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CIAO DATE: 4/00
Foreign Policy
The Asian Nuclear Reaction Chain
Joseph Cirincione
This abstract is adapted from an article appearing in the Spring 2000 issue of FOREIGN POLICY magazine.
Even the casual observer, more concerned with markets than missiles, will have noticed the faltering of global efforts to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Hardly a day passes without a new story about the threat of nuclear war in South Asia, North Korea's ballistic missile program, Russia's unsecured nuclear arsenal, Chinese nuclear espionage, or worries over nascent Iranian and Iraqi efforts to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
Today, not only does the world seem a more dangerous place, but Washington is locked in a contentious debate about what will make it safer. A broad, if rough-hewn, cold war consensus on the importance of negotiated threat reduction has dissolved into a free-for-all tangle over differing assessments of American vulnerabilities, defense spending, and the nature of U.S. global engagement. The U.S. Senate stunned the world when it rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty last year. Now it seems probable that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is the next pact headed for the chopping block. Many arms control critics reject the very idea of negotiated arms reductions as a cold war relic. Now that superpower conflict is over, the logic holds, our strategy needs to change to accommodate "a world of terror and missiles and madmen," to borrow a phrase from presidential candidate George W. Bush.
Those who claim to be reinventing arms control for the future are, in fact, turning their backs on history. Nuclear proliferation among so-called rogue states is not the primary problem. Few people recall that President John F. Kennedy's oft-quoted warning that "fifteen or twenty or twenty-five nations may have [nuclear] weapons" in the next decade was directed at Japan, Italy, Germany, and other European nations that were developing weapons programs. Nuclear weapons in "the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable," Kennedy worried, would create "the increased chance of accidental war, and an increased necessity for the great powers to involve themselves in what otherwise would be local conflicts."
But Kennedy's legacy is now under siege, and the nonproliferation clock may be set back to the 1960s. If the United States disassembles diplomatic restraints, shatters carefully crafted threat reduction arrangements, and moves from builder to destroyer of the nonproliferation regime, then there will be little to prevent new nations from concluding that their national security requires nuclear arms. Taking elements we don't like out of the regime structure starts a dangerous round of Jenga, the tabletop game where blocks are sequentially removed from a wooden tower until the whole structure collapses.
The blocks would fall quickest and hardest in Asia, where proliferation pressures are already building more quickly than anywhere else in the world. The threat of nuclear breakout in Asia has been around for years. South Korea and Taiwan, for example, flirted with nuclear-weapon programs in the 1970s but backed down under U.S pressure. There are, however, two new developments that make the current situation so volatile. First, technologies and capabilities have advanced to the point where more nations could proceed rapidly to nuclear-weapon status, if they reached the political decision to do so. Second, the United States is backing away from its commitments to the international nonproliferation regime and undertaking actions - such as the deployment of missile defense systems - that could catalyze the reaction chain.
Developments within Japan illustrate how these two dynamics interact in new and dangerous ways. In 1998, many Japanese were disturbed by how quickly the world accepted India and Pakistan's de facto status as new nuclear powers. This was not the bargain the Japanese had agreed to when-after a lengthy internal debate-they joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1976. If tensions rise and nuclear-weapon deployments increase in Asia, Japan may well conclude that its security is best served not by relying on the U.S. nuclear umbrella, but by building its own nuclear arsenal. Japanese withdrawal from the NPT would almost certainly trigger the collapse of the treaty. Some in Asia might soon decide to follow Japan's lead.
Japan will carefully watch South Asia-the area of the world most likely to see a nuclear weapon used in combat. But the Asian reaction chain is more than a South Asian rivalry gone nuclear. India's nuclear tests and current deployment plans have much more to do with China and the United States than Pakistan. Most experts date the beginning of the Indian nuclear program to China's 1964 test. China, in turn, says it was forced to develop its nuclear weapons to counter the United States.
The United States, already worried by North Korea, Chinese threats to Taiwan, and (in some quarters) about the rise of a potentially powerful Asian competitor, is advancing what seems to many a perfectly reasonable response: missile defense systems. Both China and Russia see missile defense deployments as part of a strategy to allow the United States to launch a first strike at their nuclear weapons and then use missile defenses to minimize the damage from a retaliatory strike. Missile defense deployment plans have played a major role in derailing Russian Duma ratification of the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) nuclear-reduction agreement and planned START III negotiations. China recently announced it would spend an additional $9.7 billion to upgrade its nuclear-forces modernization program.
As if matters weren't bad enough, there are two entirely new Asian risks emerging: the possible fragmentation of Russia into separate, nuclear-armed states and the possible unification of Korea as a country with nuclear capabilities and ambitions. The final outcome of these scenarios will depend a great deal on what the rest of the world is doing. If the international community moves toward reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons, then these new nations will likely follow the lead of Ukraine and South Africa, which gave up their nuclear weapons in the early 1990s as their governments changed. If these new nations find themselves in a world with an increasing number of nuclear-weapon states, they may well opt to join the club.
A great deal depends on U.S. policy choices. It would be foolish to let nonproliferation treaties unravel and thereby disarm the United States of its most effective weapons for fighting these threats. Worse, provocative U.S. actions, however defensively intended, could well prove to be the catalyst that sets in motion a chain of events that diplomacy will be powerless to stop. Only by increasing the understanding of the regional dynamics, expanding the national resources devoted to regional and international negotiations, and having the courage to lead by example in reducing nuclear dangers can the United States hope to prevent a nuclear tsunami from sweeping out of Asia.