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“For 50 years, the Arms Control Association has educated citizens around the world to help create broad support for U.S.-led arms control and nonproliferation achievements.”

– President Joe Biden
June 2, 2022
Looking Back

The Cuban Missile Crisis at 60: Six Timeless Lessons for Arms Control


October 2022
By Graham Allison

October marks the 60th anniversary of the most dangerous crisis in recorded history. In October 1962, U.S. President John Kennedy faced off with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in an eyeball to eyeball confrontation, each with his nation’s nuclear arsenal in hand. In the midst of the crisis, in a quiet aside with his brother, Kennedy offered his estimate that the risks of nuclear war were between one in three and even. Nothing that historians have discovered in the decades since has lengthened these odds. Had this crisis ended in nuclear war, hundreds of millions of people in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Europe could have experienced sudden death.

This photograph of a ballistic missile base in Cuba was among the evidence that helped persuade U.S. President John Kennedy to order a naval blockade of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. (Photo by Getty Images)As the best documented major crisis in history, in substantial part because Kennedy secretly taped the deliberations in which he and his closest advisers were weighing choices they knew could lead to a catastrophic war, the Cuban missile crisis has become the canonical case study in nuclear statecraft. Over the decades since, key lessons from the crisis have been adapted and applied by the successors of Kennedy and Khrushchev to inform fateful choices. Of the many lessons from this nearly apocalyptic episode, six offer timeless insights for arms control.

First, to survive in a world of mutually assured destruction or MAD, a nuclear power must constrain itself and find ways to persuade its nuclear adversary to constrain itself. MAD is the acronym used by Cold War strategists to capture the essence of objective conditions in which a nuclear power cannot attack an adversary that has a robust nuclear arsenal without triggering a response that destroys itself. Thus, even if country A can destroy country B totally, it cannot do so without B responding with an attack that destroys itself. A nation’s choice to attack an adversary that has a reliable second-strike nuclear arsenal is therefore functionally equivalent to a choice to commit national suicide. In these conditions, a nation’s survival requires it to coexist with its adversary since the alternative is to co-destruct.

Second, from the brute fact that “a nuclear war cannot be won” because at the conclusion the attacker would also have lost their own society, U.S. President Ronald Reagan drew a large categorical imperative: a nuclear war “must therefore never be fought.” Reagan’s often-repeated one-liner, that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must therefore never be fought,” almost says it all.

Reagan struggled with this radical, disruptive, profound truth. However good the United States was—very, he believed—and however evil the “Evil Empire” was, as he rightly named the Soviet Union, if these two deadly adversaries could not fight a nuclear war or a full-scale conventional war that would likely escalate to nuclear war, then what? Then, the whole character of their competition would have to be fundamentally different from relations between great powers through previous centuries. As Kennedy summarized his own attempt to internalize this fact, because “we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”

Lesson three spotlights the necessity for communication, especially private communication, between leaders of nuclear-armed states. Prior to the missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev developed a back channel in which they exchanged private letters. During the crisis, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy communicated secret messages from his brother the president to Khrushchev through the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, including the terms of a secret deal that led to peaceful resolution of the crisis.

Yet, the technologies of the day through which these communications were transmitted took 11 hours. In a case where messages were being sent about urgent issues, such delay obviously risked catastrophe. Thus, immediately after the missile crisis, Kennedy proposed and Khrushchev accepted the establishment of the hotline that allowed direct, secret telephone communication between the leaders.

U.S. President John Kennedy signs the order for a naval blockade of Cuba on October 23, 1962 at the White House during the Cuban missile crisis. (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)Kennedy believed that the most important lesson of the missile crisis was the necessity for mutual constraints, which he understood required unilateral constraints. In the major foreign policy speech of his career, the American University commencement speech given five months before he was assassinated, Kennedy highlighted what he identified as the central takeaway from the missile crisis: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.” This meant avoiding repeats of confrontations like the Cuban missile crisis because if there was a one-in-three chance of nuclear war in that case and if this game of nuclear Russian roulette were replayed repeatedly, the likelihood of nuclear war would approach certainty.

The fifth lesson requires that adversaries find ways to constrain their own unilateral activities, including in explicit agreements, as the price for inducing their adversary to accept mutual restraints. Thus began what has been known in the decades since as arms control. Kennedy’s unilateral announcement that the United States was ending all nuclear testing in the atmosphere challenged the Soviet Union to match it in kind. In fact, Khrushchev did. This was followed by negotiations that over time produced constraints on deployment of offensive nuclear weapons (the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks and the strategic arms reduction treaties) and defenses against ballistic missiles (the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty). Each of these treaties was in essence a bargain in which both nations agreed to forgo actions they would otherwise have taken in exchange for the other doing likewise.

Particularly for a state that identified itself as and truly was a superpower, the proposition that U.S. policymakers would forgo actions they felt advanced U.S. interests in exchange for an adversary forgoing actions that the United States judged threatening to its interests was almost unthinkable. Thus, for example, when Reagan agreed to eliminate U.S. intermediate-range nuclear-armed missiles as the price for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev eliminating the Soviets’ intermediate-range nuclear-armed missiles, he was denounced by hawkish commentators.

The leading conservative intellectual of the time, William Buckley, devoted an entire issue of his National Review to condemning Reagan’s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty as a “suicide pact.” Columnist George Will wrote in 1987 that “Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West—actual disarmament will follow.” About such criticism, Reagan observed, “Some of my more radical conservative supporters protested that in negotiating with the Russians I was plotting to trade away our country’s future security. I assured them we wouldn’t sign any agreements that placed us at a disadvantage, but still got lots of flak from them—many of whom, I was convinced, thought we had to prepare for nuclear war because it was ‘inevitable.’”

The sixth lesson recognizes that to avoid future confrontations like the Cuban missile crisis would require finding ways to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states. Kennedy was haunted by the specter of “the possibility in the 1970s of the president of the United States having to face a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these weapons” (fig. 1). As he said, “I regard that as the greatest possible danger and hazard.”

Source: Graham Allison

 

To escape that future, the United States launched a series of initiatives that created the nonproliferation regime, the centerpiece of which is the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). In that treaty, non-nuclear-weapon signatories forswore nuclear weapons in exchange for other states, including their adversaries or potential enemies, making an equivalent pledge. In contrast to the 15 or 25 nuclear-weapon states that Kennedy envisaged, today just nine states have nuclear weapons.

Six decades on, the Cuban missile crisis remains a pivotal moment in arms control. Given the nightmare that could have been, the world can be grateful for generations of effort that literally bent this arc of history. Yet, given the pressures for further proliferation of nuclear weapons resulting from the lessons leaders are now drawing from Russia’s war against Ukraine, as well as the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the toppling of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi in 2011, sustaining this success will require another burst of strategic imagination and relentless effort in the decades ahead.


Graham Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. His latest book is Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? His first book was Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis.

What lessons from the Cuban missile crisis can be applied to today's confrontation with Russia? Nuclear expert Graham Allison has some answers.

The Power of Women Strike for Peace


November 2021
By Kathy Crandall Robinson

On November 1, 1961, an estimated 50,000 women in 60 U.S. cities answered a call to join a one-day strike with the rallying slogan “End the Arms Race—Not the Human Race.”1 Astonishing observers and participants with its success, the strike sparked momentum that could not be contained in a single event. Women Strike for Peace (WSP) was launched, drawing even more women into a whirlwind of action to address the threat of nuclear war and stop atmospheric nuclear tests and the attendant radioactive fallout.

Dagmar Wilson and Coretta Scott King lead a march at the United Nations in New York on November 1, 1963, the second anniversary of Women Strike for Peace, and celebrate the Limited Test Ban Treaty. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)After less than two years of prodigious activity, the WSP shared a significant victory when the Limited Test Ban Treaty, banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere and outer space and under water, entered into force on October 11, 1963. President John Kennedy’s science adviser, Jerome Weisner, later gave specific credit for persuading Kennedy to support the treaty “not to the arms controllers inside government” but to the WSP, along with the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and Linus Pauling.2

The initial call for the strike went out after a small September 22 meeting convened by Dagmar Wilson at her Washington home. Wilson and the strike organizers were alarmed by escalating nuclear dangers and dismayed by the lack of urgent response from primarily male leaders in government and peace organizations.3 They sent the strike call via informal networks using phone trees and chain letters. This impressive low-tech organizing in less than six weeks—imagine if these women had cell phones, email, and social media—reached a receptive audience ready to act.

As Ethel Taylor, who organized the Philadelphia strike, explained,

When I received the letter from Dagmar asking me to organize a strike for peace in the Philadelphia area, I immediately went into action. Her view that radioactive fallout was an emergency, not merely an issue, expressed my feelings exactly. I called a meeting at my home and invited women.… I told them what I knew of Dagmar’s motivation for calling the strike: simply put, nuclear weapons testing was dangerous to our children’s health, and could only escalate the arms race.4

Many women and more than a few men were similarly alarmed and motivated. The moment was ripe for several reasons. The danger of nuclear war felt imminent. Throughout the 1950s, bomb shelters were built, and children routinely practiced “duck and cover” drills in school. Although some people may have been falsely reassured that these activities would protect them, everyone, including young children, knew that nuclear war was a real threat.

In the weeks before the organizers planned the strike, the nuclear threat grew. On August 13, 1961, the Berlin Wall went up along with U.S. and Soviet tensions. In August and September, the Soviet Union, followed by the United States, broke the testing moratorium that had been in place for almost three years. Over the next 16 months, the two countries conducted more nuclear tests than in the 16 preceding years, causing a spike in global radiation levels. On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union conducted “Tsar Bomba,” the largest ever nuclear weapons test, with a yield of 50 megatons.5

On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union conducted “Tsar Bomba,” the largest ever nuclear weapons test, with a yield of 50 megatons. Today, the weapon sits in a museum. (Photo by TASS via Getty Images)Along with driving the arms race, atmospheric nuclear testing produced radioactive fallout, a known and alarming public health concern. In fact, some parents were so concerned that they sent their children’s baby teeth to be checked for harmful levels of strontium-90.6

The women who launched the WSP wanted more urgent action in response to this perilous situation. Kennedy had come into office promising an end to nuclear testing and spoke of challenging the Soviet Union to a “peace race,”7 yet he deployed more nuclear weapons, increased Pentagon spending, and resumed nuclear tests.8

Many of the women strikers were involved in key peace organizations, particularly SANE. They felt hamstrung by SANE’s hierarchal structure and by male leaders who the women perceived as “less agitated, more deliberate, and more slowly moved to action.”9 Also, SANE and other peace organizations, including Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), had been targeted by anti-communist red-baiters. This did serious damage to the organizations’ reputations, hindering their effectiveness. It was another frustration for the WSP leaders who felt compelled to leave or distance themselves from SANE and the WILPF.10

WSP leaders took deliberate steps to avoid similar red-baiting. Following the strike, they formed a “non-organization” network that had no membership dues or information that could be collected by entities such as the House Un-American Activities Committee. Also, in 1962, the WSP adopted an intentionally inclusive national policy statement decreeing that “we are women of all races creeds and political persuasions.”11

Wilson summed up the feelings driving the women to act when she wrote, “We were worried. We were indignant. We were Angry.”12 They channeled that emotional commitment into relentless bold action. This included picketing, marching, and various creative demonstrations. For example, one group rented a fallout shelter, parked it in shopping center, and converted it into a “Peace Center” from which the activists distributed educational materials and called attention to the false security promised by fallout shelters.13

There were also persistent lobby activities, or as Amy Swerdlow, WSP member and historian, described, “an uninterrupted stream of visits to congressional representatives, to public officials…and to government agencies.”14 The activism extended internationally; a delegation of 50 women went to Geneva in 1962 to make the case for a test ban at the 17-nation Committee on Disarmament.15

The harmful effects of atmospheric nuclear fallout were a particular focus of education and action with “Pure Milk Not Poison” a commonly used slogan. Concerns about milk contamination included calls for boycotts of fresh milk and instructions on how to use powdered milk as a substitute. One campaign recommended that people threaten to cancel home milk deliveries if efforts to decontaminate milk were not undertaken.16

In 1961 the strikers were predominately white, middle-class women of the early Cold War era.17 They embraced traditional motherhood activities and self-identified as “ordinary housewives.” They wore skirts, hats, and white gloves to demonstrations and brought along their children. In 1962, The New York Times reported that, “[f]or the most part, they stress femininity rather than feminism.”18 In part, this feminine, maternal image helped the women garner media coverage and enabled them to push for radical change while clothed according to the expected norms of society. Although these women started out at the nadir of feminist consciousness, they became part of the rising tide of feminism’s second wave. They were empowered by working together and by the effectiveness of their actions.

Women Strike for Peace gained clout and self-confidence when activists testified at a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee on December 11, 1962.  (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)In December 1962, 14 WSP leaders were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for hearings that marked the group’s transformative moment. In a masterful theatrical display, numerous WSP activists showed up with children in tow. They cheered the witnesses and handed them roses. The first witness, Blanche Posner, lectured the committee on the women’s maternal motivation, stating, “This movement was inspired and motivated by mothers’ love for children.… When they were putting their breakfast on the table, they saw not only the Wheaties and milk, but they also saw strontium 90 and iodine 131.… They feared for the health and life of their children.”19 The WSP effectively rebutted the committee’s charges, making the congressional accusers look foolish while empowering the women and strengthening the WSP.20

Throughout the 1960s, the WSP evolved with the times, participated in growing movements, and expanded to be what today would be called more intersectional. Key leaders joined and led the “women’s liberation,” or second wave of feminism, movement. Most prominent was Bella Abzug, the WSP national legislative leader who won a seat in Congress in 1970 and was a key voice for women’s rights and political empowerment. Coretta Scott King was also a WSP participant and was in the delegation that traveled to Geneva in 1962.

Following the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Vietnam War became the WSP’s major concern. Initiatives such as the Jeannette Rankin Peace Brigade later in the decade brought together activist strands advocating for women’s liberation, anti-racism, anti-poverty, and anti-war policies. Eventually, the WSP embraced a broader peace and human rights agenda, although for key leaders in the group, ending all nuclear testing and the nuclear arms race remained core goals.

In 1988, at a press conference marking the 25th anniversary of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, I was inspired to hear Taylor talk about her experience with the WSP and the effort to secure what she called the unfinished business of a comprehensive test ban treaty. I wondered why, even as a student of U.S.-Soviet relations and arms control, I had never heard anything about mothers who had sent their children’s teeth to be checked for strontium-90 or this huge women’s strike in 1961.

The WSP played a significant role in advocating for nuclear disarmament and in pushing forward the second wave of feminism. Sadly, this story is not told often among peace activists, feminists, or anyone else. It is a history that provides needed inspiration and proof that bold, unrelenting activism can accomplish remarkable change.

Grassroots movements ebb and flow. In recent decades, disarmament progress has continued but mostly at a slower and less momentous pace. Passionate activism has decreased, and nuclear disarmament advocacy has become more the bailiwick of a professional niche community. In the process, too much of the WSP-style sense of urgency has been lost.

Even in today’s very different environment, when atmospheric testing has ended and the threat of nuclear weapons use is not quite as imminent, we could learn from the WSP and recognize that nuclear weapons dangers are not just issues to be discussed, but emergencies that require action.

In the early 1960s, there was little question that nuclear weapons posed an existential threat. When Silent Spring was published in 1962, the harmful effects of nuclear weapons fallout described in the book were well known, although environmental harms from pesticides and other toxins were not yet understood.21 Ironically, people are now keenly aware of the harm done by environmental contaminants and climate change, but are oblivious to the health and environmental damage caused by nuclear weapons production and underground testing and to the fact that nuclear weapons use could wipe out humanity in an afternoon. To revive an old slogan, it is still true that nuclear weapons are bad for children and other living things. Those of us who know this reality should say so more clearly.

We could also take a few lessons from the first years of the WSP. That means devising a strategy with an understanding of the zeitgeist—what issues and events will get media coverage, where to find intersections on key concerns with various partners, how to build political power. There also needs to be coordinated, focused, and dogged action. Ending atmospheric nuclear testing was not the only thing women strikers wanted, but ending testing was their single most urgent goal, and it was clearly understood by most Americans.

Following the first strike, it was evident that the media and policy leaders were paying attention. By the time the bullies on the House Un-American Activities Committee came for the WSP, the women had built power and were executing their game plan. They could not be derailed as other peace organizations had been. They confidently pushed forward for the human race. Now it is our turn to pick up the pace and finish what they started.

 

ENDNOTES

1. Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 247. Swerdlow, a historian and Women Strike for Peace (WSP) member who wrote its comprehensive history, notes that this number “became part of the founding legend” of the WSP based on estimates of organizers that she could not independently verify.

2. Andrew Hamilton, “MIT: March 4 Revisited Amid Political Turmoil,” Science, March 13, 1970, p. 1476.

3. Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace, pp. 16–21, 47–48.

4. Ethel Barol Taylor, We Made a Difference (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 1998), p. 1.

5. Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, “30 October 1961 − The Tsar Bomba,” n.d., https://www.ctbto.org/specials/testing-times/30-october-1961-the-tsar-bomba (accessed October 14, 2021); Arms Control Association, “Nuclear Testing and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) Timeline,” July 2020, https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/NuclearTestingTimeline.

6. Jeffrey Tomich, “Decades Later, Baby Tooth Survey Legacy Lives On,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 1, 2013, https://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/health/decades-later-baby-tooth-survey-legacy-lives-on/article_c5ad9492-fd75-5aed-897f-850fbdba24ee.htm.

7. John Kennedy, “Address Before the General Assembly of the United Nations, September 25, 1961,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, n.d., https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/united-nations-19610925 (accessed October 14, 2021).

8. “Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, n.d., https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/nuclear-test-ban-treaty (accessed October 14, 2021); John Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on the Defense Budget, March 28, 1961,” The American Presidency Project, n.d., https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/236195 (accessed October 14, 2021).

9. Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace, p. 48.

10. Ibid., pp. 45–47; Taylor, We Made a Difference, pp. 5–7 (recounting frustrations with the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in their dealing with anti-communist witch hunts and how this shaped the WSP development); Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993), pp. 157–192, 202 (addressing the struggles of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and noting how the WSP was in part “born directly out of the discontent with WILPF’s hierarchical structure and anti-Communist stance”).

11. Taylor, We Made a Difference, p. 7.

12. Ibid., p. 9.

13. Ibid., pp. 12–13.

14. Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace, p. 81.

15. Ibid., pp. 192–198.

16. Ibid., pp. 81–84.

17. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War, 4th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2017) (describing the context of the Cold War in the 1960s).

18. Jean Molli, “Women’s Peace Group Uses Feminine Tactics,” The New York Times, April 19, 1962, p. 26.

19. Communist Activities in the Peace Movement (Women Strike for Peace and Certain Other Groups): Hearings Before the United States House Committee on Un-American Activities, 87th Cong. 2074 (1962) (testimony of Blanche Posner).

20. Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace, pp. 97–124; Taylor, We Made a Difference, pp. 19–21.

21. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: First Mariner Books, 2002), pp. 6, 234. See also Mark Stoll, “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a Book That Changed the World,” Environment and Society Portal, July 8, 2020, https://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/rachelcarson_silentspring_version2_1.pdf.

 


Kathy Crandall Robinson is the chief operating officer at the Arms Control Association. For decades, she has advocated for nuclear disarmament and related policies, working with a variety of organizations, including Women's Action for New Directions, the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, and Women Strike for Peace.

 

Time to take a page from the women who, in the 1960s, put a spotlight on disarmament and helped force action on the Limited Test Ban Treaty.

Once More Into the Breach: Physicists Mobilize Again to Counter the Nuclear Threat


May 2021
By Zia Mian, Stewart Prager, and Frank N. von Hippel

In Princeton 75 years ago, Albert Einstein announced the formation of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists to educate and mobilize other scientists and the public on the dangers to humanity of the nuclear weapons recently developed by the United States and used to destroy two Japanese cities. The committee of distinguished scientists, almost all of whom had been part of the nuclear weapons program, declared, “We scientists recognize our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of the simple facts of atomic energy and its implications for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope. We believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death.”1

Albert Einstein, center, and other members of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists meet in Princeton, N.J., on Nov. 18, 1946 where they issued an appeal for $1 million to finance a nation-wide educational campaign on the social implications of atomic energy. (Photo via Oregon State University Library)The scientists feared for the future. Faced with the nuclear threat, the committee proclaimed, “there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world.” They began fundraising, with a goal of $1 million (about $10 million in today’s dollars), and published leaflets, gave lectures and talks in person and on the radio, and supported some of the first documentary films on nuclear weapons issues. The group disbanded in 1951, and Einstein died in April 1955. One legacy is that physicists have inherited a special credibility and responsibility for nuclear issues, perhaps more than we deserve.

Today, we see growing political, financial, institutional, and technical commitments to a new generation of nuclear weapons. If realized, nuclear weapons at current levels will become entrenched as part of national and international politics for the rest of this century. To contend against this future, last year we joined other colleagues in establishing the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, with the goal of educating and organizing physicists for nuclear arms control advocacy by engaging Congress and the public on the continuing danger posed by nuclear weapons.

Early Efforts

Scientists, including Einstein, had been active on nuclear policy even before World War II.2 In August 1939, Einstein famously signed a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning “that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium…and it is conceivable…that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may…be constructed.”3 During the war, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had presided over the shaping of our modern understanding of the atom, managed to meet with Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, urging them to talk to the Soviet Union, a wartime ally, about the secret bomb program in the hope of preempting a postwar nuclear arms race. For his troubles, Bohr raised Churchill’s ire, with Churchill suggesting, “It seems to me Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes.”4

In the spring of 1945, led by James Franck, a group of scientists at the University of Chicago working on the atomic bomb program, made the same argument in the “Franck Report” and urged that the United States not use nuclear weapons on Japan or at least not do so without first consulting with its allies, including the Soviet Union. The report begins,

The scientists on this project do not presume to speak authoritatively on problems of national and international policy. However, we found ourselves, by the force of events, the last five years in the position of a small group of citizens cognizant of a grave danger for the safety of this country as well as for the future of all the other nations, of which the rest of mankind is unaware. We therefore felt it our duty to urge that the political problems, arising from the mastering of atomic power, be recognized in all their gravity, and that appropriate steps be taken for their study and the preparation of necessary decisions.5

The physicists’ wartime efforts to impact U.S. nuclear policy were cloaked by secrecy, and all failed. After Hiroshima, however, the secret was out, and some scientists from the Manhattan Project that had built the atomic bomb rushed to inform the public of the terrible new weapons they had helped create and of their ideas for international control. It was an uphill battle. Polling in the days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima found that more than 80 percent of Americans approved of dropping an atomic bomb on Japan and almost as many welcomed the development of the bomb.6

Public education by the scientists, the pioneering journalism by John Hersey about Hiroshima, and the work of countless activist groups did get traction. When the public was listening, activist scientists began to have some successes in Congress.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, thousands of scientists, led by Linus Pauling, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, provided technical support to the public’s desire to end atmospheric nuclear testing and its associated global radioactive fallout.7 This effort helped enable the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing everywhere but underground, and Pauling was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that same year.

Linus Pauling outside the White House, Washington DC, protesting against nuclear weapons testing, April 28, 1962. (Photo courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives.)A decade later, with the public aroused by the Army’s proposal to put nuclear-armed interceptors for Soviet ballistic missiles in the suburbs, Congress listened to the arguments of scientist critics that the defenses being proposed could easily be blinded and overwhelmed by the Soviets. That led to the 1972 Soviet-U.S. treaty limiting anti-ballistic missile defenses and the offense-defense arms race that had already been triggered.8

In the 1980s, scientists led the resistance to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative program, commonly known as “Star Wars,” with thousands of scientists and engineers signing a pledge not to seek or accept funding to work on this space-based weapons program.9

Scientists actively supported the nuclear freeze movement in the 1980s. This included Carl Sagan and others who alerted the world to the risk of possible global atmospheric and climate consequences of large-scale nuclear war, including a years-long “nuclear winter” created by sunlight-blocking soot in the stratosphere from burned cities.10

In the mid-1980s, U.S. and Soviet scientists joined together to demonstrate in-country monitoring of Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s unilateral nuclear test moratorium, reviving U.S. congressional interest in and pressure for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was finally realized in 1996.11

With the end of the Cold War, however, many activist scientists set the nuclear weapons issue aside as public concern about the danger from the weapons waned. The focus shifted from U.S. nuclear weapons postures, policies, and budgets to the security of nuclear weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union and the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Although a few stalwarts of nuclear arms control continued to press for progress, members of Congress who had been engaged and educated by activists and scientists in the nuclear freeze movement were succeeded by members with other concerns. Nuclear weapons policy became primarily the province of entrenched interests: members representing states and districts with nuclear bases, nuclear weapons laboratories and military-industrial corporations, and nuclear strategists and lobbyists.

The Nuclear Challenge Renewed

When the Cold War ended 30 years ago, there was hope among many that nuclear weapons soon might be abolished. That passed, however, and more recent prospects for progress and leadership on disarmament by the United States raised by President Barack Obama in his speeches in Prague and Hiroshima have dimmed. Reductions of the Russian and U.S. arsenals have stalled, and in most of the seven other nuclear-armed countries, stockpiles of operational nuclear weapons are increasing.

Today, the world has about 10,000 operational and reserve nuclear warheads, plus several thousand weapons set aside for dismantlement. On average, they are about 10 times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; almost 2,000 of those weapons are on alert, ready to be launched on short notice.12 U.S. policy continues to maintain the option of first use of nuclear weapons in a conflict. Over the next several decades, nuclear weapons spending by the United States alone is expected to exceed $1.5 trillion.13

Why should today’s physicists have a special responsibility to deliver the message of the urgent need to challenge the continuing dangers from nuclear weapons? We did not invent the atomic bomb, and outside the three large multibillion-dollar-per-year U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, few U.S. physicists have much to do with nuclear weapons. At its most fundamental level, the catastrophic potential of thousands of nuclear warheads can be understood by anyone. Contending with these dangers involves a mixture of technical, policy, geopolitical, and ethical considerations that is not taught in physics or any other discipline but must be learned on the job by activists and government officials alike.

Through our knowledge of physics and reading and discussion, some physicists have become more expert in some aspects of nuclear weapons issues than most of our fellow citizens, but many of them understand the human and ethical aspects as well or better than we do. Whether justified or not, the voice of physicists on this problem seems to carry special weight. We have learned this as members of our local peace group, where we are invited along as their “experts” when they have constituent meetings on nuclear weapons policy with members of Congress or their staffers.

All physicists are aware in principle of the tremendous explosive potential of nuclear processes. Yet, like the general public after the Cold War, most do not view nuclear weapons as a high-priority issue. This seems especially true of younger physicists who did not experience the recklessness, near misses, and political struggles of the Cold War. We believe there is a latent interest in the topic, however, because of the history of leading physicists’ engagement as citizen-scientists during the second half of the 20th century.

The Physicists Coalition began work in September 2020. It is sponsored by the American Physical Society (APS), a national scientific society with 55,000 physicists as members, and is partly supported by an APS Innovation Fund award. The coalition is currently partnering with the APS Office of Government Affairs, which coordinates APS-backed advocacy campaigns. Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security hosts the coalition. Our goal is to develop a new national network of citizen-physicists as a strong voice for nuclear threat reduction.

During our first year, the coalition has been built through a grassroots process of outreach to the physics community. The coalition has a team of 12 arms control experts who have given virtual colloquiums on the dangers of nuclear weapons at 60 university physics departments and one Department of Energy national science laboratory. The universities mostly are in districts and states whose U.S. representatives or senators serve on their respective armed services committees and so have responsibility for nuclear weapons budget issues. We hope to expand to other relevant committees and to all 50 states.

The presentations vary, but all provide an overview of the danger posed by nuclear arsenals around the globe, on the threatened state of the nuclear arms control and nonproliferation regimes, and on possible immediate steps to reduce the threat. The colloquiums are followed by a meeting offering more in-depth discussion for those interested in learning about or joining the coalition.

Thus far, there has been little to no pushback to our core message that the nuclear status quo poses an existential, unacceptable danger. In fact, the colloquiums often lead to extended discussions on policy and technical aspects with strong expressions of support for threat reduction measures. Our site visits, plus a few webinars to which the larger membership of the APS Forum on Physics and Society has been invited, have resulted in a current coalition membership of more than 400 spread across the United States. Although initially focused on recruiting physicists, the coalition welcomes all interested physical scientists, including those in engineering science.

The coalition is making a special effort to recruit and support physicists who are women, people of color, or otherwise underrepresented in nuclear weapons policy debates. To this end, we have initiated a one-year Next-Generation Fellowship targeting early-career scientists and underrepresented groups. The first four fellows are working with more senior mentors to learn nuclear policy through practice and to train in policy communication and advocacy.

Those who join the coalition do so to learn more about nuclear weapons issues and to be active advocates. In the fall of 2020, as one small part of a larger mobilization by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), coalition members advocated for congressional support of the extension of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and for striking $10 million in funding in the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act designated for preparations for renewed U.S. nuclear weapons testing. The membership (about 250 at the time) generated about 400 separate contacts with Congress via emails, phone calls, and virtual meetings with staff. Both legislative goals were achieved.

Currently, the coalition is preparing to argue for the United States to adopt a more restrictive nuclear policy, either no first use of nuclear weapons or that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter their use by other countries. There is renewed hope this effort can be successful given the past support expressed by President Joe Biden for such a declaration by the United States. Other near-term advocacy goals are under discussion. Coalition members have also been developing expert policy papers on adopting a no-first-use policy, ending the U.S. policy of having a launch-on-warning option, and retiring rather than replacing U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles.14

Ultimately, the elimination of the nuclear threat will require much more than a coalition of physicists and will involve more fundamental policy shifts. We are reaching out to see whether other scientific communities in the United States are interested in making common cause. As Einstein and the Emergency Committee understood, succeeding at nuclear threat reduction will require an informed public consistently engaged with nuclear weapons policy. We therefore are beginning to collaborate with citizen groups and NGOs working on the shared goal of educating the public and Congress on steps toward removing the nuclear shadow over
our future.

Public support for this goal, albeit mostly passive, already exists. A 2020 survey found that two-thirds of Americans, including majorities of Democrats, independents, and Republicans, agreed that no country should be allowed to have nuclear weapons.15 As a result of advocacy by the Back From the Brink campaign and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, 53 U.S. cities and towns and four state legislatures (California, Maine, New Jersey, and Oregon), many organizations, and some civil leaders, including in Congress, have expressed support for specific steps to reduce nuclear threats and for nuclear disarmament.16

Finally, because the nuclear problem is global, its solution requires an international effort. The coalition is beginning to explore with communities of physicists in other countries their interest in educating their own governments. There is already interest from members of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, a movement that emerged from the Bertrand Russell-Albert Einstein Manifesto of 1955 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.17

The engagement of activist-physicists with their national nuclear politics is especially important now in the nine countries that have nuclear weapons, the five countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey) that host U.S. nuclear weapons, and the more than 25 additional countries that the United States has promised to use its nuclear weapons to defend if they come under attack. In some of these countries, the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which bans the use and the threat of use of such weapons, has already gained broad public support.18 The treaty entered into force in January 2021 and has 86 state signatories so far. There may be new allies here for the scientists of today who carry on with the crucial task set out by Einstein’s Emergency Committee so many years ago.

 

ENDNOTES

1. The group included Albert Einstein, Robert F. Bacher, Hans A. Bethe, Edward U. Condon, Selig Hecht, Thorfin R. Hogness, Philip M. Morse, Linus Pauling, Leo Szilard, Harold C. Urey, and V.F. Weisskopf. The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists records are part of the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers at the libraries and publishing arm of Oregon State University. For some of the records, see “Dear Professor Einstein: The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists in Post-War America,” Oregon State University, n.d., http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/omeka/search?query=The+Emergency+Committee+of+Atomic+Scientists&query_type=keyword&record_types%5B%5D=Item&record_types%5B%5D=File&record_types%5B%5D=Collection&record_types%5B%5D=Exhibit&record_types%5B%5D=ExhibitPage  (accessed April 12, 2021).

2. Zia Mian, “Out of the Nuclear Shadow: Scientists and the Struggle Against the Bomb,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 71, No. 1 (2015), pp. 59–69; Zia Mian, “Scientists and the Struggle Against Nuclear Weapons Today: What Would Szilard Do?” Physics and Society, Vol. 48, No. 4 (October 2019): 2–9.

3. Letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin Roosevelt, August 2, 1939, http://www.fdrlibraryvirtualtour.org/graphics/07-27/7-27-FDR-24a.pdf.

4. Martin J. Sherwin, “Niels Bohr: Spurned Prophet of Arms Control,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 42, No. 9 (1986), pp. 41–45.

5. Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945–47 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965), ch. 1, 15.

6. Craig Kafura, “Americans Want a Nuclear-Free World,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, August 6, 2020, https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/commentary-and-analysis/blogs/americans-want-nuclear-free-world.

7. Linus Pauling, Nobel Peace Prize lecture, December 11, 1963, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1962/pauling/lecture/.

8. Joel Primack and Frank von Hippel, Advice and Dissent: Scientists in the Political Arena (New York: Basic Books, 1974), ch. 13.

9. Lisbeth Gronlund and David Wright, “Saying No to Star Wars: The National SDI Boycott,” Physics and Society, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April 1986); Fred Hiatt, “6,500 College Scientists Take Anti-SDI Pledge,” The Washington Post, May 14, 1986.

10. Richard P. Turco et al., “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” Science, Vol. 222, No. 4630 (December 3, 1983), pp. 1283–1292.

11. Thomas Cochran, “The NRDC/Soviet Academy of Sciences Joint Nuclear Test Ban Verification Project,” Physics and Society, Vol. 16, No. 3 (July 1987): 5–8.

12. Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Status of World Nuclear Forces,” Federation of Atomic Scientists, March 2021, https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces.

13. Kingston Reif and Alicia Sanders-Zakre, “U.S. Nuclear Excess: Understanding the Costs, Risks, and Alternatives,” Arms Control Association, April 2019, https://www.armscontrol.org/sites/default/files/files/Reports/Report_NuclearExcess2019_update0410.pdf.

14. Stewart Prager, “A No-First-Use Policy,” Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, December 1, 2020, https://www.aps.org/policy/nuclear/upload/A-No-First-Use-Policy-Stewart-Prager-1-December-2020.pdf; Frank von Hippel, “Eliminate the Launch-on-Warning Option for U.S. Ballistic Missiles,” Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, November 15, 2020, https://www.aps.org/policy/nuclear/upload/Ending-launch-on-warning.pdf; Frank von Hippel, “Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles Need Not and Should Not Be Replaced Because of the Danger of Their Launch-on-Warning Posture,” Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, November 14, 2020, https://www.aps.org/policy/nuclear/upload/Future-of-US-ICBMs.pdf. See also Frank N. von Hippel, “The United States Would Be More Secure Without New Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 11, 2021, https://thebulletin.org/2021/02/the-united-states-would-be-more-secure-without-new-intercontinental-ballistic-missiles.

15. Kafura, “Americans Want a Nuclear-Free World.”

16. Back From the Brink, “Who’s on Board,” n.d., https://preventnuclearwar.org/whos-on-board/ (accessed April 12, 2021); International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), “ICAN Cities Appeal,” n.d., https://cities.icanw.org/ (accessed April 12, 2021).

17. Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, n.d., https://pugwash.org (accessed April 12, 2021).

18. Kate Hudson, “New Poll Shows Mass Backing for TPNW,” Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, January 22, 2021, https://cnduk.org/new-poll-shows-mass-backing-for-tpnw; Daniel Hogsta, “Polling on the TPNW,” ICAN, December 11, 2019, https://pledge.icanw.org/polling_on_the_tpnw; ICAN, “Populations in 6 NATO States Overwhelmingly Support the TPNW,” n.d., https://www.icanw.org/nato_poll_2021; ICAN, “Poll: 74% of Canadians Support Joining the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” n.d., https://www.icanw.org/poll_74_of_canadians_support_joining_the_un_treaty_on_the_prohibition_of_nuclear_weapons.


Zia Mian, Stewart Prager, and Frank N. von Hippel are members of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University and are co-founders of the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, which is hosted by the program.

Decades ago, Albert Einstein & other scientists led the way in warning about the nuclear threat. Can a new generation of scientists rally the public against a growing investment in ever more lethal weapons?

First UN Resolution Holds Lessons for Latest Nuclear Treaty


January/February 2021
By Ryan A. Musto

The UN General Assembly’s first resolution, passed 75 years ago on January 24, 1946, looked to “deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy.” Specifically, Resolution 1(I) created the UN Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) and charged it with making proposals for “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons” and the use of atomic energy “only for peaceful purposes.”1

The first session of the UN Atomic Energy Commission met in New York on June 14, 1946. (Photo: United Nations)Scholars, activists, jurists, and policymakers celebrate the resolution as a foundational moment in a collective push for nuclear disarmament, an effort that has seen its latest achievement with the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Set to enter into force on January 22, the TPNW seeks to outlaw nuclear weapons worldwide. In its preamble, the TPNW recalls the resolution as a source of inspiration, and the two initiatives are widely regarded as bookends of a lifetime commitment by the United Nations to ban the bomb.

The resolution, however, was not the lodestar many in the nuclear policy community imagine. The United States crafted its language to avoid a nuclear ban. Moreover, by placing the UNAEC under the direction of the UN Security Council, the resolution helped to consolidate an unequal global nuclear order. Less a model to achieve, the resolution is a reminder of challenges the TPNW must overcome on the path to global zero.

Bucking a Ban

In November 1945, three months removed from the U.S. atomic bombings in Japan, U.S. President Harry Truman hosted the prime ministers of Canada and the United Kingdom in Washington to chart a position on the international control of atomic energy. Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, took charge of the U.S. position.

U.S. President Harry Truman (left), UK Prime Minister Clement Atlee (center), and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie meet aboard the USCG Sequoia in Washington in November 1945. Their discussions addressed the international control of atomic energy, and their summit statement led to the creation of the UN Atomic Energy Commission. (Photo: Harris and Ewing/BiblioArchives/LibraryArchives, Canada)Bush outlined a three-staged proposal he hoped the Soviet Union, the estranged wartime ally, would support. The first two stages would use the UN to facilitate the sharing of atomic information and establish inspections for materials used in making nuclear weapons. The third stage would dismantle atomic bombs, transfer their fissile material to peaceful nuclear power plants, and help ensure that the future production of fissile material be used solely for peaceful purposes.2

Bush’s goals, however, did not include a ban on the bomb. “We also want to have atomic bombs and to be in a clear position to use them promptly, if there is any chance that our enemy has them,” Bush wrote to Secretary of States James Byrnes. “Hence our program toward international understanding should involve no premature ‘outlawing of the bomb,’ which is a dangerous phrase.” Bush believed that a determined state would be able to make an atomic bomb and thus found any nuclear prohibition futile. What needed to be outlawed in the atomic age, he argued, was not the weapons that waged war, but war itself.3

With all fissile material stored in “bar form” for use in nuclear power plants, Bush looked to prevent any surprise nuclear attack. The time it would take to divert fissile material from nuclear power plants into weaponized form, he reasoned, would provide ample warning. Yet, Bush was not prepared to forgo the ability to make that transfer. “The cost of this step to us is merely that it would make the material unavailable for atomic bombs without a period of preparation,” Bush assured Byrnes.4 It meant the United States would maintain a latent nuclear weapons capability and be able to reconstitute an atomic arsenal in a time of need.

Bush led the creation of the joint statement the three leaders issued at the conclusion of the summit. The so-called Washington Declaration dealt a blow to a ban on the bomb in varied ways. It claimed that no nation should possess an atomic monopoly, a means of assurance to the UK of an Anglo-American atomic partnership. It also held that “no system of safeguards that can be devised will of itself provide an effective guarantee against production of atomic weapons by a nation bent on aggression.” In other words, any nuclear ban seemed unenforceable. Finally, the declaration called for the creation of the UNAEC, which would make proposals for the elimination of atomic bombs, not as a category of weapon but from national armaments. Some thought this stipulation meant that an international authority, perhaps the UN, might wield a nuclear arsenal. Overall, one informed source claimed the Washington Declaration looked to avoid the “spurious security” of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact that failed to outlaw war.5

Serving the Security Council

To make the Washington Declaration’s call for the UNAEC a reality, the United States required Soviet support. In December 1945, the Soviet Union agreed on the condition that the UNAEC serve under the UN Security Council. This arrangement would give the permanent members of the Security Council and Canada veto power over any action by the UNAEC.6

With language taken directly from the Washington Declaration, Resolution 1(I) passed unanimously on January 24, 1946, but it hardly constituted a “collective delegitimization” of nuclear weapons.7 The New York Times noted that the General Assembly adopted the resolution “without even a serious attempt to analyze what it meant. The general attitude was that members could not change it without antagonizing the powers that controlled the atomic secrets, so they did not try.”8 Feeble protests, though, had emerged. Mexico called to adjourn the General Assembly to seek further clarification. The Philippines argued that the question of atomic energy was “so transcendental that there should be full discussion” and reprimanded the great powers for their attempt to “railroad the matter through.”9 Nevertheless, the great powers ensured that the resolution passed in a “swift, businesslike manner.”10

By placing the UNAEC under the UN Security Council, the resolution stripped the General Assembly’s small and medium-sized members of power to steer the world’s nuclear fate. The injustice was not lost on Philippine delegate Pedro Lopez, who declared that the resolution “would result in embarrassing, instead of glorifying, this Assembly.” As Lopez asked his counterparts in vivid terms, “If this text is adopted, should we not find ourselves in the same awkward predicament as a woman who gave life to a child and yet was not permitted to fondle it, nor to direct the course of its upbringing in accordance with the image of her ideal, or even to see the child? Would you conceive of a God who was impotent to give our fates and destinies any guiding direction after having created us?”11

Within months, the United States and Soviet Union doomed the UNAEC with dueling plans for nuclear disarmament. Faced with perpetual deadlock, the UNAEC became inactive by the end of the decade and dissolved shortly thereafter.

Trouble for the TPNW?

The loopholes and inequities Resolution 1(I) looked to exploit are obstacles the TPNW must overcome. The TPNW calls for the “irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons,” but the threat of nuclear latency, which Bush guarded against and relied on, remains. A 1997 report by the National Academy of Sciences predicted that even after all nuclear weapons had been eliminated, a score of states “could in a national emergency produce a dozen simple fission weapons in as little as a few months, even if no effort had been made to maintain this capability.”12 A more recent study published by the Wilson Center concurs. “In a world of greatly reduced or zero nuclear weapons, latency would create high levels of crisis and arms race instability. Latency might enable states to rapidly reverse their disarmament activity.”13 The TPNW offers no solution to this vexing problem, and some argue that it must prohibit “nuclear-weapons usable materials for any purpose” to meet the danger.14

The TPNW also calls on a “competent international authority” to enforce its mission, but it must avoid the power imbalance found with the subjugation of the UNAEC to the Security Council. The International Atomic Energy Agency is set to play a major role in TPNW verification, but the great powers designed and dominate its operation. Perhaps the creation of a parallel body under the TPNW composed of UN employees and a diverse cadre of independent experts would offer a solution.15

Proponents of the TPNW find one of its greatest contributions to be normative. They believe the TPNW, negotiated by more than 120 non-nuclear-weapon states of the General Assembly and civil society groups, will stigmatize and delegitimize nuclear weapons enough to change the behavior of nuclear-armed states and their allies. Its bottom-up push for a global ban on the bomb exceeds the intent behind Resolution 1(I), but supporters must beware the pitfalls of Resolution 1(I) that remain.

ENDNOTES

1. UN General Assembly, “Establishment of a Commission to Deal With the Problems Raised by the Discovery of Atomic Energy,” A/RES/1(I), January 24, 1946.

2. Vannevar Bush to James Byrnes, memorandum, November 5, 1945, in Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1945, General: Political and Economic Matters, Volume II, doc. 26, pp. 69–73, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v02/d26.

3. Ibid.

4. Vannevar Bush and L.R. Groves to James Byrnes, memorandum, November 9, 1945, in Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1945, General: Political and Economic Matters, Volume II, doc. 27, p. 74, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v02/d27.

5. Paul W. Ward, “U.S., Britain and Canada Propose UNO Establish Group to Design Guards,” The Baltimore Sun, November 16, 1945, p. 1.

6. Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko, The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 105.

7. Nina Tannenwald, Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 101.

8. James Reston, “UNO Adopts Plan for Atom Control by Unanimous Vote,” The New York Times, January 25, 1946, pp. 1, 3.

9. Sydney Gruson, “UNO Unit Adopts Bomb Resolution,” The New York Times, January 22, 1946, p. 4.

10. Sydney Gruson, “Atom Commission Has a Hard Task,” The New York Times, January 27, 1946, p. E5.

11. Record of the seventeenth UN General Assembly plenary meeting, January 24, 1946, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/482340/files/A_PV-17-EN.pdf.

12. Committee on International Security and Arms Control, National Academy of Sciences, The Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997), p. 97.

13. Joseph F. Pilat, ed., “Nuclear Latency and Hedging: Concepts, History, and Issues,” Wilson Center, September 2019, p. 7, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/book/nuclear_latency_and_hedging_-_concepts_history_and_issues.pdf.

14. Zia Mian, Tamara Patton, and Alexander Glaser, “Addressing Verification in the Nuclear Ban Treaty,” Arms Control Today, June 2017, pp. 14–22.

15. Tamara Patton, Sébastien Philippe, and Zia Mian, “Fit for Purpose: An Evolutionary Strategy for the Implementation and Verification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2019, pp. 397–404.


Ryan A. Musto is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

Approved 75 years ago, UN Resolution 1(I) illustrated challenges still facing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

The NPT in 1995: The Terms for Indefinite Extension


May 2020
By Daryl G. Kimball and Randy Rydell

The fifth review conference of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), held from April to May 1995, like previous review conferences sought to assess implementation and compliance with the treaty’s obligations and to explore ways to address shortcomings.

The 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference opened on April 17, 1995, with remarks from (left to right): Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, conference president Jayantha Dhanapala of Sri Lanka, and conference secretary general Prvoslav Davinic of the former Yugoslavia. (Photo: Evan Schneider/UN)The 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference also had another formal purpose. Article X of the NPT called for a conference of states-parties to be held 25 years after the treaty’s entry into force in order “to decide whether the [t]reaty shall continue in force indefinitely, or shall be extended for an additional fixed period or periods.”

Although the treaty provided that the extension would be determined by a majority vote, the parties felt that such a key decision should, if possible, be reached by consensus. Achieving that consensus proved to be one of the most difficult challenges in the history of multilateral diplomacy.1

The 1995 conference began with considerable uncertainty regarding the nature of any extension. Non-nuclear-weapon states, particularly developing countries belonging to the Nonaligned Movement, expressed disappointment with the lack of progress toward nuclear disarmament and feared that a decision to extend the treaty indefinitely would by default enable the nuclear-armed states to hold on to their nuclear arsenals in perpetuity and avoid any accountability in eliminating them.

At the conference, Indonesia and South Africa proposed tying the treaty’s indefinite extension to a decision to strengthen the treaty review process. They also linked it to the establishment of a set of principles and objectives on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament to hold NPT states-parties, particularly the nuclear-weapon states, accountable to their commitments. Although only a majority of states-parties was required to approve the indefinite extension, the agreed package of decisions obtained enough support that such a vote was not required. In short, there was a consensus that a majority existed for the indefinite extension.

The “Package Deal”

The conference resulted in three decisions and a resolution that the parties heralded as a “package deal.” The integrated nature of the package deal—a feature insisted upon by Indonesia, South Africa, and many other states—gave the review process a sharper focus and clarified its ends. Certain positive steps by the nuclear-weapon states before the conference, including a consistent pattern of strong U.S. support for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), likely contributed to the successful outcome.

Decision 1—Strengthening the Review Process

This decision provided for five-year review conferences, each preceded by three sessions of a Preparatory Committee of states-parties. These conferences would have three main committees, which could have “subsidiary bodies” on specific issues. It also clarified that in the future the review process would examine “principles, objectives, and ways,” including those in Decision 2, and would “look forward as well as back.” As Canadian Ambassador Christopher Westdal put it, the goal was “permanence with accountability.”

Decision 2—Principles and Objectives

The second decision set forth some “principles and objectives” for assessing progress in the following areas: universality; nonproliferation; disarmament; nuclear-weapon-free zones; security assurances; safeguards; and the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

For example, the decision laid out a “program of action” for disarmament, including:

  • the completion of negotiations on the CTBT by September 1996;
  • negotiations on a fissile materials treaty;
  • the “determined pursuit” by the nuclear-weapon states of “systematic and progressive efforts” to reduce nuclear arsenals; and
  • “further steps” to assure non-nuclear-weapon states-parties against the threat of nuclear attack.

Five years later at the 2000 NPT Review Conference, states parties went a few steps further, setting forth 13 “practical steps” relating to disarmament.2 The 2010 NPT Review Conference adopted a consensus final document that identified 22 agreed “Actions” to pursue nuclear disarmament.3

At the 1995 conference, states-parties also clarified that the treaty’s “inalienable right” to peaceful uses of nuclear energy must be applied “in conformity with Articles I, II as well as III of the [t]reaty,” which relate to nonproliferation and compliance with International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. They expanded support for the principle that new nuclear “supply arrangements” should require full-scope IAEA safeguards “as a necessary precondition” (i.e., safeguards over all nuclear materials of the importing, non-nuclear-weapon state). India and Pakistan—both NPT nonparties—had been seeking to avoid this precondition, which was later ignored by many nuclear supplier states after the U.S. initiative in 2005 to allow for expanded nuclear cooperation with India.

Decision 3—Indefinite Extension

The crucial third decision was based on a simple declaratory statement that, “as a majority exists” among the parties to extend the treaty indefinitely, the treaty shall continue in force indefinitely. The decision’s preamble contained language “emphasizing” the other decisions, which further affirmed the linkages in the package deal.

Resolution on the Middle East

The last key component of the package deal was the Resolution on the Middle East, which, inter alia, endorsed the creation of a Middle Eastern “zone free of nuclear weapons as well as other weapons of mass destruction,” (WMD) including “their delivery systems.” The NPT’s indefinite extension without a vote would not have been possible without addressing this issue—a long-standing goal of the Arab states and many other parties.

A quarter-century later, global support for the NPT is strong, but its long-term viability cannot be taken for granted, especially if the agreed goals and objectives from 1995 are not achieved.

ENDNOTES

1. Portions of this summary include excerpts from Rydell’s article “Looking Back: The 1995 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review and Extension Conference,” in the April 2005 issue of Arms Control Today. See also Jayantha Dhanapala and Randy Rydell, Multilateral Diplomacy and the NPT: An Insider’s Account (UNIDIR, 2005), https://www.unidir.org/publication/multilateral-diplomacy-and-npt-insiders-account.

2. See https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt2000/final-documents

3. See https://www.un.org/en/conf/npt/2010/


Daryl G. Kimball is executive director of the Arms Control Association. Randy Rydell serves on the Arms Control Association board and is a former senior adviser to the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs.

 

The fifth NPT review conference was pivotal to the treaty’s legacy.

Recalling the Senate Review of New START


October 2019
By Brian P. McKeon 

Nearly a decade ago, the U.S. Senate approved the ratification of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which limits deployed strategic weapons and launchers possessed by the United States and Russia. With 71 senators voting in favor, it was a rare act of bipartisanship in Washington. Key to this cross-party support was a commitment by President Obama to modernize aging nuclear warhead production facilities in the Department of Energy. Some observers believed a consensus had emerged in favor both of arms control and “nuclear modernization” that would provide a period of stability in nuclear policy-making.1 That promise appears to be fading, and a review of the 2010 ratification process could serve the current president and Congress.

U.S. President Barack Obama (left) and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev prepare  to sign the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in Prague on April 8, 2010.  (Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)New START expires in February 2021, and the Trump administration has suggested it will let it lapse to pursue a more ambitious agreement involving the United States, Russia, and China. At a July 2019 congressional hearing on U.S.-Russian arms control, not a single Republican member voiced support for extending New START.2 Many Democrats in Congress are concerned that the Trump administration made insufficient efforts to preserve the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty before withdrawing from it in response to Russia’s violations of the agreement, oppose the new low-yield nuclear weapon requested by the president, and wonder whether current plans to sustain and modernize the nuclear deterrent, with costs projected to exceed $1 trillion in the next three decades, are affordable.3

The consensus was always fragile. Perhaps its fraying was inevitable, but it is worth recalling the events that brought a moment of bipartisan harmony in nuclear policy-making.

The linkage between modernization and New START was made before the treaty was concluded. In the fiscal year 2010 National Defense Authorization Act, Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) authored a provision requiring the administration to provide a nuclear weapons plan to Congress when the treaty was submitted to the Senate, to include 10-year budget projections on “the plan to: (1) enhance the safety, security and reliability of the nuclear weapons stockpile of the United States; (2) modernize the nuclear weapons complex; and (3) maintain the delivery platforms for nuclear weapons.”4

Senior Obama administration officials soon joined the debate. In January 2010, Vice President Joe Biden previewed the president’s budget in a commentary in The Wall Street Journal. Noting the warning of the Strategic Posture Commission, chaired by former secretaries of defense William Perry and James Schlesinger, which in 2009 lamented the deterioration of the weapons complex, Biden wrote that the proposed budget “both reverses this decline and enables [the administration] to implement the president’s nuclear security agenda.”5 In a speech the following month, he argued that these investments were “not only consistent with our nonproliferation agenda; [they are] essential to it. Guaranteeing our stockpile, coupled with broader research and development efforts, allows us to pursue deep nuclear reductions without compromising our security.”6 The president’s budget requested a nearly 10 percent increase for the weapons activities of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)—raising it to $7 billion—and an increase of more than $5 billion over a five-year period.

In the report of the Nuclear Posture Review, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates took a similar tack. He wrote that funds he transferred to the Department of Energy for weapons work would allow the United States to sustain and support its nuclear deterrent while enabling future arms control reductions by “allowing us to hedge against future threats without the need for a large non-deployed stockpile.”7

Twice in 2010, while New START was under Senate consideration, the Obama administration reported on proposed investments for the weapons complex. The first report in May promised some $80 billion over 10 years.8 The second, submitted in November at the behest of Kyl, pledged another $5 billion over the ensuing decade, for a total of $85 billion.9

To push the treaty across the finish line, the president put his full weight behind the budget promises. Two days before the Senate vote on the treaty, Obama pledged to four key senators on the Appropriations Committee that he “recognize[d] that nuclear modernization requires investment for the long-term. That is my commitment to the Congress—that my administration will pursue these programs and capabilities for as long as I am president.”10 The president’s personal assurance achieved its purpose: 12 Republican senators joined 59 Democrats to approve the treaty’s ratification.

What did both sides gain? Kyl, who ultimately opposed the treaty, and other Senate Republicans succeeded in leveraging the treaty to secure long-term commitments designed to restore the health of the Energy Department enterprise. During much of 2010, Kyl was able to persuade Republican senators to stay neutral on the treaty, forcing the administration to deal with him. For its part, the administration gained progress on a central pillar of the president’s ambitious nuclear weapons agenda, which he had outlined in April 2009. He was able to do so consistent with that vision, which called for the “peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” but also promised that as long as nuclear weapons existed, the United States would “maintain and safe, secure and effective arsenal.”11

The bipartisan compromise advanced strategic stability and the health of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. New START remains in effect, with the United States and Russia abiding by its limits, and both taking full advantage of the verification regime. The nuclear complex enjoyed a decade of relative stability in funding. Although the Budget Control Act in 2011 slowed the rate of budget increases for a time, since 2010 the NNSA weapons budget has increased by more than 60 percent and is on track to receive more during fiscal years 2011–2020 than originally promised by the Obama administration.12

The current administration would do well to consider this history and the continued importance of linking arms control and nuclear modernization. Supporters of arms control will surely be reluctant to buy into a long-term nuclear modernization plan that does not involve a realistic plan for mutual restraint between the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals, namely the United States and Russia. At the same time, supporters of the nuclear deterrent should appreciate the benefits of predictability and stability for the complicated undertaking that is the nuclear enterprise.

 

ENDNOTES
 

1. Whether there was an actual consensus is debatable, given that less than one-third of the Republican caucus—12 of 41 senators—voted for the Treaty.

2. Arms Control Association Board Chair Thomas Countryman and the author were witnesses at the hearing. U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, “Russia and Arms Control: Extending New START or Starting Over?” July 25, 2019, https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/hearings?ID=CC4C4917-AD41-4EF2-A99A-B2C69B2D7ECB.

3. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the cost of maintaining the nuclear deterrent and modernizing it over three decades would total $1.2 trillion in 2017 dollars, of which more than $800 billion would go to operate and sustain the nuclear forces and about $400 billion to modernize them. U.S. Congressional Budget Office, “Approaches for Managing the Cost of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2017-46,” October 2017, https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/reports/53211-nuclearforces.pdf.

4. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, Public Law 111-84, October 28, 2009, sec. 1251.

5. Joseph R. Biden Jr, “The President’s Nuclear Vision,” The Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2010.

6. Office of the Vice President, The White House, “Remarks of Vice President Biden at National Defense University,” February 18, 2010, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-vice-president-biden-national-defense-university.

7. Department of Defense, “Nuclear Posture Review Report,” April 2010, p. i, https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/features/defenseReviews/NPR/2010_Nuclear_Posture_Review_Report.pdf.

8. Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) sponsored the legislation that was eventually passed into law requiring this report. The report was classified, but the White House released an unclassified fact sheet. “The New START Treaty - Maintaining a Strong Nuclear Deterrent,” n.d., http://www.airforcemag.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/Reports/2010/May%202010/Day18/NewSTARTsection1251factsheet.pdf.

9. “November 2010 Update to the National Defense Authorization Act of FY 2010 Section 1251 Report: New START Treaty Framework and Nuclear Force Structure Plans,” n.d., https://www.lasg.org/budget/Sect1251_update_17Nov2010.pdf.

10. 156 Cong. Rec. S10850 (daily ed. Dec. 12, 2010) (letter from President Barack Obama to Sen. Lamar Alexander [R-Tenn.]).

11. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, “Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague as Delivered,” April 5, 2009, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-prague-delivered.

12. Kingston Reif and Shervin Taheran, “U.S.-Russian Arms Control Talks to Begin Amid Uncertainty,” Arms Control Association, May 24, 2019, https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2019-05-24/us-russian-nuclear-arms-control-watch-may-2019.

 


Brian P. McKeon is a senior director at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington. He served as deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden from 2009 to 2012. While in that position, he coordinated the administration’s efforts to seek Senate approval of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

The linkage between New START ratification and the modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal offers useful lessons for today.

The Wohlstetter-Warnke Debate in Foreign Policy


July/August 2019
By Paul S. Warnke

In 1974 and 1975, two influential Cold War nuclear strategists used the pages of the still-young journal Foreign Policy to debate how to achieve stability in the U.S.-Soviet nuclear rivalry. Their discourse contributed to the course policymakers followed for decades after and continues to have relevance today as U.S.-Russian arms control agreements appear to be on the rocks.

Foreign Policy, No. 18 (Spring 1975) courtesy Foreign Policy.In the summer of 1974, Albert Wohlstetter published a pair of articles in Foreign Policy that crystallized and fueled the national debate on nuclear policy. He challenged the conventional wisdom that the United States and Soviet Union were engaged in a nuclear arms race defined by overestimation and overreaction, as well as spiraling moves and countermoves. He asserted instead that the Soviet Union was rushing ahead while the United States ambled backward. A race, at least a fair one, requires matching paces. Yet, there can be no race, Wohlstetter wrote, “between parties moving in quite different directions.”1

Wohlstetter’s claims that the United States was ceding strategic ground to the Soviet Union sparked a lengthy debate in Foreign Policy. Prominent thinkers and policymakers defended and prosecuted his thesis. They disagreed on how to measure nuclear superiority, how much the United States could afford to spend on its nuclear arsenal, and the perils and possibilities of engaging in arms control with the Soviet Union.

Of all the rebuttals to Wohlstetter that the magazine published, one stands out for its approach and imagery. Paul C. Warnke, a former defense official in the administration of President Lyndon Johnson and a staunch arms controller, did not challenge Wohlstetter’s scholarship or conclusions. He argued that the entire premise of his article was wrong: vying for advantage in the nuclear arms competition was a senseless exercise. He likened the United States and Soviet Union to two “apes on a treadmill,” accumulating more and more nuclear weapons in the futile pursuit of nuclear superiority. In Warnke’s opinion, the arms competition resembled less a race in which the two rivals were running at different paces and in different directions. They were instead “jogging in tandem on a treadmill to nowhere.”2

The Backdrop

The debate in Foreign Policy came at a turning point in the U.S.-Soviet strategic relationship. U.S. President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had just signed the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) agreement, a landmark accord that severely constrained the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) capabilities of both countries and placed five-year limits on their offensive strategic forces. Still, the pact failed to prevent both sides from pressing ahead with their nuclear weapons ambitions. The Soviet Union continued to build a new generation of multiple-warhead, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that U.S. strategists feared could threaten the survivability of U.S. land-based missiles and give Moscow escalation dominance in a nuclear exchange. Meanwhile, the price for Senate approval of SALT I was an extensive U.S. modernization program.

‘Is There a Strategic Arms Race?’

In his article, Wohlstetter set out to debunk the myths of the nuclear arms race and in the process undermine SALT I and Nixon’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union.

Wohlstetter took issue with the lexicon of arms controllers, bristling at what he considered their hyperbolic claims that the superpowers’ arms competition was “accelerating” and “spiraling.”3 In his opinion, this reliance on metaphor had led to an imprecise portrayal of the U.S.-Soviet strategic relationship.

Paul C. Warnke (left), director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, meets with President Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office. (Photo: Courtesy Warnke family)Culling declassified data from U.S. intelligence reports between 1962 and 1972, Wohlstetter concluded that the United States had chronically underestimated the number of nuclear weapons the Soviet Union would deploy. Through a buildup of ICBMs and strategic bombers, the Soviet Union had been surging forward, moving quickly from a position of strategic inferiority to one of rough parity with the United States. Contrary to the rhetoric of arms controllers, Washington was not overreacting to these developments with countervailing moves. Wohlstetter contended that U.S. strategic programs were actually in decline, with spending on offensive forces insufficient to meet the growing Soviet threat. Taken together, these findings painted an ominous picture of the strategic reality: Moscow was setting a pace that Washington neglected to match.

Wohlstetter’s Foreign Policy articles carried profound implications for U.S. nuclear policy at a critical juncture. First, they questioned the wisdom of practicing restraint with an adversary that appeared bent on achieving strategic superiority. Second, the articles added greater urgency to modernization efforts. Improving Minuteman ICBM accuracy and procuring new submarine-launched ballistic missiles and bomber capabilities appeared imperative for providing adequate U.S. strategic strength.

Finally, Wohlstetter’s articles delivered a broadside against Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s policy of détente. The articles portrayed Kremlin leaders more intent on winning an arms competition than on imitating U.S. self-control.

‘Apes on a Treadmill’

Titling his Foreign Policy article “Apes on a Treadmill,” Warnke used a simple metaphor to dispute Wohlstetter. As Warnke saw it, the United States and Soviet Union were stuck in a “‘monkey see, monkey do’ phenomenon,” in which each side reciprocated the arms decisions of the other.4 The United States responded to Soviet moves toward ABM deployments in the mid-1960s by building its own ABM systems and deploying multiple warheads on its strategic missiles to overcome defensive systems. In turn, Moscow had begun to take similar steps.

This quest for some numerical or technological edge by either side was futile, Warnke said, arguing that losing a cosmetic lead was no cause for concern because nuclear weapons served merely as offsets, not as exploitable resources for military and political gain. He strove to discredit the central premise of Wohlstetter’s article and lay bare the impulses driving the arms race.

To suppress these basic impulses, Warnke offered a daring initiative. Instead of trying to match or surpass Soviet weapon advancements, the United States should initiate a “process of matching restraint,” whereby the two superpowers would undertake a series of informal, reciprocal actions to uphold strategic stability.5 He proposed that the United States suspend many of its modernization programs. If Moscow responded by freezing its own strategic arms buildup, Washington could continue with further moderating steps. Warnke’s article ended where it started, with a metaphor: “We can be first off the treadmill. That’s the only victory the arms race has to offer.”6

Conclusion

The Wohlstetter-Warnke debate holds particular resonance for today. The United States and Russia are undertaking extensive modernization programs, refurbishing each leg of their nuclear triads and building new, exotic capabilities. As the two emphasize the role of low-yield, nonstrategic forces, nuclear weapons become instruments of statecraft with perceived military and political value. The arms control architecture is crumbling under this weight.

The visceral fear of falling behind, which Wohlstetter translated into mathematical proofs, has gained traction in the debate. The United States and Russia are striving to find an edge in their strategic competition as each develops capabilities to match or surpass the other, within and outside the parameters of existing arms control agreements. In this climate of heightened competition and suspicion, Warnke’s calls for reciprocating restraint are at risk of falling on deaf ears.

Looking back at the Wohlstetter-Warnke exchange in Foreign Policy may not resolve the complex issues of nuclear policy, but it throws them into sharp relief. In doing so, it raises the important question of whether the United States and Russia can afford to take bold initiatives and pursue mutual restraint in the name of strategic stability. Or as Warnke wrote in Foreign Policy, are the two forever doomed to continue “the solemn jog on the treadmill”?7

 

ENDNOTES

1. Albert Wohlstetter, “Is There a Strategic Arms Race? (II): Rivals but No ‘Race’” Foreign Policy, No. 16 (Autumn 1974), pp. 79–80.

2. Paul C. Warnke, “Apes on a Treadmill,” Foreign Policy, No. 18 (Spring 1975), p. 13.

3. Wohlstetter, “Is There a Strategic Arms Race?” Foreign Policy, No. 15 (Summer 1974), p. 4.

4. Warnke, “Apes on a Treadmill,” p. 15.

5. Ibid., p. 28.

6. Ibid., p. 29.

7. Ibid., p. 17.


Paul S. Warnke is a congressional nuclear security fellow for Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and the grandson of Paul C. Warnke. This article is adapted from his honors thesis for his master’s degree from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

 

Albert Wohlstetter and Paul C. Warnke squared off in the pages of Foreign Policy nearly 45 years ago, framing an arms control debate that continues today.

‘The Day After’: The Arms Control Association’s Forgotten Role


March 2019
By Greg Webb

Forty years ago, the Arms Control Association may have played an embryonic role in the most influential U.S. cultural event to inform Americans of the horrors of nuclear war.

Reprinted courtesy Tampa Bay Times. In late 1978, editors at the Florida's St. Petersburg Times newspaper decided to run a large feature on the effects of a nuclear blast. Knowing little about the technical aspects of such an event, they sought guidance.

They found association Executive Director William Kincade, who enlisted freelance journalist Nan Randall to help write a fictional account of a nuclear warhead exploding over St. Petersburg. The four-day article ran in the St. Petersburg Times starting Feb. 25, 1979.

The Association was a “tremendous, tremendous help in those pre-internet days,” recalled Frank Peters, the newspaper’s graphic artist who prepared the article’s many color illustrations.

Randall’s experience drew the attention of the now-defunct Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), and the federal scientific advisory agency enlisted her to write a similar account focused on the effects of a nuclear attack on Virginia and Washington, D.C.  for an annex to the May 1979 OTA report “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.” Randall's story was titled "Charlottesville."

Soon after, Stanford University physicist Michael Riordan was seeking projects for a small publishing house he managed. He spoke with his university colleague Sidney Drell, an association director from 1978 to 1994, who recommended he look at the OTA report.

Riordan edited and reorganized the report, leading off with Randall’s story, and published the book in 1982 to immediate acclaim just as the Nuclear Freeze movement was peaking with millions of supporters protesting the nuclear arms race.

“The book was in response to people wondering about the consequences of President Ronald Reagan’s interest in new nuclear weapons,” Riordan told Arms Control Today.

It was titled The Day After Midnight.

Randall's appendix to the OTA report, “Charlottesville, ” also caught the attention of the director and writer who was tapped to create an ABC-TV docu-drama on the human consequences of nuclear conflict titled The Day After.

When it was broadcast the evening of November 20, 1983, The Day After drew some 100 million viewers, then a record audience for a made-for-television movie. ABC followed up the broadcast with a live-televised town hall discussion featuring then-Secretary of State George Shultz, astronomer Carl Sagan, and former Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara.

The movie boosted public awareness of the risks of nuclear war and demanded the attention of policy makers to take action to reduce the danger. President Reagan watched and was moved.

In 1987, when the United States concluded the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan sent a telegram to the director: “Don’t think your movie didn’t have any part of this, because it did.”

Reflecting back on the St. Petersburg Times series, the OTA report, and The Day After, Riordan said, “I’d like to think there was chain of causation, but I can’t prove that.”Unquestionably, depictions of the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons use have profoundly affected public perceptions of the risks of nuclear war.

Did Arms Control Association leaders play a seminal role in the production of the made-for-television film ‘The Day After’?

Memo: Clinton and Yeltsin on the Nuclear ‘Football’


November 2018

U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, during their March 1997 summit in Helsinki, discussed over dinner their common burden of having an always-close-by nuclear “football,” a briefcase containing documents and communications gear necessary to initiate nuclear war.

As described in a recently declassified U.S. memorandum, the two leaders compared experiences of having briefly surrendered nuclear authority while undergoing medical operations. Clinton talked about the U.S. procedures for passing power temporarily to the vice president. Yeltsin recalls that, at the time of his 1996 heart surgery, he briefly passed authority, and his nuclear briefcase, to Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

The following is an excerpt from the official U.S. memorandum of conversation, released by the Clinton Presidential Library, in which Yeltsin jokes about the brief handoff to the prime minister:

President Yeltsin: Chernomyrdin did not have very long to play with these toys.

The President: Well let's hope none of us ever have to play too much with those toys.

President Yeltsin: I have actually taken part in an exercise with the Russian “football” at one point that involved launching a warhead onto the Kamchatka Peninsula.

(The President then describes the plot of the movie “Crimson Tide” and how it has demonstrated some of the dangers of being on a nuclear-hair trigger, although he says his people have told him that the plot of “Crimson Tide” could not actually happen.)

President Yeltsin: What if we were to give up having to have our finger next to the button all the time? We have plenty of other ways of keeping in touch with each other. They always know where to find us, so perhaps we could agree that it is not necessary for us to carry the chemodanchik (Russian term for their equivalent of the “football”).

The President: Well, I'll have to think about this. All we carry, of course, are the codes and the secure phone.

President Yeltsin: Yes, you and I are the only leaders who have to do this.

(The President calls on [U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe] Talbott to comment.)

Talbott: Mr. President, given the responsibilities of your office and President Yeltsin's, it makes more sense for the two of you to have these devices with you at all times rather than to have the function assigned to a computer somewhere or to anyone else.

The President: Well, if we do the right thing in the next four years, maybe we won't have to think as much about this problem. This issue of nuclear reduction is very important. If we were able to get to the place where our successors could go even lower than 2,000 nuclear weapons on all sides, then we would have to come to some understanding with the Chinese and the Indians and others, because it's absolutely crazy for countries as poor as those to have to waste so much money on nuclear weapons.

(It was on that subject that the dinner ended.)

In a recently declassified U.S memorandum, U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin discussed their common burden of having an always-close-by nuclear “football.”

The Nonproliferation Treaty Review Process: Major Milestones and the Way Forward


September 2018
By Thomas Markram

My first encounter with the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was 30 years ago when I joined a meeting held in August in Vienna between the South African foreign and mineral affairs ministers and the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and United States. The purpose of that meeting was to explore how South Africa could join the NPT. The answer from the depositaries was simple: South Africa could join without nuclear weapons.

Thomas Markram, deputy to the UN high representative for disarmament affairs, briefs the Security Council April 4 on the situation in Syria. (Photo: Manuel Elias/United Nations)Much has been written on the reasons why South Africa joined the NPT in July 1991. Most acknowledge there were in fact a combination of factors.

Geopolitically, under the 1988 Brazzaville Protocol, the Soviet-aligned Cuban forces withdrew from Angola, thereby ending what had been the security rationale for a nuclear deterrent. The top levels of the South African apartheid government had accepted that long-term security would be better assured through the abolition of nuclear weapons. South African President F.W. de Klerk had in fact regarded nuclear weapons as a “rope around our neck.” The years between the dismantlement of the program in 1991 and its disclosure in 1993 were marked by a delicate balancing act by the political leadership in South Africa, seeking to prevent a conservative backlash while undertaking serious fundamental reforms in a transition to a full democracy and obtaining reacceptance into the international community.

Important voices in the African National Congress and anti-apartheid movement had long campaigned against the regime’s nuclear weapons program. The new democratic government in 1994 was keen to demonstrate that South Africa was a responsible possessor of advanced technologies. Its disarmament and nonproliferation policy thus was integral to its commitment to democracy, human rights, sustainable development, social justice and environmental protection. These dynamics also shaped South Africa’s position within the NPT.

Another critical dynamic was the international environment, which, at the time when the treaty was negotiated, was very different than when South Africa joined, in the same review cycle that the treaty was due to expire. According to an account of the negotiations and early implementation, the 1.0 version of the NPT was primarily an affair between the nuclear blocs and about managing the dynamics of the Cold War. It put a brake on further proliferation to give political space for negotiations among the major powers on the arms race and disarmament. This version of the treaty featured a weak safeguards regime, as was eventually discovered in 1991 in Iraq, and a permissive arrangement for nuclear weapons cooperation among allies.

Nonproliferation was never meant as an end in itself, but rather the treaty was conceived as a partial measure for nuclear disarmament and for general and complete disarmament. Between 1970 and the mid-1990s, UN bodies and bilateral negotiations produced a substantial range of agreements aimed at halting the arms race, reducing nuclear arsenals, and strengthening nonproliferation. The treaty’s review process served to support progress in these various efforts.

Beginning in 1995, the review process took on a very different function. NPT version 2.0 became a framework for disarmament and nonproliferation. The negotiations that South Africa joined in 1995 regarding the extension of the treaty were very much between the nuclear-weapon states and the non-nuclear-weapon states.

It was in this context that South African Foreign Minister Alfred Nzo proposed at the review and extension conference the “Principles for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament” and “Strengthened Review Process.” These proposals provided the means through which progress toward achieving nuclear disarmament could be achieved and provided yardsticks to accomplish the goals of the treaty. They formed an integral part of the package deal of three decisions and resolution adopted in 1995 and formed the basis on which the treaty was extended indefinitely.

Under the strengthened review process, the NPT evolved into a de facto negotiating forum for nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. Its function in this regard has only been reinforced by the long stalemates in the Conference on Disarmament and the Disarmament Commission. Subsequent review conferences reached agreement on specific steps designed to lead to the full implementation of the treaty, especially Article VI.

In this sense, the review conferences have functioned as more than a mere safety valve designed to vent pressure from parties disgruntled over the pace of progress. They have served as the primary multilateral body within the framework of the United Nations for elaborating agreement between the nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states.

The agreed outcomes in 1995, 2000, and 2010 were quite distinct from the political declarations of 1975 and 1985. From 1995 onward, states-parties viewed NPT outcomes as politically binding agreements that should be fully and faithfully implemented, which is where the strengthened review process of the treaty has run into real difficulty. In a sense, the 13 “practical steps” of 2000 simply gave substance to the principles and objectives of 1995.

Yet, there continued to be a sense among many parties that too little had been done to implement these agreements in the 15 years following the indefinite extension of the treaty. The 2010 action plan was a remarkable achievement by providing a well-articulated road map for implementation, albeit mostly of past commitments, and the 2015 review conference ultimately failed at continuing this scenario because the parties were unable to agree on benchmarks and timelines.

Nevertheless, 25 years after the indefinite extension, we have perhaps reached a point where even successful efforts to describe old commitments in more granular levels of detail cannot make up for divisions resulting from perceptions of insufficient implementation and their pace. This is perhaps the largest political factor that led nearly two-thirds of member-states to conclude the nuclear weapons prohibition treaty last year.

Ultimately, this leaves us with the question, What is next for the strengthened review process?

The nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation regime is facing stress and pressure from all sides. Unlike when the NPT was negotiated, we now have to contend with multiple spheres of power and influence; a growing multiplicity of interests, conflicts, and asymmetries; and disarmament machinery hobbled by archaic rules and practices. Rapid technological progress is also lowering political costs for the use of force, tempting states and nonstates to conduct hostile and malicious acts in circumstances that they regard as a grey area in the law and blurring the line between strategic and nonstrategic weapons.

These trends point to a real risk that norms of disarmament, nonproliferation, and common security may give in to what seems like a growing acquiescence for military solutions to international problems. These dynamics are also serving to increase the nuclear risks we face and should compel the pursuit of new measures with a sense of urgency.

So do we need an NPT version 3.0? If so, what would that look like, and how would it function?

On its surface, nothing appears to be wrong with the mechanism, especially as review conferences have succeeded in forging agreements even where less inclusive bodies such as the Conference on Disarmament have continuously failed. Thankfully, the current crossroads at which the NPT finds itself do not reflect any waning commitment to the objective of nonproliferation. It appears that the NPT will remain indispensable and its historical significance at being nothing less than the system of international security at the heart of the United Nations will continue in ensuring no conflict can escalate to the level of an existential threat to humanity.

In this sense, I have no doubt that the legacy of the NPT can continue to endure long into the future. It is the most universal body seized with elaborating effective measures relating to disarmament. It also contains the only treaty-based obligation to negotiate in good faith to this end. Thus, it represents the only forum where non-nuclear-weapon states have any effective leverage in bargaining directly with the nuclear-weapon states.

Although many characterize the 2015 review conference as a failure, I see it instead as a watershed because its result reinforced the perception among a majority of non-nuclear-weapon states that they can bring pressure to bear through various means in the absence of demonstrable steps by the nuclear-weapon states to implement previous commitments.

Reversing this trend will necessitate a return to the traditional conception of the role of disarmament as the ultimate security assurance. This will require states to come back to treating the obligation to pursue negotiations on nuclear disarmament as an obligation to achieve a result, not as an open-ended invitation to retain nuclear weapons. This is the distinction between making progress “in” disarmament, as opposed to progress “toward” disarmament.

It will require, at a minimum, an unequivocal recommitment by the nuclear-weapon states to their obligations and a serious demonstration of serious progress in implementing past commitments. I think this will be a key factor in ensuring the legacy of the NPT can be preserved for another 50 years.


Thomas Markram is director and deputy to the high representative for disarmament affairs, UN Office for Disarmament Affairs. This article is adapted from remarks at the U.S. Department of State conference titled “Preserving the Legacy: NPT Depositary Conference on the 50th Anniversary of the Opening for Signature of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” held June 28 in Washington. The views expressed are those of the author.

The nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation regime is facing stress and pressure from all sides.

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