What is the purpose, if any, of the nuclear bomb, that brooding
presence that has shadowed all human life for sixty-five years? The
question has haunted the nuclear age. It may be that no satisfactory
answer has ever been given. Nuclear strategic thinking, in particular,
has disappointed. Many of its pioneers have wound up in a state of
something like despair regarding their art.
Now a new moment, full of fresh promise but also with novel perils, has
arrived in the nuclear story, and all the old questions have to be asked
again. As if responding to some secret signal sent out by a restless
zeitgeist, the globe is seething with events large and small in the
nuclear arena. Here in the United States, certainly, all the policy pots
on the nuclear stove are at a boil. The Obama administration recently
completed its overdue Nuclear Posture Review, a statement that Congress
requires of the president every four years on the disposition of the
country’s nuclear forces.
It gives the administration’s answer to the key questions: What nuclear
forces should the United States deploy? Why? What, if anything, does the
United States propose to do with them? The United States and Russia
this month signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START)
agreement, which will reduce warheads to 1,550 on each side and restrict
delivery vehicles to 800 apiece. This week, President Obama held a
Nuclear Security Summit with the heads of state of forty-seven other
nations to consider measures to prevent the diversion of nuclear weapon
materials into unauthorized hands. In early May will come the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which is a kind of nuclear
posture review for the entire world. Decisions on passage of the
long-rejected Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as well as a resurrected
Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty are also likely very soon.
The key question, of course, is whether the policies and actions will
meet the mounting perils of the new situation.
The Nuclear Surge
In a word, the nuclear predicament is coming of age, which is to say
that it is fulfilling a potential that every competent scientist has
known it possessed since the advent of the bomb in 1945: nuclear
technology, no longer the preserve of a few privileged powers, is
becoming available on a global basis. This is because of the simple but
decisive fact that the bomb is based on scientific knowledge, which is
in its nature unconfinable.
To say that the technology is becoming available to all, however, is not
to say that it is possessed by all or even that it will be. It means
only that if nations or others want it, they will be able to have it.
Japan, for example, does not have a nuclear bomb. But one is available
to Japan in short order if it so chooses. According to the State
Department, the bomb is thus available to some fifty other countries.
Of course, at a certain point, which may not be far off, availability,
if not possession, will spill beyond national confines and reach smaller
groups. At that point the political walls will have to be high and
strong indeed. Otherwise, a nuclear 9/11 may be upon us.
Obviously, any deliberate spread of nuclear technology, such as the
“renaissance” of nuclear power that has apparently begun, will only
accelerate the surge.
This underlying and irreversible pressure of availability is the
backdrop for today’s widespread and well-founded dread that
proliferation by just a few countries—above all, North Korea and
Iran—will push the world over what the International Commission on
Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, a group set up by the
Japanese and Australian governments, calls a “tipping point,”
precipitating a “cascade” of proliferation that will wash away the
current nuclear order.
The necessary conclusion is clear: proliferation can’t be stopped unless
possession is dealt with concurrently. In the seventh decade of the
nuclear age, the time for half-solutions is over. The head of state with
his finger on the button of some aging cold war arsenal, the head of
state itching to put his finger on such a button, the nuclear power
operator, the nuclear smuggler and the terrorist in his hideout dreaming
of unparalleled mass murder are actors on a single playing field.
This is a truth, however, that the world’s nine nuclear powers do not
like to acknowledge, because it has an implication they are reluctant to
accept, which is that if they want to be safe from nuclear danger they
must commit themselves to surrendering their own nuclear arms.
Strategic Incoherence
And yet that is exactly what Barack Obama did in his speech in Prague on
April 5, 2009, saying:
“So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to
seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
Encouragingly, his commitment has been accompanied by the widest support
for nuclear abolition since President Harry Truman sent Bernard Baruch
to ask the world in 1946 to choose between “the quick and the dead.” A
remarkable phalanx of former and current officials, Republican as well
as Democratic, have embraced the goal. Their calls originated with the
by-now-famous article by the “Gang of Four”—former Secretary of State
George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn—who in a
January 2007 Wall Street Journal article announced their support for “a
world free of nuclear weapons” and called for “working energetically on
the actions required to achieve that goal.”
A remarkable number of new government and civil panels, commissions and
other initiatives have also sprung up to support the goal. Among them is
a new group, Global Zero, which proposes abolition by 2030 and is
supported by a Who’s Who of international as well as American
signatories. Meanwhile, the traditional antinuclear movement, led by
such groups as Peace Action, the American Friends Service Committee and
the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, are marshaling support for a
nuclear weapons convention.
If Obama’s commitment to abolition and the movement in support of it
were setting the tone and agenda of current nuclear negotiations, the
world might now be in the first stage of a final solution (to give that
dread phrase a new and positive meaning) of the nuclear dilemma.
Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Instead, what have been
offered are at best a series of timid makeshifts or, at worst, de facto
subversion of the Prague objective. Let us consider two policy arenas:
the START agreement and the Nuclear Posture Review.
Nothing on the nuclear stage today is stranger or less adequately
explained than the spectacle, still on view twenty years after the end
of the cold war, of the United States and Russia holding each other
hostage to nuclear annihilation with arsenals in the thousands poised on
alert (more than 95 percent of the world’s 23,000 or so nuclear
warheads remain in the possession of the US, which has some 9,000, and
Russia, with some 13,000). The current agreement, which will remain in
force until 2020, sets a ceiling of 1,550 warheads on each side that
must be reached by 2017. The reduction from the old ceiling of 2,200 is
of course welcome. The continuation of a system of inspections is even
more welcome. But what are we to make of the 1,550 warheads that remain?
The arrangement indefinitely leaves intact the essential fact that the
United States and Russia are poised to blow each other up many times
over, as if the cold war had never ended.
An answer is often made that the United States must have such an arsenal
because Russia still does—as a “deterrent.”
Behind this issue looms a larger unasked strategic question. Are nations
in general safer when they aim nuclear weapons at one another (“deter”
one another)?
What we have heard so far of the Nuclear Posture Review exemplifies the
same intellectual debacle. The document rejects the proposal for “no
first use.” No first use is the policy of using nuclear weapons only in
retaliation for nuclear attacks. All other attacks, including ones with
biological or chemical weapons, would be met by conventional forces.
(Editor’s note: For preliminary analysis of the NPR’s impact on New
Mexico, read “Nuke It or Lose It” at SFReeper.com.)
The refusal to unilaterally reject no first use crystallizes, as perhaps
nothing else can, the strategic disarray of American nuclear policy.
Like the persistence of the forces of mutual assured destruction, it
represents the banishment of politics from strategy (meaning in fact
that strategy no longer is strategy). The first-use policy was born in
the 1950s, when US leaders believed they could deter perceived Soviet
conventional superiority in Europe only by threatening a nuclear
response.
More important for today’s concerns is that a no-first-use policy is the
sine qua non of any effective nonproliferation strategy. If nuclear
weapons are needed not only to counter other nuclear weapons but to
repel conventional, chemical and biological attacks as well, then what
responsible national leader can afford to do without them? The problem
is not merely symbolic. If the nine nuclear powers are ready to use
their arms to perform a grab bag of tasks, then the dangers to
nonnuclear countries really do multiply, perhaps inspiring them to
acquire these devices, evidently so versatile and useful, for
themselves.
Toward a New Nuclear Strategy
To escape from this scene of halfhearted and ineffectual measures
serving unclear or contradictory goals, the United States needs new
strategic thinking.
The great intellectual artifact of cold war strategy was the doctrine of
nuclear deterrence. It adopted a new aim for military deployments. In
the renowned words of Bernard Brodie in 1946, “Thus far the chief
purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on
its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other
useful purpose.” This insight, which was recognized as a basis of policy
in the early 1960s by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, marked a true
revolution in military affairs. Not to fight, according to this policy,
was to win. And yet under this policy the way not to fight was
nevertheless to plan to fight. The trick was to restrict the plan for
fighting to nuclear retaliation, in the hope that that day would never
come. Thus was born the paradoxical, or contradictory, policy on which
survival in the nuclear age was believed to rest. Safety from nuclear
destruction depended not on getting rid of the arms that threatened it
but on threats to inflict that same nuclear destruction.
And yet the doctrine did also rest on one profound truth—its
acknowledgment that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be
fought,” as Reagan and Gorbachev put it in 1985. You might say that
deterrence has pursued a sane goal by insane means—a cleavage manifested
in the fact that even as deterrence fought off nuclear use, and in a
certain sense fortified what has been called the “nuclear taboo” and the
“tradition of non-use,” it at the same time pinioned the world
permanently on the brink of such use.
Is it then possible that abolition can be seen as a rectification and
completion of the strategic revolution begun but left unfinished by
deterrence? How great, after all, would be the shift from the strategic
goal of “non-use,” or the “tradition of non-use,” to the strategic goal
of “nonpossession,” to a “tradition of nonpossession”? Doesn’t non-use
in a way already cast nuclear weapons on history’s scrap heap?
The Architecture of Zero
What’s needed is to turn abolition from a far-off goal into an active
organizing principle that gives direction to everything that is done in
the nuclear arena—in other words, a strategic goal.
The indivisible nuclear surge under way in today’s world can be mastered
only with an indivisible program to defeat it. Let us, then, borrowing
from Obama in Prague, take “the peace and security of a world without
nuclear weapons” as the new strategic objective—the political goal in
the pursuit of which all tactics become the means. That goal has two
requisites. The first is getting rid of existing nuclear weapons. The
tactical means to that goal are of course negotiations among the nuclear
powers. The second requisite is building a system that safeguards the
world from the recrudescence of nuclear weapons once they are gone. This
system will be the true architecture of zero. The tactical means to
that goal are negotiating an ever-tightening web of restrictions imposed
on all technology usable for nuclear weapons.
Of the two, the second is more difficult. For while the process of
nuclear disarmament will continue for only a limited time, until zero is
reached, the architecture of zero must be built to last forever, since
the knowledge that underlies nuclear weapons will never disappear. The
tactics for reaching this goal only begin with the construction of
systems of inspection and enforcement. More important over the long run
is building a political and legal order in which the attempt to build a
nuclear weapon would be designated a crime against humanity. More
important still would be the moral deepening of the taboo.
The art of strategy—so notably absent in today’s contradictory mélange
of policies—is to combine the measures needed to achieve the two goals
into a single, coherent, self-reinforcing plan. It should take the form
of a commitment to create the sort of nuclear weapons convention that
the antinuclear movement has long advocated—one that, as noted earlier,
seeks to ban all weapons of mass destruction.
Such a strategy would build on the truth underlying deterrence doctrine
while gradually retiring its absurd features. It would enable nuclear
strategy, at last, to catch up with history. It would deliver Russia and
the United States from the weapons-forged hostility that politically no
longer exists. It would unify the world around a common goal—one
already embraced under the NPT by 184 countries and enshrined in their
laws. Nuclear states (as long as they persist as such) would be at one
with nonnuclear states in preventing proliferation, even as they all
worked together to put in place the architecture of zero that would make
the ban permanent and safe. Finally, the strategy would provide a
measuring rod for judging the merit of interim steps, such as START and
no first use. They would be judged by the specific contribution they
made to reaching the common strategic goal.
What would nuclear weapons then be for? They almost tell us themselves.
“We are here,” they say, “to abolish ourselves, and—a big bonus—to put
up a barrier to major power war forever after into the bargain. For even
after you are rid of us, we will hover in the wings, as a potential
that cannot ever be removed.” The bomb is waiting for us to hear the
message. It has been waiting a long time. If we do not, it can always
return to what has always been its plan B, and abolish us. SFR
“We’ve totally missed the most incredible non-nuclear ‘secret superweapons’ development program of all time, and the worldwide testing of these (scalar) weapons themselves”. “It is estimated that 10 nations have active scalar weapons programs.” “Most of our elected leaders are not even privy to these ultra-classified, exotic weapons programs.” “Non-conventional scalar weapon technologies have a destructive potential beyond nukes and beyond anything mankind has ever dreamed of.” These are just a few of the quotes one can retrieve from the internet. The fact is this: There is a new, behind-the-scenes US Manhattan Project going on and it has everything to do with scalar weaponry.