It is common to hear people talk about “states like Iran and North Korea.” But there are no states like Iran and North Korea. These states are really the last of their kind. Apart from the eight nations with established nuclear weapons programs, there are no other nations racing to establish the capability to build nuclear weapons and certainly none with the hostility and disdain for the international system exhibited by North Korea and Iran. If both programs can be contained, curtailed, and ultimately rolled back, it then becomes possible to talk about the end of proliferation.
There would remain, of course, the threshold problem presented by states with advanced nuclear power programs. Any state with nuclear reactors can, theoretically, evolve that program into a nuclear weapons capability. Any state with the ability to enrich uranium for fuel rods, like Brazil, could theoretically use those facilities to enrich uranium for weapons. Any state that extracts plutonium from spent fuel rods, like Japan, could fashion that plutonium into bombs. There are a few states, like South Korea, that seek to acquire uranium-enrichment or plutonium-reprocessing capabilities as part of their civilian fuel-production enterprises. But this is a categorically different problem. It is a problem inherent in the spread of nuclear technology for civilian use. All such technology could be applied to future military purposes.
Over the course of the nuclear age, perhaps thirty nations have gone down this path, or at least explored it. More nations abandoned their programs than consolidated as nuclear weapon powers. No other nation today—not Syria, whose nuclear reactor was bombed by Israel and never replaced, nor Burma, which does not appear to have gotten far with some rumored nuclear trade with North Korea—comes close to the scale and sophistication of the programs in Iran and North Korea. In other words, no other nations are looming on the new-nuclear-state horizon.
It is true that if North Korea consolidates as a nuclear weapon state, with new nuclear tests and a growing arsenal, or if Iran crosses the nuclear Rubicon and declares itself a nuclear weapon power, then pressures will grow on some of their neighbors to seek to match their capability. North Korea’s nuclear test in 2013 stirred conservatives in South Korea to openly call for the South to develop its own weapons. Though this is unlikely in the near future, this debate could move other nations to begin to hedge their bets by seeking their own enrichment or reprocessing capabilities, and those with it may move ever closer to the development of nuclear weapons. We could see the cascade of proliferation that many experts have predicted, a new wave of nuclear weapon programs similar to the wave that rose then receded in the 1960s.
But there is nothing automatic about this process; there are powerful counterpressures and barriers to the spread of nuclear weapons. Colin Kahl, Melissa Galton, and Matthew Irvine argue in a 2013 study that
predictions of inevitable proliferation cascades have historically proven false.… In the six decades since atomic weapons were first developed, nuclear restraint has proven far more common than nuclear proliferation, and cases of reactive proliferation have been exceedingly rare. Moreover, most countries that have started down the nuclear path have found the road more difficult than imagined, both technologically and bureaucratically, leading the majority of nuclear-weapons aspirants to reverse course.1
Indeed, even though North Korea has tested nuclear weapons three times and has medium-range missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads to the surrounding states, none of its nuclear-capable neighbors has actually begun a weapon program of its own. Kahl and his colleagues argue persuasively that Iran’s neighbors would be similarly unlikely to race to get nuclear weapons even if Iran did. They would be limited both by their own technological, economic, and political realities (Egypt and Turkey) and by solid security calculations. “The Saudis are unlikely to engage in a race to indigenously produce the bomb because doing so could make the Kingdom’s strategic predicament worse, not better,” they write. “It would complicate the Kingdom’s national security, risk a strategic rupture with the United States, do great damage to Saudi Arabia’s international reputation and potentially make Riyadh the target of international sanctions. Furthermore, technical and bureaucratic constraints make a Saudi dash to nuclear weapons implausible.”2 But dramatic progress by North Korea or Iran would certainly increase proliferation incentives, requiring a major effort by the United States and other nations to establish new security assurances in the regions and new methods of isolating and punishing the proliferators.
THE PYONGYANG PUZZLE
Effective diplomacy has constrained but not ended the program in North Korea. As much as some would wish, there is no viable military option that could end the nuclear program or topple the dictatorial regime. Korea remains the most heavily militarized region on earth. An attack on North Korea could trigger a conventional war that would kill hundreds of thousands of South Koreans in the first few hours. Trying to run out the clock on the regime is risky as well. History shows that this hermit kingdom cannot be contained or ignored indefinitely. Philip Yun, a North Korea expert and the executive director of Ploughshares Fund, warns:
Just as a policy of fostering regime change is not tenable, a seemingly reasonable wait-and-see/status quo approach is also inadequate. It could sow the seeds for yet another nuclear test in 2013, which could lead to engineering advances that allow the totalitarian North to produce smaller (and more) nuclear warheads. And what better way for a determined North Korea to “market” its nuclear know-how for export?3
Diplomatic efforts have made it increasingly difficult for North Korea to engage in the kind of nuclear and missile trade that proved lucrative in the past. The Carnegie Endowment senior associate Mark Hibbs notes that cooperating member states of the United Nations “have increased their surveillance of North Korea’s shipping fleet.” As a result, “more than ever before, the number and whereabouts of North Korean vessels is understood and tracked in real time, assisting efforts to interdict suspicious cargo.”4
Narrowing North Korea’s options, restricting its ability to trade technology for cash, and tightening financial sanctions on the regime are all necessary steps as is continued engagement to seek a negotiated solution. Unfortunately, none of the nations pressuring and engaging North Korea has put in place a coherent, sustained, or successful effort. Paul Carroll of Ploughshares Fund, who has visited North Korea more times than most people would care to, summarized the problem in a 2012 article for the Yale Journal of International Affairs:
Both the United States and China have been thoroughly engaged with North Korea, but the nature of that engagement has been flawed. For China, its default position has been to provide aid and political cover when most of the rest of the world is turning the screws in response to misbehavior. China ultimately provides enough food and other assistance to keep the regime in power and the state intact. But that is all it has done. The United States has also paid plenty of attention to the DPRK. But that attention has almost always been punitive: unilateral or UN-sponsored sanctions as a reaction to provocative actions taken by the North. Neither China’s propping up nor the United States’ beating down is sufficient to achieve the security aims each has with respect to Pyongyang.5
David Albright and Christina Walrond of the Institute for Science and International Security estimate that North Korea has produced enough plutonium for six to eighteen nuclear weapons.6 Others put the figure lower. Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford University senior fellow and former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, estimates the North Korean stockpile might be enough for four to eight “primitive nuclear devices.”7 But clearly North Korea has enough material for several bombs.
Negotiated agreements shut down North Korea’s production of plutonium, and these have not restarted. The country is believed to be building a new nuclear reactor that could produce plutonium, but the grade produced would not be ideal for nuclear weapons. The North Korean regime admits it has begun a centrifuge program to produce, it says, enriched uranium for this new reactor. These centrifuges could be used to enrich uranium to weapons grade, but it is not believed to have done so as of early 2013. Any negotiated deal with North Korea would have to bring an end to both production programs.
As difficult as talks with North Korea have proven, there is no viable alternative. Efforts to coerce North Korea into compliance or collapse have failed. As I detailed in Bomb Scare, Bush-administration policies vacillated between negotiations and regime change. After emphasizing regime change during the first Bush term, the policy swung back to negotiations through the Six-Party talks involving the United States, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia. In September 2005 the parties announced an agreement wherein the United States reaffirmed its desire for peaceful relations with North Korea; the United States and North Korea agreed in principle to work toward the normalization of relations; and North Korea pledged to walk back its nuclear program, readmit international inspectors, and adhere to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But the agreement was torpedoed by a U.S. Treasury Department announcement the next day of strong new sanctions on the bank, Banco Delta Asia, a major financial conduit for North Korea and for North Korean leaders.
The intent may have been to increase pressure to get a deal, but it appears more likely to have been part of the effort by some in the administration to strangle North Korea as the sanctions hit after the agreement was reached. As Michael Mazarr and James Goodby document:
The Treasury Department’s BDA scheme crashed into this strategy like an unguided missile. Those who credit the BDA scheme with “getting the North back to the table” therefore misunderstand the chronology: a major deal was in the offing when the BDA charges drove the North away from the Six Party Talks. Some State officials have claimed that they were not warned of the BDA sanctions in advance; others, and Treasury officials, dispute this contention. What is not in dispute is Pyongyang’s reaction: it was immediate and furious. In bilateral meetings, North Korean officials harped on the subject, demanding return of their funds as a precondition for further progress in negotiations.8
It was not that the sanctions were not effective; they were. Banco Delta Asia suffered a major loss of funds; other banks backed away from doing business with North Korea; North Korea’s ability to conduct business with other nations was seriously constrained. But the economic pressure failed to achieve either a collapse of the regime or an end to the nuclear program. Quite the opposite: the nuclear program expanded. By 2007, the administration was forced to back down, returning Pyongyang’s sequestered BDA funds. Talks resumed, but with North Korea now convinced that the United States could not be trusted and real purpose of U.S. actions was not to end the nuclear program but to end the regime. The election of a new president in 2008 did not change North Korean views as they, like Iran, believe that U.S. strategy is little affected by a change in parties; it is the same policy with a different face.
The lesson, proven once again in this case, is that the point of sanctions is to drive toward a negotiated deal. Sanctions alone can never work to force compliance or a change in regime. They must be part of an integrated strategy that combines pressures with incentives, culminating in a negotiated compromise that serves both parties’ interests and allows leaders on all sides to claim victory. Siegfried Hecker argues that however difficult it may be, the United States must engage North Korea as well as pressure it. “The fundamental and enduring goal must be the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” he writes, “However, since that will take time, the U.S. government must quickly press for what I call ‘the three no’s’—no more bombs, no better bombs, and no exports—in return for one yes: Washington’s willingness to seriously address North Korea's fundamental insecurity along the lines of the joint communiqué.”9 Very similar dynamics are present when trying to deal with the thorny issue of Iran.
TROUBLES WITH TEHRAN
On the morning of June 14, 2012, American negotiators were sitting across a table in Moscow facing Iranian representatives as part of the “P5+1” talks, convened to try to find a compromise solution to the nuclear standoff with Iran. Back in the United States, TV viewers heard an ominous voice warn, “It’s time to act!” as a fiery ballistic missile launched across their screens in New York and Washington, D.C. The voice was narrating a commercial, produced by the neoconservative organization the Emergency Committee for Israel that made a not-so-subtle case to strike Iran:
President Obama says we must prevent the Iranian regime from getting nuclear weapons. Yet talking isn’t accomplishing this goal. Today, Iran has six times more enriched uranium than when President Obama came into office—enough for five nuclear bombs. We fear that the Obama administration is now intent on kicking the can down the road past the election. The Emergency Committee urges the president to live up to his promise to stop Iran. Don’t delay. Don’t ask others to do our job for us. It’s time to act.
In 2012, there was little appetite in the United States for another war. U.S. combat troops had just pulled out of Iraq and are slated to come out of Afghanistan by 2014. The public was almost completely focused on domestic problems—a recovering economy, high unemployment, and a sluggish housing market. There was enormous pressure on the Defense Department to cut its budget. A survey of public opinion by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs released in September 2012 found that while Americans saw the Middle East “as the greatest source of future threats, they are gradually shifting their foreign policy focus towards Asia and a rising China.” The survey found a decidedly antiwar public. Just over half of those surveyed (51 percent) opposed a military strike on Iran, even if the United Nations authorized one. A whopping 70 percent opposed a U.S. strike on Iran, and 60 percent did not want the United States to get involved in any war between Israel and Iran.10
Iran’s slow but relentless expansion of its nuclear program, however, combined with the insistence by some inside and outside America that military action was the only way to stop the program and a media whose drive for viewers and readers encourages breathless speculation about imminent war, made Iran the dominant nuclear policy and national security issue for most of 2011 and 2012. This was not because Iran had a nuclear bomb, was close to making a nuclear bomb, or, according to the best U.S. and allied intelligence, had made a decision to build a nuclear bomb. Iran’s nuclear capabilities were thus far confined to the fuel cycle, which was the major topic of negotiation in the P5+1 talks. Iran holds that it is guaranteed access to the peaceful uses of nuclear technology—including the right to enrich uranium—as a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran’s neighbors and most of the West are wary that Iran is hedging for the capability to “sprint to the bomb” if it chooses to do so. Experts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies note:
Iran’s nuclear effort is designed to support an independent nuclear-power program. But the still secretive nature of the program, its economic inefficiency and inconsistencies, and the substantial evidence that has emerged of nuclear weapons-related research raise questions about Iran’s actual purpose. The nation is investing vast resources in a complete nuclear fuel-cycle, which, without significant improvements in centrifuge power and foreign supply or new discoveries of uranium, would barely be able to sustain a single Bushehr-type reactor. The evidence leads to a conclusion that the program is also intended to give Iran a nuclear weapons capability.11
Iran is working to master all stages of the nuclear fuel cycle, including mining, milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication, and conversion. It is furthest along on enrichment, thanks, in part, to centrifuge designs and components Iran illegally bought from the A. Q. Khan network.12 It is enriching uranium at two sites. The major site, the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant, is under IAEA safeguards, meaning inspectors regularly visit the plant and report on production and other activities. The majority of the Natanz centrifuges enrich the uranium to 3.5 percent, supposedly as fuel for the country’s power reactor. However, a smaller facility at the site enriches to close to 20 percent, supposedly as fuel for Iran’s research reactor. Fordow, a previously clandestine facility tunneled into the mountains near the holy city of Qom, began enriching to close to 20 percent in 2011.13 Iran steadily increased the number of centrifuges at Fordow during 2011 and 2012.
Much analysis is centered on “breakout” scenarios—different pathways Iran could take to build a nuclear weapon. According to David Albright, it would take Iran four to twelve months to make enough uranium for nuclear weapons.14 That is, Iran could take the low-enriched uranium (LEU) and feed it back into its centrifuges to quickly enrich it to the approximately 90 percent grade (high-enriched uranium or HEU) needed for a nuclear weapon. The world would almost certainly see this happening:
In order to conduct a dash using LEU at Natanz, Iran would need to visibly violate its commitments under the NPT, including diverting the LEU from IAEA safeguards and likely ejecting IAEA inspectors from the country. Although only minor modifications may be necessary in the Natanz FEP infrastructure before Iran could start to enrich to weapon-grade levels, any dash using the FEP would not proceed quickly. Based on ISIS’s most recent calculations, reflecting reduced performance of the centrifuges in the FEP over the last year, but more enriching centrifuges, Iran would need about four months to produce enough weapon-grade uranium for just one bomb. And in undertaking such a risky effort in which its facilities could be destroyed by military strikes, Iran would likely want to be able to produce enough weapon-grade uranium to make several weapons.15
It would take Iran an additional one to three years to turn this uranium into a warhead for a ballistic missile.
Given these growing capabilities, there is a desire by some in the United States to push for a military attack on Iran’s facilities. This has the support of some of Iran’s not-so-friendly neighbors. Iran’s Arab rivals in the Gulf would like the United States to “cut off the head of the snake,” as one leader famously put it in a conversation with U.S. officials later disclosed by one of the WikiLeaks cables. Given the strident rhetoric from the Iranian regime, some Israeli leaders understandably view an Iranian nuclear weapon as a grave threat. Speaking at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee in March 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a ringing warning: “Israel has waited patiently for the international community to resolve [Iran]. We’ve waited for diplomacy to work. We’ve waited for sanctions to work. None of us can afford to wait much longer.”16
Would a military strike actually slow the program down? Some conservative politicians in both the United States and Israel viewed a military strike as the best solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and urged a strike before Iran entered what Israeli officials called “a zone of immunity,” where Iran could enrich uranium for a bomb quickly in mountain redoubts safe from aerial bombardment. U.S. officials repeatedly declared that a military option was not off the table, but many military leaders and experts doubted the benefits of a military strike and feared the unintended consequences. Colin Kahl at the Center for New American Security, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, spoke for many when he rebutted calls for war in his March 2012 Foreign Affairs article:
The lesson of Iraq, the last preventive war launched by the United States, is that Washington should not choose war when there are still other options, and it should not base its decision to attack on best-case analyses of how it hopes the conflict will turn out. A realistic assessment of Iran’s nuclear progress and how a conflict would likely unfold leads one to a conclusion … now is not the time to attack Iran.17
A military strike on Iran would not be a trivial affair. If conducted by the United States it would involve hundreds of air strikes over many days or weeks. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned, “The consequence could be that we would have an escalation that would take place that would not only involve many lives, but I think it could consume the Middle East in a confrontation and a conflict that we would regret.”18
The former commander in chief of the Central Command, General Anthony Zinni, was more blunt, saying that he liked to respond to advocates of attacking Iran with “And then what?”
After you’ve dropped those bombs on those hardened facilities, what happens next? What happens if they decide, in their hardened shelters with their mobile missiles, to start launching those? What happens if they launch them into U.S. bases on the other side of the Gulf? What happens if they launch into Israel, or somewhere else? Into a Saudi oil field? Into Ras Laffan, with all the natural gas? What happens if they now flush their fast patrol boats, their cruise missiles, the strait full of mines, and they sink a tanker, an oil tanker? And of course the economy of the world goes absolutely nuts. What happens if they activate sleeper cells? … What happens if there’s another preemptive attack by the West, the U.S. and Israel, they fire up the streets, and now we’ve got problems. Just tell me how to deal with all that, OK?
Because, eventually, if you follow this all the way down, eventually I’m putting boots on the ground somewhere. And like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.19
Kahl wrote, “While the potential costs of attacking Iran are fairly clear, the potential benefits are uncertain.”20 Even though a strike could damage current operations, Iran already has the know-how to restart its nuclear program, probably at a faster pace. Iran would officially withdrawal from the NPT and kick out IAEA inspectors, creating more uncertainty about the progress of a restarted program. A preemptive strike on Iran would likely rally the country around an otherwise unpopular Iranian regime. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined this concern in June 2012:
There are those [in the Iranian government] who are saying, “The best thing that could happen to us is be attacked by somebody. Just bring it on because that would unify us.” It would legitimize the regime. [The regime] doesn’t represent the will of the people. It’s kind of morphed into kind of a military theocracy. And, therefore, an argument is made constantly on the hard-line side of the Iranian government that, you know, “We’re not going to give anything up. And in fact we’re going to provoke an attack because then we will be in power for as long as anyone can imagine.”21
Many officials in the Israeli security establishment were also vocal in their concerns. Meir Dagan, former head of the Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel, called an attack on Iran “stupid” and a surefire way to start a Middle East war.22 By the end of 2012, elite and popular opinion appeared to be strongly against a military strike on Iran. Many experts agreed with Bill Keller of the New York Times, who argued that if the worst happened, a nuclear-armed Iran could be contained and deterred:
Despite the incendiary rhetoric, it is hard to believe the aim of an Iranian nuclear program is the extermination of Israel. The regime in Iran is brutal, mendacious and meddlesome, and given to spraying gobbets of Hitleresque bile at the Jewish state. But Israel is a nuclear power, backed by a bigger nuclear power. Before an Iranian mushroom cloud had bloomed to its full height over Tel Aviv, a flock of reciprocal nukes would be on the way to incinerate Iran. Iran may encourage fanatic chumps to carry out suicide missions, but there is not the slightest reason to believe the mullahs themselves are suicidal.23
Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, speaking at a conference sponsored by the Arms Control Association and the National Iranian American Council on November 27, 2012, warned that “some of the energy for sanctions is driven simply by a kind of almost fanatical commitment to a showdown with the Iranians.” If the pressure from existing sanctions and negotiations efforts do not yield results, he counseled, the best option would not be war but a mix of enhanced sanctions and deterrence. “Deterrence has worked against a far more powerful, far more dangerous, and indeed, objectively, more aggressive opponents in years past,” he said. U.S. policy should be to prevent Iran from getting “a significant military nuclear capability,” he said, and not focus on “a hypothetical, imaginary, non-credible notion that the moment they have one or two bombs they’ll eagerly rush into national suicide.”24
In much of the debate over Iran policy in 2011 and 2012, however, there was a steady current of commentary from those, like the columnist Charles Krauthammer, who argued the Iranian leadership cannot be deterred because they are not like other people. They are irrational, operating on a different level, more concerned with the Islamic afterlife than material concerns such as their nation, fortunes, families, or even their own lives. While the leadership has made many incendiary statements, there is little in the historic record of the regime to indicate that they are irrational. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General John Dempsey declared flatly in March 2012, “The Iran regime is a rational actor.”25
“Iran has been very calculating in its behavior, far more so than other so-called radical, revolutionary regimes,” said CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria, on whose program Gen. Dempsey made his remarks. “If you look at Mao’s China, he talked openly about destroying the world and about sacrificing half of China so that global communism could survive. The Iranians never talk like that and they certainly don’t do things like that. Their behavior for 30 years has been calculating. They respond to inducements and pressures in ways that are completely understandable.”26 Bill Keller noted, “The religious-military-political conglomerate that rules Iran have a powerful instinct for self-preservation.”27
In short, Iran and North Korea are difficult, idiosyncratic regimes skirting on the edge of the international system. But they are not unstoppable threats beyond the capabilities of the United States and its allies and partners. It is possible—and I have long argued—that the nuclear threats presented by North Korea and Iran can be isolated and deterred by the right combination of pressure and incentives. The major powers must constantly remind these nations of the potential benefits of rejoining the community of nations and complying with their international treaty obligations as well as the continued and escalating costs of their failure to do so. Coercive measures alone have never forced a nation into capitulation or compliance. A strategy that couples the pressures of sanctions, diplomatic isolation, investment freezes, travel restrictions, and other economic measures with practical compromises and realizable security agreements can, over the long run, encourage both these nations that they can realize their security, prestige, and regional goals more assuredly through a non-nuclear-weapons path.28
This path is not easy, but there are no alternatives. Those offered have failed the test of history, both recent and long term. Forcible regime change in Iran or North Korea, for example, is infeasible, given it would require a military effort larger than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Peaceful regime change will not succeed any time soon, given the weakness of the opposition in Iran and North Korea, the problems that U.S. backing would present for those inside the countries, and the limited tools available for the United States to affect their internal politics. Nor is it likely that the U.S. negotiators could soon realize the extensive compromises and breakthroughs necessary to produce a “grand bargain” that would normalize relations and resolve outstanding issues with either nation—should they even desire this. With Iran, in particular, surgical military strikes against known nuclear assets would only set the Iranian nuclear program back a few years and would stiffen Iranian resolve to produce a weapon in the near future. Muddling through with the current approach of stiff sanctions and half-hearted incentives has not worked. We are left, almost by process of elimination, with a strategy of matching the sanctions with genuine compromise—including the willingness to accept Iran’s right to enrich uranium under stringent international inspections—that could produce first a pause in the enrichment program then its limitation.
If, despite our best efforts, Iran or North Korea or both persist in nuclear pursuits, a combination of security assurances to neighboring states and continued isolation can contain and deter the new nuclear threats either or both would present. Though not the desired outcome, it is far preferable to the consequences of a major regional war in the Middle East or Northeast Asia. These nations are, after all, economically feeble, without military or political alliances or influence. It is the United States that remains the undisputed economic and military superpower with a vast international network of security and financial alliances.
Indeed, curtailing these programs, containing them if nonproliferation efforts fail, and holding them as an example of the high price to be paid for breaking treaty obligations are necessary not just to stop the spread of nuclear weapons but to have any hope of moving toward a world without them. “The vision of a world free of nuclear weapons will hold little attraction if it appears to be impossible to prevent states (or non-state actors) from concealing existing nuclear weapons or building new nuclear weapons in a clandestine manner,” warns the Stanford University scholar and nuclear historian David Holloway. “Moreover, the nuclear-weapon states will not eliminate their nuclear forces if new states are acquiring nuclear weapons, i.e., if the nuclear nonproliferation regime appears to be breaking down.”29
President Obama underscored the vital importance of enforcement in Prague when he declared, along with his vision and his near-term practical steps, that “rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”
The president is right. Jessica Mathews, Rose Gottemoeller, George Perkovich, Jon B. Wolfsthal, and I wrote of the importance of enforcement in our Carnegie Endowment for International Peace study, Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security:
Perhaps the most ambitious attempt ever made to extend the civilizing reach of the rule of law has been the international effort to constrain the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons, the greatest physical force created by humankind. The United States, the Soviet Union, and other states laid the foundation for this mission in the 1960s with the negotiation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In the decades since, states have evolved rules and institutions to govern nuclear exports, safeguard and account for nuclear materials, and control and even reduce the number of nuclear weapons.
The rules are not self-enforcing, as painful experience in Iraq, North Korea, Libya Iran, and elsewhere has shown. Moreover, states and international agencies must struggle to mobilize the power needed to enforce and adapt the rules as conditions change. Doing so involves difficult trade-offs as states seek benefits commensurate with the options they forgo and the costs they bear.30
Enforcement of the rules is not a job for one nation. Even if the American public wanted its government to be the world’s detective, judge, and executioner—which it does not—it would be impossible even for a nation with all our power. As the authors just quoted wrote in 2005, “The United States cannot defeat the nuclear threat alone, or even with small coalitions of the willing.”31 But the job can be done with the joint efforts of dozens of diverse nations, large and small. It has been done.
There are fewer nations now with nuclear weapons or weapons programs than at any time since the early 1960s. In the 1960s, twenty-three nations were conducting weapons-related research, were discussing the pursuit of weapons, or already had weapons.32 By the 1980s, the number was down to nineteen.33 In 2012, the number was down to ten. Indeed, more nations have given up nuclear weapons and weapons programs in the past twenty-five years than have tried to acquire them. Continuing this progress means stopping or containing the programs in Iran and North Korea and continuing to reduce dramatically the existing arsenals. The responsibilities, enforcement, and restrictions must be shared by all. “The nuclear weapon states must show that tougher non-proliferation rules not only benefit the powerful but constrain them as well,” we wrote in the Carnegie study. “Non-proliferation is a set of bargains whose fairness must be self-evident if the majority of countries is to support their enforcement.”34
The methods are well known; the strategies, proven. Global leaders just need the political will to implement policies tested by history. It is very likely that if leading nations jointly continue to engage and contain these last two small but dangerous nuclear-state threats, proceed step-by-step to reduce the number and roles of nuclear weapons worldwide, collectively enforce existing nonproliferation rules, and work steadily to resolve the regional security conflicts that give rise to the proliferation imperative, the world will witness the end of the proliferation of nuclear weapons that began seven decades ago in the deserts of New Mexico.
We can, slowly and steadily, shrink and eventually completely dissipate our nuclear nightmares.
President Barack Obama seems to agree. On a warm December day at the end of 2012, the reelected president addressed his assembled nuclear security team at the National Defense University to commemorate twenty years of achievement of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program. Named after the two senators who sponsored the legislation, Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar, the program has helped Russia and other successor states to the Soviet Union destroy thousands of nuclear-armed missiles and hundreds of silos, submarines, and bombers and deactivate more than 13,000 nuclear warheads that once threatened America and the world.
Just as the president had used his first foreign policy speech after becoming president in 2009 to talk about the elimination of nuclear weapons, he used his first national security speech after winning reelection to reaffirm his personal commitment to this goal and its critical importance to American national security. He talked about the continuing danger of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and recalled his trip with Senator Lugar to Ukraine, where they saw teams of workers funded by the U.S. program slowly and carefully taking apart old weapons. “We simply cannot allow the twenty-first century to be darkened by the worst weapons of the twentieth century,” he said, then artfully bridged to his policy goals.
It took decades—and extraordinary sums of money—to build those arsenals. It’s going to take decades—and continued investments—to dismantle them.… It’s painstaking work. It rarely makes the headlines. But I want each of you to know, and everybody who’s participating in this important effort to know that the work you do is absolutely vital to our national security and to our global security.
Missile by missile, warhead by warhead, shell by shell, we’re putting a bygone era behind us. Inspired by Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar, we’re moving closer to the future we seek. A future where these weapons never threaten our children again. A future where we know the security and peace of a world without nuclear weapons.35
Getting to that future is not something that one nation or one government can do. It will have to be a joint enterprise of several leading nations and their publics. The role of the publics in realizing this goal and, more specifically, of the private foundations that support many of the public and expert efforts detailed in this book is the subject of my concluding chapter.