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.

Over time, these programs were expanded to include the protection of rear areas, such as ports and airfields in the theater of war, against chemical and biological attack. Subsequently, these technologies were recognized as useful to the protection of the U.S. homeland from WMD attack. Thus, by September 11, DOD was recognized as the lead agency in the federal government for developing and fielding technology for countering WMD.

Today, the Pentagon is quite rightly devoting a portion of its growing budget to "transforming" the military to anticipate future threats and develop dramatically new technologies. But the core of the effort remains long-range precision strike, close integration of intelligence information with operations, and closer collaboration among Army, Navy, and Air Force units. These are worthy goals for conventional warfare, but they have not been matched by any comparable counter-WMD effort, with the sole exception of missile defense. Counterproliferation programs at DOD remain small and scattered throughout the department. Missile defense spending now reaches about $10 billion per year, but the other counterproliferation programs amount to only a few billion dollars out of the $420 billion defense budget-far too small a fraction given the importance of the mission. (Likewise, WMD-related projects get only a fraction of the new homeland security agencies' $40 billion budget, even though WMD are the homeland's greatest threat.)

Another important question for counterproliferation is whether Washington's own nuclear policy influences the spread of WMD elsewhere in the world. On the one hand, it is entirely unlikely that Pyongyang's or Tehran's calculations, let alone al Qaeda's, hinge on whether the United States has 6,000, 3,500, or 2,200 deployed strategic weapons (the numbers permitted under the last three rounds of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms agreements), retains tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Europe, forswears nuclear retaliation for chemical or biological weapons use, or develops new types of nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, it would be easier to counter the WMD ambitions of Iran and North Korea with international support, and defeating al Qaeda absolutely depends on foreign governments' cooperation in intelligence and law enforcement. To the extent that international support for these U.S.-led efforts is influenced by U.S. nuclear policy, therefore, a growing reliance by Washington on nuclear weapons for its security would complicate its efforts to marshal international cooperation against WMD terrorism and overhaul nuclear arms control regimes. Moreover, the decisions of in-between states are probably strongly shaped by their perception of the nuclear "order" that the United States represents and leads, partly by example.

U.S. nuclear weapons are a deterrent against the use of WMD by others, of course, and a means of destroying WMD preemptively. But the United States has another effective tool of deterrence and destruction: its unmatched conventional military power. (Terrorists, for their part, are unlikely to be deterred by any threats of punishment at all.) So Washington should carefully weigh the marginal benefits of new nuclear capabilities for deterrence and destruction against their diplomatic cost to the overall counterproliferation effort.

Washington's recent efforts to explore a new type of earth-penetrating nuclear warhead, ostensibly to destroy deeply buried WMD facilities, for example, are ill advised. The military rationale for this move is weak, since locating such targets would be very difficult in the first place, the United States already has earth-penetrating nuclear weapons, and the costs of crossing the nuclear threshold would be high.

Instead, DOD should seek to widen the already huge gap between its conventional military capabilities and those of other nations, develop better non-nuclear counters to WMD, and use transformational technology to narrow the range of circumstances in which the United States would resort to nuclear weapons. With such an approach, nuclear weapons would play an enduring but background role as a deterrent of last resort.

OVERHAULING INTELLIGENCE

In the course of his work on ballistic missile proliferation in the 1990s, Donald Rumsfeld became convinced that in most cases intelligence on WMD programs is likely to be inadequate. Given the stakes, he concluded, the United States must assume the worst in formulating its counterproliferation policies. This logic, encapsulated in the maxim that the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," drove the Rumsfeld Commission report that paved the way for the Bush administration's national missile defense program. Intelligence about when an intercontinental ballistic missile threat might originate in Iran or North Korea was uncertain enough, the thinking ran, that the United States would be imprudent to rely on a missile defense that would not be ready for deployment for a few years (the Clinton administration policy). Rather, it needed one immediately. The need to act urgently against WMD, even on the basis of scanty evidence, lay behind the case for preemptive war in Iraq.