The Chronicle of Higher Education

From the issue dated September 3, 2004
The Chronicle of Higher Education

A Bomb in Every Backyard

Some scholars say nuclear proliferation is a danger to the world and others say more nukes make us safer

By DAVID GLENN

Nathan E. Busch's office at Christopher Newport University is only 11 miles from a massive U.S. naval base in Virginia, the home port for at least a dozen vessels that carry 150-kiloton nuclear missiles. If one of those warheads were to detonate at the port, tens of thousands of people would die almost instantly. Within half an hour, Mr. Busch's campus would be covered in radioactive ash.

Mr. Busch and other experts could offer a long list of reasons why that probably won't happen. The United States has many techniques for securing its nuclear arsenal, and has, it seems, given each of them its own set of initials. There are fire-resistant pits, or FRP's -- warhead designs that prevent plutonium from leaking even in the case of intense fire. There are environmental sensing devices, or ESD's, which permit a bomb to explode only if it has reached a certain altitude, or if it has gone into free fall. There are permissive action links, or PAL's, which require at least two members of a nuclear crew to enter a secret code before a weapon can be detonated.

But Mr. Busch, an assistant professor of political science, also knows that the U.S. nuclear program is far from perfect. During a drill in 1980, a crew accidentally set a Titan missile onto an actual launch sequence that was averted only at the last minute. In a 1998 mock-terrorism exercise, a team of Navy SEALs broke into the Rocky Flats nuclear complex in Colorado, "stole" enough plutonium to build several bombs, and escaped undetected through a hole in a chain-link fence.

Even the best techniques are vulnerable to ordinary sloth and corner-cutting. For the first decade or so after PAL's were placed on missiles, the Strategic Air Command simply set the codes to "00000000," rendering the safeguard almost worthless.

Mr. Busch has spent the last seven years -- including a 12-month stint inside the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico -- studying such organizational imperfections. The key questions he would like to answer have roiled political scientists for decades and hover over the current presidential campaign: Exactly how bad would it be if more countries acquired nuclear weapons? Is it a global catastrophe if Iran and North Korea (and perhaps, down the line, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan) go nuclear? Or should the world think of that as a manageable headache?

On one end of the spectrum is a small but formidable group of scholars who suggest that, all else being equal, the spread of nuclear weapons might actually be healthy. These "proliferation optimists," whose most prominent member is Kenneth N. Waltz, who taught for many years at the University of California at Berkeley and is now an adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University, argue that nuclear weapons will bring peace, because nuclear-armed countries are extremely reluctant to go to war with one another. And nations can achieve this, the optimists say, with small, inexpensive arsenals that need not be maintained on hair-trigger alert.

On the other end are the pessimists, who argue that military organizations (like all large organizations) are deeply fallible, and that as more countries acquire nuclear weapons, the risk of catastrophic failure -- accidental detonation, inadvertent war, stolen plutonium -- will increase geometrically.

Into this debate marches Mr. Busch, whose new book, No End in Sight: The Continuing Menace of Nuclear Proliferation (University Press of Kentucky), offers an encyclopedic description of how the United States, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan organize and manage their nuclear arsenals. The book comes down squarely on the side of the pessimists.

Mr. Busch finds that the five countries simply don't behave as the optimists predict they should -- and they do often embody the errors and pitfalls that the pessimists worry about.

The optimists' core models of deterrence are sound, he says, "but they tend to carry those arguments just too far. Optimists tend to assume that all states will act rationally at all times. But when you're talking about nuclear holocaust, the consequences of error are not small."

Small Arsenals, Big Risks

Mr. Busch grew up in the town of Los Alamos, where his father was a laser physicist. "In a certain way, nukes are in the blood," he says. But fire-resistant pits were far from his mind when he arrived at the University of Toronto's Ph.D. program in political science in 1997. He intended to study normative political theory; he imagined writing a dissertation on Hobbes. Instead, he gradually found himself drawn into the world of nuclear strategy, and eventually made the leap into international relations.

"Thucydides, Kant, Hobbes, Grotius -- they were all concerned with what makes people tick, what motivates people, what they desire," he says. "And they were all interested in rationality in decision making. So there are a number of bridges between my political-theory work and what I'm doing now."

As he became acquainted with the optimist-pessimist debate, Mr. Busch says, he realized that "neither side -- and, for what it's worth, especially the optimists -- has devoted enough effort to testing their theories empirically." He arranged to spend the 1998-99 academic year as a graduate research assistant at the Los Alamos lab, studying early records of the U.S. nuclear program and observing current operations. In the following years, he compiled similar information from Russia, China, and the new nuclear states in South Asia. (His project excluded Britain and France, on the grounds that their systems are very similar to those of the United States, and Israel, because its nuclear program, which has never been formally acknowledged, is so cloaked in secrecy that little is known about it.)

"I've tried to develop the most comprehensive study of the safety and management of nuclear-weapons operations," he says. "There have been quite a few studies of command-and-control systems" -- that is, systems for operating the weapons during war -- "but relatively little attention has been given to the related question of the control of fissile material or the 'loose nukes' problem."

One of the optimists' central predictions is that new nuclear states will tend to develop only small arsenals, and that they will be content to maintain their weapons unassembled. Pessimists, on the other hand, worry that new nuclear powers will want fairly large, "survivable" arsenals that will not be vulnerable to being wiped out by a surprise first strike from an adversary.

Columbia's Mr. Waltz, whose 1981 paper "The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better" was a founding document of proliferation optimism, says that that is a foolish worry. "What American writers generally misunderstand is how easy it is to create an arsenal that is perceived by adversaries as being survivable," he says. If Country X is known to have even as few as five or six weapons in dispersed locations, Mr. Waltz argues, its adversaries will probably not entertain any dreams of wiping out that arsenal in a surprise first strike. For how could they be absolutely certain that all five or six bombs would be destroyed? Even if just one or two of Country X's bombs survived, it would be able to exact a terrible revenge.

"Already," Mr. Waltz says, "we in the U.S. don't know exactly how many weapons North Korea might have, so they're already able to deter us."

In a 1993 paper, the pessimist Peter D. Feaver, now a professor of political science at Duke University, replied to such arguments by saying that even if countries were never quite sure how many nukes their adversaries had, that did not mean that they would feel secure about their own weapons. "The question can be turned on its head," he wrote. "Will a proliferator ever truly feel that its arsenal is invulnerable?"

Mr. Busch's book supports Mr. Feaver's position. China and Pakistan do worry about the survivability of their forces, he says, and that fear may in turn impel them to build larger and more complex arsenals. (Pakistan fears that even if India does not know exactly where its bombs are, it might be able to launch a crippling first strike by strafing Pakistan's air strips.)

"As countries build larger arsenals," Mr. Busch says, "they encounter what we refer to as the always/never dilemma." That is, a nuclear power always wants to be able to use its weapons in a time of crisis, but it never wants the weapons to be used inadvertently or without a clear command from the central government.

There are trade-offs between those two goals. As a country builds a larger, more dispersed, survivable arsenal (fulfilling the "always" goal), its command-and-control systems become more complex, and there is more danger that weapons will be lost or seized by rogue officers. India's official nuclear doctrine, for example, calls for weapons eventually to be maintained in an assembled "rapid response" state, which might increase the risk of an accident.

The Lessons of Kargil

A second debate concerns the danger that conventional conflicts will spiral into nuclear war. In 1999, only a year after their first public nuclear tests, India and Pakistan fought a sustained shooting war in the disputed territory of Kashmir. The conflict -- which became known among foreign-policy hands as Kargil, after an Indian town near the center of the fighting -- finally cooled only after mediation by President Bill Clinton.

According to Mr. Busch, U.S. intelligence found that the Pakistani military was actively preparing to use its nuclear weapons in the event that India's army crossed the unofficial border between the Indian and Pakistani zones of Kashmir, as it threatened to do. Most alarmingly, Nawaz Sharif, who was then prime minister of Pakistan, reportedly looked genuinely surprised and frightened when Mr. Clinton's staff told him what his own military was up to.

Both sides of the proliferation debate say that Kargil bolsters their position. In Mr. Waltz's eyes, this was an instance of nuclear weapons working their deterrence magic. The Kargil conflict was much smaller, and involved far less loss of life, than the major South Asian wars of 1947, 1965, and 1971.

"If you ask people in India and Pakistan about Kargil today," he says, "they'll say, What do you mean? What war? ... The pessimists should look at what actually happens in the world. Once two or more countries have nuclear weapons, stability is established between them. The notion that there is somehow less stability in South Asia now that they have nuclear weapons, I find very hard to support."

Mr. Busch agrees that Indian and Pakistani leaders think of Kargil as a very minor war. But he finds that alarming, not comforting. "They don't seem to have taken any lessons from the experience at all," he says. "India appeared to be willing to cross the line of control, and that would have been a very serious escalation. It really did appear to be spiraling out of control."

The Perils of Inventory Control

A third debate in proliferation studies concerns countries' ability to control their inventories of plutonium, uranium, and explosives.

Here again, Mr. Busch is pessimistic. He found, for example, that China relies heavily on "the three G's" -- guns, gates, and guards -- to protect its nuclear supply, and does not have many modern technological devices that might, for example, detect whether uranium has crossed the perimeter of a facility. If China goes into a prolonged political or economic disintegration, as the Soviet Union did, guards may be tempted to pilfer material and sell it on the black market.

Mr. Waltz argues that even unstable countries will be highly motivated to keep careful track of their nuclear material. If, for example, Iraq had had a well-developed nuclear program, and some of its material had wound up in terrorist hands, its regime would have feared massive retaliation from the United States, he says.

Most observers are not so confident. Mr. Feaver, of Duke, says that the North Korean regime is so desperate for resources that it might be eager to sell its nuclear and missile technology on the open market. The United States might be persuaded to allow North Korea to keep one or two bombs, he says, if it could somehow be guaranteed that the regime would build no others, and would not share its technology. "But in fact," Mr. Feaver says, "there's no way that the outside world could prevent them from selling to others. That's why you get driven to an absolutist position on the North Korea question."

The threat of a black market in nuclear material has recently led many people, including President George W. Bush, to call for the abolition or reorganization of the "atoms for peace" component of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That program, which originally was proposed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, allows developing countries to receive uranium for use in nuclear-power plants, provided they have renounced any nuclear-weapons ambitions. "There has been recently a major rethinking of the wisdom of that bargain," says Mitchell B. Reiss, director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department and one of the editors of the new book, The Nuclear Tipping Point: Why States Reconsider Their Nuclear Choices (Brookings Institution Press).

Lingo vs. Language

Proliferation optimists and pessimists may be able to recite the same acronyms, but at a deeper level they speak different languages, Mr. Busch suggests. Optimists tend to draw on the centuries-old tradition of rational-deterrence theory, while pessimists are immersed in the newer discipline of "organization theory," which parses the not-always-rational behavior of bureaucracies and armies.

"Both sides have made internally consistent arguments that are based on their theoretical premises," Mr. Busch says. "But we need to look carefully at the empirical reality."

"No organization can proceed without a certain set of assumptions," says Lynn Eden, a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. "If you get it wrong -- and it's quite easy to -- you will fail to foresee the future. It's a tough job."

Ms. Eden's recent book, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Cornell University Press), argues that U.S. nuclear strategists have seriously underestimated the lethality and destructiveness of nuclear weapons because they have failed to incorporate the effects of "mass fire" (the huge firestorms that result from bombs' intense light and heat) into their planning models.

Something similar might be said about the United States' failure to foresee the political disintegration of the Soviet Union, Ms. Eden says. Despite all of the millions of dollars it had spent planning for various nuclear scenarios during the cold war, the United States had no strategy for the situation it actually faced during the 1990s, when the former Soviet Union's arsenal suddenly became much more vulnerable to saboteurs, smugglers, and terrorists.

On the other hand, Ms. Eden stresses, "we don't want to make the mistake of thinking that it's possible to anticipate everything in retrospect and to do everything that we wish had been done." Even the best organizations will have blind spots, she says, and that is one reason to be skeptical of some of the optimists' claims.

Some scholars suggest that the U.S. government is being extremely myopic even today, as it pours substantial resources into combating "rogue states," and relatively little money into the less-sexy project of securing nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere.

"We're allowing this stuff to sit all over the world," says Amitai Etzioni, a university professor at George Washington University, whose recent book From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations (Palgrave Macmillan) discusses nuclear proliferation. Mr. Etzioni says that the news media were much too enthusiastic about Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham's recent announcement of a new program to secure and shut down foreign nuclear facilities.

"You know what he said?" Mr. Etzioni asks. "We're going to spend $20-million over the next 18 months. Twenty-million dollars! Well, that's lovely." Compare that, Mr. Etzioni suggests, to the vast sums being spent on the war in Iraq.

Rockets and Race

It has sometimes been suggested that the pessimists' position -- or at least certain versions of it -- is subtly racist. Why should we assume that India, Pakistan, and other nuclear countries in the Third World are inherently more unstable and worrisome than, say, Britain or France?

In the new book People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press), Hugh Gusterson, an associate professor of anthropology and science studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, condemns what he calls "nuclear Orientalism." He cites an official pamphlet that was distributed to scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1990. "The cold war may be over," the pamphlet said, but future wars may involve "tribal conflicts" in countries "that may lack the restraint that has been exercised by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R."

Mr. Gusterson argues that Western countries are too quick to assume their own restraint and rationality in nuclear matters. He points to the massive volume of nuclear material that the United States has apparently lost over the years. He also notes that Gen. Curtis LeMay once ordered flights over the Soviet Union despite explicit orders to the contrary from President Harry S. Truman, and that renegade French soldiers briefly took control of a nuclear weapon in the Western Sahara in 1961.

Mr. Feaver, of Duke, concedes that ethnocentrism can cloud the West's nuclear thinking. But he also suggests that the problem can run in both directions. American scholars have recently visited Indian and Pakistani nuclear officials to discuss the dangerous errors that the United States, France, and the Soviet Union made during the cold war.

"One of the things people would like to know is how internalized those lessons have been," Mr. Feaver says. "Do the Indian and Pakistani leaders think, Well, those are the kinds of stupid mistakes that other cultures will make, and we don't have to worry about them?"

Policy Policing

So what posture should the United States take toward North Korea, Iran, and other countries with nuclear ambitions?

Mr. Feaver points out that policy makers have never paid much attention to the optimist-pessimist debate ("When I describe it to them, they think it's hilarious"), in part because no matter which side is correct, the upshot for the U.S. government is the same. If the pessimists are correct, the United States should oppose proliferation because it is intrinsically dangerous. But if the optimists are correct, the United States will still want to oppose proliferation because nuclear countries can deter it in conventional wars.

Mr. Busch says, however, that policy makers should carefully read this literature because it has generated new insights into the real-world dynamics of nuclear powers. "I think these studies will have a great deal of value for policy makers who are interested in formulating a coherent nuclear policy," he says.

Ashton B. Carter, who coordinated the Clinton administration's effort to protect Russian nuclear materials and who now teaches at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, says that whoever wins the November election will face extremely difficult choices regarding Iran and North Korea.

"Everyone should recognize that there's a powder train that runs from state proliferation to the possibility of substate, terrorist acquisition of nuclear weapons," he says. "And that means, if you ever had any doubt, that there's no good proliferation. The half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,400 years. The half-life of uranium-235 is 713 million years. So whoever makes nuclear weapons or materials now is creating a lasting danger of loose nukes.

"That's why we can't tolerate more proliferation anywhere."

NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION: IRAN AND BEYOND

If Iran succeeds in becoming a nuclear power, as Israel and Pakistan have done already, will there be a domino effect among its neighbors? In The Nuclear Tipping Point: Why States Reconsider Their Nuclear Choices, scholars assess the prospects for regional proliferation.

Egypt: Reason to worry: Egypt's government is already anxious about Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal, and Iranian weapons would only compound its fears. (Iran's mullahs once named a Tehran street after the assassin of President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt.); Reason for hope: Egypt feels well protected by its bilateral relationship with the United States.

Syria: Reason to worry: The Syrian government rests on an image of power and influence, which would be hard to maintain if it were surrounded by nuclear powers.; Reason for hope: The government has relatively warm relations with Iran, and might not feel immediately threatened by an Iranian bomb.

Saudi Arabia: Reason to worry: The Saudi government is highly unstable, and it is anxious about potential hostility from Iraq or Iran.; Reason for hope: The government knows that a serious nuclear program would destroy its ties to the United States.

Turkey: Reason to worry: The Turkish government may have offered technical assistance in the development of Pakistan's nuclear weapons.; Reason for hope: A nuclear-weapons program would end Turkey's chances of joining the European Union.