Nuclear Threat Initiative III: How It Went During the George W. Bush Administration
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To check out the titles of other entries, see the Archive.
Ted Turner founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative, with former Senator Sam Nunn as co-director, in 2001. NTI’s goal was to be the same as the Second Chance Foundation that retired Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command Lee Butler had founded a year earlier: elimination of nuclear weapons. Turner set a deadline of 2011 to achieve that goal. Butler told Turner he thought that deadline wasn’t realistic.
From 2001 to 2009—that is, for most of the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s first decade— the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney Administration was in the White House. Dick Cheney was Bush’s Vice President. He’d been the Secretary of Defense for Bush’s father and had a whole lot more experience with foreign affairs than George W. Bush did. Everyone thought Cheney would have a lot of influence on President Bush in these areas. Might even be running that part of the show.
In George W. Bush’s first year in office, foreign affairs quickly got to be a big part of things. On September 11, 2001 members of an Islamic group called Al Qaeda hijacked four passenger airliners that had taken off from airports in the northeast and mid-Atlantic, destined for California. Two of the hijacked airplanes were flown into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, both of which soon collapsed. A third was crashed into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The fourth was brought down into a field in Pennsylvania when the passengers, who’d learned on their phones what had happened, tried to take back the airplane.
All that day and for days afterward, we saw on television one of the World Trade Center towers burning and the second of the airliners flying into the second tower and exploding and both towers burning and horribly collapsing. As if this had happened not once, but many times.
President Bush and Dick Cheney were obviously taken by surprise. We all were.
Some days after the attacks, President Bush came to the site in New York City. Standing in the ruins of the World Trade Center towers with some surviving first responders—many had been killed when the towers collapsed—, President Bush declared that the people who did this were going to be made to pay. I don’t think we knew yet just who had done this but most people seemed glad to hear him talking tough. “Pay” meant be punished, not pay for the damage. No amount would have been enough to pay for this. Not even of punishment, maybe.
We were badly scared. The territory of the United States hadn’t been attacked since the Civil War, not even in World War II. Not like this. We were almost the only country in the northern hemisphere that hadn’t had to fight that war on its territory.
Before September was over, President Bush declared in a speech to Congress a “war on terror.” He could declare this war on his own: it wouldn’t be a war on another country that our Constitution said our Congress would have to declare. There was no country to declare war on. The people who had done this, we now knew, were “stateless.” They were all Muslims, it seemed, but Islam is a religion, not a country. You can’t declare war on a religion. That’s what Hitler had done. Besides, these Al Qaeda Muslims were killing other Muslims. Many.
It wasn’t clear to some of us just what this war on terror would be a war on. Nobody is on the side of terror, that’s clear. Not when it comes to those you think of as like you.
President Bush went on to have our military invade and occupy Afghanistan, even though the attackers weren’t Afghanis. Mostly Saudis, it turned out. The Taliban who were now in charge in Afghanistan had allowed the attackers to have a base in the country.
After about a year, President Bush also had us invade and occupy the country of Iraq that was nearby, on the grounds that they were developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. After we pretty much took over the country, however, none was found.
What with missing the attacks on 9/11 and getting wrong whether Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction, President Bush’s Central Intelligence Agency didn’t have much to be proud of. We wondered what the problem was.
Our military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq lasted through all of President Bush’s two terms. We weren’t able to achieve peace in either country. At the end of President Bush’s administration, it was hard to say whether we were winning his war on “terror,” or even how we’d know. There was no end in sight.
In 2006, NTI released that video called Last Best Chance which told us how easy it would be for people like the Al Qaeda terrorists to buy or steal fissile material for a nuclear bomb. For more than one. Which we knew, I guess, they were trying to do. The film asked us to think about what would happen if they managed to do that. It asked us to support efforts Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar were making to find and secure the supplies of fissile fuel now in the world. Who wasn’t going to support that? In this country, anyway.
Leaving all that aside, how did things go during George W. Bush’s two terms in office with respect to the goal Ted Turner had set for the Nuclear Threat Initiative of eliminating nuclear weapons by 2011?
Early in President Bush’s administration but after the War on Terror had been declared, on 24 May 2002, President Bush and President Putin of Russia signed in Moscow a treaty called the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT, which came to be referred to as the Moscow Treaty. That treaty limited the nuclear arsenals of each of the two countries to between 1700 and 2200 operationally deployed warheads, “operationally deployed” meaning “out there ready to go.” SORT was different from earlier disarmament treaties in that it limited not total numbers of warheads in our stockpiles but warheads that had been deployed. That seemed to me like a good move.
The treaty was criticized in Congress, however, because, among other things, it did not include a means of verification. That does seem an important omission.
Russia hadn’t wanted to ratify the treaty either but in their case it was because the U.S. had invaded Iraq in 2003. Eventually, though, our Senate and their Duma did ratify the SORT.
In terms of the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, we might have gained some ground there, if we and Russia both held up our ends, which, unfortunately, neither of us would be able to verify.
A month after SORT was signed, in June 2002, President Bush and Dick Cheney had withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, as retired General George Lee Butler had predicted they would right after Bush was elected. The ABM treaty had been in effect for thirty years, ratified in 1972, during the Nixon Administration.
At the end of George W. Bush’s father’s administration, in 1994, Russia and the United States had agreed to a treaty called START II. In it, they had agreed to remove all Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicles from our ICBMs. That, I thought, was a very good move. MIRVs were an invention that allowed us to put several warheads on a single ICBM and send them to different targets, in effect multiplying the number of ICBMs we had by the number of MIRVs on each ICBM. After START II was signed, we’d both removed our MIRVs from our ICBMs. Which was verified.
The Russians responded to George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty by putting MIRVs back on their ICBMs. We didn’t have any Anti-Ballistic Missiles that could deal with MIRVs. I guess President Bush and Dick Cheney hoped we soon would.
In 2023, we still don’t.
Definitely lost ground there, I’d say, if your goal is the elimination of nuclear weapons. Lost more than a little ground.
Then there was what had happened with North Korea. North Korea had signed on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985, which of course committed them, as it does all of those who sign it, not to develop nuclear weapons. In January 1992 North Korea had even signed with South Korea a Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. But then they hadn’t done what was needed to bring the Declaration into effect. And then, in 1993, North Korea had declared its intention to withdraw from the NPT. They took back the withdrawal just before it would have taken effect.
By now, though, it had to be pretty clear they had decided they wanted to get their own nuclear weapons.
The next year, in 1994, the Clinton Administration negotiated with North Korea something called the Agreed Framework. In the Framework, the North Koreans said they would not develop nuclear weapons if we provided them with light-water power reactors. Those are the kind that can generate power but can’t manufacture fissile fuel. Not easily. We’d also give them some other things like fuel and food. They seemed to need almost everything. The people not in their military, anyway.
The Republican Congress that took office shortly after the Framework had been agreed to by the Democratic President Clinton and North Korea hadn’t liked the Framework. It wasn’t a treaty so they hadn’t been asked to ratify it, which they almost certainly wouldn’t have. In any case, they had prevented the Clinton administration from delivering on some of the commitments the Framework made to North Korea.
The Bush administration, when it came into office in 2001, following Clinton, hadn’t liked the Framework either. By 2002, the second year of the Bush administration, the Agreed Framework was a dead letter. The Bush administration pretty clearly thought the best way to keep North Korea from developing nuclear weapons was to get tough with them.
In 2003, the second year of the George W. Bush administration, North Korea went ahead and withdrew from the NPT. In 2006, during Bush’s second term, they successfully tested a nuclear weapon.
So now we had another NWS, which stands for “nuclear weapon state.” The ninth NWS so far. This is called “proliferation.”
We hadn’t been able to do a thing about this, it looked like. We might have attacked them with our military, of course, but that would almost certainly have meant going to war with China too, again, and maybe Russia this time. President Bush had apparently decided that getting that tough with them was not a good idea. Besides, we were already fighting two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Which I guess were both part of the War on Terror. Which I suppose the war with North Korea could have been too, if we’d decided to start one.
In any case, we no doubt lost ground when North Korea became new NWS. Now we had not just another nuclear weapon state in our world but one that saw us as a mortal enemy that needed to be deterred from attacking them by their having nuclear weapons. Just as, after World War II, the Soviet Union had thought they needed nuclear weapons to deter us from attacking them.
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To check out the titles of other entries, see the Archive.