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“For half a century, ACA has been providing the world … with advocacy, analysis, and awareness on some of the most critical topics of international peace and security, including on how to achieve our common, shared goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.”

– Izumi Nakamitsu
UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs
June 2, 2022
Looking Back

Prague One Year Later: From Words to Deeds?

Paul Meyer

In his April 2009 speech in Prague, President Barack Obama used soaring rhetoric to express a vision of a transformed international security context. The speech personally engaged Obama in the effort to realize the goal of total nuclear disarmament: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”[1]

This clear vision was accompanied by a series of steps that Obama committed his administration to undertake to advance the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world. A year after his clarion call, it is appropriate to review the agenda laid out so eloquently in Obama’s address and determine how successful he has been in delivering on its great promise. Such an accountability session is particularly apt this spring as the 189 states-parties to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) gather in New York this month for their quinquennial review conference to consider the health of this core international security agreement. Perceptions of the U.S. role in supporting the fundamental purposes of the NPT and assessments of the Obama administration’s performance in realizing the Prague agenda will be major factors in shaping the political environment for the review conference.

There can be little debate over the positive impression Obama left on his Prague audience and on the wide global readership for this landmark foreign policy address. It represented a sharp break from policies of the previous administration, which had banished the term “disarmament” from its official vocabulary. The speech also broke with past nuclear policy pronouncements that suggested an expanded role for nuclear weapons in the nation’s defenses.

The Prague address, in its opening sections rendering homage to the heroes of the 1989 Velvet Revolution, subtly associated Obama’s championing of the elimination of nuclear weapons with the actions of the great Czech revolutionaries of the Cold War. In the speech, Obama remarked that the Velvet Revolution “proved that moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon.” Applying the context of the Cold War political upheavals and by extension the Cold War thinking that still characterizes some nuclear establishments, Obama criticized those “who told them that the world could not change.” He was suggesting that this moral leadership, which once liberated people from authoritarian rule, now needs to be directed at eliminating the nuclear weapons that represent “the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.”

In this struggle for nuclear disarmament, Obama claimed a leadership role for the United States. This role was not asserted simply as a function of power or the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but as a matter of “moral responsibility,” given that the United States is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon. Having set up the moral imperative for action, which itself is a remarkable change in the presidential lexicon for international security policy, Obama enumerated a series of steps his administration would implement to put the vision into practice. This article assesses the Obama administration’s performance in implementing the key steps articulated in the Prague speech.

Reliance on Nuclear Weapons

In Prague, Obama vowed to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same.” The long-awaited Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), released on April 6, set out a changed nuclear strategy, but the document regrettably was far less “transformative” than the Prague speech would have led one to believe. To a large extent, it reads like the type of document one would expect to be the product of four thematic working groups and 102 interagency meetings.[2] It represents a refinement of existing strategic policy with some troubling reformulations and a few vague commitments to consider more far-reaching measures in an eventual further round of review. The fundamental rethinking promised in the Prague speech was not in evidence.

On the core question of the function of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the NPR puts off to the indefinite future the acceptance of a policy that would unequivocally limit the role of U.S. nuclear weapons to deterring the use of such weapons by others. For now, this is the “fundamental” rather than the “sole” role for U.S. nuclear forces.[3] A residual deterrent role is still claimed for potential future biological weapons threats and against nuclear-weapon states and noncompliant states to deal with an unspecified “narrow range of contingencies”[4] in which U.S. nuclear weapons could deter attack by conventional, chemical, or biological weapons. In brief, U.S. declaratory policy still seems to want to cover all the bases with its nuclear forces.

On the issue of security assurances to non-nuclear-weapon states, the NPR manages to muddy the waters on a matter of prime importance for these states. The NPR usefully removes the caveat that security assurances would not apply to non-nuclear-weapon states in cases when they were involved in an attack against the United States in association with a nuclear-weapon state. That caveat, directed at the Warsaw Pact, was a relic of the Cold War.

At the same time, however, the NPR introduces a new condition that these non-nuclear- weapon states must be parties to the NPT and “in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.” Exactly what nonproliferation obligations would this entail? The NPT? International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards? UN Security Council Resolution 1540?[5] Perhaps more importantly, who would decide what constitutes noncompliance? Unilateral U.S. judgment? Security Council or IAEA Board of Governors’ decisions? Furthermore, despite the frequently asserted desire to strengthen the NPT, the NPR is silent on responding to the 2000 NPT Review Conference decision that negotiation of legally binding negative security assurances would help strengthen the nonproliferation regime. Instead of any opening to a process of making such security assurances legally binding, the NPR appears to want to keep them at the level of declaratory policy, subject to change at any time. This is hardly a reassuring outcome for non-nuclear-weapon states looking to the United States for some accommodation of their long-standing concerns regarding security assurances.

With respect to reducing the operational status of deployed nuclear forces (a commitment under the 2000 NPT Review Conference Final Document and, for many, a litmus test of the willingness of the nuclear-weapon states to abandon Cold War postures), the NPR concludes that the existing alert levels are just fine as they are. There is a reference to the Department of Defense initiating studies regarding “survivability” of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in the future although this is not linked to reducing alert levels, but rather to “reducing incentives for prompt launch.”[6]

Regarding NATO, the NPR, far from heralding any new thinking on the remaining U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe, is stuck on the status quo. The Cold War-era bromides of “the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons” contributing to “Alliance cohesion” are reproduced as if the integrity of an alliance that is currently engaged in major military operations in Afghanistan is somehow ensured by the existence of several hundred U.S. nuclear bombs on European soil.[7] Those NATO allies who were counting on the Obama administration to take the lead on reform of alliance nuclear policy as part of this year’s revision of the Strategic Concept will find little comfort in the dusty text of the NPR.

Those observers who were hoping for more significant reductions of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals in the current Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) process, will have to be satisfied with the NPR’s pledge to “conduct follow-on analysis to set goals for future nuclear reductions”[8] and to address nonstrategic and nondeployed nuclear weapons in some future round of negotiations. One might question why this very analysis was not undertaken by the NPR and why “conservative assumptions to determine acceptable reductions in deployed strategic nuclear weapons”[9] were used.

Get rid of one of the legs of the triad as a signal of nuclear transformation? No thanks, says the NPR, we like things as they have always been. Retention of the bomber leg of the triad is justified in the NPR as a hedge against technical challenges with another leg (an implausible eventuality) and because they can be “visibly forward deployed, thereby signaling U.S. resolve and commitment in crisis.”[10] This desire to maintain a capacity for nuclear saber-rattling may be understandable on the part of some in the military establishment, but it seems misaligned with Obama’s direction to put an end to Cold War thinking. As with the failure to insist on greater reductions in this round of strategic arms control, Obama seems to have acquiesced in the status quo preferences of the armed services.

The NPR devotes considerable attention to investments for maintaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal and contains several specific commitments. This presumably is aimed at reassuring members and supporters of the nuclear weapons complex that this administration will ensure that even more funding will be coming their way, thereby gaining their support for treaty ratification and other elements of the Obama plan. Refreshingly, there is also a pledge to expand “work on verification technologies and the development of transparency measures”[11] although no details or budget allocations are provided. This promise is helpful in the NPT context. It responds to a commitment made in the 2000 NPT Review Conference Final Document and suggests that some research and development effort will be devoted to developing the capacities required for eventually eliminating, as opposed to sustaining, the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

With respect to Obama’s Prague commitment to urge other nuclear powers to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in their strategies, presumably this advocacy will now get underway. In the absence of major changes in U.S. posture, however, it will be difficult to lobby others to reduce the profile of nuclear weapons in their declaratory policy. At New START levels of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and with nuclear doctrines that still project roles for nuclear forces beyond deterring nuclear attack, neither the United States nor Russia is likely to have much influence on the nuclear ambitions of China, India, and others. Although the NPR is clearly the prime expression of Obama’s intention to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, he also deserves credit for raising the global profile of nuclear issues by convening a summit-level session of the UN Security Council to consider this subject. Resolution 1887, which was adopted on this occasion, refers to many aspects of the NPT-centered nonproliferation regime.[12] Yet, the resolution is silent on the specific issue of reducing the role of nuclear weapons in national security policies.

Assessment: FAIR

Cutting Nuclear Arsenals

In Prague, Obama promised to negotiate a new arms pact with Russia “by the end of this year that is legally binding and sufficiently bold.” Although the negotiators missed the end-of-2009 deadline, New START was finally concluded and signed by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, symbolically back in Prague, on April 8. The “sufficiently bold” test is necessarily subjective, but the final results do not constitute major progress over those already agreed in the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) concluded by the Bush administration. The White House claims a 30 percent reduction compared to the 2,200 warhead figure of SORT, but if the lower level of the SORT range for warheads (1,700) is referenced, the 1,550 deployed warheads of New START represent a reduction of less than 10 percent.[13] Theoretically, if the “one bomber equals one warhead” counting rule were exploited, one might have no reduction at all in the actual numbers of deployed warheads. Ironically, the timeline for achieving these reductions has also lengthened as those under SORT would have to have been implemented by 2012, whereas those under New START will only be required to be achieved seven years after entry into force of the treaty (2017 at the earliest). The modest results of New START in turn raise doubts about the timing and feasibility of Obama’s promise to follow START with “further cuts” involving all nuclear-weapon states. If the United States and Russia had agreed in New START to reduce their strategic warheads to less than 1,000 each, there would have been real political momentum to engage the other nuclear-weapon states in further collective cuts. The modest reduction levels and extended implementation timelines of New START enable other nuclear powers to excuse themselves from participating in any common nuclear weapons reduction negotiation. The fact that New START punts the tricky if crucial issue of missile defenses to the future is understandable in light of the need to secure Senate consent for ratification. It would have bolstered Obama’s stance in favor of new thinking, however, if some express commitment had been made to address this Russian as well as Chinese concern. If the security accords negotiated between Russia and the United States are truly to be “bold” and reinforce the downward direction in arsenals, then the important interrelationship between offensive and defensive arms is going to have to receive more than recognition in a preamble.

Assessment: FAIR

Ratifying the CTBT

In Prague, Obama pledged to “immediately and aggressively pursue” U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Although Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was subsequently dispatched to participate in the September conference on CTBT entry into force after years of the Bush administration boycotting such events, the lack of follow-through on the president’s promise is striking. This is especially worrisome as CTBT entry into force was identified as the top priority of the NPT members at the 1995 and 2000 review conferences. It is widely known that other prominent holdouts, such as China and Indonesia, are unlikely to ratify the treaty before the United States does. Perhaps Vice President Joe Biden’s February 18 speech promising a 10 percent increase to $7 billion for the budget of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s stockpile management programs is a harbinger of a more dedicated effort to win over opponents in the Senate.[14] The administration has not yet shown signs of mounting the sort of energetic and coordinated effort that has been required in the past to obtain Senate consent for ratification of major international treaties, such as the Chemical Weapons Convention or China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. As always, domestic issues have consumed much of the administration’s time and political capital. In light of those demands and the priority that will be afforded to the ratification of New START, it would appear that the aggressive pursuit of CTBT ratification that the president promised in Prague is not going to occur anytime soon.

Assessment: POOR

Negotiating an FMCT

A year ago, Obama reaffirmed that the United States would seek a verifiable ban on the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons. This is a decades-old U.S. arms control goal. The only notable contribution to date by the Obama administration on a fissile material cutoff treaty (FMCT) was to reinstate the requirement for verification that had been rejected by the Bush administration. The Obama administration has shown little energy and less creativity in its pursuit of an FMCT since Prague. For most of the past year, the United States has continued to look to the moribund Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva to negotiate such an accord. In the face of diplomatic sabotage of the CD by Pakistan and other spoilers, the United States until now has done little more than suggest that parallel, informal seminars be held on the chief topics of an FMCT. A potentially significant development is the omission of a reference to the CD in the relevant NPR passage affirming U.S. interest in “prompt negotiation of an FMCT.”[15] This may herald a decision to consider other negotiating forums for this treaty. For some time, this author has advocated the necessity of creative diplomatic solutions to the prolonged impasse on an FMCT in the CD.[16] The U.S. president enjoys enormous convening authority to initiate action on any international file. The Bush administration employed this power to good effect on the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism. Given the attention Obama has just devoted at the April summit to programs for securing nuclear material, it is strange that the Obama administration has not yet initiated a serious diplomatic effort to start negotiations to prohibit fissile material production, the source of the problem. If the tap is left running, mopping up the overflow is ultimately going to be futile.

Assessment: POOR

Strengthening the NPT

The section regarding the NPT was probably the weakest part of the otherwise impressive rhetoric of the Prague speech. Besides reaffirming that “[t]he basic bargain is sound,” there is little clarity and coherence in Obama’s remarks as to what the chief challenges to the NPT are and what remedial action is necessary. There is an emphasis on monitoring (“more resources and authority to strengthen international inspections”) and enforcement (“we need real and immediate consequences for countries caught breaking the rules”), but there is no overriding commitment to balanced compliance with all three pillars of the treaty—nonproliferation, disarmament, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The problems besetting the NPT go well beyond the defiance of North Korea or the machinations of Iran. To limit the prescription to finding better ways to hold these two states accountable is to overlook the deeper sources of malaise within the NPT.

The Prague speech contains rather vague references to a new framework for civil nuclear cooperation, including an international fuel bank, and little in the way of concrete proposals for strengthening this core security treaty. In the context of North Korea and Iran, Obama spoke of the need for “a structure” that will ensure that violators of the rules face consequences, but he provided no elaboration of what this structure would entail. Obama’s positive remarks on international inspections suggest that he supports more funds for the IAEA, but there is no recognition of the NPT’s institutional deficit or the means to overcome it. With no annual meetings of states-parties, no governing council, and no dedicated secretariat, the NPT is oddly the poor cousin of international agreements, despite its acknowledged importance. The inability to acknowledge the governance deficiencies of the NPT, while calling for the institutionalization of auxiliary processes such as the PSI, reveals an administration blind spot that will make it difficult to reinforce the NPT’s authority. The NPR’s treatment of this theme, unfortunately, showed little evolution of thinking since the Prague speech. The recently concluded Group of Eight meeting of foreign ministers issued a statement regarding the upcoming NPT review conference that contains a tantalizing pledge to “work collectively to strengthen the institutional framework of the Treaty, which will contribute to its effective and efficient implementation.”[17] It is not yet clear what the United States intends to propose on this or any other theme at the May conference, but it will be important to show that the administration is taking the president’s aim of strengthening the NPT as much more than a declaratory exercise.

Assessment: POOR

Preventing Nuclear Terrorism

In Prague, Obama characterized the potential acquisition of a nuclear weapon by terrorists as “the most immediate and extreme threat to global security.” He announced a new international effort “to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years.” The president called for the existing “processes” of the PSI and the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism to be transformed into “durable international institutions.” He further committed to convening a global summit on nuclear security within the year. This aspect of the Prague agenda seems to have received the greatest attention by the Obama administration with a series of international preparatory meetings leading up to the summit. Obama hosted 46 nations as well as the heads of the United Nations, IAEA, and European Union at a global nuclear security summit April 12-13 in Washington. The communiqué issued at the conclusion of the summit calls for international cooperation on a range of practical measures to bolster nuclear security.[18] Although participants joined Obama’s call to secure all vulnerable nuclear material in four years, there is no detailed plan for accomplishing this. The United States is setting a good example as it commits to continue the substantial funding flow required to sustain programs to secure vulnerable fissile material and to destroy old stocks of weapons of mass destruction, but it remains to be seen whether other states have the same financial stamina or set of priorities. Given that military holdings of highly enriched uranium (HEU) dwarf civilian stocks, it would have been desirable to see some initiatives on this front at the nuclear security summit. A commitment, for example, to research options for converting U.S. naval nuclear reactors from HEU to low-enriched uranium would have sent a positive signal for change and would have contributed to facilitating the eventual verification of an FMCT as well.

Assessment: GOOD

Conclusion

The commitments enumerated above represent the practical content of a speech that radiated idealism and appealed to people around the world to seek security through cooperation rather than confrontation. For many listeners in that Prague audience and beyond, the president’s address was a reassuring assertion of U.S. commitment to and leadership in the effort to rid the world of its most devastating weapons. In another part of the speech, however, Obama affirmed that “[w]ords must mean something.” The warm glow of Obama’s oratorical success will soon fade if his administration does not follow up with demonstrable action and achievement.

The Obama administration’s record to date in translating words into deeds on the nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament front has been modest. Despite Obama’s assertion that the NPR “will move beyond outdated Cold War thinking,” this key policy document still suffers from a surfeit of “old think” and status quo postures. There are openings for more fundamental change in the future (the commitment to pursue strategic stability dialogues with Russia and especially China is important), but these will require sustained presidential direction if the inertia of the nuclear establishment is to be overcome. Clearly, domestic political factors have affected the president’s follow-up on his Prague agenda. Gates’ April 6 cover letter for the NPR notes that its implementation “will be the work of multiple administrations and Congresses, and will require sustained bipartisan consensus.”[19] Such a bipartisan consensus on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament policy does not currently exist, and Obama will need all his intellect and powers of persuasion to obtain support for the program he has outlined. A challenging domestic context is a reality for many a democratic leader but cannot obviate Obama’s responsibility to deliver on the commitments he made to a global audience a year ago. Domestic constraints were not absent in April 2009. The real question is how successful Obama will be in sustaining his vision and his specific goals in the face of these constraints. Those inspired by the president’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons deserve to see greater evidence of actual progress being made toward that goal. There is still time for Obama to channel that “Yes, we can” spirit that he so eloquently invoked in Prague into worthy action on the nuclear weapons issue. It would be a sad day for disarmament diplomacy and global aspirations “to live free from fear” if the hopes of another “Prague Spring” were to be dashed by failures of will or the forces of reaction.


Paul Meyer is director-general of the Security and Intelligence Bureau in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. A career Canadian Foreign Service officer, he served as Canada’s ambassador and permanent representative to the Conference on Disarmament from 2003 to 2007. The views expressed in this article are solely his own.


ENDNOTES

1. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, “Remarks by President Barack Obama, Hradèany Square, Prague, Czech Republic,” April 5, 2009.

2. U.S. Department of Defense, “Background Briefing on the Nuclear Posture Review from the Pentagon,” April 6, 2010.

3. U.S. Department of Defense, “Nuclear Posture Review Report,” April 2010, www.defense.gov/npr/docs/2010 Nuclear Posture Review Report.pdf, p. vii (hereinafter NPR).

4. Ibid., p. 16.

5. UN Security Council, Resolution 1540, S/RES/1540, April 28, 2004. This resolution obliges states to take a series of measures to prevent nonstate actors from engaging in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

6. NPR, p. 27.

7. Ibid., p. 32.

8. Ibid., p. xi.

9. Ibid., p. 20.

10. Ibid., p. 24.

11. Ibid., p. vii.

12. UN Security Council, Resolution 1887, S/RES/1887, September 24, 2009.

13. Many analysts argue that 2,200 is the operative number because it establishes the ceiling, but 1,700 is part of the range stipulated in SORT and therefore is valid as a point of comparison between the targets for reductions under that treaty and New START.

14. Office of the Vice President, “Remarks of Vice President Biden at National Defense University,” February 18, 2010.

15. NPR, p. 46.

16. See Paul Meyer, “Is There Any Fizz Left in the Fissban? Prospects for a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty,” Arms Control Today, December 2007.

17. “G8 Foreign Ministers’ Statement on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Disarmament and Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy: A Contribution to the 2010 NPT Review Conference,” March 30, 2010, Gatineau, Canada.

18. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, “Communiqué of the Washington Nuclear Security Summit,” April 13, 2010.

19. NPR, p. i.

 

In his April 2009 speech in Prague, President Barack Obama used soaring rhetoric to express a vision of a transformed international security context. The speech personally engaged Obama in the effort to realize the goal of total nuclear disarmament: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

Good News and Bad News on the NPT

By Michael Krepon and Samuel Black

The past is so much with us that it can sometimes obscure the present. This is certainly true with respect to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), whose quinquennial review is scheduled to begin on May 3. During past reviews, the health and well-being of the NPT regime has been measured primarily by the actions of the five states recognized by the treaty as possessing nuclear weapons. Under Article 6 of the treaty, all five—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—are obligated to act in good faith to facilitate the progressive reduction and eventual elimination of their nuclear stockpiles. As permanent members of the UN Security Council, the “P-5” also have special responsibilities to address proliferation dangers that, as reaffirmed by the council on September 24, 2009, constitute “a threat to international peace and security.”[1]

During the Cold War, the P-5 produced, in the aggregate, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, tested these weapons more than 2,000 times, and threatened to use them during harrowing crises or in warfare. Most of this wretched excess was the doing of the Soviet Union and the United States.

Given this history, past review conferences understandably produced action plans that focused primarily on what the first five proliferators needed to do to strengthen the regime. Continued pressure on the P-5 is certainly warranted because they still possess more than 20,000 nuclear weapons.[2] Nevertheless, well-rehearsed speeches blaming the P-5 for the ills of the global nonproliferation regime obscure recent trends and impressive gains.

Looking back, the NPT has made extraordinary strides. The treaty entered into force on March 5, 1970, with just 43 member states. Among the original absentees were China and France. Initial safeguards at nuclear facilities were rudimentary. The original International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) guidance on the structure and contents of safeguards agreements contained three paragraphs on implementation, all of which focused heavily on minimizing the burden placed on safeguarded facilities. For example, this guidance stated that the IAEA should “avoid hampering” the development of nuclear expertise and international cooperation including “international exchange of nuclear material.”[3] By comparison, the IAEA’s 1997 Model Additional Protocol is far more specific, uses stronger language (“shall” instead of “should”), and authorizes far more encompassing inspections, setting a new standard for responsible nuclear stewardship.[4] Over time, the NPT’s membership has grown to almost as many states as belong to the United Nations. In 2008 the IAEA carried out 2,797 inspections, design information verifications, and complementary access visits in 163 countries, which required 14,121.5 calendar-days in the field.[5]

Despite the power and influence nuclear weapons are presumed to possess, the NPT has established nonproliferation as a global norm. States pursuing nuclear weapons programs after the NPT entered into force have been cast as outliers. The IAEA Board of Governors has found two states, Iran and North Korea, to be in noncompliance with their safeguards agreements.[6] Others, including South Korea and Syria, have conducted activities that, when exposed, have been viewed by the IAEA as matters of serious concern, prompting the agency to request clarifications or dispatch inspection teams.

Although a number of non-nuclear-weapon states have strengthened their commitment to the NPT over the past two decades, the most impressive gains during this period have been made by four of the P-5. These gains can be measured by six key indicators of nuclear weapons’ utility: actual battlefield use, threats of battlefield use, overall stockpile size, warheads deployed, nuclear weapons tests, and fissile material production for weapons. Based on these six indicators, compliance with the NPT’s core obligations by four of the P-5 has become stronger, and the value they have placed on nuclear weapons has plummeted since the Cold War ended. Despite these gains, which are described below, the outcome of the 2010 NPT Review Conference is in doubt, as is, more importantly, the health and well-being of the NPT regime. Threats to the well-being of the regime now lie increasingly in the actions of outlier states, the politicization of deliberations by the IAEA board, and the reluctance of key non-nuclear-weapon states to step up to their obligations as guardians of the treaty.

The profound nature of the positive trends described below has been underappreciated for three primary reasons. First, the residual P-5 capabilities remain large, reflecting the excessive size of their arsenals in past decades. Second, old ways of thinking linger in P-5 nuclear enclaves, where attempts to buck these trends capture headlines, even when they are ineffectual. For example, Bush administration efforts to add new warhead designs to the U.S. nuclear stockpile garnered global attention but died quickly on Capitol Hill. Third, nuclear posture reviews, treaty ratification, and entry-into-force provisions are designed or controlled by those who seek to brake, rather than accelerate, enduring trends. By rightly focusing on how much remains to be done to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles and to end nuclear testing permanently, supporters of the NPT wrongly fail to appreciate how much the stock price of nuclear weapons has fallen for major powers over the past two decades.

Waning Utility

Consider the particulars, starting with the battlefield use of nuclear weapons. When the nuclear age began, no one was so bold or so foolish as to predict that the “winning weapon” would remain sheathed for more than six decades.[7] Others have analyzed at length the reasons for this unexpected and enormously important tradition of restraint.[8] What matters most, for the purposes of this article, is the inescapable conclusion that a weapon not used on battlefields loses its military utility. Every year that passes without the use of nuclear weapons in crisis or warfare makes it more difficult for a political leader to authorize subsequent use, while making the user more of an international pariah.

A second criterion is the political utility of nuclear weapons. Even if unused on a battlefield, nuclear weapons could still have political utility in that they could influence behavior in crises and in war. During the Cold War, the United States often directed nuclear threats against China during the Korean War and in crises over Formosa/Taiwan. The Soviet Union and the United States also ramped up their readiness to use nuclear weapons during Cold War crises to influence decision-making. U.S. maneuvers were most evident when nuclear-armed aircraft carriers and strategic bombers were forward deployed during a crisis. On some occasions, instructions to increase readiness for use of nuclear weapons were broadcast in ways that could easily be intercepted.

Now, U.S. aircraft carriers do not carry nuclear weapons on board, and Washington typically moves theater missile defense capabilities rather than B-52s into harm’s way when tensions increase in troubled regions. Nevertheless, veiled nuclear threats by the P-5 have not ceased entirely. Russian leaders have not so subtly implied that the CzechRepublic and Poland could become targets for nuclear detonations if they choose to host U.S. theater missile defense components. In addition, the United States has clarified on a few occasions, including the run-up to both wars against Saddam Hussein, that the use of weapons of mass destruction against U.S. forces, friends, and allies would be met with a devastating response. Rare, public threats by British and U.S. leaders in recent decades have been directed only at countries that are not in good standing with the IAEA and are presumed to have weapons of mass destruction in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.[9]

The pattern of nuclear-tinged threats over the past two decades has changed markedly from the Cold War. The most harrowing crises since the Cold War ended have involved outliers to the NPT. India and Pakistan have experienced four crises since 1990 in which veiled or blunt nuclear threats have been exchanged, and North Korea periodically engages in nuclear bluster when it wishes to raise temperatures on the Korean peninsula. Verbal threats in periods of heightened tension in South and East Asia have been complemented by the flight testing or movement of nuclear-capable missiles. The record is clear: states that seek political utility from nuclear weapons during periods of heightened tension now reside primarily outside the NPT.

Declining Numbers

A third measure of nuclear weapons utility is stockpile size. According to data compiled by Stan Norris and Hans Kristensen, global nuclear stockpiles reached their peak in 1986 at more than 65,000 warheads.[10] Moscow and Washington have reduced their stockpiles by approximately 50,000 warheads below their Cold War peaks.[11] The stockpiles of France and the United Kingdom have been in decline since 1981 and 1992, respectively.[12] The British and French stockpiles are now respectively 43 percent and 32 percent smaller than they were in these peak years.[13] Of the P-5 nuclear arsenals, only China’s is believed to be growing, albeit modestly.[14]

Another important barometer is the number of nuclear weapons deployed. Since the Cold War ended, Moscow and Washington have reportedly removed from operational status more than 19,000 nuclear weapons.[15] The number of nuclear weapons deployed by France has been reduced by at least 125.[16] The United Kingdom has reduced its arsenal by approximately 200 deployed nuclear weapons.[17] Of the P-5, only Beijing is increasing the number of warheads it deploys.[18]

Every test of a nuclear weapon is a declaration of utility. In 1962 alone, there were an astonishing 178 nuclear weapons tests. From 1965 to 1974, there was an average of 62 tests per year. In the following decade, the average was 54 tests per year. From 1985 through 1994, the average number of tests dropped to 18 per year. Since 1996, the P-5 have not conducted a single declaration of utility in the form of a nuclear weapons test.[19]

A final yardstick is fissile material production for weapons. Four of the P-5—again, with the exception of China—have officially declared a moratorium on fissile material production. Beijing may be refraining from new fissile material production for weapons, but it has yet to publicly confirm this.[20]

In summation, by all six key indicators, the utility of nuclear weapons has declined dramatically for four of the P-5 over the past two decades. Stockpiles and numbers of deployed nuclear weapons are declining significantly. The potential for military conflicts between major powers has diminished greatly, along with accompanying threats to use nuclear weapons. Probably none of the P-5 is now producing fissile material for weapons. None of the five has tested nuclear weapons for 15 years, an extraordinary and previously inconceivable stretch of time. Finally and most importantly, no country has resorted to battlefield use of a nuclear weapon since 1945.

Significant Gains

This track record deserves respect rather than denigration. To be sure, Cold War stockpiles and nuclear testing were excessive by any measure. Yet, the extent of reductions in Russian and U.S. stockpile sizes and nuclear force structures reflect significant shifts in perceived utility, not merely the shrinkage of wretched excess. The structure of international relations has changed since the Cold War ended. Berlin, Cuba, and Taiwan no longer evoke nuclear flashpoints. Major powers now lose standing by brandishing nuclear weapons against each other or against non-nuclear-weapon states. Major powers that seek to gain influence now do so by means of economic and energy-related indicators, not by nuclear weapons. When Moscow seeks to pressure its neighbors, it gains more leverage by threatening to cut off natural gas supplies than by threatening nuclear strikes.

The NPT is both a beneficiary and a cause of these positive trends. The extent of causality can admittedly be debated, except in one crucial respect: The treaty’s indefinite extension in 1995 was clearly linked to the subsequent completion of negotiations and entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). This pledge was partially delivered in 1996 but has yet to be honored fully. Nonetheless, the positive linkage between the NPT and nuclear testing is clear: If there were no connection between nuclear testing and the indefinite extension of the NPT, the P-5 would surely have tested old or new weapons repeatedly during the past 15 years.

Nuclear trend lines for four of the P-5 have been decidedly positive over the past four review conferences. Supporters of the NPT, who have pushed long and hard for these trend lines, can be justifiably proud of their work, even though they habitually see the glass as half-empty. Temporary reversals of these enduring trends could occur at any time, which would compound P-5 responsibility for the NPT’s uncertain state. Their most important duty as treaty guardians and as veto-wielding members of the Security Council is to deal purposefully with compliance concerns. In their dealings with Iran and North Korea, however, Beijing and Moscow sometimes have higher priorities than to uphold NPT compliance.

Russian and U.S. nuclear stockpiles remain extremely large, and although further reductions are in store, Moscow has demonstrated limited enthusiasm for widening their scope to include tactical nuclear weapons. The Bush administration did serious harm to NPT norms by championing a civil nuclear deal with India without compensatory steps to shore up the treaty. Meanwhile, Beijing still acts as a free rider to the NPT regime, rather than taking on responsibilities commensurate with its growing power. China’s intentions and force structure remain opaque, while its modernization programs are proceeding at a faster pace than those of other states with nuclear weapons. Beijing, like Washington, has still not ratified the CTBT.

Other complaints could no doubt be added to this list, but there is undeniable, impressive evidence that, on balance, the contributions of four of the P-5 to the NPT regime have grown significantly in recent decades. In contrast, outliers to the NPT are relying more heavily on nuclear weapons. Three of the four NPT outliers—India, North Korea, and Pakistan—are the only states to have tested nuclear devices since 1996 and are enlarging their fissile material and weapons stockpiles. Israel, the fourth non-NPT state, has not done nearly enough to support the NPT by means of parallel steps that reinforce the treaty’s objectives and purposes. The NPT regime’s weaknesses are growing for other reasons as well. The IAEA board has not acted consistently and coherently to uphold treaty obligations. Many states resist “second-generation” norms of responsible nuclear stewardship, particularly those associated with strengthened safeguards, materials protection, and accountancy. Key non-nuclear-weapon states that are needed to serve as guardians of the NPT have been missing in action in Vienna and New York. Egypt threatens to hold the NPT hostage to its regional interests. Above all, the nuclear program of Iran, a noncompliant party to the treaty, casts a long shadow over the NPT regime.

These positive and negative trend lines will intersect with uncertain effect at the 2010 NPT Review Conference. Four of the five major powers have contributed most of the significant gains for the NPT regime over the past two decades, but all five still have a long way to go in fulfilling their treaty obligations. Although the P-5’s trend lines are mostly positive, the same cannot be said for the IAEA, for states outside the treaty, or for those undermining it from inside.

 


 

Michael Krepon is co-founder of the HenryL.StimsonCenter and author of Better Safe than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb (2009). Samuel Black is a research associate at the StimsonCenter.


ENDNOTES

1. UN Security Council, Resolution 1887, S/RES/1887, September 24, 2009, www.un.org/Docs/sc/unsc_resolutions09.htm.

2. This information was compiled from various sources within the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Nuclear Notebook collection.

3. See International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), “The Structure and Content of Agreements Between the Agency and States Required in Connection With the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” INFCIRC/153 (corrected), June 1972, www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/Others/infcirc153.pdf.

4. See IAEA, “Model Protocol Additional to the Agreement(s) Between State(s) and the International Atomic Energy Agency for the Application of Safeguards,” INFCIRC/540 (corrected), May 1997, http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/1997/infcirc540c.pdf.

5. International Atomic Energy Agency, “Safeguards Statement for 2008,” n.d., http://www.iaea.org/OurWork/SV/Safeguards/es2008.pdf.

6. IAEA Board of Governors, “Report by the Director General on the Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement Between the Agency and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” GOV/2003/3, January 6, 2003, www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/MediaAdvisory/2003/gov2003-3.pdf; IAEA Board of Governors, “Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” GOV/2005/77, September 24, 2005, www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2005/gov2005-77.pdf.

7. The phrase “winning weapon” was coined by Bernard Baruch in 1946. See Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War 1945-1950 (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), pp. 172-173.

8. See, for example, Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008); T.V. Paul, The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

9. For evidence of noncompliance prior to 1991 threats, see UN Security Council, Resolution 707, S/RES/707, August 15, 1991, www.fas.org/news/un/iraq/sres/sres0707.htm. For evidence of noncompliance prior to 2003 threats, see UN Security Council, Resolution 1441, S/RES/1441, November 8, 2002, http://www.un.org/Docs/journal/asp/ws.asp?m=S/RES/1441(2002).

10. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), “Table of Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945-2002,” November 25, 2002, www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab19.asp (hereinafter NRDC table).

11. Ibid. The information in this table has been supplemented by data from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Nuclear Notebook collection.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Nuclear Notebook: Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2008,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2008, p. 42-45.

15. For current figures for Russian and U.S. deployed strategic nuclear weapons, see the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Nuclear Notebook collection. For peak figures for Soviet and U.S. deployed strategic nuclear weapons, see NRDC, “Table of U.S. Nuclear Warheads,” November 25, 2002, www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab9.asp; Pavel Podvig, ed., Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 139, 251, and 351.

16. For French deployed warheads, we take “deployed” to mean the number available for immediate use: carried on patrol by ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), stationed at airfields, or mounted on land-based ballistic missiles. We assume, conservatively, that only one French SSBN is on patrol at any given time. See Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “French Nuclear Forces, 2008,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 64, No. 4 (September/October 2008), http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/k01h5q0wg50353k5/fulltext.pdf. At its historical peak in 1992, we again assume a lone SSBN on patrol as well as the other deployments, including of the Hades missile. Robert S. Norris and William M. Arkin, “French Nuclear Forces 1993,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 49, No. 8 (October 1993), p. 56.

17. For British deployed warheads, we take “deployed” to mean the number available for immediate use: carried on patrol by SSBNs or stationed at airfields. Current British SSBNs reportedly carry 48 weapons, and one is on patrol at any given time. See Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “British Nuclear Forces, 2005,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 61, No. 6 (November/December 2005), http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/k52425n3320m8644/fulltext.pdf. At its historical peak in 1975-1982, there were 48 weapons on patrol on SSBNs and roughly an additional 200 gravity bombs at airfields. See Richard Moore, “The Real Meaning of the Words: A Pedantic Glossary of British Nuclear Weapons,” UK Nuclear History Working Paper, No. 1, March 2004, www.mcis.soton.ac.uk/Site_Files/pdf/nuclear_history/Working_Paper_No_1.pdf.

18. U.S. Department of Defense, “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China 2009,” March 25, 2009, pp. 24-25, www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/China_Military_Power_Report_2009.pdf.

19. For raw data, see NRDC, “Table of Known Nuclear Tests Worldwide,” November 25, 2002, www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab15.asp.

20. Sharon Squassoni, Andrew Demkee, and Jill Marie Parillo, “Banning Fissile Material Production for Nuclear Weapons: Prospects for a Treaty (FMCT),” July 14, 2006, www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RS22474.pdf.

 

The past is so much with us that it can sometimes obscure the present. This is certainly true with respect to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), whose quinquennial review is scheduled to begin on May 3. During past reviews, the health and well-being of the NPT regime has been measured primarily by the actions of the five states recognized by the treaty as possessing nuclear weapons. Under Article 6 of the treaty, all five—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—are obligated to act in good faith to facilitate the progressive reduction and eventual elimination of their nuclear stockpiles. As permanent members of the UN Security Council, the “P-5” also have special responsibilities to address proliferation dangers that, as reaffirmed by the council on September 24, 2009, constitute “a threat to international peace and security.”

Learning From the 1999 Vote on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Daryl G. Kimball

When President Bill Clinton described the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) as “the longest-sought, hardest fought prize in arms control history,” he was not exaggerating. In the face of international outrage over their rapid-fire pace of Cold War testing, U.S. and Soviet leaders attempted in 1958-1959 and again in 1963 to negotiate a comprehensive ban on all nuclear test explosions. They came close but were unable to agree on the details for inspections and had to settle for the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited atmospheric testing. The United States, Russia, and other states conducted hundreds more nuclear tests underground, which enabled further arms racing and proliferation.

Not until the end of the Cold War three decades later did Moscow (in 1991) and Washington (in 1992) manage to halt testing, unilaterally. In 1994 the two countries launched multilateral negotiations on a treaty banning all nuclear weapons test explosions in all environments.

The CTBT is crucial to disarmament and nonproliferation. By prohibiting all nuclear test explosions, it impedes the ability of states possessing nuclear weapons to field new and more deadly types of warheads, while helping to prevent the emergence of new nuclear-armed states. Moving forward on the CTBT remains an essential step toward restoring confidence in the beleaguered nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. The nuclear-weapon states’ commitment to achieve the CTBT was a crucial part of the bargain that won the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995 and the 2000 NPT Review Conference document.

Since it was opened for signature on September 24, 1996, 181 countries have signed the CTBT, and 150 countries have ratified it. The roster of ratifiers includes three of the five NPT nuclear-weapon states: France, Russia, and the United Kingdom. The other two, China and the United States, have signed but not ratified the CTBT. Under the treaty’s Annex 2, 44 specified countries must ratify the treaty to bring it into force. The United States is on that list and is one of nine such countries that have not ratified the treaty.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Senate’s brief debate and 51-48 vote against CTBT ratification on October 13, 1999, coupled with the Bush administration’s opposition to the treaty, has slowed the momentum toward the pact’s formal entry into force. Consequently, 13 years after the CTBT was opened for signature and exactly a decade after the Senate’s first vote on the treaty, the goal of CTBT entry into force remains unfulfilled and U.S. test ban policy remains in a state of limbo.

The situation is self-defeating and counterproductive. Given the U.S. signature of the CTBT and the Bush administration policy to maintain the U.S. nuclear test moratorium, the United States bears most CTBT-related responsibilities. There is neither technical need nor any political support for the renewal of U.S. nuclear testing. At the same time, it is vital to reduce the risk that other countries might conduct nuclear tests that could improve their nuclear capabilities. Yet, the U.S. failure to ratify the CTBT has diminished Washington’s ability to prod other nations to join the treaty and improve its ability to detect and deter clandestine nuclear testing.

There is cause for optimism. The prospects for U.S. ratification are better than they ever have been. Technical developments since 1999 have strengthened the arguments of treaty proponents, and the political alignment in the Senate has changed significantly. One key factor, though certainly not the only one, is that President Barack Obama pledged in his April 5 nuclear weapons speech in Prague that his administration “will immediately and aggressively” pursue U.S. ratification of the CTBT. In May, Gary Samore, the top White House adviser on arms control and proliferation, said the administration is “moving very deliberately in terms of doing the necessary technical and intelligence work to look at the important questions of verification, questions of American stockpile stewardship.”[1] This puts the administration on a pace that could allow for reconsideration of the treaty as early as mid-2010 or possibly later if sufficient Senate support does not emerge. To make sure their efforts are successful this time, the Obama administration and its Senate allies must understand the course of events that led to the 1999 debacle.

What Went Wrong in 1999

The record of the CTBT in the Senate from 1997 to October 1999 suggests that the October 13 vote was not simply “about the substance of the treaty,” as then-Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) claimed in a press conference after the vote and as Senate opponents such as Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) claim today. In fact, the “no” vote had less to do with the substantive issues and was more a consequence of the political miscalculations of treaty proponents; the failure of many senators to explore and understand core issues; the deep, partisan divisions in the nation’s capital; and the president’s failure to organize a strong, focused, and sustained campaign for the treaty.

Following Clinton’s transmittal of the CTBT to the Senate in September 1997, treaty opponents initially pursued a blocking strategy. They were well positioned to pursue such a strategy. Treaty approval requires a two-thirds majority, so opponents of a treaty need to muster only 34 votes. In addition, as members of the majority party at the time, they were able to exercise a great deal of control over the Senate calendar.

In January 1998, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) announced that he would not hold hearings on the CTBT “until the administration has submitted the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty] protocols and the Kyoto global-warming treaty.” The delaying strategy stifled debate and led many proponents and opponents to postpone preparations for the CTBT debate because they believed that the Republican Senate leadership would not agree to schedule time for debate and a vote.

In the early weeks of 1998, the Clinton administration made repeated statements supporting the CTBT and urging timely Senate consideration of the treaty. The administration also secured valuable support for the treaty from four former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the directors of the nuclear weapons laboratories, and the members of NATO, but it failed to build on the strong base of expert and public support for the CTBT and to take the case for the treaty directly to the Senate.

In January 1998, national security adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger called the CTBT “one of the president’s top priorities,” but the administration had other concerns to which it gave precedence. Domestically, the White House was keen to pursue several policy objectives in the run-up to the midterm elections, and Helms’ “hostage-taking” strategy had raised the political cost of pushing for the CTBT.[2]

For its part, the administration’s national security team was preoccupied with securing Senate approval for NATO expansion. Instead of appointing a coordinator to build CTBT support, national security officials relied on the possibility that Russia would ratify START II, thus enabling them to send the ABM Treaty and START II protocols to the Senate for consideration and breaking Helms’ stranglehold on the CTBT. However, the Duma did not ratify START II, and other crises emerged. Through the first half of 1999, the CTBT remained on the political back burner as the Clinton administration and Congress were immobilized by the impeachment hearings and trial related to the Monica Lewinsky affair and soon after by NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia and charges of espionage at the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories.

Following the end of hostilities in the Balkans in the late spring of 1999, Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and pro-treaty nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) redoubled their efforts to raise attention to the plight of the CTBT and to press the Senate leadership to begin the process of considering the treaty.

On July 20, a bipartisan group of nine senators held a press briefing, citing overwhelming public support for the treaty and calling for prompt Senate action. That same day, all 45 Democratic senators wrote to Lott, asking for “all necessary hearings...to report the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to the Senate for timely consideration” before the October 1999 international conference on CTBT entry into force. In a separate letter, Republican Senators Arlen Specter (Pa.) and Jim Jeffords (Vt.) also urged the Senate leadership to begin the process of CTBT consideration.

As he had done for nearly two years, Helms rebuffed his Senate colleagues, sarcastically writing to Dorgan, “Inasmuch as you are clearly concerned about the need for swift Senate action on treaties, perhaps I can enlist your support in respectfully suggesting that you write to the President urging that he submit the ABM Protocols and the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate? I will be very interested in any response you receive from him.” The Raleigh News & Observer characterized Helms’ letter as a “playful response to supporters of the treaty [that] underscores his failure to take any of those concerns seriously. That’s a very unbecoming and dangerous attitude to have toward the serious problem of nuclear proliferation.”[3] The exchange simply reinforced attitudes on both sides.

Nongovernmental CTBT advocates accelerated their public education and Senate lobbying efforts. They encouraged concerned citizens to call their senators about the treaty, pushed newspapers to editorialize on the topic,[4] and collected support from former military and government officials, independent nuclear weapons scientists, and hundreds of public interest organizations.[5]

By late August 1999, news reports suggested that the White House and Senate Democrats were preparing for a pitched battle and were threatening to bring the Senate to a standstill unless Republicans agreed to hold hearings on the CTBT.[6] The renewed effort by CTBT proponents to jump-start Senate consideration of the treaty appeared to be all the more credible to CTBT opponents because of the appearance of White House-led coordination. In reality, most in the Clinton administration remained dubious about the prospect of real action on the treaty, and little more was done to build support.

Through August and September, treaty opponents responded by accelerating preparations for a possible vote on final passage. James Schlesinger, who once headed the Defense and Energy departments, and Kyl, in consultation with Lott, stepped up their lobbying efforts, which were aimed at uncommitted Republican senators. In addition, a number of prominent former national security officials were urged to voice their opposition. At the same time, Lott continued to try to prevent the scheduling of a vote. He told Dorgan and other Senate treaty supporters that he would speak with Helms about allowing hearings but that “this is a dangerous time to rush to judgment on such an important issue.... If it is called up preemptively, without appropriate consideration and thought, it could be defeated.”[7] Lott would soon propose a schedule that allowed less than five working days for consideration of the treaty.

In late September, apparently without information about the opposition’s quiet lobbying effort, Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.), along with other leading Senate CTBT proponents and the White House, decided to try to advance the issue by introducing a nonbinding Senate resolution that called for beginning the process to consider the CTBT and scheduling a vote on the treaty by March 31, 2000. The plan to press for the resolution, which was never introduced, was agreed to at a meeting between Berger and the Senate Democratic leadership on the evening of September 22. At the meeting, participants weighed the possibility that Lott might try to schedule a vote on the treaty on short notice, but they considered the possibility low and decided to press forward.

On September 29, having been informed of the Democrats’ intention to introduce their resolution, Helms and Lott abandoned their blocking strategy and proposed a vote on final passage of the treaty by October 7. Lott calculated that the Democrats might not agree to his terms for a truncated debate and that even if they did, he could assemble the votes needed to block ratification. According to Kyl, 34 senators had been persuaded to vote against ratification by September 14.[8]

Indeed, Lott’s initial proposal for 10 hours of debate on the treaty with only six days’ notice was not accepted by the Democratic leadership. Some Senate supporters, the White House, and the NGO community criticized the offer, calling it a “rush to judgment” because it did not provide sufficient time for hearings and a thorough and informed debate. In consultation with the White House, Senate Democratic leaders negotiated for more time and a more thorough series of hearings. On October 1, however, they decided to accept Lott’s final “take it or leave it” counteroffer for a vote as soon as October 12.

The decision to accept the offer was apparently motivated in part by the belief that the negative effect of continued inaction on the treaty could be as severe as outright defeat. It was very likely that if a vote were not scheduled before the end of 1999, and therefore before the 2000 election season, the treaty would not come before the Foreign Relations Committee and then the full Senate until the middle of 2001 or later. As Biden said on October 2, “The question is: If you are going to die, do you want to die with no one knowing who shot you, or do you want to go at least with the world knowing who killed you?”[9]

With the final vote on the CTBT just days away, Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Secretary of Defense William Cohen finally launched a high-profile, high-powered effort to win Senate support for the treaty. The White House highlighted the fact that the CTBT enjoyed the overwhelming support of U.S. military leaders, as well as leading weapons scientists and seismological experts. Clinton met with several undecided senators at the White House, while Cohen and Albright lobbied undecided senators and worked to communicate the importance of the issue through the news media.

Treaty supporters had recognized from the beginning of their campaign that they would need the support of several influential “internationalist” Republicans to win over the large bloc of undecided votes. Yet, over the course of 1998 and 1999, proponents had made little headway, as most senators ignored the issue and the administration did next to nothing to engage them on issues relating to the treaty.

By the end of October 8, the first day of Senate floor debate, the most crucial of these Republican senators—John Warner (Va.), Pete Domenici (N.M.), Richard Lugar (Ind.), and Chuck Hagel (Neb.)—as well as other Republican moderates, had declared their intention to vote against the treaty.

As important as their support might have been, the debate was effectively over before the administration’s CTBT effort moved into high gear during the week of October 4 and the conclusion of hearings on the treaty on October 7. The CTBT’s opponents, led by Helms and Kyl, had already lined up more than 34 “no” votes. The eleventh-hour efforts of the White House were simply too little too late.

Opposition Tinged With Regret

Even as they prepared to vote against the CTBT, many Republicans were clearly disturbed by the politically charged nature of the debate and frustrated with the situation presented to them by the leadership.

As Hagel observed on the opening morning of the Senate floor debate, “We are trapped in a political swamp as we attempt to compress a very important debate on a very important issue. My goodness, is that any way to responsibly deal with what may, in fact, be the most critical and important vote any of us in this chamber ever make? It is not.”

Even as he outlined his reasons for voting against the treaty, an anguished Lugar acknowledged that, “under the current agreement, a process that normally would take many months has been reduced to a few days. Many senators know little about this treaty. Even for those of us on national security committees, this has been an issue floating on the periphery of our concerns.”

Recognizing that the opportunity for give-and-take was absent and that the votes needed for ratification were not there, 62 senators wrote to the leadership on October 12 “in support of putting off final consideration until the next Congress.” Prominent Republicans, including Lawrence Eagleburger, who served as secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, argued that “if the Senate cannot bring itself to do the right thing and approve the treaty, then senators should do the next best thing and pull it off the table.”[10]

Agreeing to postpone the vote required the same kind of “unanimous consent” agreement needed to schedule the vote, and some CTBT opponents had publicly said they opposed any such agreement. On the eve of the vote, Lott and Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) were on the verge of an agreement to postpone the vote; but Senators Paul Coverdell (R-Ga.), Helms, James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Kyl, and Bob Smith (R-N.H.) reportedly raced to the majority leader’s office to tell him that they were prepared to block any new agreement that would postpone the vote.[11] These senators appear to have been motivated as much by their political instincts as their discomfort with the CTBT.

Smith argued in an October 12 floor speech, “Postponing a vote on the CTBT will allow the White House to claim victory in saving the treaty, and will allow the White House to continue to spin the American people by blaming opponents for not ratifying the treaty. There is no conservative victory in that.” In the end, Lott was either unwilling or unable to persuade this small group of hard-liners to delay the vote.

By taking up the treaty in what Lugar called “an abrupt and truncated manner that is so highly politicized,” the Senate was unable to sort out the many issues relating to treaty ratification. Unlike previous Senate deliberations on arms control treaties, there was no negotiation or exchange of views concerning possible conditions that might assuage concerns and win the support of skeptical senators, such as Clinton’s proposed set of six CTBT “safeguards” (see sidebar). Without the time necessary to achieve clarity and political consensus, the doubts and questions raised about the CTBT effectively undercut potential support for the treaty.

Looking Forward

It will never be known whether it might have been possible to win the Senate’s approval with greater presidential leadership, a more collegial Senate culture, and a more effective presentation of the case for the treaty. The future of the CTBT, however, may well depend on the lessons that decision-makers and the public draw from the 1997-1999 period and how they apply those lessons in the coming year or two.

Although the outcome of any arms control treaty debate depends on politics as much as on hard-headed national security considerations, a first step toward repairing the damage from the October 1999 debate and building support for the CTBT should be a more thorough and substantive exchange of views between the executive branch and Congress on core technical issues concerning the treaty.

Winning over new, uncommitted senators and changing the minds of some who voted no in 1999 will require some time and new evidence that gives them reason to support the CTBT. Most importantly, the administration must address lingering Republican concerns about the verifiability of the CTBT by documenting how and why the International Monitoring System (IMS), on-site inspections, and transparency measures specified in the CTBT, combined with U.S. intelligence capabilities, can effectively detect and deter militarily significant cheating.

Advances in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) nuclear weapons Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) over the past decade have significantly increased confidence in the reliability of the existing U.S. arsenal. A 2002 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel, which included three former nuclear weapons laboratory directors, found that the current SSP provides the technical capabilities that are necessary to maintain confidence in the safety and reliability of the existing seven types of nuclear warheads in the active stockpile, “provided that adequate resources are made available...and are properly focused on this task.”[12] According to the NAS panel, age-related defects, mainly related to non-nuclear components, can be expected, “but nuclear testing is not needed to discover these problems and is not likely to be needed to address them.”

Although the U.S. nuclear arsenal is aging, the aging process is better understood today than ever before, and confidence in the ability to maintain the warheads is increasing at a faster rate than the uncertainties. For example, in 2006 the Department of Energy announced that studies by Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories showed that the plutonium primaries, or pits, of most U.S. nuclear weapons “will have minimum lifetimes of at least 85 years,” which is about twice as long as previous official estimates.

Contrary to the allegations of some CTBT opponents in 1999, the cessation of nuclear explosion testing has not caused the laboratories to lose technical competence. Rather, significant advances have been achieved as researchers were able to study the physics underlying weapons performance in greater depth, undistracted by the demands of a nuclear weapons test explosion program.

According to weapons physicist Richard Garwin, the new evidence on the longevity of weapons plutonium “has removed any urgency to engineer and manufacture new design replacement warheads.” Garwin says the continued performance of legacy warheads can be more reliably certified than new ones.[13]

Test ban monitoring and verification capabilities have also improved. As the July 2002 NAS panel report documents, with the combined capabilities of the IMS, national technical means, and civilian seismic networks, no potential CTBT violator can be confident that a nuclear explosion of any military utility could escape detection. The IMS itself has more than doubled since 1999, with approximately 280 of the planned 321 global monitoring stations now built, including a new array of highly capable noble-gas monitoring stations that can detect minute amounts of the radioactive gases emitted by underground explosions into the atmosphere.

The developments over the past decade led George Shultz, secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan, to say at an April 17 press briefing in Rome that his fellow Republicans “might have been right voting against it some years ago, but they would be right voting for it now, based on these new facts.”

Unlike the Clinton administration, which failed to commission a blue-ribbon review of technical issues before the 1999 vote,[14] the Obama administration has already put into motion the studies and reviews necessary to establish the technical and policy basis for the Senate’s reconsideration and approval. These include a new intelligence community monitoring assessment of test ban monitoring capabilities, as well as an updated version of the 2002 NAS report. Both of these reviews are scheduled to be completed by early 2010.

In the final analysis, undecided senators will have to make a net benefit analysis. Given that the United States will need to maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear arsenal for some time to come, given U.S. interest in detecting and deterring surreptitious nuclear test explosions, and given the importance of strengthening the beleaguered nuclear nonproliferation regime, is the United States more secure ratifying a treaty that bans an activity that is unnecessary for U.S. security but would help others improve their nuclear capabilities, or is it in the U.S. interest to stand outside the treaty?

Political Changes

The political environment has changed significantly since 1999. Most obviously, the Democrats will hold about 15 more seats for the upcoming CTBT vote than the 45 they had 10 years ago. Because they are in the majority now, the Democrats also have much greater control over the Senate calendar than they did before. Under Senate rules, however, the minority party and even individual senators can exert considerable influence over the chamber’s business.

Also, even though a base of 60 is far better than a base of 45, it still means that the Obama administration will need to win the support of at least seven Republicans, a difficult but attainable goal.

There are some encouraging signs. A growing array of Republican and Democratic national security opinion leaders recognizes the value of the CTBT and is calling for reconsideration. In 2007, former Republican Secretaries of State Shultz and Henry Kissinger, along with two Democrats, former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn (Ga.), called on the Senate to initiate a bipartisan process “to achieve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, taking advantage of recent technical advances, and working to secure ratification by other key states.”[15] President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and former NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks have also recently endorsed U.S. ratification of the CTBT.[16]During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Senator John McCain (Ariz.), who voted against the treaty in 1999, outlined a policy that included “taking another look” at the CTBT. He made similar comments earlier this year. Lugar also has indicated that he might vote differently this time.

Avoiding Political Ambushes

In spite of the changes since 1999, some of the potential pitfalls are similar. For example, the Obama administration must not allow CTBT opponents to sap support before the formal debate on the treaty even begins. The White House and the Department of State are now laying the groundwork in advance of formal reconsideration of the treaty, but opponents are also preparing.

One potential advantage CTBT opponents will have is that the Senate is expected to debate the forthcoming START follow-on agreement some time in the first quarter of 2010 and prior to the CTBT. Senate opponents of the CTBT, such as Kyl, have already declared their intent to condition their support for the START follow-on on the acceptance of a set of conditions that would shape and direct the administration’s future policies and budgets for support and “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and stockpile. The administration and Senate CTBT supporters may need to provide such assurances about their commitment to maintain the stockpile to win the support of some Republicans for the CTBT.

If the administration’s fiscal year 2011 budget request includes major additional funding for weapons complex infrastructure investments and new-design warheads or if it allows nuclear weapons “modernization” conditions to be attached to the resolution of ratification for the START follow-on agreement, some potential Senate supporters of the CTBT may pocket that and fail to provide their support when the time comes to vote for the treaty itself.

Some senior administration officials are clearly alert to the challenge. “I think there are a lot of people that still hope for the return” of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program,[17] “and they are going to be sadly disappointed,” Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen O. Tauscher said in a recent interview.[18]

Tauscher has correctly noted that new-design warhead approaches, such as the RRW plan advanced by the Bush administration and rejected by Congress, are less attractive than other measures, such as refurbishing existing warheads to maintain and modernize the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

Although some Republicans will push for new-design warheads, Tauscher said the administration would hold firm and would instead put forward a more robust stockpile management plan that increases the confidence in existing warheads and “negates the need” for the RRW program.[19]

Conclusion

The next 12 to 18 months may represent the best opportunity for U.S. ratification of the CTBT in a generation. Moving forward and gaining the necessary 67 Senate votes in support of ratification will be a difficult but attainable task requiring favorable political conditions and a well-executed ratification campaign that draws on the lessons of the failed CTBT ratification effort in 1999. With sustained presidential leadership, bipartisan support from key senators and former test ban skeptics, and a realistic assessment of the significant improvements in the ability to maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal and detect nuclear test explosions, the outcome of the Senate’s second vote on the CTBT can be different from the one 10 years ago. A Senate vote for the CTBT would repair the damage of 1999 and advance the global effort to reduce nuclear dangers.


Daryl G. Kimball has served as executive director of the Arms Control Association since 2001. He previously was security programs director for Physicians for Social Responsibility, where he helped lobby for the U.S. nuclear test moratorium legislation of 1992 and negotiation of a zero-yield Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Kimball was also executive director of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, where he led a group of nongovernmental organizations in their efforts to win support for U.S. CTBT ratification.


ENDNOTES

1. Gary Samore, Remarks at the Arms Control Association annual meeting, Washington, May 20, 2009, www.armscontrol.org/node/3671.

2. For further details, see Daryl G. Kimball, “Holding the CTBT Hostage in the Senate: The ‘Stealth’ Strategy of Helms and Lott,” Arms Control Today, June/July 1998, www.armscontrol.org/act/1998_06-07/kimjj98.

3. “Nukes-Not Fun and Games,” The Raleigh News & Observer, July 30, 1999.

4. Between September 23, 1997, and October 13, 1999, approximately 120 U.S. editorials were published in favor of the CTBT, while approximately 10 recommended rejection.

5. For a list of supporters, see Congressional Record, October 8, 1999, pp. S12262-12263.

6. Eric Schmitt, “Democrats Ready for Fight to Save Test Ban Treaty,” The New York Times, August 30, 1999.

7. Congressional Record, September 10, 1999, p. S10722.

8. Richard Lowry, “The Test-Ban Ban,” National Review, November 8, 1999.

9. “Nuclear Test Ban Vote Set for October,” Associated Press, October 2, 1999.

10. Lawrence S. Eagleburger, “The World Is Watching: Don’t Kill the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” The Washington Times, October 11, 1999.

11. Eric Schmitt, “Senate Kills Test Ban Treaty in Crushing Loss for Clinton,” The New York Times, October 14, 1999; Lowry, “Test-Ban Ban.”

12. NationalAcademy of Sciences (NAS), “Technical Issues Related to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” 2002.

13. Richard L. Garwin, “A Different Kind of Complex: The Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons and the Nuclear Weapons Enterprise,” Arms Control Today, December 2008, www.armscontrol.org/act/2008_12/Garwin.

14. After the defeat of the CTBT in 1999, Clinton appointed former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Shalikashvili to review the policy and technical issues related to the treaty. His report was completed in January 2001. See www.armscontrol.org/act/2001_01-02/ctbtreport. The NAS did not complete its assessment of technical issues related to the CTBT until 2002.

15. George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn, “Toward a Nuclear Weapons Free World,” The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2007.

16. Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, “U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy,” April 2009.

17. The RRW program is a proposal by the administration of President George W. Bush to design and develop a new-design warhead as a substitute for the W-76 warhead, which has just undergone a life-extension refurbishment. Congress rejected the RRW program mainly on the basis that it was not considered technically necessary.

18. Josh Rogin, “Tauscher: Sorry, Republicans: No Return of the Reliable Replacement Warhead,” The Cable, September 15, 2009, www.thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/09/15/tauscher_sorry_republicans_no_return_of_the_reliable_replacement_warhead.

19. Ibid.

 

When President Bill Clinton described the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) as “the longest-sought, hardest fought prize in arms control history,” he was not exaggerating. In the face of international outrage over their rapid-fire pace of Cold War testing, U.S. and Soviet leaders attempted in 1958-1959 and again in 1963 to negotiate a comprehensive ban on all nuclear test explosions. They came close but were unable to agree on the details for inspections and had to settle for the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited atmospheric testing. The United States, Russia, and other states conducted hundreds more nuclear tests underground, which enabled further arms racing and proliferation.

Robert McNamara’s Logical Legacy

J. Peter Scoblic

When Robert S. McNamara, the former secretary of defense and so-called architect of the Vietnam War, died this summer at the age of 93, he left behind a fraught legacy.

As a statistician, HarvardBusinessSchool professor, and Ford Motor executive, McNamara had developed a reputation by his early 40s for almost robotic efficiency and logic. Soon after he joined the Pentagon, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) called him “an IBM machine with legs,” and he meant it as a compliment. Before long, however, that friendly caricature turned critical. Opponents argued that McNamara’s embrace of rationalism—his seeming fetish for numbers and charts—impeded rather than enhanced his ability to apprehend reality. Yet, if McNamara misunderstood Vietnam, and he certainly did, his rationalism was not the problem. In the final decades of his life, having never lost faith in his powers of analysis, he turned them to a singular and complex problem: the lessons of his own life.

To his credit, if not to the satisfaction of his critics, McNamara spent years wrestling with the mistakes he made in Vietnam. At times, however, it seemed that the harder he looked, the further his understanding receded. In 1995 he published In Retrospect, in which he famously acknowledged that he and his comrades in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had been “wrong, terribly wrong.” He spent the next years probing deeper, traveling to Hanoi to meet with his erstwhile enemies in an attempt to shed light on the war and what could have been done differently. Yet, when he published a book about his investigations, it was tellingly titled Argument Without End, a reference not only to Vietnam but to the nature of history itself. And, when he agreed to be interviewed by filmmaker Errol Morris, the resulting documentary was titled (again tellingly) “The Fog of War” and it concluded by emphasizing incomprehensibility. Asked if he felt guilty about the war, McNamara demurred: “I don’t want to go any further with this discussion. It just opens up more controversy. I don’t want to add anything to Vietnam. It is so complex that anything I say will require additions and qualifications.”

McNamara’s record on arms control provides both further complication and welcome simplicity to this knotty history. As secretary of defense, McNamara played a key role in clarifying the nature of nuclear deterrence and codifying that understanding in international law. In his retirement, he went further, arguing for steps toward nuclear disarmament. Admittedly, many once-hawkish statesmen have gravitated toward abolitionism in their later years, for example, Paul Nitze. McNamara came by his nuclear philosophy not suddenly or in penance for earlier sins, as many suspected he had regarding his re-examination of Vietnam, but rather as the result of that quality for which he was so often derided: reason.

Shifts in Doctrine

When McNamara took over the Pentagon in 1961, U.S. military policy relied on the threat of an all-out nuclear strike to deter or respond to a Soviet attack of any kind. In concrete terms, this meant that if the Red Army were to attack West Germany, for instance, the United States would respond by launching 3,500 weapons at civilian and industrial targets not only in the Soviet Union, but also in the rest of the Communist bloc. The upshot was that hundreds of millions of Russians, Chinese, and Eastern Europeans would have died.

In essence, this was the nuclear extension of the strategic bombing campaigns that the United States had visited on Germany and Japan during World War II, campaigns in which McNamara had assisted. When Gen. Curtis LeMay was bombing and ultimately firebombing Japanese cities in an effort to eliminate that country’s industrial capacity, McNamara’s job as a young Army officer was to make the process more efficient. LeMay subsequently led the Strategic Air Command (SAC), but in 1961, when McNamara saw how SAC planned to use the nuclear arsenal, he was appalled. In addition to the strategy’s obvious moral defects, the problem was that enough Soviet nuclear weapons might survive the onslaught, leaving the U.S.S.R. able to cripple the United States in retaliation. Were the Soviets to invade Western Europe, McNamara wanted to be able to provide the president with options other than unimaginable nuclear holocaust that could lead to the United States’ own destruction.

Following the guidance of his rationalist brethren at the RAND Corp., the famed think tank brimming with mathematicians and game theorists, McNamara found an alternative in the doctrine of counterforce, whereby the United States would try to limit a nuclear exchange by initially targeting only enemy military forces. The idea was to hold Soviet cities hostage to a follow-on strike in an attempt to control escalation and prevent retaliation. As McNamara said on June 16, 1962, in his famous “No Cities” speech, “[Our] principal military objectives, in the event of a nuclear war stemming from a major attack on the [NATO] Alliance, should be the destruction of an enemy’s forces, not his civilian population.” Nuclear weapons, then, were to be used much like conventional weapons. The implication was that the United States could employ them to force an end to hostilities on its terms—that is, to win.

McNamara soon concluded, however, that counterforce was unlikely to control escalation; it would instead almost certainly provoke devastating retaliation. He reasoned that any attempt to build enough weapons such that the damage of a retaliatory strike would be acceptably limited would undoubtedly be met by a similar buildup from the Soviets, who would insist on maintaining the deterrent that comes from the ability to inflict unacceptable pain. The soundness of that logic was reinforced by a Pentagon study showing that no combination of civil defenses, missile defenses, and offensive superiority could limit damage in any meaningful sense against an adversary willing to build up its arsenal. Additionally, McNamara realized that efforts to gain advantage would simply destabilize the situation, encouraging futile attempts to “win” or self-defeating attempts to “not lose” by launching first. By 1967, he had lost faith in counterforce, and he gave a speech emphasizing deterrence via the maintenance of “a highly reliable ability to inflict unacceptable damage upon any single aggressor or combination of aggressors at any time during the course of a strategic nuclear exchange, even after absorbing a surprise first strike.”

McNamara did not reverse the course of U.S. nuclear policy. Counterforce continued to guide U.S. war plans because, in a conflict, it was still better to have options than to resort immediately to massive retaliation. Furthermore, McNamara increased the size of the U.S. strategic arsenal by more than 5,000 warheads, announced a limited national missile shield to defend against Chinese attack, and advocated the development of missiles with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, whose accuracy and attractiveness as targets made them first-strike weapons. None of these moves comported with his emphasis on deterrence.

Nevertheless, McNamara’s recognition that the superpowers’ nuclear relationship was and would always be one of mutual assured destruction was crucial. It demonstrated the bankruptcy of “nuclear victory” and allowed for diplomatic efforts to increase nuclear stability. Although President Lyndon Johnson was unable to begin strategic arms control talks with Moscow before he left office, McNamara had laid the groundwork for President Richard Nixon’s pursuit and conclusion of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which codified mutual assured destruction.

McNamara also helped redirect U.S. nonproliferation policy. A few weeks after China’s first nuclear test in October 1964, Johnson appointed Roswell Gilpatric to lead a commission to study proliferation. Gilpatric, who had served as McNamara’s deputy at the Pentagon until that January, favored aggressive efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; but many of his fellow commissioners, as well as senior officials such as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, thought that the United States would benefit from allowing nuclear weapons to spread to certain friendly nations. McNamara, briefing the committee as secretary of defense, argued that the United States would not be able to control “selective proliferation” and that Soviet cooperation, which the United States needed, would not materialize if the United States allowed its allies to have nuclear weapons. He recommended a comprehensive test ban, a nonproliferation agreement, and security guarantees for non-nuclear-weapon states. McNamara’s briefing was persuasive, Gilpatric’s view carried the day, and ultimately the Johnson administration negotiated the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

After leaving the Pentagon in early 1968, McNamara joined the World Bank and, during his 13 years there, remained silent not only on Vietnam, to the chagrin of many, but also on nuclear policy. Not until he returned to private life in the early 1980s did he become vocal in his support for tighter restraints on nuclear weapons. He joined the board of the Arms Control Association and took part in other research and advocacy initiatives. In 1986, frustrated by the Reagan administration, he published Blundering Into Disaster, which reprised his argument that nuclear weapons could not provide military advantage. McNamara took particular aim at the Strategic Defense Initiative, which he saw as destabilizing and technologically far-fetched. He recommended talks with Moscow to reduce tensions and the size of the U.S. and Soviet arsenals. After the end of the Cold War, he continued to push for arms control; by the early 1990s, he was advocating steps toward nuclear abolition.

Working Out a Worldview

Combined with his advocacy of the Vietnam War, McNamara’s steady support for arms control makes for an unusual legacy, suggesting that he was pulled in two distinct ideological directions. His prosecution of the war implied a simplistic, Manichaean view of the Cold War, a view of communism as a monolithic enemy that had to be defeated lest it overwhelm the West. By contrast, his pursuit of strategic arms control implied a willingness to accept coexistence with the Soviet Union. The problem was not that McNamara’s rationalism took him in two different directions, but rather that reason alone was insufficient, and with Vietnam it took him much longer to arrive at an understanding that comported with the facts.

That calamitous delay was caused by a lack of expertise and the opportunity it provided for assumptions to flourish unchecked. To fight a war, especially a counterinsurgency, it is essential to understand the goals of one’s enemy, but by his own admission, McNamara knew almost nothing about Vietnam. Because he knew so little, he fell back on the pre-existing and widely shared assumption that the Vietnamese Communists were engaged not in a civil-war-cum-struggle-for-independence but rather an expansionist push on behalf of China and the Soviet Union. As ur-critic David Halberstam wrote in The Best and the Brightest, “The real problem was the failure to re-examine the assumptions of the era, particularly in Southeast Asia. There was no real attempt…to analyze Ho Chi Minh’s position in terms of the Vietnamese people and in terms of the larger Communist world, to establish what Diem represented, to determine whether the domino theory was in fact valid.” In this context, McNamara’s rationalism served not to reveal the truth but to wall it off, reinforcing previously held convictions until the United States was stuck in a quagmire.

When it came to the arms race, however, McNamara had few such convictions, for the simple reason that a nuclear orthodoxy had yet to solidify in 1961. True, many of McNamara’s contemporaries, especially conservatives such as Goldwater, applied their Manichaeism to the arms race, believing that victory in the Cold War required the ability to win a nuclear war. Yet, to his credit, McNamara immediately recognized that massive retaliation demanded re-examination. As more data came in about the Soviet ability to match U.S. forces, the offensive demands of counterforce, and the ineffectiveness of defenses, McNamara grew skeptical that escalation could be controlled and that a nuclear war could be won. In addition, during the Cuban missile crisis McNamara had seen that counterforce had offered no palatable options and that the threat of mutual destruction had done much to encourage a peaceful resolution. Unencumbered by rigid beliefs, McNamara’s reasoning and experience led him quickly to an understanding that has remained durable even as Vietnam has come to be seen as a mistake.

In his later years, McNamara refined his understanding of the nuclear balance through further dissection of the Cuban missile crisis, which showed how sane actors, behaving in what they believed to be their rational self-interest, could run headlong into irrational and potentially catastrophic predicaments. Ironically, McNamara’s emphasis on reason and analysis ultimately led him to an appreciation of the central role that irrationality played in international security. In 1993, he wrote, “It can be confidently predicted that the combination of human fallibility and nuclear arms will inevitably lead to nuclear destruction.” It was a sentence that seemed to encapsulate McNamara-ism perfectly, incorporating a hard-earned recognition of human weakness with an apparently undiminished assurance in his analytic acumen. It was an assurance that his critics would find grating and even offensive to the very end. One can only hope that he will be proven wrong.


J. Peter Scoblic is executive editor of The New Republic and author of U.S. vs. Them: Conservatism in the Age of Nuclear Terror. From 1999 to 2003, he was editor of Arms Control Today.

 

When Robert S. McNamara, the former secretary of defense and so-called architect of the Vietnam War, died this summer at the age of 93, he left behind a fraught legacy. (Continue)

The National Missile Defense Act of 1999

Greg Thielmann

The National Missile Defense Act of 1999 was described by its chief sponsor, Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), as "the necessary first step to protecting the United States from long-range ballistic missile attack."[1] Indeed, the act constituted an important milestone on the road to U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, a step that the sponsors of the act advocated. Although the act itself neither authorized any programs nor appropriated any funds, it was misrepresented then and has been misrepresented since as proof of strong congressional support for the urgent and unqualified pursuit of strategic missile defenses.

The National Missile Defense Act gave the United States a clearly stated policy goal: to "deploy as soon as is technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate)...." These simple words essentially became executive branch policy following the election of 2000. They were adopted as a charter for the Missile Defense Agency, appearing prominently today on the home page of the agency's Web site. Although the meaning of "effective" has been subject to debate and the elections of 2006 and 2008 have affected the implementation of that policy, the act represents an enduring symbol of the potent backing strategic missile defense has received from Congress during the last 10 years.

Ironically, the threat assessments on which the act was based have proven unrealistic with regard to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. None of these countries and no other proliferant states have deployed long-range ballistic missiles in the decade following the act.

The sponsors of the act also identified growing Chinese missile deployments as a source of concern, "perhaps [the] most troubling"[2] in the words of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Yet, the U.S. strategic ballistic missile defenses deployed after passage of the act were never intended to defend against a deliberate Chinese attack.

Those missile defense deployments were also not directed at a deliberate Russian attack, although the act prepared the way for the U.S. decision in 2001 to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, which had been a keystone in the management of the U.S.-Russian strategic relationship. The Russians abandoned START II on the day after U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. In ratifying START II, the Russian Duma had conditioned its approval on continuing U.S. adherence to the ABM Treaty.

The Russian abandonment of START II, which the United States had never ratified, removed any chance of reducing Russian strategic offensive forces under the stabilizing terms of that treaty. Although Russian missile and warhead numbers continued to decline even without START II, the Russians were able to retain "heavy ICBMs" and other land-based ballistic missiles with multiple, independently targetable re-entry vehicles.

In short, China and Russia have increased the quality and, in the case of China, the quantity, of their strategic ballistic missile forces in response to U.S. missile defense programs. However, there is no evidence that the U.S. programs have dissuaded the states of proliferation concern from developing or deploying ballistic missiles.

Cold War Origins

The United States and the Soviet Union deployed limited numbers of strategic missile defense interceptors and radars in the middle years of the Cold War. These defenses were designed to cope with the intercontinental-range (greater than 5,500 kilometers) and intermediate-range (3,000-5,500 kilometers) ballistic missiles, with which the two sides could threaten each other's homeland. The U.S.S.R. went first, deploying nearly 100 nuclear-armed ABM interceptors around Moscow in the 1960s. The United States began deploying a comparable number of nuclear-armed ABM interceptors at Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1974. The 1972 ABM Treaty had banned the United States and U.S.S.R. from developing nationwide defenses as well as systems or components for sea-based, air-based, space-based, or mobile land-based ABM deployments. The treaty permitted each side to build ABM systems at two fixed locations for defense of each national capital area and a land-based missile base, with up to 100 interceptors at each site. A 1974 protocol to the treaty reduced that allowance, limiting each side to only one site. The Soviets opted to maintain their system around Moscow while the United States elected to protect a missile field in North Dakota, until Congress cut off funding in 1975. A 1997 agreement on confidence-building measures, negotiated in the ABM Treaty's Special Consultative Commission, precisely demarcated strategic missile defense interceptors from those that were designed to intercept tactical and theater ballistic missiles. The latter systems were deemed incapable of overcoming the technical challenge of coping with the much faster re-entry of ICBM and sea-launched ballistic missile warheads.

Although the Soviets sought to be able to defend their capital and national leadership against the new U.S. missile threat that emerged in the 1960s, they never succeeded. U.S. warheads and the options for countermeasures were too numerous and the radars on which the Moscow system relied too vulnerable. Yet, bureaucratic inertia, vested interests, and the psychological desire to have some defense, however inadequate, have allowed vestiges of the Soviet/Russian system to survive even to the present day.

The United States was susceptible to the no-less-potent illusion that it could use technology to replace the defensive shield two oceans had historically provided for keeping enemies at bay. Nurtured by an almost unlimited faith in technological solutions and feeling the same natural reluctance as the Soviets to accept vulnerability, Washington plowed ahead until the inevitable logic of cost effectiveness caught up with strategic defenses in the mid-1970s when the Safeguard ABM system was canceled and dismantled. Although a new vision of a defensive umbrella that would render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" was articulated by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, the Strategic Defense Initiative he launched two years later eventually fell victim to the "cost effectiveness at the margin" criterion advocated by his own special adviser, Paul Nitze. Strategic missile defense planning changed direction successively under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but research and development funding remained robust throughout both presidencies, and neither administration made any decision to deploy strategic defenses.

Three events were key in creating the political environment for passage of the National Missile Defense Act. First was the 1994 U.S. congressional elections, which gave the Republicans a majority in the House and Senate. The new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), included "a renewed commitment to a National Missile Defense" in his "Contract With America."[3] Republicans in both houses consistently and relentlessly pursued this goal as part of the GOP's political agenda, culminating in passage of the 1999 act.

Report Spurs Action

The second and most important substantive development was the July 1998 release of the Report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, who had been President Gerald Ford's secretary of defense. The report's executive summary warned that North Korea and Iran would be able to inflict major destruction on the United States within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability and that both placed "a high priority on threatening U.S. territory" and were even then "pursuing advanced ballistic missile capabilities to pose a direct threat to U.S. territory."[4] The report claimed that any other nation with a well-developed, Scud-based ballistic missile infrastructure could be within five years of an ICBM capability. Finally, the report warned that the United States "might have little or no warning before operational deployment" of these systems.[5]

The dire warnings of the Rumsfeld Commission were subject to considerable criticism and controversy among experts. Senate Democrats were still confident going into the August recess that year that they could sustain efforts by the Clinton administration to avoid congressional passage of an unqualified endorsement of strategic missile defense in reaction to the report. The public, however, which had already been spooked by Rumsfeld's depiction of a potential near-term threat from "rogue state" ballistic missiles, was about to receive a further jolt. North Korea surprised the world with its August 31, 1998, attempt to place a satellite in space using a three-stage Taepo Dong-1 rocket. Although the attempt was unsuccessful, no missile re-entry vehicle was tested, and the system's throw weight was inadequate to deliver a nuclear-sized payload to the United States, the political impact of the event was enormous. Proponents of strategic missile defenses skillfully used the North Korean launch as vindication of the Rumsfeld Commission's warnings and accompanying allegations that previous U.S. intelligence assessments had been overly sanguine.

Most Democratic senators became unwilling to stand behind White House threats to veto the strategic missile defense resolution being pushed by the Republican majority. The alternative strategy the Democrats chose was to make the issue go away by adding language to make the bill uncontroversial. Amendments to the policy bill provided reminders that any national missile defense program funding would have to be subject to annual authorization and appropriation measures and that it was still U.S. policy to seek negotiated reductions in Russian strategic forces. Clinton stressed that the amendments made clear that no deployment decision had been made, but the simple language of the bill implied strongly that Congress recognized U.S. technological obstacles as the only acceptable justification for delay. The Senate bill passed 97-3 on March 17, 1999. The House bill passed the next day, 317-105.

Clinton announced in 2000 that strategic missile defenses, then under the rubric of the National Missile Defense program, were sufficiently promising and affordable to justify continued development and testing but that there was not sufficient information about the technical and operational effectiveness of the entire system to move forward with deployment. He noted that critical elements, such as the booster rocket for the interceptor, had not been tested and that there were questions about the system's ability to deal with countermeasures.[6]

At the outset of the Bush administration in 2001, the programmatic course of strategic ballistic missile defense and the future of the ABM Treaty were still up in the air. That summer, a bipartisan majority of the Senate Armed Services Committee even voted to reduce missile defense funding.

The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon created an entirely different atmosphere for continuing the debate. In the fearful wake of those attacks, President George W. Bush was successful in supercharging strategic missile defense procurement and deployment. In spite of virtually unanimous international opposition, he announced U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in late 2001 and a commitment to deploy strategic defense interceptors by 2004. The U.S.-based deployments and their "operational" designation were accomplished only after Rumsfeld, whom Bush had appointed secretary of defense, suspended traditional acquisition rules and operational testing criteria, introducing an unconventional and controversial "spiral" development process. By the end of two terms, the Bush administration was able to deploy a set of 20 ground-based missile defense (GMD) interceptors at sites in Alaska and California and to plan for deploying another 24 there and 10 more in Poland.

The ABM Treaty constituted a tacit acknowledgment by both sides that unlimited strategic defenses constituted a threat to the stability of the balance in offensive forces. Each side further demonstrated by its subsequent actions, albeit at different times, that offenses and defenses were inextricably connected. In 1988 the United States demanded that the Soviet Union dismantle the large phased-array radar Moscow was constructing at Krasnoyarsk before Washington would agree to any new offensive arms control limits.[7]

In response to U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty on June 13, 2002, Russia announced one day later that it would no longer consider itself bound by START II, consistent with the Duma's ratification terms in 2000, which were contingent on continuation of the ABM Treaty. Thus, not for the first or last time, U.S. determination to escape from strategic missile defense strictures led to the loss of an opportunity to secure lower limits and stabilizing measures in strategic offensive forces.

In 2004 the Bush administration began talks with eastern European states to explore the potential use of their territory for deployment of U.S. GMD interceptors and a sophisticated midcourse X-band radar. By the end of his administration, Bush had secured agreements with the Czech Republic for hosting the radar and Poland for hosting the missile interceptors, but the agreements remain to be ratified by the host governments. Meanwhile, on the U.S. side, the pendulum again seems to be swinging away from the urgent priority assigned to strategic missile defense by the Bush administration. President Barack Obama said in his April 5, 2009, Prague speech that he would only go forward with a missile defense system in Europe that was "cost effective and proven." His revised request for the Missile Defense Agency in the fiscal year 2010 budget was $7.8 billion, a $1.2 billion funding cut in missile defense.[8]

Conclusion

In this tenth anniversary year of the National Missile Defense Act, it is worth noting that the North Korean ICBM seen as imminent when the act was passed has still not been successfully flight-tested. Deployment is down the road, "probably another three to five years minimum," according to Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [9] Helms worried during the 1999 debate over the act that "Iran may very well be able to deploy an ICBM before America has a missile defense to counter it, even if the United States breaks ground on construction tomorrow morning."[10] In fact, neither Iran nor any of the other emerging ballistic missile states the Rumsfeld Commission said could have ICBMs by 2003 has them today.

The sponsors of the National Missile Defense Act were correct in predicting that the pursuit of strategic missile defenses outside the ABM Treaty would not necessarily forestall additional reductions in the number of Russian strategic missiles given the state of Russia's economy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That pursuit did, however, derail START II, the next step of negotiated reductions in U.S. and Russian strategic forces. In order to satisfy the requirements of START II, Moscow would have had to deploy only single-warhead ICBMs, leading to a force structure with greater crisis stability and possibly with fewer overall warheads than it currently has. U.S. strategic missile defense deployments also provided additional incentives for the modernization of Chinese strategic forces that so troubled Helms at the time the act was debated. Using formulas familiar to U.S. and Russian strategic planners countering strategic defenses in the past, the Chinese have increased the mobility and number of their deterrent forces while improving the survivability of their re-entry vehicles.

Actual threat history aside, the National Missile Defense Act became an important argument in the continuing policy debate over the direction and pace of the strategic missile defense program. After 1999, whenever skeptics of missile defense raised programmatic issues, the act was cited as proof that an overwhelming and bipartisan majority in Congress had already established a policy of rapid deployment, relegating other issues to a subordinate position. The act prodded the executive branch to move forward with little consideration of the full repercussions. Following the superficial logic of the act, the United States discarded the ABM Treaty even though most of the U.S. missile defense activities that have taken place between then and now could have been accommodated under the broad conceptual framework of the treaty. Moreover, the United States rushed to deploy defenses against the rogue-state ICBM missile threat before that threat materialized and before U.S. defensive systems had been adequately tested. These actions cost the United States dearly in terms of treasure spent and opportunities lost to reduce the threat from its potential adversaries with the most lethal capabilities, against which U.S. strategic forces are still principally directed.


Greg Thielmann is a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, where he directs the Realistic Threat Assessments and Responses Project. He previously served as a senior professional staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer for 25 years.


ENDNOTES

1. "Senate Backs Missile Defense System," CNN.com, March 17, 1999, www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/17/missile.defense/.

2. Congressional Record, March 15, 1999, p. S2632.

3. Republican Contract with America, http://www.house.gov/house/Contract/CONTRACT.html.

4. Greg Thielmann, "Rumsfeld Reprise? The Missile Report That Foretold the Iraq Intelligence Controversy," Arms Control Today, July/August 2003, p. 3.

5. Ibid.

6. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, "White House Fact Sheet on National Missile Defense," September 1, 2000.

7. Paul Lewis, "U.S. Ties Arms Deal to a Soviet Radar," New York Times, September 1, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/01/world/us-ties-arms-deal-to-a-soviet-radar.html.

8."David Morgan, "Pentagon Seeks $1.2 Billion Cut for Missile Defense," Reuters, May 7, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE5465CJ20090507.

9. Gen. James Cartwright, Testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, June 16, 2009.

10. Congressional Record, March 15, 1999, p. S2632.

 

The National Missile Defense Act of 1999 was described by its chief sponsor, Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), as "the necessary first step to protecting the United States from long-range ballistic missile attack."[1] Indeed, the act constituted an important milestone on the road to U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, a step that the sponsors of the act advocated. Although the act itself neither authorized any programs nor appropriated any funds, it was misrepresented then and has been misrepresented since as proof of strong congressional support for the urgent and unqualified pursuit of strategic missile defenses. (Continue)

Civilian Control Of Nuclear Weapons

William Lanouette

Ever since the Manhattan Project, which built the first U.S. atomic bombs during World War II, tensions have persisted among civilian and military leaders over the control of nuclear weapons. Those tensions are highlighted anew with a proposal to move the U.S. nuclear weapons program from the Department of Energy to the Department of Defense. President Barack Obama this year asked the Office of Management and Budget to study the shift and report on the pros and cons by September. The concept has raised concern on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Former Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary recently said that civilian control is good public policy and a good model for other countries to follow.[1]

What exactly is meant by "civilian control" of nuclear weapons? Over the last seven decades, this elusive and evolving topic has blended and sometimes blurred two related concepts: authority and administration. The authority to order the use of nuclear weapons rests with the president, based on the U.S. Constitution. The administration of the nuclear complex and arsenal is based on legislation that created a civilian nuclear authority and specified new roles for the president.

Authority comes from the "civilian control of the military" that the Constitution guarantees by giving Congress power to declare war while making the president commander-in-chief. As commander-in-chief, the president and his civilian secretary of defense have the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. That authority has never been in dispute.

Administration is what has changed over the decades since it first became politicized after World War II by scientists and politicians who opposed "militarization" of the atom. Thus, the debate that helped frame the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 and spelled out the role civilians should play in the nuclear enterprise re-emerges with the Obama proposal. It is essentially about administration, not authority.

At issue is a tangle of traditions, laws, presidential directives, and ad hoc practices that have evolved since 1939, when scientists at Columbia University first saw that the awesome power of the atom could play a decisive role in the coming war. The civilian-military interactions that followed have fostered a massive nuclear weapons program that swelled during the Cold War and is only now in serious decline. Throughout this history, many scientists working on nuclear weapons have asserted their independence and mistrusted the military, and those attitudes may yet influence the decision at hand.

To appreciate these attitudes, it is helpful to trace these civilian-military interactions to the dawn of the nuclear age, from the time when nuclear scientists dominated policymaking to the present, when they have some influence but no power. During the spring and summer of 1939, physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard demonstrated that nuclear chain reactions might work and then co-designed the world's first nuclear reactor. Also at Columbia, chemist Harold Urey devised a way to separate the rare uranium isotope U-235 that could fuel it.[2] Yet, with the science of nuclear weaponry at hand, a way to integrate science and the military was still missing.

At first, the scientists were the only ones who foresaw nuclear weapons as a possibility, and their interactions with the military were frustrating and nearly futile. Szilard urged Fermi to approach the U.S. Navy that spring, but when he told Navy scientists about the atom's potential both as a power source for ships and a powerful new weapon, he was ridiculed. That summer, Szilard drafted and helped deliver a warning letter from friend and colleague Albert Einstein to President Franklin Roosevelt that detailed recent German atomic bomb research and urged a prompt U.S. effort. When a federal government Uranium Committee was finally created that fall, however, Army and Navy members mocked Szilard's ideas as little more than a type of science-fiction death ray.[3]

Still, Fermi and Szilard persevered; and their research finally garnered the first government support in 1940, allowing them to conduct experiments at Columbia that eventually paid off in December 1942 with the world's first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Beginning then, it was clear that an atomic bomb was possible. By the fall of 1942, however, the Army's Manhattan Project had absorbed their work, and tensions soon arose between scientists and military leaders. Szilard enjoyed "baiting brass hats" and resisted the gruff demeanor and no-nonsense management style of the project's commanding general, Leslie R. Groves, who considered the scientists he supervised to be "crackpots."[4]

In 1943, soon after the secret Los Alamos laboratory was established, physicists Isidor Rabi and Robert Bacher protested the Army's "militarization" of the scientists and their work, and a compromise was negotiated so that the scientists did not need to wear Army uniforms.[5] The same year, physicists Hans Bethe and Edward Teller proposed giving "full responsibility" for the atomic bomb project to the scientists. "It was natural," historian Martin Sherwin noted, "that many scientists came to believe that they, themselves, rather than the military, bore the ultimate responsibility for victory and the security of the nation."[6] Szilard especially believed that scientists should participate in policy decisions for two reasons: they had expert knowledge of what was and was not possible, and they had rational powers that could clarify public policy issues. From the beginning, Szilard eagerly offered his self-proclaimed "sweet voice of reason" to anyone who would listen.

One wartime leader who heeded that voice was Vannevar Bush, the civilian director of the U.S. atomic bomb effort. In the spring of 1944, Szilard bombarded Bush with proposals for a postwar control commission that would be dominated by scientists and other civilians. Bush proposed the scheme to Roosevelt that summer, saying that "experts," not politicians or the military, should run the commission.[7] A year later, in the summer of 1945, the Interim Committee that President Harry Truman had created to advise him on postwar nuclear policies proposed a nine-member commission with five civilians holding sway over two Army and two Navy officers.[8]

This history of the scientists and their mistrust of the military is important because it set the stage for the rancorous legislative struggle over "civilian control" that defined national policy following the war's end. First, the scientists lobbied for international control of atomic energy, warning of a postwar nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. In that context, they insisted that only civilian control would convince other nations to cooperate in such a broad-reaching alliance.

The Manhattan Project scientists were quick to oppose Groves and the May-Johnson bill that was introduced in the House to continue Army control over all nuclear programs.[9] They found a champion in the Senate with Brien McMahon (D-Conn.), who considered the atomic bomb "the most important thing in history since the birth of Jesus Christ" and viewed the scientists who had created it to be secular saints.[10] Following their lead, McMahon proposed creating a five-member civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

Groves inadvertently made the scientists' case for civilian control when he refused to turn over classified atomic bomb information to Congress, a move that highlighted potential problems with continuing military control of nuclear research and weapons.[11] At the same time, the scientists decried as intolerable the restrictions on scientific research proposed by the May-Johnson bill.[12]

In Congress, the debate over postwar control of nuclear weapons eventually came down to a fight between the scientists and the military. In a national radio broadcast in March 1946, McMahon denounced the "militaristic oligarchy" that Army control would bring. But on Capitol Hill, a legislative compromise driven by Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-Mich.) undermined the concept of an independent Atomic Energy Commission by creating a statutory Military Liaison Committee that would soon come to dominate the civilian commissioners' deliberations on nuclear weapons policy. Also created in the amended bill was a scientists' General Advisory Committee , whose opinions over the years were heard but seldom heeded. The Atomic Energy Act that Truman signed gave the president authority to appoint AEC commissioners and to order the AEC to transfer nuclear materials to the Pentagon.[13] Truman had supported the McMahon bill as first proposed but also accepted the amendments that weakened its emphasis on civilian independence.[14] Truman came to recognize that, from the beginning, his authority was not absolute in practice. Indeed, he acknowledged that he had not actually authorized the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman only acted decisively on August 10, 1945, when he ordered that the third bomb, which would be ready in about two weeks, should not be used without his explicit permission.[15] As Groves later remarked, Truman was "like a little boy on a toboggan who never had an opportunity to say yes. All he could have said was no."[16]

Truman voiced his continued fears about losing his authority over the atomic bomb's use in 1948 when he said that he did not want "to have some dashing lieutenant colonel decide when would be the proper time to drop one."[17] That year, Truman professed that the atomic bomb "isn't a military weapon" because of its widespread destructive power and thus should not be integrated into the Pentagon's operational plans.[18] At the time, Truman's budget director, James Webb, supported the president's view by arguing that atomic bombs are "symbolic" and that the military's failure to grasp this reality was a good reason not to transfer them.[19]

Gradually, Truman's authority came under challenge, especially after the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in August 1949. During the Korean War, it was not a dashing lieutenant colonel but a flamboyant general, Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, who claimed he was prepared to dispatch nuclear-armed bombers under his command on his own authority.[20] LeMay argued in 1950 that he should have the authority to receive nuclear weapons from the AEC if Washington were ever destroyed by Soviet attack.[21] This claim was not authorized, but the same year, Truman ordered that nine MK-4 non-nuclear assemblies be transferred to the military for training purposes. Then, in April 1951, AEC Chairman Gordon Dean agonized in a memo to fellow commissioners about whether it was legal to heed another order by Truman and transfer to Guam nine complete weapons.[22] Dean did so, ceding physical control of usable nuclear weapons to the military for the first time.

Civilian control of the atomic bomb's administration shifted again from the AEC to the Pentagon when, in a more bureaucratic way, the Eisenhower administration created a new post: assistant to the secretary of defense for atomic energy. President Dwight Eisenhower also approved transfer and deployment of weapons to secure U.S. bases overseas.[23] Next, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 allowed the Pentagon to manufacture weapons and weapons components. That same year, nuclear weapons were dispersed around the United States and abroad to assure their greater safety from Soviet attack and their operational readiness.[24] Still, in the decades since the act's amendment, the Pentagon has continued to rely on the AEC and its successors for nuclear expertise and weaponry rather than developing the capability itself.

Unavoidably, as the nuclear stockpile's size and diversity expanded, it became increasingly impractical to arrange for AEC civilians physically to transfer nuclear bomb components to the military. Also, with the advent of thermonuclear hydrogen bombs, Eisenhower ordered that only these new and more powerful weapons, with yields of more than 600 kilotons, would require the AEC to maintain custody of the capsule that contains fissionable material.[25] In 1956 the AEC said it no longer needed to insist on civilian control, and from then on, transfers from the weapons complex to the military became so routine they were called "allocations." Near the end of the Eisenhower administration in 1959, more than 80 percent of U.S. nuclear weapons were in military custody.[26]

This trend did not pass unnoticed, however, and in 1960, Representative Chet Holifield (D-Calif.) took to the House floor to sound the alarm. Holifield decried the loss of civilian control over nuclear weapons, blaming in part the "gradual step-by-step surrender to the steady pressure of our strong and entrenched military bloc" while acknowledging "that technological change has made obsolete the old and cumbersome procedures."[27]

In the 1960s, questions arose about the president's authority to order nuclear attack as the Eisenhower administration's "massive retaliation" policy shifted under presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to one of "flexible response." A massive retaliation with strategic nuclear weapons would be ordered from a central military command, whereas a flexible response with tactical nuclear weapons might be ordered by a field commander.

The Kennedy administration was the first to fit the weapons with electronic permissive action links (PALs), which are coded mechanical or electrical locks. According to political scientist Peter Douglas Feaver, that step provided a change from "custody" of the weapons to "assurance" that weapons could only be used if so ordered by the president.[28] In 1966, AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg proposed that all finished nuclear weapons be automatically transferred to the Pentagon, a practice Johnson ordered in 1967.[29]

Since then, the AEC's successors-the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Energy Department, and the department's semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration-have retained administrative control over the nuclear weapons enterprise.

Yet, that control may have less practical value than it did when the debate over the issue began more than 60 years ago. In part, PALs provided an attractive technical fix. They afforded practical assurances that command-and-control systems used to implement a presidential order were reliable, even when the weapons were in military custody. This arrangement settled the question of authority, but the question of administration continues to this day.

At issue in the current debate is the perspective that "civilian" scientists and bureaucrats can bring to questions about the utility, safety, reliability, and ultimate value of the still-vast nuclear arsenal. These topics assume special significance as the United States pursues policies aimed at reducing that arsenal and eventually eliminating all nuclear weapons worldwide. In this context, the scientists' resistance to "militarization" when the Atomic Energy Act was new may still survive to inform the debate.

 

 


William Lanouette is author of Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, The Man Behind the Bomb. A writer and journalist who has covered nuclear energy and nuclear weapons for more than four decades, he was a senior analyst for energy and science issues at the U.S. Government Accountability Office from 1991 to 2006.


ENDNOTES

1. Matthew L. Wald, "Bomb Plants Could Shift to Control of Pentagon," The New York Times, February 7, 2009, p. A11. See Lisa Hoffman, "Military to Control Nukes?" Scripps-Howard News Service, February 6, 2009.

2. William Lanouette with Bela Silard, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, The Man Behind the Bomb (New York: Scribners, 1992), chaps. 13-15. See Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson Jr., The New World: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1939-1946 (Washington, DC: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972), chap. 14.

3. Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows, pp. 284-297. See Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985), pp. 568-569, 574-578.

4. Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 59. Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows, pp. 237-238.

5. Sherwin, A World Destroyed, p. 55.

6. Ibid., p. 48.

7. Peter Douglas Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 90.

8. Ibid., p. 91; Hewlett and Anderson, New World, pp. 412-413.

9. The Army's bill for its continued control over nuclear affairs was introduced in the House by Military Affairs Committee chairman Andrew Jackson May (D-Ky.) and in the Senate by Edwin C. Johnson (D-Colo.).

10. Stewart L. Udall, The Myths of August (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), p. 32.

11. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians, p. 93.

12. Hewlett and Anderson, New World, p. 434.

13. Section 6(a) of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which is entitled "Military Applications of Atomic Energy," authorized the AEC to research and produce atomic bombs. It gave the president authority to direct the AEC to "deliver such quantities of fissionable materials or weapons to the armed forces for such use as he deems necessary in the interest of national defense" or "authorize the armed forces to manufacture, produce, or acquire any equipment or device utilizing fissionable material or atomic energy as a military weapon." In this sense, the AEC's "monopoly" over weapons development and production was already undermined by the new legislation.

14. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians, p. 100.

15. J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 86.

16. Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, "The Fight Over the Atom Bomb," Look, Aug. 13, 1963, p. 20.

17. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians, p. 120.

18. Ibid., p. 125.

19. Ibid., p. 123.

20. Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), pp. 133-134.

21. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians, p. 50.

22. Ibid., pp. 134, 138. See Gordon Dean and Roger Anders, eds., Forging the Atomic Shield: Excerpts From the Office Diary of Gordon E. Dean (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 107-109, 136. See also Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1947-1952 (Washington, DC: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972), pp. 522, 538-539.

23. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians, pp. 158, 161.

24. Ibid., p. 159. For a broader assessment, see Walter B. Slocombe, "Democratic Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons," Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) Policy Paper, No. 12 (April 2006).

25. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians, pp. 163-164.

26. Ibid., pp. 168, 202.

27. Ibid., p. 178. See Congressional Record, Feb. 9, 1960, p. 2169.

28. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians, p. 195.

29. Ibid., p. 203.

 

Ever since the Manhattan Project, which built the first U.S. atomic bombs during World War II, tensions have persisted among civilian and military leaders over the control of nuclear weapons. Those tensions are highlighted anew with a proposal to move the U.S. nuclear weapons program from the Department of Energy to the Department of Defense. President Barack Obama this year asked the Office of Management and Budget to study the shift and report on the pros and cons by September. The concept has raised concern on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Former Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary recently said that civilian control is good public policy and a good model for other countries to follow. (Continue)

The Threshold Test Ban Treaty

Edward Ifft

As the likelihood increases that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) will get a new look in the Senate and perhaps advance closer to entry into force in the Obama administration,[1] it is useful to look back at its antecedents. There are three principal ones: the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT), known in most of the world as the Partial Test Ban Treaty; the 1968 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT); and the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT). The NPT put in place the promise to end nuclear testing forever, and the LTBT repeated this promise and prohibited nuclear explosions in all environments except underground. Meanwhile, the NPT's Article VI disarmament provision was widely understood to include a commitment to enact eventually a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing. Quite properly, constant attention is given to the NPT, and Arms Control Today discussed the LTBT and NPT negotiations recently.[2] The TTBT, however, is sometimes forgotten, which is unfortunate because it was an important step in the 60-year struggle to control nuclear explosions and it has interesting lessons to tell about the art and science of negotiations, as well as verification and compliance issues.

Origins of the TTBT

Beginning with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's famous 1954 call for an end to all nuclear testing, there have been many starts and stops to political discussions and efforts of groups of experts to solve the political, military, and verification problems associated with a potential CTBT. President John Kennedy settled for the LTBT rather than a comprehensive treaty because of Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev's resistance to on-site inspections. Yet, the Soviet Union was pressing for a CTBT by 1974 and gaining public relations points while the United States resisted because of concerns about verification and stockpile reliability. In March 1974, at a meeting between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, it was agreed in principle to seek to ban nuclear explosions above some yet-to-be-determined yield. The issue was given even greater urgency in May when India exploded a nuclear device in the Rajasthan Desert, calling it a "peaceful nuclear explosion" (PNE).

A few days earlier, a U.S. delegation had flown by military plane to Moscow to begin what were described as "technical discussions" on a possible TTBT. Those of a conspiratorial nature may conclude that this term was used to keep the bureaucracy from getting too excited about what was about to happen. Moscow was chosen as the venue to get the U.S. team away from the distractions of Washington and to allow greater access to Soviet officials, some of whom would not have been allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union because of the sensitive nature of their work.

The chief U.S. negotiator was Walter Stoessel, ambassador to the Soviet Union. I functioned as his deputy, chairing the internal meetings and supervising the preparation of delegation statements and reports to Washington. Norm Terrell, who worked for Helmut Sonnenfeldt, counselor of the Department of State and close colleague of Kissinger, was the primary link to Kissinger through Sonnenfeldt. Nine other members of the U.S. team represented the other relevant agencies. They had a very high level of expertise, especially on the verification issues. Carl Romney, a legendary Air Force seismologist, took the lead on the crucial issue of seismic detection of underground explosions. An unusual and very useful feature of the group was that two eminent geophysicists were "public members" of the delegation, not representing any agency. They were Professor Lynn Sykes of Columbia University and Professor Gene Herron of Southern Methodist University. They added an independent scientific view, which sometimes served as a good counter to entrenched U.S. government views, which were not always correct, and provided added credibility with the scientific community.

The Soviet delegation was also impressive. It was led by Igor Morokhov, deputy minister of the so-called Ministry of Medium-Machine Building (Minsredmash), which ran the Soviet nuclear complex. His deputy was Ambassador Roland Timerbaev, an experienced and skillful negotiator from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. General Aleksandr Osin, thought to be director of the Soviet nuclear test site in Kazakhstan, was the chief military representative. Another important figure was Aleksandr Zakharenkov, introduced as a professor at the Kurchatov Institute, but actually from Minsredmash.[3] The rest of the Soviet team consisted of experts on nuclear testing, PNEs, and verification.

The U.S. delegation had been told they would be in Moscow for "a few days" for "technical discussions." Some unfortunately believed this and packed their suitcases accordingly. In actuality, the negotiations continued for five intensive weeks. I wrote the initial plenary statement on the overnight flight to Moscow. We hit the ground running and held nine plenary meetings in the first 10 days. This was rather remarkable. In the initial Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) negotiations in 1969, Ambassador Gerard Smith had wanted to hold a formal plenary every day but quickly found it impossible to have more than three such meetings a week. This was due to the burden of getting U.S. statements prepared and agreed, along with the necessary extensive reporting and analysis for Washington.

Working conditions in Moscow for the U.S. delegation were cramped. We lived in the old Rossiya Hotel across Red Square from the Kremlin and had our offices in the U.S. embassy. This was the old building on Ulitsa Tchaikovskaya, the current embassy not having been constructed yet. Space was at such a premium that the delegation was allotted two small rooms with three desks and chairs, plus an acoustic conference room for classified work. The team consisted of 13 officers, plus two secretaries. The secretaries got two of the desks and chairs, which left one for the 13 other officers. I joked that the first person to show up in the morning could have the chair and the others would have to stand all day. In practice, the day consisted of one long working session in the conference room. The success of the whole operation seemed to validate the proposition that progress in negotiations is inversely proportional to the comfort of the negotiators. If this is indeed correct, it may explain why progress is so frustratingly slow in places such as Geneva, New York, and Vienna.

The atmosphere in the negotiations was very good from the start. Part of the sense of urgency was the knowledge that there was a summit meeting in July and it would be good to have a treaty ready to sign. Still, it was clear from the start that there were three fundamental issues that needed to be addressed:

1. What should be the yield threshold?

2. How could this threshold be successfully monitored?

3. How should PNEs be dealt with?

The Yield Question

Although this was the fundamental question, there was only so much one could say about it. Both sides were guarded, waiting for the other to state a preference. It became clear that the United States would come down somewhere between 100 kilotons and 200 kilotons, although some in the U.S. delegation preferred a higher number. The Soviets, who preferred a CTBT in any case, were guarded in their statements.[4] There was a limit to what could be tested at the Nevada Test Site-the resultant shaking of buildings in Las Vegas was becoming a problem. Multimegaton tests, such as the 1971 Cannikan test of the Spartan ABM warhead conducted at Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands, caused a public uproar and no longer seemed necessary in any case.

Stoessel normally did not attend internal delegation meetings but did attend an important one near the end of the negotiations in which he asked each person for his recommendation on the number. Not surprisingly, the State Department and Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) representatives advocated a lower number, while those from the Department of Defense asked for a higher level. It is not known what Stoessel recommended to Washington, but it was wisely decided to leave the final number to the summit, which decided on 150 kilotons.

Although this level seemed high to some, it was a real constraint, both sides having conducted many tests above this level before the threshold took effect in 1976. For example, during 1972-1976, the Soviet Union conducted at least 24 tests with yields reported to be more than 150 kilotons, including three with yields between 1.5 megatons and 10 megatons.[5] During this same period, the United States conducted at least 13 tests with yields reported to be more than 150 kilotons. This includes the Cannikan test, whose yield was reported to be "less than five megatons."[6] In contrast to these very large explosions, the device dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of about 15 kilotons, while the Nagasaki bomb had a yield of about 21 kilotons.

Verification

Everyone knew that verification would be a big problem because even the testers themselves could not predict or measure yields precisely, but both countries set about to solving it in a scientific, nonpolitical way. The meetings were held in a facility near the famous Tretyakov Gallery. It had blackboards, and it was unusual and gratifying, after the extreme formality of earlier arms control negotiations, to be able to encourage scientists from either side to go spontaneously to the blackboard in the middle of a formal meeting to illustrate their points and argue their case. This informal, problem-solving approach should be applied more frequently in international negotiations. It was crucial to producing a complete treaty from scratch in only five weeks. The completed verification protocol involved a surprisingly detailed exchange of calibration information regarding the actual yields and locations of earlier tests in each geophysically distinct area of the test site, along with the relevant characteristics of these areas, such as depth of water table, seismic velocity, porosity of the rock, etc.

Peaceful Nuclear Explosions

A particularly devilish problem concerned so-called PNEs. The Soviets had a very active program that involved using nuclear explosives for excavations, putting out oil well fires, mining gold, deep seismic sounding, etc. One very ambitious and controversial project under consideration was the Kama-Pechora Canal, which was part of the plan to divert water from flowing north into the Arctic Ocean to instead go south into the Volga and thence to Central Asia. This would have involved excavating a canal with high-yield PNEs. Although the United States was losing interest in PNEs by 1974, it had conducted 27 such experiments under Operation Plowshare and had an interest in using them for exploiting oil shale and other possibilities. More radical U.S. ideas were to excavate a sea-level canal using PNEs across Nicaragua to replace the Panama Canal and the excavation of a harbor at Cape Thompson, Alaska.[7]

Another complication was the fact that Article V of the NPT promised that "potential benefits from any peaceful applications of nuclear explosions will be made available to non-nuclear-weapon States Party to the Treaty on a nondiscriminatory basis." There was in fact some interest in "PNE services," for example, excavating a canal to bring water from the Mediterranean to Egypt's Qatarra Depression or excavating chambers deep in hard rock for the permanent storage of high-level radioactive waste. Exasperated at hearing of some negative remarks in Washington by ACDA Director Fred Ikle regarding PNEs, Morokhov described him as "a man divorced from reality." As fate would have it, the tables were turned in 1977 when General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev declared a moratorium on Soviet PNEs. In all, the Soviet Union conducted 124 such explosions.[8]

In theory, it might have been possible to design a regime to distinguish between weapon tests and PNEs and even provide PNE services, perhaps through the International Atomic Energy Agency. In practice, the problem seemed just too difficult, and the United States showed no interest in solving it. It was clearly impossible to combine weapons tests and PNEs in such a way as to prevent any possible weapons benefit from PNEs. The high yields and diverse locations of PNEs would have undermined the efforts to constrain weapon tests. The solution to the seemingly intractable PNE problem was to punt it to a separate agreement. The idea came about late one night when Norm Terrell and I were discussing the issue with Timerbaev. We agreed that the best and perhaps only way to deal with the interrelationship between weapons and PNEs was to have two separate treaties. Although without instructions on the matter, with the summit rapidly approaching, we each agreed to recommend it to our respective governments.

Even though it was near midnight (it is still light then in Moscow in late June), Norm and I went straight to Spaso House to present the idea to Stoessel. He came downstairs in his bathrobe, we discussed it by his fireplace, and he agreed. Norm and I then went directly to the embassy and sent a cable to Washington. Washington and Moscow both readily approved the idea. Unlike the celebrated "Walk in the Woods" between negotiators Paul Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky in the Intermediate Nuclear Forces negotiations eight years later, which was rejected by both sides, this was an example of an ad referendum approach that succeeded.[9] The idea that negotiators must never try such approaches is simply not correct.

As the summit drew near, the bureaucracy in Washington suddenly realized that the "technical talks" were about to give birth to an actual treaty, which would be signed in a few days by the two presidents. Several "political-level" officials were rushed to Moscow to take charge, with the result that the already overcrowded work space now became truly chaotic. In reality, the new folks, through no fault of their own, never really caught up to the fast-moving train and had a minimal impact.

The PNE Treaty

President Richard Nixon and Brezhnev signed the completed TTBT on July 3, 1974. The sides then set about to negotiate the companion treaty to govern PNEs. I returned to Washington to work on the SALT II negotiations, and Robert Buchheim became Stoessel's deputy. Other key players were the State Department's Robert Martin and leading scientists from the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. The details of the PNE Treaty, which was signed on May 28, 1976, need not be discussed here. The key problem was to allow large PNE projects without circumventing the 150-kiloton limit on weapons tests. It was solved by allowing group explosions up to 1,500 kilotons, no one of which could exceed 150 kilotons, and setting up an elaborate system of on-site inspections to make sure this limit was not exceeded. The fundamental problem of how to distinguish between weapons tests and PNEs was solved in a clever way. The sides had to declare their weapon test sites-the Semipalatinsk site in Kazakhstan and Novaya Zemlya for the Soviets and the Nevada Test Site for the United States. Any nuclear explosion within these sites would be considered a weapons test and governed by the TTBT. Any nuclear explosion elsewhere would be considered a PNE and governed by the PNE Treaty. Thus the impossible question of the intent of a nuclear explosion was neatly swept aside. The PNE Treaty was never really used because each side had lost interest in high-yield PNEs by that time. This is not the only example in which arms control delegations worked diligently to solve a difficult problem only to have it disappear shortly thereafter.

Verification Problems

Although the sides had given Gromyko and Kissinger exactly what they had asked for with the TTBT, problems soon arose. It had been well understood by the scientists that seismic means alone would carry a significant band of uncertainty when converted into a yield estimate. This conversion required assumptions regarding a host of geophysical factors: type of rock in which the explosion occurred, water content, the coupling to deeper layers of rock, and the transmission paths to the seismic sensors, many of which would be thousands of kilometers distant. This was the reason for the unprecedented exchange of data mentioned above, which would reduce these uncertainties. This remarkable degree of cooperation would only occur with the exchange of the instruments of ratification, which did not occur, due to political factors. In particular, charges that the Soviets were cheating began to appear, most commonly through leaks to conservative newspaper columnists. Although the White House had been warned about the band of uncertainty in estimating yield, they were unprepared for the storm of criticism regarding the alleged cheating; and the scientists could not refute these charges because, due to measurement uncertainties, the data could be used to support a yield estimate either above or below 150 kilotons.

Although many sensitive aspects of the Soviet nuclear program have been revealed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the author's knowledge, we still do not know whether the Soviets exceeded the agreed 150-kiloton limit, either accidentally or on purpose. Indeed, it is not clear how often the United States itself may have accidentally exceeded the limit. An interesting footnote to these damaging controversies is that there were differences between U.S. and British seismologists regarding the methodology for estimating the yields of Soviet tests. The British approach, which led to lower yield estimates, compensated more effectively for differences between the hard-rock geology of the Soviet Union's test site, which absorbed less of the blast, and the U.S. test site, which contained softer rock. These "yield wars" continued for years until it was finally accepted that the British estimates were more accurate.[10]

That a test might accidentally exceed the estimated yield was well known. The sides attempted to deal with this in advance with a rather remarkable understanding to the effect that "one or two slight, unintended breaches per year" of the yield ceiling would not be considered a violation, although they would be a cause for concern and a subject for consultations. This understanding was part of the public record submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent to ratification.[11]

In 1976, with ratification increasingly problematic, each side agreed to observe the 150-kiloton limit pending ratification. This state of affairs, which continued for 16 years, is interesting from several perspectives. Politically, it created the bizarre situation that the sides accepted the limit without the verification regime and data exchange we had painstakingly worked out and that everyone agreed was essential to monitor the constraint. From a legal perspective, it is an interesting variation of the concept of "provisional application," which is recognized in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.[12]

Solving the Verification Problem

By 1986, President Ronald Reagan, having canceled the trilateral CTBT negotiations initiated by President Jimmy Carter, was under pressure from General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's "Peace Offensive," which included a strong push for a CTBT. Reagan proposed an alternative: if Gorbachev would agree to work on solving the verification problems in the TTBT and the PNE Treaty first, the United States would then negotiate "on ways to implement a step-by-step program...limiting and ultimately ending nuclear testing." Gorbachev agreed, and new delegations were sent to Geneva to improve the two verification protocols. The U.S. team was skillfully led by Ambassador Paul Robinson. It included a notable cast of characters with great experience in the U.S. nuclear test program. It was obvious what part of the country some of them came from, adorned with boots, huge silver belt buckles, string ties, and turquoise-fashion statements not usually seen in diplomatic circles in Geneva.

Taking full advantage of Gorbachev's openness to verification and transparency, the teams devised a very intrusive and effective set of measures for both treaties, including a requirement to notify all test explosions in advance. The most innovative provision allowed the monitoring side to make a yield measurement of any explosion more than 50 kilotons using a satellite hole drilled near the actual emplacement hole. The CORRTEX[13] technology employed relies on the fact that, unlike most sound waves, whose velocity is independent of the source, in the extreme conditions of temperature and pressure close to a nuclear explosion, there is a correlation between the yield and the velocity of the shock wave. Measuring the crushing of a coaxial cable in the satellite hole measures the velocity of the shock wave as it moves toward the surface and hence the yield of the explosion. Each side was also allowed to use on-site inspection for tests of more than 35 kilotons, along with three seismic stations to gather data on specified tests. In the United States, these were in Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Washington state, providing a good angular perspective on the Nevada Test Site. Similar stations were established in the Soviet Union.

To test the CORRTEX method, each side agreed to allow the other to monitor a nuclear explosion at its test site. The Soviets did so at the Nevada Test Site on August 17, 1988, and the United States monitored a test at the Semipalatinsk site in Kazakhstan on September 14. These operations were logistically complicated, but both sides were satisfied with the results and gained greater confidence in their ability to verify the treaty. At the participants' 10-year reunion held in Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site in 1998, it was clear that the experience of working closely with mysterious former enemies had been a positive, life-changing one for many on each side. Ratification proceeded smoothly, and the TTBT and the PNE Treaty, with their new verification protocols, entered into force on December 11, 1990. The Soviets were able to monitor two U.S. nuclear tests before testing was stopped in 1992 by President Bill Clinton.

The United States never got to do the same because Gorbachev instituted a moratorium on Soviet tests in 1991, which was later extended by Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Congress responded in 1992 with legislation imposing a U.S. test moratorium in 1993. The new Clinton administration decided to extend the U.S. moratorium and negotiate a CTBT in the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, negotiations that were launched the next year.[14]

Lessons from the TTBT Negotiations

One important lesson from the experience is that the oft-repeated statement that U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations must unavoidably be long, painful, and "adversarial" is simply not true. Of course, any negotiation will be adversarial in the sense that the sides will begin with different positions and perspectives, otherwise there would be no need for a negotiation at all. The TTBT negotiations went from zero to a full-blown and fairly complicated treaty in only five weeks.[15] The secret is that the political leadership must establish clear goals at the outset: What is the problem we are trying to solve? Then the sides must send negotiators who have the authority and the courage to make difficult decisions. Such negotiations need not be painful and certainly can be conducted in an atmosphere of mutual respect, regardless of whether one approves of all aspects of the other side's system. Recognition of this fact could help in solving even the most difficult future international security problems.

Another important lesson is the need for effective verification in arms control agreements and prompt and effective responses to compliance problems.[16] Charges and denials of cheating, particularly when played out in public and allowed to fester, will severely damage any regime, no matter how well crafted. This remains true for U.S.-Russian relations in spite of the admirable openness and easy communication we now enjoy. It will be even more so in future agreements with more difficult partners, such as Iran or North Korea.

One of the major problems with the TTBT and the PNE Treaty is that they never had much of a constituency in the United States. Advocates of nuclear testing feared that they put us on a slippery slope that would lead to a CTBT. On the other hand, the arms control community was not enthusiastic because they felt the treaties were a diversion that would delay a CTBT. Some were also displeased that the outcome appeared to legitimize PNEs. History has proven both sides partly right and partly wrong. The treaties provided many useful lessons and innovative ideas, only some of which are discussed here, and were probably the best approach in the circumstances of their time.

As a signatory state for the CTBT, the United States is bound by the Vienna Convention not to undermine the object and purpose of that treaty. In addition, the TTBT and the PNE Treaty remain in force. Their provisions would come into play if nuclear testing were resumed by either side. It is problematic whether either side has the equipment and trained inspectors ready to carry out these provisions on short notice. It is the hope of essentially the entire world, including all close allies of the United States, that the day is not far off when the CTBT will enter into force and take the place of the TTBT and the PNE Treaty and we can close the books on these agreements, which are fascinating, but only stepping stones to the ultimate goal.


Edward Ifft is a retired Department of State official who served as the deputy head of negotiations on the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, deputy director of the On-Site Inspection Agency, and senior adviser to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He is an adjunct professor in the security studies program of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy of the U.S. government.


ENDNOTES

1. As a candidate, Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) stated, "As President, I will reach out to the Senate to secure the ratification of the CTBT at the earliest practical date and will then launch a diplomatic effort to bring onboard other states whose ratifications are required for the treaty to enter into force." "Arms Control Today 2008 Presidential Q&A: President-elect Barack Obama," Arms Control Today, December 2008, special section.

2. Daryl Kimball and Wade Boese, "Limited Test Ban Treaty Turns 40," Arms Control Today, October 2003, pp. 37-38; George Bunn and John Rhinelander, "The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Then and Now," Arms Control Today, July/August 2008, pp. 56-60.

3. Roland Timerbaev, "On the Threshold Test Ban Treaties of 1974-76," Security Index, Vol. 13, No. 2 (82) (2006).

4. For a discussion of the internal Soviet deliberations, see ibid.

5. I. A. Andryushin et al., "50 Years of Peace-The History of Nuclear Testing in the USSR," DSWA-TR-96-87, October 1997.

6. U.S. Department of Energy, "United States Nuclear Tests," DOE/NV-209 Rev. 14, December 1994.

7. Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) Preparatory Commission, "Peaceful Nuclear Explosions," www.ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/.

8. Timerbaev, "On the Threshold Test Ban Treaties of 1974-76." See Milo Nordyke, "The Soviet Program for Peaceful Nuclear Explosions," Science and Global Security, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1998), pp. 1-117.

9. Miles A. Pomper, "In Memoriam: Paul H. Nitze (1907-2004)," Arms Control Today, December 2004, pp. 44-45.

10. Peter Marshall and Alan Douglas, "Strategic Perspectives Through Oral History," in U.S.-UK Nuclear Cooperation After 50 Years, ed. Jenifer Mackby and Paul Cornish (2008), pp. 291-295.

11. U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Arms Control and Disarmament Agreements (1996), p. 134.

12. Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, art. 25 (1969). For a discussion of the legal issues associated with possible provisional application of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), see Edward Ifft et al., "A New Look at the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty," Security Paper, No. 6 (2008).

13. CORRTEX stands for Continuous Reflectometry for Radius Versus Time Experiments. The Soviets had a similar system known as Methods of Impulse Sensing (MIS).

14. For further details on the history of negotiations on nuclear testing, see UN Institute for Disarmament Research, "In Pursuit of a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty," 1991. For a detailed chronology of events, see SAIC, "A Chronology of Comprehensive Test Ban Proposals, Negotiations and Debates," 1994. See also Jaap Ramaker et al., The Final Test, (Vienna: CTBTO, 2003).

15. Of course, one may object that the treaties required extensive "fixing" later, but this does not invalidate these conclusions.

16. "Effective verification" has become one of the key criteria for most arms control agreements. The concept clearly will be interpreted differently by different people in different contexts but has generally been defined as the ability to detect cheating that would be militarily or politically significant in time to take corrective action. For a good discussion of effective verification in the context of the CTBT, see David Hafemeister, "The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: Effectively Verifiable," Arms Control Today, October 2008, pp. 6-12.

 

LOOKING BACK: The 1978 Nuclear Nonproliferation Act

Sharon Squassoni

The 1978 Nuclear Nonproliferation Act (NNPA) sought to tighten the criteria for nuclear cooperation and reshape the nuclear fuel cycle. Many of its provisions have been forgotten, but the NNPA regained notoriety this year with the approval of the U.S.-Indian nuclear cooperation agreement. The objectives of the NNPA are timeless and in no danger of being achieved soon.

The solutions proposed by the NNPA may still be necessary to ensure the long-term viability of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, particularly those related to sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle-uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing-that can produce fissile material either for fuel or for weapons.

Origins of the NNPA

Over the years, the NNPA has been most often associated with a critical turn in U.S. nonproliferation policy that required countries to belong to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in order to receive U.S. nuclear exports. Stung by India's 1974 nuclear test and mindful of the plans of other states outside the NPT to acquire sensitive technologies, the United States concluded that full-scope safeguards should be a prerequisite for nuclear supply. Eventually, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) adopted the same condition for supply in 1992. Although this can be viewed as a major success of the NNPA, a closer look at what it tried to achieve, however, reveals a set of far-reaching goals that are frustratingly no closer to fruition today.

When the NNPA was signed into law 30 years ago, analysts struggled to explain the wide-ranging impact of the complex bill on U.S. nuclear exports and policy. The Congressional Research Service devoted a 35-page report to explaining its provisions in clear English. A flurry of articles appeared in such high-profile venues as Foreign Affairs to decry the new restrictive measures of the NNPA and U.S. nonproliferation policy in general. Most focused on the folly of the United States in moving the goalposts in nuclear cooperation at a time when U.S. dominance in the nuclear market was waning.

Experts can argue precisely why the NNPA evolved as it did, but the context is fairly clear. In the early 1970s, technically competent states in Asia and Europe sought to reduce their dependence on the United States as virtually the sole supplier of reactors and nuclear fuel by developing their own fuel cycle capabilities. The perceived need to diversify supply only grew stronger after the 1973 oil shock, which had two effects. First, states recognized the need to shift away from oil to generate electricity. Second, general concern about fuel supplies led states with nuclear power programs to conclude that reprocessing plutonium from spent nuclear fuel would ultimately be necessary to make the most of finite uranium supplies. The oil shocks were a key impetus for states such as France and Japan, which were greatly dependent on foreign resources for energy, to invest heavily in nuclear energy.

Until 1971, the United States had supplied about 90 percent of the reactors in the western world and dominated the low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel market through what could be described as unfair business practices-setting LEU prices artificially low (below the cost of production) and discouraging foreign enrichment ventures. A stab by the Nixon administration at encouraging some foreign enrichment plants in 1971 backfired. Europeans balked when told that they would be given access to unclassified gaseous diffusion technology, which requires enormous amounts of electricity to run, while U.S. firms would have access to more competitive, but classified, centrifuge technology.

The decisions to create both URENCO, the British-Dutch-German enrichment venture, and Eurodif, the French-run enrichment partnership, were validated by U.S. difficulties in meeting contractual obligations to supply LEU fuel just a few years later. In June 1974, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) "closed the books" on enrichment and made some existing contracts "conditional," as it discovered U.S. enrichment capacity would not be able to meet demand. Reportedly, the AEC even returned checks for services.[1] One year later, reorganization of the AEC into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) threw U.S. nuclear exports into a tailspin. The United States did not export any LEU for nine months while the NRC and ERDA sorted out their responsibilities and regulations.

More troubling than Europe's development of commercial fuel-cycle capabilities was the decision of these new nuclear suppliers to spread the wealth. After learning of the U.S. decision not to supply LEU, the Brazilians promptly concluded a contract with the Germans to acquire a full nuclear fuel cycle while France concluded reprocessing plant contracts with Pakistan and South Korea. The contracts were eventually abandoned after intense diplomatic lobbying by the United States. However, coupled with the ominous 1974 India nuclear test, it was clear that coordinated supplier restraints were needed.

Other factors were also critical in setting the scene for the NNPA. In the wake of the Indian test and facing pressure from Congress, which was highly engaged in those issues at that time, the Ford administration concluded that it would not continue to support spent fuel reprocessing because of concerns about proliferation. The Carter administration, entering office in 1977, took this a little further and sought to discourage allies from using plutonium as fuel in the civil fuel cycle. French, German, and Japanese allies were, unsurprisingly, very unhappy with U.S. decisions, particularly because they wanted to reprocess U.S.-origin spent fuel.

An Imperfect Instrument With Idealistic Objectives

Several precursor bills introduced before 1977 contained more stringent requirements for U.S. exports than would ultimately wind up in the NNPA. For example, one bill sought to ban foreign reprocessing of U.S.-origin spent fuel; another sought to make U.S. nuclear exports contingent on a state forgoing all enrichment and reprocessing, not dissimilar to the bilateral arrangements the United States is now pursuing with some states. A separate legislative tack was simultaneously pursued to impose sanctions on the acquisition of enrichment and reprocessing capabilities by certain states through the Symington and Glenn amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act.

Fundamentally, the NNPA sought to make the international nuclear fuel cycle a less attractive platform from which to develop nuclear weapons. The NNPA envisioned sticking to a once-through fuel cycle that would avoid using separated plutonium, or separated uranium-233 (U-233), or HEU. To realize that vision, it would be necessary to defer commercial deployment of breeder reactors, create terminal spent fuel storage facilities, and assure countries that they would have a reliable supply of LEU, through the creation of an International Nuclear Fuel Authority and an interim fuel stockpile. It would also be necessary to get serious about universal NPT compliance and better International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. Supplier states would have to agree not to transfer sensitive nuclear technologies, such as uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing.

The NNPA had a major impact on U.S. nuclear export controls, notably levying a requirement that recipient states have full-scope safeguards. Eventually, other NSG suppliers adopted the same prerequisite but only after the shock of Iraq's pre-1991 weapons of mass destruction transgressions. The NNPA's more far-reaching goals, including an International Nuclear Fuel Authority, a fuel bank, and multinational enrichment facilities and spent fuel repositories, have remained out of reach. None of these have been pursued with any success, yet they are virtually all on today's agenda.

In many ways, the NNPA attempted to legislate an earlier U.S. objective to internationalize the nuclear fuel cycle. Such proposals under the 1946 Baruch plan were viewed suspiciously by some countries as a way of maintaining what was then U.S. nuclear hegemony. The Atoms for Peace program of the 1950s abandoned the idea of institutional frameworks to control proliferation, opting instead to place trust in bilateral safeguards to ensure the peaceful uses of the atom. By the mid-1970s, however, it was becoming clear that perhaps the newly minted NPT needed to be shored up.[2]

Had the United States truly been seen as a reliable supplier in the years just prior to the NNPA, a backlash against U.S. policy might not have resulted. The question today is whether the objectives of the NNPA are still worth pursuing. If so, how?

Lessons for Today

The nuclear nonproliferation regime today is under stress from several different directions. The recent crises are well known: North Korea's withdrawal from the NPT and nuclear test; Abdul Qadeer Khan's sale of sensitive uranium-enrichment technology to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and perhaps others; and Iran's violation of its NPT obligations and refusal, despite numerous UN Security Council resolutions, to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. These last two crises illustrate the fundamental difficulties in controlling what are essentially dual-use technologies, those that can be used to make fuel for power plants or for weapons.

Although the NNPA did not create the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation project completed almost three decades ago, it provided additional impetus by requiring in Section 105 of the bill that the president initiate a re-evaluation of all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. One of the basic conclusions of that project was that institutional approaches to nonproliferation were needed in addition to whatever technical improvements might be possible. Most of the current proposals to reduce the risks of expanded fuel-cycle capabilities are not very different from those of 30 years ago, such as regional fuel-cycle centers and fuel banks. The urgency of promoting such institutional approaches vanished when nuclear industry growth slumped after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and low uranium prices made plutonium recovery relatively unattractive. These proposals are relevant once more because of renewed interest in nuclear power.

At this writing, dozens of states have announced intentions to pursue nuclear energy for the first time. Fundamentally, a major expansion of nuclear power need not pose greater proliferation risks if two basic principles are applied: there should be no growth in the amount of direct, weapons-usable fissile material nor in purely national enrichment capabilities. The implication is that civil reprocessing of spent fuel should be curtailed rather than expanded. Solutions such as fuel leasing or international spent fuel repositories could help in this regard. Iran has agreed to leasing fuel from Russia for the Bushehr plant, and Russia is open to taking back spent fuel from all its nuclear partners. The question is whether other suppliers, such as the France, Japan, and the United States, could follow suit.

Similarly, institutional solutions can help diminish the possibility of uranium-enrichment plants being used covertly to produce HEU or providing a latent capability should a state decide to withdraw from the NPT. On the supply side, the NSG has been exploring tighter supply criteria to provide additional confidence in states' intentions, and others including IAEA Director-General ElBaradei have proposed internationalizing any future facilities so that their misuse or appropriation might be made more difficult or be deterred or prevented. Criteria include having full-scope safeguards and a version of the 1997 Model Additional Protocol in force, among others. An additional protocol grants safeguards inspectors additional authority and information.

On the demand side, the situation is a little more complex because the proposals have almost all originated in the supplier states, apart from the conditions established by India in its new cooperation agreement with the United States. Supply assurances to provide incentives for states to forgo domestic enrichment programs include layered guarantees, fuel banks, and shares in existing enrichment ventures.

Some states have already begun to agree to fuel assurances. Ukraine reportedly has stepped back from its plans to develop a full fuel cycle and will join the Russian enrichment center at Angarsk. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) issued a policy declaration this year that states it will forgo uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing in favor of long-term arrangements with governments and contractors primarily for economic reasons, but also because of the international concerns about sensitive fuel-cycle capabilities in developing countries. Not coincidentally, the UAE signed a nuclear cooperation with the United States in November.

India and the NNPA

The recent U.S.-Indian nuclear cooperation agreement is not the only controversial nuclear cooperation agreement to be approved by Congress in the wake of the NNPA. Others include the 1985 agreement with China, which was held up because of China's nuclear transfers to Pakistan, and the renegotiated agreements with Japan (1987) and Euratom (1995), both contentious because of the issue of U.S. consent to reprocess U.S.-origin spent fuel. Although the Chinese, Japanese, and Euratom agreements were all controversial in their day, provoking hearings and resolutions of disapproval, the Indian agreement posed an entirely different dilemma because it called into question a fundamental tenet of U.S. nonproliferation policy and law for 30 years, that the United States should cooperate only with states that have signed the NPT. More than that, however, certain elements of the agreement threaten to throw other U.S. fuel-cycle assurances into disarray.

India, in the 2005 Joint Statement and in the 123 agreement itself, required three kinds of fuel supply assurances: help in establishing a strategic reserve of fuel, a supply agreement with the IAEA, and assurances that the United States would find alternate suppliers if the United States had to cut off supply with India for any reason. India obviously desired to avoid a repetition of the 1980 U.S. cutoff in nuclear fuel to India's Tarapur reactors. That termination occurred because India failed to meet the NNPA's requirement for full-scope safeguards in non-nuclear-weapon-state recipients of U.S. nuclear exports. (India is considered a non-nuclear-weapon state under the NPT.) Although this requirement was waived by the 2006 Hyde Act, a cutoff could occur should India test another nuclear weapon. Future tests are not "grandfathered" into the U.S.-Indian 123 agreement.

Remarkably, India's Tarapur reactors never stopped operating because they lacked nuclear fuel, despite the U.S. cutoff. Other nuclear suppliers helped plug the gap: first France, then China, and now Russia. Eventually, however, India began to experience shortages in domestic uranium supply because of the 1992 NSG decision to require full-scope safeguards that resulted in operating some reactors at much lower capacities. Ironically, just at the time when the NNPA's full-scope safeguards requirements began to pinch, they were dropped.

States that are now considering fuel assurances are obviously not motivated to seek them for the same reasons as India. The bar for them is set much lower. The idea behind fuel assurances for other states is to provide incentives for them not to acquire the capacity to enrich uranium or reprocess spent fuel. Although national strategic stockpiles of fuel have not been featured prominently in proposals, an IAEA role in assuring supply and ensuring alternative suppliers have been elements of other proposals.[3] Still, other characteristics of the U.S.-Indian 123 agreement may complicate the picture.

The first is that India insisted on "corrective measures" that could be taken if fuel supplies were cut off. Although never publicly defined, such corrective measures are thought to refer to India's removal of its indigenous reactors from safeguards to accommodate domestic, unsafeguarded fuel in the event of a cutoff of foreign fuel. Clearly, NPT non-nuclear-weapon states-parties would not have this option, but the precedent of connecting safeguards obligations to guaranteed fuel is troubling.

Second, the India 123 agreement provided, in principle, consent for India to reprocess U.S.-origin spent fuel, pursuant to negotiation of subsequent arrangements. India would need to build a new reprocessing plant for that purpose. This could place India among the small group of states that are accorded such privileges, raising the question for other states such as South Korea.

Third, the agreement also allowed, in principle, for cooperation in enrichment and reprocessing, provided that the requirements of the Hyde Act are met for engagement in a bilateral or multilateral program devoted to improving proliferation-resistant fuel cycles and an amended 123 agreement is approved. Such cooperation may never be pursued by the United States, particularly under a new administration, but its possibility raises questions about where to draw the line in restricting sensitive nuclear technologies. If the NSG is able to implement criteria on which it has been working in this area in the near term, the issue of such cooperation with India could melt away.

Revisiting the NNPA?

The successes and failures of the NNPA may be more relevant than ever as the nuclear nonproliferation community continues to grapple with the dilemmas posed by India, Iran, and a potential expansion of nuclear energy across a wide swath of states. New institutional frameworks are needed to curb enthusiasm for engaging in uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing. The United States, no longer the pre-eminent nuclear supplier, must gain wide support for implementing a vision of a nuclear fuel cycle that poses fewer proliferation risks than before. Moreover, the United States needs to begin taking seriously the NNPA's call to identify alternative options to nuclear power to meet countries' energy needs, particularly low-carbon-emitting sources.

The 110th Congress passed legislation to help fund the Nuclear Threat Initiative's fuel bank, which is a positive step toward implementing some of the more far-reaching objectives of the NNPA. Another idea on the table has been to tighten congressional approval of subsequent arrangements for reprocessing by amending the Atomic Energy Act. Given how Congress failed to adequately review the U.S.-Indian nuclear cooperation agreement, it is not clear that greater authority would result in greater oversight. Perhaps the biggest impact Congress might make on other countries' fuel cycle decisions would be to overcome nuclear waste storage roadblocks in the United States and start to build support for taking back spent fuel of U.S. origin. The world cannot expect and should not desire Russia to be the sole nuclear waste repository. Such an effort could be valuable in allowing U.S. policymakers to confront the true costs of nuclear power and proliferation directly.

 


 

Sharon Squassoni is a senior associate in the nonproliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

 


 

ENDNOTES

1. Lawrence J. Franko, "U.S. Regulation of the Spread of Nuclear Technologies Through Supplier Power: Lever or Boomerang?" Law & Policy in International Business, Vol. 10 (1978), p. 1181.

2. Lawrence Scheinman, "Equal Opportunity: Historical Challenges and Future Prospects of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle," Arms Control Today, May 2007, pp. 18-22.

3. Frank von Hippel, "National Fuel Stockpiles: An Alternative to a Proliferation of National Enrichment Plants?" Arms Control Today, September 2008, pp. 20-24.

 

The 1978 Nuclear Nonproliferation Act (NNPA) sought to tighten the criteria for nuclear cooperation and reshape the nuclear fuel cycle. Many of its provisions have been forgotten, but the NNPA regained notoriety this year with the approval of the U.S.-Indian nuclear cooperation agreement. The objectives of the NNPA are timeless and in no danger of being achieved soon. (Continue)

LOOKING BACK: Carter’s 1978 Declaration and the Significance of Security Assurances

John Steinbruner

In terms of operational practice as distinct from political rhetoric, institutionalized security policy in the United States is based on two presumptions: that imperial aggression is the principal form of threat and that the countervailing threat of deterrent retaliation is the most decisive method of protection. This formulation was established during the Cold War and has been retained in its aftermath. Because no country can plausibly threaten immediate imperial aggression against U.S. territory, the formulation is now justified as a hedge against the rise of an unnamed peer competitor. For many other countries, however, the United States itself is the most credible potential embodiment of such a threat.

Although most prefer not to dwell on that practical fact, it does make the security assurances first issued by the Carter administration 30 years ago a matter of immediate interest. In the traditional formulation, a reliable deterrent should be based on the capacity to retaliate under all circumstances, not merely on the expressed intention to do so. Capacity displayed in immediate operational capability is considered to be more credible and less subject to deception or rapid change than are expressed intentions. That hard standard is far more readily achieved by the United States than by any other country. Because most countries do not have and cannot reasonably acquire unquestionable nuclear deterrent capability, they are dependent on agreed restraint and forced to rely more heavily on judgments of intention. As a result, the authoritative declarations of intention embodied in security assurances have greater global significance than is usually assumed in U.S. discussion of the topic.

Historical Declarations

The declarations of greatest significance are those issued in connection with the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Those countries who agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons under the terms of the treaty had reasonable expectation that they would in return receive protection from the five states allowed to retain nuclear weapons. That basic rule was not included in the treaty text, however, because it was difficult to reconcile with U.S. and Soviet alliance commitments. By the time the NPT was negotiated in the late 1960s, the original principle of the UN Charter that each member state would be protected by all the others had been superseded by Cold War arrangements whereby protection was preferentially provided to formal alliance members. The United States believed at the time that the defense of Western Europe against conventional attack might require initiating the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon state-parties to the treaty that belonged to the opposing Warsaw Pact. U.S. officials considered it imperative to extend the same commitment to Japan and South Korea as well.

Unable to include the expectation of general protection directly in the treaty language, the non-nuclear-weapon states resorted to UN Security Council Resolution 255, passed on June 19, 1968. The resolution “recognizes” that aggression with nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear-weapon state-party to the treaty would create an immediate obligation for action under the UN Charter and “welcomes the intention expressed by certain states” to provide assistance under those circumstances. That language suggests not merely the promise not to attack (negative assurance) but also to provide active defense if someone else did (positive assurance). By virtue of the Security Council vote, the concept was implicitly accepted by all five NPT nuclear-weapon states, although France abstained from the vote, stating that declaratory assurances would be inadequate without corresponding disarmament provisions.

In 1978, eight years after the NPT officially entered into force and 10 years after approval of Resolution 255, the United Nations convened its first special session on disarmament, and the United States used the occasion to issue an authoritative statement of intention. Speaking to the special session on behalf of President Jimmy Carter, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance stated:

The United States will not use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear- weapon state party to the NPT or any comparable internationally binding commitment not to acquire nuclear explosive devices, except in the case of an attack on the United States, its territories or armed forces, or its allies, by such a state allied to a nuclear weapon state, or associated with a nuclear-weapon state in carrying out or sustaining the attack.[1]

That statement of negative assurance, endorsed by all succeeding administrations and reiterated at the 1995 NPT review conference that indefinitely extended the treaty, has come to be regarded as the standard formulation of U.S. declaratory policy. Its main feature is that the United States reserves the right to initiate the use of nuclear weapons in response to an attack of any sort as long as another nuclear-armed state is somehow implicated in the attack.

That qualified assurance had earlier been given formal legal standing for those states adhering to the nuclear-weapon-free-zone treaties for Latin America, the South Pacific, and Africa. In the Latin American case, the United States signed and subsequently ratified protocols to the treaty of Tlateloco extending negative security assurances to the states-parties to the treaties; but, as part of the ratification process, President Richard Nixon issued a proclamation laying out the qualification that was subsequently issued more generally but less formally in the 1978 statement.

Then, in 1996 with a Soviet invasion of Europe no longer a plausible concern, an aide to President Bill Clinton introduced additional qualifications at a White House press conference announcing that the United States had signed the corresponding protocol to the Treaty of Pelindaba, which sought to establish an African nuclear-weapon-free zone. He stated that attacks by other weapons of mass destruction would be justifying conditions for nuclear retaliation, and that was understood but not directly stated to mean chemical or biological agents. In Senate testimony two weeks earlier, Secretary of Defense William Perry had also implied that the use of nuclear weapons would be considered in responding to a chemical weapons attack. Neither statement addressed the central question as to whether the uniquely destructive power of nuclear weapons could be appropriately applied to substantially lesser forms of “mass destruction.”

In citing the doctrine of belligerent reprisal as justification for the additional qualifications, Clinton administration officials evoked a traditional legal rule holding that the provisions of one treaty would be suspended if those of related one were violated. Hence an attack using chemical or biological agents in violation of the 1925 Geneva protocol by a party to the Pelindaba treaty would invalidate its protection against a nuclear response.[2] They generally did not mention, however, that the doctrine would allow only for a response that could be demonstrated to be necessary and proportionate.

The evident efforts of Nixon, Carter, and Clinton to minimize legal limitations on U.S. deterrent operations all reflect an underlying institutionalized commitment to preserve as much uncertainty as possible in the minds of all conceivable opponents as to how far the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons might be extended. The incremental supplement to deterrence supposedly achieved against a willful aggressor by that deliberate ambiguity outweighed the legitimate interest of the non-nuclear-weapon states in establishing categorical security assurances, an interest on which they have repeatedly said their continued adherence to the treaty ultimately depends.

The U.S. extended deterrence doctrine has been emulated and thus reinforced by France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, all of whom have advanced similar qualifications to the security assurances they have issued.[3] Because the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States contain more than 95 percent of the nuclear weapons believed to exist, those two countries together effectively set the global standard. There is, however, a meaningful difference between them. Russia, whose conventional force capabilities are not competitive with those of NATO, has far more reason to rely on the extended deterrent effect of nuclear weapons for its own defense than does the United States. In fact, with the world’s most capable military establishment and least vulnerable national territory, the U.S. doctrine is especially subject to serious moral and practical questions.

Those questions are implicitly posed, moreover, by China’s nuclear weapons policy. China has historically had potentially antagonistic security relationships with Russia and the United States and is entangled in one of the world’s most significant remaining disputes over sovereign jurisdiction: the question of the ultimate status of Taiwan, which could become a trigger for active confrontation. China has nonetheless maintained the most limited deployment of the five official nuclear powers and has proclaimed the most restricted doctrine of use. China has repeatedly issued categorical assurance that it would not to be the first to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons at any time or under any circumstances, and those assurances are reflected in its deployment pattern. The most authoritative information indicates that China has less than 100 operational nuclear delivery systems, less than 25 of which could reach the United States and none of which are ever brought to immediately available alert status. Academic speculation aside, nothing in the historical record suggests that this minimal deployment posture and exclusive doctrine of retaliation has provided inadequate deterrent protection for China, despite the fact that it had the most demanding burden during its formative period and arguably still has.

Fundamental Issues

The extended deterrence doctrine has acquired nearly axiomatic status in U.S. security culture, to an extent that even its most glaring defects are generally ignored. Although few if any individuals seriously believe in the existence of an implacable aggressor held in check only by the threat of massive retaliation and poised to exploit any ambiguity of resolve, the continuation of deterrent operations designed against a hypothetical threat of that sort is considered prudent beyond question. That the resulting operational coupling of large U.S. and Russian alert forces creates the possibility of inadvertent catastrophe is dismissed as a negligible risk despite the directly applicable folk wisdom embodied in Murphy’s law: if something can go wrong, it eventually will.

Even more remarkably, the fact that large dispersed deployments increase the risk that terrorists might seize a weapon or an equivalent amount of explosive material is accepted despite frequently articulated fears of exactly that possibility. Current mainstream discussion appears willing to consider reducing active deployments to the 1,500-warhead level but not below 1,000. That latter figure might begin to impose meaningful constraint on the destructive potential of the U.S. deterrent force, but the former would not. There is no prominently articulated support for emulating China’s categorical assurances even from those who have recently advocated the elimination of nuclear weapons as an ultimate goal.

Despite its impressive hold over the U.S. security establishment, however, the extended deterrence doctrine is not assured indefinite reign. It has been undermined within the security bureaucracy by a radical assault from an intense minority faction promoting decisive military superiority as an ultimate substitute for deterrence. Successfully evoking the authority of President George W. Bush, they have advanced a doctrine of preventive war euphemistically labeled pre-emption. In an address to the West Point graduating class in 2002 and in an ensuing review of nuclear weapons policy, Bush reserved the right to initiate the use of force, including nuclear weapons if necessary, to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by states considered to be inherently hostile to the United States.[4] In his 2002 State of the Union address,[5] Bush named Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as instances; in the perception of the world, he implemented the doctrine in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, unjustifiably as it turned out. Meanwhile, his administration issued a series of military planning documents proclaiming the intention to dominate space for national military advantage and began integrating both long-range precision strike weapons and ballistic missile defense into nuclear weapons operations, all of which projects a serious intention to engage in preventive operations.[6]

In the estimate of attentive military planners in China and Russia, the prevention/pre-emption doctrine backed by a rate of military investment that far exceeds their own is an inherent threat to their own deterrent forces, not merely to the named adversaries. If they come to believe that the doctrine has been established in the United States, they will be forced to counteract it in some fashion. That in turn is a threat to those in the professional core of the U.S. establishment who understand that the doctrine is inherently unrealistic and dangerously provocative. It is the unsustainable political project of an ideological minority whose actions have been discredited in Iraq and whose domination can be expected to diminish within the U.S. political system whatever the outcome of the election.

It is distinctly possible that adverse international reactions to the prevention/pre-emption doctrine will ultimately catalyze an accommodating revision of U.S. security policy that sweeps aside the traditional doctrine of extended deterrence as well. That outcome would be a bitter irony for the advocates of decisive superiority, but the threat of terrorist access to nuclear explosives provides a major incentive for that to occur. Admittedly, any hostile nuclear explosion anywhere in the world might trigger an insensate U.S. political reaction, reinforcing the aspiration for military dominance and giving it longer political life. Such an event would not render the aspiration achievable, however, and belligerent emotion would have to yield eventually to implacable fact.

Fortunately, it is more likely that some breach-of-security incident will command sufficient attention to give standing to the obvious common sense solution, namely, an arrangement whereby all nuclear weapons are removed from active operational deployment to secure storage where they can be continuously monitored and accurately counted. Because they could be reactivated if necessary, that arrangement would preserve all of the deterrent effect plausibly required and would essentially eliminate the inherent danger of inadvertent catastrophe. It would also provide much more reliable protection against terrorist exploitation, especially if all weapons-grade nuclear explosives are subjected to the same monitored storage conditions. Under such an arrangement, conveying reassurance of responsible management would be the principal objective. Preservation of a residual deterrent effect, readily achieved by the existence and operational potential of the stored weapons, would be subordinate to that objective.

The relentless underlying reality is that the process of globalization has rendered massive imperial aggression against any of the major established states virtually infeasible but is subjecting all of them to the disruptive threat of dissident violence emanating from the breakdown of legitimate authority in fragile jurisdictions. Common interest in preventing severe disruption of the global economy gives all major states strong reason to established higher standards of control over nuclear explosives and other menacing technologies. Those common interests are more significant than any residual threat of imperial aggression or coercive projection of influence. The imperatives of the situation require extensive collaboration for mutual protection rather than belligerent competition for national advantage. The ultimate implication is that reassurance replaces deterrence as the central purpose of security policy.

Defenders of the U.S. extended deterrence doctrine will be quick to point out that it plays an important role in conveying reassurance, as indeed it does for formal allies. Under emerging circumstances, however, it will be vitally important to recognize that extended deterrence does not require and cannot tolerate the initial use of nuclear weapons under any circumstance and that its legitimacy depends on global rather than culturally preferential application. To sustain the traditional doctrine in appropriately subordinated form, the United States will not only have to issue categorical negative security assurances, as China has done, but also globally inclusive positive assurances. It will have to indicate it is prepared to protect any country from unprovoked imperial attack and that it will not itself undertake pre-emptive attack without international authorization. That is the only viable way of justifying the degree of military superiority it will retain for quite some time.

Practical Observations

The U.S. political system does not concentrate executive authority to the degree that would be required to change operational security doctrine. The president and other authoritative agents can and do make doctrinal pronouncements, but institutionalized implementation depends on consensus created by seminal formative experience and lengthy evolution. The Cold War formulation still largely prevails because the United States has not yet encountered a comparably powerful formative experience. Unfortunately, it is an open question whether institutionalized policy can be appropriately altered in response to fundamental changes of circumstance without the motivating and organizing focus of global war, real in the case of World War II and widely imagined during the ensuing Cold War period.

It is not evident that entanglement in civil conflict and fear of associated terrorism will alone drive a fundamental reformulation. The threat involved is much smaller in scale in any given instance and different in character but not so different as to compel consensual reformulation. Nonetheless, current agonies of policy in Iraq and Afghanistan will clearly be formative experiences of some enduring consequence, and the lessons eventually drawn are likely to feature the importance of global collaboration. It is very unlikely that acceptable stabilization can be achieved in either instance without constructive engagement with Iran and significant assistance from Russia and China in accomplishing the degree of engagement required. That in turn will require fundamental accommodation with all three countries involving categorical negative assurances and substantial positive ones as well. Most immediately, however, that process will probably be burdened by the Russian action in Georgia, which is actually a localized event resulting from the failure of accommodation but is being depicted by defenders of the established doctrine as an ominous indication of broader imperialist impulse.

It is more likely that the consequences of global warming will eventually become imposing enough to force fundamental accommodation and the reformulation of policy necessary to accomplish it. Reliably effective action requires a massive transformation to energy generating technologies that do not emit carbon gases, which is unlikely to be accomplished on sufficient scale without substantial expansion of nuclear power generation. That in turn could not be safely or practically accomplished without new reactor designs, much more secure management of the fuel cycle, and intimate collaboration between the sources of finance and technology—primarily the European Union, Russia, and the United States—and the leading venues of application—China, India, and the developing world generally. Fundamental security accommodation would be an indispensable precondition.

Whatever the degree of accommodation eventually achieved, it is reasonable to expect that negative and positive security assurances will have increasing prominence in the regulation of security relationships. The disparities in military investment and resulting operational capability between the United States and everyone else virtually preclude equitable restriction of military capabilities and therefore make credible restraint on behavior essential. It will be increasingly incumbent on the United States to convey reassurance about the rules and circumstances under which its military establishment operates. It will be incumbent on potential adversaries to accept restrictions on behavior that preclude justification of coercive action. It will be incumbent on all to work out routine documentation of compliance more continuous and more convincing than traditional methods of adversarial verification. That is a predictable trend, however discouraging immediate events and traditionally interpreted history may appear to be.


John Steinbruner is director of the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) and chairman of the board of directors of the Arms Control Association.


ENDNOTES

1. “Statement of Secretary of State Vance: U.S. Assurance on Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons, June 12, 1978,” Department of State Bulletin, August 1978, p. 52, ACDA, Documents on Disarmament, v. 1978, p. 384.
2. George Bunn, “The Legal Status of U.S. Negative Security Assurances to Non-Nuclear Weapon States,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Spring-Summer 1997), pp. 1-17.
3. A conceptual distinction is often made between extending the deterrent effect from one state to another and extending it to forms of attack other than nuclear weapons. The operational doctrines of France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States all include both forms of extension.
4. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, “President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point,” June 1, 2003.
5. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, “President Delivers State of the Union Address,” January 29, 2002.
6. Nancy Gallagher and John D. Steinbruner, “Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008, pp. 25-29.

In terms of operational practice as distinct from political rhetoric, institutionalized security policy in the United States is based on two presumptions: that imperial aggression is the principal form of threat and that the countervailing threat of deterrent retaliation is the most decisive method of protection. This formulation was established during the Cold War and has been retained in its aftermath. Because no country can plausibly threaten immediate imperial aggression against U.S. territory, the formulation is now justified as a hedge against the rise of an unnamed peer competitor. For many other countries, however, the United States itself is the most credible potential embodiment of such a threat. (Continue)

LOOKING BACK: The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Then and Now

George Bunn and John B. Rhinelander

Less than a year after dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the United States adopted a statute prohibiting the transfer of its nuclear weapons to any other country. It was not until 23 years later, however, that countries began signing an international treaty that prohibited the transfer of nuclear weapons by a country that had them to any other country, indeed “to any recipient whatsoever.”[1] On July 1, 1968, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and many other countries signed the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) at ceremonies in Washington, Moscow, and London. Subsequently, nearly 190 countries have signed and ratified the treaty aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons from the few countries that then had them to the many that did not and at reducing and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons from the world.

The 40th anniversary of the NPT provides an opportunity to re-examine the history of the treaty’s negotiation and ask what lessons it offers for today.

The NPT’s Negotiating History

The NPT’s history really began in 1946. That year, the Department of State and some of the scientists who had made the bomb drew up the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, which, with major revisions, became a formal U.S. proposal to the United Nations known as the Baruch Plan. It proposed that the United States turn over control of all its enriched uranium, including that in any nuclear weapons it had, to a new UN body (over which the United States and the other permanent members of the Security Council would have a veto) and that all countries in the world should be prohibited from possessing their own nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union opposed this plan, and the UN committee created to consider it got nowhere.[2]

The next stab at controlling nuclear weapons proliferation came in 1953 when President Dwight Eisenhower proposed to the UN General Assembly the negotiation of a treaty that would seek to control nuclear activities around the world and prevent, if possible, the spread of nuclear weapons to additional countries. This led to negotiations that finally produced a useful treaty, though one that fell short of what Eisenhower had proposed. This treaty, the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of 1956, authorized creation of the IAEA and gave it the responsibility for providing information and assistance to countries seeking to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and for performing inspections of their nuclear facilities to ensure that the operators did not divert from peaceful purposes to weapons production the uranium fuel used to run nuclear reactors and the plutonium that was produced in such reactors.[3]

The NPT negotiations themselves really got started after the unanimous approval of a 1961 UN General Assembly resolution on negotiation of a treaty that would ban countries without nuclear weapons from acquiring them and that would require the inspections that the IAEA treaty only authorized. In particular, the resolution asked the countries “possessing nuclear weapons” to “undertake to refrain from relinquishing control of nuclear weapons and from transmitting information necessary for their manufacture” to nations not possessing nuclear weapons. Second, it recommended that states not possessing nuclear weapons “undertake not to manufacture or otherwise acquire control of such weapons.” It urged nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states to “cooperate to those ends.”[4]

The same year marked another step that had an important but indirect effect on the creation of the NPT. At President John Kennedy’s request, Congress approved legislation establishing the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) to replace the State Department in the research, planning, and negotiation of arms control and disarmament treaties. Soon after the ACDA’s creation, its leaders sought authority from Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Kennedy to negotiate with the Soviets an agreement intended to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to additional countries. This authority was granted after negotiations within the U.S. government and with U.S. allies produced a modified draft treaty.

By forming an institution separate from the State Department that would handle negotiations regarding a treaty such as this, Kennedy also created a means to sidestep opposition in Foggy Bottom to the NPT and win support from others in the executive branch and Congress. The State Department had long supported establishment of a multilateral force (MLF) composed of ships owned by several NATO countries, including the United States, armed with U.S. nuclear weapons and manned by officers and sailors from the United States and other participating NATO countries. Some State Department officials had insisted that U.S. officers and sailors on MLF ships would retain control of the U.S. nuclear weapons. However, other State Department officials and some allies felt that the MLF effort would be endangered if a new treaty prohibited transfer of control of nuclear weapons to any other entity, such as an MLF ship with officers and sailors from countries not having nuclear weapons or that had an MLF “board of directors” that included many allies that did not have nuclear weapons.

In 1962, Rusk showed Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko a simple U.S. draft nonproliferation agreement based on the 1961 General Assembly resolution, which the Soviets had not opposed. The draft did not mention the MLF but would not have prohibited it. Gromyko rejected Rusk’s proposal without even consulting Moscow. How much this action was based on Gromyko’s knowledge that NATO members were considering the MLF proposal was not clear, but there had been many private discussions about the MLF proposal among NATO members. Leaks to representatives of non-NATO countries seemed likely.

At the Disarmament Committee that followed this Rusk-Gromyko meeting, Gromyko focused on a broad Soviet proposal for “general and complete disarmament,” including complete nuclear disarmament, not on the General Assembly nonproliferation resolution.[5] Given Gromyko’s reaction and the interest of West Germany and others in the MLF proposal, negotiations to implement the 1961 General Assembly resolution calling for an NPT stalled for several years, but so did NATO-country negotiations to create an MLF armed with nuclear weapons.

After the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, U.S.-Soviet tensions relaxed somewhat, and serious negotiations to produce a ban on nuclear weapons tests produced U.S.-Soviet agreement on the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 (limited because it did not ban nuclear weapons tests underground). Still, the possibility of a successful negotiation of an MLF agreement with U.S. allies seemed likely to make successful negotiation of an NPT with the Soviets impossible. ACDA officials were concerned that the United States would get neither an MLF nor an NPT unless some way to break this stalemate could be found.

Indeed, it took three years of failure both in the MLF negotiations and the NPT negotiations to produce a U.S. decision to give up on an MLF and pursue an NPT alone. Then, the ACDA was authorized to try to negotiate with the Soviets a draft NPT with a provision prohibiting the five nations then having nuclear weapons (China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States) from transferring control over any of their nuclear weapons to anyone. As finally negotiated, this provision also called on these five nations not to “assist, encourage or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear explosive weapons, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.” Moreover, the nations not having nuclear weapons that joined the treaty had to agree not to receive or manufacture or “otherwise acquire nuclear weapons…and not to seek or receive any assistance” in their manufacture.[6]

With this new U.S. formula in hand, U.S.-Soviet negotiations over a draft NPT finally began in earnest in Geneva. Later, Rusk and Gromyko met in New York to discuss further NPT negotiation possibilities, and it became clear that the Soviets were now interested in such talks. In September 1966, a U.S.-Soviet working group, which included one of the authors of this article, came up with three possible drafts of an NPT prohibition on the transfer of nuclear weapons that the Americans and the Soviets could present to their governments.

President Lyndon Johnson also authorized ACDA negotiators to present a draft no-transfer treaty provision to the West German government, probably the most important U.S. ally in Western Europe that the NPT would ban from having nuclear weapons. Johnson had good reason to be concerned about the reaction of the West Germans. They had already done considerable work related to building nuclear power reactors, and some in the West German government appeared to support research into nuclear weapons production, given that U.S. nuclear weapons were stationed with U.S. troops on West German territory. The British and the French already had nuclear weapons and would be accepted as NPT nuclear-weapon states in the U.S.-Soviet staff-proposed drafts. No other U.S. allies then seemed both seriously interested in and clearly capable of making nuclear weapons.

Fortunately, after further prolonged negotiations with the United States as well as with other NATO allies, the West Germans finally came around. They signed the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state, thus obligating themselves not to acquire nuclear weapons. Without West Germany’s NPT promise not to acquire nuclear weapons, the Soviets would not have accepted an NPT. The Soviets had already complained about U.S. nuclear weapons deployed with U.S. forces in West Germany, weapons that were guarded by U.S. troops. The Soviets were not about to agree to a treaty permitting West Germany to control any nuclear weapons.

These further negotiations with the West Germans and other U.S. allies produced a consensus on a U.S. proposal to submit to the Soviet negotiators. With changes resulting from further negotiations both with the Soviets and our interested allies, we produced a final draft of the NPT to present at the Geneva-based Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee and the UN General Assembly in 1968. This included provisions recommended by the eight nonaligned countries represented at the Geneva disarmament conference, including India, such as Article IV, which provides that the NPT “shall” not be interpreted as “affecting the inalienable right” of all NPT parties “to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination.”

The NPT Today

The 1968 NPT permitted the five states that had tested nuclear weapons to keep these weapons for the time being but obligated them under Article VI to negotiate to reduce and ultimately eliminate them. The treaty also prohibited other states-parties from acquiring nuclear weapons.[7] Forty years after the signing of the NPT, it is a worldwide treaty joined by more than 180 countries that do not have nuclear weapons as well as the five that had tested them by 1968. Russia has taken the place of the Soviet Union as one of the five nuclear-weapon states, and the 14 other former Soviet republics that became independent have become non-nuclear-weapon states-parties to the NPT.

Today, the most important NPT provision that has not been well observed is Article VI, the obligation of the five nuclear-weapon states “to negotiate in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”

In 2007, when she was the United Kingdom’s foreign minister, Margaret Beckett called for negotiators to take additional steps toward nuclear disarmament. She said, “The judgment we made 40 years ago [at the NPT’s signing] that the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons was in all our interests is just as true today as it was then. For more than 60 years, good management and good fortune have meant that nuclear arsenals have not been used, but we cannot rely just on history to repeat itself.”[8]

It is true that on occasion nuclear-weapon states have taken advantage of NPT treaty review conferences to reiterate their intention to seek nuclear reductions. Yet, no serious nuclear-weapon reductions have taken place that include all five states permitted by the NPT to possess nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has been no exception. Unlike previous administrations, the current administration has made only a small effort to negotiate nuclear weapons reductions with Russia at a time when the two countries still control more than 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world. The U.S.-Russian nuclear reduction treaty (the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty) signed by the presidents of the two countries during the Bush administration calls for the removal from active deployment of some nuclear warheads, but it does not require their elimination.

Instead of negotiating agreed nuclear weapons reductions, the Bush administration has announced a wide range of potential uses for nuclear weapons, greater than any past U.S. administration seems to have announced.[9] In addition, the administration did not accept prior commitments by earlier U.S. administrations that limit the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon countries, including commitments that the United States will not use nuclear weapons against countries that have agreed that they will not acquire nuclear weapons.[10] In brief, the Bush administration has done little to carry out the U.S. obligation to pursue “nuclear disarmament” mandated by Article VI.

Early this year, Congress passed legislation calling for the executive branch to conduct a thorough review of U.S. nuclear weapons policy by the end of the first year of the next administration. This review, Congress said, must describe the new U.S. administration’s “assessment of the role of nuclear forces in military strategy”; its “objectives…to maintain a safe, reliable and credible nuclear posture”; and its views of the “relationship among U.S. nuclear deterrence policy, targeting strategy, and arms control.” This would mark the first such re-examination since the Bush administration’s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, which stated a new U.S. policy of relatively free use of nuclear weapons against countries that are hostile to the United States even though they do not have nuclear weapons.[11]

In addition, three important states (India, Israel, and Pakistan) refused to join the NPT in 1968 when it was opened for signature, and they eventually produced nuclear weapons. Despite its refusal to join the NPT and its acquisition of nuclear weapons, India has been rewarded by the Bush administration by a proposed U.S.-India agreement that, if implemented, would appear to violate current U.S. law and be inconsistent with agreed international guidelines.

North Korea did join the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state but later withdrew and tested a nuclear weapon that appeared to be in part the product of its nuclear weapons research activities conducted while it was an NPT state-party. Several countries, most prominently South Africa, abandoned their nuclear weapons-making efforts and joined the NPT.

Negotiations to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons began in the Clinton administration and, after a long pause, were taken up again by the Bush administration. Several preliminary agreements have been signed. However, North Korea has not yet carried out its promise to eliminate its nuclear weapons. Iran, while a member of the NPT, has a uranium-enrichment program that began in secrecy 20 years ago and remains ambiguous as to its purpose: weapons, peaceful uses, or both. Negotiations with Iran remain stalemated.[12]

Conclusion

The nuclear nonproliferation regime is at a crossroads. If it is to be saved and reinvigorated, the next U.S. president must take the lead at the start of his administration, January 20, 2009.

First, the president should outline a plan to strengthen the nuclear nonproliferation regime to Congress, to the U.S. public, and to foreign leaders. We hope he will include the Shultz-Perry-Kissinger-Nunn proposals in the Wall Street Journal calling for deep cuts in nuclear weapons around the world.[13] This is, of course, one vision of what serious planning and successful negotiation of a nuclear weapons reduction agreement pursuant to Article VI could produce.

Second, the next U.S. president should propose early concrete steps for U.S.-Russian cooperation and nuclear reductions The United States should propose additional reductions beyond SORT and the continuation of START verification measures. It is self-evident that positive relations between the United States and Russia will be central both to specific near-term actions and to the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Third, the next U.S. president should extend these talks to include the other nuclear-weapon states. At a time that U.S.-Russian arms reduction talks have effectively stalled out, it may seem disingenuous for the two countries that control more than 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world to invite the “Three” (China, France, and the United Kingdom) to join their occasional nuclear weapons reduction negotiations. However, early agreements between Russia and the United States and then among the five nuclear-weapon states on steps toward nuclear disarmament are essential to satisfy the non-nuclear-weapon NPT members that these two countries are complying with their Article VI obligations. Significant compliance with this obligation is important to forestall further proliferation by non-nuclear-weapon countries and to keep some of them from withdrawing from the NPT.

Fourth, the United States should establish a serious dialogue with China on nuclear weapons issues. This is essential to steps that China and the United States, joined by others, should take in pursuit of nuclear disarmament.

Fifth, the next president should appoint a nonproliferation “czar” before inauguration day. The czar would work with the president-elect on his policy positions and be the leader of the president’s effort to enact legislation creating a new agency to focus on nonproliferation and arms reduction negotiations. In the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, the ACDA led the U.S. effort to negotiate an NPT and other important treaties to limit nuclear arms. The ACDA was separate from the State Department but under the general direction of the secretary of state (but not the rest of the State Department) as well as the president.

Unfortunately, conservatives in Congress during the last years of the Clinton administration succeeded in abolishing the ACDA and placing its employees back in the State Department. This meant that the personnel responsible for negotiations to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons were more likely to be influenced by State Department personnel responsible for specific regions of the world. State Department personnel focused on other subjects than preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and on other regions than those where that spread is a matter of particular concern. This happened in the case of the recent U.S.-Indian agreement that was to provide major nuclear assistance to India despite its pursuit of nuclear weapons, a pursuit which earlier U.S. administrations had tried hard to prevent and then slow. In negotiating the U.S.-Indian agreement, State Department officials overrode or ignored established arms control concerns in their eagerness to reach an unsound agreement.

Sixth, the 2006 U.S.-Indian nuclear agreement should be set aside. It seems to be stalled now by political opposition within India, and it will not likely come before the U.S. Congress for approval this year. If it went into force one day, it could help undermine the NPT regime. Instead, India should become a key actor in pursuit of the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons, a goal that former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi urged so eloquently at the UN.

In conclusion, it should not be forgotten that the NPT has been the primary rulemaker that has prevented the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. Many countries have nuclear research reactors and a sufficient industrial base to at least begin pursuing nuclear-weapon activities. Without joining the NPT, India, Israel, and Pakistan have become nations with nuclear weapons. North Korea, not well developed industrially, produced fissile material for nuclear weapons and then withdrew from the NPT. Libya, although a member of the NPT, started development of nuclear weapons but, with efforts by other countries to enforce the norm of the NPT and some financial assistance, was persuaded to stop that effort. In the Middle East, we saw Iraq pursuing nuclear weapons in the 1980s and 1990s. It took a UN-Iraq war to stop that effort. Subsequently, the existence of the NPT made it possible for the UN Security Council to demand strict disarmament requirements in a post-war cease fire. We have seen what may be nuclear weapons-making efforts in Iran and Syria. Additional NPT members in that region of the world, where non-nuclear sources of energy such as oil are readily available, have expressed interest in building nuclear power reactors. Does their nuclear interest go beyond power reactors?

What would the world look like if there were no NPT? It has provided the standard that has restrained many countries from pursuing nuclear weapons. Without it, would there be 20 or 30 countries with nuclear weapons or pursuing nuclear weapons?

Corrected online September 3, 2008. See explanation.



George Bunn, the first general counsel for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, helped negotiate the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and later became U.S. ambassador to the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee. He is now at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. John B. Rhinelander is senior counsel at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. He served as deputy legal adviser at the Department of State and legal adviser to the ABM Treaty/SALT I delegation.


ENDNOTES

1. Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (July 1, 1968), art. I (hereinafter NPT).

2. See, e.g., Lenice N. Wu, “The Baruch Plan,” in Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament, ed. Richard Dean Burns (New York: Charles  Scribner’s Sons, 1993), pp. 771, 774-783; George Bunn, Arms Control by Committee: Managing Negotiations with the Russians (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 59-61.

3. Bunn, Arms Control by Committee, pp. 85-92.

4. UN General Assembly Resolution 1665, December 4, 1961 (the “Irish Resolution”).

5. See Bunn, “The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: History and Current Problems,” Arms Control Today, December 2003, p. 5.

6. NPT, arts. I and II.

7. Bunn, Arms Control by Committee, pp. 87-103; U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Arms Control and Disarmament Agreements: Texts and Histories of Negotiations (1980), pp. 82-83.

8. Margaret Beckett, Keynote address at Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference, Washington, D.C., June 25, 2007.

9. Amy F. Woolf, “Nuclear Weapons in the U.S. National Security Policy: Past, Present, and Prospects,” CRS Report for Congress, October 29, 2007, p. 10.

10. Over the years, several presidents have made commitments not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states party to the NPT, for example the nuclear nonuse protocol to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America of 1967, which the United States signed and ratified before the NPT. Similar treaties exist for several other regions of the world. The protocols to these treaties have been signed but not ratified by the United States. See, e.g., George Bunn, “The Legal Status of U.S. Negative Security Assurances to Non-Nuclear Weapon States,” Nonproliferation Review, Spring-Summer 1997, p. 1.

11. See David Holloway, “Deterrence, Preventive War, and Preemption,” in U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy/Confronting Today’s Threats, eds. George Bunn and Christopher Chyba (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press and CISAC, 2006), p. 34; Roger Speed and Michael May, “Assessing the U.S. Nuclear Posture,” in U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy/Confronting Today’s Threats, p. 248; George Bunn and Christopher Chyba, “U.S. Nuclear Postures for a New Era,” in U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy/Confronting Today’s Threats, p. 297.

12. See William J. Broad, “Look Who’s Tough on Iran Now,” The New York Times, News of the Week in Review, June 1, 2008, p. 1.

13. George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2007, p. A15; George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2008, p. A13. See interview with Sam Nunn,  “World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” Arms Control Today, March 2008, p. 6.

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