Ending Nuclear Terrorism: By America and Others
by Daniel Ellsberg

One phase of the Nuclear Age, the period of superpower arms race and confrontation, has indeed come to a close (though the possibility of all-out, omnicidal exchange of alert forces triggered by a false alarm remains, inexcusably, well above zero).  But another dangerous phase now looms, the era of nuclear proliferation and with it, an increased likelihood of regional nuclear wars, accidents, and nuclear terrorism.

And the latter prospect is posed not just by “rogue” states or sub-state terrorists but by the United States, which has both led by example for sixty years of making nuclear first-use threats that amount to terrorism and may well be the first or among the first to carry out such threats.

Averting catastrophe—not only the spread of weapons but their lethal use—will require major shifts in attitude and policy in every one of the nuclear weapon states, declared and undeclared. But such change is undoubtedly most needed, and must come first, in the United States and Russia.  Despite important and creditable moves, both unilateral and negotiated, since 1991 to reverse their bilateral arms race, and piecemeal measures to restrain proliferation, none of their initiatives and proposals has shown a decisive shift away from cold war notions of the broad functions of and requirements for nuclear weapons in “superpower” arsenals.

Neither country has adopted—even as a goal—a nuclear posture that is remotely appropriate, let alone adequate, to discourage proliferation effectively.  On the contrary, as in the past, their joint declaratory position against proliferation is at odds with their operational doctrines and nuclear weapons programs which continue, on balance, to stimulate the spread and possible use of nuclear weapons.  And that is true of all the declared nuclear powers, which not coincidentally make up the permanent membership of the UN Security Council.

With each month and year that these states maintain large nuclear arsenals, postpone ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and sustain nuclear policies that suggest that such weapons convey major-power status and are useful for political and military purposes, other nations can only conclude that acquiring and in some circumstances using nuclear weapons may well be in their national interest.

U.S. Nuclear Policies Encouraging Proliferation

Looking specifically at the United States, a whole set of policies persist that have long tended to encourage proliferation.  These have included long-term selective blindness and tolerance for some covert nuclear weapons programs, Israel’s in particular, but also in India, South Africa, Pakistan, and in earlier periods, Iran and Iraq.

Moreover, the United States maintains a massive nuclear arsenal after the end of the Cold War, resists radical cuts, and insists on its right, and that of its NATO allies, to threaten or implement initiation of nuclear attack (“first-use”) against non-nuclear challenges.

Beyond this, US policies continue to endorse the notion that the relative size of nuclear arsenals is an essential badge of status.  Just like their predecessors—and with the support of most elite opinion-makers and mainstream arms control analysts—the Clinton and the two Bush administrations have declared themselves resolved to maintain nuclear superpower standing, insisting on a US arsenal that will remain for the foreseeable future an order of magnitude larger than all others apart from Russia, and that is projected to remain “Number One” in the world indefinitely.

The need for US nuclear “superiority” goes unquestioned, while these same administrations along with members of Congress and editorial-writers lecture potential “rogues” among the non-nuclear-weapon states on the anachronism of their fantasy that having some nuclear weapons rather than none will confer on them any prestige, status or influence.

All these expressions of nuclear policy—what we do, and what we say to ourselves, as opposed to what we say others should do—especially in the absence now of any serious military threats to US national security, can only encourage potential nuclear states to regard nuclear weapons in the same way that the United States and its major allies, along with Russia, evidently do: as having vital, multiple, legitimate uses, as well as being unparalleled symbols of sovereignty, status, and power.

Perhaps most dangerously, such potential proliferators are led by past and present American doctrine and behavior to consider—among the possible, acceptable and valuable uses of nuclear weapons—the issuance and possible execution of nuclear first-use threats: i.e., the “option” of threatening to initiate nuclear attacks, and if necessary of carrying out such threats.

The threat of first-use (against a country without nuclear weapons) is intentionally implicit in the repeated statements of President Bush and Secretary of State Rice over the last year, echoed by leading members of Congress, that “all options are on the table” with respect to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.  Such threats have the perverse effect of challenging other states, including Iran itself, to acquire nuclear capabilities of their own, perhaps stimulating a regional nuclear arms race—mimicking past superpower folly—to be able likewise to threaten, to deter or to preempt nuclear attack.

Years after the former members of the Warsaw Pact, including Russia, began asking to be admitted to NATO, and after China has acquired most-favored-nation status, the United States still refuses to adopt a policy of “no-first-use.” This means that the United States refuses to make a commitment to never under any circumstance initiate a nuclear attack.  This is also true of Britain, France and now Russia, which abandoned its no-first-use doctrine in late 1993, citing the United States-NATO example and reasoning in doing so.

This is not only a matter of words, as some suppose.  Despite sensible moves on both sides beginning in late 1991 to remove tactical nuclear weapons from the surface navy and from ground units—responding to realistic fears in both leaderships of “loose nukes” in the Soviet Union—both states continue to deploy sizeable numbers of tactical weapons on air bases and still larger numbers in reserve storage.  Virtually all of these weapons are vulnerable to nuclear attack.  Thus, they are weapons only for first-use or for use against non-nuclear opponents.

So long as these continue to be components of the nuclear arsenals of both the United States and Russia, even after their own overarching confrontation has ended, there is simply no logical argument for denying either the legitimacy or reasonableness of nuclear arsenals sized and shaped to the same ends in other countries.  This is especially true for countries such as Pakistan and Israel, who face regional opponents with much larger conventional forces.  This, after all, was the historic rationale for NATO’s reliance on first-use nuclear threats.

In May 1990, a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir was plausibly feared by US officials, and little has happened since to reduce the prospect of a recurrence.  But neither then nor later was the United States in a position to invoke an internationally-accepted norm against Pakistan’s tacit first-use threats, since Pakistan was so clearly imitating US and NATO behavior.

U.S. Nuclear Weapons Use

Later in 1990, after Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait, not one of the four nuclear states militarily arrayed against Iraq in the Gulf War—the United States, Britain, France and Israel—refrained from tacit threats to initiate nuclear attacks under some circumstances.  Under public questioning, high US and other Allied officials—including Vice President Quayle, Secretary of Defense Cheney and General Schwarzkopf—pointedly refused to rule out the possible first-use of nuclear weapons against Iraq: in particular, if the Iraqis used chemical weapons extensively, which was regarded as highly possible.  Thus, nuclear weapons were used as a threat against a non-nuclear opponent during the Gulf War.

By the same token, contrary to the belief of most Americans that US nuclear weapons have never been used in the fifty years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American Presidents have employed nuclear threats over a dozen times, generally in secret from the US public, in crises and limited wars in Indochina, East Asia, Berlin, Cuba and the Middle East. The Soviet Union, Israel, and Pakistan have used nuclear weapons in the same way.

In each of these cases, nuclear weapons were used in the exact sense in which a gun is used when it is pointed at someone’s head in a confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled.  To get one’s way without having to pull the trigger is a major reason for acquiring the gun and, often, for brandishing it.

Some of these nuclear threats were probably bluffs, some probably not. Most were ambiguous, some were rejected, some were believed to be successful, including those in the Gulf War.  But all of them involved real dangers, short-run or long, to some degree for both sides; intimidation on this scale is never without mutual risk.

One of the successes, the Pentagon concluded, was the Gulf War.  Saddam Hussein did not, after all, use the chemical weapons he then possessed—some on alert missiles– either against Allied troops or against Israel.  Fear of Israeli nuclear reprisal may have been an especially effective deterrent.  But this success, if true, came at a high price.  The message that the United States and its allies regarded such threats both as legitimate and as successful was not lost on potential proliferators, who could imagine themselves either as receiving or as imitating such threats themselves in the future.

Yet another spur to proliferation was the accompanying thought, among Third World observers, that Iraq might have been spared both these nuclear threats and the heavy conventional bombing it received if Saddam Hussein’s efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon had already been successful.  That inference became inescapable after 2003, with the dramatic difference in the US responses to a supposed nuclear weapons program in Iraq and an actual successful one in North Korea.  (A conventional or nuclear US attack in the near future on a yet-non-nuclear Iran would underline that point once again for the rest of the world).

And once proliferation has occurred, new nuclear states are likely to use the same ambiguous first-use threats, in the same ways and with the same risks of provocation, commitment, and of possible failure and escalation.

This observation rejects the common, condescending implication that significant risk of nuclear war will emerge for the first time only with the acquisition of nuclear weapons by “irresponsible, immature” leaders in the Third World.  But it also presumes that the risk of nuclear war has been higher over the last sixty years than the world public was allowed to learn.

With nuclear weapons in the hands of a greater number of leaders, individually no more but no less reckless than most American presidents of the last sixty years, the long-term risk of nuclear explosions launched by nuclear weapons states is higher still.  There is no basis here for limiting the danger of such attacks exclusively to non-state, “terrorist” groups.  The latter real and growing danger must be seen not as replacing but as adding to (and being enhanced by) the dangers of existing and broadened possession of nuclear weapons by states, led by our own.

Failure to Make Nuclear Disarmament Irreversible

Equally foolish and dangerous is the failure of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to require Russian commitment—at the price of reciprocal American commitment–to immediate deactivation of strategic weapons to be dismantled under arms control agreements; and to the dismantling, under reciprocal, bilateral controls, of warheads as well as vehicles; and to international control of all the fissile material from these warheads.  Only such a combination of measures could lock in the reductions verifiably and irreversibly.  Yet these administrations have hung back from proposing, let alone demanding, such bilateral commitments at the cost of US freedom of action to maintain huge stockpiles of warheads and material “in reserve.”

There isn’t any national security rationale, or any excuse, for US failure to press Russian leaders now, and on every occasion, to commit Russia to reduce and dismantle its nuclear forces, both strategic and tactical, as far and as fast as they can be induced to go on a mutual and reciprocal basis.  Yet because of reluctance to cut our own forces as deeply as Yeltsin, for one,  actually proposed—down to 2000 in 1992, and reportedly to 1000 in 1994—high-level officials under Clinton as under George H.W. Bush bargained Yeltsin up in terms of joint levels of strategic forces to be negotiated.

The present administration of George W. Bush has actually announced that the most recent agreed reduction schedule—down to 1700-2200 “operationally deployable” warheads by December 2012 with no provision for destruction of warheads or missiles  or for detailed verification, and with many thousands each in reserve —is to be the last they envision negotiating.

The risks of such fecklessness are incalculable.  The unprecedented opportunities that emerged in late 1991 (or even earlier, under Gorbachev) for reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons and for changing long-standing Cold War policies were and are obviously subject to continuous erosion and challenge. Warnings by Secretary of Defense Cheney at that time—reiterated by Secretary Perry and then by Secretaries Rumsfeld and Gates–that the Russian future i s highly uncertain are self-evidently realistic. (Likewise, arms policies in China).  But the conclusions they have all drawn from this, serving to preserve swollen defense budgets and nuclear arsenals on both sides, seem perversely implausible.

It is true that there is a continuing danger of a shift to a more authoritarian, militarist regime within Russia, which would close down such opportunity as still might be nurtured for greatly increased trust and cooperation, openness to international inspection, and reductions in arms.  (This may, or may not, already have happened under Putin, but the contrary possibility has scarcely been explored by the U.S.)

But that is precisely why reciprocal commitments to inspection and disarmament should have been sought urgently throughout this period, and at present.  No matter how fascistic its future or even present leadership might become, Russian need for credits and trade would make its leaders extremely reluctant to disavow formal undertakings that had been ratified.  The logic of these ominous uncertainties points in exactly the opposite direction from maintaining insanely high levels of nuclear weaponry in Russian, along with American, hands.

Nuclear Insanity

“Insane” is not too strong a word for arguments that occupy planners in the Pentagon and otherwise-serious arms control analysts in favor of maintaining thousands of thermonuclear warheads in the US arsenal—hence thousands in Russia—in a world where neither any longer has a superpower adversary.  After two generations of a strategic nuclear arms race that was the clearest example in human history of a social process psychotically divorced from reality or an urge to survive, such advisors have clearly lost any conception of what a nuclear bomb is or does.

They have forgotten, if they ever knew, that pictures of Nagasaki in the late summer of 1945 show what happens to a medium-sized city when just the detonator to a modern, thermonuclear weapon is exploded in its midst.  Almost no Americans are aware of the elementary fact that every thermonuclear fusion weapon, or H-bomb—which comprise all of our strategic arsenal, still over 6,000 warheads—requires a Nagasaki-type fission warhead, or A-bomb, to set it off.

The earliest thermonuclear blasts released 1,000 times the explosive power of the A-bomb detonator that triggered it, which was in turn 2,000 times more powerful than the largest “blockbuster” of World War II.  The latter destroyed a city block with ten tons of TNT.  The second fusion explosion, in February 1954, had a yield equivalent to 15 million tons of TNT, over seven times greater than the tonnage of all the bombs dropped by the United States in World War II, including the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  That single bomb—the first test of a droppable H-bomb—had greater explosive power than that of all the shells and bombs together in all the wars of human history.

It is in that unearthly light that bomb designer Herbert York, the first director of Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory and later President Carter’s test ban negotiator, gave an unfamiliar but plausible answer to the Cold War question: How many survivable, deliverable nuclear warheads would it take to deter an adversary rational enough to be deterred at all?  York’s answer was: “Somewhere in the range of 1, 10, or 100”; and, he conjectured, “I think it is closer to 1 than it is to 100.”

York also suggested another way of arriving at an upper limit for an appropriate nuclear arsenal.  He proposed that we ask ourselves what is the upper limit of destructive power within a short period of time that we would want a single state, or a single individual heading that state, to control.  Suppose that upper limit was the ability to inflict, in a day or two, the full scale of destruction of World War II.  Surely it would be challenging to justify a capability to inflict immediate damage that was greater than that.

The criterion would imply, York calculated, an upper limit to a survivable nuclear force of about 100 thermonuclear warheads.  It might be as many as 200.  It would certainly not allow 1000 warheads, or 500.

Thus, even by Cold War standards of requirements for deterring nuclear attack, applied to present and foreseeable conditions: what nuclear-weapon state can really make a plausible case for possessing as many nuclear weapons as the 200 deployed by Britain or China, or the 348 deployed by France? Not France, or Britain, or China; nor the United States, nor Russia.

Even the smaller of these states continue to maintain and to expand arsenals so large as to mock intolerably the presumption of the Non-Proliferation Treaty that none of the other states of the world, the non-nuclear-weapon states, has any compelling or legitimate reason to possess even one nuclear weapon. That can be said even of India (40-50 assembled warheads), or Israel (commonly estimated at 200 warheads, but with other estimates ranging from 300-600).

Meanwhile, the United States arsenal—10,000 warheads, nearly 6000 operational—is one hundred times the maximum suggested by York.  The Russian stockpile–16,000 warheads, over 7000 operational, is even larger.  Even after reductions currently agreed under the current Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty by 2012, the operational warheads alone–1700-2200 “operationally deployable” warheads,for each (apart from the much larger number of inactive/reserve weapons “on the shelf”)—will be ten to twenty times the York levels.

And they will still be larger in 2013 and beyond than the arsenals that either deployed in 1968, when they signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. By their behavior, the two nuclear superpowers have been saying to every non-nuclear-weapon state over the forty years since then: “You don’t need a single nuclear weapon ever.  We need thousands indefinitely.”

By the time of the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference, it seemed obvious (to this writer, among many others) that this contradiction could not be sustained much longer (even though, under intense diplomatic pressure from the U.S., the non-nuclear members of the NPT did renew the Treaty indefinitely).  The situation looked, and remains,  unstable.  At a time when fissile materials and nuclear weapons were becoming widely available, the nuclear weapons states, led by the United States and Russia, could not continue to maintain and flaunt the privileges of the nuclear “club” without membership in that club eventually expanding.

It did not take long.  In retrospect, the Indian decision to test, inevitably triggering Pakistani tests, followed quickly on that NPT Conference performance by the nuclear weapons states.  Before long, North Korea was the first to join them (and Israel) outside the Treaty, and proceeded to test (followed by a sudden renunciation of military threats and a willingness to negotiate by the U.S.: a sequence from which Iran, for one, may have drawn dangerous conclusions.)