Originally posted in August 2005.
As Iran begins preparations for the resumption of uranium processing, the US is repeating its threats of imposing sanctions through the UN Security Council. "We cannot allow rogue states that violate their commitments and defy the international community to undermine the NPT's fundamental role in strengthening international security," President Bush insisted recently.
As we approach the 60 years anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki annihilations, it is time for some perspective. Notably, it is time to reflect on how, while pretending to do the opposite, the Bush administration has waged total war on the precarious international framework for nuclear arms limitation. In so doing it has not merely violated legally binding commitments, but effectively thwarted humanity's hope of a world free - or at the very least, nearly so - from nuclear weapons.
35 years ago, on March 5, 1970, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) entered into force. Eventually ratified by all but three countries on earth, it would be the most widely recognized arms limitation agreement ever. The US, having of course been vitally involved in the negotiations, had signed it as soon as it was opened for signature on July 01 1968. The NPT was to be implemented with the help of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and reviewed in special conferences every five years.
In brief, the NPT allows only five states to have nuclear weapons: the US, the UK, France, Russia, and China. These five - aka the permanent members of the UN Security Council - agree not to transfer nuclear weapons technology to others, who agree not to seek to develop nuclear weapons. But importantly, that is not all. In return for the vast majority of countries forever forswearing the right to have nuclear forces, the five also agreed agreed in Article VI of the NPT eventually to get rid of theirs.
While little known, especially in the US, this requirement is not in dispute. It was a central premise when on May 11 1995, the Cold War firmly behind them, 170 countries made the historic decision to extend the treaty indefinetely. And in 1996, the International Court of Justice unanimously held that Article VI obligates states to "bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects." Indeed, the five recognized nuclear weapon states recommitted themselves to this goal at the 30-year Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in New York, May 2000.
At this conference, all parties adopted by consensus a Final Document containing a Programme of 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament, including "an unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals." These 13 steps are quite specific. They include the ratification of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT); negotiations on a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty; the preservation and strengthening of the AntiBallistic Missile (ABM) Treaty; nuclear disarmament by unilateral and multilateral means; and a "diminishing role for nuclear weapons in security policies."
For a while, a spirit of optimism prevailed. Then the Bush administration took office, followed half a year later by 9/11. And suddenly the nuclear night engulfed us once again. As the International Herald Tribune would later observe:
[T]he Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review, released this year, indicates a clear intent to maintain a colossal nuclear arsenal for time without end. It lays out elaborate plans for designing and developing new generations of nuclear weapons for air, sea, and land deployment in 2020, 2030, and 2040. It does not name a date for any "unequivocal undertaking" on abolition.
The world was astonished. Shocked nuclear arms advocates noted how this "makes a mockery of 30 years of US commitments" under the NPT. Nevertheless, just four months later, as if nothing whatsoever had happened, Bush thundered in a graduation speech at West Point: "We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them."
Let us look at some of the ways in which the United States has since systematically broken, not to say trampled on, the NPT and the 13 Practical Steps agreed upon in 2000. To begin with, there is the question of nuclear disarmament, or lack thereof.
Disarmament
Although no conceivable threat requires the US to maintain more than a few hundred warheads - for instance, fewer than 200 would suffice to annihilate Russia - the US maintains, fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, some 10,350 such. Of these, 5,300 are considered active and no less than 4,530 are strategic. 2,000 are on hair-trigger alert, ready to launch within minutes. Unbelievably, the average US warhead has a destructive power 20 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, which killed 200,000 people sixty years ago.
There has, to be sure, been some progress. On May 24, 2002, President Bush and President Putin signed to great fanfare the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty (SORT), which requires both sides to shrink their deployed strategic nuclear warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012. However, if one reads the fine print, it turns out that SORT does not actually reduce nuclear forces! Flaunting one of the 13 Practical Steps - the 'Principle of Irreversibility,' which calls for the physical destruction of weapons by sawing up or otherwise - it merely requires a change in operational status. Each side can keep unlimited numbers in storage. And, as the Union of Concerned Scientists (USC) points out:
It also does not require the destruction or elimination of a single nuclear missile silo, submarine, missile, warhead, bomber or bomb. Moreover, there are no verification measures to create confidence that either country is carrying out the required changes in operational status. Finally, it provides no timeline or milestones between now and 2012, and expires at the precise moment that its only requirement - the 1,700-2,200 limit on deployed forces - comes into force.
Thus, as one analyst expressed it, either party could defer cuts until December 31, 2012, at which point violations would be moot because the treaty expires on that day. And unlike most arms control agreements, either party can withdraw upon three months notice without any reason, whereas traditionally, abrogation requires six months notice and is only allowed if supreme national interests are threatened. To put the whole treaty into perspective, even if it survives and is fully complied with, the projected US and Russian arsenal in 2012 has a destructive power approximately 65,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb.
The Bush administration clearly wanted it this way. In a 2003 gesture of less than good faith, the US rejected Russian proposals to further reduce both nations' nuclear stockpiles to 1,500 each. The USC sums it up: "Instead of 'liquidating the Cold War legacy,' this treaty has effectively locked-in the most dangerous leftover Cold War threat."
This is not all. In the words of the Arms Control Association:
By pursuing an agreement with Russia to reduce deployed strategic nuclear warheads to a level of 1,700-2,200 apiece, the United States has signaled it will not seek entry into force of the START II treaty or to negotiate a START III treaty as outlined by then-Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin in March 1997. In setting the START process aside, the United States and Russia will not be obligated to give up multiple warheads (MIRVs) on missiles, as called for by START II, and the United States is not seeking actual destruction of warheads as proposed under the START III framework.
Anyhow, as stated in its Nuclear Posture Review and confirmed by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush administration plans to maintain some 6,000 warheads indefinitely and will retain its 2,000 active warheads on alert, able to be launched in a matter of minutes. Aside from the continuing menace of nuclear holocaust this represents, it is not exactly cheap. The US is now spending some $40 billion a year on its nuclear forces, far more than the total military spending for most countries and nearly a tenth of its own. It is also a stunning 150 per cent increase over its nuclear weapons spending during the Cold War.
To cap it off: In direct contradiction to the agreement on a 'diminishing role for nuclear weapons in security policies,' the US government is evidently preparing to develop a new class of such devices.
Abstention from further armament
In 1994, the US Congress wisely passed a law barring US research and development of a new low-yield weapon with a yield of 5 kilotons (1/3 Hiroshima bomb) or less. The law aimed to discourage other countries from developing such user-friendly 'mini-nukes.' In its FY2004 budget request, however, the Department of Defense requested a repeal of this law, which the Senate approved on May 20, 2003. The reason can only be that the US government intends to proceed with development of new nuclear weapons.
And indeed, the Bush administration has requested funding in its 2006 budget in order to continue research of nuclear 'bunker busters' under the Air Force-led Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) Project. The Senate recently voted 53-43 to fund this study with $4 million (though it did reject, for now, an additional $4.5 million for modifying the B-2 bomber to carry the weapon).
The RNEP is no academic exercise: The Department of Energy's 2005 budget included a five-year projection of $484.7 million for US weapons laboratories to complete a warhead design and begin production by 2009. Nor is it necessarily a question of mini-nukes. According to the UCS, designers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory intend to use the 1.2-megaton B83 nuclear bomb - the USA's largest, about 100 times more devastating than the Hiroshima one - in a more massive casing. This despite the fact that analysis by independent scientists, including Dr. Michael May, a former director of Lawrence Livermore, shows that such a weapon would be more likely to disperse than destroy any chemical or biological agents, and would generate nuclear fallout potentially killing millions.
But even if much smaller warheads are used, a congressionally established panel of the National Academy of Sciences recently concluded that "earth penetrating nuclear weapons cannot go deep enough to avoid massive casualties at ground level, and they could still kill a million people or more if used in heavily populated areas." The study found that a bunker-buster, due to the huge amount of radioactive debris, would not be much better at sparing people nearby than an above-ground nuclear warhead of the same yield.
The ABM Treaty
Another of the 13 Practical Steps concerned preservation and strengthening of the 1972 ABM Treaty, a cornerstone of international arms control that limited the anti-ballistic missile systems defending against missile-delivered nuclear warheads. Seeking to maintain the balance of power implicit in the mutual nuclear deterrence of the superpowers, it marked a decisive change for the better in US-Soviet relations.
However, during his 2000 campaign, George W. Bush promised to resurrect the gargantuan 'Star Wars' missile defense program dreamed up by Reagan (though originally proposed by a team of conservative science fiction writers). He pledged to offer Russia amendments to modify the ABM Treaty. This he never bothered to do: On June 13, 2002, the United States officially withdrew from the Treaty in order to pursue the shield.
The missile defense idea is quite ridiculous. It has so far cost some $100 billion without yielding a deployable system, let alone one that guarantees effective protection against constantly evolving, and far more flexible, missile technology. Also it is useless against nuclear terrorism and probably even against deployment by small states, who are more likely to, say, launch cruise missiles from merchant ships off the coast than send up ICBMs. Insofar as it works, however, the missile shield is widely understood to be an offensive weapon because it would immunize the US to the nuclear deterrents of other countries, leaving it free to use conventional force against them. Consequently, it gives these other countries an incentive to beef up said deterrents as much as it takes.
The US intelligence community warned in 2002 that the abrogation of the ABM Treaty could lead to an increase in the number of warheads China deploys on long-range ballistic missiles from about 20 today to 75-100 by 2015. And indeed, some observers interpreted statements by US National Security Advisor (now Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice to suggest that the US would not mind an expansion of China's arsenal allowing it to overwhelm the future US missile shield.
Non-production and -supply of nuclear material
Yet another of the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to by the five recognized nuclear weapons states in 2000 is the creation of a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, informally known as 'fiss-ban.' Since the beginnings of the NPT, such a ban on the production of fissile material has been seen by the non-nuclear countries as a milestone toward the nuclear disarmament mandated by Article VI. Additionally, it was viewed as the best hope of bringing the three nuclear weapons states refusing to join the NPT - Israel, India, and Pakistan - into the nonproliferation regime. By ratifying a fiss-ban treaty, they would agree to freeze their nuclear capabilities at fairly modest levels.
To these ends, as well as to guard against nuclear terrorism, President Clinton first proposed the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty in 1993, vowing to "press for an international agreement that would ban production of these materials [highly enriched uranium and plutonium] for weapons forever." That hopeful prospect was one of the incentives motivating non-nuclear states to accept an indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995.
When the five acknowledged nuclear powers promised a fiss-ban at the NPT review in 2000, it was meant to be an effectively verifiable one. Indeed, the stance of most countries is that it must have a verification mechanism, administered for example by the IAEA, to be at all credible. However, a year ago, in a sudden reversal of policy that baffled arms control experts and put the US at odds with close allies like Australia, Canada, and Japan, the Bush administration saw fit to discard the principle of 'trust but verify.' The Washington Post reported:
Arms-control specialists reacted negatively, saying the change in U.S. position will dramatically weaken any treaty and make it harder to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. The announcement, they said, also virtually kills a 10-year international effort to lure countries such as Pakistan, India and Israel into accepting some oversight of their nuclear production programs.
Which may well have been the goal. The move seems designed to benefit a select group of US allies: Israel, India, and, paradoxically, the latter's arch-enemy Pakistan, whose fleet of nuclear delivery-capable F16s the Bush administration has been replenishing since 2002. Thus, besides the betrayal of its commitment to the non-nuclear countries, it callously boosts the South Asian arms race, which puts billions at risk from what a fresh report by the Congressional Research Service identifies as the most likely prospect for the future use of nuclear weapons by states.
Last month, in another radical about-turn undermining fiss-ban and reversing decades of US non-proliferation policy, President Bush unilaterally recognized India as a nuclear power. He did so by agreeing to share civilian nuclear technology with India, dropping the sanctions imposed on it since its 1998 underground tests. Thus he also ditched the fundamental principle that nuclear technology can only be shared if there are guarantees that it will not fuel nuclear arms production. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation nailed it:
In one important respect, the Indians have received more leniency than the five established nuclear "haves" have asked for themselves: The US, Britain, France, Russia, and China say they have halted the production of the fissile material that goes into nuclear bombs, while India has only promised to join a universal ban that would include Pakistan - if such a thing ever materializes. Yet that pledge, in the future conditional tense, was apparently enough for the Bush administration.
Implementation of the agreement would break domestic US law, but Bush has pledged to lobby for these laws to be amended. Robert Einhorn, formerly the State Department's top nonproliferation official, told an American Enterprise Institute program that the nuclear agreement will make it harder to advocate stricter rules for Iran and North Korea. "The administration lowered the bar too far," he said.
The US move is widely seen as a geostrategic attempt to counterbalance China, which in result is less likely to join a future fiss-ban treaty even in the declawed form promoted by the USA. In one sense, however, the move merely codifies established policy, inasmuch as the sr. Bush administration sold at least 1,500 nuclear dual-use items to Israel despite requirements under the NPT that the existing nuclear powers not help another country's nuclear weapons program 'in any way.'
Needless to say, the jr. Bush administration continues the US policy of shielding Israel from pressures to sign the NPT and open its nuclear facilities to inspection by the IAEA - as Iran has done long ago and even North Korea is now signaling willingness to do. The policy contradicts US acceptance of the 1991 UN Security Council Resolution 687 with "the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons."
The hypocrisy over Israel led to much contention at the NPT Review Conference in New York in May this year, where even close US allies like Egypt, which has a peace treaty with Israel, found it unacceptable. But perhaps the most vexing issue was one that the Bush administration declined to discuss at all: ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
Like the fiss-ban treaty but even more so, the CTBT has been seen as key to nuclear disarmament for over four decades. A complete ban on nuclear tests, it would prevent the nuclear quintet from developing new nuclear weapons, which only self-imposed moratoria on testing currently do. When the NPT was extended in 1995, the non-nuclear signatories - including Iran - agreed to do so on the background of the nuclear powers' promise soon to finalize a CTBT.
Again, Clinton blazed the trail: Having lobbied hard for the treaty, he became the first world leader to sign it on September 24, 1996. And again, Republicans proceeded to quash his achievements. On October 13, 1999, the Republican Senate majority rejected ratification. Subsequently the Bush administration has not only refused to ask the Senate to reconsider but declared, in August 2001, that it will not provide financial or technical support for on-site inspections related to the treaty.
It refused to allow ratification to even be discussed at the May 2005 review conference in New York, although such ratification is one of the 13 steps agreed to in 2000 and the treaty is ratified by 122 countries including all other NATO countries and Russia.
According to European diplomatic sources, progress toward a joint statement at the May 2005 conference foundered during the final days as the US refused to meet a Russian demand to promote the CTBT. The resultant non-result of the conference was described by delegates from around the world as "extremely regrettable" (Japan), "profoundly disappointing" (Norway), "unfortunate" (Ukraine), and a source of "frustration" (Chile and Brazil). One of the more instructive comments was made by the President, Sergio de Queiroz Duarte. Asked if the United States had been fully committed to success, he replied that every party to the Treaty was fully committed to the success of the Conference, "as each participant defines success."
Quite so: Not a single high-ranking US official bothered to attend. According to the May 11 issue of Newsweek, US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton - now the recess appointee to the post of ambassador to the United Nations - cut off pre-conference negotiations six months in advance.
Non-deployment against non-nuclear states
Bolton, to be sure, has never missed a chance to sabotage the vision of a world free from nuclear fears. Back on February 21 2002, he single-handedly repealed the 24-year-old US pledge, issued by the Carter administration, not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. On the next day, a State Department spokesman dutifully reaffirmed US commitment to the pledge. But it soon turned out that Bolton may have been more forthright, or better informed. For the following month, a leaked Pentagon report revealed contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria and Libya. The plan "identified four areas where the US should be prepared to press the button":
In an Arab-Israeli conflict, in a war between China and Taiwan, in an attack by North Korea on South Korea and in an attack by Iraq on Israel or another neighbor. Additionally, the weapons could be used against targets able to withstand conventional attack and in retaliation for the use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons."
More disconcerting contingency plans were to be revealed. According to The Washington Post, in January 2003 Bush charged the Strategic Command (or Stratcom) with preparing a pre-emptively focused plan ignoring the 1978 'negative assurance.' This is a plan for a 'full-spectrum global strike,' which Bush secretly defined as "a capability to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives." And sure enough; on March 15 this year, the Pentagon placed on its public Web site the 'Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations,' the executive summary of which declares that the line between nuclear and conventional attack has been obliterated and that the "integration of conventional and nuclear forces is therefore crucial to the success of any comprehensive strategy."
Conclusion
So where, in all this, is the NPT with its vision of, and legally binding commitment to, a phasing out of nuclear weapons? Shockingly if unsurprisingly, the Bush administration has suggested that the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to in 2000 is now merely a 'historical document.' And presumably, so is the Non-Proliferation Treaty, negotiated by terminal enemies at the height of the Cold War but relegated to the dustbin of history by the winner - except for the bits that suit its interest.
The last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, who contributed more than anyone to ending the Cold War on peaceful terms, does not mince his words:
"I think the United States is sick. It suffers from the sickness, the disease of being the victor and it needs to cure itself from this disease."
He said the United States should not suggest that other countries have no need for nuclear weapons while it retains a large arsenal itself.
"They say other people don't need it, but what kind of law is this that they are advocating? It's the law of the jungle," he said.
Among the many who echo his words is one of the architects of US nuclear policy in the postwar era, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Robert S. McNamara:
I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous.... It says to the nonnuclear weapons nations, "We, with the strongest conventional military force in the world, require nuclear weapons in perpetuity, but you, facing potentially well-armed opponents, are never to be allowed even one nuclear weapon."
This, then, is the moral context in which it is strongly rumored that top elected officials in the Bush administration are preparing, not just for sanctions, but for military action against Iran - a country which has not yet been proven to violate the NPT and which, even if it does in fact seek a nuclear deterrent, is only doing so to forestall such illegal invasion as the US carried out against its neighboring country based upon trumped-up charges of having weapons of mass destruction.
Which brings us back to Bush's lofty words in March 2005: "We cannot allow rogue states that violate their commitments and defy the international community to undermine the NPT's fundamental role in strengthening international security." Or, as he put it in February 2004: "See, free societies are societies that don't develop weapons of mass terror and don't blackmail the world."
Good to know.
