Nuclear Proliferation: A Gathering Storm

By Conn Hallinan

’Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue
negotiations in good faith on effective measures
relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an
early date and to nuclear disarmament, and a Treaty on
general and complete disarmament under strict and
effective international control.’ Article VI, Treaty on
the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 1968

’The United States will not use nuclear weapons against
any non-nuclear weapon party state to the Non-
Proliferation Treaty - except in the case of an attack on
the United States, its territories or armed forces, or
its allies, by such a state allied to a nuclear weapon
state.’ Addendum to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons, 1978, agreed to by the United
Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and endorsed by France.
Reaffirmed in 1980 and 1995.

’The leaders of states who use terrorist means against
us, as well as those who would consider using, in one
way or another, weapons of mass destruction, must
understand that they would lay themselves open to a
firm and adapted response on our part. This response
could be a conventional one. It could be of a different
kind.’ French President Jacques Chirac visiting the
nuclear submarine Vigilant, Jan. 19, 2006.

Treaties are rarely scintillating, but the 30-y ear
old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)has a
certain sparseness of language and precision of meaning
that makes it an engaging read. Boiled down, it commits
the 177 non-nuclear nations that signed it not to acquire
nuclear weapons and the Big Five nuclear powers-the
U.S. Britain, France, China and the USSR-to dismantle
theirs.

The theory behind it was simple: non-nuclear weapons
states would forgo developing nukes on the conditions
that, 1) they are never blackmailed with nuclear weapons,
2) the Big Five get rid of their arsenals.

All of this seems to have gotten lost in the recent
uproar over Iran. While Tehran is being accused of
trying to scam the NPT by secretly developing nuclear
weapons, the open flaunting of the Treaty by the major
nuclear powers is simply ignored.

For almost 38 years the vast majority of the world’s
nations have adhered to the NPT. Only India, Pakistan,
Israel, and possibly North Korea have joined the Big
Five, although, at the time the Treaty was signed, a
dozen more were on the verge of developing them. In
short, the vast bulk of the signers have held to what
they agreed to.

The Big Five, however, have ignored the obligation to
dismantle their nuclear arsenals or to even discuss
general disarmament. At the NPT Review Conference last
summer the issue did not even come up, a shortcoming
which UN General Secretary Kofi Annan called a
’disgrace.’

Not only have the Big Five refused to consider
eliminating their nuclear arsenals, in 2002 the Bush
Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR)
unilaterally overturned the 1978 pledge, and the White
House threatened to use nukes on Syria, Iran and Iraq,
all non-nuclear states. The Administration’s rationale
is that the NPT is not just about nuclear weapons, but
’weapons of mass destruction,’ which it argues,
includes chemical and biological weapons. It is a re-
interpretation the French appear to embrace as well.

But chemical and biological weapons were specifically
excluded from the NPT for the very good reason that
they are not weapons of mass destruction.

Chemical weapons are certainly nasty, but generals in
World War I found them more an annoyance than a
serious threat. While artillery (the big killer),
machine guns and rifles inflicted 8.5 million deaths
from 1914-1918, gas only killed about 100,000.
Chemicals are simply too difficult to deliver and too
volatile to do much damage.

Bacteriological warfare is spooky, but even more
difficult to make effective. Anthrax may have shut down
Washington, but it only killed five people.

Nuclear weapons are quite another matter, although as
memories of World War II grow dim, it is easy to fall
into the equivalence trap.

A brief reminder:

The fireball that consumed Hiroshima reached 18
million degrees in one millionth of a second. It
evaporated 68 percent of the city, demolishing
structures built to withstand an 8.5 earthquake. It
charred trees five miles from ground zero, blew out
windows 17 miles from the city’s center, and killed
100,000 people in a single blow. Another 100,000 plus
would follow in the months ahead.

The bomb that flattened Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. The
standard warhead in the U.S. arsenal today-the W-76-is
100 kilotons. A substantial number of our weapons are
250 kilotons, and they range as high as five megatons.
One of the latter can eliminate a small country.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), there are presently about 27,000 such warheads
in the world, many of them capable of being launched
within a half hour. In accepting the 2005 Nobel Peace
Prize, Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA, said ’More
than 15 years after the Cold War, it is
incomprehensible to many that the major nuclear weapons
states operate with their weapons on hair-trigger
alert.’

This is the price the world is paying for not insisting
that the Big Five do what they agreed to do.

And the danger is getting worse. Not from countries
like Iran, but from the nuclear weapons
establishment-particularly in the U.S.-that is
systematically trying to dismantle the fragile barrier
of treaties that hold the beast in check.

One of the key threads in this increasingly tattered
web is the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
The theory behind the CTBT was that banning tests would
prevent any further developments in nuclear weapons
technology, particularly the miniaturization of
warheads. It was also assumed that no one would risk
deploying a weapon which had not been tested. Nuclear
devices are tricky and a substantial number of designs
produce duds.

A side benefit to the CTBT was that it would also
prevent the nuclear powers from randomly pulling
warheads off line and testing them to make sure they
still worked. The Treaty designers hoped that a lack of
confidence in a weapon’s reliability was all to the
good. If you are not sure something will work, you may
be more reluctant to use it.

But the ink was hardly dry when the U.S.-and, it would
appear, France-figured out how to redesign weapons
without actually setting them off. Using sophisticated
computers, weapon labs in France, and at Livermore, Los
Alamos and Sandia in the U.S., began to configure a new
generation of nuclear weapons.

Indeed, India pointed to this computer-based U.S.
weapons program as one of the reasons why it initiated
a round of nuclear tests in 1998, although New Delhi’s
accusations received virtually no ink in the states.

Last year, Congress launched the Reliable Warhead
Replacement (RWR) program purportedly to insure that
the U.S. nuclear arsenal would continue to work. One
could certainly make an argument that RWR was a
violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the
CTBT.

But according to the Northern California anti-nuclear
group Tri-Valley CARE, the program is also retooling
warheads to make them smaller in yield (and therefore
more likely to be used), capable of taking out deeply
buried targets, and able to destroy chemical and
biological weapons.

This redesign effort was revealed in a report by
William Schneider Jr., chair of the Defense Science
Board, who wrote in 2004 that the U.S.must not just
simply improve nuclear weapons capacity ’on the
margins,’ but must develop ’weapons more relevant to
the future threat environment.’

It is possible the U.S. could accomplish this without
resuming testing (although Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld has openly talked about violating the test
ban). But even if the U.S. doesn’t test, other nations
will certainly not allow themselves to fall behind just
because they don’t have fancy computers. If the U.S.
continues on this path, other nations will resume
testing, which will, in turn, encourage non-nuclear
nations to begin their own programs. It is estimated
that up to 40 nations could manufacture nuclear weapons.

’The most important thing,’ ElBaradei told the Financial
Times, ’is to make the big boys understand that the major
league is not an exclusive club. If you are not going to
dissolve that club, others are going to join it. A world
of haves and have nots is not
sustainable.’

The major danger in the world today comes not from
countries like Iran and North Korea, but from the
unwillingness of the major nuclear powers to live up
to the promise they made back in 1968.

’The central problem in halting nuclear proliferation,’
says Selig Harrison, director of the Asia Program of
the Center for International Policy and a former India
bureau chief for the Washington Post, ’lies in the
failure of the original nuclear powers that signed the
NPT to live up to Article 6, in which they pledged to
phase out their nuclear weapons.’