The Greatest Threat to Us All

By Joseph Cirincione
The New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 3, March 6, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
by Richard Rhodes
Knopf, 386 pages

The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger
by Jonathan Schell
Metropolitan, 251 page

Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons
by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark
Walker, 586 pages

America and the Islamic Bomb:The Deadly Compromise
by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento
Steerforth, 292 pages

Nuclear terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States today.

The violence in Pakistan has brought the threat into stark relief. Osama bin Laden is widely thought to be hiding in Pakistan, a country with a substantial nuclear arsenal, strong Islamic fundamentalist influences in its military and intelligence services, and a military dictatorship seemingly in danger of collapse.

To understand the roots of this strategic failure, we have no more reliable guide than Richard Rhodes. His books tell us much about how the US went from the atomic discoveries of the 1930s to the irrational situation in the 1980s in which a total of 65,000 nuclear weapons were held by the United States and the Soviet Union. Although the global arsenals have since been reduced to some 26,000 bombs, the United States and Russia continue to possess most of the world's nuclear warheads, with the other seven nuclear nations together holding the remaining one thousand.

In 1976 George H.W. Bush, then the director of the CIA, set up a "Team B" of private analysts with the blessing of Dick Cheney, then President Gerald Ford's chief of staff, and Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense. The team produced a wildly exaggerated portrait of a Soviet empire bent on world domination.

Subsequent groups have copied the Team B strategy. In 1998, the Republican-controlled Congress established the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, led by Donald Rumsfeld. By consistently applying worst-case assumptions, the Rumsfeld Commission warned that Iran and North Korea could hit the United States with missiles within five years. The report persuaded Congress to boost spending on antimissile systems from $3 billion annually to $11 billion in 2007.

In 2000, the Rumsfeld Commission on space weapons again used a series of worst-case assumptions to conclude that the country faced an imminent "space Pearl Harbor." That report led to the current US strategy to deploy new weapons for total US domination of outer space. In fact, no nation credibly threatens the vast US satellite system.

Under President George W. Bush, the practice of exaggerating threats to the United States in order to justify aggressive military policies has been taken to alarming extremes. The Bush administration said the problem was not controlling and eliminating existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons but dealing with the evil regimes that are trying to acquire them. The answer was the forceful overthrow of those regimes.

The cold war arms race was not, Rhodes argues, a natural condition of the US–Soviet rivalry. Those who claimed to act out of patriotism perpetuated the waste of billions of US tax dollars, squandered the possibility of achieving lasting nuclear security, and weakened America's global standing. The $5.5 trillion spent on nuclear weapons was money not invested in domestic needs.

In his famous 1983 "Star Wars" speech, Reagan said his proposed anti-missile system would open the way for the eventual elimination of the weapons themselves. Rhodes' account of the Reykjavik summit in October 1986 shows how close Reagan and Gorbachev came to eliminating all nuclear weapons within ten years. Start I and the INF Treaty eliminated thousands of missiles from Europe and cut the strategic arsenals of the two superpowers in half.

Jonathan Schell picks up where Rhodes leaves off. Nuclear weapons, Schell writes, lost any conceivable rational purpose after the end of the cold war.

Schell argues that plans by the Bush administration for new nuclear weapons and for new uses for these weapons swung nuclear policy sharply away from deterrence and in the direction of nuclear use: "The mission of nuclear weapons is no longer to produce stalemate with a peer, it is to fight and win wars against nations with little or no ability to respond."

Two new books provide essential information for understanding the nuclear dangers posed by Pakistan. They provide a disturbing picture of the proliferation network set up by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, who presided over sales of nuclear materials to Libya, Iran, and other countries. Despite claims that his operations have been shut down, both books argue that the Khan network still exists, and both agree that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are not safe.

The current turmoil in Pakistan intensifies the gravest threat to American national security: that al-Qaeda could steal or acquire a nuclear weapon or the material to make one. Pakistan is now the most urgent risk, but not the only one. Fifty countries have stockpiles of materials that could be used for nuclear weapons.

The key to stopping al-Qaeda or a similar organization from detonating such a device is preventing the group from getting highly enriched uranium and other bomb-making technology in the first place. In principle we know how to do this. Thousands of US and foreign civil servants are working to eliminate or secure supplies of bomb materials, particularly highly enriched uranium.

Both John McCain and Mitt Romney have supported Bush's policy on Pakistan, including continuing to rely on General Musharraf. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton support Musharraf's removal through free elections. None of the candidates believe that elections alone will solve Pakistan's problems.

Republicans George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and Democrats William Perry and Sam Nunn want the United States government to recommit itself to the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and to embrace a concrete plan of action to achieve this goal.

This could dramatically reduce the threat.
 

AR  Bad scene. We need to act carefully in Pakistan.