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.

ANCIENS REGIMES

Much can also be done to strengthen the multilateral regimes intended to curb the use or production of WMD. The NPT has been disparaged in the United States in recent years because, it is said, the "bad guys" can ignore it with impunity (since it has inadequate verification and enforcement provisions) and the "good guys" would be good even without the agreement. This critique is wrong for two reasons.

First, with regard to proliferation, the world does not divide neatly into good guys and bad guys. There is a substantial "in between" category of countries that could be tempted to acquire WMD but might be coaxed out of it. Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine chose to forsake the nuclear weapons they inherited from the Soviet Union, for example; Argentina and Brazil mutually agreed to give up their nuclear programs; South Korea and Taiwan preferred U.S. protection over developing their own arsenals; and South Africa, after it changed regimes, lost its sense of external threat and its need to protect itself with WMD. Gaining greater international acceptance by signing the NPT and abandoning their nuclear ambitions was a key factor in all of these countries' decisions.

Second, even if bad guys disregard the NPT, such agreements are useful, albeit indirectly. If it became necessary for Washington to lead action against a rogue, the international consensus embodied by the NPT would help the United States marshal the support of other nations.

Even though the NPT has considerable value in its current form, its provisions can and should be strengthened. One of its vexing weaknesses, which dates to the era when the treaty was negotiated, is the concept of the "peaceful atom," which allows states to produce certain nuclear materials for peaceful ends. The NPT permits all signatories to enrich uranium (in order to make fuel for power reactors) and reprocess plutonium (an inevitable byproduct in "spent" fuel removed from the reactor after it is used up), provided they declare what they are doing and submit to periodic inspections.

This is problematic, however, because under the guise of a peaceful power reactor program a nation can come very close to having a bomb. All the owner of a complete fuel cycle needs to do to make weapons in short order is withdraw from the NPT, kick out inspectors, and turn enriched uranium or plutonium into bombs. Both Iran and North Korea have sought to exploit this situation. In an age of terrorism, the creation of new fissile material, in any guise, poses a lasting danger.

To plug this loophole, the United States should champion a revision of the peaceful atom concept, encouraging nuclear power where it is needed but opposing any new nations from operating enrichment or reprocessing facilities. In return, the nations where such facilities exist would offer reliable fuel services (provision of enriched fuel and disposition of spent fuel) at reasonable prices to all nations that wish to use nuclear reactors for electrical power generation and that forgo their own complete fuel cycle. Other steps to strengthen the NPT could include stiffening inspection and enforcement provisions and making withdrawal from the treaty an automatic trigger for international action.

THE PENTAGON'S ROLE

In the 1990s, the term "counterproliferation" was used in the Pentagon to signify that contending with WMD was an important mission in the post-Cold War world. Nuclear retaliation for use of WMD against U.S. troops was always understood to be an option, but not an attractive one, since it was not clear that all potential opponents could be deterred. If they proved not to be, presidents deserved a better menu of responses. Various programs were thus created to develop non-nuclear counters to WMD on the battlefield, including chemical and biological warning sensors, improved vaccines against bioattack, individual and collective protective coverings, decontamination systems, special munitions for attacking and neutralizing enemy WMD, radiochemical forensics, and active defenses such as ballistic missile defense.