Why the Nuclear Question Still Haunts the World : The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War have greatly raised the risks of proliferation

The aim of the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty is straightforward. It seeks to freeze at five the number of states that have nuclear weapons. By no coincidence the five--the United States, Russia, Britain, China and France, which also happen to be the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council--had all exploded nuclear devices before the NPT was signed in 1968. That assured their claims to membership in a club whose exclusiveness they were and still are eager to maintain.

Signers of the treaty, now numbering 164 countries, endorsed a document that looked forward both to an end to the big-power arms race and to eventual full nuclear disarmament. Lending special urgency to that hope were widely accepted forecasts that within a relatively short time as many as 20 states would be able to develop their own nuclear weapons. The concern, in short, was that world stability and peace could soon be put at risk by a host of small regional nuclear powers.

THE NPT BY ITSELF IS NO BARRIER TO PROLIFERATION

That concern has not been realized, in part no doubt because of the NPT. Indeed, the number of “threshold” states that were thought to be working on nuclear weapons shrank markedly by the late 1980s. South Africa abandoned its program. Argentina and Brazil bilaterally agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons, and both joined the regional treaty that makes all of Latin America a nuclear-free zone. South Korea and Taiwan, under U.S. prodding, seem to have opted out of the nuclear race. More recently Ukraine, which fell heir to the world’s third-largest nuclear arms stockpile when the Soviet Union was dissolved, has agreed to divest itself of these weapons and join the NPT. Other states, however, have not been deterred from pursuing an independent nuclear course. India, Pakistan and Israel--none of them members of the NPT--are all believed to have built or to be building nuclear arsenals.

A conference scheduled for next spring in New York will decide whether to extend the NPT and, if so, for how long. But, as the world learned to its dismay in the last few years, the treaty by itself is no barrier against proliferation. Iraq and North Korea are members of the NPT, yet both were able to pursue nuclear weapons programs clandestinely and successfully. Only after Iraq was defeated in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 did the full and frightening dimensions of its nuclear subterfuge emerge. North Korea’s quest for nuclear arms may--or may not--have been suspended by the recent controversial and costly U.S. agreement to supply it with alternative fuel sources, including two new light-water nuclear reactors. Meanwhile, Iran and Libya are suspected of trying to acquire a nuclear arms capability. And there are few who believe that Iraq, despite its recent setback, is ready to permanently forswear nuclear weapons.

CONCERN ABOUT NUCLEAR SPREAD IN THE THIRD WORLD

As a consequence, says Leonard Spector, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, we no longer face “proliferation in the abstract.” We have instead a renewed threat that nuclear arms will spread in the Third World.

Ted Galen Carpenter, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is one of those who believes that “the non-proliferation regime is slowly unraveling and that in a decade we will have a significant number of nuclear states.” Worse, the system is breaking down “asymmetrically,” with the countries that seem most bent on acquiring nuclear weapons precisely the countries that are most likely to contemplate using them. Meanwhile, “the more peaceably inclined nations remain non-nuclear--and entirely dependent on U.S. protection. . . . “

Spector and Carpenter agree that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War have greatly raised the risk of proliferation. As Spector sees it, “Russia has lost control over its nuclear materials, creating a situation that should be our number one concern.” Evidence of that concern--and welcome evidence of a readiness to respond to it--came recently when the United States quietly negotiated a deal for the secret removal of about half a ton of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium from Kazakhstan. The material, stored at a poorly protected site, could have become the target for black marketeers or terrorists. By arranging for its storage at the nuclear complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn., the United States eased that concern. But worries continue about leakage of weapons-quality nuclear material from the former Soviet Union.

Seth Cropsey, director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, shares Carpenter’s pessimism that proliferation is inexorable. The key question now, he argues, is not how to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons but how to prevent their use.

This fatalistic approach is by no means universally accepted. Proliferation specialist Spector, for one, cautions against the political paralysis he believes the “post-proliferation” school of thinking invites. And, indeed, there’s little to commend the notion that the United States and other anti-proliferation leaders should passively accept the inevitability of proliferation. If anything, in the aftermath of nuclear developments in Iraq and North Korea, efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons should be intensified. At the same time, however, there’s a compelling need to develop a policy--and the military means to support it--to deal with the implicit threats presented by hostile states with nuclear arms.

Spector is right in arguing for continued strong U.S. support for the NPT, and for maintaining strict export controls on materials and technology that could have nuclear weapons applications. A strong proponent of a comprehensive test-ban treaty, he similarly urges a continued emphasis on bilateral diplomacy with potential nuclear states, and points to successes with Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Cato’s Carpenter would have the United States and international agencies encourage regional nuclear-free zones. He also proposes good-offices aid to India and Pakistan to help those two antagonists develop fail-safe command and control systems that would lessen the chances of one or the other accidentally setting off a nuclear conflict.

The agenda could be extended. Monitoring of threshold nuclear countries--Iran, Iraq and North Korea especially--should be stepped up, and Russia should be helped in any way possible to tighten its controls over nuclear materials. Edward Luck, president of the U.N. Assn. of the United States, proposes an additional step: creation of a U.N. Commission on Nuclear Proliferation under the Security Council, to act as a watchdog and contingency planner and play a more active role than that now taken by the sometimes cautiously bureaucratic International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna. None of these steps, of course, obviate the need for the United States to have a strategic policy to defend itself and its allies if political and diplomatic efforts to arrest the spread of nuclear weapons fail.

Most experts agree on the need for what Spector calls a light missile shield as part of a comprehensive anti-proliferation policy. At a minimum, some feasible defense against the kind of intermediate-range missiles that such would-be nuclear powers as Iran, Iraq and North Korea would most likely use as delivery systems is a must, although no such system could be regarded as foolproof. There’s also general agreement about the folly of undertaking preemptive strikes against the nuclear facilities of threatening states. Such strikes would be both dangerous--spreading radioactive fallout and inviting conventional, unconventional or terrorist retaliation--and quite possibly ineffective, given the difficulty in clearly identifying suspect sites.

Cropsey of the Heritage Foundation argues instead that the best deterrent could be the threat to attack with conventional weapons the military infrastructures that are universally the key props of authoritarian regimes.

If proliferation does occur in the Third World, the immediate danger, by definition, will be regional, and that raises a basic question for American policy-makers: Should the Cold War doctrine of extended deterrence, under which the United States either formally or implicitly placed friendly non-nuclear countries under its protection, continue as a matter of policy? In a potentially multipolar rather than bipolar nuclear world, in other words, is the United States ready to accept the risks it would run if it were drawn into a regional conflict that might be only peripheral to its national interests? And if Washington rejects that kind of exposure--if it is not to act automatically where nuclear threats might arise--does that increase the incentive for other states, friendly or hostile, to try to get their own nuclear arsenals?

STRATEGIC PLANNING REMAINS A PRIORITY

The end of the Cold War, U.S.-Russian agreements to reduce their nuclear arsenals and the overall shrinking of American military forces have plainly not ended the need for careful strategic planning and decision making--or for informed strategic debate. The policy of the United States should be to continue doing all that it can, along with like-minded states, to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Forceful diplomacy and maintaining and extending controls over weapons-related exports are two essential features of such a policy. Beyond that, there’s little choice but to focus planning on what Cropsey calls attention to: Where proliferation fails, the compelling need is to keep new nuclear states from using the weapons they have acquired.

Next Sunday: The United Nations and failed states.