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.

It would obviously be preferable to avoid such worst-case calculations again. But they cannot be dismissed out of hand, since WMD activities are inherently difficult to monitor. It is comparatively easy to keep tabs on the size and disposition of armies, the numbers and types of conventional weaponry such as tanks and aircraft, and even the operational doctrines and plans of military establishments (since these generally need to be rehearsed to be effective). By their nature, in contrast, WMD concentrate destructive power in small packages and tight groups. Chemical and especially biological weapons can be manufactured in small-scale facilities. And although plutonium-based nuclear weapons require large and relatively conspicuous reactors and reprocessing facilities, uranium-based weapons can be produced in modest facilities that lack distinctive external features.

A crucial question, therefore, is whether adequate intelligence is likely to be available to make counterproliferation efforts effective. If the spread of WMD is by nature simply too difficult to monitor, then the world is doomed to a perpetual state of panic. But it bears remembering that the uncertainties of the 1950s, an era with comparable fears of a "missile gap," were largely dispelled by the invention of satellite reconnaissance. Emerging intelligence technologies might help improve the current situation as well.

Cutting-edge forensics, for example, can analyze material samples for traces of suspicious chemicals, biological material, or radionuclides. The samples can be obtained from air-sniffing planes or by plucking a leaf from a bush or wiping a handkerchief across a countertop. From a distance, a laser light shined on the plume of a smokestack might even reveal something about the plume's composition and thus the activities underway within the building. Tiny unattended ground sensors can be placed by hand or dropped covertly from unmanned aerial vehicles into suspicious locales; they can be networked with cell-phone technology and even made mobile by attaching them to robots, animals, or birds. "Tagging," the covert placement of identifying features, transmitters, or chemical markers on objects destined for WMD facilities, can also help monitor suspect programs. And a revolution is underway in close-in signals intelligence, which may help penetrate and exploit a WMD program's cell phones, laptop computers, local area networks, and other information infrastructure. Information from these specialized WMD-specific techniques can be combined with the usual types of intelligence from intercepted communications, defectors, and the occasional spy.

Nevertheless, no technology in the offing holds the promise of lifting the veil of WMD activities as completely as satellite photography did for the Soviet Union's nuclear missile and bomber programs. Accurate intelligence on WMD thus needs to be enhanced by three additional ingredients, one a matter of international policy and two matters of intelligence community management.

The first, paradoxically, is active cooperation by the parties under surveillance. Just as the Soviet Union eventually accepted satellite overflight of its territory, so too will potential proliferators have to allow greater access to their territory, facilities, and scientists. At a minimum, governments that wish to avoid suspicion-and thus coercion or even preemptive attack-will need to allow the kind of access promised to UN inspectors in Iraq in the winter of 2002-3, including the right to inspect facilities by surprise, take material samples for forensic analysis, and install monitoring equipment. This must be complemented by data declarations, document searches, and interviews of scientists. These are tall orders, of course, since they involve compromises of sovereignty and legitimate military secrecy for the nations inspected and rely on these governments' cooperation. But they are the only way North Korea's WMD ambitions will be verifiably eliminated, for example, or Iran's nuclear power activities fully safeguarded.

At the same time, moreover, there must be a shift of the burden of proof from the international community to the party under suspicion. For a cooperative inspection system to succeed, it must be the responsibility of the inspected party to dispel-not the responsibility of the United States or the international community to prove-concerns that dangerous WMD activities are underway.

The other two ingredients of better WMD intelligence require changes in Washington. Since proliferation is essentially a scientific activity, the intelligence community needs to increase the size and technical training of its workforce. Because intelligence agencies have difficulty recruiting and retaining top talent with more lucrative prospects in private industry, they need to forge better links with the outside scientific community so that advice and insight are "on call." This availability would have the additional benefit of aiding collection, since an essential "open" source of proliferation intelligence comes from monitoring scientific literature, the training and movement of foreign scientists, and commerce in scientific equipment.

Finally, a closer link between intelligence and action always spurs improvements in both collection and analysis. Since September 11, the counterterrorism intelligence effort has moved from producing papers characterizing terrorist groups to supporting operations to interdict terrorists. By all accounts, the intelligence community has risen to the challenge of producing "actionable" intelligence on terrorists. Similarly, an overhauled U.S. counterproliferation program based on the 8 D's will stimulate the intelligence community to focus on the problem of producing solid intelligence on WMD.

A comprehensive and aggressive effort to improve counterproliferation intelligence can start to make headway, but only if the president decides to make it a top priority. Americans regret that their government did not overhaul its counterterrorism capabilities years before the September 11 attacks, neglecting reforms that seemed tragically obvious after the World Trade Center was destroyed. Now, U.S. counterproliferation programs need an overhaul. It will be unforgivable if that too has to wait until after another catastrophe.