How to Counter WMD

Ashton B. Carter

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004

Summary:  The Bush administration has done little to contain the spread of weapons of mass destruction, even as undeterrable nonstate actors grow more intent on obtaining and using them. U.S. counterproliferation policy needs an overhaul. Its new goals should be to get nuclear material out of circulation, reinforce nonproliferation agreements, and use new technologies and invasive monitoring to get better and more actionable intelligence.

Ashton B. Carter served as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration and is Co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Nuclear terrorism, accordingly, must be stopped at the source, and the formula for doing so is simple and clear. As John Kerry recently put it, "No material. No bomb. No nuclear terrorism." That means taking three steps. First, ensure that all governments that have plutonium and highly enriched uranium lock them up securely so they cannot be sold to, seized by, or diverted to terrorists. Second, ensure that no more bomb materials are made. And third, destroy excess stocks of these materials whenever and wherever possible. These are worthy tasks for U.S. global leadership.

The first step would be to lock up every existing lump of fissile material anywhere in the world and treat it as if it were already a bomb. The United States should take the lead in devising and promulgating universal standards for the safe custody of nuclear materials, applicable to all governments whether they are parties to the NPT or not, and establish appropriate measures for monitoring and enforcement. Every government that has nuclear weapons or reprocesses plutonium as part of its long-term energy policy should be expected to give the world reasonable assurances that its materials are safe from both seizure by outsiders and diversion by wayward insiders.

The United States should assist all governments to meet those standards through a dramatic expansion of the Nunn-Lugar programs of the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy. The United States missed a major opportunity to transform Nunn-Lugar after the September 11 attacks, while it had the attention and sympathies of the world. But it is not too late.

A reinvigorated Nunn-Lugar program should begin in Russia, where efforts to secure the staggering quantities of fissile material accumulated by the Soviet Union have been proceeding in desultory fashion for more than a decade. It is technically feasible to secure all these materials within the term of the next U.S. president, and he should make doing so a top priority. But that will require devoting greater funding to the effort and overcoming congressional restrictions and Russian hypersensitivity.

An expanded Nunn-Lugar effort should also aim to sequester all significant caches of highly enriched uranium used in research reactors worldwide, which sometimes double as "sleeper cells" of nuclear terrorism. It should offer Pakistan the same kind of assistance as Russia and draw up plans for the complete and verifiable elimination of WMD programs in Iraq and Libya now and in Iran and North Korea as soon as circumstances permit.

The second step should be to stop adding to the world's stock of fissile materials, by preventing additional governments, especially those hostile to the United States, from making plutonium or enriching uranium. This will require establishing a clear U.S. strategy-diplomatic at first, but coercive if necessary-for the complete and verifiable elimination of Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programs. The United States should also seek agreement that no more fissile material for weapons purposes will be produced anywhere, including in India, Pakistan, and Israel. Addressing the inherent risks associated with nuclear power reactors, U.S. policy should oppose new entrants into the uranium-enrichment and plutonium-reprocessing markets. Research or isotope-production reactors should cease the practice of using weapons-grade uranium fuel.

The third and final step would be to reduce, wherever possible, existing stocks of weapons materials. The long-stalled "blending down" of Russian bomb-grade uranium to reactor fuel and the disposition of excess plutonium, for example, should be accelerated.

Bioterrorism presents a completely different challenge. It cannot be eradicated, but it can be contained. Unlike nuclear weapons, biological weapons contain no single critical ingredient that can be sequestered, and the technology to breed pathogens and turn them into weapons is widespread in both the scientific community and in industry. The underlying science of biological weapons is progressing rapidly, multiplying opportunities to manipulate organisms for good or ill. Tomorrow's biological weapons may well feature engineered pathogens not found in nature.

Still, the president could take steps to contain the danger of bioterrorism so any attempt would end in the would-be mass terrorist's utter failure. Since it would take days for victims of a biological attack to sicken, a quick and effective public health response, together with advance stockpiling of medications and selective immunization, would dramatically reduce the impact of a bioattack. A reasonable goal for the president would be to ensure that professionals in the Department of Health and Human Services could certify that the nation is immune to mass destruction by today's common bioagents.