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President George Bush has put his administration and the nation on a permanent war-footing. With an aggressive State of the Union speech, he expanded the war on terrorism to now include states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction. In so doing he significantly exaggerates the dangers from these nations and underestimates the persistence of the proliferation problem.
"Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we'd been spending on defense in a single year. But the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap." In honor of the anniversary of the debut of Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb", the Non-Proliferation Project provides some choice quotes from this dark masterpiece.
Rhetoric and missile tests may be flying, but for many Indians nuclear war seems a remote prospect. At the height of tensions between India and Pakistan, people in the bustling city of Bangalore, India's answer to California's Silicon Valley, had decided that they were far more concerned about the dismal state of the IT economy than they were concerned about nuclear Armageddon. Fear of nuclear war in this South Indian city is conspicuous in its absence.
The Bush administration has decided to support plans to dispose of excess weapons-usable plutonium by burning it in nuclear reactors as mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel. This support comes after a year-long review and is a welcome development in efforts to secure, control and dispose of nuclear materials in the United States and in Russia. The U.S. program is part of a bilateral agreement signed with Russia, with each country committed to eliminate 34 tons of plutonium. Nevertheless, a very important question still remains: What will be done with the rest of the excess U.S. plutonium?
The Nuclear Posture Review unveiled by the Bush administration in early January continues to reduce the nuclear force from its current levels, down from their high point of some 15,000 deployed strategic warheads in 1987. The review, however, retains the basic concepts that defined the cold war nuclear arsenal and abandons plans for deeper, irreversible reductions envisioned by previous administrations.
Held at the International Trade Center.
The fierce partisan political warfare that has characterized Washington policy issues since the mid-1990s has now thankfully subsided. All hope that the new spirit will last beyond the current crisis. But principled disagreements on key issues remain, particularly on missile defense. There is no bipartisan consensus.
After a year-long review, the Bush administration has announced plans to continue U.S. efforts to deal with the nonproliferation risks posed by the state of the Russian weapons complex. It remains to be seen how all threat reduction programs will fare in the next budget, but it appears that the administration has overcome its initial skepticism regarding these programs and their benefits for U.S. security.
UN Under-Secretary General Jayantah Dhanapala said January 22, "The terrorist acts of 11 September have shaken the world out of a dangerous complacency. The public, concerned groups, and legislators are now starting to take much more seriously not only the threat of terrorism but also the danger that WMD may actually be used against military or civilian targets." Read excerpts from his speech to the Arms Control Association.
The United States will soon become the first nation since World War II to withdraw from a major international security agreement. President Bush's abrogation of the ABM treaty will undermine President Putin in Russia, alienate U.S. allies, antagonize China, polarize domestic debate and weaken national security. Ironically, it will also expose the fragility of missile defense plans. It has been technology, not treaties, limiting effective defenses.
The United States and Russian Federation reached an important arms control milestone on December 5 when both sides completed reductions in the strategic nuclear arsenals to 6,000 accountable weapons each, as required under the START I Treaty. These reductions are a massive reduction from the size of the nuclear arsenals both countries deployed when the agreement was signed in 1991, and demonstrate the value of negotiated, verified arms reduction agreements in U.S. security policy.
Bad weather twice postponed the intercept test scheduled for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program, previously known as National Missile Defense. Weather plays a much greater role than most realize in the success of these demonstrations. The official reason for cancellation is that the poor weather at Vandenburg Air Force Base "did not meet range safety requirements." High winds at the test site may have been enough to force a postponement, but less than ideal weather could mean that the interceptors cannot intercept at all.
President Bush said in May that he wanted to build a new "strategic framework" for nuclear relations between the United States and Russia. Six months later, he has taken a significant step in that direction with the announcement Tuesday of intentions to reduce U.S. nuclear forces and of a hoped-for compromise on missile defense to be worked out at Crawford, Texas, in days to come.
Homeowners all across America are renegotiating their mortgages to lock in historically low interest rates. President Bush should do the same this week with nuclear weapons. He and President Vladimir Putin should take advantage of historically good relations to lock in deep reductions to both nations’ nuclear arsenals.
Rose Gottemoeller discusses the nuclear and radiological threats, how they differ, and what the level of concern should be about them.
There is significant evidence that both proliferating states and terrorist groups are actively seeking to acquire stolen fissile material for nuclear weapons. Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea, among others, have all been reported to be seeking to acquire such material, as have the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult in Japan, and Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization, Al Qaida.
On Tuesday President George W. Bush acknowledged that the al Qaeda network terrorist network has been attempting to acquire nuclear materials for use in terrorist plots against the West. Construction of a nuclear device from the ground-up, however, is not an easy task. The following excerpt from Tracking Nuclear Proliferation, A Guide in Maps and Charts 1998 provides insight into the level of expertise and technological sophistication that are required to build a nuclear weapon.
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Acton holds the Jessica T. Mathews Chair and is co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Fiona Cunningham is a nonresident scholar in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow in 2020-21.
Dalton is the co-director and a senior fellow of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment. An expert on nonproliferation and nuclear energy, his work addresses regional security challenges and the evolution of the global nuclear order.
Rose Gottemoeller is a nonresident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. She also serves as the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Hibbs is a Germany-based nonresident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. His areas of expertise are nuclear verification and safeguards, multilateral nuclear trade policy, international nuclear cooperation, and nonproliferation arrangements.
Kassenova is a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment.
Ulrich Kühn is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the head of the arms control and emerging technologies program at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg.
Jamie Kwong is the Stanton pre-doctoral fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Levite was the principal deputy director general for policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission from 2002 to 2007.
Thomas MacDonald is a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Perkovich works primarily on nuclear strategy and nonproliferation issues; cyberconflict; and new approaches to international public-private management of strategic technologies.
Ülgen is a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe in Brussels, where his research focuses on Turkish foreign policy, nuclear policy, cyberpolicy, and transatlantic relations.
Tristan Volpe is a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and assistant professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Fumihiko Yoshida is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Tong Zhao is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program.
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