Beyond the Summit, a Deadly Swamp : Incalculable Threat Lies in Mini-Powers’ Nuclear Capability
Scientists, especially nuclear scientists, would do well to remember Leo Szilard’s warning back in the mid-’30s when he urged his fellow scientists to keep their fission discoveries secret “in view of the remote but not negligible chance of grave misuse in Europe.” Today the chance of grave misuse is no longer remote, nor limited by national boundaries. So Szilard’s further warning about the dangers of proliferating scientific findings in the chaotic world of 1939 bears repeating: “Unfortunately, it will appear to many people premature to take some action until it will be too late to take any action.”
We need Szilard’s kind of vision if we are to come through the difficult adolescence that the Nuclear Age has thrust upon us. We’re only 40 years into it, and the number of nuclear decision-makers is inexorably growing. There are today seven or eight nations (depending on whether Pakistan appears on the list) that have opened--or could open tomorrow--a nuclear weapons production line. Another 20 countries have the nuclear know-how to go for the bomb, but have chosen not to, at least not all the way. Some, like Sweden, have gone many of the steps down that path--”nine and a half of the ten steps” a Swedish diplomat acknowledged recently. This kind of nuclear holding pattern--stopping within a calculated sprinting distance of the bomb--may in fact mark the nuclear strategy of more and more nations and call for redefining membership in the so-called Nuclear Club.
Unless the world changes the way it does its nuclear business, by the year 2000 there will be 50 countries that can build the bomb if they choose to. The problem is both how many countries get the bomb and which ones get it. Nobody worries about Sweden. But beleaguered countries, today in places like South Asia and the Middle East, are not likely to get off the nuclear trail until they have the bomb in hand or within sight. They can see that any country that’s got the bomb is suddenly a nuclear power, a power not to be trifled with. How then, in a technically maturing Nuclear Age, can beleaguered nations be talked out of taking steps down that path? Or can they?
Spin the Nuclear Age out, with business as usual, for another 40 years, and the danger of the world degenerating into nuclear anarchy becomes all too real. In one or two generations, it won’t just be countries that can build the bomb. The knowledge is spreading and the raw materials are everywhere. What would the world be like if well-financed sub-national groups also had the “to bomb or not to bomb” choice? In that kind of future, every state that had an enemy, within or without, would be at risk of nuclear attack. And neither missile defenses nor threats of nuclear retaliation could deter the madman or terrorist.
Keeping the world from coming to this pass is a problem that must be solved on our watch, those of us born on the cusp of the Nuclear Age and now coming to power and responsibility in it. And the “we” who must act is everyone--scientists, policy makers, the arms-control community and average citizens. It is our generation that will be judged.
Nuclear proliferation is just too complex a problem for any one group or any one country to solve. But there is a question of leadership, and it is clear that the principal responsibility for that leadership rests with the United States and its citizens. We took the first steps on this path: The bomb and its use as an instrument of force were both “born in the U.S.A.” We have a moral responsibility to stand back and take a long view of where we are heading and leading.
Finding our way toward a safer future will demand new styles of thinking. Scientists have traditionally argued that the march of technology cannot be stopped and have called on policy makers to come up with a way of dealing with the resulting threat. Politicians have cowered before the political problems involved--even have claimed that scientists should be able to find a technical solution. The arms-control community, claiming an ability to marry technology and diplomacy, has made little progress on the long-term problem--in fact has largely ignored it for nearly two decades in favor of the still unsuccessful effort to halt the U.S.-Soviet nuclear numbers competition. And citizens have abdicated their responsibility, claiming that they can’t be expected to do anything about a problem for which even “the experts” can’t agree on the most promising lines of attack--as if they didn’t have a vital role in national agenda-setting. All these groups in the United States must adjust their focus to a long-term solution, and then extend that synergism to a global solution.
Scientists, and especially the community of nuclear scientists, have a particular role to play. They must teach the politicians that they are in thrall to fantasy if they believe that nuclear weapons can be rendered impotent and obsolete. No matter what exotic technology advances we might make in extra-terrestrial strategic defenses, first-generation nuclear truck bombs could still wreak death and havoc on an unimaginable scale. What can 80 battle stations in space do against a 15-kiloton van parked in Times Square? Scientists must lead the way through this technical logic.
Scientists must also more forcefully join the call and the quest for energy sources beyond nuclear power, with its regrettable character as a major stepping stone toward the development of nuclear bomb capability.
There are other critical needs as well: Much more attention must be paid to the spread of nuclear knowledge and materials; there must be less hiding behind the ideal of unfiltered access to all scientific knowledge.
The political world must come to realize that diplomatic initiatives will be a vital component of any solution. If we cannot absolutely deny technology, we must work to suppress appetite. That will demand that the superpowers (and others) find some way to work together to mitigate the threats against--or to guarantee the security of--countries that would otherwise build the bomb. This may be difficult to swallow if one considers the controversial nature of such cases in point as South Africa, Pakistan and Israel. But what’s the alternative?
The technical arms-control community must also see and respond to the severity of this problem. In particular, this vital community must avoid getting lost in the details of the East-West competition that seems currently to fill its whole field of vision. To be sure, agreed limitations on nuclear arsenals will be a necessary component of any long-term solution, but if there is one thing we have learned over the last two decades it is that such limitations are not a sufficient condition to achieve such a solution.
And citizens for their part must demand politically that this problem get fixed--and participate in the fixing. The fundamental issue--the evolutionary acquisition by humanity of a devastating instrument of force--is within their understanding. It does not require a degree in math or physics, so there is no excuse for shifting all responsibility to “the experts.” It does require work to understand and weigh alternative policy options, to make hard choices, and to ensure that politicians get serious about this problem.
Finally, there is the question of vision. We must be careful to find the proper focal point, the goal against which we set the sails of nuclear policy. We must correct the myopia that sees only the East-West struggle and thinks only in terms of avoiding superpower nuclear conflict. Such nearsightedness allows the bomb to spread, beyond our notice, to desperate countries that are more likely to use it than present nuclear powers are, simply because they feel more threatened. But we also cannot afford to take such a distant view that the goal moves out of reach, such as the visionary objective of “general and complete disarmament.” That will not happen in the time period in which the nuclear threat must be disarmed. It is on the middle distance, the next one to two generations, that we need to fix our sights, a time period in which we can act with effect even as the nuclear secret spreads.
Having begun with Szilard, I will end with advice from E.U. Condon, another prescient scientist from the early days of the Nuclear Age, who in 1946 foresaw a direct line of descent leading from the Manhattan Project to the terrorist bomb:
“No longer need Guy Fawkes put the gunpowder directly under Parliament. The atomic bomb of modest size that the agent assembles in his hideaway will, when it goes off, take with it every structure within a mile. . . . And what defense . . . exists? . . . The identity of the bomb maker will be hard to establish; there is a surprising anonymity about a ball of fire. . . . The saboteur cannot be found, but the factory that makes his bomb need never exist.”
Ensuring that Condon’s saboteur and his factory never exist is our task. We had best get on with it.
