Bush's Nuclear Revolution: A Regime Change in Nonproliferation

George Perkovich

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2003

Summary:  The White House's radical new strategy to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction will likely make the world less secure, not more.

George Perkovich is Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of India's Nuclear Bomb.

FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE

Conservative defense intellectuals and officials deserve credit for highlighting the fact that effective nonproliferation requires changes in the policies or governments of states unwilling to abide by international laws and norms. Yet they then proceed to make the reverse mistake, looking only at the outlaws and ignoring the challenges posed by nuclear weapons in general. So long as some states are allowed to possess nuclear weapons legitimately and derive the benefits that flow from them, then other states in the system will want them too -- including, perhaps, the successors to the governments the Bush administration currently opposes. The proliferation threat thus stems from the existence and possession of nuclear weapons and theft-prone materials, not merely from the intentions of today's "axis of evil." Redressing this larger threat requires cooperation from Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and others, as the administration has discovered now in dealing with North Korea.

The nonproliferation radicals recognize that the good guys of today can become the bad guys of tomorrow. So they say the United States must retain and "upgrade" an enormous strategic arsenal forever to deter or defeat any adversary. At the same time, they argue that the new bad guys (rogue states and terrorists), unlike the old bad guys (the Soviet Union), cannot be deterred and contained and so must be eliminated quickly. The Bush administration thus essentially favors a strategy of repeated regime change plus a large, steadily modernizing nuclear arsenal.

This bleak vision makes sense only if the determination to retain deployed nuclear arsenals forever does not exacerbate proliferation risks, and if the weapons being retained provide a necessary, usable, and effective deterrent against threats that are greater than proliferation. Since neither of these assumptions is valid, the strategy is flawed.

On the "supply" side, the longer worldwide stockpiles of weapons, fissile materials, precursor technologies, and expertise remain and grow, the greater the risk of their being diverted to proliferation. (Think of Russia today and Pakistan over the next 30 years.) It is true that even without operable nuclear weapons, fissile materials would pose a proliferation threat and would have to be zealously accounted for and secured. But securing sensitive assets would be much easier in a zero-arsenal world than in one where multiple states maintain operational nuclear forces and large related infrastructures with little or no transparency and international monitoring.

On the "demand" side, the fact that several powerful countries continue to assign great value to their nuclear arsenals reinforces just how important these weapons can be as sources of power and prestige and raises their attractiveness for others. This role-model effect does not by itself cause other states or terrorists to seek nuclear weapons. But it does impede efforts to persuade India, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, and Iraq to curtail their acquisitions. It could also cause Japan, Brazil, and others to rethink their abstinence. Moreover, the administration's "emphasis on tactical uses" of nuclear weapons "increases the motivation of" targeted states "to improve and extend their own nuclear force, or to get one if they don't have it," as notes Michael May, the former director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The behavior of North Korea and Iran seems to confirm May's warning.

Nonproliferation radicals counter by changing the subject. They say the massive U.S. nuclear arsenal and the doctrine of first use together avert proliferation on the part of American allies such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Germany. Each of these states could readily acquire nuclear weapons, but, according to this view, chooses not to because the American arsenal gives it a deterrent shield. Yet, South Korea, Germany, and Japan today seem more alarmed than reassured by U.S. strategy. Rather than the nuclear-heavy status quo, they would prefer at least a serious attempt to remove, in a verifiable and step-by-step manner, nuclear weapons from national arsenals, as called for by the NPT.

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

The Bush administration justifies its maintenance of vast nuclear arsenals as a response to three types of threats: terrorists, rogue states, and great-power rivals such as Russia and China.

Yet it is hard to see how nuclear weapons could play any role whatsoever in either deterring or responding to terrorists, who are determined, mobile, small in number, and hard to target. It is almost as hard to see how nuclear weapons are necessary and appropriate to confront the challenges posed by rogue states, something the current Iraq and Korea crises should demonstrate.