Four appendices offer important context. Appendix 1 discusses how the imaginations of novelists and filmmakers swayed the public via scenarios starkly at odds with nuclear-age realities. Appendix 2 discusses the tightening of control over nuclear weapons since 1945. Appendix 3 discusses intelligence failures regarding strategic arms deployment. Appendix 4 discusses nuances of the complex relationships between missile defensive and offensive weaponry.
This book assembles in one place an integrated picture of what lessons history and strategic thinking offer us to confront today’s nuclear threats. They are lessons we are well advised to absorb, and to apply to evolving events and threats today and in the future.
1.
THE RUSH TO NUCLEAR ZERO: COURTING CATASTROPHE
So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, “Yes, we can.”
SINCE NEWS OF THE TWIN ATOMIC BOMBINGS THAT ENDED THE SECOND World War first hit front pages around the world, the cause of abolishing nuclear weapons has resonated with millions. A visit to the Los Alamos “Trinity” test site, where the first atomic bomb exploded, offers mute testament to the vast scale of man-made destruction unleashed two-thirds of a century ago: the three-foot-high remnant of the 100-foot tower that cradled the massive, ungainly device; the ground littered with tiny shards of “trinitite,” also called “Alamogordo glass.” The explosion instantly fused the sand around the tower base into a green-gray glass that sparkles in the sun—and that emits radioactive alpha and beta particles. One site visit will give visitors about half the radiation dosage they would get from a transcontinental plane flight. A brown rock obelisk, about twice the average height of an adult, marks the spot where the world was changed forever.
Beginning with President Harry S. Truman, every American president has expressed a desire to see the world rid once and for all of nuclear weapons. All have stated that it is a goal unlikely to be achieved anytime soon. But on February 15, 2012—less than three years after President Obama joined his predecessors in cautioning that nuclear abolition is a faraway goal—“perhaps not in my lifetime”—anonymous senior administration officials leaked a “trial balloon.” The Obama administration was considering three levels of arms cuts beyond those already slated in the 2010 New START Accord, down to far lower nuclear force levels than 2009’s total stockpile of 5,133 warheads. The three target level ranges leaked were 1,000–1,100, 700–800, and 300–400.
It is evident that President Obama desires to push America’s nuclear arsenal as low as possible, to levels near those he had originally said might be decades away. He gave the reasons in his April 5, 2009, Prague address:
The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. No nuclear war was fought between the United States and the Soviet Union, but generations lived with the knowledge that their world could be erased in a single flash of light….
[T]he threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold….
Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped…. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.
…[W]e must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. And… as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.
Obama views himself as a transformational president. And in national security what could be more transformational than ending the world’s post-1945 nuclear nightmare? The New START Treaty, ratified in December 2010, and the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit are cited as examples of success in the direction of nuclear zero. But New START was a unilateral U.S. strategic arms-reduction agreement, as the Russians were already below treaty limits. Under the treaties to which they are signatories, the Russians can actually build newer, more modern missiles and add to their arsenal; they are in fact doing so, testing several models. New START’s verification provisions are far more limited than those in the treaty it replaced (the Bush Moscow Treaty of 2002). As for the Nuclear Security Summit, its participants paid more attention to Israel for its arsenal than they did to North Korea for having exited the Nonproliferation Treaty and joined the nuclear club.
Abolitionism cannot surmount several immense obstacles. First, hostile states will not only decline to follow our good example; they will be induced to increase their arsenals, which become more valuable as our arsenal shrinks—100 nukes in Pakistan matter much more in a world in which the U.S. has the same number than in a world in which the U.S. has a few thousand. This behavior runs counter to the psychology of civilized people who see nuclear weapons as being for deterrence only, but a nuclear Iran eager to destroy the Great Satan (U.S.) and Little Satan (Israel) will think differently.
Consider what the Soviets did in the 11 months between the November 1985 Geneva Summit and the October 1986 Reykjavik Summit. In that short span they capped off their 25-year strategic buildup by adding over 5,000 warheads, topping out at some 45,000 warheads—this despite the U.S. having frozen the total number of its warheads in 1967 at 31,255, and reducing them constantly since. Gorbachev did soon come around, as Russia’s economy imploded. But it is unrealistic to expect Iran’s fanatical mullahs to do the same. Pakistan’s increasingly Islamist leadership plans to double its arsenal as rapidly as possible.
A second obstacle to abolitionism is that verifying clandestine stockpiles of warheads and missiles is simply impossible at present and likely will remain so for a long time. We failed to find a dozen jet planes Saddam hid in the sands of Iraq, until after his overthrow. Concealing missiles and nuclear warheads deep underground would be, by comparison, child’s play.
China has been developing—and possibly concealing—new nuclear weapons. It revealed in December 2011 that it has built 3,000 miles of deep underground tunnels—called “the Underground Great Wall”—that may conceal an arsenal far larger than the 200 to 400 weapons China is commonly thought to possess. China has never divulged anything compatible to the extensive nuclear data that we have collected from the Russians over the past 20 years, and thus we can only guess at the size of its arsenal. A former U.S. national security official, Professor Phillip Karber, had students working for three years to compile all available data on the subject. Karber offered no specific China arsenal estimate. The data, official film footage on China’s bomb and missile programs, show huge missiles shuttling inside the tunnels. Prominent skeptics argue that current estimates are correct, citing CIA estimates of arsenal size and estimates of fissile material produced in China. But CIA nuclear intelligence estimates are often wrong. Given that Chinese leaders know they may someday face the United States in a western Pacific showdown, it defies strategic logic to assume that the massive across-the-board Chinese military buildup would exempt the most powerful class of weapons.