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Nuclear Wars and conflicts International USA
by Jonathan Power
LONDON Proliferation
Lost somewhere in the mists of history is the knowledge
that it was the pro-American Shah of Iran who initiated
Iran’s quest to build a nuclear bomb. And it was the
anti-American revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini that
initially suspended work on the bomb.
Fanning the panic of proliferation has been a mainstay
of the Bush administration, supported in the wings by
the British government and more recently France’s
president, Jacques Chirac. It is a high stakes game
that can slide too easily into the call for regime
change, as it did with Iraq.
Yet current would-be proliferators are arguably not as
set on proliferating, nor even as advanced in their
capabilities, as their antagonists suggest. Meanwhile,
unyielding critical rhetoric combined with a lack of
incentives to back down seems to only make the likes of
North Korea and Iran more determined than ever.
Today’s game also overlooks the success of previous
tactics. South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine and
Kazakhstan and, most recently, Libya were persuaded to
give up nuclear weapons programs because the right
incentives were put before them.
In fact Libya’s nuclear program had gone on for many
more years than has either Iran’s or North Korea’s.
Despite a great deal of assistance from Pakistan’s
rogue nuclear weapons’ entrepreneur, A.Q. Khan, Libya
appeared seriously slowed, if not stalled, by
apparently insurmountable difficulties.
Iran may well be trying to build nuclear weapons but
doesn’t give the impression of being in a tearing
hurry. Its heavy-water moderated research reactor will
not be online until 2014. Those who have suggested an
earlier timetable ignore the slow progress made on
completing the Bushehr reactor, a light-water nuclear
power reactor initially ordered from Germany in 1975.
As for North Korea, an evaluation by Alexander
Montgomery, in the current issue of the quarterly
journal International Security, argues that North Korea
is likely to possess much less plutonium than is
commonly claimed. Making a close analysis of the
capacity factor of the Yongbyon nuclear reactor and
factoring in the number of shutdowns it has experienced
as a result of mechanical problems, together with the
fact that 700 broken fuel rods were placed in dry
storage, it is unlikely that North Korea has more than
enough plutonium for three bombs, not enough to sell or
use in a test and still maintain a sufficient
deterrent.
Moreover, North Korea only embarked on its effort to
develop a uranium enrichment plant late in 2000.
Perhaps North Korea all along has only thought of its
nuclear weapons program as a useful bargaining chip.
The Bush administration’s tendency to overstate the
dangers of these countries’ nuclear arms progress
compares starkly with the peculiar insouciance of the
Clinton administration. Strobe Talbot, a former deputy
secretary of state, confesses in his recent book the
administration’s total surprise when India held its
first nuclear weapons test, even though articles in The
Statesman, an Indian daily, had warned it was coming a
couple of months before.
Clinton’s only major accomplishment in the field was
paced by the freelance diplomatic activity of former
President Jimmy Carter. Clinton agreed to a deal forged
by Carter and Kim Il Sung that ended North Korea’s
nuclear bomb development in return for the building of
two conventional nuclear power stations and a lifting
of the American trade embargo. Clinton never seemed to
realize this was his most stupendous foreign policy
success and allowed the Republican majority in Congress
to get away with sabotaging full implementation of the
deal.
But the Clinton administration did lay the foundations
for its successor to raise Cain about the possibility
of a nuclear-armed rogue country building nuclear-
tipped missiles sophisticated enough to reach the
American heartland. The missile shield is a
preposterous and expensive solution to a problem that
need never exist.
Some opponents of the missile shield have said that an
attack is more likely to come from a terrorist group
armed with a stolen or primitively manufactured nuclear
weapon smuggled in on a boat. But a new report from the
International Institute for Strategic Studies makes
clear that Russian nuclear weapons have remained safely
secured even during the early years of turbulence;
there is no evidence of a nuclear back market. Demand
has not responded to the minor supply. It is highly
improbable that any terrorist group could become a do-
it-yourself nuclear power; and so-called dirty bombs
would cause only a small number of casualties.
Joe Public is being led by the nose on nuclear
nonproliferation policy, which has become nothing more
than a political game.