by CKR
Last summer, Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr., spoke at Los Alamos. Even earlier, Max Kampelman wrote an op-ed for the New York Times. I’ve written about what they’ve said and taken up the banner in my small way.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed by George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn (subscription). The aftermatter says that others who endorse the views expressed are Sidney D. Drell, Martin Anderson, Steve Andreasen, Michael Armacost, William Crowe, James Goodby, Thomas Graham, Jr., Thomas Henriksen, David Holloway, Max Kampelman, Jack Matlock, John McLaughlin, Don Oberdorfer, Rozanne Ridgway, Henry Rowen, Roald Sagdeev and Abraham Sofaer. (Update 01/07: Here's the article.)
Here are the first steps they recommend toward the goal of the title:
• Change the Cold War posture of deployed nuclear weapons to increase warning time.
• Continue to reduce the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them.
• Eliminate short-range nuclear weapons designed to be forward-deployed.
• Initiate a bipartisan process with the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
• Provide the highest possible standards of security for weapons and weapons material.
• Get control of the uranium enrichment process and spent fuel, and guarantee uranium for nuclear power reactors at a reasonable price.
• Halt production of fissile material for weapons.
• Redouble efforts to resolve regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers.
You can see that I’ve borrowed from their agenda. I think it makes a lot of sense.
This is not a bunch of wooly-headed pacifists. George Shultz and Henry Kissinger were secretaries of state. William Perry was secretary of defense. Sam Nunn was chair of the Senate Armed Forces Committee. Thomas Graham participated in negotiating most of the arms control treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union. Jack Matlock was ambassador to the Soviet Union under Ronald Reagan. Many of the signatories are associated with the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The makeup of the group tilts slightly toward Republican.
Many of the group had experience with Ronald Reagan, and it is his goal, shared with Mikhail Gorbachev at the Rekyjavik summit, that they espouse: eliminating nuclear weapons. As Joe Cirincione noted, it was Richard Perle and others now known as neocons who helped to dissuade Reagan from going more directly toward that goal. None of the signatories of the Wall Street Journal op-ed are from the neocon faction or the American Enterprise Institute. Unfortunately, those are the people more likely to have the President’s ear.
The op-ed makes sense from several perspectives. One combines idealism with a commitment the United States made a generation or more ago to the world through the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: to work toward nuclear and general disarmament.
Another takes account of the changes in the world since the Cold War. Part of that commitment to work toward disarmament included ending the arms race. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the leaders of both countries were moving in that direction. That commitment has been met, but its end has changed the world in a fundamental way. There are no longer meaningful targets for hundreds, let along thousands, of nuclear weapons. In today’s world, nuclear weapons make sense as deterrents toward more powerful nations and as objects of national pride. For every nation that wants such pride and deterrent, two or three more will find nuclear weapons desirable. It is this cycle that the proposals in the op-ed are intended to break.
Finally, there is another sense in which nuclear weapons are becoming obsolete. The United States has little capacity to build new nuclear weapons. Rocky Flats, outside of Denver, was the main fabrication site for plutonium pits. Production ended there in 1989 because of environmental problems. The site was declared closed (pdf) last year, safe enough to be a nature preserve, not safe enough for people to live on. The buildings are gone. No pits will be built here.
The Pantex facility in Amarillo, Texas, is where nuclear weapons were assembled. Recently, however, their work has been disassembly, which must continue if the deadlines of the Moscow Treaty are to be met. Pantex was built during the Cold War and needs to be updated.
Tritium is being produced in civilian reactors because there aren’t any government reactors that can do the job. The Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge is another Cold-War-era facility that is undergoing some updating.
The Department of Energy has embarked on the process of developing “Complex 2030,” a new weapons complex. Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, is the only place in the nation that can handle plutonium. A series of mishaps, combined with burgeoning population in its area, took that capability away from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory a decade ago. The Preliminary Environmental Impact Statement for Complex 2030 lists a potential for producing 80 pits a year at Los Alamos. That’s the maximum. A new pit facility would require convincing the neighbors that it’s a good thing, along with a much more extensive regulatory process, not to mention a cost of billions of dollars. Eighty pits a year with lifetimes of fifty years means a stockpile of 4000 weapons.
Britain is now deciding how to update its Trident submarine fleet, most likely with fewer nuclear weapons. Russia has agreed with the US to decrease its numbers to 2200 by 2012. China appears to be more interested in making money than in increasing its 100 or so nuclear weapons to much more than 200.
Decreasing the numbers of nuclear weapons would help to eliminate the probability that terrorists would acquire one or the materials needed to make one. Paying more attention to regional security, particularly in the Middle East as recommended by the Iraq Study Group, would go far to damp down the desire for nuclear weapons there. Part of that, of course, would have to be an open acknowledgement of Israel’s nuclear arsenal and talks about how to eliminate that, too. Israel has expressed a desire for a deal like India’s. Perhaps that provides an opening.
I’m concerned that this proposal won’t get enough attention because of the carnage in Iraq and how to end it. But we need to be able to do both at once. This could provide some badly needed synergism.