John Wohlstetter - Sleepwalking with the Bomb

Third, abolitionists have no basis for their confidence in the UN’s ability to stop a determined nuclear aspirant. The worst nations will simply ignore entreaties and evade inspections. What can work—the only remedy–is positive regime change. The Soviet Union evaded arms treaty obligations for years and concealed the full size of its massive strategic buildup. Only with the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev late in the Cold War did things change for the better. Until similar change comes to Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran, abolition is chimerical.

To be sure, President Obama talked in Prague about the need to punish violators:

Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished…. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons…. North Korea must know that the path to security and respect will never come through threats and illegal weapons. All nations must come together to build a stronger, global regime…. [W]e must stand shoulder to shoulder to pressure the North Koreans to change course.

He went on to note the threats posed by Iran and by terrorists in possession of a nuclear weapon.

But President Obama had spurned a rare opportunity for positive regime change in June 2009, when the Iranian opposition formed in fury at the stolen election that returned Islamist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Iranian presidency. Instead of siding with the demonstrators and uniting a coalition to put maximum pressure on the mullahs, Obama stood aside and contented himself with feeble verbal sallies. Moreover, he pursued arms talks with a leadership that had never honored an agreement made and that was clearly determined to pursue its nuclear ambitions, in part by slow-rolling diplomatic negotiations whenever possible. He also allowed Russia and China to water down several rounds of Iran sanctions. Though since late 2011 sanctions against Iranian oil and financial interests began to bite, they have not stopped Iran’s nuclear program.

As this book went to press the furies were assembling in the Mid-east. It appears increasingly likely that Iran’s relentless progress towards nuclear weapon capability cannot be arrested by sanctions alone, and thus that Israel, perceiving a nuclear Iran as an existential threat, will take preventive military action. Israel’s determination to act has been reinforced by the Obama administration’s strong public opposition to launching a strike and by a notably unsympathetic international community. A nuclear-armed Iran, declared “unacceptable” by two American presidents, does suggest how ineffective, indeed dangerous, nuclear nonproliferation efforts tend to be.

Finally, there is a fourth obstacle to abolitionism: it creates the dangerous situation in which the public’s gut sentiment favoring abolition can trump practical obstacles to verification and enforcement, and thus could push Western nations to disarm first. Were a nuke to detonate anywhere on the planet, momentum for unilateral disarmament could snowball. Many advocates fan such emotional flames. But embarking on a course of unilateral disarmament before devising the requisite diplomatic and military arrangements needed to effectively police a nuclear-zero world—a condition nowhere near to being achieved—would begin the slide down the slippery political slope. There is no definitive correct number of nuclear weapons that the United States needs at any given time; this would be true even if every other nation’s number were perfectly known. Thus there is no definitive stopping point for disarmament, and advocates can keep pressing Western democracies to cut their arsenals—pressures not felt by the world’s most dangerous nuclear-armed regimes.

The president has shown an alarming willingness to trade a modest missile defense program—one that would hedge against clandestine nuclear breakout in event of countries violating nuclear-zero pledges—for the instantly revocable promises of an adversary. Ronald Reagan conditioned zeroing out nuclear missiles on keeping missile defense development, in order to erect a shield as a hedge against such cheating. But President Obama is manifestly eager to bargain away missile defense leverage—shown by the notorious “open mic” verbal exchange with a top Russian leader at the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul. [1] The text of the exchange appears in chapter 4. Leaving America defenseless even against small nuclear-armed missile attacks invites nuclear blackmail during a crisis.

The president did announce in Prague two laudable initiatives: to curb black market smuggling of nuclear material and to secure all loose nuclear material within four years (by the end of 2013). But his optimism about negotiations follows a utopian model of resolving differences between nations, premised upon a presumed commonality of interest in mutual survival:

When nations and peoples allow themselves to be defined by their differences, the gulf between them widens. When we fail to pursue peace, then it stays forever beyond our grasp. We know the path when we choose fear over hope. To denounce or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also a cowardly thing to do. That’s how wars begin. That’s where human progress ends.

Put simply, the president mistakenly believes that all nations share a common interest in mutual survival. He thus rejects the idea of irreconcilable conflict. But such conflicts manifestly exist. In fact, what irreconcilably opposed governments share is a parallel desire to survive; neither has any interest in a mortal enemy’s surviving. Rather, each desires—and must aim for—the enemy’s destruction.

The United States has no common interest in survival with al-Qaeda. The United States desires to survive; so does al-Qaeda. But parallel desires are not common interests. The United States has no interest in Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood surviving. It has no interest in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s militant Islamist republic surviving. It has no interest in the North Korean regime surviving. Nor would it have an interest in militant Islamists gaining control over Pakistan’s government, and thus its nuclear arsenal. Conversely, nothing would more greatly benefit militant Islamists of any stripe than the destruction of the United States. The United States, along with its allies, is the main obstacle to the global triumph of militant Islam.

In the run-up to World War II, the Western democracies had mutual interests in one another’s survival, but hardly any security interest in the survival of Hitler’s Nazi regime or of the militarist regime in Japan. The United States formed an alliance of convenience with Soviet Russia, but U.S. interests ceased coinciding with Russia’s at war’s end, and only when in 1991 the former Soviet Union collapsed could the United States win the Cold War. While the United States and the Soviets both sought to survive, the Soviet project would have benefited most of all from the U.S.’s demise.

Just as America had no common interest with past enemies in mutual survival, it would be a deadly mistake to think that it shares such an interest today, given growing nuclear threats from hostile states, some of whose leaders embrace a fanatical religious ideology that welcomes Armageddon. Such powers may not act on ideological imperatives, but we cannot assume they will decline to do so.

Regrettably, many of Barack Obama’s policies make a war more likely. Rushing towards abolition of nuclear weapons will, on the fair historical evidence, not induce dangerous nuclear states to follow the U.S. lead. Instead, our adversaries will see greater benefit in increasing their own arsenals if America’s is pared to a few hundred.

We make comfortable assumptions about how our adversaries will act at our potentially grave peril.