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.

The Bush administration's new "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)," announced in December, is wise in some places, in need of small fixes in other places, and dangerously radical in still others. Most important, the strategy's approach to nuclear issues seems destined to reduce international cooperation in enforcing nonproliferation commitments rather than enhance it. America's willingness to use force against emergent WMD threats, as in Iraq, can stir the limbs of the international body politic to action. But a truly effective strategy to reduce nuclear dangers over the long term must bring along hearts and minds as well.

The WMD proliferation problem involves biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, but the third raises the most telling issues. Chemical and biological weapons are legally prohibited by treaty, and so the challenge they pose is basically one of enforcement. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are temporarily legal in five countries, not illegal in three others, and forbidden essentially everywhere else -- a complex and inconsistent arrangement that presents a unique set of dilemmas.

This regime was established by the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, signed in 1968 and extended indefinitely in 1995. Shaped largely by the two superpowers, the NPT posited that the world would be more secure if proliferation did not extend beyond the five states (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China) that at the time possessed nuclear weapons. It reflected the widely held judgment that the more nuclear weapons holders there were, the greater the risks would be that some weapons would go off, either accidentally or on purpose.

The vast majority of countries, however, felt that "total elimination of nuclear weapons is the only absolute guarantee against [their] use," and enshrined this conviction in Article VI of the NPT. That is, nuclear weapons per se are a problem, even if they could serve as effective deterrents against certain threats. The United States and the other four nuclear powers accepted this proposition and in May 2000 reaffirmed their "unequivocal undertaking" to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

To persuade the rest of the world to give up its right to future acquisition of nuclear weapons, in other words, the nuclear weapon possessors had to promise to give up their own eventually. They had to offer other incentives as well: a pledge not to use their weapons to threaten non-possessors, help in acquiring and using civilian nuclear technology for states that renounced nuclear weapons and accepted international monitoring, and the enhanced security of knowing that the treaty would also help keep one's neighbors from acquiring nuclear weapons. On this foundation, the United States and other countries have constructed over the years a nonproliferation regime of norms, laws, rules, institutions, sanctions, and, ultimately, un-backed coercion.

Since the NPT was agreed to in 1968, only five states have acquired nuclear weapons: Israel, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and perhaps North Korea. The first three never signed on to the treaty, and so their ongoing possession is morally, politically, and strategically (although not juridically) akin to that of the original five nuclear powers. South Africa subsequently gave up its weapons and joined the regime as a nonpossessor. North Korea, which did sign the NPT in 1985, has been caught twice escaping its obligations and is now trying to cut a new deal.

Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan ceased their suspected nuclear weapons development programs over the years. Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine inherited nuclear weapons upon the Soviet Union's dissolution but opted to relinquish them in favor of joining the NPT. Iraq had a clandestine illegal nuclear weapons program that was detected and largely dismantled as a result of the last Persian Gulf War. Today, therefore, Iran is the only state known to be actively seeking nuclear weapons -- in violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of its nonproliferation commitments -- that is not also under some form of "arrest."

Most analysts would agree that the arms control regime has worked better and longer than expected but nevertheless needs to be strengthened to better handle new circumstances and challenges. The Bush administration thinks otherwise. It concludes from the few problem cases that "traditional nonproliferation has failed," as one White House official recently told The Washington Post.

To administration radicals such as Robert Joseph (the National Security Council's senior counterproliferation official), Douglas Feith (undersecretary of defense), John Bolton (undersecretary of state), and Stephen Cambone (principal deputy undersecretary of defense), nuclear weapons per se are not the problem -- "bad guys" with them are. Rejecting the fundamental premise of the NPT, these officials seek not to create an equitable global regime that actively devalues nuclear weapons and creates conditions for their eventual elimination, but rather to eradicate the bad guys or their weapons while leaving the "good guys" free of nuclear constraints. Ballistic missile defense, in this vision, will protect against the few weapons that get away, while Special Forces and the Department of Homeland Security will protect against non-missile-borne threats.

The administration has enunciated this position with admirable clarity in its new national security strategy. Commentators have fixated on the invocation of "preemptive" military action to counter enemies seeking "the world's most destructive technologies." Yet this is not the crazy idea it is often portrayed to be. To enforce a robust nonproliferation regime, preemption might actually make sense in certain cases. The real problem in the new strategy is not preemption but narrowness -- the focus on three wretched governments and terrorists, and the emphasis on force, coercion, and selective treaty enforcement as the main instruments of national policy.