GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Volume 8 ● Number 1–2 ● Winter/Spring 2006—Nuclear Perils
Bush and the Bomb: Undermining Non-Proliferation
Arms Control: Arrested ProgressThe United States has had a leadership role in initiating, negotiating, and implementing nuclear arms control treaties and agreements throughout the last forty years. These treaties and agreements exist in a variety of forms, including bilateral and multilateral agreements and both qualitative and quantitative arms control measures. While many of the treaties and agreements focused on the US–Soviet relationship, others have dealt with regional nuclear issues, and some with the related question of nuclear-weapons testing. This brief overview of several decades of relevant negotiations, arrangements, and treaties provides background and context for the current situation regarding US policy on nuclear arms control and non-proliferation.
The 1960s were a productive period for those supporting nuclear arms control. Although there was frustration over the failure to achieve a comprehensive test ban, a treaty banning tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water was signed and ratified in 1963. This was followed by a Latin American treaty in 1967 prohibiting nuclear weapons in that region, and by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was signed in 1968 and entered into force in 1970.
In many respects, the 1970s represented the high point of nuclear arms control for the United States. Key measures included the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) interim agreement and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, both signed in 1972; the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, which was signed in 1974 (but not ratified until 1990); and the 1979 SALT II Treaty (not ratified).
The 1980s also witnessed some progress on nuclear arms control. Arguably the most important measure was the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1987, with entry into force in 1988. The context for arms control changed dramatically in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1990, members of NATO and the former Warsaw Pact agreed to the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, which fundamentally reshaped the deployment of military forces on the continent. While this treaty dealt with conventional forces, it substantially affected the climate of relations between NATO and the central and eastern European nations.
Progress on nuclear arms control continued during the early part of the 1990s with the START I and START II Treaties on limiting strategic nuclear weapons. During this decade, countries in South-East Asia and Africa successfully negotiated nuclear-weapons-free zones for their regions. Agreement was also reached on signing a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), although it did not enter into force because key states failed to ratify the treaty.
However, the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century have seen little progress in traditional arms control negotiations. In 1999, during President Clinton’s second term in office, the US Senate rejected the CTBT. President George W. Bush chose not to resubmit the treaty to the Senate, and in December 2001, he gave Russia six months’ notice that the United States was withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.
Despite the announcement of the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, in May 2002 the United States and Russia signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) to reduce deployed strategic nuclear warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 for each country. SORT only contains five brief articles (in contrast, for example, to the extraordinarily long and convoluted SALT Treaties). These articles refer to the countries’ obligations under the START I Treaty and the NPT, allowing them to take advantage of the verification provisions contained in START I. However, SORT lacks provisions for restricting weapons in storage, awaiting dismantlement, or kept as hedges against changes in other countries’ nuclear programmes. As a result, the United States plans to retain thousands of nuclear weapons in these categories, which will not be counted against the treaty limits. The Value of Arms ControlThere has been a continuing, extensive, and acrimonious debate over the value of arms control in recent decades. Detractors point to the tremendous cost in time and money of negotiating agreements that in many cases seemed to do little to slow or halt the arms race. Supporters contend that such agreements provided for dialogue at a time when it was otherwise difficult to accomplish, that they helped cap nuclear-weapons programmes, and that they laid the groundwork for more substantive agreements.
At a Washington, D.C., press conference on 21 March 1963, President John F. Kennedy predicted that without significant international effort to stop nuclear-weapons testing and prevent nuclear proliferation, there could be dozens of nuclear states by the end of the 1970s:
I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful [with the nuclear test ban], there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, fifteen or twenty … I see the possibility in the 1970s of the president of the United States having to face a world in which fifteen or twenty or twenty-five nations may have these weapons. I regard that as the greatest possible danger and hazard.
The NPT of 1968 established two classes of states. The first, the “haves”, were those states that had produced and exploded nuclear devices before 1 January 1967. These five countries are the “original” nuclear states: the United States, the Soviet Union (whose treaty obligations were assumed by Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union), Britain, France, and China.
The second group consisted of those states that had not demonstrated a nuclear-weapons capacity before 1967, the “have nots”. However, many states originally chose to remain outside the treaty. Even after the United States pushed for universal membership in advance of the 1995 NPT review conference, Cuba, Israel, India, and Pakistan remained outside the regime. Cuba eventually decided to join the treaty in September 2002; the other three countries are still not parties to the NPT.
As of this writing, there are five acknowledged nuclear states within the NPT (the United States, Russia, China, France, and Britain) and two states that chose not to be parties to the NPT and subsequently announced that they had nuclear weapons (Pakistan and India). One additional state is generally considered to have nuclear weapons (Israel), and another may have nuclear weapons (North Korea). There are a small number of additional countries of concern, principally Iran, and perhaps Algeria.
In the past, the United States was a leader in global non-proliferation efforts, and helped prevent proliferation in many countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. The United States was instrumental in convincing South Korea to forgo nuclear weapons in the 1970s; it also played a critical role in helping Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine join the NPT as non-nuclear states two decades later. Through serious, sustained diplomatic effort, the United States helped produce many non-proliferation success stories.
Yet even though non-proliferation efforts have succeeded in preventing the emergence of dozens of nuclear states, the failures (Israel, Pakistan, India, and perhaps North Korea) are significant. In addition, the non-proliferation regime is not well constructed to deal with non-state actors. Possible ProliferatorsTo date, analysts and policymakers concerned with non-proliferation have generally focused on three categories of states: the five original nuclear states, the proliferators from outside the NPT regime (Israel, Pakistan, India), and the “rogue states” (generally North Korea and Iran, possibly Algeria, and formerly Iraq).
Academics, analysts, journalists, and policymakers alike have too frequently ignored two other groups: “genie states”, those states that have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons but have not done so; and non-state actors. Proliferation to either of these groups could endanger regional and global security, and there are plausible scenarios for such proliferation. In this article, I provide a preliminary analysis, utilising a new framework for non-proliferation study that includes consideration of the genie states and non-state actors.
Nuclear-capable countries are worthy of concern because many of them have previously made active decisions to forgo nuclear weapons. If they chose to reverse this decision, some of them could develop nuclear weapons in weeks or months. These countries include Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, as well as Canada, Sweden, and Switzerland. Several of these countries, such as Brazil and Argentina, started nuclear programmes before deciding not to proceed further.
The second often-overlooked group is quite different because it consists of non-state actors, including terrorist organisations. After the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, there was tremendous media attention to the likelihood of al-Qaeda obtaining nuclear material, possibly from former Soviet countries. Russia, because of its enormous inventories of weapons and weapons-grade material, has justifiably been the focus of most efforts to safeguard nuclear material. Yet there has been far less analysis of nuclear sources beyond Russia. Insufficient attention has also been paid to tools other than military force and pre-emption that the international community might use to prevent proliferation to non-state actors. US policy continues to emphasise military measures and pre-emption—counter-proliferation, rather than non-proliferation.
To develop a robust non-proliferation policy, we must integrate recommendations for all of these groups—the five original nuclear states, non-NPT proliferators, “rogue states”, genie states, and non-state actors. Concentrating on one group at a time gives the others a free ride. Addressing the ThreatsGenie StatesThe needs and concerns of genie states seem to receive little attention at present. Neglecting these states may increase the likelihood that they will develop the sense that they must provide for their own security, rather than participate in collective security efforts. If they do so, the risk of nuclear proliferation may increase substantially.
One key issue is whether the genie states consider the US “nuclear umbrella” to be credible. The nuclear umbrella is the promise that the United States will come to the aid of non-nuclear allies—with nuclear weapons if necessary—if they are attacked by a nuclear state. If they consider that promise to be shaky, these countries may perceive greater incentive to develop their own nuclear weapons. Many political, economic, and diplomatic tools can be used to support the genie states; and these tools should be utilised. Military tools can and should be a last resort in these efforts.
Perhaps the most constructive role for US policy is to participate in efforts to reduce the risk that conflicts will escalate. Here, too, multilateral diplomacy and non-military measures may be considerably more effective than unilateral steps or early recourse to military action. Non-State ActorsNon-state actors such as terrorist groups are a particular challenge, as they have been largely ignored by the non-proliferation regime until quite recently (non-state actors are not even mentioned in the NPT). In developing and assessing options for reducing the risk of non-state actors obtaining access to nuclear material, a core research issue is weighing the future potential for harm as opposed to the current level of danger. The international community has apparently been relatively successful thus far in keeping nuclear material away from non-state actors. It is hard to say how much this is due to skill, or to what extent it is simply a matter of luck.
Unfortunately, unless there are dramatic changes in control systems and the international security environment, it is probably only a matter of time before non-state actors obtain access to nuclear weapons. Too much material is unaccounted for and probably cannot be accounted for. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-governmental organisation founded by media executive Ted Turner and former US senator Sam Nunn, regularly documents “proliferation-significant” cases of theft or attempted theft of nuclear material from the former Soviet Union. The clock is working against us.
Improving the non-proliferation regime’s capacity to deal with non-state actors may also strengthen the regime as a whole. Thus, non-state actors might seek to obtain complete nuclear weapons, while states might be more likely to develop key components indigenously and then obtain the additional parts by other means, such as purchase, theft, or diversion of a legal transfer. Even so, at some point each seeker of nuclear weapons would still need to obtain fissile material in order to have operational nuclear weapons. Consequently, the same measures that could make it more difficult for non-state actors to develop or obtain nuclear material or weapons would also make it more difficult for states to do so. This relatively simple example highlights the continued need to control the explosive material at its source, regardless of whether we seek to prevent proliferation to states or to non-state actors. Other core objectives in preventing proliferation include the physical protection of facilities and of nuclear material.
In addition, the Bush administration’s commitment to the war on terrorism may permit policy approaches that would not be feasible if states alone were the issue. For example, President Bush has used strong language about holding states responsible for groups that operate within their borders. Concerned states could use diplomatic and economic pressure to convince other states to address non-state threats within their borders. Bush’s Nuclear PolicyIn his State of the Union address in January 2002, President Bush represented the threats to US national security as emanating principally from the “axis of evil”—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Together, the themes of responding to the “axis of evil” and conducting the “war on terrorism” have framed recent US national security policy decisions. Those decisions have included invading Afghanistan and Iraq, threatening to invade other countries, approving the development of new nuclear weapons, and moving towards a resumption of nuclear testing.
In January 2002, the Bush administration delivered its “Nuclear Posture Review” to Congress. Leaked portions of this secret policy document indicate that the Bush administration ordered the drafting of contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven countries, including Iran, Syria, Libya, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, and China. Only two of these countries (Russia and China) are known to have nuclear weapons; a third (North Korea) is suspected of having a small number of nuclear weapons.
Using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries violates the commitment to “negative security assurances” that had been US policy since 1978. Through negative security assurances, countries with nuclear weapons promise not to attack non-nuclear states except in response to an attack by a non-nuclear state that was aided by a nuclear state.
The Nuclear Posture Review also calls for developing nuclear bunker busters and nuclear warheads “that reduce collateral damage”, as well as weapons that could be used against terrorist targets. The review refers to this as “possible modifications to existing weapons to provide additional yield flexibility”.1 Each of these developments threatens the non-proliferation regime by providing incentives for other countries to follow the US path.
Significant risks are associated with the Bush administration’s policies. First, the United States is committing enormous time, blood and treasure to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than two thousand US troops have died in Iraq, most of them since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in May 2003.
Second, there is a risk of open conflict with North Korea, Iran, and other states. In the introduction to his administration’s National Security Strategy, released in September 2002, President Bush threatens continued pre-emption, stating that “as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed”. Later in the document, this point is reinforced:
Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents; whose so-called soldiers seek martyrdom in death and whose most potent protection is statelessness. The overlap between states that sponsor terror and those that pursue W[eapons of] M[ass] D[estruction] compels us to action.2
The US State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism has been relatively constant in recent years, and highlights this apparent overlap with states thought to be seeking chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons. In its Country Reports on Terrorism 2004, published in May 2005, the current list of state sponsors is Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Sudan (Iraq’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism was lifted in October 2004).
Third, current US policies risk dismantling the non-proliferation regime. The NPT has been the linchpin of efforts to control nuclear proliferation. Yet the Bush administration has not been meeting the commitments that the Clinton administration made at the 2000 NPT review conference. These commitments, often referred to as the “Thirteen Steps”, the “practical steps”, or the “programme of action”, included pledges by all states that are party to the NPT to work for and uphold:
• Entry into force of the CTBT.
• A halt to all nuclear-weapons tests.
• Negotiations on further nuclear reductions.
• An unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.
• Increased transparency by the nuclear-weapon states regarding their nuclear capabilities.
• A diminished role for nuclear weapons in security policies.
At the 2005 NPT review conference, however, US representatives worked to prevent mention of the Thirteen Steps, continued to refuse to implement US commitments made at earlier review conferences, and blocked consensus on numerous issues. In addition, they sought to avoid discussion of negative security assurances. The United States had offered such assurances under previous administrations, but the Bush administration backtracked on this commitment as well.
Fourth, current policies risk unintended consequences. The Bush administration is developing new nuclear weapons and moving towards resumption of nuclear testing while saying that other countries should do neither. Yet other countries may well be tempted to do as the United States does, not as it says. The result is likely to be greater instability—presumably not the outcome the Bush administration seeks. New Nuclear WeaponsThere have been several important recent changes in US nuclear policy. Two of these relate to developing new nuclear weapons, including low-yield “mini-nukes”, and larger “bunker busters” to destroy even heavily fortified positions. In addition, the Bush administration has moved to speed up a possible resumption of US nuclear-weapons tests by reducing the estimated time it would take to prepare the test sites for use (from the current two to three years to eighteen months). The administration is also considering building a new facility to produce the plutonium “pits” that act as triggers for nuclear weapons (the current facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory is viewed as inadequate to meet potential needs for future warheads).
Preliminary analysis is undertaken here of two of these issues: mini-nukes and bunker busters. They serve as examples of changes in nuclear policy that may have significant effects on the US approach to non-proliferation and nuclear arms control. Mini-NukesIn recent years, a key intellectual argument for small or low-yield nuclear weapons has come from Stephen Younger, who was senior associate laboratory director for national security at Los Alamos until 2001. He became the head of the Defence Threat Reduction Agency just before the 11 September attacks, and has now returned to Los Alamos as a senior fellow. In “Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century”, a widely disseminated paper published in summer 2000, Younger contended that the United States had deterred itself from using nuclear weapons because they were so destructive. He argued that this had reduced the value of nuclear weapons, and that it would be necessary to develop smaller, more usable, nuclear weapons to restore their deterrent value.
The current debate over low-yield nuclear weapons, or mini-nukes, tends to focus on the war on terror and the need for more flexibility in the nuclear force. As we have seen, this focus is also consistent with the language of the Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review.
While low-yield nuclear weapons have received a great deal of attention in recent budget deliberations, the issue is by no means new. In fact, the Spratt–Furse amendment to the Fiscal Year (FY) 1994 Defence Authorisation Bill was a response to pressure to build new nuclear weapons in the early 1990s. At the time, two analysts from the Los Alamos National Laboratory proposed that the United States develop several categories of new nuclear weapons, including “micro-nukes” with ten-ton yields; low-yield earth-penetrating weapons; “mini-nukes” with yields of about one hundred tons of explosive; and other “exotic” warheads designed for special uses.3 Their claims were similar to those Stephen Younger would make nearly a decade later: that the United States was deterring itself from using nuclear weapons because they were too powerful, too destructive.
The Spratt–Furse amendment allowed basic research on small nuclear weapons (mini-nukes), but did not permit development that could lead to testing or production. Spratt–Furse was overturned in the FY 2004 Defence Authorisation Bill. The legislation permitted research and design work on mini-nukes. However, congressional approval is still required before production of such weapons can take place.
More recently, however, the issue of low-yield nuclear weapons appears to have dropped off the congressional agenda. In the FY 2005 budget process, low-yield nuclear weapons were included in the “Advanced Concepts Initiative”. However, Congress refused to fund that programme, substituting instead the “Reliable Replacement Warhead” programme. The latter is not yet well defined, but seems to focus on building new nuclear weapons that would be part of a smaller US nuclear arsenal that is cheaper and easier to maintain. The Reliable Replacement Warhead programme does not appear to include low-yield nuclear weapons. It is not clear whether that is because of concern over the controversial nature of low-yield weapons or because the US military leadership concluded that such weapons were unnecessary.
Both the House of Representatives and the Senate have approved funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead programme as part of the FY 2006 Energy and Water Appropriations Bill. However, this funding is “fenced”, a provision prohibiting use of this money to produce new nuclear weapons.
There is no evidence that the pursuit of low-yield nuclear weapons has been abandoned permanently. Given the risk that they might be more readily used and would blur the firebreak between conventional and nuclear weapons, it is important to continue tracking them. Pursuit of these weapons by the United States significantly undermines the Bush administration’s argument that others should not be developing new weapons. Bunker BustersThe official name of the programme to produce bunker busters is the “Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator” (RNEP). Proponents argue that these weapons are necessary to attack deeply buried weapons or other targets. They contend that making adversaries’ weapons vulnerable to attack will increase the power of the US deterrent.
The United States already has both nuclear and conventional weapons designed to penetrate the earth, though they are reportedly incapable of destroying targets that are deep underground. The conventional weapon exists in two forms: the GBU-28, which is laser-guided, and the GBU-37, which is guided by the Global Positioning System (GPS). The nuclear version is the B61-11, which is also guided by GPS. All of these bombs are dropped from aircraft. According to some reports, the B61-11 has a yield that can be adjusted across an extraordinarily wide range, from 0.3 to 340 kilotons.
Research on the effects of nuclear bunker busters suggests that these weapons would probably cause considerable damage to surrounding areas. Adversaries might well decide to locate their weapons stores within cities so that the US military might be deterred from attack for fear of causing massive civilian casualties. There is also a significant risk of heavy casualties among the forces using the weapons.
In a March 2003 article, Stanford physicist Sidney Drell and colleagues calculated that a nuclear weapon would require a yield of well over one hundred kilotons in order to destroy a target that was buried one thousand feet underground. But even a one-kiloton warhead, detonated at a depth of twenty to fifty feet, would “eject more than 1 million cubic feet of radioactive debris from a crater about the size of ground zero at the World Trade Center—bigger than a football field”.4
A 2005 US National Research Council study on the effects of bunker busters concluded that many hardened and deeply buried targets could be threatened only by nuclear weapons. However, it also concluded that it would be impossible for such weapons to penetrate the earth so deeply that the resulting explosion would be contained.5
A 2004 Congressional Research Service report obtained by the Federation of American Scientists suggests that plans for the production of these weapons have already been incorporated into the Bush administration’s budget proposals. The report shows that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) had requested $27.6 million for the RNEP for FY 2005, increasing to $95 million for FY 2006, $145.4 million for FY 2007, $128.4 million for FY 2008, and $88.4 million for FY 2009, making a five-year total of $484.7 million. According to the report’s author, Jonathan Medalia, “The FY2005 request document … seems to cast serious doubt on assertions that RNEP is only a study.”6
Supporters of the RNEP programme argue that these numbers are placeholders required as part of the multi-year budgeting process, and do not imply a commitment to production. Opponents argue that if the only intent is to fund research, NNSA should not have included requests for the funding of development- and production-engineering. Presumably as a result of this controversy, the NNSA budgets for FY 2006 and FY 2007 did not propose funding for these purposes.
Despite the more narrowly stated administration proposal for FY 2006, Congress still reacted negatively to the proposed programme. The Senate voted to delete the administration’s entire request for the RNEP for FY 2006. The House of Representatives approved $4 million in funding for a conventional bunker buster, but also rejected any funding for the nuclear bunker buster for FY 2006. As with mini-nukes, deleting funding in a particular year does not mean that the programme itself has been eliminated. Congress will need to keep a careful watch on the RNEP. And there are signs that it will do so. In December 2005, US Representative David Hobson vowed to oppose any attempts by the Bush administration to revive study of the RNEP. “It’s dead. Forget about it. Go conventional,” said Hobson, Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee. He also indicated that Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld had told him, “You may win this year, but we’ll be back.” Hobson reportedly replied, “Well, OK, I’ll still be here.”7
Pursuing this muscular weapon may heighten international concern that the United States is preparing to intervene unilaterally around the globe. The range of uses proposed for the RNEP is also likely to increase concern that the United States is prepared to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. Bush’s Dangerous CourseIn its February 2003 report, “Differentiation and Defense: An Agenda for the Nuclear Weapons Program”, the Republican House Policy Committee argued that
possession of weapons of mass destruction alone is insufficient justification for military action. Possession combined with evidence of the intent to use those weapons is sufficient … There is a limited right of anticipatory self-defense in some circumstances, even if it is not certain that a strike is imminent.
The Republican House Policy Committee is focusing on US policy, of course. But one can imagine the response of a US administration if another country adopted the same reasoning. A US adversary could claim with some justification that the US intent to use weapons of mass destruction is clear, citing the arguments for new nuclear weapons, for example, and that it therefore had the right of “anticipatory self-defence” against the United States.
Opponents of the Bush administration’s proposals cite several negative consequences that would result from their implementation. These objections have been cogently summarised as a series of talking points by Marie Rietmann of the US non-governmental organisation, Women’s Action for New Directions:
Possessing low-yield nuclear weapons increases the likelihood they will be used in conflict … Developing new or modified nuclear weapons sends the wrong message to other nations who may also view them as desirable … [T]he development of a new low-yield nuclear weapon could lead to the resumption of underground nuclear testing … There are other, non-nuclear, ways to destroy and disable underground bunkers.8
As noted above, the Bush administration’s policies undermine global non-proliferation efforts. They also reduce US leverage over other countries: it is difficult to convince others not to develop nuclear weapons when one is doing so oneself. Developing new weapons designs is likely to produce considerable pressure for testing, further undermining the already vulnerable CTBT. By developing new weapons and moving towards the resumption of nuclear tests, US policymakers may be helping to create the very threats to which they claim to be responding, as other countries rush to emulate the United States.
Most importantly, the Bush administration is talking about eliminating the firebreak between nuclear and conventional weapons. That is a serious mistake, which could well have disastrous consequences for the United States and its allies. Nuclear weapons—even very small nuclear weapons—can cause extraordinary damage in an extremely short period of time. The Need for ActionCurrent prospects as regards limiting the development of new nuclear weapons, maintaining the moratorium on nuclear testing, or fully implementing the NPT, are not very promising. Issues of this magnitude require political leadership to produce change. Unfortunately, that leadership is highly unlikely to come from the United States at this time.
Might it come from elsewhere? One possibility is that non-nuclear countries might continue to take a leading role in responding to nuclear proliferation. For example, non-nuclear countries—“middle powers”—took the lead in negotiating the Thirteen Steps declaration that helped bring the 2000 NPT review conference to a successful conclusion. But ultimately, if the nuclear nations are not willing to fulfil their commitments, the negotiating prowess of these other countries will have little meaning.
In the United States, even the limited amount of caution previously shown in weapons procurement and deployment seems to have been decreasing since the November 2004 presidential election. Moves towards the development of new nuclear weapons may lead to a push for renewed nuclear testing. Conducting new nuclear tests would require the United States formally to abandon the moratorium on nuclear testing that it has observed since 1992.
At the same time, however, this analysis has identified some potential for policy progress, even within the current political environment. There is arguably a window of opportunity to enhance the non-proliferation regime’s capacity to deal both with non-state actors and nuclear-capable states, but it is unclear how long it may last. For example, it may be possible through political, diplomatic, and economic means to reinforce the decisions of the genie states to forgo nuclear weapons.
Addressing these issues is an urgent matter, because preventing proliferation is likely to be markedly less costly in human and monetary terms than responding after proliferation has already occurred.
In December 2005, Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned against business as usual, saying: “Either we continue to rely on nuclear weapons, and face the reality that in the next 10–20 years, 20 or 30 countries will have nuclear weapons, or each country must cease its nuclear weapons programme and destroy existing nuclear arsenals.”9
2. White House, “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America”, Washington, D.C., September 2002, p. 15.
3. See William M. Arkin and Robert S. Norris, “Tinynukes for Mini-Minds”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1992.
4. Sidney Drell et al., “A Strategic Choice: New Bunker Busters versus Nonproliferation”, Arms Control Today, March 2003.
5. US National Research Council, Effects of Nuclear Earth-Penetrator and Other Weapons (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2005).
6. Jonathan Medalia, “Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator Budget Request and Plan, FY2005–FY2009”, Congressional Research Service, RS21762, 8 March 2025 [http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/crs/RS21762.pdf].
7. Joe Fiorill, “Hobson Vows Continue[d] Opposition to RNEP”, Global Security Newswire, 16 December 2024 [http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2005_12_14.html#38C81EAB].
8. Marie Rietmann, “Urgent Action: Prevent New Nuclear Weapons” [http://www.wand.org/will/newnukestalkpoints.html]. The talking points are undated, but accompanying materials were developed in April 2003.
9. “ElBaradei Warns on Nuclear Weapons”, Press Association, 13 December 2005. |