In Midnight’s Shadow
by DNassre
Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev at the signing of the SALT accords in 1972
DANNY NASSRE
Those concerned about the fate of humanity might want to take a look at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, the publication’s symbolic warning of how close we are to destroying ourselves.
Your concern might grow when you discover that the clock is currently set at five minutes to midnight (the closer to midnight, the greater the danger), its latest setting since 1984, during an especially tense period in the Cold War. It was three minutes to midnight then, so we’re two minutes safer now — whatever that means. A metaphorical clock, however, might not be the best way to capture the state of global security, so the Bulletin explains that “the world stands at the brink of a second nuclear age.”
The United States is the world’s leading nuclear and military power, so, by default, our policies have the greatest effect on the worldwide nuclear situation. In trying to determine if we are, in fact, heading towards a “second nuclear age,” the first place to look is right here.
In principle, the foundation of American (and global) nuclear policy is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Introduced in 1968, the NPT is the world’s broadest treaty on nuclear activities. Ratified by all but four countries, it prohibits the possession of nuclear weapons by any but original the original declared nuclear weapons states, and obligates these states to undertake efforts to reduce their arsenals, with the eventual goal of complete disarmament.
A review conference for the NPT is held every five years. American press coverage of the most recent conference, in May 2005, was far from extensive, but the New York Times did run a lead article on the meeting the day before it began. It noted that the American delegation would highlight issues of Iran and North Korea’s non-compliance, and the loopholes that allow for the production of nuclear weapons via nuclear energy development, while essentially ignoring its own obligations under the treaty. “[President Bush],” it said, “is seeking agreement from a smaller club, called the Nuclear Suppliers Group….This approach is intended to work around the United Nations, and avoid subjecting the United States to a broad debate about whether it is in compliance with its own obligations under the treaty.”
So, how well is Washington complying? Article VI of the NPT calls on all signatories “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures” to end the arms race and to negotiate a treaty on total disarmament. Even a brief glance at US nuclear policy in the past few decades might lead some to question the extent of our “good faith” in this regard.
Signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) allowed only two ABM sites for each country (reduced to one each two years later) and prohibited the development of sea, air, mobile-land, or space-based ABM systems. These missile defense systems are intended to protect against enemy missiles by intercepting them. The ABM treaty aimed to discourage the increased proliferation and deployment of nuclear weapons that could occur to overcome such defenses.
The United States’ undermining of the ABM Treaty goes back to the Reagan administration and its Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars.” It was an attempt to develop a spaced-based system that would use lasers to intercept missiles. After Ronald Reagan’s election to a second term, a Foreign Affairs article by McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, Robert McNamara and Gerard C. Smith — all key figures in Cold War and defense policy — said that the plan does not “respect reality,” and that the idea that nuclear weapons, even only nuclear missiles, can be made “impotent and obsolete,” as Reagan suggested is an “illusion.” They pointed out that at contemporary levels of missile deployment, even a 95 percent success rate for SDI intercepts would still result in the “disintegration” of both the United States and Russia, and noted that none of Reagan’s advisors ever claimed that any success rate approaching this was even possible. The officer in charge of SDI, Lieutenant General James Abrahamson, admitted that “a perfect defense is not a realistic thing.”
Assuming potential adversaries actually react to things happening around them, it probably wouldn’t have been much of a defense at all. Bundy and the others noted that “any prospect of a significantly improved American defense is absolutely certain to stimulate the most energetic Soviet efforts to ensure the continued ability of Soviet warheads to get through,” improving our chances for “disintegration”.
The end of the Cold War saw the beginning of vital cooperation between the United States and former Soviet republics in the securing of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material in the latter’s territories, but it has done little to curb American ambitions to develop new nuclear weapons and ABM systems. The Strategic Defense Initiative was never implemented, but plans for missile defense were kept alive, with modifications, throughout the Clinton administration. At the end of 2001, the Pentagon submitted its latest Nuclear Posture Review to Congress. The report emphasized that the United States needs “greater flexibility…with respect to nuclear forces and planning” than it had during the Cold War, and foretold the development of technologies that would enable “US non-nuclear and nuclear capabilities to be coupled with active and passive defenses.” Most notably, a “variety of flexible, pre-planned non-nuclear and nuclear options,” including extensive deployment of missile defense systems, were noted as a goal of current planning.
Around the same time, the United States withdrew from the ABM treaty, “following North Korea’s example,” as only the second state to withdraw from a postwar arms-control treaty, according to John Rheinlander, one of the American treaty negotiators. At an Arms Control Association conference held a year before the withdrawal, Rheinlander said that US rejection of the treaty would result in “a world without effective legal constraints” and deal “a fatal blow over the long term to the NPT regime.” The Federation of American Scientists warned that the “framework of international law would disintegrate” if other countries were to follow the example we would set in withdrawing from the treaty. This argument was given almost immediate support by Russia’s subsequent withdrawal from the START II arms reduction treaty, which would have further reduced the number of American and Russian deployed strategic weapons, and effectively limited the number of warheads on each missile to one by eliminating multiple independently-targeted reentry vehicles. The Russian parliament had recently ratified START II with the proviso that the United States continue to abide by the ABM treaty.
Willingness on the part of states to withdraw from these treaty obligations renew concerns about nuclear proliferation. In particular, proliferation increases the chances of an accidental launch of a nuclear-armed missile, a deliberate nuclear attack by a state, or the use of a nuclear weapon in a terrorist attack. All of these situations could presumably lead to a wide-ranging nuclear exchange. And there is growing agreement that each of these risks is exacerbated by the United States’ current nuclear posture.
The possibility of an accidental nuclear launch is not as absurd as it may sound, especially when one considers the complexity and age of the technologies involved, and the “high-alert” status of the US and Russian arsenals — one which allows for deciding how to respond to a perceived attack after as little as twenty minutes of deliberation.
A 1998 article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled “Accidental Nuclear War – A Post Cold-War Assessment,” co-authored by several nuclear security experts, notes that a number of authorities consider a launch based on a false warning to be the most likely form of an accidental attack. They are quick to point out that “this danger is not theoretical,” and mention two breakdowns in the US system in 1979 and 1980, caused by human error and computer-chip failures, which indicated that a massive Soviet strike was imminent. They also note a 1995 incident in which a US scientific research rocket launched from Norway activated Russian “nuclear suitcases,” leading to an emergency conference which decided that there was, in fact, no threat of an attack, supposedly just four minutes before standard procedure would have mandated a decision.
Since this incident, Russia’s early-warning systems have become even less reliable, as its number of early-warning satellites has been reduced from nine to three. Because Russia’s deployed arsenal is especially vulnerable to surprise attack, with much of it in poorly-defended silos, mobile units, and docked submarines, it has a greater incentive to respond to perceived threats quickly. A recent report by the Federation of American Scientists says that “the next time Russia interprets a benign event as a potential nuclear attack, it is not clear that it will have enough information to decide that it can afford to wait.”
Unfortunately, American policy leading up to and continuing after Washington’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty is creating a situation in which Russia will become more reliant on this questionable and deteriorating early-warning system. In January 2000 negotiations, the United States tried to push for Russian acceptance of an American missile defense system — which was supposed to defend against missiles from antagonists such as Iran — by assuring them that Russia would not be threatened as long as it maintained its high-alert posture and its extensive deployment of weapons. In an article on the negotiations, the New York Times quoted John D. Steinbruner, a nuclear expert at the University of Maryland, as calling the Clinton administration’s position “pretty bizarre,” since “we know their warning system is full of holes.” The article also noted that “experts agree that Russia’s network of early warning radars, satellites and computers is decaying and increasingly prone to false alerts,” and quoted MIT physicist Lisbeth Gronlund as saying that the United States is paying the price of “the continued threat of Russian unauthorized, accidental and erroneous launches” for “what she characterized as an unworkable antimissile dream.”
Gronlund’s characterization of missile defense as a dream isn’t necessarily accurate. It depends on what your goals are. A 1999 analysis of missile defense by the RAND Corporation says that the “reason the general problem [of creating a ballistic missile defense system] is worth solving is not that some rogue would launch an unprovoked, and patently suicidal, nuclear or biological attack on US territory,” a situation it calls “far-fetched.” Rather, the report concludes, missile defense is for situations in which “in the face of utter defeat by US conventional forces, an enemy regime could threaten such an attack in order to deter the United States — and conceivably carry out the threat if the United States were not deterred.” This latter “coercion” scenario is not far-fetched, according to RAND, which describes ballistic missile defense as not simply a shield but an “enabler of US action.”
Crucially, RAND notes that the United States would probably not normally be deterred from acting abroad to protect vital American interests, so that missile defense would be especially useful in situations where we are acting to defend “less-than-vital interests.” So, according to one of the nation’s premier defense think tanks, a primary purpose of national missile defense, which it endorses, is to protect the United States from itself when a country’s nuclear weapons are insufficient to deter us from attacking it to protect less-than-vital American interests.
This assessment is not controversial, and becomes increasingly relevant when one considers the burgeoning dominance of American nuclear power. In Foreign Affairs, Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press claim that the era of mutually-assured destruction, the Cold War paradigm, is coming to an end, and that “it will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike.” Their article details improvements to American nuclear forces since the end of the Cold War, such as the deployment of highly-accurate Trident II D-5 missiles on submarines, the equipping of nuclear-armed cruise missiles on B-52 bombers that are probably invisible to Chinese and Russian radar, the upgrades to the B-2 bomber that render it invisible to radar, and the placement of higher-yield warheads on Minuteman ICBMs. They also catalogue the waning effectiveness of Russian and Chinese nuclear capabilities, especially Russia’s warning system, which they call a “mess.” According to them, Russia would have no warning of a US nuclear attack from submarines in the Pacific, and only a few minutes’ notice if the attack were to come from certain parts of the North Atlantic.
The United States deliberately seeks “nuclear primacy,” they say, and not for deterring terrorists or rogue states. Such an explanation “does not add up,” in light of the fact that the Pentagon is upgrading the warheads used in most submarine missiles to attack hard targets such as bunkers or ICBM silos. The United States already has over a thousand weapons that could attack bunkers or caves where terrorist weapons might be stored; therefore, additional upgrades are probably being made to allow the United States to take out a very large number of hard targets. “The current and future US nuclear force,” they say, “seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike against Russia or China.”
Missile defense is part of this quest for primacy. Lieber and Press agree with critics of missile defense that say it would fail to defend against a major nuclear attack, but point out that it “would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one — as an adjunct to a American first-strike capability, not as a standalone shield.” The United States would be able to decapitate a nuclear power’s arsenal in a first strike, and then withstand the relatively small retaliation by means of its ABM systems.
Given this, one does not need to be too empathetic to understand Russian apprehension at the latest American plans for an ABM radar installation in the Czech Republic and missile interceptors in Poland. Nevertheless, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed Russian fears, saying “the idea that somehow ten interceptors and a few radars in Eastern Europe are going to threaten the Soviet [sic] strategic deterrent is purely ludicrous and everybody knows it.”
Apparently not. Last summer, MIT physics professor Ted Postol and Brookings Institution fellow and former American diplomat James Goodby argued in the International Herald Tribune that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s alternative proposal to allow the United States to share an early warning radar with Russia in Azerbaijan made “very good sense,” as it would allow the two countries to combine their complementary tracking systems while easing Russian trepidation. As for the American proposal, they note that the system would enable the United States to track virtually every ICBM Russia launches at our eastern shores, and that the system can be upgraded over time with no external modifications — the radars can easily serve as forward lookouts for the soon-to-be-upgraded Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor system, eliminating the need for the THAAD system to rely on American-based radars that would have difficulty effectively scanning large portions of the sky for Russian missiles by themselves. The consequence of this would be “that 1,000 or more THAAD interceptors could be, in principle, eventually used as part of a US national missile defense system aimed at Russia.”
In a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science last summer, Postol drew attention to National Presidential Security Directive 23 (NPSD-23), which says that the missile defenses it had planned for 2004 “will serve as a starting point for fielding improved and expanded missile defense capabilities later.” This, he says, sends a signal to the Russians that the current plans are only the leading edge of a potentially “unbounded” expansion of the missile defense system. The creeping of NATO membership along the country’s borders probably isn’t seen as coincidental.
Russia’s opposition to these plans has lead to its decision to suspend its participation in the European Conventional Armed Forces Treaty, and the issue remains a sticking point in relations between Moscow and Washington. Even if an understanding is reached, it is likely to be one that involves maintaining the Russian arsenal’s high-alert status.
This posture is untenable. A figure no less prominent than former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called current US nuclear weapons policy “immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous.”In his 2005 Foreign Affairs article, “Apocalypse Soon,” McNamara noted that there is an “unacceptably high” risk of inadvertent nuclear war.
McNamara is hardly a dove. Indeed, he confirms the necessity of a large nuclear arsenal capable of withstanding an initial attack and inflicting unacceptable damage to the attacker for as long as nuclear-armed potential adversaries exist. But there is a difference between such a deterrent and the threat posed by a first-strike capability. This is why McNamara says that our commitment to ensure that nukes remain a vital part of the projection of our military power “is simultaneously eroding the international norms that have limited the spread of nuclear weapons and fissile materials for fifty years.”
He notes that a large portion of US nuclear policy has remained unchanged since even before his tenure. Importantly, the United States has never had a “no first-use” policy. McNamara says “we have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons — by the decision of one person, the president — against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so,” and gives a chilling reminder that launching a “nuclear holocaust” would only take twenty minutes of deliberation by the president and his advisors.
McNamara’s objections are currently relevant to the counter-proliferation efforts that are a big part of the Bush administration’s rhetoric, if not actual practice. Ashton Carter, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense and Co-Director of Harvard and Stanford’s Preventative Defense project, is critical of the short shrift given to counter-proliferation programs at the Pentagon while missile defense gets $10 billion annually. He warns that a “growing reliance by Washington on nuclear weapons for its security would complicate its efforts to marshal international cooperation against WMD terrorism and overhaul nuclear arms control regimes,” and singles out the aforementioned earth-penetrating warheads in development as “ill-advised.” Instead, he advocates for the expansion of non-nuclear capabilities so that nuclear weapons “play an enduring but background role as a deterrent of last resort.”
Defense analyst Graham Allison of Harvard’s Kennedy School advocates a variety of measures to revive the global non-proliferation regime, such as establishing a secured global fuel supply for nations to peacefully pursue nuclear power; and the creation of a standardized system of secure controls for nuclear material. These are among the most important steps that could be undertaken in the name of global security.
But as long as American nuclear policy is one of escalation, we should not be surprised if cooperation on this front is lagging. Allison notes that at the 2005 NPT review conference, the United States renounced disarmament commitments made at the previous review in 2000, and forbid the very word “disarmament” from appearing in conference documents. This lead to the refusal of non-nuclear states to cooperate on the issue of loopholes in the NPT that allowed North Korea and Iran to develop nuclear weapons programs.
Just as dangerous as the lack of cooperation is the antagonism US policies can generate. The long-term picture is difficult to assess, but growing fears among a number of experts and former policy makers should not be taken lightly. This anxiety extends across the political spectrum. In January, Henry Kissinger and other former Washington officials wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal decrying the “increasingly hazardous reliance” on nuclear weapons, and warning that we cannot replicate our Cold War policies vis-à-vis the Soviet Union with a growing number of nuclear weapons states without “dramatically increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used.”
Kissinger and the others noted that the world has become skeptical of the commitment of the nuclear weapons states to the NPT, and recommended the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would prohibit the testing that would be important to the development of nuclear weapons by non-weapons states (Washington does not intend to ratify the treaty, because it doesn’t want to rule out the possibility of testing new weapons)..
The problem of nuclear proliferation may have only gotten worse since the end of the Cold War, yet US nuclear policy is hardly a staple of popular discussion. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly 45 percent of Americans viewed nuclear weapons as a great threat to the world as of last summer, but it’s doubtful that many have read things like the matter-of-fact claims in the country’s most prestigious foreign affairs journal that the United States aims to dominate the international order through a nuclear first-strike capability.
The rest of the world might not be so surprised. The invasion of Iraq was likely seen as a preview of the American actions for which missile defense might serve as an “enabler.” John Lewis Gaddis, professor of military history at Yale, pointed out the obvious: “the invasion of Iraq appears to have convinced leaders in those countries that they must have a nuclear capability of their own. Far from deterring them, the United States may have pushed them into finding ways to deter it.” Noted Israeli historian Martin van Creveld was more to the point: “Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons [in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion]”, he said, “they would be crazy.” The fact that the United States gives enormous military aid to two of the four nuclear weapons states that are non-signatories to the NPT — Israel and Pakistan — and intends to cooperate on the development of nuclear technology with a third — India — cannot be lost on Iran.
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran completed last year said that the country’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.” It might be time to consider how our policies factor into this cost-benefit analysis.
Another predictable consequence of invading Iraq was confirmed by the American intelligence community, which said that the invasion increased the overall threat of terrorism since the September 11th attacks and lead to a diffusion of fundamentalist ideologies around the globe, which is especially alarming given that terrorist groups are widely believed to be the most likely perpetrators of a future nuclear attack. The virtual consensus of security and defense experts is that a nuclear terrorist attack is among the gravest threats to international security, especially given the wealth of poorly secured nuclear material scattered around the world. Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said in a 2004 National Academy of Sciences meeting that he had “never been more fearful of a nuclear detonation than now.… There is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear strike on US targets within a decade,” and Robert McNamara publically admitted to sharing these fears.
We should not be surprised by repeats of the Iranian and North Korean confrontations, and attacks that may dwarf those of September 11th, if we maintain our current course. Some of steps towards altering it are obvious enough: reviving the ABM treaty; curbing the development of new nuclear weapons; reducing our arsenal, paying special attention to weapons that encourage counter-proliferation, such as earth-penetrating warheads; and reducing the alert status of deployed nuclear weapons to increase warning times — the vital measures that need to be taken to ensure the security of all nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material around the world require international cooperation that could only be bolstered by such changes in our posture.
The probability of a nuclear attack at any point in time may be low, but the tremendous consequences of such an event make it among the most serious threats facing the world.
