How to Stop Nuclear Terror

Graham Allison

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2004

Summary:  President Bush has called nuclear terror the defining threat the United States now faces. He's right, but he has yet to follow up his words with actions. This is especially frustrating since nuclear terror is preventable. Washington needs a strategy based on the "Three No's": no loose nukes, no nascent nukes, and no new nuclear states.

Graham Allison is Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. From 1993 to 1994 he was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans.

Simultaneously, a "Global Cleanout Campaign" should extract all nascent nukes from all other countries within the next 12 months. Since all research reactors in non-nuclear weapons states contain fissile material that came from either the United States or Russia, each has a sufficient legal claim to demand its return. Compensation and wrangling may be required. But the United States and Russia must not take no for an answer.

A "no new nascent nukes" approach will require ensuring that all nuclear aspirants, especially Iran and North Korea, stop producing heu and plutonium. This effort should begin under the auspices of inspections mandated by the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), including the NPT's Additional Protocol that allows more intrusive inspections of suspected nuclear sites. But two other elements must also be added to the current system: a prohibition on the production of fissile material, and actual enforcement mechanisms. Enforcement should begin with political and economic sanctions for recalcitrant states but should also include threats and the use of military force if necessary, whether covert or overt. Enhanced export controls and greatly strengthened intelligence capabilities (especially human agents) should focus on preventing the work of nuclear aspirants and stopping sales from potential suppliers. Ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which the Bush administration has rejected, despite support from four former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including Secretary of State Colin Powell) and the negotiation of a cutoff in production of fissile material in current nuclear-weapon states would reinforce this principle.

Iran will be a decisive test of this strand of the new strategy. The administration has declared that the United States "will not tolerate the construction of a nuclear weapon" by Iran and has elicited similar threats from its allies. American assertiveness has galvanized the IAEA to demand that Iran prove a full account of past and present nuclear activity. Unless Iran complies, the IAEA will refer the case to the UN Security Council.

Note the differences between the administration's current approach and the "no new nascent nukes" approach proposed. The administration has named Iran a member of the "axis of evil" and threatened it with regime change. It has tried to persuade Russia to halt construction of Iran's Bushehr light-water nuclear power plant. And it has accepted verbal declarations of support from Iran's trading partners in Europe. The proposed strategy, in contrast, would focus on one objective only: denying Iran material from which nuclear weapons can be made. This would mean preventing Iranian enrichment of uranium or reprocessing of spent fuel to produce plutonium. With Russian President Vladimir Putin as his partner, Bush would remind Iran that in signing the NPT, it forswore nuclear weapons, and he would demand that Iran verifiably dismantle any emerging capability for enrichment or reprocessing.

To win Moscow's support, Washington should accept Russian completion of the Bushehr reactor, confirm Russia's role as fuel supplier to the reactor, initiate joint Russian-American research on new proliferation-resistant nuclear power plants, and agree that Russia become the secure depository for international spent fuel. Fuel supplied at favorable prices to Bushehr would be owned and managed by Russia and withdrawn at the end of the fuel cycle. (Russia's minister of atomic energy has even expressed a readiness to form a joint U.S.-Russian venture to supply this fuel.) To force Iran's hand, the United States and Russia would show Tehran that they are ready to do whatever is necessary to prevent it from acquiring the ability to produce its own fissile material.

The "no new nuclear weapons states" part of the strategy would draw a bright line under the current eight nuclear powers and say unambiguously, "no more." Four decades ago, President John F. Kennedy predicted that by the end of the 1970s, 25 countries would have nuclear weapons. His pessimistic forecast reflected a presumption then generally accepted: that as states acquired the scientific and technical ability to build nuclear weapons, they would do so. Thanks to far-sighted international efforts, however, including treaties, security assurances, and overt and covert threats, most nations have renounced nuclear weapons instead. Through the NPT, first signed in 1968 and extended indefinitely in 1995, 184 nations agreed to eschew such weapons, and existing nuclear weapons states pledged, in effect, to sharply diminish the role of nuclear weapons in international politics. But as with the nascent nukes, the problem has been enforcement.

During the Cold War, rival superpowers served as the enforcers, preventing nuclear proliferation within their spheres of control. Thus the United States scotched South Korean and Taiwanese aspirations, and the Soviet Union dissuaded North Korea. When the Soviet Union disappeared in December 1991, leaving weapons in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, intense U.S.-Russian cooperation was able to eliminate these, too. All 4,000 nuclear warheads were returned to Russia for dismantlement, and the newly independent states were compensated with nuclear fuel for their civilian reactors. But the United States and Russia then failed to devise a common strategy for dealing with nuclear weapons elsewhere. As a result, Pakistan and India both tested nuclear weapons during the 1990s and declared themselves members of the nuclear-weapons club.

The test case for a "no new nuclear weapons states" policy will be North Korea. That country remains, as former Secretary of Defense William Perry called it, "the most dangerous spot on earth." If it follows its current course, North Korea will soon be able to produce dozens of such weapons annually. Should it achieve this, South Korea and Japan will likely also go nuclear before the end of the decade. Taiwan could follow suit, risking war with China. And Pyongyang, already the world's leading supplier of missiles, could become a sort of Nukes"R"Us, supplying weapons to whoever could pay -- including terrorists. Should that happen, future historians will justifiably condemn today's leaders for their negligence.

Already, the challenge from Pyongyang has become less manageable and much more dangerous than it was when President Bush took office. Indeed, some members of his administration have reportedly concluded that the problem is beyond the point of no return and have started focusing on how to accommodate North Korea and avoid blame. The proposed strategy, by contrast, would begin with an unambiguous stance on this question: no nuclear North Korea. It would focus solely on this objective and subordinate all others, especially regime change. However despicable North Korea's regime, the United States has higher priorities than getting rid of it. The administration should start to recognize the urgency of this threat. Its mantra of "no crisis," evidently chosen to avoid distraction from Iraq, has served U.S. interests poorly. Bush must also get Putin and President Hu Jintao of China to contemplate the consequences of a nuclear North Korea for their own countries. Active cooperation in stopping Pyongyang should be a major test of their security relationships with Washington. That said, the administration should drop its objections and immediately accept North Korea's proposal for bilateral negotiations. North Korea is correct when it claims that only the United States can address its security concerns.

Direct talks will allow Washington to test its presumption that, above all else, Kim Jong Il is committed to his own survival. The United States should offer him a deal: survival in exchange for nuclear disarmament. This deal would offer big carrots and threaten a big stick. If North Korea is prepared to visibly and verifiably forgo nuclear weapons and dismantle its nuclear weapons production facilities, the United States should publicly pledge to abandon any attempt to change North Korea's regime by force. It should also arrange for generous economic assistance from South Korea and Japan, which they stand ready to provide if North Korea forgoes its nukes. If, however, North Korea refuses to verifiably relinquish nuclear weapons and persists in its current efforts, the United States should threaten to use all means, including military force, to stop it. Horrific as the consequences of a preemptive attack on North Korean nuclear facilities would be, the prospect of a nuclear North Korea willing to sell its weapons to al Qaeda and other terrorists would be worse.