Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Jonathan Schell

  • From Hiroshima to Fukushima

    This article was originally published by The New York Times.


    Jonathan SchellThe horrible and heartbreaking events in Japan present a strange concatenation of disasters.


    First, the planet unleashed one of its primordial shocks, an earthquake, of a magnitude greater than any previously recorded in Japan. The earthquake, in turn, created the colossal tsunami, which, when it struck the country’s northeastern shores, pulverized everything in its path, forming a filthy wave made of mud, cars, buildings, houses, airplanes and other debris.


    In part because the earthquake had just lowered the level of the land by two feet, the wave rolled as far as six miles inland, killing thousands of people. In a stupefying demonstration of its power, as The New York Times has reported, the earthquake moved parts of Japan 13 feet eastward, slightly shifted the earth’s axis and actually shortened each day that passes on earth, if only infinitesimally (by 1.8 milliseconds).


    But this was not all. Another shock soon followed. Succumbing to the one-two punch of the earthquake and the tsunami, eleven of Japan’s 54 nuclear power reactors were shut down. At this writing, three of them have lost coolant to their cores and have experienced partial meltdowns. The same three have also suffered large explosions.


    The spent fuel in a fourth caught fire. Now a second filthy wave is beginning to roll — this one composed of radioactive elements in the atmosphere. They include unknown amounts of cesium-137 and iodine-131, which can only have originated in the melting cores or in nearby spent fuel rod pools. Both are dangerous to human health.


    The Japanese government has evacuated some 200,000 people in the vicinity of the plants and issued potassium iodide pills, which prevent the uptake of radioactive iodine. The U.S. aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan had to change course when it sailed into a radioactive cloud.


    The second shock was, of course, different from the first in at least one fundamental respect. The first was dealt by Mother Nature, who has thus reminded us of her sovereign power to nourish or punish our delicate planet, its axis now tipping ever so slightly in a new direction. No finger of blame can be pointed at any perpetrator.


    The second shock, on the other hand, is the product of humankind, and involves human responsibility. Until the human species stepped in, there was no appreciable release of atomic energy from nuclear fission or fusion on earth. It took human hands to introduce it into the midst of terrestrial affairs.


    That happened 66 years ago, also in Japan, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time, President Harry Truman used language that is worth pondering today.


    “It is an atomic bomb,” he said. “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”


    Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, referred to the atomic bombings by implication when he stated that the current crisis was the worst for Japan “since the Second World War.”


    For some years afterward, atomic energy was understood mainly to be an inconceivably malign force — as the potential source of a sort of man-made equivalent of earthquakes, and worse.


    In the 1950s, however, when nuclear power plants were first built, an attempt began to find a bright side to the atom. (In 1956 Walt Disney even made a cartoon called “Our Friend the Atom.”)


    A key turning point was President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace proposal in 1953, which required nuclear-armed nations to sell nuclear power technology to other nations in exchange for following certain nonproliferation rules. This bargain is now enshrined in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which promotes nuclear power even as it discourages nuclear weapons.


    As Ira Chernus has chronicled in his book “Atoms for Peace,” the proposal paradoxically grew out of Eisenhower’s distaste for arms control. He had launched a nuclear buildup that would increase the U.S. arsenal from 1,436 warheads at the beginning of his two terms to 20,464 by the end. His strategic nuclear policy was one of “massive retaliation,” which relied more heavily on nuclear threats than Truman’s policy had. Arms control would have obstructed these policies.


    Yet Eisenhower needed some proposal to temper his growing reputation as a reckless nuclear hawk. Atoms for Peace met this need. The solution to nuclear danger, he said, was “to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers” and put it “into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace” — chiefly, those who would use it to build nuclear power plants.


    Of course, the weapon never was taken out of the hands of soldiers, but the basic power of the universe was indeed handed over to nuclear power engineers — including Japanese engineers.


    The long, checkered career of nuclear power began. The promise at first seemed great, but the problems cropped up immediately. The distinction between Disney’s smiling, friendly atom and the frowning, hostile one kept breaking down.


    In the first place, the technology of nuclear power proved to be an open spigot for the spread of technology that also served the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In the second place, the requirement of burying nuclear waste for the tens of thousands of years it takes for its radioactive materials to decline to levels deemed safe mocked the meager ingenuity and constancy of a species whose entire recorded history amounts only to some 6,000 years.


    Finally, the technology of nuclear power itself kept breaking down and bringing or threatening disaster, as is now occurring in Japan.


    The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control.


    Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind. The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are the things that habitually go wrong — and have gone wrong in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump grinds to a halt.


    You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch.


    These predictable and unpredictable failings affect every stage of the operation. For instance, in Japan, the nuclear power industry has a record of garden-variety cover-ups, ducking safety regulations, hiding safety violations and other problems. But which large bureaucratic organization does not?


    And if these happen in Japan, as orderly and efficient a country as exists on earth, in which country will they not? When the bureaucracy is the parking violations bureau or the sanitation department, ordinary mistakes lead to ordinary mishaps. But when the basic power of the universe is involved, they court catastrophe.


    The problem is not that another backup generator is needed, or that the safety rules aren’t tight enough, or that the pit for the nuclear waste is in the wrong geological location, or that controls on proliferation are lax.


    It is that a stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom.


    When nature strikes, why should humankind compound the trouble? The earth is provided with enough primordial forces of destruction without our help in introducing more. We should leave those to Mother Nature.


    Some have suggested that in light of the new developments we should abandon nuclear power. I have a different proposal, perhaps more in keeping with the peculiar nature of the peril. Let us pause and study the matter. For how long?


    Plutonium, a component of nuclear waste, has a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning that half of it is transformed into other elements through radioactive decay. This suggests a time-scale. We will not be precipitous if we study the matter for only half of that half-life, 12,000 years.


    In the interval, we can make a search for safe new energy sources, among other useful endeavors. Then perhaps we’ll be wise enough to make good use of the split atom.

  • Reaching Zero

    This article was originally published by The Nation

    What is the purpose, if any, of the nuclear bomb, that brooding presence that has shadowed all human life for sixty-five years? The question has haunted the nuclear age. It may be that no satisfactory answer has ever been given. Nuclear strategic thinking, in particular, has disappointed. Many of its pioneers have wound up in a state of something like despair regarding their art. For example, Bernard Brodie, one of the originators of nuclear strategy in the 1940s, was forced near the end of his life to realize that “nuclear strategy itself–the body of thoughts that he himself had helped formulate–was something of an illusion,” according to historian Fred Kaplan. In the introduction to The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Lawrence Freedman airs the suspicion that the phrase “nuclear strategy” may be a “contradiction in terms.” Henry Kissinger, a leading figure in nuclear strategizing for a half-century, has expressed a similar feeling of futility. In a remarkable reconsideration, amounting to an oblique recantation of his past thinking, he has written recently in Newsweek:

    The basic dilemma of the nuclear age has been with us since Hiroshima: how to bring the destructiveness of modern weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that are being pursued. Any use of nuclear weapons is certain to involve a level of casualties and devastation out of proportion to foreseeable foreign-policy objectives. Efforts to develop a more nuanced application have never succeeded, from the doctrine of a geographically limited nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s to the “mutual assured destruction” theory of general nuclear war in the 1970s.

    Now a new moment, full of fresh promise but also with novel perils, has arrived in the nuclear story, and all the old questions have to be asked again. As if responding to some secret signal sent out by a restless zeitgeist, the globe is seething with events large and small in the nuclear arena. Here in the United States, certainly, all the policy pots on the nuclear stove are at a boil. Soon, the Obama administration will complete its overdue Nuclear Posture Review, a statement that Congress requires of the president every four years on the disposition of the country’s nuclear forces.

    It will give the administration’s answer to the key questions: What nuclear forces should the United States deploy? Why? What, if anything, does the United States propose to do with them? On April 8 the United States and Russia will sign a new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) agreement, which will reduce warheads to 1,550 on each side and restrict delivery vehicles to 800 apiece. Also in early April, President Obama will hold a Nuclear Security Summit with the heads of state of forty-four other nations to consider measures to prevent the diversion of nuclear weapon materials into unauthorized hands. In early May will come the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which is a kind of nuclear posture review for the entire world. Decisions on passage of the long-rejected Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as well as a resurrected Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty are also likely very soon.

    The key question, of course, is whether the policies and actions will meet the mounting perils of the new situation. What’s needed for success, I will suggest, is a revival precisely of the discredited art of nuclear strategic thinking, which may, with suitable adjustments, yet have something to offer us. Strategy, military thinkers have long told us, is the art of marrying up tactical means with broad political ends. That is exactly what is most sorely missing in nuclear policy today. Certainly, no mere piecemeal examination will suffice. A comprehensive approach is needed.

    The Nuclear Surge

    For taken together, the dangers mark the world’s arrival at a new stage in the evolution of nuclear danger, forcing fundamental decisions on nuclear and nonnuclear powers alike. In a word, the nuclear predicament is coming of age, which is to say that it is fulfilling a potential that every competent scientist has known it possessed since the advent of the bomb in 1945: nuclear technology, no longer the preserve of a few privileged powers, is becoming available on a global basis. This is because of the simple but decisive fact that the bomb is based on scientific knowledge, which is in its nature unconfinable. This spread is at the heart of the growing nuclear peril–a kind of nuclear surge–in today’s world.

    To say that the technology is becoming available to all, however, is not to say that it is possessed by all or even that it will be. It means only that if nations or others want it, they will be able to have it. Japan, for example, does not have a nuclear bomb. But one is available to Japan in short order if it so chooses. According to the State Department, the bomb is thus available to some fifty other countries. This number of potential nuclear powers is destined to grow. If those countries do not build the bomb, the reason can only be a domestic and international political decision that they should not. The more this availability spreads (as it must), the higher and stronger the political barriers against proliferation must become.

    Of course, at a certain point, which may not be far off, availability, if not possession, will spill beyond national confines and reach smaller groups. At that point the political walls will have to be high and strong indeed. Otherwise, a nuclear 9/11 may be upon us.

    Obviously, any deliberate spread of nuclear technology, such as the “renaissance” of nuclear power that has apparently begun, will only accelerate the surge.

    This underlying and irreversible pressure of availability is the backdrop for today’s widespread and well-founded dread that proliferation by just a few countries–above all, North Korea and Iran–will push the world over what the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, a group set up by the Japanese and Australian governments, calls a “tipping point,” precipitating a “cascade” of proliferation that will wash away the current nuclear order. South Asia has of course already gone nuclear, with India and Pakistan engaged in an arms race. India, aping the United States, has planned a triad of air, land and sea nuclear forces while impoverished, crisis-ridden Pakistan struggles to keep up.

    The Middle East and East Asia, led by Iran and North Korea, could become the next regions to travel down this path. According to the Washington Post, A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s bomb and the arch-proliferator of its nuclear technology, has said that Iranian officials asked him in the 1980s to sell them ready-made bombs. Since then Iran has appeared to many to be using its right to develop nuclear power technology as a pathway to building the bomb from scratch. If it does, other countries in the Middle East may well follow suit. More immediately, Iran and nuclear-armed Israel would find themselves in a perilous balance–or rather, extreme imbalance, since Israel already has an undeclared arsenal of perhaps 200 warheads. If North Korea, which already has the bomb, refuses, as seems likely, to give it up under pressure from the world community, then something similar could happen in East Asia, and Japan might indeed produce its own bomb.

    And yet if it’s tempting to some in the United States and elsewhere to define the new nuclear moment solely as a crisis of proliferation, they should be brought up short by a single brute fact: more than 95 percent of the world’s 23,000 or so nuclear warheads remain in the possession of two countries: the United States, with some 9,000, and Russia, with some 13,000.

    If one ineluctable truth of Year 65 of the bomb is that the sources of nuclear danger are destined to be global, another is that the world’s existing arsenals are likewise indivisibly global. They are joined in a kind of unity of hostility. Each nuclear nation (Israel, which has no nuclear adversary, may be the odd man out) cites the arsenal of another or others as the rationale for possessing its own, in multiple chains that link them together into a network of threats and counterthreats. For example, in one such chain, Pakistan fears India, which fears China, which fears Russia, which fears the United States. This network of terror and counterterror underscores another truth of the nuclear age: every possessor of the bomb, by its very existence, teaches possible proliferators a pair of lessons that are the prime (if not the only) motives for proliferation. First, you will be living in a nuclear-armed world; second, if you want to be protected in that world you must have nuclear arms yourself. (In addition, it has of course occurred to many countries, especially North Korea and Iran, that nuclear weapons could deter overwhelming conventional power such as that possessed by the United States.) From national points of view, each arsenal is distinct, but from a global proliferation point of view they are a joint inducement for the further spread of nuclear arms.

    The necessary conclusion is clear: proliferation can’t be stopped unless possession is dealt with concurrently. In the seventh decade of the nuclear age, the time for half-solutions is over. The head of state with his finger on the button of some aging cold war arsenal, the head of state itching to put his finger on such a button, the nuclear power operator, the nuclear smuggler and the terrorist in his hideout dreaming of unparalleled mass murder are actors on a single playing field. In this respect, too, the nuclear dilemma has become indivisibly global.

    This is a truth, however, that the world’s nine nuclear powers do not like to acknowledge, because it has an implication they are reluctant to accept, which is that if they want to be safe from nuclear danger they must commit themselves to surrendering their own nuclear arms.

    Strategic Incoherence

    And yet that is exactly what Barack Obama did in his speech in Prague on April 5, 2009, saying, “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Encouragingly, his commitment has been accompanied by the widest support for nuclear abolition since President Harry Truman sent Bernard Baruch to ask the world in 1946 to choose between “the quick and the dead.” For one thing, a remarkable phalanx of former and current officials, Republican as well as Democratic, have embraced the goal. Their calls originated with the by-now-famous article by the “Gang of Four”–former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn–who in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal article announced their support for “a world free of nuclear weapons” and called for “working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.” This unlikely foursome harked back to the previously underappreciated fact that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, at their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, had come within an ace of agreeing to nuclear abolition. (The deal foundered because Gorbachev would agree to it only if Reagan dropped his Strategic Defense Initiative, and Reagan would not.) Today, a majority of former secretaries of state and defense support a world free of nuclear weapons.

    A remarkable number of new government and civil panels, commissions and other initiatives have also sprung up to support the goal. Among them is a new group, Global Zero, which proposes abolition by 2030 and is supported by a Who’s Who of international as well as American signatories, including, for example, Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter and former GOP Senator Chuck Hagel. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Henry L. Stimson Center and the Nuclear Threat Initiative all have serious, well-funded programs to scout the path to zero and determine what would be required to stay there. Meanwhile, the traditional antinuclear movement, led by such groups as Peace Action, the American Friends Service Committee and the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, are marshaling support for a nuclear weapons convention.

    If Obama’s commitment to abolition and the movement in support of it were setting the tone and agenda of current nuclear negotiations, the world might now be in the first stage of a final solution (to give that dread phrase a new and positive meaning) of the nuclear dilemma. Each proposal in the negotiations would be weighed in the light of the distance it traveled toward a nuclear-weapons-free world. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Instead, what have been offered are at best a series of timid makeshifts or, at worst, de facto subversion of the Prague objective. If this trend continues, it is entirely possible that the ultimate mockery will occur: nuclear arsenals will march forward into the future under a banner that reads Ban the Bomb.

    Let us consider two policy arenas: the START agreement and the Nuclear Posture Review.

    Nothing on the nuclear stage today is stranger or less adequately explained than the spectacle, still on view twenty years after the end of the cold war, of the United States and Russia holding each other hostage to nuclear annihilation with arsenals in the thousands poised on alert. The current agreement, which will remain in force until 2020, sets a ceiling of 1,550 warheads on each side that must be reached by 2017. The reduction from the old ceiling of 2,200 is of course welcome. The continuation of a system of inspections is even more welcome. But what are we to make of the 1,550 warheads that remain? After all, the limit on the 1,550 is also a permission for the 1,550. The arrangement indefinitely leaves intact the essential fact that the United States and Russia are poised to blow each other up many times over, as if the cold war had never ended. What is that about?

    If strategy is the art of using tactics to achieve political ends, then the persistence of these arsenals represents its nemesis. What political purpose is served? There is no quarrel between the two nations that would justify deployment of even a single nuclear weapon. An answer is often made that the United States must have such an arsenal because Russia still does–as a “deterrent.” But this begs the question. For today, as in the past forty years, since the beginning of arms control agreements in 1972, the size of the US arsenal has of course been a negotiated figure. The question is not, as is sometimes pretended, whether in the face of a Russian threat the United States needs to protect itself and size its forces accordingly; it is what figure the two sides should jointly set in talks like the ones just concluded. What stopped Hillary Clinton when she went to Moscow from proposing a force on each side of, say, 300 weapons, as has been suggested by a prominent Air Force officer and two Air University professors recently in Strategic Studies Quarterly? For that matter, why not zero? That step admittedly would require bringing the other nuclear powers into the talks. But why not do that–or at least set a time frame for doing so, thereby explicitly linking the current agreement to the president’s announced goal?

    It is here that the strategic deficit becomes most glaring. It’s not just that tactics have lost contact with political goals, it is that nuclear tactics (in this case, deployments) are weighed without any reference to politics whatsoever. Admittedly, the possibility of Russia backsliding into hostilities with the United States is sometimes cited as a reason for strategic “hedging,” but the obvious next question is whether the United States would prefer to be in a nuclear confrontation with a backslid Russia or in a merely conventional confrontation. Has Washington decided that in case of any hostilities nuclear confrontations are preferable to nonnuclear ones?

    Behind this issue looms a larger unasked strategic question. Are nations in general safer when they aim nuclear weapons at one another (“deter” one another)? Are some pairs safer and others not? Which ones? For example, do Americans think India and Pakistan were wise in 1998 to jointly go nuclear and threaten each other with annihilation? Are they safer today for having taken that step? The refusal of the United States and Russia to show the way by denuclearizing their own relationship is an answer that speaks louder than the Prague commitment and undercuts it. That refusal says that nuclear weapons are useful and do make you safer. But this lesson cuts the legs out from under any serious nonproliferation effort. Wasn’t the need for nonproliferation where we began? Isn’t that now the main professed goal of the United States in the nuclear field? Here is strategic incoherence in its acutest form. Deployments to meet a vanished threat spoil any effort to deal with a current real one.

    What we have heard so far of the Nuclear Posture Review exemplifies the same intellectual debacle. Reportedly, the document will reject the proposal for “no first use.” No first use is the policy of using nuclear weapons only in retaliation for nuclear attacks. All other attacks, including ones with biological or chemical weapons, would be met by conventional forces.

    The rejection of no first use would crystallize, as perhaps nothing else can, the strategic disarray of American nuclear policy. Like the persistence of the forces of mutual assured destruction, it would represent the banishment of politics from strategy (meaning in fact that strategy no longer is strategy). The first-use policy was born in the 1950s, when US leaders believed they could deter perceived Soviet conventional superiority in Europe only by threatening a nuclear response. Is it really necessary to state once again that the cold war is over? Apparently it is, because in this arena, too, news of the geopolitical revolution of 1989-91 has yet to reach the American strategic brain. There, “extended deterrence” seems to be permanently planted on the basis of a kind of incurable nostalgia for the cold war. Fantastically, surreally, the United States is still using nuclear arms to repel a Russian conventional attack on Europe, as if it were 1958. (We might as well say “Soviet attack,” since the threat is imaginary.) This obsolete readiness is symbolically embodied in the deployment even today of some 200 American tactical nuclear warheads in Europe, ready at a moment’s notice to repel Soviet hordes coming through the Fulda Gap. In February, five of the European countries thus “defended” (Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Norway) recommended that the weapons be withdrawn. Washington is still thinking about it.

    More important for today’s concerns is that a no-first-use policy is the sine qua non of any effective nonproliferation strategy. If nuclear weapons are needed not only to counter other nuclear weapons but to repel conventional, chemical and biological attacks as well, then what responsible national leader can afford to do without them? The problem is not merely symbolic. If the nine nuclear powers are ready to use their arms to perform a grab bag of tasks, then the dangers to nonnuclear countries really do multiply, perhaps inspiring them to acquire these devices, evidently so versatile and useful, for themselves.

    Toward a New Nuclear Strategy

    To escape from this scene of halfhearted and ineffectual measures serving unclear or contradictory goals, the United States needs new strategic thinking. In exploring what it should be, perhaps it will be useful to look back at past strategic thought.

    The great intellectual artifact of cold war strategy was the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. It adopted a new aim for military deployments. In the renowned words of Bernard Brodie in 1946, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.” This insight, which was recognized as a basis of policy in the early 1960s by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, marked a true revolution in military affairs. Broadly speaking, war-fighting strategies were replaced by war-not-fighting strategies. Not to fight, according to this policy, was to win. And yet under this policy the way not to fight was nevertheless to plan to fight. The trick was to restrict the plan for fighting to nuclear retaliation, in the hope that that day would never come. Thus was born the paradoxical, or contradictory, policy on which survival in the nuclear age was believed to rest. Safety from nuclear destruction depended not on getting rid of the arms that threatened it but on threats to inflict that same nuclear destruction.

    In retrospect, it seems the doctrine of deterrence has been a true Janus: it has been based on one thoroughgoing absurdity and one profound truth. The absurdity was the idea that you could lastingly and reliably avoid an action–mutual suicide in a nuclear war–by threatening the action. The problem, as many critics noted, was that at any given moment–but especially in a crisis–you did not know whether you would get the nuclear non-use that was the new strategic goal or the use whose threat was the tactical means to achieve the non-use. Strategists and moralists twisted and turned in the coils of this dilemma, even as the world lived (as it still technically lives) on the knife-edge of catastrophe. Moralists pondered the virtue of threatening a crime in order not to commit it; strategists wondered how a threat of “suicide” (McNamara) could be “credible” to the one so threatened. None of them found answers, yet the policy became so deeply ingrained in policy circles that today people refer to the American nuclear arsenal as “our deterrent,” as if the hardware and its alleged purpose were one.

    And yet the doctrine did also rest on one profound truth–its acknowledgment that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” as Reagan and Gorbachev put it in 1985.Implicit in this revolution in military affairs was a strategic revolution. The political gains that governments had pursued through wars were given up, now replaced by a need to preserve the peace, which itself became the only sane strategic objective. You might say that deterrence has pursued a sane goal by insane means–a cleavage manifested in the fact that even as deterrence fought off nuclear use, and in a certain sense fortified what has been called the “nuclear taboo” and the “tradition of non-use,” it at the same time pinioned the world permanently on the brink of such use.

    Is it then possible that abolition can be seen as a rectification and completion of the strategic revolution begun but left unfinished by deterrence? How great, after all, would be the shift from the strategic goal of “non-use,” or the “tradition of non-use,” to the strategic goal of “nonpossession,” to a “tradition of nonpossession”? Doesn’t non-use in a way already cast nuclear weapons on history’s scrap heap?

    It is a peculiarity of deterrence that the weapons themselves, rather than political developments, dictate the strategic aim (non-use). In its pathological form, this peculiarity leads to the divorce of deployments and posture from politics that we see now. But in the benign form of abolition, the strategy dictated by arms and the strategy dictated by policy would coincide. Both would say, with the new Henry Kissinger: there is no quarrel in the world worth a nuclear war, so don’t fight one or arm yourself to do so.

    The conclusion is strengthened when you recall that even at zero, deterrence does not melt away completely. The reason is that the roots of the nuclear dilemma lie in inextinguishable advances in scientific knowledge. For even as this knowledge could permit cheaters to violate an abolition agreement, so it would permit the international community to respond in kind. The point is not to propose overelaborate schemes of nuclear rearmament if a crisis were to occur at zero (the conventional forces of the threatened international community would surely suffice) but to point out that there is no sharp discontinuity, as is often suggested, between the “minimum deterrence” represented by, say, a few hundred weapons and zero. Rather there is a smooth continuity all the way to zero, and even beyond, as political and legal as well as technical arrangements needed to keep the world at zero gradually strengthened. Unfortunately, technical bans are all in principle reversible. It has been otherwise with a few moral and legal revolutions, including the abolition of slavery, and there is reason to hope that the abolition of nuclear arms would be one of these. When that happened, deterrence would have been left finally and completely behind.

    The Architecture of Zero

    The needed change is to turn abolition from a far-off goal into an active organizing principle that gives direction to everything that is done in the nuclear arena–in other words, a strategic goal. The indivisible nuclear surge under way in today’s world can be mastered only with an indivisible program to defeat it. Let us, then, borrowing from Obama in Prague, take “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” as the new strategic objective–the political goal in the pursuit of which all tactics become the means. That goal has two requisites. The first is getting rid of existing nuclear weapons. The tactical means to that goal are of course negotiations among the nuclear powers. The second requisite is building a system that safeguards the world from the recrudescence of nuclear weapons once they are gone. This system will be the true architecture of zero. The tactical means to that goal are negotiating an ever-tightening web of restrictions imposed on all technology usable for nuclear weapons.

    Of the two, the second is more difficult. For while the process of nuclear disarmament will continue for only a limited time, until zero is reached, the architecture of zero must be built to last forever, since the knowledge that underlies nuclear weapons will never disappear. The tactics for reaching this goal only begin with the construction of systems of inspection and enforcement. More important over the long run is building a political and legal order in which the attempt to build a nuclear weapon would be designated a crime against humanity. More important still would be the moral deepening of the taboo.

    The art of strategy–so notably absent in today’s contradictory mélange of policies–is to combine the measures needed to achieve the two goals into a single, coherent, self-reinforcing plan. Above all, the nonproliferation efforts that are the precursors to an architecture of zero are in mortal need of the united planetary political will that can be created only by a clear, credible commitment to a time-bound plan for abolition to which all nuclear powers are formally agreed. It should take the form of a commitment to create the sort of nuclear weapons convention that the antinuclear movement has long advocated–one that, as noted earlier, seeks to ban all weapons of mass destruction.

    To postpone abolition is to postpone nonproliferation. Today arms control and nonproliferation proceed in two parallel negotiating universes–the NPT review on the one side and START talks on the other. The two need to be brought together in a simple bargain that is already implicit in the provisions of the NPT: the nuclear powers will surrender their arsenals on condition that other powers agree not to obtain any.

    Such a strategy would build on the truth underlying deterrence doctrine while gradually retiring its absurd features. It would enable nuclear strategy, at last, to catch up with history. It would deliver Russia and the United States from the weapons-forged hostility that politically no longer exists. It would unify the world around a common goal–one already embraced under the NPT by 184 countries and enshrined in their laws. Nuclear states (as long as they persist as such) would be at one with nonnuclear states in preventing proliferation, even as they all worked together to put in place the architecture of zero that would make the ban permanent and safe. Finally, the strategy would provide a measuring rod for judging the merit of interim steps, such as START and no first use. They would be judged by the specific contribution they made to reaching the common strategic goal. To give some examples: adoption of no first use by all nuclear powers would be highly valued as a way station toward abolition. In principle at least, nuclear weapons would have been completely retired from use, for if no one strikes first, no one can strike in retaliation–thus no one will strike with a nuclear weapon at all, and no one will threaten to do so.

    Arms reductions would, of course, have value as steps toward zero; but the inspection regimes accompanying them would be especially prized, not just for their own sake but because an ever-stronger regime of inspection is a sine qua non of life in a world without nuclear weapons.

    Influence would flow from nonproliferation measures to arms control as well. The more nonnuclear-weapons states accepted stringent inspections, the more they permitted transparency of their nuclear facilities and the more they accepted restrictions on withdrawal from the NPT, the more ready would the nuclear powers be, less afraid now of cheating, to surrender their arsenals.

    What would nuclear weapons then be for? They almost tell us themselves. “We are here,” they say, “to abolish ourselves, and–a big bonus–to put up a barrier to major power war forever after into the bargain. For even after you are rid of us, we will hover in the wings, as a potential that cannot ever be removed.” The bomb is waiting for us to hear the message. It has been waiting a long time. If we do not, it can always return to what has always been its plan B, and abolish us. 

  • Obama’s Nuclear Challenge

    This article was originally published in The Nation

    “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” President Obama said at the open-air rally in Prague on April 5. With these words came a change in the global air, as if a window had been opened a crack in a dark room that had been sealed shut for decades. On only two previous occasions had an American president proposed the abolition of nuclear arms. The first was Truman’s proposal at the United Nations in 1946 to place all nuclear technology under international control and devote it entirely to peaceful purposes, and so to strangle the nuclear age in its cradle. Stalin’s Soviet Union, bent on developing the bomb, would not agree.

    The second was the summit meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, where President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev came within an ace of agreeing to full nuclear disarmament. Their bid foundered on Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which he would not give up and Gorbachev would not accept. Thereafter the pronuclear consensus was restored. Its chief assumption, embodied in the doctrine of deterrence, was that safety from nuclear weapons paradoxically depended on their continued presence. Unremitting readiness to carry out genocide and worse had somehow been accepted as an inescapable commitment of even the greatest civilizations.

    Obama’s words disrupted this collective suicidal trance. He placed his commitment in an appropriate context: Prague had been the scene of Czech protests against Soviet domination, and Obama saluted those “who helped bring down a nuclear-armed empire without firing a shot.” The reference was doubly fitting. In the first place, the popular movement broke the spell of omnipotence that had surrounded the totalitarian empire. Like the bomb, the Soviet Union had been shielded by a reputation of immovability. The resistance movements in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, using the “power of the powerless,” in the phrase of Václav Havel, gave the lie to this illusion. They revealed the possibility of “the impossible” and made it happen. Obama acknowledged the parallel with nuclear disarmament when he took note of those “who hear talk of a world without nuclear weapons and doubt whether it is worth setting a goal that seems impossible to achieve,” and, advising Czechs to remember the lessons of their Velvet Revolution, declared fatalism “a deadly adversary.”

    In the second place, it was that same resistance, together with Gorbachev’s perestroika, that by ending the cold war opened the clearest path to nuclear disarmament since 1946. Now that the rivalry that had been used to justify the threat of annihilation had been liquidated, might it be possible to eliminate the weapons that posed that threat? Might this “impossible” thing also be possible? The first three post-cold war presidents passed up the opportunity. Obama has seized it.

    Unfortunately, as soon as he announced the goal of abolition, he added that it would not “be achieved quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime.” With those words, the crack of the window seemed to narrow, the moral gloom thickened and the fatalism he had just renounced settled in again. Sighs of relief were almost audible among the upholders of the pronuclear consensus. As The Economist noted, “The world may never get to zero. But it would help make things a lot safer along the way if others act in concert. If North Korea and Iran can keep counting on the protection of China and Russia in their rule-breaking, progress will be all too slight.” In other words, a likely insincere commitment to abolition is to be a new talking point in stopping others from joining the nuclear club, which, for its part, will go on as before.

    A further sentence in Obama’s speech gave support to such views. Speaking of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the president said, “The basic bargain is sound: countries with nuclear weapons will move toward disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them.” But moving toward disarmament is not the same as disarming. It is one thing to say to the world, “We all must do without nuclear weapons,” and quite another to say, “You must do without nuclear weapons, and we will keep 1,500 of them for as long as we are all alive.” In the latter case, the abolition commitment would become one more layer of hypocrisy in a situation already overloaded with it. But after more than sixty years of deceptive promises, the countries that do without nuclear weapons will not accept a “bargain” that gives a new lease on life to a double standard they already reject.

    These fears are mitigated by the agenda of measures Obama announced as first steps toward abolition. A wish list of arms controllers of recent years, they include ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; negotiating a fissile material cutoff treaty; negotiating mutual cuts in nuclear warheads with Russia, perhaps to a level of 1,500 or 1,000; and fortifying the NPT. These proposals would be welcome in any context, but they take on added meaning when viewed as way stations on a journey to a nuclear-weapons-free world. Most interesting, perhaps, was Obama’s promise to host a Global Summit on Nuclear Security in the next year. Will it concentrate solely on nonproliferation or acknowledge the indispensable link between that goal and full nuclear disarmament? The answer, of course, will not depend on Obama alone. He has brought the nuclear dilemma back into public view. But his vision is a work in progress, a ground of contention on which all who desire disarmament are invited to exert themselves.

    Was Obama’s speech historic? Not yet. It was an invitation to participate in history. It will be historic if we make it so. Obama says he is prepared to postpone abolition until he has died. He is 47. I wish him long life. Let us free the world of nuclear weapons while he is still among us.

    Jonathan Schell is is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.

  • A Powerful Peace

    Article originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

    If the nuclear powers wish to be safe from nuclear weapons, they must surrender their own.

    With each year that passes, nuclear weapons provide their possessors with less safety while provoking more danger. Possession of nuclear arms provokes proliferation. Both nourish the global nuclear infrastructure, which in turn enlarges the possibility of acquisition by terrorist groups.

    The step that is needed to break this cycle can be as little doubted as the source of the problem. The double standard of nuclear haves and have-nots must be replaced by a single standard, which can only be the goal of a world free of all nuclear weapons.

    What is it that prevents sensible steps toward nuclear abolition from being taken? The answer cannot be in doubt, either. It is the resolve of the world’s nuclear powers to hold on to their nuclear arsenals. Countries that already have nuclear arms cite proliferation as their reason for keeping them, and those lacking nuclear arms seek them in large measure because they feel menaced by those with them.

    A double-standard regime is a study in futility—a divided house that cannot stand. Its advocates preach what they have no intention of practicing. It is up to the nuclear powers to take the first step.

    Their nuclear arsenals would be the largest pile of bargaining chips ever brought to any negotiating table. More powerful as instruments of peace than they ever can be for war, they would likely be more than adequate for winning agreements from the non-nuclear powers that would choke off proliferation forever.

    The art of the negotiation would be to pay for strict, inspectable, enforceable nonproliferation and nuclear-materials-control agreements in the coin of existing nuclear bombs. What would be the price to the nuclear powers, for example, of a surrender by the nuclear-weapons-free states of their rights to the troublesome nuclear fuel cycle, which stands at the heart of the proliferation dilemma? Perhaps reductions by Russia and the United States from two thousand to a few hundred weapons each plus ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty?

    Further reductions, now involving the other nuclear powers, might pay for establishment and practice of inspections of ever-greater severity, and still further reductions might buy agreements on enforcement of the final ban on nuclear arms. When nuclear weapons holdings reached zero, former nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states, abolitionists all, would exercise a unanimous will to manage, control, roll back, and extirpate all nuclear weapon technology.

    A world from which nuclear weapons had been banned would, of course, not be without its dangers, including nuclear ones. But we must ask how they would compare with those now approaching.

    Let us suppose that the nuclear powers had agreed to move step by step toward eliminating their own arsenals. The iron chains of fear that link all the nuclear arsenals in the world would then be replaced by bonds of reassurance. Knowing that Russia and the United States were disarming, China could agree to disarm. Knowing that China was disarming, India could agree to disarm. Knowing that India was ready to disarm, Pakistan could agree to disarm as well. Any country that decided otherwise would find itself up against the sort of united global will so conspicuous by its absence today.

    During the Cold War, the principal objection in the United States to a nuclear-weapon-free world was that you could not get there. That objection melted away with the Soviet Union, and today the principal objection is that even if you could get there, you would not want to be there. The arguments usually begin with the observation that nuclear weapons can never be disinvented, and that a world free of nuclear weapons is therefore at worst a mirage, at best a highly dangerous place to be. It is supposedly a mirage because, even if the hardware is removed, the know-how remains. It is said to be highly dangerous because the miscreant re-armer, now in possession of a nuclear monopoly, would be able to dictate terms to a helpless, terrorized world or, alternately, precipitate a helter-skelter, many-sided nuclear arms race.

    This conclusion seems reasonable until you notice that history has taught an opposite lesson. Repeatedly, even the greatest nuclear powers have actually lost wars against tiny, backward nonnuclear adversaries without being able to extract the slightest utility from their colossal arsenals. Think of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, or the U.S. in Vietnam, or Britian in Suez.

    If, in the 60 years of the nuclear age, no great power has won a war by making nuclear threats against even tiny, weak adversaries, then how could a nuclear monopoly by a small country enable it to coerce and bully the whole world? The danger cannot be wholly discounted, but it is surely greatly exaggerated.

    If the nuclear powers wish to be safe from nuclear weapons, they must surrender their own. They should collectively offer the world’s non-nuclear powers a deal of stunning simplicity, inarguable fairness, and patent common sense: we will get out of the nuclear weapon business if you stay out of it. Then we will all work together to assure that everyone abides by the commitment.

    The united will of the human species to save itself from destruction would be a force to be reckoned with.

    Jonathan Schell wrote this article as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Jonathan is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and a senior visiting lecturer at Yale. He has written many books. This article is adapted from his latest, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.

  • Are You With Us…Or Against Us

    Originally published at www.tomdispatch.com

    The journey to the martial law just imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed president, the dictator Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington on September 11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan’s intelligence chief, Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to meet with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps the earliest preview of the global Bush doctrine then in its formative stages, telling him, “You are either one hundred percent with us or one hundred percent against us.”

    The next day, the administration, dictating to the dictator, presented seven demands that a Pakistan that wished to be “with us” must meet. These concentrated on gaining its cooperation in assailing Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which had long been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence services in Afghanistan and had, of course, harbored Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps. Conspicuously missing was any requirement to rein in the activities of Mr. A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, who, with the knowledge of Washington, had been clandestinely hawking the country’s nuclear-bomb technology around the Middle East and North Asia for some years.

    Musharraf decided to be “with us”; but, as in so many countries, being with the United States in its Global War on Terror turned out to mean not being with one’s own people. Although Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999, was already a dictator, he had now taken the politically fateful additional step of very visibly subordinating his dictatorship to the will of a foreign master. In many countries, people will endure a homegrown dictator but rebel against one who seems to be imposed from without, and Musharraf was now courting this danger.

    A public opinion poll in September ranking certain leaders according to their popularity suggests what the results have been. Osama bin Laden, at 46% approval, was more popular than Musharraf, at 38%, who in turn was far better liked than President Bush, at a bottom-scraping 7%. There is every reason to believe that, with the imposition of martial law, Musharraf’s and Bush’s popularity have sunk even further. Wars, whether on terror or anything else, don’t tend to go well when the enemy is more popular than those supposedly on one’s own side.

    Are You with Us?

    Even before the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, the immediate decision to bully Musharraf into compliance defined the shape of the policies that the President would adopt toward a far larger peril that had seemed to wane after the Cold War, but now was clearly on the rise: the gathering nuclear danger. President Bush proposed what was, in fact if not in name, an imperial solution to it. In the new dispensation, nuclear weapons were not to be considered good or bad in themselves; that judgment was to be based solely on whether the nation possessing them was itself judged good or bad (with us, that is, or against us). Iraq, obviously, was judged to be “against us” and suffered the consequences. Pakistan, soon honored by the administration with the somehow ridiculous, newly coined status of “major non-NATO ally,” was clearly classified as with us, and so, notwithstanding its nuclear arsenal and abysmal record on proliferation, given the highest rating.

    That doctrine constituted a remarkable shift. Previously, the United States had joined with almost the entire world to achieve nonproliferation solely by peaceful, diplomatic means. The great triumph of this effort had been the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, under which 183 nations, dozens quite capable of producing nuclear weapons, eventually agreed to remain without them. In this dispensation, all nuclear weapons were considered bad, and so all proliferation was bad as well. Even existing arsenals, including those of the two superpowers of the Cold War, were supposed to be liquidated over time. Conceptually, at least, one united world had faced one common danger: nuclear arms.

    In the new, quickly developing, post-9/11 dispensation, however, the world was to be divided into two camps. The first, led by the United States, consisted of good, democratic countries, many possessing the bomb; the second consisted of bad, repressive countries trying to get the bomb and, of course, their terrorist allies. Nuclear peril, once understood as a problem of supreme importance in its own right, posed by those who already possessed nuclear weapons as well as by potential proliferators, was thus subordinated to the polarizing “war on terror,” of which it became a mere sub-category, albeit the most important one. This peril could be found at “the crossroads of radicalism and technology,” otherwise called the “nexus of terror and weapons of mass destruction,” in the words of the master document of the Bush Doctrine, the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

    The good camp was assigned the job not of rolling back all nuclear weapons but simply of stopping any members of the bad camp from getting their hands on the bomb. The means would no longer be diplomacy, but “preventive war” (to be waged by the United States). The global Cold War of the late twentieth century was to be replaced by global wars against proliferation — disarmament wars — in the twenty-first. These wars, breaking out wherever in the world proliferation might threaten, would not be cold, but hot indeed, as the invasion of Iraq soon revealed — and as an attack on Iran, now under consideration in Washington, may soon further show.

    …Or Against Us?

    Vetting and sorting countries into the good and the bad, the with-us and the against-us, proved, however, a far more troublesome business than those in the Bush administration ever imagined. Iraq famously was not as “bad” as alleged, for it turned out to lack the key feature that supposedly warranted attack — weapons of mass destruction. Neither was Pakistan, muscled into the with-us camp so quickly after 9/11, as “good” as alleged. Indeed, these distinctions were entirely artificial, for by any factual and rational reckoning, Pakistan was by far the more dangerous country.

    Indeed, the Pakistan of Pervez Musharraf has, by now, become a one-country inventory of all the major forms of the nuclear danger.

    *Iraq did not have nuclear weapons; Pakistan did. In 1998, it had conducted a series of five nuclear tests in response to five tests by India, with whom it had fought three conventional wars since its independence in 1947. The danger of interstate nuclear war between the two nations is perhaps higher than anywhere else in the world.

    *Both Iraq and Pakistan were dictatorships (though the Iraqi government was incomparably more brutal).

    *Iraq did not harbor terrorists; Pakistan did, and does so even more today.

    *Iraq, lacking the bomb, could not of course be a nuclear proliferator. Pakistan was, with a vengeance. The arch-proliferator A.Q. Khan, a metallurgist, first purloined nuclear technology from Europe, where he was employed at the uranium enrichment company EURENCO. He then used the fruits of his theft to successfully establish an enrichment program for Pakistan’s bomb. After that, the thief turned salesman. Drawing on a globe-spanning network of producers and middlemen — in Turkey, Dubai, and Malaysia, among other countries — he peddled his nuclear wares to Iran, Iraq (which apparently turned down his offer of help), North Korea, Libya, and perhaps others. Seen from without, he had established a clandestine multinational corporation dedicated to nuclear proliferation for a profit.

    Seen from within Pakistan, he had managed to create a sort of independent nuclear city-state — a state within a state — in effect privatizing Pakistan’s nuclear technology. The extent of the government’s connivance in this enterprise is still unknown, but few observers believe Khan’s far-flung operations would have been possible without at least the knowledge of officials at the highest levels of that government. Yet all this activity emanating from the “major non-NATO ally” of the Bush administration was overlooked until late 2003, when American and German intelligence intercepted a shipload of nuclear materials bound for Libya, and forced Musharraf to place Khan, a national hero owing to his work on the Pakistani bomb, under house arrest. (Even today, the Pakistani government refuses to make Khan available for interviews with representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency.)

    *Iraqi apparatchiks could not, of course, peddle to terrorists, al-Qaedan or otherwise, technology they did not have, as Bush suggested they would do in seeking to justify his war. The Pakistani apparatchiks, on the other hand, could — and they did. Shortly before September 11, 2001, two leading scientists from Pakistan’s nuclear program, Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the former Director General of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and Chaudry Abdul Majeed, paid a visit to Osama bin Laden around a campfire in Afghanistan to advise him on how to make or acquire nuclear arms. They, too, are under house arrest.

    If, however, the beleaguered Pakistani state, already a balkanized enterprise (as the A.Q. Khan story shows) is overthrown, or if the country starts to fall apart, the danger of insider defections from the nuclear establishment will certainly rise. The problem is not so much that the locks on the doors of nuclear installations — Pakistan’s approximately 50 bombs are reportedly spread at sites around the country — will be broken or picked as that those with the keys to the locks will simply switch allegiances and put the materials they guard to new uses. The “nexus” of terrorism and the bomb, the catastrophe the Bush Doctrine was specifically framed to head off, might then be achieved — and in a country that was “for us.”

    What has failed in Pakistan, as in smashed Iraq, is not just a regional American policy, but the pillars and crossbeams of the entire global Bush doctrine, as announced in late 2001. In both countries, the bullying has failed; popular passions within each have gained the upper hand; and Washington has lost much of its influence. In its application to Pakistan, the doctrine was framed to stop terrorism, but in that country’s northern provinces, terrorists have, in fact, entrenched themselves to a degree unimaginable even when the Taliban protected Al-Qaeda’s camps before September 11th.

    If the Bush Doctrine laid claim to the values of democracy, its man Musharraf now has the distinction, rare even among dictators, of mounting a second military coup to maintain the results of his first one. In a crowning irony, his present crackdown is on democracy activists, not the Taliban, armed Islamic extremists, or al-Qaeda supporters who have established positions in the Swat valley only 150 miles from Islamabad.

    Most important, the collapsed doctrine has stoked the nuclear fires it was meant to quench. The dangers of nuclear terrorism, of proliferation, and even of nuclear war (with India, which is dismayed by developments in Pakistan as well as the weak Bush administration response to them) are all on the rise. The imperial solution to these perils has failed. Something new is needed, not just for Pakistan or Iraq, but for the world. Perhaps now someone should try to invent a solution based on imperialism’s opposite, democracy, which is to say respect for other countries and the wills of the people who live in them.

     

    Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute, and a visiting lecturer at Yale University

  • Nuclear Renaissance

    The review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), a five-yearly event, opened in New York on May 2 without benefit of an agenda. The conference had no agenda because the world has no agenda with respect to nuclear arms. Broadly speaking, two groups of nations are setting the pace of events. One — the possessors of nuclear arms under the terms of the treaty, comprising the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China — wants to hold on to its nuclear arsenals indefinitely. The other group — call them the proliferators — has only recently acquired the weapons or would like to do so. Notable among them are North Korea, which by its own account has built a small arsenal, and Iran, which appears to be using its domestic nuclear-power program to create a nuclear-weapon capacity.

    As the conference began, Iran announced that it would soon end a moratorium on the production of fissile materials and Pyongyang declared that it had become a full-fledged nuclear power — a declaration buttressed by testimony in the Senate from the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, that North Korea now has rockets capable of landing nuclear warheads on the United States. If the two countries establish themselves as nuclear powers, a long list of other countries in the Middle East and North Asia may seek to follow suit. In that case, the NPT will be a dead letter, and the gates of unlimited proliferation will swing open.

    The two groups of nations are in collision. The possessors want to stop the proliferators, and the proliferators want to defy them as well as ask them to get rid of their own mountainous nuclear arsenals. One of the liveliest debates at the conference concerns the nuclear fuel cycle, whereby fuel for both nuclear power and nuclear bomb materials is made. In the possessor countries, proposals abound to restrict this capacity to themselves, thus digging a moat around not only their arsenals but their nuclear productive capacities as well. The proliferators respond that the world’s nuclear double-standard should not be fortified but eliminated: In the long run, either everyone should have the right to the fuel cycle — and for that matter to the bombs — or no one should. (This was the view of Pakistan and India until, in May 1998, they remedied the inequity in their own cases by testing nuclear weapons and declaring themselves nuclear powers.)

    Far more contentious is the new American military doctrine of pre-emptive war, aimed at stopping proliferation by force, as the United States said it sought to do by overthrowing the government of Iraq. Inasmuch as the Bush administration has suggested that even nuclear force might be used, the new policy represents the ultimate extreme of the double standard: The United States will use nuclear weapons to stop other countries from getting those same weapons. The proliferators accordingly fear a world whose commanding heights will be guarded by the nuclear cannons of a few nations, while the rest of the world cowers in the planet’s lowlands and back alleys. Nuclear disarmament, once the domain of the peace-loving, would become a prime engine of war in an imposed, militarized global order.

    The debate between the nuclear haves and have-nots is probably unresolvable anytime soon. Certainly it will not be settled at the review conference. And yet, as is true of so many adversaries, the two groups of nations have more in common with each other than with other nations: They both want nuclear weapons. And if one looks at what is happening on the ground, a remarkable uniformity appears. All the parties in this quarrel are expanding their nuclear capacities and missions. In a sense the two groups, even as they threaten each other with annihilation, are cooperating in nuclearizing the globe.

    The end of the cold war was supposed to be the beginning of a farewell to nuclear danger, but now, fifteen years later, it’s clear that a nuclear renaissance is under way. China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Britain are all increasing their arsenals and/or their delivery systems. (In an amazingly undernoticed development, the shadow of danger from Chinese nuclear weapons is falling over larger and larger areas of the United States.) The United States, even as it reduces the number of its alert nuclear weapons — though not the total number of nuclear weapons, alert or otherwise — is rotating its nuclear guns away from their traditional Cold War targets and toward Third World sites. (The United States and Russia built up such an excess of nuclear bombs during the Cold War that they can string out their dismantlement almost indefinitely without carving into their joint capacity to finish off most of human civilization.) Britain likewise is redirecting its targeting. Its Defense Secretary has stated that even the modest step of declaring no-first-use of nuclear weapons “would be incompatible with our and NATO’s doctrine of deterrence, nor would it further nuclear disarmament objectives.” In other words, Britain may find it necessary to initiate a nuclear war to achieve nuclear disarmament. Finally, individuals and terrorist groups are reaching for the bomb and other weapons of mass destruction. Osama bin Laden, for instance, has declared that obtaining such is the “religious duty” of Muslims, and September 11 gave us an example of how he might use them.

    All but unheard in the snarling din are the true voices of peace — voices calling on the one group of nations to resist the demonic allure of nuclear arms and on the other group to rid themselves of the ones they have, leaving the world with a single standard: no nuclear weapons. Of the countries represented at the conference, fully 183 have found it entirely possible to live without atomic arsenals, and few — barring a breakdown of the treaty — show any sign of changing their minds. In the UN General Assembly the vast majority of them have voted regularly for nuclear abolition. Behind those votes stand the people of the world, who, when asked, agree. Even the people of the United States are in the consensus. Presented by AP pollsters in March with the statement, “No country should be allowed to have nuclear weapons,” 66% agreed. In other countries, the percentage of supporters is higher. On the day their voices are heard and their will made active, the end of the nuclear age will be in sight.

    Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, received the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2003 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award.

    Originally published by The Nation Magazine.

  • A Revolution in American Nuclear Policy

    A metaphorical “nuclear option” — the cutoff of debate in the Senate on judicial nominees — has just been defused, but a literal nuclear option, called “global strike,” has been created in its place. In a shocking innovation in American nuclear policy, recently disclosed in the Washington Post by military analyst William Arkin, the administration has created and placed on continuous high alert a force whereby the President can launch a pinpoint strike, including a nuclear strike, anywhere on earth with a few hours’ notice. The senatorial “nuclear option” was covered extensively, but somehow this actual nuclear option — a “full-spectrum” capability (in the words of the presidential order) with “precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations)” — was almost entirely ignored.

    The order to enable the force, Arkin writes, was given by George W. Bush in January 2003. In July 2004, Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated to Adm. James Ellis Jr., then-commander of Stratcom, “the President charged you to ‘be ready to strike at any moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world’ [and] that’s exactly what you’ve done.” And last fall, Lieut. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, stated, “We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes.”

    These actions make operational a revolution in US nuclear policy. It was foreshadowed by the Nuclear Posture Review Report of 2002, also widely ignored, which announced nuclear targeting of, among others, China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya. The review also recommended new facilities for the manufacture of nuclear bombs and the study of an array of new delivery vehicles, including a new ICBM in 2020, a new submarine-launched ballistic missile in 2029, and a new heavy bomber in 2040. The review, in turn, grew out of Bush’s broader new military strategy of pre-emptive war, articulated in the 2002 White House document, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which states, “We cannot let our enemies strike first.” The extraordinary ambition of the Bush policy is suggested by a comment made in a Senate hearing in April by Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who explained that the Defense Secretary wanted “bunker buster” nuclear bombs because “it is unwise for there to be anything that’s beyond the reach of US power.”

    The incorporation of nuclear weapons into the global strike option, casting a new shadow of nuclear danger over the entire planet, raises fundamental questions. Perhaps the most important is why the United States, which now possesses the strongest conventional military forces in the world, feels the need to add to them a new global nuclear threat. The mystery deepens when you reflect that nothing could be more calculated to goad other nations into nuclear proliferation. Could it be that the United States, now routinely called the greatest empire since Rome, simply feels the need to assert its dominance in the nuclear sphere?

    History suggests a different explanation. In the past, reliance on nuclear arms has in fact varied inversely with reliance on conventional arms. In the very first weeks of the nuclear age, when the American public was demanding demobilization of US forces in Europe after World War II, the U.S. monopoly on the bomb gave it the confidence to adopt a bold stance in postwar negotiations with the Soviet Union over Europe. The practice of offsetting conventional weakness with nuclear strength was soon embodied in the policy of “first use” of nuclear weapons, which has remained in effect to this day. The threat of first use under the auspices of the global strike option is indeed the latest incarnation of a policy born at that time.

    This compensatory role for nuclear weapons emerged in a new context when, after the protracted, unpopular conventional war in Korea, President Eisenhower adopted the doctrine of nuclear “massive retaliation,” intended to prevent limited Communist challenges from ever arising. And it was in reaction to the imbalance between local “peripheral” threats and the world-menacing “massive” nuclear threats designed to contain them that, in the Kennedy years, the pendulum swung back in the direction of conventional arms and a theory of “limited war” to go with them. Meanwhile, nuclear arms were officially assigned the more restricted role of deterring attacks by other nuclear weapons — the posture of “mutual assured destruction.”

    Today, though the Cold War is over, the riddle of the relationship between nuclear and conventional force still vexes official minds. Once again, the United States has assigned itself global ambitions. (Then it was containing Communism, now it is stopping “terrorism” and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.) Once again, the United States is fighting a limited war — the war in Iraq — and other limited wars are under discussion (against Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc.). And once again, nuclear arms appear to offer an all too tempting alternative. Arkin comments that a prime virtue of the global strike option in the eyes of the Pentagon is that it requires no “boots on the ground.” And Everett Dolman, a professor at the Air Force School at Maxwell Air Force Base, recently commented to the San Francisco Chronicle that without space weaponry, “we’d face a Vietnam-style buildup if we wanted to remain a force in the world.”

    For just as in the 1950s, the boots on the ground are running low. The global New Rome turns out to have exhausted its conventional power holding down just one country, Iraq. But the 2000s are not the 1950s. Eisenhower’s overall goal was mainly defensive. He wanted no war, nuclear or conventional, and never came close to ordering a nuclear strike. By contrast, Bush’s policy of preventive war is inherently activist and aggressive: The global strike option is not only for deterrence; it is for use.

    A clash between the triumphal rhetoric of global domination and the sordid reality of failure in practice lies ahead. The Senate, on the brink of its metaphorical Armageddon, backed down. Would the President, facing defeat of his policies somewhere in the world, do likewise? Or might he actually reach for his nuclear option?

    Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, received the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2003 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award.

  • There Is Something In this World that Does Not Love an Empire

    Acceptance speech upon receiving the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2003 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award, November 15, 2003

    Jonathan SchellI am honored to be honored, and especially in the company of David Krieger and Richard Falk, who are for me true heroes of the nuclear age.

    I want to talk about violent and nonviolent means of change. We gather in a dark time. Our country, in what seems to me a wrong turn of truly epic proportions, has turned to force, to violence as the mainstay of its policy, not only abroad but at home as well, menacing and constricting constitutional freedom at home, while approaching the world with a drawn imperial sword. And yet I want to speak of something hopeful.

    I think that in the twentieth century, we witnessed the bankruptcy of violence, broadly speaking. You all probably know the saying “War is the final arbiter.” It means that if you want to find the powerful ones in a given situation, look for the people with the guns. Or, in the words of Max Weber, who really spoke not just for a tradition of thought as long as history but also for a common-sense understanding, “politics operates with very special means, namely power backed up by violence.”

    Or as Vladimir Lenin said, “Great problems in the life of nations are decided only by force.” This was thought to be true in revolution, and obviously, all the more so in war. Indeed, I’d say that the conviction that force was always the final arbiter was not in truth so much an intellectual conclusion as a tacit assumption on all sides—the product not of a question asked and answered but of one unasked.

    I want to question the truth of this assertion. I argue, in fact, that force, always a tragedy for both user and the one upon which it is used, has become less and less effective in deciding political matters. Indeed, the history of the twentieth century, I argue, holds a lesson for the twenty-first. It is that in a steadily and irreversibly widening sphere, violence, always a mark of human failure and bringer of sorrow, has now also become dysfunctional as a political instrument.

    The domain of force has been squeezed on two sides. First, at the top of the system, has come the nuclear revolution, which, by rendering war between the greatest powers unthinkable, has ruled out the kind of global war that twice broke out in the twentieth century. The paralyzing influence of nuclear arms extends far below the superpower level, deep into the realm of conventional war, helping to render conventional war between fully fledged nation-states a rare thing compared to earlier times.

    Those of you familiar with the work of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation know what this nuclear stalemate meant and still means: that our species stood, and still stands, on the brink of its annihilation. And you know too what solution this Foundation recommends, and that I recommend, too: Get rid of those weapons, get rid of them in Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, India, but also in China, Russia, France, England and, yes, here in the United States. As John Kennedy said to his good friend, the British Ambassador Ormsby Gore, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, “Our world will never make any sense until we get rid of these things.” His insight, born as the responsibility for the future of the United States and the whole human species bore down upon him in that mortal crisis is as critical for the twenty-first century as it was for the twentieth, even more so. And it holds true, of course, for all the weapons of mass destruction.

    And yet, this evening I’m not going to talk more about that great, necessary, common sense objective of our time. For it seems to me that if you propose to get rid of something—in this case, weapons of mass destruction, which stand at the apex of the structures of force, you need something to replace it with. What’s wonderful is that even in the midst of the twentieth century something began to appear—not perhaps a full-fledged answer, but the beginnings of the answer, the foundations.

    If at the superpower level, political matters cannot be decided by force, something else has to decide—and something else did decide with the Cold War, for example. What was that something? This brings me to the pressure on warfare—or, more specifically, on imperial conquest—from the other side, the underside, so to speak. If we look at the recent history of empire, surely the most notable fact is that all of the empires that stood at the beginning of the twentieth century–the British, the French, the Dutch, the German, the Portuguese, and so forth—have all gone under the waves of history. The same is true of the fascist empires that arose in the nineteen-thirties.

    There is something in this world that does not love an empire.

    The great pioneer was of course Mohandas Gandhi, who began his campaign against imperial rule at the beginning of the twentieth century. Surprisingly, he found hope in religious faith. Reversing centuries of tradition, which had taught that God was to be sought above all in monasteries and desert places, he said of his pursuit of God, “If I could persuade myself that I should find Him in a Himalayan cave, I would proceed there immediately. But I know that I cannot find Him apart from humanity.” The aim of his life would be to “see God,” but that pursuit would lead him into politics. “For God,” he said, reversing centuries of tradition in a phrase, “appears to you only in action.”

    Gandhi overcame the suspicion that if spiritual energies were released into the political world, the result would be more destructive than constructive. We don’t need to go beyond September 11th to see how true that is. Or, we can look to our own religious fundamentalists who look forward to something called “the rapture,” in which the faithful will be flown up to heaven while everyone else perishes.

    What Gandhi offered was two essential correctives: he insisted that a spiritualized politics must be nonviolent. And also that it must be tolerant. He insisted on something else, though, that is equally important. He declared—I would say discovered—that not only should the power of government depend on the consent of the people but that it actually did so, and that was true of dictatorships as well as democracies.

    We know the result, although it took a long time: the British were forced to quit India. We may wonder, though, whether it was restricted to India. The end of the Soviet Union gives an answer. The activists who brought down that leviathan seemed to rediscover—but also to remodel and vary—Gandhi’s scheme.

    Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident, and later president of the Czech Republic, spoke of “living in truth”—the title of an essay he published in 1978. Living in truth stood in opposition to “living in the lie,” which meant living in obedience to the repressive regime. Havel wrote: “We introduced a new model of behavior: don’t get involved in diffuse general ideological polemics with the center, to whom numerous concrete causes are always being sacrificed; fight ‘only’ for those concrete causes, and fight for them unswervingly to the end.”

    Why was this “living in truth”? Havel’s explanation constitutes one of the few attempts of this period, or any other, to address the peculiarly ineffable question of what the inspiration of positive, constructive nonviolent action is. By living within the lie, that is, conforming to the system’s demands, Havel says, “individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” A “line of conflict” is then drawn through each person, who is invited in the countless decisions of daily life to choose between living in truth and living in the lie.

    Living in truth—directly doing in your immediate surroundings what you think needs doing, saying what you think is true and needs saying, acting the way you think people should act—is a form a protest, Havel admits, against living in the lie, and so those who try to live in truth are indeed an opposition. But that is neither all they are nor is it the main thing they are. That is to say, if the state’s commands are a violation deserving of protest, the deepest reason is that they disrupt this something—some elemental good thing, here called a person’s “essential existence”—that people wish to be or do for its own sake, whether or not it is opposed or favored by the state or anyone else.

    Havel rebels against the idea that a negative, merely responding impulse is at the root of his actions. He rejects the labels “opposition” or “dissident” for himself and his fellow activists. Something in him craves manifestation. People who so define themselves do so in relation to a prior “position.” In other words, they relate themselves specifically to the power that rules society and through it, define themselves, deriving their own “position” from the position of the regime. For people who have simply decided to live within the truth, to say aloud what they think, to express their solidarity with their fellow citizens, to create as they want and simply to live in harmony with their better ‘”self,” it is naturally disagreeable to feel required to define their own, original and positive “position” negatively, in terms of something else, and to think of themselves primarily as people who are against something, not simply as people who are what they are.

    For Havel, this understanding that action properly begins with a predisposition to truth has practical consequences that are basic to an understanding of political power: Under the orderly surface of the life of lies, therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its hidden openness to truth. The singular, explosive, incalculable political power of living within the truth resides in the fact that living openly within the truth has an ally, invisible to be sure, but omnipresent: this “hidden sphere.” Thus in 1978 did he foresee the downfall of the Soviet Union.

    Now you may wonder why, in the United States of 2003, I’m talking about Mohandas K. Gandhi in the early 1900s and Vaclav Havel in the 1970s. In the first place, the two historical events I have cited were not marginal. These were the two greatest empires of the time. The British empire was the one on which the sun was supposed never to set. But it did set. And the most important reason was probably the nonviolent resistance organized by Gandhi.

    The Soviet empire was no detail of the twentieth century. Who would have thought that that colossus, with its immense nuclear arsenal, its Red Army, its KGB, all of those instruments of force in the hands of a totalitarian state, would melt away one fine day like the morning dew? And who would have thought that this would happen substantially without violence? Who would have thought it? Well, Havel thought it and Lech Walesa, the electrician who led the Solidarity trade movement, thought it, and they did it. “We did it,” Lech Walesa told a Joint Session of the US Congress, “without breaking a single pane of glass.”

    I could give many more examples. I think all democratic activism is of this character. This is what I hope can turn around the policies of the United States. But also every empire that was standing at the beginning of the twentieth century had fallen by its end. And that goes for the fascist empires—the Japanese and the German—that arose at mid-century.

    There is something in this world that does not love an empire.

    There is another aspect of this business that is close to home. Revolution without violence, of the kind that occurred in India and the Soviet Union—and also in Spain, Greece, Portugal, the Philippines, Serbia, and any number of other countries that I can mention—has tended, much more than the violent kind to lead to liberal democratic rule. What is democratic rule, after all, including the American Republic, but a means of governing oneself without violence—of transferring power without tank fire at the local television station, without torture in the basement?

    So these two things go together. The one is a good solid foundation for the other. A third thing goes with them, though this is less developed—something very familiar: simply the gradual strengthening and thickening of the rule of law, in the form of agreements, treaties, international organizations, governmental and otherwise. These are the counterpart in international affairs of nonviolent revolution at the level of the street and liberal democracy at the level of the national state.

    I mentioned the nuclear dilemma. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, 182 countries have agreed to do without nuclear weapons. The treaty provides in its Article VI that the existing nuclear powers should join the 182 in living without nuclear arms.

    If I’m right that the nonviolent political power—sometimes called people power—is at the bottom of both the collapse of the world’s empires in the twentieth century and is a promising new foundation for democratic government, then what a colossal error it is for the United States to get back into the imperial business. For it does seem to me that the United States is indeed engaged now in the enormous folly of seeking to reinvent imperialism for the twentieth century.

    The spread of democracy is a wonderful thing—if I’m right it is a necessary foundation for peace—and it can happen. But it cannot be advanced by force, and still less by the creation of a new empire, an idea that is as unworkable as it morally mistaken. Empire, the embodiment of force, violates equity on a global scale. No lover of freedom can give it support. It is especially contrary to the founding principles of the United States.

    “Covenants, without the sword, are but words,” Hobbes said. Since then, the world has learned that swords without covenants are but empty bloodshed. Can cruise missiles build nations, in Iraq or elsewhere? Does power still flow from the barrel of a gun—or from a B-2 bomber? Can the world in the twenty-first century really be ruled from 35,000 feet? Modern peoples have the will to resist and the means to do so. Imperialism without politics is a naive imperialism. In our time, force can win a battle or two but politics is destiny.

    Perhaps you have read the news this morning. In Baghdad over the last several weeks there have been a series of devastating explosions. Now again today there have been explosions, but this time the American command has announced that we are the ones doing it.

    But these explosions cannot build democracy–not in Iraq and not in the United States, where democracy is also in danger.

    The point I want to leave you with is not only that violence is futile, but that the antidote and cure—nonviolent political action, direct or indirect, revolutionary or reformist, American or other—has been announced. May we apply it soon to our troubled country and world.