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Who Will / Should Have the Bomb?: Nuclear Weapons in the

21st Century

Dr. Marvin MillerProgram in Science, Technology & Society

MIT

Smith CollegeApril 10, 2007

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Background

• Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945)

• The Acheson-Lilienthal Report (1946)

• “Atoms for Peace” (1953) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) (1957)

• The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) (1970)

• Reaction to Indian and Pakistani Nuclear Tests (1974; 1998); Nuclear Orientalism?

• The Bomb Today

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Nuclear Weapons & Moral Values

• The role of scientists

• The paradox of nuclear deterrence

• The morality of nonproliferation; a nuclear “double standard”?

Nuclear Abolition: Desirable?; Feasible?

• Dangers of the nuclear status quo

• Can we “put the nuclear genie back in the bottle?”

• The way ahead

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The Acheson–Lilienthal (A-L) Report on the International Control of Atomic

Energy (March 1946)

• Failure of Bohr and Stimson-Acheson initiatives to approach Soviet Union directly on control of the atom to prevent a nuclear arms race

• Secretary of State Brynes appoints Acheson to chair a committee to develop US plan for international control of the atom for newly-formed UN Atomic Energy Commission (Jan. 1946)

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• Acheson appoints board of consultants to advise on the scientific and technical aspects of the plan; chair is David Lilienthal, head of TVA; most prominent member and lead author of A-L Report is J. R. Oppenheimer

• Principal Objective: devise international arrangements to prevent use of atomic energy for weapons and to promote its use for the benefit of society, i.e., production of electricity and radioisotopes for medicine, agriculture, and industry [Oppenheimer et al., Nehru/Bhabha; SDS]

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• Major Conclusions:

– No adequate defense against atomic weapons;– US cannot forever maintain a nuclear monopoly;– “The development of atomic energy for destructive purposes

and its development for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent”, or “atoms for peace and atoms for war are Siamese twins” [Hannes Alfven, 1977];

– “No prospect of security against atomic warfare in a system of international agreements to outlaw such weapons controlled only by a system which relies on inspection and similar police-like methods…so long as intrinsically dangerous activities may be carried out by nations, rivalries are inevitable and fears are engendered that place too great a pressure on such a system that no degree of ingenuity or technical competence could possibly cope with them.”

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– Instead all such activities should be controlled by an international Atomic Development Authority (ADL), while safe activities can be undertaken by private and national institutions in collaboration with the ADL;

– The US must transfer its weapons and all weapons-related materials and facilities to the ADL during a transition period; i.e., A-L plan is premised on a world free of nuclear weapons in national hands

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• President Truman asks Bernard Baruch to present A-L plan to UN AEC; Baruch makes two key changes that assure its rejection by the Soviet Union

• Under any circumstances, A-L plan was a visionary proposal since it would require states to relinquish much of their sovereignty in the nuclear domain. But whatever chance it might be accepted was foreclosed by the Cold War tensions that had already begun to dominate postwar relations. As long as the US had the bomb, Stalin was determined that the Soviet Union would also have them.

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• Today we again face the prospect of nuclear proliferation via misuse of nuclear power whose use might increase significantly to reduce the risks of climate change; current nonproliferation regime is widely viewed as inadequate; is it time to revisit the A-L plan?

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The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty

(1970)

• States that have tested nuclear weapons prior to Jan. 1967 (US, Soviet Union, UK, France, and China) are permitted to retain them; all other signatories (178 to date) agree not to acquire nuclear weapons and to accept safeguards administered by the IAEA to verify this commitment

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• Treaty contains two significant incentives for non-weapons states signatories: – Article IV: full access to the peaceful atom as an

“inalienable right”;– Article VI: nuclear weapons state parties agree

to eventually give up their nuclear weapons, specifically: “Each of the parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

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• Nevertheless, Israel, India, and Pakistan refuse to join as non-nuclear weapons states:– By 1967, Israel has secretly acquired the bomb to

enable it “to threaten another Hiroshima in order to prevent another Holocaust”;

– India, defeated in a traumatic border war with China in 1962, accelerates development of nuclear weapons under the cover of an extensive peaceful program including acquisition of dual-use, “dangerous” nuclear technologies; “India will never accept colonialism in the atomic sphere” (Homi Bhabha)

– Pakistani Premier Ali Bhutto pledges that Pakistanis will “eat grass” if necessary in order to match India’s nuclear capability

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Reaction to the Indian and Indian-Pakistani Tests (1974; 1998); in

particular, such states shouldn’t have the bomb because,

• They are poor and can’t afford them;

• Deterrence will be unstable in such countries;

• They lack the technical and political maturity to be trusted with nuclear weapons

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“The more appropriate reaction to the Indian nuclear test would be one of despair that such great talent and resources have been squandered on the vanity of power, while 600 million Indians slip deeper into poverty. The sixth member of the nuclear club may be passing the begging bowl before the year is out because Indian science and technology so far have failed to solve the country’s fundamental problems of food and population”. (NYT Editorial, May 19, 1974)

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“It was clear that what the Indians and Pakistanis did was unacceptable and they are not now members of the nuclear club”. (Madeline Albright, LA Times, June 5, 1998)

“We must make clear to the Indian government that it is today what it was two weeks ago, an arrogant, overreaching cabal that, by its devotion to the caste system, the political and economic disenfranchisement of its people and its religious intolerance, is unworthy of membership in any club.” (Robert McFarlane, NYT, May 30, 1998)

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“Nuclear weapons, once thought of as the “great equalizer”, must now be seen differently. They are one thing in the hands of governments animated by rational policies to protect national interests and a normal regard for human life. They are quite another in the hands of a brutal megalomaniac like Saddam who wouldn’t blink at the mass destruction of his enemies…The most formidable threat to our well-being would be a Saddam in possession of true weapons of mass destruction…In any contest in which one side is bound by the norms of civilized behavior and the other is not, history is, alas, on the side of the barbarians.”(Richard Perle, WSJ, August 22, 1990)

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Nuclear Weapons, Power Politics & Moral

Values • The role of scientists

“In 1948, no one asked whether or not to take part in such work. I had no real choice in the matter, but the concentration, total absorption, and energy that I brought to the task were my own. I understood, of course, the terrifying inhuman nature of the weapons we were building. But the recent war had also been an exercise in barbarity, and although I hadn’t fought in that conflict, I regarded myself as a soldier in the new scientific war [emphasis added].

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The monstrous destructive force, the scale of our enterprise and the price paid for it by our poor, hungry, war-torn country, the casualties resulting from the neglect of safety standards and the use of forced labor in our mining and manufacturing activities, all these things inflamed our sense of drama and inspired us to make a maximum effort so that the sacrifices – which we regarded as inevitable – would not be in vain.” (Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, 1990)

See also testimonies of, e.g., Oppenheimer, Fritz Haber, Werner von Braun, etc.

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• The paradox of nuclear deterrence– Although any use of nuclear weapons would kill

large numbers of noncombatants and thus would violate the jus in bello rule of just war theory, which holds that the use of military force must be proportional and discriminatory, the threatened use of nuclear weapons in self-defense to deter a nuclear attack that would similarly lead to large numbers of casualties is justified under the jus ad bello rule of just war theory. This conclusion was reaffirmed in a ruling by the International Court of Justice in 1996:

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“In view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”

With the end of the Cold War, there is now little risk that the use of nuclear weapons will lead to mutually assured destruction (MAD). However, there is growing concern that nuclear weapons will continue to proliferate and eventually be used. This raises another moral concern: what is a state(s) permitted to do to stop such proliferation?

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• Advocating Water & Drinking Wine With Respect to Nuclear Weapons

“This goal [establishing an international norm that forbids the nuclear ambitions of non-nuclear states] raises basic hypocrisy on the part of the nuclear powers: they retain their own arsenals while denying others the same right. This contradiction prompted Washington unwisely to commit under Article VI of the NPT ‘to pursue good-faith negotiations’ towards complete disarmament, a goal it has no intention of pursuing.” (John Deutch, Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2005)

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“America’s nuclear arsenal helped thwart Soviet expansionism and provided the umbrella under which Western Europe and the Asian rim countries became – and remained free throughout the Cold War. For embattled Israel, nuclear weapons have not only helped guarantee its existence, they have paradoxically provided it with the margin of strength it needs to contemplate territorial concessions, unimaginable for other states its size…In the hands of democracies, nuclear weapons safeguard liberty; in the hands of dictatorships, they safeguard despotism. [Emphasis added] It’s doubtful that the Soviet Union could have survived as long as it did had it never developed nuclear weapons. That’s true for North Korea today, and it explains why the mullahs in Tehran seek to bolster their faltering regime with an atomic bomb.” (WSJ, Editorial, Aug. 2005)

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“Although it is right to oppose the emergence of new nuclear weapons states in all circumstances, it is also right to oppose it more in some than in others. The character and behavior of the regime – its record of aggression, its history of supporting terrorism, its stability, its record on preventing exports of sensitive technologies, whether it is a democracy, its involvement in a dispute with a neighbor that in turn could involve nuclear weapons – all can and should influence the intensity of what the US and other countries should be prepared to do to prevent or counter it. While the emergence of a nuclear Iran and a nuclear Switzerland would be of concern, they would not be of equal concern.” (Richard Haas, The Opportunity, 2005)

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Nuclear Abolition: Desirable?; Feasible?

• Dangers of the nuclear status quo– Size, alert status, and dispersion of US and

Russian arsenals create dangers of accidental, erroneous, and unauthorized nuclear use; similar problems on a smaller scale in South Asia and the Middle East

– Size and dispersion of global stockpiles of weapons and weapons materials create high risk of terrorist acquisition of nuclear weapons

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– US and Russian nuclear doctrines, particularly refusal to agree to a policy of no-first-use and revitalizing the weapons complex undermine our moral authority and the willingness of others to cooperate on nonproliferation and also tempt adversaries to acquire their own nuclear weapons

“The need is clear for a revitalized nuclear weapons complex that will be able, if directed, to design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads in response to new national requirements, and maintain readiness to resume underground nuclear testing if required.” (US Dept. of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review, Jan. 2002)

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• Can we “put the nuclear genie back in the bottle?”; does abolition require “un-inventing” the bomb?– What if all weapons were dismantled, their materials

and components rendered impossible or unattractive for reuse, weapons laboratories and the associated facilities for manufacturing and testing bombs were closed and their employees retired or retrained

– What if a strong stigma were attached to the possession of nuclear weapons as there is now attached to slavery, mass murder, and the possession of chemical and biological weapons

– What if in support of such a stigma a norm is established that permits the deployment of highly effective verification means, including societal verification.

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The risks of a nuclear-weapons-free world, e.g., that it would make the world “safe” for conventional war, can never be reduced to zero. However, these risks are likely less than those if nuclear weapons are not abolished. If possession of nuclear weapons doesn’t tend to zero, in the long run it will tend to universality, and the probability of nuclear use will greatly increase.

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“To date, the issue of [un-inventing the bomb] has received remarkably little attention, with a few honorable exceptions. We have, however, had nearly half a century of “thinking the unthinkable” – pondering nuclear holocaust. The time has now surely come to think the other unthinkable, a feasible world permanently free of nuclear weapons. (Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy, 1990)

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The Way Ahead

“Reassertion of [Reagan and Gorbachev’s] vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and practical measures toward achieving that goal would be a bold initiative consistent with America’s moral heritage…Without that bold vision, the actions will not be perceived as fair or urgent. Without the actions, the vision will not be perceived as realistic or possible…First and foremost is intensive work with leaders of the countries in possession of nuclear weapons to turn the goal of a world without them into a joint enterprise.”

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(George Schultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons”, WSJ, Jan. 4, 2007)

Recommended Steps• Changing the Cold War posture of deployed nuclear

weapons to increase warning time and thereby reduce the danger of accidental or unauthorized use

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

• Providing the highest possible security standards on all stocks of weapons and weapons-useable materials everywhere in the world

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

• Ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)

• Halting the production of fissile materials for weapons

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An Important Additional Step

• Declare that the only defensible role for nuclear weapons is to deter their use by other countries that possess them, and hence adopt a policy of "no first use" of nuclear weapons under any circumstances