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Catherine M. Kelleher is a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute, Brown University, a College Park Professor at the University of Maryland, and Professor Emerita at the U.S. Naval War College.

Judith Reppy is Professor Emerita in the Department of Science and Technology Studies and Associate Director of the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University.

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GETTING TO ZERO

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................................................................................ixAbbreviations...........................................................................................................................xiIntroduction Catherine McArdle Kelleher................................................................................................11 The Vision of a World Free of Nuclear Weapons David Holloway.........................................................................112 Advocacy for Nuclear Disarmament: A Global Revival? Randy Rydell.....................................................................283 Is a World without Nuclear Weapons Attainable? Comparative Perspectives on Goals and Prospects Götz Neuneck.....................434 The U.S. Nuclear Arsenal and Zero: Sizing and Planning for Use—Past, Present, and Future Lynn Eden.............................695 Nuclear Deterrence, Disarmament, and Nonproliferation Alexei G. Arbatov..............................................................906 British Thinking on Nuclear Weapons Ian Anthony......................................................................................1027 France's Nuclear Stance: Independence, Unilateralism, and Adaptation Venance Journé.............................................1248 Challenges for U.S.-China Strategic Stability in the Obama Administration Jeffrey lewis..............................................1499 Europe, Nuclear Disarmament, and Nonproliferation: What Next? Nadia Alexandrova-Arbatova.............................................16710 Israel's Nuclear Future: Iran, Opacity, and the Vision of Global Zero Avner Cohen...................................................18711 Iran Policy on the Way to Zero Jill Marie Lewis with Laicie Olson...................................................................20612 India and Nuclear Zero Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu.....................................................................................22413 Fissile Materials and Disarmament: Long-term Goals, Short-term Steps James M. Acton.................................................24514 Nuclear Zero at the Weapons Laboratories Judith Reppy...............................................................................26015 Is the Civil Nuclear Industry Relevant to Nuclear Disarmament? Marco Deandreis and Simon Moore......................................28316 Nuclear Abolition or Nuclear Umbrella? Choices and Contradictions in U.S. Proposals Matthew Evangelista.............................29617 American Conventional Superiority: The Balancing Act Dennis M. Gormley..............................................................31718 Steps toward a World Free of Nuclear Weapons David Holloway.........................................................................34719 Practical Steps toward Nuclear Zero Peter Dombrowski................................................................................360Contributor Biographies.................................................................................................................385Index...................................................................................................................................391

Chapter One

David Holloway

INTRODUCTION

The Reykjavik Summit meeting between General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan, which took place in October 1986, was a very dramatic occasion. Deep reductions in strategic nuclear forces were discussed, and agreements seemed very close at hand. An additional session was arranged to try to resolve differences over SDI (the Strategic Defense Initiative). In the end no agreements were reached. At the time Reykjavik seemed to many to be a terrible failure, but historians now regard it as one of the most important of the Cold War summit meetings.

The possibility of getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether came up at the Reykjavik meeting, but it was not the central issue. Neither side formally proposed the elimination of nuclear weapons, though Gorbachev had made such a proposal in January 1986. The issue arose at Reykjavik in the heat of a discussion about the shape of START (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) and the elimination of strategic weapons. Reagan and Gorbachev found themselves at cross purposes. The United States proposed that each side reduce its strategic offensive arms by 50 percent in the first five years of an agreement; during the following five years "the remaining fifty percent of the two sides' offensive ballistic missiles shall be reduced." Gorbachev wanted to know what would happen to the bombers in the second five years. What ensued seems from the transcript to have been an increasingly testy exchange, in which Reagan said, in apparent irritation: "It would be fine with [me] if we eliminated all nuclear weapons." Gorbachev responded: "We can do that. We can eliminate them." Secretary of State George Shultz added, "Let's do it." Reagan then went on to say that if they could agree to eliminate all nuclear weapons, [Reagan] thought they could turn it over to their Geneva people with that understanding, for them to draft up that agreement, and Gorbachev could come to the U.S. and sign it." Gorbachev agreed and then went on to talk about the treaty on strategic arms reductions.

Not everyone was happy that the issue of eliminating nuclear weapons had been raised at Reykjavik. There was a great deal of criticism in the United States and from NATO allies. According to Shultz, Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, and many in the State Department regarded Reykjavik "as a blunder of the greatest magnitude." Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Reagan that the chiefs were alarmed by the idea of giving up ballistic missiles. Margaret Thatcher, who believed that nuclear weapons were absolutely essential for British security and for NATO, soon flew to Washington to make her displeasure clear to President Reagan. "Any leader who indulges in the Soviets' disingenuous fantasies of a nuclear-free world courts unimaginable perils," former president Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger wrote six months later.

The brief discussion at Reykjavik of the elimination of nuclear weapons elicited another, more propitious, response. In October 2006, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University held a conference to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Reykjavik meeting. (Hoover is a conservative research institute often associated with the Republican Party.) The primary organizers were George Shultz, Reagan's secretary of state, and Sidney Drell, a Stanford physicist with a long involvement in national security issues and arms control. The aim of the conference was to rekindle the Reagan-Gorbachev vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. The participants were overwhelmingly American, and many of those present had taken part in the Reykjavik meeting.

The atmosphere at the conference was gloomy about the nuclear state of the world; the first North Korean nuclear test had taken place some days earlier. The Bush administration's efforts to stop nuclear proliferation were not working. The nonproliferation regime appeared to be failing, and there was a sense that something radical needed to be done, that the status quo was drifting to a bad outcome. The most important result of the conference was an article in the Wall Street Journal in January 2007 calling for a world free of nuclear weapons. George Shultz and former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who had both attended the conference, were joined by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn in signing the article. This was a bipartisan group—or "nonpartisan," as Shultz likes to call it—with two Republicans and two Democrats. The article was the product of serious discussion among the four principals, with Sidney Drell playing an important role. Shultz and his colleagues paid careful attention to the wording of the article. Before the end of the month Mikhail Gorbachev supported the call for urgent action in an article of his own in the Wall Street Journal.

The article by Shultz et al. (sometimes referred to as the "Gang of Four," the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," or the "Quartet") elicited enormous interest, in the United States and beyond. Its authors were surprised and gratified. To judge by the letters received and by newspaper editorials published around the world, the response was overwhelmingly favorable. It was clear that they had tapped into a deep-seated anxiety about the way in which the nuclear order was developing. They called for a number of steps to lay the groundwork for a world free of nuclear weapons: further reductions in nuclear forces; the de-alerting of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear forces; the elimination of short-range nuclear weapons designed to be forward deployed; ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; and so on.

These proposals were not new. What was new was that it was these men, with vast experience in the making of U.S. national security policy, that were advocating them; as Gorbachev put it in his article, they were not men known for utopian thinking. Yet by itself that is not enough to explain the response to the Wall Street Journal article, for eminent men make many appeals to little effect, and many others have called for getting rid of nuclear weapons without attracting public attention. It was some combination of the men and the moment that produced the powerful response. In October 2007 a second conference was held at the Hoover Institution to discuss the various steps that might be undertaken to move toward a world without nuclear weapons. All four horsemen took part in that conference; they wrote a second article, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal in January of 2008.

About two-thirds of the former American secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, and national security advisors have given general support to the appeal of Shultz and his colleagues. So too did Barack Obama when he was still a candidate for the presidency. In an interview in September 2008 (that is, before the election), he said:

As president, I will set a new direction in nuclear weapons policy and show the world that America believes in its existing commitment under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to work to ultimately eliminate all nuclear weapons. I fully support reaffirming this goal, as called for by George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn, as well as the specific steps they propose to move us in that direction.

Apart from Iran's nuclear ambitions, nuclear weapons were not an issue in the 2008 presidential election; they did not become the focus of differences between the candidates. Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate, also endorsed the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Foreign governments have taken the Hoover Initiative seriously. The British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, expressed her support in June 2007, and in February 2008 the Norwegian government organized a conference to explore how the vision of a world without nuclear weapons could be turned into reality. Four senior German statesmen published an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in response to, and in general support of, the Hoover Initiative. Similar groups in Britain and Italy have published articles in the press offering their support. In a speech to the Conference on Disarmament in August 2009, the Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, noted that "the complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons and a nuclear-weapon-free world have become widely embraced goals, and various initiatives on nuclear disarmament have been proposed." He welcomed these developments.

In a speech in Prague on April 5, 2009, President Obama reiterated his commitment to the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons: "I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." He laid out a list of practical measures that his administration would pursue to move in that direction. On September 24, 2009, he chaired a UN Security Council summit (the first time a U.S. president had done so) on nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament, and he invited the four "horsemen" to be present. The Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution (Resolution 1887) enshrining a shared commitment to the goal of a world without nuclear weapons and setting out a framework for action. On October 9, 2009, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." The Nobel Committee "attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons."

Nuclear disarmament has now moved into the mainstream of American—and international—politics, becoming the focus of intense debate and discussion. Before looking in a later chapter at some of the steps that have been taken to turn the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons into reality, it will be useful to consider, if only briefly, past efforts at nuclear disarmament. This is not the first time that there has been a call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. After World War II negotiations were held under the auspices of the United Nations to eliminate the bomb. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955—which provided the basis for the Pugwash Meetings—also urged that nuclear weapons be eliminated. So too did the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. After the end of the Cold War there were several commissions and reports calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Here I shall discuss briefly two of these efforts: the negotiations on the international control of atomic energy in the late 1940s and the Reykjavik Summit meeting of October 1986. The former provides a template against which later disarmament proposals have frequently been measured; the latter provides a prologue of sorts to the current effort to move toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

THE INTERNATIONAL CONTROL OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Many of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project believed that the world, as it was then organized, could not cope with the atomic bomb. They had just lived through the most destructive war in history, and memories of the carnage of World War I were still strong. How could an international system in which large-scale wars appeared to be a natural and recurrent phenomenon cope with a weapon as destructive as the atomic bomb? Robert Oppenheimer put the point succinctly in October 1945 when he said: "[T]he peoples of this world must unite or they will perish."

Already during World War II the great physicist Niels Bohr, who learned of the Manhattan Project when he escaped from Denmark in September 1943, had advocated international cooperation in dealing with nuclear weapons after the war. Bohr feared that political differences would lead to a breakdown in the wartime alliance and to an arms race between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. He did not believe that this was inevitable, because he saw the bomb as an opportunity as well as a danger. The very magnitude of the threat it posed to the human race would make it necessary for states to cooperate, and that might provide the basis for a new approach to international relations. Bohr won support from senior officials in Washington and London for his idea that the way to avoid an arms race was to bring atomic energy under international control, but he did not succeed in convincing either Roosevelt or Churchill of the need for an initial approach to Stalin on that score.

The idea of international control nevertheless remained on the political agenda. In November 1945, Truman, along with the British and Canadian prime ministers, called for a UN commission to study how atomic weapons might be eliminated and atomic energy applied to peaceful uses. The Soviet government agreed to this proposal. The UN Atomic Energy Commission was established in January 1946 to make recommendations in four areas: (a) the exchange of basic scientific information; (b) the control of atomic energy to ensure its use for peaceful purposes; (c) the elimination of atomic weapons; and (d) safeguards against the "hazards of violations and evasion."

Two months later, in March 1946, the U.S. State Department published A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy, which outlined a plan to achieve the two goals of preventing the use of atomic energy for destructive purposes and promoting its use for the benefit of society. It became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report (after Dean Acheson, then undersecretary of state, and David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and soon to be the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission), but Robert Oppenheimer was the key influence on the report.

The Acheson-Lilienthal report proposed that all dangerous activities be placed under an international Atomic Development Authority, while safe activities such as research and the peaceful uses of atomic energy were to be left under the control of individual states. The report defined as "dangerous" any activity that offered a solution to one of the three major problems of making atomic weapons: (a) the supply of raw materials; (b) the production of plutonium and uranium-235; and (c) the use of these materials to make atomic weapons. The Atomic Development Authority would control world supplies of uranium and thorium, construct and operate plutonium production reactors and uranium isotope separation plants, and license the construction and operation of power reactors and other activities in individual countries.

This report provided the basis for the U.S. proposal presented to the UN Atomic Energy Commission in June 1946 by Bernard Baruch. Five days later, Andrei Gromyko, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, presented the Soviet plan calling for an international convention banning the production, stockpiling, and use of atomic weapons, and for the destruction of all existing bombs within three months. The two proposals were based on very different premises. The Baruch Plan, like the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, proposed a powerful international agency. Baruch did make important modifications to the report's recommendations, insisting that the permanent members of the Security Council forgo the right of veto in this area and stressing that states must be punished for violations. The Soviet proposal echoed the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning chemical weapons, though it went further in prohibiting production and stockpiling as well as use. Like the protocol it lacked provisions for international control, and relied on individual governments for enforcement, though Stalin soon modified the proposal to include full international control.

The two proposals can be characterized as follows, with the American position stated first: (a) international organization vs. national governments; (b) no veto vs. veto; (c) international control vs. national control; and (d) international enforcement vs. national enforcement. In December 1946, at the urging of the United States, the UN Atomic Energy Commission approved the Baruch Plan, with ten countries voting for it and the Soviet Union and Poland abstaining. The Soviet veto ensured that the Security Council would not endorse the commission's report.

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