Zero Tolerance

Re-rationalization

When I retired in 1994 as head of U.S. Strategic Command, I was convinced that the United States was on an irreversible path that would eventually lead to zero nuclear weapons. In 1994, the nation had a priceless opportunity to pursue a set of initiatives, acquire a new mindset, and re-embrace principles that value the sanctity of human life.

But within a year, the momentum had slowed. And for the past five years, we have seen a creeping re-rationalization of nuclear weapons—as symbolized, most recently, by the Senate rejection in October of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It will be tragic if that process continues into this new century. The ultimate abolition of nuclear weapons involves a long and difficult process as it is. It will become even more difficult the longer we delay in getting the process under way.

Three key arguments are commonly proposed as to why the nuclear powers cannot get rid of nuclear weapons. First, these weapons cannot be “disinvented.” Second, the abolition of these weapons cannot be verified. Third, the absence of nuclear weapons will once again make “major wars” possible.

The arguments obscure a vital understanding. Issues regarding risk reduction and prospective abolition depend upon judgments about costs and benefits along the path to zero and at the end state. In turn, these judgments depend upon a disciplined and continuing assessment of the security environment at each stage at which further reductions might be taken or a state of abolition maintained.

In contrast, the risks of abolition are too often simply asserted as if they could not be adequately mitigated. Such assertions typically project upon that end state a risk calculus based on today's sovereign relationships among nations, the technological tools that exist today, and current societal attitudes.

This mindset ignores or discounts the stunning reality that the global security environment has already been profoundly transformed by the end of the Cold War. It also misses the point that this astonishing and wholly unanticipated eventuality was itself the product of both serendipity—such as the elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev—and the willingness of statesmen (in particular, President George Bush) to work relentlessly toward reducing nuclear dangers, even in the face of unrelenting tension.

Turning to the specific argument that nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented, that is merely a truism with no definitive implications for either abolition or retention. But I would suggest that a world free of nuclear weapons but burdened with the knowledge of their possibility is far more tolerable than a world in which an indeterminate number of actors maintain—or seek to acquire—these weapons under capricious and arbitrary circumstances.

The former constitutes existential deterrence, wherein all nations are marginally anxious but free of the fear of imminent nuclear threats. The latter is a continuing nightmare of proliferation, crises spun out of control, and the dreaded headline that a city somewhere in the world has been vaporized.

In contrast, the verification argument has obvious implications for nuclear abolition. Critics are inclined to spin out either/or scenarios—if one cannot definitively determine if there are cheaters out there, one cannot safely go non-nuclear. End of story.

In fact, as many of us have said for years, absolute verification is not possible. But it is possible to build a system in which there would be a very high probability of being caught, if militarily significant activity were going on. And if the cheating were not militarily significant, then U.S. conventional forces would be a sufficient deterrent.

Further, we need only to reflect on the extraordinary progress in verification since the United States and the Soviet Union first committed themselves to reducing their nuclear arms. Imagine what could be achieved if all the nuclear powers committed themselves to the elimination of nuclear weapons. Sanctions and incentives can be designed to severely penalize cheating and reward compliance. And that sanctions-and-incentives regime will become increasingly imaginable and attainable as the distant goal of abolition draws nearer.

Muddled thinking

The argument that nuclear weapons have and will continue to preclude “major war” is the most difficult nut to crack. It has become an article of faith among political science “realists,” governmental officials of the major powers, and, I suspect, among most arms controllers as well.

However, I take great exception with its unstated premise—that the Soviet Union was driven by an urge to armed aggression with the West, and that nuclear deterrence was the principal reason why the Soviets did not send their troops pouring through the Fulda Gap.

Access to Soviet archives continues to shed critical new light on the intentions and motivations of Soviet leaders during the tensest moments of the Cold War. For instance, Vojtech Mastny, a senior research scholar with the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center, analyzed the deterrence argument and concluded, in an article last year in Foreign Affairs:

“The much-vaunted nuclear capability of NATO turns out, as a practical matter, to have been far less important to the eventual outcome than its conventional forces. But above all, it was NATO's soft power that bested its adversary.”

The importance of that point cannot be overstated. It goes to the heart of the debate over the future role of nuclear weapons as justified by their asserted primacy in averting major conflict during the Cold War.

Certainly there is no question that the presence of nuclear weapons played a significant role in the policies and risk calculus of the Cold War antagonists. They made the United States and the Soviet Union exceedingly cautious when one another's vital interests were stake. It may be fairly said that once these weapons were introduced into U.S. and Soviet arsenals, nuclear deterrence was the best (and the worst) hope the United States and the Soviet Union had for avoiding mutual catastrophe.

But it is equally clear that the presence of these weapons inspired the United States and the Soviet Union to take risks—especially in launch-on-warning force postures—that brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust and left it there. And it is increasingly evident that senior leaders on both sides consistently misread each other's intentions, motivations, and activities. Their successors still do so.

Nuclear deterrence was, as I remarked in February 1998 at the National Press Club, a “dialogue of the blind and deaf. It was largely a bargain we in the West made with ourselves.” To run the nuclear enterprise during the Cold War, the United States created gargantuan agencies with mammoth appetites and a sense of infallibility, which consumed near infinite resources in pursuit of a messianic vision that demonized enemies, real and potential.

But these agencies and the men who staffed them were far from infallible. The capacity for human and mechanical failure, and for human misunderstandings, was limitless. I have seen bombers crash during exercises designed to replicate, but which were inevitably far less stressful than, the actual conditions of nuclear war. I have seen human error lead to missiles exploding in their silos. I have read the circumstances of submarines going to the bottom of the ocean laden with nuclear missiles and warheads because of mechanical flaws and human error.

Muddled thinking increasingly came to confuse and misguide nuclear weapons policy and posture, and that remains the case today. At the end of the twentieth century, arms control negotiations were in gridlock, largely because the United States and Russia still clung to doctrines and force levels that were irrelevant to their post-Cold War security interests.

The price of this folly is of historic importance. By exaggerating the role of nuclear weapons, and by misreading the history of nuclear deterrence, the United States and Russia have enshrined policies and operational practices that are antithetical to their mutual security objectives and unique defense requirements.

Worse, in the United States, these policies and practices have weakened the U.S. grasp of conventional power and the application of classic deterrence in an age in which the United States stands unchallenged in conventional military weaponry.

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The United States adheres to the primacy of nuclear weapons in the face of compelling evidence that nuclear deterrence was—and remains—a slippery intellectual construct that translates very poorly into the real world of spontaneous crises, inexplicable motivations, incomplete intelligence, and fragile human relationships.

Nuclear weapons did not and will not, of themselves, prevent major wars, and their presence unnecessarily prolonged and intensified the Cold War. In today's environment, the threat of use has been exposed as neither credible nor of any military utility. In Korea, in the Formosa Strait, in Indochina, and in the Persian Gulf, presidents—Democratic and Republican—have categorically rejected the use of nuclear weapons, even in the face of grave provocation. Threats of nuclear use have been fully exposed as neither credible nor of any military utility.

Lack of vision

At the beginning of a new century, we find ourselves trapped in the worst of all outcomes. Nuclear-weapon policy has been reduced to simplistic declarations that nuclear arms are merely “political weapons,” as if they could be disconnected from the risks of misper-ceived intentions, the demands of operational practice, and the emotional cauldron of an acute confrontation. U.S. and Russian nuclear postures are being largely maintained at Cold War levels, at enormous expense, and at increasing risk, as Russia's early warning and command-and-control systems deteriorate.

Meanwhile, new entrants in the nuclear club—India and Pakistan—are elaborating primitive forces and so-called deterrent policies without benefit of the intricate and costly warning and control measures essential to any hope for crisis stability.

Finally, new forces are coming into play as domestic political pressures build to deploy ballistic missile defenses for the continental United States, as governments rise and fall, and as regional animosities deepen.

This dismal state of affairs was not foreordained. Rather, it is the product of the failure of strategic vision. I do not offer that criticism lightly, because I was once partly responsible for anticipating and acting on the perceived consequences of strategic change at the highest levels of government.

A little more than 10 years ago, as director of Strategic Plans and Policy for the nation's armed forces, I was engaged in rewriting national military strategy in anticipation of the end of the Cold War. While working with Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we both foresaw the precipitous decline of Soviet-style communism and outlined—in broad strokes—what that would mean in redefining the roles, missions, organization, and equipage of our military forces.

My task was to fill in the details and present them to Powell for his consideration. My conclusions, amended by three subsequent years as commander of strategic nuclear forces, are still largely relevant as the new century opens.

First, the United States must continue to play the leading role in sustaining and extending global peace and security. Second, managing relations with Russia is, by far, America's primary security interest. Third, maintaining stability in the Persian Gulf and on the Korean Peninsula remain vital interests, which is to say that challenges there must be met with immediate and overwhelming force. Fourth, the United States must assume that smaller contingencies may arise requiring some form of American intervention, but with less robust forces and objectives.

This broad framework, first sketched in more than a decade ago, was tied to a highly detailed and rationalized force structure and organization that differed dramatically from the Cold War era. It called for a 30 percent reduction in the size of the armed forces, a much more compact alignment of forces, a premium on joint warfighting, and highly sophisticated hardware and systems that would elevate warfare beyond the reach of any prospective opponent.

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That vision, which Powell endorsed, was short-lived. To be sure, it began on a promising note. Events in the summer of 1990 quickly proved that the United States would not tolerate a challenge to its vital interests in the Persian Gulf. Iraq's aggression was stopped, reversed, and harshly penalized by forceful American leadership and a brilliant combined-arms campaign that took Iraqi forces out of play with blinding speed and with minimal Coalition casualties.

Shortly thereafter, President George Bush took a series of unilateral steps that dramatically advanced the purposes and the prospects of nuclear arms control. Then, with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the stage seemed to be set for a historic realignment of the forces and the rules governing security relations and sovereign states.

But with the change in administrations, momentum was lost. I am dumbfounded by the state of today's U.S. leadership. It is unfocused and uncertain, reeling from crisis to crisis, sharply divided over ends and means, and bereft of a sense of larger purpose. The United States is materially driven and spiritually depleted.

Relationships with Russia and China hang by frayed diplomatic threads, the consequence of U.S. policies that have proven intemperate, shortsighted, and too often premised on wishful thinking. Saddam Hussein has restored his power base and dismantled the inspection regime, and the United States has yet to decode the bait-and-switch tactics emanating from Pyongyang.

Finally, U.S. conventional forces are under enormous stress, stretched thin across a host of roles and deployments, their capabilities diminished by falling readiness. Only recently have the Congress and the administration acknowledged this and begun to provide the resources required to reconcile strategic ends and means.

Meanwhile, all the services have seen their ranks thinned by disaffection, grinding deployments, and economic distress. Worse, the services are still required by Congress to fund a highly wasteful base structure and an unending array of pork barrel projects and programs.

Why is the United States engaged in indeterminate and divisive internal quarrels over the most fundamental questions of national security? With respect to the conventional roles and missions of our armed forces, the answer is clear: As a nation, the United States has yet to redefine— much less inculcate in its national psyche—a broader vision of its vital interests in the post-Cold War era.

With respect to nuclear forces and policy, this failure is compounded by sheer intellectual paralysis. The traditional arms control process, which served the world well through the tensions of the Cold War, is not just stalled but dysfunctional. It is freighted with psychology, language, assumptions, and protocols that perpetuate distrust, constrain imagination, limit expectations, and prolong outcomes.

Further, the United States is mired in partisan politics—the nation's most vital interests are reduced to spiteful liberal-conservative standoffs, as the “debate” over Senate ratification of the test ban treaty so clearly demonstrated. Arms control focuses on things that now matter relatively less, such as numbers of warheads, at the expense of things that matter a great deal more, such as the policies that drive the numbers and the rapid-response postures that endure more than 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nuclear war, started by accident or egregious miscalculation is always—in theory— just minutes away.

As for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ingrained patterns of interaction between the nuclear and non-nuclear weapons states are promoting a coming train wreck, a collision of competing expectations that at this juncture are irreconcilable.

The long-term goal

It is time for a reappraisal of what is possible and what is not, what is desirable and what is not. With respect to nuclear weapons, abolition is the only defensible goal—and that goal matters enormously.

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“Now watch what happens when I move over here.”

First, all of the formally declared nuclear powers as defined by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty are legally committed to abolishing their arsenals according to the letter and the spirit of the treaty. Further, every American president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has publicly endorsed the elimination of nuclear weapons.

A clear and unequivocal commitment to that goal—sustained by concrete policy and measurable milestones—is essential to give substance to that long-standing declaratory position.

Such a commitment would go far beyond seizing the moral high ground. It would focus analysis on achieving a precise end state. All force postures above zero would simply become way points along the road. The commitment would also shift policy attention from the endless debate over numbers to the achievement of a security climate essential to successive reductions. The commitment would condition government—at all levels—to create and respond to every opportunity for shrinking arsenals, cutting infrastructure, and curtailing modernization. And it would set the stage for the rigorous enforcement of the nonproliferation regime and the application of unrelenting pressures to reduce nuclear arsenals on a global basis.

However, in keeping with the unanimous conclusions of my colleagues on the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences in our 1997 report, The Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy, I am persuaded that the more attainable intermediate step is the prohibition of nuclear weapons.

Prohibition by treaty is the more familiar coin of the realm in global efforts to constrain weapons of mass destruction. The prohibition of biological and chemical weapons, as established in formal conventions, has put down indisputable markers: as weapons of mass destruction, these means are morally repugnant and an affront to humanity. (Ironically, chemical and biological weapons, as horrific as they may be, are not in the same league as nuclear weapons. The latter are the only true weapons of mass destruction. But they are not yet prohibited by an international convention.)

The most urgent concern regarding steps toward prohibition should be those elements of nuclear capabilities that pose the most immediate danger. At the top of the list: the U.S. and Russian practice of maintaining thousands of warheads in high states of alert, that is, launch readiness.

Having successfully proposed to President Bush in September 1991 to reduce bomber readiness from several minutes to several days, I am appalled that more than eight years later, land- and sea-based missiles remain in what amounts to immediate launch postures. The risk of accidental or erroneous launch would evaporate in an operational environment in which warheads and missiles were de-mated and preferably widely separated in location.

Next, it is vital to recognize that all numbers of nuclear weapons above zero are arbitrary. Against an urban target, one weapon represents an unacceptable horror. Twenty weapons would destroy the 12 largest Russian cities with a total population of 25 million. Arsenals in the hundreds, much less in the thousands, can serve no meaningful objective.

From this perspective, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty process is bankrupt. The START II ceiling of 3,000 to 3,500 operational warheads to be achieved by the year 2007 is out of touch with reality. Even the START III objective of 2,000 operational warheads is a meaningless reduction in terms of possible devastation.

But in light of the interrelated and intransigent attitudes of the nuclear weapons states—declared or other-wise—the best interim compromise may be an arbitrary figure in the hundreds, as defined by the arsenals of Britain, France, and China. Numbers above that level are irresponsible and they owe more to bureaucratic politics and political demagoguery than to any defensible strategic rationale.

But again, the goal is not a few thousand warheads or a few hundred, but zero. The United States must take the lead in working toward the goal. No other nation is in a position to make it happen.

A lasting peace

If the United States commits itself to working toward nuclear abolition—even if the end state is 20 or 30 years down the road and cannot be clearly seen today—it must also make an equally firm commitment to devoting the necessary resources to ensure the United States will remain the world's most powerful nation in conventional forces.

The capabilities and professionalism of the intelligence community, badly eroded since the end of the Cold War, must also be rebuilt. And the United States must recognize its unique responsibility in preserving and extending the capacity of international organizations— including the United Nations—to combat global poverty and abuses of human rights.

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“Uh, we were sorta hoping for something like, ‘Live and let live’.”

But above all in this new century, the United States must remedy its loss of strategic vision and restore a sense of larger purpose. The United States has become much too prone to demonize its enemies, real or prospective. It has become too quick to wield the meat ax of power politics than to stay the course of patient diplomacy.

Finally, the best guide in the process of national renewal is for the United States to simply act in accordance with the principles and values that set it apart from tyranny and above the murderous instincts of racial, ethnic, and religious hatred. That is the test that will ultimately define the goodness of the people of the United States, the worth of the nation, and its legacy to humanity.

On March 4, 1865, at the end of his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln said: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

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Those words come from a different time, a different world, a different set of circumstances. And yet the vision and the values and the humanity embodied in those words would serve the United States well as this new century unfolds.