American or European cities. Robert Batcher with the U.S. State Department Office of Technology Assessment notes:
Compared to North America, India and Pakistan have higher population densities with a higher proportion of their populations living in rural locations. The housing provides less protection against fallout, especially compared to housing in the U.S. Northeast, because it is light, often single-story, and without basements. In the United States, basements can provide significant protection against fallout. During the Cold War, the United States anticipated 20 minutes or more of warning time for missiles flown from the Soviet Union. For India and Pakistan, little or no warning can be anticipated, especially for civilians. Fire fighting is limited in the region, which can lead to greater damage as a result of thermal effects. Moreover, medical facilities are also limited, and thus, there will be greater burn fatalities. These two countries have limited economic assets, which will hinder economic recovery.18
In the early 1980s, scientists used models to estimate the climatic effect of a nuclear war. They calculated the effects of the dust raised in high-yield nuclear surface bursts and of the smoke from city and forest fires ignited by airbursts of all yields. They found that ‘a global nuclear war could have a major impact on climate – manifested by significant surface darkening over many weeks, subfreezing land temperatures persisting for up to several months, large perturbations in global circulation patterns, and dramatic changes in local weather and precipitation rates’.19 Those phenomena are known as ‘Nuclear Winter’.
Since this theory was introduced it has been repeatedly examined and reaffirmed. By the early 1990s, as tools to asses and quantify the production and injection of soot by large-scale fires, and its effects, scientists were able to refine their conclusions. The prediction for the average land cooling beneath the smoke clouds was adjusted down a little bit, from the 10–25°C estimated in the 1980s to 10–20°C. However, it was also found that the maximum continental interior land cooling can reach 40°C, more than the 30–35 degrees estimate in the 1980s, ‘with subzero temperatures possible even in the summer’.20
In a Science article in 1990, the authors summarized:
Should substantial urban areas or fuel stocks be exposed to nuclear ignition, severe environmental anomalies – possibly leading to more human casualties globally than the direct effects of nuclear war – would be not just a remote possibility, but a likely outcome.21
Carl Sagan and Richard Turco, two of the original scientists developing the nuclear winter analysis, concluded in 1993:
Especially through the destruction of global agriculture, nuclear winter might be considerably worse than the short-term blast, radiation, fire, and fallout of nuclear war. It would carry nuclear war to many nations that no one intended to attack, including the poorest and most vulnerable.22
In 2007, members of the original group of nuclear winter scientists collectively performed a new comprehensive quantitative assessment utilizing the latest computer and climate models. They concluded that even a small-scale, regional nuclear war could kill as many people as died in all of World War II and seriously disrupt the global climate for a decade or more, harming nearly everyone on Earth.
The scientists considered a nuclear exchange involving 100 Hiroshima-size bombs (15 kilotons) on cities in the subtropics, and found that:
Smoke emissions of 100 low-yield urban explosions in a regional nuclear conflict would generate substantial global-scale climate anomalies, although not as large as the previous ‘nuclear winter’ scenarios for a full-scale war. However, indirect effect on surface land temperatures, precipitation rates, and growing season lengths would be likely to degrade agricultural productivity to an extent that historically has led to famines in Africa, India and Japan after the 1784 Laki eruption or in the northeastern United States and Europe after the Tambora eruption of 1815. Climatic anomalies could persist fora decade ormore because of smoke stabilization, farlongerthan in previous nuclear winter calculations oraftervolcanic eruptions.23
The scientists concluded that the nuclear explosions and firestorms in modern cities would inject black carbon particles higher into the atmosphere than previously thought and higher than normal volcanic activity (see Chapter 10, this volume). Blocking the Sun’s thermal energy, the smoke clouds would lower temperatures regionally and globally for several years, open up new holes in the ozone layer protecting the Earth from harmful radiation, reduce global precipitation by about 10% and trigger massive crop failures. Overall, the global cooling from a regional nuclear war would be about twice as large as the global warming of the past century ‘and would lead to temperatures cooler than the pre-industrial Little Ice Age’.24
Despite the horrific consequences of their use, many national leaders continue to covet nuclear weapons. Some see them as a stabilizing force, even in regional conflicts. There is some evidence to support this view. Relations between India and Pakistan, for example, have improved overall since their 1998 nuclear tests. Even the conflict in the Kargil region between the two nations that came to a boil in 1999 and again in 2002 (with over one million troops mobilized on both sides of the border) ended in negotiations, not war. Columbia University scholar Kenneth Waltz argues, ‘Kargil showed once again that deterrence does not firmly protect disputed areas but does limit the extent of the violence. Indian rear admiral Raja Menon put the larger point simply: “The Kargil crisis demonstrated that the subcontinental nuclear threshold probably lies territorially in the heartland of both countries, and not on the Kashmir cease-fire line”’.25
It would be reaching too far to say the Kargil was South Asia’s Cuban missile crisis, but since the near-war, both nations have established hotlines and other confidence-building measures (such as notification of military exercises), exchanged cordial visits of state leaders, and opened transportation and communications links. War seems less likely now than at any point in the past.
This calm is deceiving. Just as in the Cold War stand off between the Soviet Union and the United States, the South Asian détente is fragile. A sudden crisis, such as a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, or the assassination of Pakistan President Pervez Musaraf, could plunge the two countries into confrontation. As noted above, it would not be thousands that would die, but millions. Michael Krepon, one of the leading American experts on the region and its nuclear dynamics, notes:
Despite or perhaps because of the inconclusive resolution of crises, some in Pakistan and India continue to believe that gains can be secured below the nuclear threshold. How might advantage be gained when the presence of nuclear weapons militates against decisive end games? … If the means chosen to pursue advantage in the next IndoPakistan crisis show signs of success, they are likely to prompt escalation, and escalation might not be easily controlled. If the primary alternative to an ambiguous outcome in the next crisis is a loss of face or a loss of territory, the prospective loser will seek to change the outcome.26
Many share Krepon’s views both in and out of South Asia. Indian scholar P.R. Chari, for example, further observes:
[S]ince the effectiveness of these weapons depends ultimately on the willingness to use them in some situations, there is an issue of coherence of thought that has to be addressed here. Implicitly or explicitly an eventuality of actual use has to be a part of the possible alternative scenarios that must be contemplated, if some benefit is to be obtained from the possession and deployment of nuclear weapons. To hold the belief that nuclear weapons are useful but must never be used lacks cogency. …27
A quickly escalating crisis over Taiwan is another possible scenario in which nuclear weapons could be used, not accidentally as with any potential US-Russian exchange, but as a result of miscalculation. Neither the United States nor China is eager to engage in a military confrontation over Taiwan’s status, and both sides believe they could effectively manage such a crisis. But crises work in mysterious ways – political leaders are not always able to manipulate events as they think they can, and events can escalate very quickly. A Sino-US nuclear exchange may not happen even in the case of a confrontation over Taiwan’s status, but it is possible and should not be ignored.
The likelihood of use depends greatly on the perceived utility of nuclear weapons. This, in turn, is greatly influenced by the policies and attitudes of the existing nuclear weapon states. Recent advocacy by some in the United States of new battlefield uses for nuclear weapons (e.g., in pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities) and for programmes for new nuclear weapon designs could lead to fresh nuclear tests, and possibly lower the nuclear threshold, that is, the willingness of leaders to use nuclear weapons. The five nuclear weapon states recognized by the Non-proliferation Treaty have not tested since the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, and until North Korea’s October 2007 test, no state had tested since India and Pakistan did so in May 1998. If the United States again tested nuclear weapons, political, military and bureaucratic forces in several other countries would undoubtedly pressure their governments to follow suit. Indian scientists, for example, are known to be unhappy with the inconclusive results of their 1998 tests. Indian governments now resist their insistent demands for new tests for fear of the damage they would do to India’s international image. It is a compelling example of the power of international norms. New US tests, however, would collapse that norm, trigger tests by India, then perhaps China, Russia, and other nations. The nuclear test ban treaty, an agreement widely regarded as a pillar of the nonproliferation regime, would crumble, possibly bringing down the entire regime.
All of these scenarios highlight the need for nuclear weapons countries to decrease their reliance on nuclear arms. While the United States has reduced its arsenal to the lowest levels since the 1950s it has received little credit for these cuts because they were conducted in isolation from a real commitment to disarmament. The United States, Russia, and all nuclear weapons states need to return to the original bargain of the NPT – the elimination of nuclear weapons. The failure of nuclear weapons states to accept their end of the bargain under Article VI of the NPT has undermined every other aspect of the non-proliferation agenda.
Universal Compliance, a 2005 study concluded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, reaffirmed this premise:
The nuclear-weapon states must show that tougher nonproliferation rules not only benefit the powerful but constrain them as well. Nonproliferation is a set of bargains whose fairness must be self-evident if the majority of countries is to support their enforcement … The only way to achieve this is to enforce compliance universally, not selectively, including the obligations the nuclear states have taken on themselves … 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.28
While nuclear weapons are more highly valued by national officials than chemical or biological weapons ever were, that does not mean they are a permanent part of national identity. A January 2007 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal co-authored by George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn, marked a significant change in the thinking of influential policy and decision makers in the United States and other nuclear weapons states. They contend that the leaders of the countries in possession of nuclear weapons should turn to the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a ‘joint enterprise’. They detail that a nine-point programme that includes substantial reductions in the size of nuclear forces in all states, the elimination of short-range nuclear weapons, and the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The op-ed concludes that, ‘Reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and practical measures towards achieving that goal would be, and would be perceived as, a bold initiative consistent with America’s moral heritage. The effort could have a profoundly positive impact on the security of future generations’.29
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 96% 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 several hundred 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 US President Harry Truman’s proposals in 1946 which 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).30 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.
Is it reasonable to expect such dramatic changes in international security strategies? Absolutely; there is nothing inevitable about either proliferation or nuclear arsenals. Though obscured by the media and political emphasize on terror and turmoil, the nations of the world have made remarkable progress in the past two decades in reducing many nuclear dangers.
There are farfewer countries that have nuclear weapons or weapon programmes today than there were in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. In the 1960s, 23 countries had weapons or were pursuing programmes, including Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and West Germany. Today, nine countries have weapons (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States). Iran may be pursuing a weapons programme under the guise of peaceful nuclear power, but no other nation is believed to be doing so.
In fact, more countries have given up nuclear weapons or weapons programmes in the past 20 years than have started them. South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine all gave up weapons in the 1990s. Similarly, civilian governments in Brazil and Argentina in the 1980s stopped the nuclear weapon research military juntas had started. We now know that United Nations inspection and dismantlement programmes ended Iraq’s nuclear weapon programme in 1991. In December 2003, Libya became the most recent nation to abandon a secret weapons programme.
The Non-proliferation Treaty 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. And until North Korea tested in October 2006, no nation had exploded a nuclear weapon in a test for 8 years – the longest period in the atomic age. The outrage that greeted the test shows how strong this anti-nuclear sentiment had become.
There is more good news. The ballistic missile threat that dominated American and NATO national security debates in the late 1990s is declining by most measures: There are far fewer nuclear-tipped missiles capable of hitting the United States or any European country today than there were 10 years ago. Agreements negotiated by American Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush have slashed the former Soviet arsenal by 71% from 1987, while China has retained about 20 missiles that could reach US shores. No other country can strike the United States from its own soil. Most of the news about missile tests in Iran, North Korea, or South Asia are of short- or medium-range missiles that threaten those nations’ neighbours but not America.31
Nonetheless, four critical challenges – nuclear terrorism, the threats from existing arsenals, the emergence of new weapon states, and the spread of dual-use nuclear fuel facilities – threaten to unravel today’s nuclear non-proliferation regime. Overcoming these challenges will require forging a consensus of expert opinion, focusing the attention of senior officials, securing the necessary funding, and, above all, executive leadership. The decisions taken over the next few years with regard to these challenges by the president of the United States and the leaders of other nuclear-weapon states as well as other key countries will determine whether the progress of the last two decades in reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons and materials continues, or whether the world launches into the second wave of proliferation since World War II.
To understand the need for and the practicality of a comprehensive approach to reducing the danger of nuclear war, consider what is required to prevent new nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. For some scholars and officials, the addition of new nations to the nuclear club is as natural and inevitable as population growth. Kenneth Waltz argues, ‘Nuclear weapons will nevertheless spread, with a new member occasionally joining the club … Someday the world will be populated by fifteen or eighteen nuclear-weapon states’.32
American expert William Potter says this view is shared by many in the Bush administration. ‘Principle one’, for many officials he says, is ‘that nuclear proliferation is inevitable, at best it can be managed, not prevented’.33 Currently, however, there are only two countries of serious concern. If the nuclear programmes in North Korea and Iran can be checked, then prospects for halting and reversing proliferation globally improve dramatically. If they are not, then they may start a momentum that tips neighbouring countries over the nuclear edge.
The specifics and politics vary from country to country, but all of the threats from new nations acquiring weapons share the same need for a comprehensive, multi-dimensional approach. Iran, by far the more difficult of the cases, can serve as a model of how such an approach could work.
The current Iranian government plans to build between 6 and 20 nuclear power reactors and all the facilities needed to make and reprocess the fuel for these reactors. The same facilities that can make fuel for nuclear reactors can also make the fuel for nuclear bombs. Whatever its true intentions, convincing Iran that while it could proceed with construction of power reactors, the country must abandon construction of fuel manufacturing facilities will not be easy. It will require both threats of meaningful sanctions, and promises of the economic benefits of cooperation.
This is the package of carrots and sticks that comprised the negotiations between the European Union and Iran. Calibrating the right balance in this mix is difficult enough, but the package itself is not sufficient to seal a deal. The hard-line government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad further complicates 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 nuclear programmes 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 towards the state and that an end to that country’s programme would lead to the restoration of diplomatic relations. Similar assurances will be needed forIran.
But there is also a regional dimension. Ending the threat from an Iranian nuclear programme will require placing the Iranian decision in the context of the long-standing 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. This dynamic was noted in the very first US National Intelligence Estimates of the proliferation threats done in 1958 and 1961 and is still true today.
Iran’s leaders will want some assurances that there is a process underway that can remove what they see as potential threats from their neighbours, including Israel. For domestic political reasons, they will want to present their nuclear abstinence as part of a movement towards a shared and balanced regional commitment.
Some may argue that Israel would never give up its nuclear weapons. 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 involved the abandonment of existing programmes (in South America) and the dismantlement of actual weapons (in Africa and Central Asia). All the states in the region rhetorically support this goal, as do many of the major powers, but in recent years, little diplomatic effort has been put behind this policy – certainly nothing on the scale of the effort 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. This is a recipe for nuclear war.
This is not a distant fear. In late 2006 and early 2007, a dozen Muslim nations expressed their interest in starting their own nuclear power programmes. In the entire 62-year history of the nuclear age there has been exactly one nuclear power reactor built in the Middle East (the one under construction in Iran) and two in Africa (in South Africa). Suddenly, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Morocco, and several Gulf states have begun exploring nuclear power programmes. This is not about energy; it is about hedging against a nuclear Iran.
The key to stopping this process is to get a counter-process going. States in the region must have some viable alternative to the pessimistic view that the Middle East will eventually be a nuclear free-for-all. In order for this effort to succeed, there will have to be a mechanism 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.
A comprehensive approach operating at several levels is the only sure way to prevent more and more nations from wanting and acquiring the technology that can bring them – legally – right up to the threshold of nuclear weapons capability.
Ultimately, reducing the risks from nuclear weapon 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. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the Manhattan Project, 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 that in no way advance the general problem of the avoidance of war are not satisfactory proposals’.34 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, like a drop of ink diffusing 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, in regions within which 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 programmes 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 and achieving a permanent resolution of the Kashmir issue. Ridding the Middle East of nuclear weapons and new nuclear programmes requires normalization of relations between Israel and other regional states and groups based on a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Resolution of some of these may come more quickly than most imagine. Even 10 years ago it was inconceivable to many that Ian Paisley, the leader of the militant Protestant Democratic Union Party would ever share power with Martin McGuinness, a leader of the militant Catholic IRA. Both called the other terrorist. Both swore to wipe each other’s groups from the face of the earth. Yet, in 2007, they shook hands and were sworn into office as the joint leaders of a united Northern Ireland.
Others conflicts may take more time to resolve, but as history teaches, 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 U.S. 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 programmes, 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’.
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 El Baradei 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 or plutonium. These weapons still appeal to national pride but they are increasingly unappealing to national budgets and military needs. It took just 60 years to get to this point in the nuclear road. If enough national leaders decide to walk the path together; is should not take another 60 to get to a safer, better world.
Acknowledgement
Campbell, K.M., Einhorn, R., and Reiss, M. (eds.). (2004). The Nuclear Tipping Point: Global Prospects for Revisiting Nuclear Renunciation (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press), cited in Universal Compliance, p. 130.
Campbell, K., Einhorn, R., Reiss, M. (eds.). (2004). The Nuclear Tipping Point: Why States Reconsider Their Nuclear Choices (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution). A comprehensive set of case studies of why and how eight key nations decided not to acquire nuclear weapons … fornow.
Cirincione, J. (2007). Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press). A concise guide to the science, strategy, and politics of the nuclear age.
Office of Technology Assessment. (1979). The Effects of Nuclear War (Washington, D.C.). The seminal source for the blast, fire, radiation, and strategic effects of the use of nuclear weapons.
Rhodes, R. (1986). The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster). Rhodes won the Pulitzer Prize for this gripping, comprehensive history of how the first atomic bombs were built, used, and regretted.
Shute, N. (1957). On the Beach (New York: Ballantine Books). The best-selling, classic novel about the world after Nuclear War.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (2006). Weapons of Terror: Feeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms (Stockholm). An international prescription for a nuclear-free world.