The challenge of nuclear weapons

We are on the precipice of a new and perilous nuclear era. The existing international regime is grounded in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which entered into force in 1970, for preventing new nuclear weapon states, reducing existing nuclear arsenals, and controlling the spread of nuclear technology and material. ¹ That regime is in serious jeopardy.

The spread of technology creates the danger of additional states with nuclear arms and fissile material. Of particular concern are uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing technologies used for civilian energy. Such technologies provide opportunities for theft or sale to terrorist groups or other factions unrestrained by accepted norms of behavior, and so further increase the risk that nuclear weapons will be used.

In addition to North Korea and Iran, more than 40 nations have taken substantial steps forward in nuclear technology. Others have indicated interest in developing such technology for civilian power. And once a nation can enrich uranium for a civilian power reactor, it is well on the way to nuclear weapons. Without a change of course, the US and the world will soon be compelled to enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious and economically costly than the period of cold war deterrence.

Bloated arsenals

During the cold war, nuclear weapons were essential to maintaining international security because they were a means of deterrence. Mutual Soviet–American deterrence was based on the realizations that a war with modern nuclear weapons would cause death and destruction on a terrifying and unprecedented scale and that no practical means afforded protection from devastating retaliation. War with nuclear weapons had become, in the words of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “destruction of the enemy and suicide.” Sixteen years ago, when the cold war ended with the demise of the Soviet Union, the doctrine of mutual Soviet–American deterrence became obsolete. Deterrence continues to be relevant for many states faced with threats from other states. But as the prospect of nuclear proliferation grows increasingly ominous, reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.

Nevertheless, US and Russian nuclear stockpiles remain bloated. In 2012, more than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, both the US and Russia will still have approximately 5000 nuclear warheads in their arsenals. Nearly 2000 of those will be deployed on ballistic missiles, many on hair-trigger alert, which presents unnecessary risk of an accidental or unauthorized launch. Why are these two nations retaining such large nuclear arsenals? What are the weapons for?

The current situation presents two major challenges—and opportunities. The first is to develop a strategy for dealing with the world as it is today, starting with steps to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons. The second is to rekindle a bold vision that US President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union’s General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev brought to their remarkable summit meeting 20 years ago in Reykjavík, Iceland—a world freed of the nuclear sword of Damocles—and to develop a working strategy to achieve that vision.

Reagan and Gorbachev met at a moment of great stress following the breakdown of American–Soviet nuclear talks and the insertion of intermediate-range nuclear force (INF) missiles confronting one another in Europe. The two leaders came tantalizingly close to a formal commitment and schedule for getting rid of all nuclear weapons (see the box on page 56). Although they failed in the end, they did succeed in turning the arms race on its head. They initiated steps leading to significant reductions in deployed long-range nuclear forces and to the elimination of an entire class of threat—the INF missiles in Europe.

Can we rekindle their vision? Can we escape from the nuclear deterrence trap before it is too late? Or, in the words of Max Kampelman, former chief US negotiator with the Soviet Union and counselor of the US Department of State, “Can we change the world from what it is to what it ought to be?”

To face the first challenge and deal with the world as is, the international community must save and strengthen the nonproliferation regime based on the NPT. In view of the continuing spread of nuclear weapons technology, the NPT will need to be supplemented with intrusive new inspection rights for monitoring compliance with treaty provisions and for detecting covert efforts by a would-be proliferator to evade those provisions. Important agreements have already been reached to bring such cooperative-inspection rights into practice. They include the Proliferation Security Initiative, a cooperative effort by nations to enforce export controls, interdict illegal transfers, tighten border controls, and prosecute violators. ² The authority of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is also being expanded under the Additional Protocol ³ to include on-site challenge inspections of undeclared and suspect activities. In the past, authority under NPT provisions limited inspections to the declared peaceful nuclear activities of the signatory nations.

Of course, the most direct way for states or terrorist entities to acquire nuclear weapons is to steal or illegally purchase them—a real danger. The best means of denying them a nuclear capability is to provide maximum protection for existing stockpiles of weapons and nuclear materials and to reduce stockpile size. The highly successful Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, also known as Nunn–Lugar after the US senators who proposed it in 1991, has provided security for a large share of the extensive nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. ⁴ Efforts are under way to extend cooperative threat reduction globally.

Implementation of security measures presents major diplomatic and intelligence challenges. Ultimately, success will depend on achieving broad cooperation with the nonnuclear weapons states, whose national security and economic concerns must also be addressed. That means offering them benefits to offset their motivations for joining the nuclear club and to help persuade them to accept more intrusive inspections. One important incentive will be a guarantee of secure energy sources, nuclear or otherwise, to nonnuclear countries willing to forgo constructing their own nuclear enrichment and reprocessing facilities. Toward that end the US, Russia, and the IAEA have individually made important proposals, common in purpose but differing in details. All would create a mechanism to guarantee the provision of uranium fuel for operating reactors for civilian power and research; the fuel would remain under agreed safeguards.

Bunker busters and other new designs

One need not look abroad for challenges to the present nonproliferation regime. It suffices to look toward Washington and recent US proposals to develop new nuclear weapons designs. The Department of Defense’s Nuclear Posture Review ⁵ of December 2001 highlighted a need for new high-yield, earth-penetrating nuclear weapons—the so-called bunker busters. Their purpose was to defeat growing threats of hardened and deeply buried underground targets of military interest being built in many countries. (See Physics Today, May 2003, page 27 and the article by Robert Nelson, November 2003, page 32 .) The design and production of very-low-yield, new-concept weapons was also proposed for attacking shallow underground military targets. These designs were put forward as causing less damage, and therefore being “more usable,” particularly against targets that contain biological or chemical warfare agents that, it was alleged, could be destroyed without being dispersed.

Those proposals for developing and deploying new weapons went through several years of heated debate in Congress before being rejected in separate actions during the past three years. Rejection was based on a judgment that benefited from careful, detailed, independent technical analyses: The new weapons’ potential military value was marginal and less compelling than their likely harmful impact on the nonproliferation regime and the nation’s security.

The congressional action was also a ringing rejection of the dangerous notion that a nuclear weapon is more usable if its collateral damage is reduced. No matter how small a nuclear payload is, using it would be a most fateful decision. We would be crossing a very dangerous threshold.

If the US, the strongest nation in the world, were to conclude that it cannot protect its vital interests without relying on new nuclear weapons for new military missions, it would be a clear signal to other nations that nuclear weapons are valuable, even necessary, for their security. It would also be counter to the nonnuclear states’ repeated urging that the nuclear states reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, reduce the numbers of weapons, and work toward ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT; see reference and the article by Jeremiah Sullivan, Physics Today, March 1998, page 24 ). Indeed, at the United Nations in 1995, many nonnuclear nations set those terms as conditions for their agreeing to extend the NPT indefinitely.

Following the rejection of the two programs for new bombs, the Bush administration and Congress are considering the scope of a different program, the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (see Physics Today, February 2007, page 24 , and the news story on page 35 of this issue). The RRW’s stated purpose is to transform both the nuclear infrastructure and the nuclear weapons themselves so that the US can maintain long-term high confidence in its arsenal as it reduces the arsenal’s size. The program’s proponents allege that the transformation will require a modernized infrastructure and new warhead designs that will increase long-term reliability, safety, and use control—protection from weapons being exploded against us if they are acquired by terrorist actions—without requiring a resumption of nuclear testing.

What are nuclear weapons for?

The part of the RRW program that is directed at transforming the nuclear infrastructure is important and generally not controversial. The infrastructure needs serious attention. Much of it dates back to the beginning of the cold war, or even to World War II. No matter how optimistic the nation’s policymakers, scientists, and citizens, no matter how effective in the pace of reducing our arsenal, as long as the US has nuclear weapons it must be able to maintain confidence in the safety and reliability of the warheads in the shrinking stockpile.

However, in planning a modernized nuclear complex that will be more efficient, flexible, and environmentally friendly, we need to answer the questions, What are our nuclear weapons for? How big an arsenal do we want, or think we need? In November 2001 Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement asserting as a fact, not merely an aspiration, that “the United States and Russia have overcome the legacy of the Cold War. Neither country regards the other as an enemy or threat.” They emphasized that the two nations are allies working together against the spread of nuclear weapons in a “new strategic relationship that is cooperative rather than adversarial.”

In light of those official policy statements, I have trouble understanding why we still seem to be planning for 1700 to 2200 deployed nuclear warheads in 2012, backed by some 3000 more reserves in the stockpile. What are they for? Potential targets in Russia, as described by the Nuclear Posture Review, ⁵ are “the instruments of political control and military power …, leadership and military capabilities, particularly weapons of mass destruction, military command facilities and other centers of control and infrastructure that support military forces.” An estimated total number of such targets ⁷ is between 200 and 300, a figure considerably larger than in any other nation with nuclear weapons or any potential nuclear enemy. One might conclude that an appropriate planning number for the size of our arsenal would be roughly an order of magnitude smaller than the current total of about 5000.

The more difficult and contentious part of the RRW program is the transformation of the current stockpile with newly designed warheads. The stated goal of increasing confidence in the arsenal and its long-term safety, reliability, and use control faces the daunting technical challenge of specific limitations imposed by the legislation authorizing the program. New weapons for new military missions may not be developed, and underground test explosions must not be required in order to certify the new designs.

The key question is, Can we achieve the goals of the RRW program without underground explosive testing? In developing its modern arsenal, the US has performed more than 1000 explosive tests over a period of 50 years. How confident could one be in certifying a new weapon that doesn’t have a strong pedigree based on that nuclear test program? The ongoing vigorous and successful Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension programs have established that the US stockpile of so-called legacy weapons is safe and reliable and does not show significant evidence of aging (see reference and the article by Raymond Jeanloz, Physics Today, December 2000, page 44 ). And, in the context of those programs, the directors of Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories, the three weapons labs, have, for the past decade, annually certified the stockpile to be safe and reliable. Those programs also include important improvements in nonnuclear components—for example, continually improving the safety of the arming, fusing, and firing system and enhancing performance margins.

I don’t think that we presently know the answer to the key question I posed. I do believe it is a worthwhile question to try to answer, and a sensible approach to it should include the following three elements.

First, the nation needs to proceed carefully with research on modifications or a new warhead design before moving to the development and manufacture of new warheads. Detailed analyses, subjected to independent scrutiny, will be needed to determine whether it is possible to build confidence and a strong technical consensus that the proposed changes are mutually compatible and have the appropriate test pedigree from previous work in developing the current stockpile. It is not a question of the individual components working but of the system—in fact a system of systems—being reliable.

Second, we must recognize that implementing changes is not urgent—the legacy stockpile is strong. The pace of the work should not consume human and budgetary resources to the extent of savaging the important and highly successful Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension programs.

Third, let’s be clear about the limited scope of what we are doing so as to avoid potentially harmful impacts on the nonproliferation goals here and globally. The US needs the cooperation of the many nonnuclear states, whose concerns about the seriousness of the nuclear powers’ commitment to limiting their nuclear efforts in accord with the NPT cannot be ignored, denied, or dismissed as irrelevant. Many nonnuclear states strongly registered such concerns in negotiations at the United Nations in 1995, when they agreed to continue the NPT indefinitely into the future. They called on the nuclear powers to ratify a CTBT and restrain their nuclear programs in order to ameliorate the present discriminatory situation between the nuclear powers and the nonnuclear states who are restrained by treaty from developing any nuclear forces.

The Reykjavík vision

Turning to the second challenge mentioned earlier, beyond the immediate challenge to prevent proliferation from getting out of control, we need to re-create the Reykjavík vision for escaping the nuclear deterrence trap and removing the nuclear threat that still hangs over our heads.

US leaders have addressed this challenge in earlier times. In his “Atoms for Peace” address to the United Nations in 1953, President Eisenhower pledged the US’s “determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma—to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”

President John F. Kennedy, seeking to break the logjam on nuclear disarmament in the early 1960s, said, “The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.” President Reagan called for the abolishment of “all nuclear weapons,” which he considered to be “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on Earth and civilization.” Reagan was a true nuclear abolitionist. Gorbachev shared his vision, and the two men strove to realize it in their remarkable Reykjavík meeting more than 20 years ago. Their vision to eliminate all nuclear weapons shocked experts in the doctrine of nuclear deterrence but galvanized the hopes of people around the world. The leaders of the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals had discussed the abolition of their most powerful weapons.

The entrenched nuclear orthodoxy responded very negatively to the Reykjavík vision. Former president Richard Nixon said, “No summit since Yalta has threatened western interests so much as at the two days at Reykjavík,” and former secretary of defense James Schlesinger called Reykjavík “a near disaster from which we were fortunate to escape.” Many in the arms control community also registered opposition, as did national leaders and analysts who, during the cold war years, claimed that efforts to zero out nukes were pie-in-the-sky impractical and would divert, if not obstruct, efforts for step-by-step arms control. Thinking out of the box inevitably causes such repercussions. Reagan, however, wrote in his memoirs that “Reykjavík was a major turning point in the quest for a safe and secure world.” Similarly, one year after the summit, Gorbachev wrote that it “marked a turning point in world history…. It tangibly demonstrated that the world situation could be improved…. At Reykjavík we became convinced that our course was correct and that a new constructive way of political thinking was essential.” Whatever its proponents and detractors may have thought, the summit certainly was, as Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz said, “the highest-stakes poker game ever played.”

What should be done?

The challenge to rekindle the vision of Reykjavík and to develop a strategy to realize it was addressed at a conference that Shultz, who participated at the summit, and I organized last October at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; the gathering marked the 20th anniversary of that remarkable meeting. ⁹ Conference participants reviewed the impact of Reykjavík and its relevance for today’s world. And we formulated a set of practical steps to define a path for ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

The conclusions of the conference were summarized in an article, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 4 January 2007. The article was signed by Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn and endorsed by most of the conference participants, who also signed on to the article. First and foremost, the article emphasized the need for intensive work with leaders of the countries in possession of nuclear weapons, both to turn the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise and to create a working mechanism for accomplishing that goal. Such a joint enterprise, by involving changes in the strategic assumptions and attitudes of the states possessing nuclear weapons, would lend additional weight to efforts already under way to avoid the emergence of a nuclear-armed North Korea or Iran.

The program developed at the Hoover Institution conference constitutes a series of urgent steps for which agreement should be sought. They require both political and technical progress and would reduce nuclear danger and lay the groundwork for a world free of the nuclear threat. Such steps, as described in the WSJ article, include

• ▸ Changing the cold war posture of deployed nuclear weapons to increase warning time and thereby reduce the danger of an accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon.

• What actions can be taken to increase warning time and reduce the number of operationally deployed nuclear weapons that have procedures in place for a prompt launch?

• ▸ Continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them.

  This calls for a review of the role of nuclear weapons in the post–cold war world, particularly to address how many deployed and reserve warheads and delivery systems are needed. Can we move to a force structure consisting exclusively of responsive forces that can be activated as required during a time of rising tension? Reductions would necessarily start with Russia and the US, who possess more than 90% of all nuclear weapons. What rate of reduction is practical, and to what extent will reductions require coordinated actions and negotiated agreements among all the nuclear powers? What monitoring and verification tasks will need to be accomplished to support reductions?

• ▸ Eliminating short-range nuclear weapons designed to be forward deployed.

• ▸ Beginning with US and Russian forces, these weapons should be repositioned for maximal safety and security as rapidly as is practical while verifiable protocols for their elimination are worked out. As a first step, Russia and the US should negotiate more transparency, in particular to include an exchange of data concerning short-range nuclear weapons. Further, they should agree on basic standards for protecting such weapons from illicit transfer.

• ▸ Initiating a bipartisan process with the Senate, including understandings to increase confidence and provide for periodic review, to achieve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, taking advantage of recent technical advances, and working to secure ratification by other key states.

  During the past decade, the US has maintained a safe and reliable nuclear deterrent with its aggressive Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension programs; it has not had to rely on underground explosive tests. Recent advances in surveillance, computer simulations, and instrumentation for analyzing aboveground experiments on weapons’ subsystems have enhanced our understanding of nuclear-explosion science. They have also increased confidence that we will see any evidence of significant aging and be able to respond so as to maintain confidence in the reliability, safety, and effectiveness of our weapons. Further diagnostic tools, such as the National Ignition Facility nearing completion at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, will make it possible to validate advanced supercomputer codes for the study of materials under extreme conditions that are closer to those in a nuclear explosion.

  In addition, progress continues in the ability to detect, from great distances, very-low-yield underground tests performed covertly in an effort to violate a CTBT. Under a CTBT, the integrated worldwide resources for detecting and characterizing nuclear explosions will be further enhanced. The ability to verify nuclear explosions is important, independent of whether a comprehensive test ban is in place.

  An in-depth review of all those advances should be prepared and presented to the Senate in public hearings, to the extent possible.

• ▸ Providing the highest possible standards of security for all stocks of weapons, weapons-usable plutonium, and highly enriched uranium everywhere in the world.

  The Nunn–Lugar program should be extended globally and should continue to be strengthened in terms of resources, leadership, and diplomacy. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 concerning nonproliferation should be made mandatory to the extent feasible. ¹⁰

• ▸ Getting control of the uranium enrichment process, combined with the guarantee that uranium for nuclear power reactors could be obtained at a reasonable price, first from the Nuclear Suppliers Group ¹¹ and then from the IAEA or other controlled international reserves. It will also be necessary to deal with proliferation issues presented by spent fuel from reactors producing electricity.

  This calls for an enhanced diplomatic effort to generate an international mechanism that will guarantee all countries the availability of nuclear fuel for peaceful uses and establish safeguards against the further spread of technology for uranium enrichment and fuel reprocessing.

  Halting the production of fissile material for weapons globally; phasing out the use of highly enriched uranium in civil commerce and removing weapons-usable uranium from research facilities around the world and rendering the materials safe.

  How can negotiations jump-start the process? The challenges are to verify and enforce mechanisms that confirm the production cut-off and to develop technical alternatives to using highly enriched uranium in research and commercial installations around the world.

  Redoubling our efforts to resolve regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers.

This step is a call for continued high-priority diplomatic efforts, perhaps including efforts to expand regional nuclear-free zones.

In addition to the eight items detailed above, it will be important to develop effective measures to impede or counter any nuclear-related conduct that is potentially threatening to the security of any state or people. Such measures will require both technical and diplomatic efforts. Examples include cooperative international early warning systems; shared, limited defenses against nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to protect against a cheater who develops a primitive nuclear missile threat; and agreements to codify reasonable and enforceable limitations on antisatellite developments and on long-range missiles.

At the highest political levels—the presidential level for the US—a serious international diplomatic initiative will be needed to endorse the Reykjavík vision of a nuclear-free world and energize an effort toward realizing the world that ought to be from the world that is today.

Reassertion of the Reykjavík vision coupled with practical measures toward attaining it could have a profoundly positive impact on the security of future generations. Without the bold vision, the actions will not be perceived as fair or urgent. Without the actions, the vision will not be perceived as realistic or achievable.