by Cheryl Rofer
The arms control community as it exists today focuses primarily on nuclear weapons and, to a lesser degree, chemical and biological weapons. The Federation of American Scientists traces its ancestry back to the Manhattan Project, and many of today’s arms control organizations have developed from that small community.
It is also a very specialized community. Scientists from the Manhattan Project had inside knowledge of the workings of nuclear weapons, and the nuclear strategists of the 1950s developed an arcane vocabulary of nuclear strikes and counterstrikes. The 1970s and 1980s brought an influx of civilians into an antinuclear movement, which the arms control community never completely identified with. At the end of the Cold War, most of those civilians came to believe that it was also the end of nuclear threat. A small, impassioned remnant of antinuclear activists continues outside the arms control community, ignored both by the public and the arms controllers.
The arms controllers’ governmental heyday was during the 1970s and 1980s, when many of them helped to negotiate the big arms control treaties: START, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, along with its complement, the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. Today’s arms control community largely consists of those arms controllers and their students.
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is the foundation of today’s arms control, and arms controllers participate in its review conferences, held every five years.
The combination of historical development, specialized knowledge and now the Bush Tax limit the ability of the arms control community to provide new approaches to, er, arms control. I pause because that phrase itself may be part of the problem. It grew out of the attempt to control the growth of numbers of nuclear weapons during the Cold War’s spiraling arms race, and thus may be seen as a tool for limiting one’s adversary’s options rather than moving toward the goals of the NPT’s Article VI: the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.
The retention of that phrase signals that the Bush Tax may have been part of arms control even before the eponymous president took office. The association of arms control with Cold War thinking has been a lever that Bush’s neocons used against arms control and its practitioners.
Joe Cirincione, now president of the Ploughshares Fund, and George Perkovich, head of the Carnegie Endowment’s nonproliferation program, are certified members of the arms control community. I’ll be looking at two of their recent papers in this post.
Neither Perkovich nor Cirincione makes his objectives explicit in these two papers. But the standard arms control objectives are to decrease the numbers of nuclear weapons and states possessing them. The means to those ends is a network of treaties and other understandings, including the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Cirincione could have powerfully critiqued Bush administration policies in two ways: 1) compare the Bush administration strategy to its execution or 2) provide an alternative strategy and show how the Bush administration has come up short. Unfortunately, as I noted, we don’t know what the Bush administration strategy has been. That eliminates critique number 1. Neither of these papers provides a strategy of its own, eliminating critique number 2.
Cirincione’s paper is a list or more or less the same events that Christopher Ford lists, but Cirincione’s list is of failures whereas Ford’s is of successes. The papers are almost mirror images, differing utterly in their interpretation of events.
Cirincione’s language is foreboding, like the Federation of American Scientists’ doomsday clock:
Failure of economic regimes threatens global depression; failure of the nonproliferation regime threatens global catastrophe.But “global catastrophe” is not backed up by much of an argument.
Cirinicione pays more attention to nuclear terrorism than does Ford, although the real risks from nuclear terrorism have hardly been analyzed, and the threat is frequently overhyped. Michael Levi’s On Nuclear Terrorism is an exception to the Bush Tax; he analyzes the steps for terrorists to make or steal a nuclear weapon and concludes that security does not have to be all-encompassing; it is enough to increase law-enforcement activities that push up the probabilities that terrorists will fail.
Like Ford’s paper, Cirincione’s is based on a negative. Where Ford excoriates the arms controllers, Cirincione excoriates the Bush administration. Neither provides a way forward. Cirincione’s paper contains a short final section, “Repairing the Damage,” which quotes others, a specific goal unclear.
It is more than just a turn to diplomacy; the nation needs a new course of action. The collapse of the Bush doctrine is a chance for the new administration to change U.S. nuclear policy fundamentally toward one that “would take into account the limited present-day need for a nuclear arsenal as well as the military and political dangers associated with maintaining a massive stockpile,” as Manhattan Project veteran Wolfgang Panofsky wrote just before his death. “Given that the risks posed by nuclear weapons far outweigh their benefits in today’s world, the United States should lead a worldwide campaign to de-emphasize their role in international relations.”
George Perkovich provides bullet points at the top of his paper:
- The next American president should emphasize the goal of a world without nuclear weapons and really mean it.There are good points here, but they are without a strategy that brings them together into a logical whole. They are, again, a list, not flowing into each other or interlocking in any clear way. The trees overshadow the forest.
- The verification and enforcement mechanisms that would be required to achieve this would augment U.S. and global security at a time when the nuclear industry will likely expand globally.
- Without a clearer commitment to the elimination of all nuclear arsenals, non–nuclear-weapon states will not support strengthened nonproliferation rules, inspections, and controls over fissile materials.
- The accounting and control over nuclear materials that would be necessary to enable nuclear disarmament would greatly reduce risks that terrorists could acquire these materials.
- If nuclear deterrence would work everywhere and always, we would not worry about proliferation. If nuclear deterrence is not fail-safe, the long-term answer must be to reduce the number and salience of nuclear weapons to zero.
Perkovich declares an overall strategy later in the paper:
This Brief summarizes four security interests that would be served by making the longterm project of abolishing nuclear weapons a central purpose of U.S. policy: preventing proliferation; preventing nuclear terrorism; reducing toward zero the unique threat of nuclear annihilation; and fostering optimism regarding U.S. global leadership.Unfortunately, he does not structure his paper to develop this strategy. The paper barely supports the initial bullet points, including a potpourri of ways to strengthen adherence to the NPT that are standbys of the arms control community, the arguments as to whether the nuclear weapon states have lived up to their obligations under Article VI, weak questioning of the logic of deterrence, and a box refuting arguments that are comfortable.
At times it seems that Perkovich himself is struggling with the desirability of his goal:
Yet, if the leaders of the major powers established as an organizing principle of their diplomacy the goal of creating the conditions for eliminating nuclear arsenals, it is highly probable that majorities of their citizens and the rest of the world would feel a charge of optimism about the direction in which they are seeking to move.Look at all those hedge words and the negativity of that last sentence.The vision of a world free of nuclear weapons does not make its attainment feasible, let alone inevitable.
In another box, Perkovich provides a way forward by urging the new president to support a consortium of international think-tanks “to map the road to a nuclear-weapon-free world.” Could this contain some self-interest?
You’ve got to have a horse to beat a horse, one of my mentors liked to say. The arms control community had no horse in the US-India 123 agreement race. And they lost. Neither of these two papers has a horse.