Sleepwalking With the Bomb (4 page)

Abolitionism cannot surmount several immense obstacles.
First, hostile states will not only decline to follow our good example; they will be induced to increase their arsenals, which become more valuable as our arsenal shrinks
—100 nukes in Pakistan matter much more in a world in which the U.S. has the same number than in a world in which the U.S. has a few thousand. This behavior runs counter to the psychology of civilized people who see nuclear weapons as being for deterrence only, but a nuclear Iran eager to destroy the Great Satan (U.S.) and Little Satan (Israel) will think differently.

Consider what the Soviets did in the 11 months between the November 1985 Geneva Summit and the October 1986 Reykjavik Summit. In that short span they capped off their 25-year strategic buildup by adding over 5,000 warheads, topping out at some 45,000 warheads—this despite the U.S. having frozen the total number of its warheads in 1967 at 31,255, and reducing them constantly since. Gorbachev did soon come around, as Russia’s economy imploded. But it is unrealistic to expect Iran’s fanatical mullahs to do the same. Pakistan’s increasingly Islamist leadership plans to double its arsenal as rapidly as possible.

A second obstacle to abolitionism is that
verifying clandestine stockpiles of warheads and missiles is simply impossible at present and likely will remain so for a long time.
We failed to find a dozen jet planes Saddam hid in the sands of Iraq, until after his overthrow. Concealing missiles and nuclear warheads deep underground would be, by comparison, child’s play.

China has been developing—and possibly concealing—new nuclear weapons. It revealed in December 2011 that it has built 3,000 miles of deep underground tunnels—called “the Underground Great Wall”—that may conceal an arsenal far larger than the 200 to 400 weapons China is commonly thought to possess. China has never divulged anything compatible to the extensive nuclear data that we have collected from the Russians over the past 20 years, and thus we can only guess at the size of its arsenal. A former U.S. national security official, Professor Phillip Karber, had students working for three years to compile all available data on the subject. Karber offered no specific China arsenal estimate. The data, official film footage on China’s bomb and missile programs, show huge missiles shuttling inside the tunnels. Prominent skeptics argue that current estimates are correct, citing CIA estimates of arsenal size and estimates of fissile material produced in China. But CIA nuclear intelligence estimates are often wrong. Given that Chinese leaders know they may someday face the United States in a western Pacific showdown, it defies strategic logic to assume that the massive across-the-board Chinese military buildup would exempt the most powerful class of weapons.

Third,
abolitionists have no basis for their confidence in the UN’s ability to stop a determined nuclear aspirant.
The worst nations will simply ignore entreaties and evade inspections. What can work—the only remedy–is positive regime change. The Soviet Union evaded arms treaty obligations for years and concealed the full size of its massive strategic buildup. Only with the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev late in the Cold War did things change for the better. Until similar change comes to Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran, abolition is chimerical.

To be sure, President Obama talked in Prague about the need to punish violators:

Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished.… The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons.… North Korea must know that the path to security and respect will never come through threats and illegal weapons. All nations must come together to build a stronger, global regime.… [W]e must stand shoulder to shoulder to pressure the North Koreans to change course.

He went on to note the threats posed by Iran and by terrorists in possession of a nuclear weapon.

But President Obama had spurned a rare opportunity for positive regime change in June 2009, when the Iranian opposition formed in fury at the stolen election that returned Islamist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Iranian presidency. Instead of siding with the demonstrators and uniting a coalition to put maximum pressure on the mullahs, Obama stood aside and contented himself with feeble verbal sallies. Moreover, he pursued arms talks with a leadership that had never honored an agreement made and that was clearly determined to pursue its nuclear ambitions, in part by slow-rolling diplomatic negotiations whenever possible. He also allowed Russia and China to water down several rounds of Iran sanctions. Though since late 2011 sanctions against Iranian oil and financial interests began to bite, they have not stopped Iran’s nuclear program.

As this book went to press the furies were assembling in the Mid-east. It appears increasingly likely that Iran’s relentless progress towards nuclear weapon capability cannot be arrested by sanctions alone, and thus that Israel, perceiving a nuclear Iran as an existential threat, will take preventive military action. Israel’s determination to act has been reinforced by the Obama administration’s strong public opposition to launching a strike and by a notably unsympathetic international community. A nuclear-armed Iran, declared “unacceptable” by two American presidents, does suggest how ineffective, indeed dangerous, nuclear nonproliferation efforts tend to be.

Finally, there is a fourth obstacle to abolitionism:
it creates the dangerous situation in which the public’s gut sentiment favoring abolition can trump practical obstacles to verification and enforcement, and thus could push Western nations to disarm first.
Were a nuke to detonate anywhere on the planet, momentum for unilateral disarmament could snowball. Many advocates fan such emotional flames. But embarking on a course of unilateral disarmament before devising the requisite diplomatic and military arrangements needed to effectively police a nuclear-zero world—a condition nowhere near to being achieved—would begin the slide down the slippery political slope. There is no definitive correct number of nuclear weapons that the United States needs at any given time; this would be true even if every other nation’s number were perfectly known. Thus there is no definitive stopping point for disarmament, and advocates can keep pressing Western democracies to cut their arsenals—pressures not felt by the world’s most dangerous nuclear-armed regimes.

The president has shown an alarming willingness to trade a modest missile defense program—one that would hedge against clandestine nuclear breakout in event of countries violating nuclear-zero pledges—for the instantly revocable promises of an adversary. Ronald Reagan conditioned zeroing out nuclear missiles on keeping missile defense development, in order to erect a shield as a hedge against such cheating. But President Obama is manifestly eager to bargain away missile defense leverage—shown by the notorious “open mic” verbal exchange with a top Russian leader at the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul.
¹
Leaving America defenseless even against small nuclear-armed missile attacks invites nuclear blackmail during a crisis.

The president did announce in Prague two laudable initiatives: to curb black market smuggling of nuclear material and to secure all loose nuclear material within four years (by the end of 2013). But his optimism about negotiations follows a utopian model of resolving differences between nations, premised upon a presumed commonality of interest in mutual survival:

When nations and peoples allow themselves to be defined by their differences, the gulf between them widens. When we fail to pursue peace, then it stays forever beyond our grasp. We know the path when we choose fear over hope. To denounce or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also a cowardly thing to do. That’s how wars begin. That’s where human progress ends.

Put simply, the president mistakenly believes that all nations share a common interest in mutual survival. He thus rejects the idea of irreconcilable conflict. But such conflicts manifestly exist. In fact,
what irreconcilably opposed governments share is a parallel desire to survive; neither has any interest in a mortal enemy’s surviving. Rather, each desires—and must aim for—the enemy’s destruction.

The United States has no common interest in survival with al-Qaeda. The United States desires to survive; so does al-Qaeda. But parallel desires are not common interests. The United States has no interest in Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood surviving. It has no interest in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s militant Islamist republic surviving. It has no interest in the North Korean regime surviving. Nor would it have an interest in militant Islamists gaining control over Pakistan’s government, and thus its nuclear arsenal. Conversely, nothing would more greatly benefit militant Islamists of any stripe than the destruction of the United States. The United States, along with its allies, is the main obstacle to the global triumph of militant Islam.

In the run-up to World War II, the Western democracies had mutual interests in one another’s survival, but hardly any security interest in the survival of Hitler’s Nazi regime or of the militarist regime in Japan. The United States formed an alliance of convenience with Soviet Russia, but U.S. interests ceased coinciding with Russia’s at war’s end, and only when in 1991 the former Soviet Union collapsed could the United States win the Cold War. While the United States and the Soviets both sought to survive, the Soviet project would have benefited most of all from the U.S.’s demise.

Just as America had no common interest with past enemies in mutual survival, it would be a deadly mistake to think that it shares such an interest today, given growing nuclear threats from hostile states, some of whose leaders embrace a fanatical religious ideology that welcomes Armageddon. Such powers may not act on ideological imperatives, but we cannot assume they will decline to do so.

Regrettably, many of Barack Obama’s policies make a war more likely. Rushing towards abolition of nuclear weapons will, on the fair historical evidence, not induce dangerous nuclear states to follow the U.S. lead. Instead, our adversaries will see greater benefit in increasing their own arsenals if America’s is pared to a few hundred.

We make comfortable assumptions about how our adversaries will act at our potentially grave peril.

__________________

1.
The text of the exchange appears in
chapter 4
.

Then it may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

P
RIME
M
INISTER
W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL
, H
OUSE OF
C
OMMONS
, M
ARCH
1, 1955

O
N
S
EPTEMBER 24, 1924, READERS OF THE
B
RITISH LITERARY MAGAZINE
Nash’s Pall Mall
opened its pages to a chilling article by Winston Churchill. In “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” Churchill—a statesman then out of political office—warned what was incubating in the embers of the recent world war. Beyond the horrors of the war he had observed on the Western Front, he wrote of the immense escalation the summer of 1919 would have seen had there been no armistice. With incredible prescience, Churchill intuited the direction towards which modern war technology was heading:

Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard?

… Such, then, is the peril with which mankind menaces itself. Means of destruction incalculable in their effects, wholesale and frightful in their character, and unrelated to any form of human merit: the march of Science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities; and the fires of hatred burning deep in the hearts of some of the greatest peoples of the world, fanned by continual provocation and unceasing fear and fed by the deepest sense of national wrong or national danger!

Modern nuclear history began with discoveries by late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century physicists looking into certain strange elements and mapping out the internal structure of the atom. By the time the first physicist grasped the potential of unlocking the energy contained there, the world was already on the path to a second global conflict. But the statesman who saw the future came first.

Churchill’s foreboding 1924 prophecy encompassed the three components of the greatest threat humankind has faced since 1945: nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and fanatics in possession of both. His remarks came when guided missiles were a pipe dream, rocketry consisted of sending tiny projectiles aloft for a few seconds or minutes to reach at most a few miles’ altitude, and scientists had yet to even discover the neutron particle, which made splitting the nucleus of an atom feasible. The element plutonium was still unknown, let alone the process of thermonuclear fusion that would ultimately allow the miniaturization of high-yield weapons. Though visionaries like the sci-fi writers Jules Verne and H. G. Wells had imaginatively seen ahead before Churchill spoke, among statesmen of his time Churchill’s prediction was uniquely farsighted.