Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear security summit

  • Strange Spectacle: Nuclear Security Summit 2016

    At the invitation of President Obama, on April 1 more than 50 leaders of countries, including all states possessing nuclear arsenals except Russia and North Korea, gathered in Washington for the fourth Nuclear Security Summit. The focus was on securing civilian highly enriched uranium (HEU) and similar modest and voluntary steps aimed at preventing terrorists from acquiring nuclear and radiological weapons. HEU intended for use in civilian nuclear reactors is a small fraction of the total amount of weapons-usable HEU and plutonium in the world.

    It was a strange spectacle indeed to have so much political capital invested in limited measures which do not address:

    • the estimated 15,000-plus nuclear weapons in the possession of states which say they are prepared to use them; there are no safe hands, state or non-state, for these horrific devices
    • the large stocks of HEU and plutonium in military programs
    • the large stocks of reactor-grade but weapons-usable plutonium
    • ongoing production of HEU and plutonium and construction of new reprocessing plants to yield plutonium

    The contrast is stark with the global negotiations on prevention of climate change that culminated in the Paris Agreement last December. While that agreement is only a start, at least those negotiations acknowledged the reality of climate change and sought to address the entire threat.

    Also remarkable and deplorable is that the United States and the other nuclear-armed states are boycotting the United Nations Open-ended Working Group on Taking Forward Multilateral Negotiations on Nuclear Disarmament. Established by the General Assembly with the support of 138 countries, the Working Group is charged with discussing legal measures and norms needed to attain and maintain a world without nuclear weapons.

    The United States and five other nuclear-armed states (France, Russia, China, Israel, North Korea) have additionally refused the Marshall Islands’ invitation to appear in the International Court of Justice to defend their compliance with the obligation, under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and customary international law, to pursue in good faith negotiations on the elimination of nuclear arsenals. Only the nuclear-armed states which have accepted the general jurisdiction of the Court, the United Kingdom, India, and Pakistan, are defending their records before the Court in cases brought by the Marshall Islands.

    The world would have been far safer if this had been the fourth Nuclear Abolition Summit. It is past time for the United States, Russia, and other states to embrace and urgently implement a broader agenda to achieve without delay a world free of nuclear weapons.

  • President Obama Is on the Right Track

    This article was originally published on the National Journal Experts’ Blog

    President Obama is on the right track with his multiple efforts to reduce nuclear dangers.  I only wish that it were a faster track and reflected a greater sense of urgency.  His policies take account of some important current realities: The Cold War has ended (20 years ago); the greatest threat confronting the US and the world is no longer all-out nuclear war, but nuclear proliferation and nuclear-armed terrorists; and the United States has obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to engage in “good faith” negotiations to achieve total nuclear disarmament. 

    The Obama administration made a smart move by ruling out using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states that are in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty.  It could have gone further, though.  While the administration surely sees its posture as a useful threat for states not in compliance, this is a two-edged sword.  Such threats also send a message to the rest of the world that the US still finds nuclear weapons useful and is willing to threaten their use.  This continued reliance on nuclear weapons reinforces the current double standards of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots,” which in the long run will not hold.  Some states may be encouraged, as was North Korea, to pursue nuclear weapons capabilities in the belief that they can deter an attack by a more powerful adversary.

    The nuclear weapons reductions in the New START agreement are modest and leave more than enough capability on each side to destroy civilization, but they are a step forward and they do extend the important verification provisions of the first START agreement.  They should be seen as a platform from which to continue the downward movement in nuclear arms to zero.  Ultimately, zero is the only safe, secure and stable number of nuclear weapons in the world. 

    The US has enormous conventional force capability.  While this allows us to reduce our reliance upon nuclear weapons, it also creates problems with the Russians in achieving further nuclear reductions.  Russia has repeatedly expressed concerns with our missile defense deployments, our unwillingness to curtail space weaponization, and our Prompt Global Strike program that would entail putting conventional warheads on ICBMs.  To get to substantially lower levels of nuclear arms and finally to zero, we are going to have to meet the concerns of the Russians and other countries that we are not simply making the world safe for US conventional weapons superiority.

    Realists such as former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger support the new nuclear posture of the Obama administration.  Critics such as Senators Jon Kyl and John McCain are playing nuclear politics with loaded barrels, pursuing outdated nuclear policies that are MAD in all senses, not only policies of Mutual Assured Destruction but policies based upon Mutual Assured Delusions.  We cannot continue to base our security on nuclear weapons without running the risk of massive and catastrophic disaster.  

    I would urge President Obama to move rapidly in building on the progress he has made to this point.  There is no scenario that would justify US use of nuclear weapons again.  Nuclear deterrence is unstable and dangerous.  Deterrence is a theory and it cannot be proven to be effective under all conditions in the future.  It came close to failing on various occasions during the Cold War.  Deterrence relies upon rationality, and it remains a dangerous assumption that all leaders will act rationally at all times.  Deterrence is subject to human fallibility, and human fallibility and nuclear weapons are a flammable mixture.

    A stronger indication that President Obama is indeed committed to seeking “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” would be a policy of No First Use of nuclear weapons, coupled with taking the weapons off hair-trigger alert and continuing to work with the Russians and soon other nuclear weapon states on major reductions in arsenals.  We should be pursuing a new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.  US leadership for this will be essential.

  • Nuclear Security

    This article was originally published by the International Herald Tribune

    The 47 heads of state who will assemble in Washington next week for the world’s first Nuclear Security Summit should focus like a laser beam on the biggest potential threat to civilization.

    Psychologically, it is almost impossible to imagine terrorists exploding a nuclear bomb that devastates the heart of Moscow or Mumbai, New York or Cairo. Analytically, however, there’s only one difference between Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack that extinguished the lives of 3,000 people in New York, or the 11/26 attack that killed nearly 200 in Mumbai, and a nuclear Mumbai or 9/11 that could kill hundreds of thousands in a single blow. That difference is terrorists getting a nuclear bomb.

    No one who has examined the evidence has any doubt that terrorist groups — including Al Qaeda, Chechen separatists and Lashkar-e-Taiba — have shown serious interest and undertaken substantial efforts to acquire material and equipment for this purpose. The highly enriched uranium required to make an elementary nuclear bomb could be hidden inside a football.

    The big insight that motivates the summit is that the leaders assembled there have in their power the ways and means to successfully prevent nuclear terrorism. The key to success is to deny terrorists the means to achieve their deadliest aspirations.

    Fortunately, physics provides a syllogism that says: no fissile material, no mushroom cloud, no nuclear terrorism.

    All that the members of the international community have to do to prevent this ultimate catastrophe is to lock up all nuclear weapons and materials as securely as gold in Fort Knox or treasures in the Kremlin Armory. This is a big “all” — but it consists of actions we know how to take and can afford. Other powerful radioactive sources should be equally protected.

    How can this be done? The leaders who convene will address an issue the international community has so far been dragging its feet on — implementing the obligation states have already committed themselves to in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540, to adopt “effective, appropriate measures to secure all nuclear materials.”

    In confronting this challenge, those assembled can apply many of the lessons learned by the United States and Russia over the past 18 years in their cooperative threat-reduction program, as well as the best practices and technologies developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

    The bottom line by which the summit should be scored is whether as a result of this effort, states take specific actions, including the allocation of resources to make the world safer from a nuclear explosion by an extremist group.

    A number of states will announce actions that they have already taken in preparation for the summit. Others, we hope, will make unambiguous commitments to take observable actions. We trust these actions will be supported by every state, reflecting a global recognition that a nuclear explosion anywhere is a nuclear explosion everywhere.

    This Nuclear Security Summit focuses on the most urgent dimension of nuclear danger. But this is only one part of a larger, more complex agenda. The “New START” arms control agreement between the United States and Russia takes another step on the path to eliminating all nuclear arsenals. Next month, the Nonproliferation Review Conference will provide a further opportunity for international cooperation in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

    To address the array of nuclear threats and specifically the specter of a nuclear bomb exploding in one of our cities with consequences that will fundamentally change our lives and our world, the supreme requirement is for meaningful, sustained international cooperation.

    We applaud the leaders for their initiative in focusing on this grave challenge. Still, as with many international summits that have gone before, we will withhold judgment until we see what leaders actually do measured in terms of the challenge we face.