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.

WORST PEOPLE VS. WORST WEAPONS

President George W. Bush has rightly proclaimed that keeping the worst weapons out of the hands of the worst people is Washington's highest national security priority. But so far, the United States has attacked the people much more vigorously than the weapons.

The war on terrorism that Washington is fighting and the war on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that it needs to fight are related but not identical. The attacks of September 11, 2001, stimulated a comprehensive overhaul of U.S. counterterrorism practices and agencies. The United States went on the offensive in Afghanistan and around the world; border and immigration controls were tightened; emergency response was fortified; and a new Department of Homeland Security was created.

But counterproliferation policies have not been overhauled. The most significant action taken by the United States to counter WMD since September 11 has been the invasion of Iraq. Although at the time intelligence suggesting a recrudescence of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs appeared to justify the war, it now seems that the intelligence was incorrect. Meanwhile, North Korea has quadrupled its stock of plutonium, a far graver setback to counterproliferation than anything Saddam might have been pursuing. A distracted administration has left the initiative for curbing Iran's evident nuclear ambitions to two groups that failed to support the Iraq invasion: the Europeans and the UN. And it has made no new efforts to prevent nonstate actors such as terrorists from getting their hands on WMD.

The term WMD generally applies to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; ballistic missiles; and, more recently, "dirty bombs," ordinary explosives containing some radioactive material. But this definition is too broad. Chemical weapons are not much more lethal than conventional explosives and hardly deserve the WMD label. Similarly, long-range ballistic missiles are especially destructive only if they have a nuclear or biological warhead, and so should not be considered a separate category. Dirty bombs cause local contamination and costly cleanup but not true mass destruction; they too should be given lower priority. The primary focus of counterproliferation policy, therefore, should be nuclear and biological weapons.

In February, President Bush laid out his proposal for dealing with the spread of WMD. Some of his ideas are useful, but by and large they represent piecemeal extensions of long-standing policies. In contrast, a true overhaul of counterproliferation policy would recognize that, like the defense against terrorism, the defense against WMD must be multilayered and comprehensive. Such reforms would aim to eliminate the threat of nuclear terrorism entirely by denying fissile materials to nonstate actors and would prepare to contain the scale of the most likely forms of bioterrorism to minor outbreaks. It would revamp outdated arms control agreements, expand counterproliferation programs in the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, and improve the way intelligence on WMD is collected and analyzed. It would favor countering WMD with non-nuclear rather than nuclear measures. And it would at last develop coherent strategies for heading off the two most pressing nuclear proliferation threats: those emanating from Iran and North Korea.

SEEING IN 8-D

The counterproliferation toolbox contains what the Department of Defense (DOD) began calling the "8 D's" during the Clinton administration: dissuasion, disarmament, diplomacy, denial, defusing, deterrence, defenses, and destruction. Because the dynamics driving proliferation in different countries vary, no single tool is appropriate or sufficient for every case. The stakes are so high that doctrines relying on one tool to the exclusion of others are foolhardy. A sensible policy must use them all.

A crucial but underappreciated element of a successful policy is getting as many countries as possible not to develop WMD in the first place. The United States has dissuaded Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey from going nuclear by forging stable alliances that offer these countries better security than they could achieve through unconventional weapons programs of their own. A peaceful and just world order led by the United States is the reason why only a few of the world's nearly 200 nations are proliferation "rogues." Providing security in exchange for nonproliferation is something the United States has been doing right and should keep doing right.