As Obama knew only too well, presidents don’t have the luxury of starting with a blank slate.
1 They inherit the policies and problems of their predecessors. In addition to the country’s crashing economy, the new president was now in charge of tens of thousands of troops waging two wars with no clear strategy for victory or resolution. But incoming Obama officials also confronted several critical nuclear problems: one of those wars, in Afghanistan, threatened the stability of neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan; Osama bin Laden was hidden in the region, organizing and possibly still seeking a nuclear weapon; Iran was racing ahead with a nuclear program that had barely existed eight years earlier; a nuclear arms race was underway in South Asia; North Korea was now armed with tested nuclear weapons; and relations with the largest nuclear-armed state, Russia, were back to a Cold War chill.
As Bush officials had moved off stage, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to put the best gloss on their tenure, proclaiming in September of 2008 that the Bush administration would leave the nuclear-proliferation “situation … in far better shape than we found it.”
2 But that is not how it looked to the Obama team. To them, it seemed that nearly every nuclear problem President George W. Bush had inherited from his predecessor had grown worse.
The Bush administration has started with great promise and strong resolve in 2001. Officials were determined to clean up the basket of nuclear issues they felt the Clinton administration had dumped in their laps. India and Pakistan were expanding their nuclear arsenals after a series of tests in 1998. President Bill Clinton had resolved a crisis with North Korea in 1994 with a negotiated agreement that froze North Korea’s production of plutonium, but Bush officials thought the deal did little to end the threat. Iran and Libya were nurturing secret nuclear programs, and, worse, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was flouting UN sanctions and seemed to be secretly continuing chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons programs. In short, nuclear dangers seemed to be multiplying worldwide in early 2001.
Bush officials were determined to resolve these crises with a radical new approach, a strategy that became popularly known as the Bush Doctrine. This policy would prove tragically flawed. It would lead to war with Iraq, a rapid expansion of the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, the collapse of U.S. credibility and prestige around the world, the weakening of the nonproliferation regime, and an unstable, increasingly hostile, nuclear-armed Pakistan. There was nothing inevitable about these developments. Deeply flawed policies created the proliferation crises that would later confront the new Obama administration.
THE BUSH DOCTRINE
Neoconservative institutes had spent years developing alternatives to the consensus security policies in place during the Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton administrations. Their recommendations heavily influenced the incoming Bush officials. In many cases, experts from these institutes were appointed to key positions. John Bolton, who would serve as Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control and international security and then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had summarized his contempt for arms control as a scholar at one of these think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. The Clinton administration, Bolton wrote in 1999, suffered from a “fascination with arms control agreements as a substitute for real nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
3 Michael Allen, the special assistant to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, later described the incoming teams views: “We’re like ‘Arms control, what’s that?’ … I often hear about arms control from the old-timers, but it’s so different now.… Most of the times it’s ‘isolate,’ how can we isolate a country even more?”
4Gary Schmitt, at the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, explained: “Conservatives don’t like arms control agreements for the simple reason that they rarely, if ever, increase U.S. security.… The real issue here, and the underlying question, is whether the decades-long effort to control the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them through arms control treaties has in fact worked.” He contended that it was no longer “plausible to argue that our overall security was best served by a web of parchment accords, and not our own military capabilities.”
5Although many neoconservatives assumed high government positions in the Bush administration,
6 it was not until the attacks of September 11, 2001, that they were able to profoundly change the course of U.S. nuclear policy. In the wake of the attacks, their views overwhelmed the pragmatist views of Secretary of State Colin Powell and others who supported existing treaties, favored continuing the negotiated elimination of programs in North Korea and other states, and saw U.S. global leadership in terms of traditional great-power relations. Rather than the realism prescribed by Condoleezza Rice in her 2000
Foreign Affairs article outlining the policy Bush purported to follow, the administration ended up closer to the concept of a “benevolent empire” championed by neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan in a 1998
Foreign Policy article.
7Traditional conservatives and liberals differ in their values and priorities but share a general view that the proper role of the United States is to manage the global order. Neoconservatives believe that the point of U.S. power is to change the world. They viewed the immediate post–Cold War period as a moment where the United States had unrivaled economic and military power. They wanted the United States to be free to exercise this power in pursuit of its national interest while exporting its values abroad. To take advantage of this moment, neoconservatives advocated that the United States use its might to shape the world to its liking—spreading democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Rather than having the United States be simply a leader promoting change in the world, the United States was to be the dominant power transforming it.
The new order would be built on three interrelated principles, developed by neoconservatives but now known collectively as the Bush Doctrine. First, the United States would favor direct military action over diplomacy and containment. Bush explained why: “Deterrence—the promise of massive retaliation against nations—means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.”
8 Second, the United States would not wait for a threat to appear before taking military action. As Bush argued, “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.”
9 Third, the administration pivoted from terrorist groups to nation-states, linking the September 11 attackers directly to regimes that officials believed hostile to U.S. interests. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz proclaimed, “It’s going to be a broad campaign; it’s not going to end quickly. One of those objectives is the [a]l Qaeda network. The second objective is state support for terrorism, and a third is this larger connection between states that support terrorism and states that develop weapons of mass destruction.”
10The new, action-oriented approach had its roots in positions developed by neoconservatives in the 1990s. Several leaders of this movement, joined by traditional conservatives, summarized their view in a joint letter to President Clinton in 1998, urging war with Iraq. The group included Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. They argued that
the policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months.… [W]e can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections.… The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Sadaam Hussein and his regime from power.
Many of the individuals who had developed this policy during the Clinton years were in high positions in the Bush administration by 2002. They formalized their views as the new government policy in two key documents: “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” released in September 2002, and the “National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction,” released in December 2002. The latter called it “a fundamental change from the past.”
11 The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, made public in early 2002, reflected these ideas, detailing expanded missions for nuclear weapons, including use against underground bunkers, mobile targets, and many conventional military situations, which would require thousands of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal. “A broader array of capability is needed,” said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, summarizing the new posture, “to dissuade states from undertaking political, military, or technical courses of action that would threaten U.S. and allied security.”
12Supporters of the new policy saw nuclear proliferation as part of a larger, global struggle. Bush officials argued that the threats today were different from those of the Cold War—and greater than them. The primary threat came from a small number of outlaw states that had no regard for international norms and were determined to acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Previous presidents had viewed the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons as a paramount concern and sought their elimination through treaties. President Bush, however, asserted that the greatest danger to the United States stemmed from the nexus of outlaw regimes, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorists. The answer was to go after the hostile states, not to pursue new treaties. In essence, Bush had changed the focus from “what” to “who.” The new strategy sought the elimination of regimes rather than weapons, believing that the United States could determine which countries were responsible enough to have WMD capabilities and which were not. U.S. power, not multilateral treaties, would enforce this judgment.
David Sanger summarized the strategy in September 2002 for the New York Times:
It sketches out a far more muscular and sometimes aggressive approach to national security than any since the Reagan era. It includes the discounting of most nonproliferation treaties in favor of a doctrine of “counterproliferation,” a reference to everything from missile defense to forcibly dismantling weapons or their components. It declares that the strategies of containment and deterrence—staples of American policy since the 1940’s—are all but dead. There is no way in this changed world, the document states, to deter those who “hate the United States and everything for which it stands.”
13
The strategy seemed to succeed at first. The war in Afghanistan was fast and cheap. Even though U.S. forces failed to capture bin Laden, the invasion scattered al Qaeda and routed the Taliban from power. Seizing the moment, Bush announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in December 2001 with none of the immediate consequences opponents had predicted, as President Vladimir Putin of Russia acquiesced, reluctantly, to its abrogation. The administration and the Republican Congress swiftly increased funding for antimissile programs and the entire defense budget. Antimissile-program funding increased from $4 billion in fiscal year 2000 to more than $9 billion by fiscal year 2004; overall military spending spiked from $280 billion to $380 billion over the same period, not including the price of the wars. (These trends would continue. The defense budget hit $542.5 billion in fiscal year 2009 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost an additional $12 billion per month.)
14The administration cowed congressional Democrats into approving military action against Iraq and defied traditional patterns by gaining Republican seats in the 2002 congressional elections, taking control of the Senate (and increasing their margins in 2004). In 2003, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney bulldozed skeptics in their drive for war with Iraq, cheered by the media and a small army of Washington experts warning of “gathering storms,” “mushroom clouds,” and the catastrophic consequences of any delay to invasion. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Special Commission on Iraq found no evidence of any weapons or weapons program in the months preceding the invasion, but administration officials were skeptical of the analysis and asserted there was “no doubt” the weapons existed. (Inspectors later estimated that they could have certified the absence of any weapons with just a few more weeks of investigation.)
The initial phase of the Iraq war appeared to accomplish the mission and began paying dividends. In April 2003, Iran, which had cooperated in the overthrow of the Taliban and welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, quietly offered to talk with the United States about its nuclear program, its support for the radical Hamas and Hezbollah movements, and its relationship with Israel. Bush officials rejected the offer and instead began talking of campaigns to overthrow regimes in Iran, Syria, and even North Korea.
15In December, in the most significant nonproliferation success of the Bush administration, Libya agreed to give up its nuclear, chemical, and long-range missile programs. Although the presence of 250,000 U.S. troops in the region undoubtedly played a role, the victory became possible only when the administration departed from its strategy of forcing a change in regimes and sought instead a change in a regime’s behavior. The combination of years of sanctions, threats of force, and credible assurances of security won Libya’s reversal. Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi went from being the poster child for rogue-state leaders to a man Bush called a “model” that others should follow. (This brief period of cordial relations ended when the Arab Spring swept the region and swept Gaddafi from power in 2011.) Information Libya provided, along with information from Iranian officials after the disclosure of their secret enrichment program, led to the public exposure of the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear black market, another success story, although a partial one.
Finally, in April 2004, Bush officials won passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1540, requiring all nations to take greater legal and diplomatic efforts to block proliferation, a major step forward and one that, again, relied on diplomacy and existing international institutions rather than ad hoc coalitions and forced regime change. Administration officials also short-changed the 2005 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, sending only low-ranking officials and rebuffing efforts to get a compromise agreement.
The new strategy, however, could not hold. By 2005, the losses started to overwhelm the gains.
FAILURES OF POLICY
The most consequential blunder of the Bush doctrine was the invasion of Iraq. The war was the first implementation of the counterproliferation strategy, justified almost exclusively by the claim that Saddam Hussein had or soon could have nuclear weapons that he would then give to terrorists to attack the United States. Bush told the nation on the eve of war, “The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands.” Bush dismissed entreaties from U.S. allies to delay the war. “No nation can possibly claim that Iraq has disarmed,” he said. “We are now acting because the risks of inactions would be far greater.” In passing, at the end of his remarks, the president spoke of his desire to advance democracy, liberty, and peace in the region.
16By 2005, government and independent reviews had proven false each of the prewar claims. Iraq did not have nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, save for a few obsolete chemical-weapon shells; programs for producing such weapons; or plans to restart these programs, which had been shut down in the early 1990s by UN inspectors. None of the key findings in the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was accurate, with the exception of the finding that Hussein was highly unlikely to transfer any weapons to terrorist groups. U.S. and British officials went far beyond the intelligence findings in their public statements.
Tom Ricks summarized the harsh assessment of many national security experts in his 2006 history of the war, Fiasco:
President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy. The consequences of this choice won’t be clear for decades, but it already is abundantly apparent in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information—about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda’s terrorism—and then occupied the country negligently. Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered.
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By the end of the Bush administration, Americans had turned decisively against the war and favored a rapid withdrawal.
18 International opinion of the United States plummeted even faster to historic lows. A 2005 Pew Study found that when the publics of sixteen nations were asked to give favorability ratings of five major leading nations—China, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States—the United States “fared the worst of the group. In just six of the 16 countries surveyed does the United States attract a favorability rating” of 50 percent or higher.
19 Not surprisingly, the United States drew the most negative responses from countries in the Middle East, including U.S. allies Jordan and Turkey.
The failure of the war and of the analysts and officials who championed it has been well documented elsewhere (though few have had their careers harmed by their catastrophic decisions). The damage the Bush Doctrine caused to other areas of U.S. national security has been less well examined. By the end of the Bush administration, there were increased nuclear dangers on almost every front. Here, in brief form, are the major problems that confronted the Obama team as it took office.
The Danger of Nuclear Terrorism Had Increased
The turn from Afghanistan to Iraq allowed al Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup in nuclear-armed Pakistan and counterattack in Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence officials concluded in February 2005 Senate testimony that U.S. policy in the Middle East has fueled anti-U.S. feeling and that the Iraq war has provided jihadists with new recruits who “will leave Iraq experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism.”
20 After the Iraq invasion, the number of terrorist attacks rose globally, and al Qaeda grew in influence and adherents.
21 Nuclear sites around the world, not just in Pakistan, remain vulnerable to terrorist attack, theft, or diversion. The amount of nuclear material secured in the two years after September 11, 2001, was at best equal to the amount secured in the two years before that date.
22 Brian Finlay of the Henry L. Stimson Center noted, “Top-line nonproliferation funding has remained largely static since 2005, increasing only marginally from $1.25 billion … to $1.4 billion” during fiscal years 2005–2007.
23 In 2008 a report from former September 11 commission chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean gave the administration a “C” on its nuclear efforts.
24Iran’s Nuclear Program Had Accelerated
Iran’s early nuclear-research program grew into an industrial-size uranium-enrichment program, going from a few test centrifuges to thousands of operational centrifuges, bringing Iran closer to the capability to produce a nuclear weapon. The United States failed to develop a coherent plan for stopping the program. Most of the construction and development of Iranian nuclear facilities occurred after 2000, including the opening of plants to produce uranium gas, the first successful operation of a centrifuge cascade to enrich uranium, and the construction of a vast facility to house more than 50,000 centrifuges. By late 2008, Iran had installed 8,000 centrifuges at Natanz. Further, Iran had amassed enough low enriched uranium and enrichment technology that it could produce enough material for the core of a nuclear bomb, given a political decision to so.
The Bush administration stood aside and even thwarted European efforts to negotiate, refusing until the end of the administration even to meet with senior Iranian officials about the program. Regime change was to be the answer, not negotiations. Former undersecretary of state Nicholas Burns now says, “I served as the Bush administration’s point person on Iran for three years but was never permitted to meet an Iranian.”
25 The United States has also failed to contain Iran’s regional ambitions. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) says, “America’s refusal to recognize Iran’s status as a legitimate power does not decrease Iran’s influence, but rather increases it.”
26North Korea Detonated a Nuclear Bomb and Expanded Its Weapons Program
Pyongyang went from enough material for perhaps two weapons to enough for up to ten. President Clinton’s long-term engagement effort—whatever its faults—had made significant progress in transforming North Korea’s behavior, getting the North to freeze its plutonium-production facilities and even approach normalizing relations with the United States. Near the end of Clinton’s term, talks were underway to end all missile tests and to open up diplomatic-liaison offices in Pyongyang and Washington.
Clinton-administration officials left office confident that incoming secretary of state Powell would continue the dialogue and carry it to a successful conclusion. On March 6, 2001, Powell told reporters, “We do plan to engage with North Korea and pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off.” Powell went on to say that “some promising elements were left on the table” and that the United States has “a lot to offer that regime if they will act in ways that we think are constructive.”
27President Bush, however, overruled his new secretary of state, viewing this strategy as too accommodating and weak on verification.
28 In its first year in office, the administration stepped back from high-level engagement by setting preconditions for the resumption of talks, including “improved implementation of the Agreed Framework,” “verifiable constraints” on missile developments, and a less threatening military posture.
29The administration followed this curtailment of engagement over the next months by naming North Korea as part of the “Axis of Evil,” and including the country in the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review plans as a possible target of U.S. nuclear weapons. With each step, the Bush administration and North Korea moved further from the negotiating table. Almost a decade of improving relations unraveled quickly. In October 2002, the Bush administration confronted Pyongyang with evidence of a North Korean uranium-enrichment program, which the Bush administration said invalidated the 1994 Agreed Framework. Surprisingly, North Korea admitted it had such a program, but dialogue was scuttled. U.S.–North Korean relations went rapidly downhill. Between 2002 and 2006, the U.S. and North Korea would meet in intermittent and unproductive sessions under the umbrella of the Six-Party Talks (which also included China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea), with little progress.
Pyongyang became more aggressive. In December 2002, North Korea threw out IAEA inspectors, removing seals and monitoring equipment with the stated intention of restarting its nuclear facilities at Yongbyong. Soon after, North Korea became the first signatory in history to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It ended the freeze on its plutonium program and declared itself to possess enough reprocessed plutonium to produce nuclear weapons. On the Fourth of July 2006, North Korea test-fired seven ballistic missiles, including the failed test of a long-range Taepodong-2. North Korea tested its first nuclear device on October 9, 2006.
30The Bush administration never organized a consistent policy toward North Korea, drawing a series of “red lines” that the North Koreans crossed with impunity. The situation deteriorated slowly and painfully as North Korea advanced its nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities. By September 2008, the “pragmatists” in the Bush administration appeared to have prevailed over the hard-liners opposed to negotiations and resuscitated a process for a verifiable end to the Korean nuclear program, but it was too late to make much progress.
Nuclear Technologies Usable for Weapons Programs Proliferated Around the World
More nations declared their intentions to develop the ability to enrich uranium for nuclear-reactor fuel, the same technologies that can be used to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs. U.S. proposals to curtail these technologies failed to win any significant support. In February 2004, President Bush had called for current nuclear exporters to provide nuclear fuel at reasonable costs for countries that renounce enrichment and reprocessing. He also urged members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group to cease sales of reprocessing and enrichment equipment to nations without functioning programs.
31 The plan drew little support, follow-up was ineffective, and efforts to dissuade nations from pursuing nuclear-enrichment programs have failed. Brazil has continued its enrichment programs,
32 and other nations considering engaging in enrichment activities include Argentina, Australia, Canada, South Africa, South Korea, and Ukraine. Further, more than a dozen Middle East nations expressed interest in pursuing nuclear energy and research programs, including Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
33 These civilian programs could lay the groundwork for weapons capability.
Thousands of Cold War Nuclear Weapons Cut, but Thousands Remained Poised for Attack
The Bush administration made its most dramatic, though largely unheralded, progress in reducing Cold War nuclear arsenals. When President Bush took office, Russia and the United States each had deployed some 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads.
34 President Bush initially made unilateral cuts to a huge nuclear force that many in the military saw as more of budgetary burden than an instrument of U.S. power. But bowing to pressure from Congress, he then pivoted to win Russian agreement to similar reductions in a legally binding treaty, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT, which came into force in June 2003.
However—consistent with the overall view that the United States should not be restricted by international treaties—the administration did not include any verification mechanisms in the treaty and then shut down the negotiation process supported by every U.S. president since Harry Truman. This meant that U.S. inspectors would no longer be able to verify Russian reductions after December 31, 2009, when the START II Treaty would expire.
35 Meanwhile, the administration’s desire to expand NATO by bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance, coupled with plans to deploy strategic missile interceptors and radar installations in Poland and the Czech Republic aggravated Russian concerns over U.S. intentions. The Russian-Georgian conflict brought U.S.-Russian relations to their worst point since before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The strain in U.S.-Russian relations predated the Bush administration and is aggravated in no small part by Russian policies. There was no coherent plan, however, for addressing the danger from the almost 1,300 Russian nuclear warheads poised for attack within fifteen minutes, even as the deterioration of its radar and surveillance satellites introduces grave doubts about the reliability of Russia’s early-warning system. The former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn (D-GA) warned, “It’s insane for us, 16 years after the Cold War, to think of the Russian president having four or five minutes to make a decision about whether what may be a false warning requires a response before he loses his retaliatory force.”
36The Currency of Nuclear Weapons Increased in Value
Even as the numbers decreased, new missions for the remaining weapons and proposals to build new types of nuclear weapons seemed to increase their role in U.S. national security strategy. This encouraged the view among other nations that nuclear weapons could substitute for conventional weapons. Stephen Hadley, before becoming President Bush’s national security adviser, said “It is often an unstated premise in the current debate that if nuclear weapons are needed at all, they are needed only to deter the nuclear weapons of others. I am not sure this unstated premise is true.”
37 Hadley had been a participant in the National Institute for Public Policy’s January 2001 report, “Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control.”
38 The group called for a more “flexible” nuclear deterrent against a wide range of targets. These policies were brought into the administration and enshrined in the Nuclear Posture Review delivered to Congress in December 2001, which advocated new nuclear weapons capabilities for use against nonnuclear targets, including chemical and biological weapons stockpiles, underground bunkers, mobile targets, and states without nuclear weapons, such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Congress refused to fund these new weapons, but Russia, France, and Pakistan mirrored U.S. logic in policies justifying the use of nuclear weapons against conventional threats.
39The U.S.-India Deal Blew a Hole Through Barriers to the Spread of Nuclear Weapons
Bush’s July 2005 decision to reverse U.S. policy toward India and begin selling sensitive nuclear technology and fuel to the country seemed to reward India’s nuclear proliferation. By providing India with supplies of uranium, the deal allowed the country to accelerate its production of nuclear weapons, a capability Pakistan would be quick to mirror. The action was a de facto recognition of India as a nuclear state, with all the rights and privileges reserved for those states that have joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty, yet without the same obligations. This raised concerns that states such as Pakistan and Israel might follow. Indeed, Pakistan soon demanded a similar deal with the United States,
40 and China reportedly agreed to sell Pakistan two nuclear reactors. The deal made it more difficult to convince other states to accept tougher nonproliferation standards. Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) said, “There are many ways to deepen U.S.-India ties without damaging the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
41The Nonproliferation Regime Weakened
The 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference (held every five years) ended acrimoniously, failing to act on the consensus of the majority of states for stronger nonproliferation and disarmament efforts or to adopt any of the dozens of useful suggestions proposed by many of the nations present. As other nations concluded that the United States had no intention of fulfilling its NPT-related disarmament obligations, including ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or moving decisively toward nuclear disarmament, they balked at shouldering additional antiproliferation burdens. In 2004, a high-level advisory panel that included Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, warned the UN secretary-general, “We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.”
42Nuclear Smuggling Networks Remained Active
Although the A. Q. Khan nuclear black market in Pakistan was disrupted in 2004, failure to do so earlier allowed Iran, Libya, and possibly North Korea to acquire key components for nuclear weapons production. (This was first detected under the Clinton administration, which failed to shut it down.) The failure to get more cooperation from Pakistan, which used the network for its own nuclear imports, made it difficult to determine if the network had been shut down completely or had simply gone further underground. European intelligence reports indicate that illicit nuclear sales continue to thrive in the region.
43Antimissile Programs Failed to Fulfill Their Promise
The Bush administration had hoped to develop a multilayered missile defense system that could protect the United States and its allies. The administration and the Congress swiftly increased annual funding for antimissile programs, from $4 billion in fiscal year 2000 to more than $9 billion by fiscal year 2004, continuing those funding levels through the end of the administration. It also elevated the organization in the Department of Defense responsible for managing these programs to a full-fledged agency, the Missile Defense Agency, increasing its bureaucratic clout.
From 2000 to 2007, the United States spent almost $60 billion on antimissile systems without realizing any substantial increase in military capability. The ground-based interceptors the administration deployed in Alaska and California were widely regarded as ineffective.
44 A rush to deploy similar interceptors in Eastern Europe against a hypothetical long-range Iranian missile threat aggravated relations with Russia. The administration also passed up a Russian offer to field radar bases near Iran that could help counter the existing threat of Iran’s short- and medium-range missiles.
REPAIRING THE DAMAGE
By the end of the Bush administration, there was a broad recognition of the failure of the Bush approach, if not yet agreement on all the specifics. Richard Haass, president of the Council of Foreign Relations, summed up the problem with the administration’s attraction to regime change as a solution to proliferation: “It is not hard to fathom why: regime change is less distasteful than diplomacy and less dangerous than living with new nuclear states. There is only one problem: it is highly unlikely to have the desired effect soon enough.”
45 The former Bush State Department official Nicholas Burns argued, “The next president needs to act more creatively and boldly to defend our interests by revalidating diplomacy as a key weapon in our national arsenal and rebuilding our understaffed and underfunded diplomatic corps.” Rather than defaulting to the idea of using U.S. military force against Iran or other nations, Burns said, “dialogue and discussion, talking and listening, are the smarter ways to defend our country, end crises and sometimes even sow the seeds of an ultimate peace.”
46The nation needed a new course of action. The collapse of the Bush Doctrine was a chance for the Obama administration to fundamentally change U.S. nuclear policy to one that “would take into account the limited present-day need for a nuclear arsenal as well as the military and political dangers associated with maintaining a massive stockpile,” as the Manhattan Project veteran Wolfgang Panofsky wrote just before his death. “Given that the risks posed by nuclear weapons far outweigh their benefits in today’s world, the United States should lead a worldwide campaign to de-emphasize their role in international relations.”
47A growing majority of U.S. national security experts across the political spectrum had come to embrace this view. So did both 2008 presidential candidates. Barack Obama said in 2008, “It’s time to send a clear message: America seeks a world with no nuclear weapons.”
48 Senator John McCain similarly pledged, “The United States should lead a global effort at nuclear disarmament.”
49The platforms adopted by both parties at their conventions that year concretely demonstrated the consensus that had taken hold among American security elites as to the main dangers and the way to reduce these dangers. The Republican platform said:
The gravest threat we face, nuclear terrorism, demands a comprehensive strategy for reducing the world’s nuclear stockpiles and preventing proliferation. The U.S. should lead that effort by reducing the size of our nuclear arsenal to the lowest number consistent with our security requirements and working with other nuclear powers to do the same. In cooperation with other nations, we should end the production of weapons-grade fissile material, improve our collective ability to interdict the spread of weapons of mass destruction and related materials, and ensure the highest possible security standards for existing nuclear materials wherever they may be located.
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Similarly, the Democratic Party platform listed “securing nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists” as the third of Barack Obama’s seven national security goals and pledged to “seek deep, verifiable reduction in United States and Russian nuclear weapons and work with other nuclear powers to reduce global stockpiles dramatically” and “create a bipartisan consensus to support ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.” In language mirroring the Republican analysis, the Democratic platform said:
America will seek a world with no nuclear weapons and take concrete actions to move in this direction. We face the growing threat of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons or the materials to make them, as more countries seek nuclear weapons and nuclear materials remain unsecured in too many places. As George Shultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn have warned, current measures are not adequate to address these dangers. We will maintain a strong and reliable deterrent as long as nuclear weapons exist, but America will be safer in a world that is reducing reliance on nuclear weapons and ultimately eliminates all of them. We will make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of U.S. nuclear weapons policy.
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Additionally, a number of high-level and grassroots efforts were underway that would encourage and help the new president to implement this vision. The Brookings Institution expert Ivo Daalder and the former assistant secretary of defense Jan Lodal argued in their seminal article, “The Logic of Zero,” that “given this remarkable bipartisan consensus, the next president will have an opportunity to make the elimination of all nuclear weapons the organizing principle of U.S. nuclear policy.”
52 They and other experts developed concrete plans for practical steps toward elimination that promised to be far more effective than the failed policies of the previous eight years.
Would the new president heed their advice? A struggle would soon begin within the new Obama administration between the “transformationalists,” who sought a new vision to transform U.S. nuclear policy, and the “incrementalists,” who would focus on gradual steps using the techniques of previous years. The president would have to act quickly, for the policy window that opened in January 2009 would not last long. Delay and indecision could cost him the chance to bring about the visionary change he promised in his campaign and the relief from the nuclear dangers the nation and world so urgently needed.