Bush’s Nuclear Weapons Policy: Illogical, Ineffective and Dangerous

President Bush’s Nuclear Weapons Policy: Illogical, Ineffective and Dangerous

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January 22, 2003
by Kurt Gottfried

The Bush administration is keenly aware that nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists or desperate states pose the gravest potential danger facing the United States. But the policies the administration has adopted to cope with these threats flow from a set of illogical priorities. The administration’s policies regarding America’s own nuclear weapons have systematically undercut the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which has for 33 years defined the only internationally accepted barrier to nuclear proliferation. In addition, the richest and most likely source of nuclear materials and weapons for terrorists and would-be proliferators is the enormous and poorly secured Russian stockpile. Yet the administration has placed far lower priority on this ticking time-bomb than on nuclear threats that do not yet exist.

Smarten Up—Proliferate!

The administration’s foreign and defense policies convey a clear message to present and future adversaries of the United States: spare no effort to acquire nuclear weapons!

The United States has overwhelming superiority in conventional military forces, and it will hold this position for the indefinite future because its investment in military research and development dwarf those of all other states. This conventional capability is backed by far the most versatile, invulnerable and sophisticated nuclear arsenal in the world.

The administration contends that all this is not enough: to protect US national security, still greater reliance on nuclear weapons is needed. In its 2001 Nuclear Posture Review the Defense Department envisaged nuclear options for a wider range of circumstances than ever before, and called for the development of new nuclear weapon types and heightened readiness of the Nevada test site. In the arms reductions negotiations between Presidents Bush and Putin, the administration insisted on maintaining nuclear forces of Cold War dimensions, with thousands of the strategic nuclear weapons withdrawn from the deployed forces held in a ready reserve force.

These policies and positions undercut the NPT, in whose creation the United States played a central role. The president’s desire for a free hand to develop and test new weapons has led the administration to abandon the US obligation under the NPT to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Worst of all, the administration is ignoring the commitment not to attack non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons that the United States undertook in the 1995 negotiations that resulted in the indefinite extension of the NPT.

By displaying such an addiction to nuclear weapons while possessing the world’s most powerful conventional forces, the administration is constructing the strongest imaginable rationale for other countries to acquire nuclear weapons. The administration should not have been surprised that North Korea has heard its message, especially after President Bush asserted that the United States has the right—in peacetime and on its own authority—to use all means at its disposal to prevent states from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The critical but difficult goal of stemming proliferation can only be attained if the United States leads an international partnership committed to this end. The world’s leading democracies must be willing and steadfast members of this alliance if it is to be effective, yet the Bush administration has antagonized many of their leaders and millions of their citizens.

The administration’s behavior has been as important a cause of this hostility as its actual policies. In pursuit of the objectives to which it has given the highest priority—national missile defense and especially Iraq—the administration has made it clear that it cares little about the political and security problems that face its allies. And the administration has gratuitously aggravated the situation by the arrogant and hostile manner in which it dismissed the Kyoto global warming accord and boycotted the International Criminal Court. Both are strongly supported by our closest and oldest allies and their electorates.

The Russian Time Bomb

The Russian stockpile holds hundreds of thousands of pounds of weapons grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU). Less than 100 pounds of HEU is needed to make a simple bomb of the type that destroyed Hiroshima, and more sophisticated designs use much less fissionable material. Still more dangerous are the thousands of "small" tactical nuclear weapons, many of which are not equipped with devices intended to prevent unauthorized use.

The United States launched an imaginative and partially successful effort to deal with this danger in 1991 thanks to the bi-partisan leadership of Senator Richard Lugar and former Senator Sam Nunn. In the past decade, this Cooperative Threat Reduction program has installed initial security upgrades at some 40% of the Russian sites holding weapons-usable materials and rendered about 15%of the HEU stockpile unusable. Of perhaps greatest importance, the program has provided alternate work for a portion of the Russian nuclear weapons scientists, whose expertise may well be the most serious proliferation risk.

That so much remains undone is due to the many obstacles the Threat Reduction program has faced from the outset and that continue to this day. These have been erected by shortsighted members of Congress, red tape in the American bureaucracy, and inadequate commitment by the Clinton and Bush administrations—as well as the vexations that arise in Russia itself. The program actually consists of some 30 separate programs in the Departments of Defense, Energy and State, which tends to stymie coordination and coherence. The HEU Purchase Agreement with Russia, which blends down HEU into reactor fuel, is proceeding far too slowly because it is now required to be viable in the commercial market.

Before 9/11, the Bush administration actually advocated large cuts in funding for the Threat Reduction program. This attitude has since changed, but the funding level is still no higher than that projected by the Clinton administration.

US funding for the program runs at about $1 billion annually. This should be compared to expenditures on the administration’s highest priority programs against nuclear attack: untold billions that an attack on and occupation of Iraq would entail, and $8 billion annually for missile defense. Even more significant is the disparity in President Bush’s political commitment to these programs and to the Threat Reduction program.

The prospects for success are also incomparable. No occupation is needed and no technical problems must be solved to deal with the Russian weapon complex; we know how to employ scientists, safeguard sites, decommission weapons, and render fissionable materials militarily useless.

Missile defense, on the other hand, must overcome daunting technical challenges if it is to become effective. Even if we set aside the detailed critiques indicating that these problems are close to insoluble and accept the administration’s own projections, missile defense will at best provide only fragile protection of the continental United States by the end of the decade against a nuclear-armed ballistic missile. It is unlikely, furthermore, that a state possessing only a few nuclear warheads would risk the loss of so valuable a weapon by putting it on an intercontinental ballistic missile, which is technically the most difficult delivery mode. A nuclear-armed cruise missile launched from a merchant ship offshore would have a far better chance of hitting its target, and the United States has no plans for mounting a defense against such a strike.

What Now?

To reduce the danger posed by the Russian stockpile at the pace and to the point that our security calls for, President Bush must make a commitment at least comparable to the one he has made to missile defense and Iraq.

The President now has an excellent opportunity to turn his attention to this task. Senator Lugar has just become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the new Congress, and will be a highly effective advocate for giving the Cooperative Threat Reduction program the attention and resources it must have. Proper funding is necessary, of course, but that alone will not suffice.

The President should decide that the problems that have burdened the Threat Reduction program are intolerable. He should implement this decision by appointing an official in charge of the whole program who would report directly to him. The President should lobby the Republican members of the House who, in the past, have often stymied Senator Lugar’s efforts. And Mr. Bush should ask President Putin to make an analogous commitment and to undertake a corresponding reorganization on the Russian side.

The North Korean situation should have demonstrated to the administration that the threat of brute force does not suffice to thwart proliferation, especially when the administration's own policies and military posture signal that only the possession of nuclear weapons could give a fundamentally weak state any hope of defending itself.

The president should, in the light of this disturbing experience, reconsider his entire policy regarding nuclear weapons. He should ask whether adopting a military posture right now to counter aggressive "peer competitors" that might arise in the invisible future could create a self-fulfilling prophecy, while also aggravating the dangers that exist today. He should, instead, move towards an unambiguous and whole-hearted endorsement of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and demonstrate this commitment by asking the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

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Kurt Gottfried is an emeritus professor of physics at Cornell University, and is a cofounder and the chair of the board of directors of UCS.

UCS is an independent nonprofit alliance of 60,000 concerned citizens and scientists across the country. We augment rigorous scientific analysis with innovative thinking and committed citizen advocacy to build a cleaner, healthier environment and a safer world.

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