Nuclear Threat Initiative IV - How It Went During Obama's Administration: Part One
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 see the titles of other entries, check out the Archive.
Ted Turner founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative in 2001. He’d recruited former Senator Sam Nunn as co-director. 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 the previous year: elimination of nuclear weapons. Turner hit the ground running and set a deadline of 2011 to achieve that goal. Butler told Turner he thought that deadline was unrealistic. Butler had been right.
In 2007, near the end of the administration of George W. Bush, NTI had gotten a boost, you have to think, from an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal by four well-known “Cold Warriors”—George Shultz, Sam Nunn, William Perry, and Henry Kissinger. The op-ed had argued for “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons” because, the four former Cold Warriors recognized, terrorists are not going to be “deterred” by them.
If the goal was the elimination of nuclear dangers, we’d lost ground overall in the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration—and not just a little ground.
In 2008, we learned that our next president would be someone named Barack Obama. He seemed to have come out of nowhere. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School who afterwards had gone into “community organizing” in Chicago and then started running for political office and soon gotten elected to the U.S. Senate and now President.
How would things go in his administration for NTI and the cause of eliminating nuclear weapons?
Was this relevant? Early in his first term, President Obama decided not to use George W. Bush’s concept of a “war on terror.” Great Britain had decided in 2007 to drop the term, saying it was “unhelpful.” “Terror” was a tactic, they said, not a specific enemy. (Nuclear weapons are weapons of terror, aren’t they, and President Bush hadn’t declared war against them.) In any case, in March 2009, President Obama’s Department of Defense changed the name, officially, from “Global War on Terror” to “Overseas Contingency Operation.” The specific enemy was understood to be the group called Al Qaeda. And some of its “extremist” offshoots.
Here’s something relevant. On April 5, 2009, just a few months after his inauguration, President Obama gave his first foreign policy speech, in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, a city that had been behind the Iron Curtain. In it he declared “clearly and with conviction” America’s commitment to seek “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Other presidents had expressed a desire, or a said we had a “dream,” to have a world free of nuclear weapons. Obama was the first president to make a “commitment” to it.
In the speech, Obama also emphasized, as NTI’s video called Last Best Chance had in 2006 and the four former Cold Warriors’ op-ed had in 2007, the danger of terrorists getting a nuclear weapon (“Terrorists” understood, I think, as people who were both stateless and suicidal, as well as, of course, hostile to us). The danger was substantial, we knew that by now. The way Obama put it in Prague was, “One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival.”
There was a big reaction to the speech, almost all positive, as far as I could tell. Certainly in Prague.
In January 2010, soon after this speech, the Nuclear Threat Initiative released another dramatic film, this one called Nuclear Tipping Point. The first, called Last Best Chance had been released in 2006 and had featured Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar. This one featured the four former Cold Warriors who in 2007 had published the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.”
The film was introduced by the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State during the George W. Bush administration, retired four-star general Colin Powell. In the introduction Powell declared, straight out, the conclusion he had come to after his many years of experience in the military, much of it in command of nuclear weapons. He had concluded, he said, that nuclear weapons “are useless, they cannot be used.”
That’s a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff talking.
Powell does not say right away that nuclear weapons must therefore be eliminated. He says that what we must now do, and what the Nuclear Tipping Point film will show us, is that we have to prevent “terrorists”—people who cannot be deterred by our nuclear weapons—from getting any. But then, as he comes to the end, he says, we must “come together” to “reduce the number of nuclear weapons” and then “eliminate them from the face of the earth.”
Again, that’s a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff talking.
In the rest of the film, the four former Cold Warriors who had published the surprising op-ed in 2007, surprising given the champions of nuclear deterrence they had been, unfold the implications of the argument they made in their op-ed. The account is accompanied by dramatic music and images. (Some of the images are of missiles being launched that if you know a bit about such things you know don’t have anything to do with nuclear weapons. Not that much of a problem, I suppose.)
The film gives us excerpts from some important speeches, a speech by President Kennedy on September 25, 1961, in which he says “the weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” A speech by President Reagan on January 21, 1985 in which he says “we seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.” And President Obama’s speech in Prague in 2009 in which he made the commitment “clearly and with conviction to the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
President Reagan also had said in that speech “there is only one way safely and legitimately to reduce the cost of national security and that is to reduce the need for it.” He didn’t mean, I’m sure, that you could have a world in which you didn’t need “national security.” He must have meant we should try to imagine and create a world where we don’t think that defending ourselves from threats to our “national security” is what we have to be doing all the time, using nuclear weapons.
Nine countries now have nuclear weapons. I don’t know any that did it for reasons other than national security. Or maybe it’s better to say national insecurity.
If we are concerned about our security, we may talk tough but it’s because we are scared, right? Insecure. Might there be ways of helping us all feel less insecure and less scared that don’t require nuclear weapons, the problem being that nuclear weapons end up making us feel and be more insecure, more scared. If we are paying attention.
After Reagan, the film showed Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, saying that from the “pinnacle” he and President Reagan had achieved at their summit in Reykjavik, where they actually for a moment considered eliminating nuclear weapons, “we saw that a world of the future could prosper only if it were a world without nuclear weapons.” 23:25. That’s a slightly different point, isn’t it? He’s saying the world could, not just be more secure, but “prosper” only in a world free of the weapons.
In Nuclear Tipping Point, the four American statesmen again make the point that terrorists with nuclear weapons cannot be deterred by our nuclear weapons, implying that the only defense against them would be “a world free of nuclear weapons.”
Nunn then says in the film that it is “bordering on insanity” that we and Russia would still, in 2010, almost twenty years after the end of the Cold War, have nuclear weapons on Cold War hair trigger alert pointed at each other.
The four do mention some good things that have happened since the end of the Cold War. William Perry mentions the Trilateral Agreement in 1994 that, during the Clinton Administration, got Ukraine to return to Russia the nuclear weapons—over 1700 of them—and delivery systems—bombers and ICBMS—it had retained after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. As part of the deal, Ukraine was supposed to have gotten “security assurances” of some kind from the U.S., the U.K., and Russia.
Sam Nunn says again, as he had in the Last Best Chance film in 2006, that we are in “a race between cooperation and catastrophe.” He also says, as he had in that film, that we need a “vision” of a world without nuclear weapons that we don’t now have. A “vision” is different from a “commitment,” isn’t it? It’s different because it is imagining an actual world in which the commitment might be fulfilled. It’s different from a “dream” too because it’s not just a dream.
On April 6, in the White House, President Obama screened Nuclear Tipping Point. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Congressional leaders and his staff were invited to the screening.1
I can’t tell you what they thought of it.
Thanks to Phineas Anderson for intelligence on who attended the screening.
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 see the titles of other entries, check out the Archive.