The D Word VIII: Deterrence and Rationality B
On January 4, 2007, over six years after the attacks by the fundamentalist group Al Qaeda on New York and Washington, D.C. in 2001, four American statesmen who had been important players in designing and implementing nuclear deterrence during the Cold War published a surprising op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
It was entitled “Towards a World Without Nuclear Weapons.”
The authors were William Perry, Secretary of Defense under President Clinton (1994-97); Sam Nunn, former Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1987-95), both Democrats; Republican George Shultz, Secretary of State under President Reagan (1982-89); and to the surprise of many, Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford (1969-1977), also a Republican.
The four men, former champions of our nuclear deterrent, here recognized that, as they put it, “non-state terrorist groups with nuclear weapons are conceptually outside the bounds of a deterrent strategy.” In simpler terms, deterrence wouldn’t work on such groups.
You have to think some people had realized this before now. In 2001, six years before the four published the op-ed, the attacks on 9/11 had made it clear enough. Still, because of who the four were, the op-ed got attention.
The four also recognized that the spread, or “proliferation,” of nuclear weapons then taking place in the world was going to make a strategy of deterrence even less reliable.
In 2008, the four published a second op-ed, entitled “Toward a Nuclear Free World.”
In 2009, Barak Obama, our newly elected President, gave in Prague his first foreign policy speech. In it, he unfolded some implications of what the four former champions of our nuclear deterrent had come to acknowledge.
In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down [with the end of the Cold War], but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one.
In the years since the end of the Cold War in 1989, President Obama was saying, we had come to be at a greater risk of nuclear attack than we had been during the Cold War.
Obama pointed out that nuclear attacks don’t just destroy buildings. They destroy cities and the people in them, children, adults, old people. We already knew this because we’d done just that in Hiroshima. Where, it is estimated, 70,000 people were killed by that bomb and its aftereffects. The pictures we were allowed to see showed the destroyed buildings, not the people.
Still later in the speech, Obama made a commitment:
Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. And as nuclear power –- as a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.
So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.
No president of the United States or of any other country had committed us to the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons before.
Later in the speech, did he qualify the commitment?
As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies –- including the Czech Republic. But we will begin the work of reducing our arsenal.
As long as nuclear weapons existed, he said, we would be relying on them “to deter any adversary.”
The four statesmen had recognized in their op-ed, and Obama must have known, that nuclear weapons would have no power to deter any adversaries who were stateless and suicidal, like the terrorists who flew the airliners into the buildings. So while we might not be able to deter “any adversary,” maybe we could deter the leaders of states who weren’t suicidal. We’d need nuclear weapons to do that as long nuclear weapons existed, Obama was saying.
President Obama was also concerned, as had been four op-ed writers, about the spread to new countries—the “proliferation”—of nuclear weapons. This was happening even though in 1968, at the end of President Johnson’s administration, a “Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty” had been signed by most of the countries in the world, including the United States and the Soviet Union. In the NPT, the states that didn’t have nuclear weapons had agreed not to acquire them. The states that already had them (the US, the UK, France, the Soviet Union, and China, at the time) didn’t say they would get rid of the ones they had but did say they wouldn’t share the weapons or the technology or resources with other countries.
A few countries didn’t sign the NPT. Who? India, Pakistan, and Israel. They must either have had nuclear weapons and not wanted to admit it, or not yet have had them but be working on it, thinking this would somehow serve their purposes.
The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty had become effective in 1970, almost forty years ago.
Everyone who signed the NPT had also agreed in one of its articles, Article 6, I think it was, to pursue, actively, nuclear disarmament. That hadn’t exactly happened. This had been pointed out from time to time. President Obama seemed to be saying he would pursue this.
But in a world in which stateless terrorists were operating, a world in which the logic of deterrence, such as it was, no longer governed when it came to them, something other than deterrence would be necessary to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
The problem now was not just new countries acquiring nuclear weapons or existing nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands. The technical knowledge of how to build a bomb the size of the Hiroshima bomb was widespread by now. What was crucial now was keeping the fissile fuel needed for a nuclear bomb from falling into the wrong hands. “Fissile fuel” is sometimes referred to as “nuclear material." It is the highly enriched (sometimes called “weapons grade”) uranium. Or plutonium.
To address this problem, President Obama in his eight years in office sponsored four global “Nuclear Security Summits.” The first summit, in April 2010 and the last in 2016, were in Washington, D.C. The other two were held in Seoul, South Korea and The Hague, Netherlands. The many representatives who came—representatives of 47 countries and 3 international organizations came to the first one and the numbers went up from there—worked to strengthen the cooperation among countries to secure existing nuclear weapons and nuclear material and to reduce the amount of both in national stockpiles.
By this time, there was a lot of nuclear material out there. At the beginning of World War II, there had been none in the world.
Sixty-four kilograms, about one-hundred forty pounds of highly enriched uranium had been in the Hiroshima bomb. Tons and tons were out there now. Somewhere. It would be nice to know where. And it if were secure.
Russia attended the first three Nuclear Security Summits. They declined to come to the last one in 2016 because, they said, America had become too central to what was being done. The effort needed to be more “international,” they said. What did they mean by that? It was “international” from the get-go, wasn’t it?
You’ll notice that these meetings had nothing to do with “deterrence.” That is, with trying to turn aside action through fear. Instead they were about prevention, about increasing the security of nations by increasing the security of nuclear materials and preventing those materials from falling into the hands of terrorists and other countries.
You couldn’t do anything, not now, about preventing nuclear materials from coming into the hands of the countries that had it. Except get them to cut back the amount of it they had and secure it better. The more there was out there, the greater the chance it would fall into the wrong hands, right? Assuming there were some not-wrong hands.
But more important, these summits were about preparing the ground, about countries learning to trust and cooperate with each other.
About these Summits, might you have wanted to say, Well, President Obama, when are you going to start creating the “world without nuclear weapons” you committed us to in Prague?
Here’s how I see it: These summits weren’t trying to get rid of nuclear weapons yet but to create the necessary conditions for a world without nuclear weapons. The first was to secure the materials—the fissile fuels—that were necessary to make such weapons. The second was to get better at cooperating, also a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for getting rid of the weapons. Cooperation that had become possible because of trust.
Neither of which had a prayer of being accomplished in a world where conduct was governed solely by deterrence, did it?
Would President Obama’s successor understand that the conditions the Nuclear Summits were working towards were necessary even if not sufficient?
By 2016, we knew Obama’s successor would be either Hilary Clinton, who had been Obama’s Secretary of State and would be our country’s first woman president if elected, or Donald J. Trump, a real estate investor whose father had been a real estate investor and who had been a reality TV star on a popular program called the “The Apprentice.” Trump had a gift, it looked like, for making people who weren’t at all rich real estate heirs think he was their kind of guy.
We’d have to see who the American voters thought would make a better president.
Candidate’s Trump’s motto, like that of the people who in the 1930’s and 40’s had tried to keep us out of the war against Nazi Germany, some of whom turned out to be sympathizers with Nazi Germany, was “America First.” If the voters preferred him, it seemed pretty clear he wouldn’t continue programs like the one Obama had gotten going.
And there we’d be.
For now.