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World Policy Journal
Volume XX, No 4, Winter 2003/04
Prevention, Not Intervention: Curbing the New Nuclear Threat
William D. Hartung
*
From the moment he took office, President George W. Bush has been preoccupied with the need to protect U.S. territory, forces, and allies from a nuclear attack. He has followed through on this concern in a variety of ways: abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, boosting missile defense funding, striking a deal to reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, and unveiling a new nuclear doctrine that seeks to increase U.S. capabilities to destroy underground nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons facilities. But his most passionate anti-nuclear sentiments have been reserved for his assertion that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of nuclear weapons represents the greatest threat to peace and stability in the world today.
Bush’s anti-nuclearism is a muscular affair, grounded in the unilateralist credo of "peace through strength." His administration is not putting its trust in treaties or the rule of law to diminish the nuclear danger, but in its ability to use force or the threat of force to preempt the development of these devastating weapons by hostile nations or terrorist groups. Yet, in the real world, as opposed to the world that exists in the imaginings of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, overthrowing Saddam Hussein will have virtually no impact on the future ability of al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group to get its hands on a nuclear weapon. Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that’s where the money is," a terror network intent on gaining access to nuclear weapons or the ingredients thereof is likely to go where the bombs are. Bribing an underpaid Russian security guard or infiltrating the Pakistani nuclear program are far more promising avenues for terrorists seeking a nuclear weapon than cutting a deal with Saddam Hussein’s regime, which on present evidence does not possess nuclear weapons and would be extremely unlikely to share them with an Islamic fundamentalist group if it did. 1
Keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of aggressive regimes and terrorist groups will require the use of a powerful foreign policy tool that the Bush administration has never been entirely comfortable with—concerted, consistent international diplomacy. 2 Specifically, it will involve strengthening, rather than rejecting, the existing network of treaties and bilateral agreements that have kept nuclear weapons from becoming a far more pervasive problem. It will also require the systematic reduction of global stores of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials to the lowest possible levels. 3 Preventive diplomatic efforts will be far more effective in stopping the new nuclear danger than provocative military strikes.
What About Iraq?
Arms control skeptics in the Bush administration frequently point to Iraq as the ultimate evidence for their argument that diplomacy is of minimal value for dealing with regimes that are determined to acquire nuclear weapons. But a comparison of the administration’s case for war against Iraq with the recent historical record and current policy alternatives suggests otherwise. The logic of the Bush administration’s stance on war against Iraq is that Saddam Hussein is an adversary who has not hesitated to use chemical weapons against his own people, and that he would be likely to use nuclear weapons if he were allowed to acquire them. In the administration’s view, an Iraqi bomb could be used against U.S. troops or America’s allies, or passed on to a terrorist group or brandished as a threat to gain greater influence over the region’s oil resources. Since no one knows for sure when Iraq might develop a nuclear weapon, administration strategists assert that it is better to "take out" Saddam Hussein sooner rather than later. As the president put it in a speech in Cincinnati this past October, "We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." 4
But there is no documented operational link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, nor is there any reason to believe that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons of mass destruction on to a terrorist group except as an act of desperation. Second, the notion that a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein would be "undeterrable"— that he would use a nuclear weapon against the United States at the risk of seeing himself and his regime completely destroyed in a devastating counterattack— is not in keeping with his behavior to date. Nor is there evidence to suggest that Iraq is on the verge of developing or acquiring a nuclear weapon. And most importantly, there are alternative policy options available that would be more effective not only in keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of Saddam Hussein but in the still more important task of keeping them out of the hands of terrorist groups.
Woolsey-Headed Thinking
Try as it might, the Bush administration has not been able to document an operational link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the al-Qaeda terror network. This is no surprise to experts on the region. As former National Security Council analyst Daniel Benjamin has put it, "Iraq and Al Qaeda are not obvious allies.... They are natural enemies." Nor would Hussein be liable to trust a fundamentalist like Osama bin Laden, given his own troubles with internal Islamic opposition groups. As Benjamin notes, "Mr. Hussein has remained true to the unwritten rules of state sponsorship of terror: never get involved with a group that cannot be controlled and never give a weapon of mass destruction to terrorists who might use it against you." 5
Friends of the administration like former CIA director and current Defense Policy Board member R. James Woolsey have tried to conjure an Iraq–al-Qaeda connection, citing as evidence such examples as an alleged meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence official and al-Qaeda suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta prior to the September 11 attacks. Subsequent investigation of the alleged meeting has since led Czech president Vaclav Havel to conclude that no such meeting occurred, an assessment corroborated by U.S. intelligence officials. Woolsey, a professional Iraqophobe with strong ties to conservative think tanks and Iraqi opposition groups that have long advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, argued in the wake of the September 11 attacks that not only was Iraq the most likely "state sponsor" of al-Qaeda but was a probable source of the anthrax that killed 5 Americans and terrified millions more in the fall of 2001. 6
The closest the administration has come to forging a link is a free-association syllogism along these lines: if Iraq is evil, and al-Qaeda is evil, Iraq and al-Qaeda must be part of the same evil. As National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice puts the case, "Terrorism is a problem, weapons of mass destruction [are] a problem, the potential link between the two is a problem. What September 11 did is to vivify what [happens] if evil people decide that they’re going to go after you, and that it doesn’t take much." 7 Or, as President Bush put it in his Cincinnati speech, "Terror cells and outlaw regimes building weapons of mass destruction are different faces of the same evil." 8 But, as Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council staffer and author of a book advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, notes, the idea of an Iraq–al-Qaeda link is a particularly weak argument for intervention: "It would be the dumbest thing in the world for Saddam to be supporting anti-U.S. terrorism right now, and most of what we’ve seen from him suggests he knows that." 9
A threat that the administration’s policymakers do not appear to be taking seriously is the possibility that by treating Iraq and al-Qaeda as a common evil they may promote connections between the two that would not otherwise have existed. As CIA director George Tenet noted in a letter made public last fall at the insistence of then Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing the line short of conducting terrorist attacks…against the United States. Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] attack against the United States might be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him." 10
Softballs and Tiddly-Winks
The evidence put forth by the Bush administration regarding an imminent nuclear threat from Iraq has also been less than persuasive. The impressionistic tone of its case was exemplified by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s comments at a September 3 briefing. Asked what hard evidence the U.S. government possessed that Iraq "may be getting close again to obtaining a nuclear weapon," Rumsfeld replied: "To the extent that they have kept their nuclear scientists together and working on these efforts, one has to assume they have not been playing tiddlywinks, that they have been focusing on nuclear weapons." The secretary of defense asserted that more concrete evidence would be forthcoming, "when the president decides he thinks it’s appropriate." 11
President Bush for his part has been no less evasive. In a joint appearance with British prime minister Tony Blair at Camp David not long after Rumsfeld’s statement, Bush cited a 1998 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency suggesting that Iraq was then as few as six months away from being able to develop a nuclear weapon. "I don’t know how much more evidence we need," the president declared. The problem is that no such report apparently exists. IAEA’s only report on Iraq’s nuclear capabilities from that period stated that "based on all credible information available to date…the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its programme goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material." The report did suggest that Iraq may have been between 6 and 24 months away from developing nuclear weapons in 1991, before the Persian Gulf War and before seven years of U.N. weapons inspections. 12
A White House backgrounder released the following week asserted that Iraq "has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb," citing as a prime example Iraqi attempts to buy aluminum tubes that Bush officials claimed were to be used to build centrifuges for the production of highly enriched, bomb-grade uranium. But independent experts like former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright have suggested that the tubes in question have many nonmilitary uses, and are not of the type that would be particularly useful in enriching uranium. And the British government’s dossier on Iraqi capabilities states that there is "no definitive intelligence" linking the tubes to a uranium enrichment project. In early January, the IAEA reported that inspections in Iraq suggested that the "aluminium tubes sought by Iraq in 2001 and 2002" were "consistent with reverse engineering of rockets"—as Baghdad had asserted— and "not directly suitable" for building centrifuges to enrich uranium. 13
During his October 7 speech in Cincinnati meant to justify military action against Iraq, the president cited a 1998 statement from a "high-ranking Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected" that suggested that "despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue." Bush failed to mention that the defector in question, Khidhir Hamza, had not worked in the Iraqi nuclear program since 1991, and had not been inside the country since 1995. 14
The sketchiness of the administration’s case regarding the Iraqi nuclear threat is less surprising in light of the fact that the decision to attack Iraq was by all accounts made by a handful of Bush advisers in October 2001 without benefit of a national intelligence estimate (NIE). An NIE is a formal compilation of what U.S. intelligence agencies know about a particular topic and is generally viewed as a precondition for a major policy shift toward a potentially hostile state like Iraq. But as Middle East expert Anthony Cordesman has noted, the administration’s decision-making with respect to Iraq "bypassed much of the intelligence community and many people in the U.S. Central Command as well as the normal national security process." 15 The CIA’s estimate of Iraqi capabilities, which became public last October, asserted that "Iraq is unlikely to produce indigenously enough weapons-grade material for a deliverable nuclear weapon until the last half of this decade." 16
Amidst this fog of exaggeration, the most pressing specific concern expressed by President Bush in Cincinnati was that "if the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." Indeed, the uncertainties involved in how a given regime might procure a readymade nuclear weapon or the materials needed to assemble one represent the most urgent nonproliferation challenge of this new era. The Baghdad regime is unlikely to be able to "buy or steal" the active ingredients of a nuclear weapon under the current glare of international publicity created by the inspections and the looming possibility of war. Poorly guarded nuclear weapons stockpiles and bomb-grade materials in Russia and elsewhere remain the most likely avenue for an anti-U.S. regime or a terrorist group to get its hands on a nuclear weapon. Forestalling this frightening possibility has little to do with waging war on Iraq, and everything to do with stepping up cooperative efforts to neutralize, destroy, or secure the world’s bloated stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapons-grade materials.
Cooperative Threat Reduction
In January 2001, shortly before President Bush’s inauguration, a bipartisan task force chaired by former Senate majority leader Howard Baker and former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler reported that "the most urgent national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists or hostile nation states and used against American troops abroad or American citizens at home." 17 The task force recommended the development of a long-term project to safeguard, destroy, or neutralize Russia’s vast nuclear stockpile, estimated to include up to 40,000 strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, plus enough enriched uranium and plutonium to build tens of thousands more. If implemented, the plan, which would cost $3 billion a year, would more than triple current U.S. government funding for these purposes.
The Baker-Cutler task force was not proposing a novel new policy, but an intensification of highly successful "cooperative threat reduction" programs that had been initiated in the early 1990s under the leadership of former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn and incoming Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar. The motivating theory was that the most effective way to limit the risks of nuclear proliferation from Russia would be to provide aid to dismantle nuclear weapons and nuclear production sites, secure weapons-grade materials, and offer alternative employment to scientists who might otherwise be tempted to sell their skills on the international market. The combination of a crumbling military empire and a chaotic post communist economy increased the likelihood that Russian nuclear bombs or nuclear materials would be sold by impoverished military or security personnel, or stolen as a result of under funded or disorganized security procedures.
Despite inadequate funding, cooperative threat reduction programs have done more than any other single initiative to reduce the nuclear threat to the United States by financing the deactivation of nearly 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads, the destruction of over 700 long-range ballistic missiles, and the elimination of tons of bomb-grade nuclear materials. 18 In one of the great unsung arms control achievements of the first Bush and Clinton administrations, the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan were persuaded to give up their nuclear weapons after the breakup of the Soviet Union and sign on as non-nuclear members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), thereby sparing the world the danger of three new nuclear states on the unstable periphery of the former Soviet Union.
Despite its evident concern about nuclear weapons or nuclear materials falling into the hands of terrorist groups or hostile states, the Bush administration has been slow to implement the Baker-Cutler recommendations. As a candidate, George W. Bush expressed support for the Nunn-Lugar and related nonproliferation programs, but his first budget request was for just $759 million, a $100 million cut from that proposed by the outgoing Clinton administration. And neither the administration’s September 2001 request for $40 billion in emergency antiterrorism funding or subsequent supplemental requests for fighting the war on terrorism have included additional funding for these critical programs. It was only through the action of a bipartisan congressional coalition that nonproliferation spending was boosted to more than $1 billion per year, a level maintained in this year’s budget. To put this in perspective, the federal government’s entire annual budget for nonproliferation programs is the equivalent of roughly four days’ expenditures for the Bush administration’s proposed military intervention in Iraq, which the Congressional Budget Office has estimated will cost about $9 billion a month. Tripling these programs to the levels recommended by the Baker-Cutler task force would cost the equivalent of less than two weeks of the proposed war in Iraq. 19
The problem is not that the Bush team has abandoned nonproliferation, but rather that it has failed to pursue it with the urgency, resources, and commitment it deserves. The administration’s removal of enough highly enriched uranium to make at least two bombs from a research laboratory in Yugoslavia last August is a model for what needs to be done on a broader scale. But that important step required a $5 million contribution from the Turner Foundation due to the inability of the Bush administration to secure the funds needed to close the deal. Given recent reports of transfers of military equipment from Yugoslavia to Iraq, the move to secure the bomb-grade uranium could not have been more timely. But what will happen if there is no private funder available to jump into the next breach?
The obvious solution is to create a flexible, well funded government program aimed at rapidly securing nuclear weapons and nuclear materials in Russia and throughout the world. Unfortunately, the administration has so far failed to support lawmakers who favor a global nonproliferation fund to purchase and destroy nuclear weapons and nuclear materials from any nation of concern, not just Russia.
The pledge by the members of the Group of Eight (the world’s highly industrialized nations, plus Russia) at the G8 summit in June 2002 to create a ten-year, $20 billion "Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction," was a step in the right direction, but it does not commit the United States to spend much more on nonproliferation than it is spending now. It remains to be seen whether the G8 pledge is merely a "feel good" gesture, or whether the Bush administration will begin to give this issue the priority it deserves. 20 Meantime, while personnel, equipment, and leadership resources are being focused on Iraq, the greater proliferation threat—the existence of huge stocks of poorly secured nuclear weapons and nuclear materials—is not being addressed.
Going on the Diplomatic Offensive
The Bush administration’s prevailing view is that the arms control treaties of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s are Cold War relics premised on the outmoded notion of mutual assured destruction, and thus no longer apply to a multipolar world of unstable regimes and unpredictable actors. In this new era, the argument goes, the United States needs maximum flexibility to pursue the appropriate mix of military force and bilateral or multilateral understandings necessary to protect U.S. territory, U.S. allies, and U.S. troops from attack by weapons of mass destruction.
These arguments surfaced during the administration’s campaign to justify U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In a variation of the theme, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld suggested that arms control agreements are entered into only by antagonists. And since Russian-U.S. relations have warmed, Moscow, Rumsfeld maintained, need not fear the end of the ABM Treaty or changes in the U.S. posture toward other major arms agreements. It was not as if we needed arms control agreements with Britain and France, Rumsfeld noted. 21
The argument is an interesting rhetorical device, but it is also inaccurate. Many existing arms control agreements—including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, and the Chemical Weapons Convention—are multilateral agreements that include friends and potential adversaries alike. Properly enforced, these arrangements offer the best hope of stemming the spread of weapons of mass destruction to renegade states or terror networks. To the extent that they are flawed, the solution is not to relegate them to the junkyard but to bolster them with additional measures directed at problem states, ranging from bilateral agreements like the 1994 U.S.-North Korean nuclear framework accord to multilateral initiatives like a streamlined and strengthened sanctions and inspection regime for Iraq.
With 187 signatories—five nuclear weapons states and 182 non-nuclear weapons states—the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 is one of the most generally effective arms control treaties of the modern era. In the early 1960s, with four nations— the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union—already in possession of nuclear weapons, President Kennedy worried that there might be 15 to 20 nuclear weapons states within a decade unless concerted diplomatic efforts were undertaken. Instead, there was only one addition to the nuclear club—China—and the number of nations with nuclear arsenals remained relatively stable for nearly 30 years, largely due to the creation of the NPT and the commitment of the major powers to stem the spread of nuclear weapons. It was not until the late 1990s, when nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, and renewed concerns about the nuclear programs of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea raised fears of a major new round of nuclear proliferation, that the nonproliferation regime starting showing serious strains. 22
It is important to remember that the NPT continues to serve a critical function. Eighteen industrialized states—Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland—are sufficiently advanced to produce nuclear weapons. They have abstained, pursuant to their commitments under the treaty. In addition, six states—Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine—have renounced nuclear weapons or major nuclear weapons development programs and joined the regime as non-nuclear states. 23 If a collapse of the NPT regime caused even one in three of these nations to pursue the nuclear option, the number of nuclear weapons states in the world could quickly double.
The basic bargain upon which the NPT is based—that nuclear weapons states will move toward the elimination of their arsenals in exchange for a commitment by non-nuclear weapons states to forswear the acquisition of nuclear armaments—has been challenged from two directions. Three non-signatory states—Israel, Pakistan, and India—have "gone nuclear," while three signatory states—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, (Bush’s "axis of evil")—have pursued the development of nuclear weapons with varying degrees of determination.
From above, the five "official" nuclear weapons states recognized under the terms of the treaty—the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom— have failed to live up to their obligation to take concrete steps toward the elimination of their nuclear arsenals. At the conclusion of the NPT review conference in 2000, the United States joined other parties in agreeing to an action plan calling for "the engagement as soon as appropriate of all the nuclear-weapon States in the process leading to the total elimination of their nuclear weapons." 24 The United States also endorsed a statement made to the conference on behalf of the five major nuclear weapon states that signaled "an unequivocal commitment to the ultimate goal of a complete elimination of nuclear weapons." 25 The Bush administration’s plans to develop a new generation of "bunker busting" nuclear weapons and to spend billions to modernize the U.S. nuclear weapons development and testing facilities in California, Colorado, New Mexico, South Carolina, Nevada, Tennessee, and Texas clearly contradict this commitment. 26
The Bush-Putin nuclear accord, with its relaxed time line for the reduction of deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads and its lack of any concrete commitment to destroy the nuclear weapons taken off active deployment status, represents a major missed opportunity. A more rigorous agreement aimed at permanently reducing nuclear armaments—with an eye toward their ultimate elimination—could have served as a stepping stone to the first concrete multilateral nuclear arms reduction initiative of the nuclear era.
The failure of the major nuclear powers to honor their commitments to establish a process for eliminating their arsenals has contributed to the decisions of newer nuclear powers like India and Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons. The Bush administration’s nuclear doctrine, with its explicit embrace of scenarios involving the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, is also likely to stimulate nuclear weapons development by weaker states and regional powers. These pressures from above are obviously not the only factors driving proliferation; there are also powerful regional issues such as the attempt to match or neutralize the nuclear arsenals of nearby states or to gain greater power within a region via acquisition of nuclear weapons. But the ability of the major powers to serve as honest brokers in curbing nuclear proliferation in volatile regions like South Asia and the Middle East is severely compromised by their own mixed records of meeting their commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The answer to the crisis of nonproliferation is not to let the NPT wither away in favor of ad hoc efforts. What is needed is a policy of NPT plus. The elements of such a policy would include the following:
Reinforcing the Bush-Putin accord’s commitment to reduce deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons by two-thirds over the next decade by means of a binding agreement to accelerate the pace of reductions and destroy all warheads withdrawn from service under the terms of the accord;
Creating a global nonproliferation fund with the resources not only to deal with the urgent task of destroying, securing, or neutralizing Russian weapons-grade nuclear materials but to carry out similar programs in other nations where proliferation is a concern; 27
Implementing a streamlined and strengthened regime of sanctions and inspections in Iraq that narrows the list of proscribed goods and services to items of direct military concern, improves border and cargo monitoring, provides economic incentives for Iraq’s neighbors to comply with the sanctions regime, and implements more rigorous controls and accounting procedures over the sale of Iraqi oil; 28
Resuming nuclear talks with North Korea built upon the principles of the 1994 U.S.-North Korea nuclear framework agreement, which called for the elimination of Pyongyang’s nuclear capability in exchange for a program of economic assistance and a U.S. pledge of non-aggression against North Korea;
Initiating multilateral discussions among the five major nuclear weapons states designed to set time lines for the deep reduction and ultimate elimination of their nuclear weapons, accompanied by parallel regional discussions on eliminating nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons development programs in the Middle East and South Asia.
Tough Cases
In the case of Iraq, it is important to remember that the inspections regime in place from 1991 to 1998 accomplished a great deal more than is commonly realized. As the British government’s September 2002 dossier on Iraq noted, "Despite the conduct of Iraqi authorities toward them, both UNSCOM [the U.N. inspection mission] and the IAEA Action Team have valuable records of achievement in discovering and exposing Iraq’s biological weapons programme and destroying very large quantities of chemical weapons stocks and missiles as well as the infrastructure of Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme." A 1999 report by a panel of independent experts convened by the United Nations concluded that "the bulk of Iraq’s proscribed weapons programmes have been eliminated." As of 1998, the inspection mission had destroyed all of Iraq’s nuclear and chemical weapons production facilities, as well as its main biological weapons production site. 29
In short, while Saddam Hussein’s efforts to thwart the inspections were maddening, they did not prevent the first U.N. inspection mission from dismantling most of his weapons of mass destruction capabilities. If the new round of inspections is allowed to proceed, backed with Security Council action— up to and including the use of force, if necessary—there is no reason to believe it cannot eliminate the remnants of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. The goal should not be perfection, or demonstrating that Saddam has been miraculously transformed into a paragon. The goal should be the substantial elimination of his most dangerous military capabilities. If the Bush administration were to put real energy into crafting a more robust sanctions and monitoring regime, it could eliminate the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for far less cost in blood, treasure, and instability than by launching a war for "regime change."
The North Korean case is also in need of closer scrutiny. As arms control expert Leon V. Sigal has argued, the revelation of a secret North Korean uranium enrichment "program"— which at this point appears to be no more than a procurement effort that has acquired some components that could eventually be used to build a uranium enrichment facility—was probably Pyongyang’s usual backhanded way of trying to get U.S.-North Korea nuclear negotiations back on track. If North Korea’s goal was to build up its nuclear arsenal as quickly as possible, it could have exploited its plutonium-fueled reactor at Yongbyon, finished building two other partially completed reactors, and generated enough material for up to 100 nuclear weapons.
It was these activities that were proscribed by the 1994 framework agreement. But even as it sought to challenge the Bush administration, North Korea initially chose not to violate these fundamental features of the accord. It instead chose to pursue a uranium enrichment capability, a much more cumbersome route toward the possible development of a nuclear device that was not explicitly covered by the agreement. 30 It was only in mid-December, after Spanish and U.S. naval personnel intercepted a North Korean shipment of Scud missiles bound for Yemen, that Pyonyang upped the ante by threatening to restart the reactor at Yongbyon. By early January, the North Korean crisis had intensified as Pyongyang kicked out IAEA inspectors and announced its withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But negotiations aimed at eliminating North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs remain the best available policy option.
The history of the U.S.-North Korea framework suggests that when the United States has met its end of the bargain, Pyongyang has complied with its obligations. When the United States has violated the letter or the spirit of the accords—as the Bush administration did by suggesting unilateral changes in the terms of the accord, expressing hostile intent by publicly labeling North Korea as part of the "axis of evil," and identifying it as a potential target of a U.S. nuclear strike in its nuclear posture statement—Pyongyang has stepped up its military activities in the hope of jolting Washington back to the negotiating table.
The Korean situation is a prime example of the limits of the Bush doctrine of preemption. Given that Pyongyang may have one or two nuclear weapons, constructed prior to the 1994 framework accord, and that all the major players in the region want to resolve this new nuclear crisis without risking a war, the prudent choice is a diplomatic solution to the problems of North Korean nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. The fact that Pyongyang’s main source of gas centrifuges for its proposed uranium enrichment project is Pakistan, a major U.S. ally in the war on terrorism, further underscores the point that the Bush slogan of forcing nations to be either "with us or against us" is of limited utility in implementing a serious strategy for stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.
The only true "undeterrables" in the new nuclear equation are the practitioners of catastrophic terrorism, like the September 11 suicide hijackers. Tyrants with state power are first and foremost survivors. Their desire to survive can be exploited to create enforceable mechanisms short of war for eliminating their ability to develop or use weapons of mass destruction. Dealing with tough cases like Iraq and North Korea through concerted diplomacy—backed up by force or the threat of force only as a true last resort—would free up time, energy, and resources for the urgent task of building a global coalition to eliminate, secure, and protect the world’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction so that terrorists seeking these awful weapons will have the odds firmly stacked against them.
The dynamics of the proliferation challenge are too complex for one country to deal with on its own, no matter how awesome its military arsenal. And the depth of cooperation required goes far beyond the Bush administration’s preferred approach of announcing a forceful position and then rounding up an ad hoc international posse to join the charge. When it comes to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, diplomacy works. •
*William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow and director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute.
Notes1. No respected governmental or independent source says that Iran or Iraq possess nuclear weapons. There is dispute about the status of North Korea, with some analysts suggesting that Pyongyang may have extracted enough bomb-grade material to make one or two nuclear weapons before the implementation of the 1994 U.S.-North Korea nuclear framework agreement. In contrast, Israel is believed to have at least 100 nuclear weapons, India has an estimated 50 to 90, and Pakistan is believed to have 30 to 50. (See Joseph Cirincione, ed., with Jon B. Wolfstahl and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction [Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002], pp. 35–43.)
2. For an overview of the Bush nuclear doctrine, see William Arkin, "Secret Plan Outlines the Unthinkable," Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2002.
3. According to Cirincione et al., in Deadly Arsenals, current global nuclear stockpiles include more than 30,000 strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, the vast majority of which are in the possession of the United States and Russia. Russia alone is believed to possess enough highly enriched uranium and plutonium to make an additional 40,000 nuclear weapons. (See Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler, A Report Card on the Department of Energy’s Nonproliferation Programs with Russia [Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, U.S. Department of Energy, January 10, 2001], p. v.)
4. Office of the White House Press Secretary, "President Outlines Iraqi Threat," remarks by the president on Iraq, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 7, 2002.
5. Daniel Benjamin, "Iraq and Al Qaeda Are Not Allies," New York Times, September 30, 2002.
6. R. James Woolsey, "The Iraq Connection," Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2001.
7. Susan Page, "Showdown with Saddam: The Decision to Act," USA Today, September 11, 2002.
8. "President Outlines Iraqi Threat," p. 4.
9. David S. Cloud, "Missing Links: Bush Efforts to Tie Hussein to al Qaeda Lack Clear Evidence," Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2002. For a detailed review of Pollack’s book, see Brian Urquhart, "The Prospect of War," New York Review of Books, December 19, 2002.
10. David Rogers and Greg Jaffe, "CIA Says Iraq on Brink of War Would Use Terror," Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2002.
11. United States Department of Defense News Transcript, "DOD News Briefing—Sec. Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers," September 3, 2002.
12. Dana Milbank, "For Bush, Facts Are Malleable; Presidential Tradition of Embroidering Key Assertions Continues," Washington Post, October 22, 2002.
13. William J. Broad, "UN Arms Team Taking Up Its Task, a Mixture of ‘Hide and Seek’ and ‘20 Questions,’" New York Times, November 19, 2002; Michael R. Gordon, "Agency Challenges Evidence Against Iraq Cited by Bush," New York Times, January 10, 2002.
14. "President Outlines Iraqi Threat," p. 3; and Milbank, "For Bush, Facts are Malleable."
15. Page, "Showdown with Saddam."
16. Frida Berrigan, "Stumbling Blindly Into War," Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org), November 15, 2002.
17. Baker and Cutler, Report Card, p. ii.
18. "Nunn-Lugar Scorecard," Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council (RANSAC), available at www.ransac.org.
19. William Hoehn, "Analysis of the Bush Administration’s Fiscal Year 2003 Requests for U.S.-Former Soviet Union Nonproliferation Programs," RANSAC, April 2002. For a good overview of the range of potential costs involved in a war in Iraq, see William D. Nordhaus, "Iraq: The Economic Consequences of War," New York Review of Books, December 5, 2002.
20. On the G8 initiative, see "Perspectives on the G8 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction," testimony of Kenneth N. Luongo, executive director, Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, before the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, October 9, 2002; and Jon Wolfstahl, "It Takes More Than Money" (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 28, 2002), available at www.ceip.org.
21. For an example of Rumsfeld’s arguments along these lines, see Jim Garamone, "Rumsfeld Asks Senate to Support Nuke Reduction Treaty," Armed Forces Press Service, July 17, 2002, which summarizes part of the secretary of defense’s testimony on the Bush-Putin accord as follows: "[Rumsfeld] said both the United States and Russia are working toward the day when no arms control treaties will be necessary between the United States and Russia. ‘That’s how normal countries deal with each other,’ he said. ‘The United States and Great Britain—both nuclear powers—do not require massive arms control protocols to govern relations,’ Rumsfeld said. ‘We would like the relationship with Russia to move in that direction, and indeed, it is.’"
22. Cirincione, et al., Deadly Arsenals, pp. 17–18.
23. See Cirincione, et al., Deadly Arsenals, p. 43, for documentation on states that have abstained from or denounced the development of nuclear weapons in line with their commitments to the NPT.
24. "Final Document of the 2000 NPT Review Conference: A Program of Action on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament," reprinted in Cirincione, et al., Deadly Arsenals, pp. 379–81.
25. "Statement to the 2000 NPT Review Conference by H. E. Hubert de la Fortelle on Behalf of the Permanent Five Nuclear-Weapon States, Introducing Their Collective Statement," reprinted in Cirincione, et al., Deadly Arsenals, pp. 381–85.
26. For more details on the Bush administration’s plans for developing new nuclear weapons and upgrading the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, see William D. Hartung, with Jonathan Reingold, About Face: The Role of the Arms Lobby in the Bush Administration’s Radical Reversal of Two Decades of U.S. Nuclear Policy (New York: World Policy Institute, May 2002); and Natural Resources Defense Council, "Faking Restraint: The Bush Administration’s Secret Plan for Strengthening U.S. Nuclear Forces" (Washington, D.C.: NDRC, February 13, 2002).
27. For details on proposals for a concerted global nonproliferation program, see Sen. Richard Lugar, "Next Steps in U.S. Nonproliferation Policy," Arms Control Today, December 2002; and Sam Nunn, remarks, Non-Proliferation Conference, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., November 14, 2002, available at www.ceip.org.
28. For a detailed proposal along these lines, see David A. Cortright, George A. Lopez, and Alistair Millar, Winning Without War: Sensible Security Options for Dealing with Iraq, policy brief F5, Sanctions and Security Project, Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame and the Fourth Freedom Forum, October 2002.
29. Ibid., pp. 7–11.
30. Leon V. Sigal, "North Korea Is No Iraq: Pyongyang’s Negotiating Strategy," Arms Control Today, December 2002.