Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Bennet Ramberg

  • Dealing with a Nuclear North Korea

    This article was originally published by Politico.


    Bennett RambergOnce again North Korea befuddles.


    On the cusp of receiving food aid from the United States as the quid pro quo for opening the Yongbong nuclear complex to international inspectors and a halt in missile testing, Pyongyang wasted little time to turn “progress” into a sink hole.


    The rub: a three-stage North Korean rocket set to launch a small satellite into orbit in the next few days. The concern, the data gleaned from the launch will mature Pyonygang’s ambition to build an intercontinental ballistic missile that could threaten the United States with a nuclear warhead.


    Maturation has been long in coming. North Korea first replicated the Soviet Scud rockets it acquired from Egypt decades ago, and has slowly developed a healthy inventory of short- and intermediate-range missiles. But the long-range rocket proved to be another matter. Its 2006 and 2009 launch attempts failed.


    In anticipating each, Washington first pouted, but then returned to efforts to coax Pyongyang back to the six-party talks to can fulfill the North’s 2005 nuclear disarmament pledge. For a time, Kim Jong Il did return, but winked — attempting to pocket any benefits he could, while continuing to modernize his secret nuclear enrichment enterprise.


    This has left Washington uncertain, as the new Kim prepares the missile launch. There are no perfect options. But there are at least four imperfect alternatives to deal with the North’s missile and nuclear programs, First, continue the policy of coaxing. Second, attempt further to isolate the regime. Third, use force to halt the most threatening nuclear elements. Or, fourth, accept what cannot be changed and learn to live with a nuclear armed North Korea.


    Coaxing is business as usual. Trying to get Pyongyang to reliably say “uncle” and give up the bomb does not seem to be in the cards. The international community has tried and tried again since South Korea, Russia, China and Japan joined the United States and North Korea in the six-party talks in 2003. The approaching rocket launch, coupled with reports that Pyongyang may yet test another nuclear weapon, suggests that the new Kim intends to continue the path of the old to stay in power.


    The second option might be called the Bolton approach. Former U.N. Amb. John Bolton has written many articles pressing for strict isolation of Pyongyang, to bring down the regime. He advocates detaching Pyongyang from “international financial markets, ramping up efforts to prevent trade in weapons…and pressuring China to adhere to existing UN sanctions resolutions.”


    The major impediment is that Beijing refuses to go along — making the strategy a chimera.


    Force marks a third option. Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry and Assistant Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, writing in The Washington Post and Time magazine in 2006, called on the Bush administration to initiate a submarine cruise missile strike to destroy Pyongyang’s long-range rockets on the launch pad. They argued, “the risk of inaction will prove far greater” for the United States — even at the risk of igniting a new Korean war.


    Carter is now deputy secretary of defense. But there is no public talk that his proposal has any traction today in the Obama administration.


    This leaves a fourth option — accepting what we can’t change while attempting to reduce nuclear risks. The stark fact remains that without regime change — which was key in the elimination of other nuclear arsenals, including the former Soviet republics and South Africa — North Korea will remain a nuclear armed state. Washington’s challenge is to assure that Pyongyang never uses the arsenal out of malice or fear.


    North Korea’s use of its arsenal without provocation seems farfetched. More than anything, the leadership seeks to stay in power. It must know that any nuclear launch would result in the regime’s demise in the devastating U.S. and allied response that would be sure to follow.


    Nonetheless, there remains the specter that North Korea could launch due to fear of preemption or as part of an escalating incident. Reducing these risks ought to be the priority.


    This requires better communication between Washington and Pyongyang. At the very least, there should be a negotiated hot-line, replicating the Cold War link between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Better yet, full diplomatic relations could reduce the likelihood of major misunderstanding.


    Neither a hot line nor diplomatic relations should be seen as reward to the North, but rather the realization that a nuclear Pyongyang is likely to be part of the northeast Asian landscape for the foreseeable future.


    Assuming otherwise — without taking the necessary measures to reduce risk — could create is a far greater problem for the United States than either proceeding with the failed policies of the past or the impractical options advanced by some.

  • New START and the Lingering Nuclear Cold War

    Bennett Ramberg


    This article was originally published on The Huffington Post.


    As the Senate attempts to wrap its lame duck session with the New START finale, lost in the back and forth over ratification lies one question that few senators appear willing to ask: Why, now twenty years after the Cold War, do Moscow and Washington find it acceptable to retain thousands of warheads pointed at the other with or without the treaty? Recent official strategy documents by both countries fail to address the matter convincingly leaving each country dedicated to continuing the mutual nuclear hostage relationship that ought to have been put to bed long ago.


    Today’s Russian-American arsenals remain remnants of a bygone era. During the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons became both the currency of power and the acute source of preemption anxiety born out of the surprise attack scars the two countries suffered in World War II. The result propelled the exponential growth of weapons to prevent a nuclear Pearl Harbor.


    At its height, the United States stocked 31,000 weapons, the Soviet Union over 40,000 by some estimates. Largely reflecting the Cold War’s demise, but also the legacy of earlier arms limitation treaties, Moscow and Washington have come a long way in curbing inventories. Today the United States deploys some 2000 strategic warheads and Russia 2500. Still, under New START, millions of people will remain in the cross hairs of 1550 deployed warheads.


    In February 2010, Moscow unveiled its rationale. Notwithstanding deterrent weight it now gives to a new generation of precision guided conventional weapons, the Kremlin’s continues to see the nuclear arsenal as its ultimate security blanket: “Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a use of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction against her and (or) her allies, and in a case of an aggression against her with conventional weapons that would put in danger the very existence of the state.”


    In its April 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, the Obama administration took a more nuanced approach. It eliminated nuclear targeting of non nuclear weapons states that complied with NPT vows. It added, only in “a narrow range of contingencies” would it use nuclear weapons to deal with chemical, biological and conventional attack. But all other circumstances, including targeting of Russia with the bulk of the arsenal, nuclear war plans remain in tact. The presumption: the Bomb provides “stability.” “As long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States will maintain secure and effective nuclear forces” to deter, reassure allies and promote stability globally and in key regions.


    Despite the president’s pledge to seek nuclear abolition, the Review registered “very demanding” “conditions” that make more dramatic nuclear reductions practically impossible: resolution of regional disputes that motivates nuclear possession, greater nuclear transparency, better verification to detect nonproliferation violators and credible enforcement mechanisms to deter cheating. The Review concluded, “Clearly, such conditions do not exist today. But we can — and must — work actively to create those conditions.”


    New START marks a step to meet the conditions in the Russian-American sphere, but ultimately a modest one. Eighteen on site inspections, data exchanges, a consultative committee to iron out  disputes serve verification goals. But the Obama administration’s  commitment to an $85 billion ten year refurbishment of the nuclear weapons complex signals little reduction in policies that continue the nuclear hostage relationship.


    Indeed the new nuclear doctrines, budgets to boost the weapons  enterprise and congressional skepticism about New START serve as reminders of President Obama’s lament in his 2009 call for a world without nuclear weapons — “This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime.” The difficult New START debate punctuates the deeper underlying point: the nuclear Cold War has never gone away. The fact should give comfort to no one.

  • Syria’s Challenge to Nuclear Proliferation and What IAEA Could Do

    This article was originally published by the Huffington Post.

    “Syria has not cooperated with the Agency since June 2008 in connection with the unresolved issues related to the Dair Alzour site and the other three locations allegedly functionally related to it. As a consequence, the Agency has not been able to make progress towards resolving the outstanding issues related to those sites.”

    So concludes the September 6, 2010 International Atomic Agency report revealing the nuclear investigative dead end bearing on suspect Syrian nuclear activities. Simply reissuing the conclusion, as IAEA does on a quarterly basis, marks a policy to nowhere. The time is long overdue for the nuclear watchdog to take a more assertive stand not simply to hold Damascus accountable for past and continued nuclear cheating but to use Syria as an example to buttress the flailing nonproliferation regime. IAEA can start this week at the Board of Governors meeting.

    Syria’s nuclear weapons ambitions came to light in September 2007 when Israeli aircraft destroyed what had been a concealed nuclear weapons reactor. Subsequent revelations by American intelligence and media uncovered a number of troubling facts. First, IAEA safeguards had failed to detect even a inkling of Syria’s nuclear cheating. The failure continues a pattern found elsewhere–Iraq (in the 1980s), Libya and Iran–raising troubling questions about NPT safeguards generally. Second, even when evidence reveals a nuclear violator, Syria demonstrates IAEA impotence to force transparency or reverse behavior. Indeed, Damascus has done Tehran one better: following its sole material concession–granting inspectors access to the bombed reactor site, but only after Syrian engineers had carted away debris and placed a new building over the plant’s footprint to conceal evidence–it repeatedly has said “no” to IAEA requests to provide additional information about past and current nuclear activity and gotten away with it.

    The collusion of other countries in Syria’s venture remains equally troubling. North Korea provided reactor technology and Iran, financing. Tehran’s contribution marks the first time an NPT party helped another to develop a weapons capacity.

    The implications for the region are not hard to foresee. Fast forward a decade or two. Nuclear energy has spread across the Middle East implementing plans begun in 2010 or earlier: Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and others have in place the skeleton for a weapons program shrouded by “peaceful” energy reactors. Suspicions mount. Rumors spread about hidden weapons activities. IAEA either remains clueless or inspectors report concerns to a sclerotic Board of Governors. Governments and pundits express dismay: how did we get to this point?

    This week IAEA’s Board of Governors can act to promote a different history by confronting Syria. The Board has the ability to do so by calling for a “special inspection” of all suspect Syrian sites as provided by the safeguards agreement the Agency entered into with Damascus: “If the Agency considers that information made available by the State, including explanations from the State and information obtained from routine inspections, is not adequate for the Agency to fulfill its responsibilities under the Agreement…” it may order “special inspection.” Discovery of nuclear contraband would demand elimination.

    Were Syria to balk, the Board of Governors should declare Damascus in noncompliance and send the matter to the Security Council to take action including sanctions. No doubt the course will bring out the cynic in many of us. After all, Iran’s continuing sanctions defiance and North Korea’s success in detonating a nuclear weapon despite economic penalties and political isolation suggest sanctions offer little.

    But this may misread history. At times, sanctions worked to halt nuclear efforts. They helped defeat Iraq’s inclinations after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They stunted Libya’s nuclear program. And because Syria remains economically weak, sanctioning Damascus can bring results. Swift and robust application–rather than the Council’s historic incremental approach–can make the strategy work. The alternative–more toothless IAEA reports–will only set the stage for a proliferating world none of us can wish for.

  • A World Free of Nuclear Weapons: The Wrong and Right Way to Do It

    UPI Outside View, January 24, 2008

     

    Since the beginning of the Atomic Age, policymakers and scholars have attempted to come up with formulas to constrain the nuclear genie. In mid-January, in an effort to move this ambition forward, former senior decision-makers — Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, Defense Secretary William Perry and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Samuel Nunn — released “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” a report published in the Wall Street Journal designed to advance nuclear abolition.

    The timing would seem propitious. In December 2007, in voting down a new nuclear weapon (the reliable replacement warhead), Congress mandated that President Bush and his successor rationalize the U.S. nuclear arsenal by the end of 2009 to justify future appropriations. As a result, a disarmament proposal advanced by such statesmen and endorsed by dozens of prominent experts should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, it cannot.

    At first blush the Shultz et al. proposal appears to be promising for nuclear-arms controllers, who could object to extension of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, deeper nuclear reductions beyond those promoted by the Bush administration or increasing the warning time for the initiation of nuclear use. Likewise the call for cooperative ballistic missile defense, increased security at nuclear materials sites, strengthening non-proliferation verification and implementation of the treaty banning nuclear weapons testing. If constraining nuclear development or use marks the objective, the answer is no one.

    However, if the aim truly is the elimination of nuclear arms — the authors declared an objective to eradicate the “threat to the world” — the proposal falls far short. A review of what could be done versus what the authors say should be done supports this conclusion.

    — Set a timeline for the elimination of nuclear arsenals, not an “agreement to undertake further substantial reductions.” The authors’ call for extension of the monitoring provisions of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty coupled to undefined reductions below the 1,700 to 2,200 nuclear warheads allowed under the 1992 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty with Russia may be admirable, but it does not amount a “nuclear-free world.” Absent weapons elimination benchmarks — including disposal of non-deployed warheads — the authors’ plan amounts to maintenance of diminished but still substantial weapons caches.

    — Separate nuclear warheads from delivery systems. To reduce the risk of nuclear war prior to abolition, the authors advocate increased warning and decision time for nuclear initiation. They speak abstractly about mutually agreed upon “physical barriers in the command-and-control sequence” to prevent premature nuclear launch. Only warhead separation from missiles meets the objective. Certainly, if Pakistan can separate its bombs from delivery vehicles to allow time for prudent decisions, so can the United States, Russia and others.

    — Eliminate long-range ballistic missiles except those used for commercial and scientific research. Such an approach nullifies the authors’ promotion of ballistic missile defense. A precedent for negotiated missile elimination includes the 1987 Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate Force Reduction Treaty. Elimination also finds precedent in the unilateral withdrawal and destruction of obsolete delivery systems from arsenals.

    — Eliminate all high enriched uranium and separated plutonium rather than enhance security at sites holding such material. The authors call for countries to apply the highest standards of security to nuclear materials. But only removal and disposal will prevent access by terrorists or nuclear ambitious nations.

    — Ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty. The U.S. Senate failed to do so during the Clinton administration. The authors propose a “process” to get the treaty implemented but fail to call upon the most prominent hold out to adopt the agreement it gave birth to.

    — Go beyond the Additional Protocol to verify that countries are not using civil nuclear programs for military purposes. The protocol allows International Atomic Energy Agency inspection of all suspect nuclear sites. Many countries have yet to adopt it, but the protocol itself is imperfect. Placing all atomic plants under IAEA co-management would do a better job to prevent nuclear breakouts.

    — Provide teeth to deal with nuclear violators. The authors fail to furnish a strategy to combat atomic cheats. Given the gravity of an attempted nuclear breakout, the international community must have “in place” a dedicated military capacity to stop any nuclear fudging.

    Shultz and his colleagues conclude, “Progress (toward a nuclear-free world) must be facilitated by a clear statement of our ultimate goal.”

    Unfortunately the goal is muddled by the authors’ own formulation. If nuclear disarmament is the objective, we can do far better.

    Bennett Ramberg, Ph.D., J.D., served in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the George H.W. Bush administration. The author of three books and editor of three others on international security, he has written for such prestigious journals as Foreign Affairs and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Ramberg’s Op-Eds have appeared in all major newspapers in the United States and many around the world.

  • Contesting Iran’s Nuclear Future

    Iran continues to challenge international efforts to hold it accountable for its suspicious nuclear activities. Later this month, the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors will meet to address the issue against the backdrop of growing fear that time to contain the country’s nuclear ambitions is running out. This leaves little doubt that Iran will be high on the Bush administration’s foreign-policy agenda in the months to come.

    To date, the IAEA has relied on public shame to force Iran’s compliance. In the past two years, agency inspectors laid bare much of Tehran’s nuclear program. But suspicions remain that Iran’s ruling mullahs have not revealed all. Should Iran continue to waffle, the international community must decide if it must take more aggressive steps to force the revolutionary state to accede. The following options suggest that there is no clear path.

    The most benign approach would be to continue current IAEA efforts. Arguably, agency inspections and quarterly public reports will, in time, embarrass Iran to resist the nuclear-weapons temptation. This butts against two facts, however. First, suspicions persist that Iran has not come clean about all its nuclear activities. Second, Iran’s enrichment and reprocessing endeavors make no sense apart from nuclear weapons. For example, the solitary power reactor Tehran hopes to initiate in 2005 or 2006 does not justify the economic investment in facilities to recycle nuclear fuel into weapons-grade material.

    Believing that diplomacy had not run its course, Britain, France and Germany opened a dialogue with Iran outside the IAEA framework. In October 2003, the three European powers sent their foreign ministers to Tehran. The diplomats offered economic carrots and peaceful nuclear-energy assistance as a quid pro quo for Iran to halt its developing enrichment program. The meeting prompted cautious optimism: Tehran announced that it would suspend the manufacture of nuclear centrifuges. Nine months later, the mullahs reversed themselves.

    Chagrined, the Europeans renewed the dialogue. The Iranians stonewalled. They declared that “no country has the right to deprive us of nuclear technology.” The Europeans remain undaunted. They continue to try. Today, for instance, they are sitting down with the Iranians in Paris, where they will likely continue to dangle economic incentives in exchange for Tehran’s promise of a halt to Iran’s enrichment program. Tehran’s probable, coy response: It might suspend – again – its enrichment activities, but just for a short time, to give diplomacy a chance.

    Unimpressed, the Bush administration remains convinced that Iran is using diplomacy to buy time for its nuclear ambitions. For months, the administration has pushed the IAEA to declare Tehran in violation of its nuclear nonproliferation obligations. The result would place the matter before the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions.

    But this is another path to nowhere. Iran’s critical vulnerability to sanctions – reliance on the hard currency earned through oil exports – is a double-edged sword. The United States is unlikely to generate Security Council support for measures that will restrict the already tight oil market. Washington also is stuck on its own petard – the Iraq WMD intelligence debacle. In the absence of a nuclear weapons “smoking gun” – certified by the IAEA – the Security Council is unlikely to issue more than a rhetorical slap on the wrist that calls upon the mullahs to reconsider their transgressions.

    Among the dwindling options is confrontation. One option would galvanize members of the Proliferation Security Initiative – which includes a core group of a dozen or so nations that have agreed to intercept WMD contraband – to isolate Iran until it disgorges its nuclear weapons capacity. However, building the PSI into a serious new “alliance of the willing,” in the absence of a clear and present danger, is unlikely.

    Then there is military action. Only military occupation can guarantee Iran’s nuclear disarmament; limited military strikes will not destroy hidden nuclear facilities. But, in the Iraq aftermath, either option would be a hard sell to the American public. On the other hand, Israel, which considers Iran a mortal enemy, does not require a sales job. Jerusalem repeatedly has declared that it will not allow Iran a nuclear weapons capacity. But Israel is in no better position than the United States to destroy the program.

    This leaves two factors that may impact Iran’s nuclear future. One is peaceful regime change. Although there is some hope that a new generation of Iranians – who might be more nonproliferation compliant – will replace the mullahs, there appears to be little prospect in the short term. In time, impetus could come from a thriving democratic Iraq. Unfortunately, Baghdad’s political future will not be resolved anytime soon.

    On the flip side, the United States and its allies could concede that little can be done to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions. By accepting this prospect, the challenge will be to keep the nuclear peace. The solution must include an explicit warning to Tehran from Washington and Jerusalem: Any Iranian nuclear threat or act – or any complicity in a terrorist nuclear act – would result in the elimination of the revolutionary regime by any and all means. The time to issue this warning is now, before the mullahs realize their nuclear ambitions. The result might have a sobering impact as Iran weighs a nuclear armed future.

    Bennett Ramberg served in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

    First published by the San Francisco Chronicle.

  • Terrorism Has Altered The Nuclear Equation Forever

    LOS ANGELES: Fifty years ago this month President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his Atoms for Peace proposal at the United Nations. This seminal event laid the groundwork for much of the nuclear enterprise that we see around the world today. It also generated a nuclear Trojan horse.

    Countries around the world greeted the prospects of the atom with glee: nuclear power plants would be too cheap to meter and nuclear isotopes would generate a renaissance in science, medicine and industry. While the atom contributed to some of these laudable objectives, it unwittingly booby-trapped the landscape with nuclear mines that terrorists can now set off.

    The world is littered with possibilities. Dirty-bomb ingredients are ubiquitous. They are in hospitals and industry. They are transported through cities as nuclear waste to storage sites. They cannot just disappear. Nuclear power plants are vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Nuclear weapons derived from the peaceful atom reside in such unstable countries as Pakistan and North Korea. In more stable regions, countries insist on recycling weapons useable plutonium which can be diverted.

    Booby-trapping the world certainly was not Eisenhower’s intention. Anguished by the accelerating nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, he sought a way out. His solution was to reduce the capacity of the superpowers to produce nuclear weapons by conveying their “normal uranium and fissionable materials” to an atomic energy agency. The new organization would house and distribute the stocks for peaceful purposes.

    While an international “bank of fissionable material” never came about, the Atoms for Peace address broke the American inhibition against spreading nuclear knowledge and technology to the rest of the world. In 1955, Washington initiated the United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. Twenty-five thousand scientists descended on Geneva to take advantage of the declassification of documents that held many of the secrets of the nuclear age.

    Washington did not proceed down this road naïvely. It knew that Atoms for Peace was not risk-free. But it faced a conundrum: if the United States did not promote the atom, it could not control it either. Knowledge is universal; inevitably, the rest of the world would catch up. The challenge was to build dikes to curtail the negative implications of the spread of nuclear technology. In 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency was created to promote and monitor global nuclear markets. The 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty sought to halt the ambitions of nations to get the bomb in return for the peaceful nuclear assistance. Domestic and international controls over nuclear and dual-use exports followed. Most recently, Washington gathered several nations together in a Proliferation Security Initiative to intercept nuclear contraband.

    The dikes were not enough to prevent seepage. Israel used the “peaceful” atom provided by a French research reactor to develop the bomb. India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq and South Africa followed. At the same time, the United States beat back the temptations of Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, West Germany and Taiwan. When regimes changed in Belarus, Ukraine, South Africa and now Iraq, nuclear weapons programs were abandoned.

    As the international community reinforced its dikes against proliferation, it continued to build its peaceful nuclear infrastructure oblivious to another risk: nuclear terrorism. During the early nuclear era, terrorism as we know it today had not raised its ugly head. When it did emerge in the 1970’s, terrorists seemed mindful about the political costs of taking too many innocent lives.

    Nonetheless, even from the beginning of the nuclear age, the creators speculated on the risks of nuclear terrorism. In 1944, scientists at University of Chicago working on the Manhattan Project conjectured that a political group could unleash a nuclear blitzkrieg by smuggling an atomic weapon into the United States on a commercial aircraft. The terrorism of the 1970’s prompted public policy groups, many driven by a phobia of all things nuclear, to demand that weapons-useable plutonium and highly enriched uranium no longer fuel nuclear power and research reactors. The Europeans, Russians and Japanese resisted. America wavered. Then, many of these same groups began asking questions about the vulnerability of nuclear plants to terrorist attack. American officials took umbrage.

    As the 20th century ended, the absence of any serious act of nuclear violence convinced officials that nuclear terror would remain to province of fiction writers. Then the Sept. 11 attacks occurred. President George W. Bush announced that in the caves of Afghanistan, U.S. forces had uncovered plots to attack nuclear power plants. But eliminating the risks in the short run was impossible. Enhancing protection, while imperfect, remained the only option.

    As we map our nuclear future we should be mindful of the closing remarks of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech: “The United States pledges before you – and therefore before the world – its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma – to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”

    In the post-Sept. 11 world, solving “the fearful atomic dilemma” requires not more but less Atoms for Peace. The risk of nuclear terrorism, coupled to the environmental and proliferation burdens the initiative gave rise to, now requires that we roll back Eisenhower’s vision and try to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle.

    *This article was originally published in Atoms for Peace’. The writer, who served in the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs during the first Bush administration, is author of “Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy.”