Iran, North Korea and The Challenges of Proliferation

Speech presented at the Center for National Policy

PDP Co-Director William J. Perry delivered a speech to the Center for National Policy on May 24, 2006, in Washington, DC, at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill. Dr. Perry’s speech focused on Iran, North Korea, and the challenges of proliferation. Dr. Perry discussed the options available to the United States in order to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism stemming from the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea.

Thank you for that wonderful introduction. My interest in North Korea and Iran stem primarily from my concern that a nuclear bomb will go off in an American city set off by a terrorist. I believe that nuclear terrorism is the greatest danger that our country faces today. I am not alone in that belief. In the presidential race both George W. Bush and John Kerry stated that they believe that nuclear terrorism is the greatest danger that we face. In spite of that, The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, in evaluating our performance in preventing nuclear terrorism, gave us at best a “D”. A “D”—when I was a professor in Stanford, and I give somebody a “D”—I’m not immensely impressed with him.

Graham Allison, in his seminal book, Nuclear Terrorism, said he believed there was a probability – 50/50 probability – that a nuclear bomb would be set off within one of our cities within the decade. Now, I understand that it is really impossible to put a quantitative estimate on a complex phenomenon like that, but my impression from what I know is that Graham Allison is too optimistic. I think if it happens it could happen sooner than that.

There is however some good news here. The good news is that the terrorists really cannot make nuclear reactors or a nuclear bomb. They would have to either steal or buy the nuclear weapons or at the minimum the fissile material from which a nuclear weapon can be made. And therefore many of our programs to prevent this from happening are based on keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of the terrorists. During my time as Secretary, I suppose my top priority was addressed directly to that concern. I spent about a third of my time looking directly at ways of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and material. Primary to why I’ve been doing that was the nuclear reduction program. And as a result of that program, we were able to dismantle almost 10,000 nuclear weapons, half in former Soviet Union and half in the United States, and to provide stronger security for the remaining weapons.

That program is still unfinished, and should have a higher priority these days than it does have. But by and large the nuclear reduction program is an effective way of dealing with the danger of spreading nuclear weapons to terrorists in countries of the former Soviet Union. It does not, however, deal with emerging nuclear powers. There is no comparable program. Therefore, I see that the greatest risk today of a terrorist getting a nuclear bomb comes from three different countries: Pakistan, North Korea, and Iraq. In Pakistan, we’ve already had a leakage of nuclear materials and technology to the Khan network. That has however been contained, and I think in all probability, that problem has been resolved.

In Iran we have to be concerned not only with the leakage to a terror group but even possibly a sanctioned leak. In North Korea, I think the problem could be different it’s not a leakage of technology but the possibility that it actually sells a bomb or some materials to a terror group given their desperate economic situation. The danger of an emerging nuclear power is magnified many times, however, by the domino effect that would occur if either Iran or North Korea became full-fledged nuclear powers. You can see an arms race in the Far East, an arms race in the Middle East, in countries like Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, going nuclear. So there are many ways we could fail in this regard. As a price of failure, I say again, the price of failure is that there might be a nuclear bomb detonated in an American city. Hundreds of thousands of people would be killed. There would be hundreds of billions of dollars of direct damage and incalculable indirect economic effects. An economic panic would result after such an attack. And there would be incalculable political and social damage.

You could give a whole talk on just calculating what would happen in this country after a nuclear bomb went off in Washington or New York City. I will sum it up simply by saying it would be the worst single catastrophe in American history. Therefore, prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons should be our number one security priority. And yet the efforts to prevent the spread have been ineffective. North Korea has built already a nuclear arsenal. It continues to build it. And Iran is on the threshold. The failure of our efforts to stop proliferation today has been so profound, so obvious that we are now looking for alternatives that are different from the ways of the past.

There are three generic alternatives that the president can pursue. The first is to revise our diplomacy, in particular, to revise it to include direct talks, and to revise it to establish a more effective coercive means. I have more to say about that. The second alternative is simply to take out the threatening nuclear facilities with military strikes. I have more to say about that. And the third is learn to live with it. That is to understand what it takes to make the necessary security adjustments. I have more to say about that. I’m going to do this by starting out talking about these two countries. First North Korea and then Iran.

In North Korea, our head diplomat started off four or five years ago saying that we would not make or conduct direct talks with North Korea. For more than a year and a half there has been a stalemate with no talking with North Korea continuing to improve and build nuclear material facilities. Then, with the encouragement of China, we participated in so called “six-party talks.” But we participated for almost two years with no real dialogue. Our representative would go to the meetings stand up, read a statement, and sit down and that was it. So I want to draw a distinction between attending talks and truly participating in dialogue in the talks. Finally, last September there was a six-party talk with real dialogue. Ambassador Chris Hill engaged with the North Koreans, he made serious and substantive proposals and they came to an understanding. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the day after that understanding was announced, first Washington and then Pyongyang walked back on that dialogue. Basically there seemed to have been a misunderstanding about the understanding. There have been no talks since then.

North Korea has stated they would not come back to the table. The question then is can we change the formula, can we add some element to it so that we can get those talks going in a positive direction and resolve the issues that have kept us apart. I cannot be too hopeful about that. There are very important economic incentives, both negative and positive that could be used, but nearly all of them with any substance are in the hands of either China or South Korea. And neither of those nations has shown any intention to use those incentives, either positive or negative. Within the U.S. government, in my judgment, there is a schism between those who believe we should engage Korea and those who believe that the only way of dealing with a regime that bad is regime change. So there are these two very different points of view.

That takes me to the second alternative, which is taking out the nuclear facilities, there is one practical reason I don’t favor that alternative, which is the plutonium is now gone from Pyongyang. We could take out the reactor that sits there, we could take out the processor that sits there, but the plutonium and probably the bombs from which they are making from the plutonium have gone somewhere, and we don’t know where. So we could not take out the bombs. And second, and this has been a consideration that we had back in 1994, even when the plutonium could have been destroyed, which is that such a strike would very likely lead to a second Korean war, a war that probably would have even higher casualties than the first Korean War. Additionally, there’s a question as to whether that’s even feasible. A war with North Korea would inevitably involve South Korea and it is not saying it too strongly to say that the South Korean government is adamantly opposed to a war.

So that brings me of course to the third alternative, which is to learn to live with the problem and make the necessary security adjustments. What security adjustments would we make? If I was the Secretary of Defense and had to live with nuclear weapons in North Korea, what would I be looking at? Well first of all, you’d look at the possibility of defending against them. You’d have an effort to enhance the nuclear defense system in Alaska. But even if it were to perform exactly according to specifications, it simply would not fill the bill. The problem is that North Korea could sell the bomb to somebody else who would put the missile on a truck or freighter. We also have a program called PSI, Proliferation Security Initiative, designed to prevent the provision of nuclear technology or material to North Korea and any nation. I guess the only thing I could say about that is that I am in favor of that, the Proliferation of Security Initiative. But I believe that to stop the North Koreans from transferring nuclear bombs to anyone and to prevent the transfer of amounts of plutonium of that size necessary to make a bomb is truly a faith based initiative. (Laughter).

And finally, the forces that deter which served us so well all those years of the Cold War. I believe that North Korea is indeed deterred from the path of attacking the United States by our overwhelming military power. But again the problem is that even if they don’t attack us, they’re just going to sell the bombs to somebody else. We can of course threaten retaliation against North Korea if a bomb goes off in our cities. But there is a very real question as to whether we can identify whether that bomb came from North Korea or someplace else. So there’s a question of whether deterrence is feasible. On the subject of the forensics of nuclear identification, it has been described as needing much more work. I’m not only talking about the red tape. Only to simply say that there is reason to doubt, at least under present conditions, that we are secure. In sum, on North Korea, we have dug a very deep hole, and there are no attractive alternatives left.

Let me shift to Iran. On Monday this week, Ash Carter and I held a workshop on the Iranian nuclear program. And there, the assembled experts, after a day of discussions, came to the very strong conclusion, that we had also dug ourselves into a very deep hole in Iran with no attractive alternatives left. The negotiations that have been ongoing between the EU-3 and Iran and Russia and Iran are clearly dead. So the first thing we looked at is what could be done to strengthen those negotiations? It seemed clear that the hope for these U.N.-led negotiations is that we could have the U.S., Jordan, and Iraq talk with Iran. Whether those talks were bilateral, or whether they were part of the larger forum seemed to be not so important as perhaps to get them going and that they be direct. You can imagine another six-party talk with the United States, the European community, Russia and maybe China, joined with Iran. You can imagine many different ways of shaping and forming the table, but the indispensable condition is that the United States be sitting at that table, and not just sitting like they did when there was the first set of talks, but actively participating in the dialogue. This is, I believe, a necessary condition for success.

Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons is long lasting and deep. And I think it’s going to take considerable deterrence to move them away from that ambition. I think the negotiations are still going to require some degree of coercion. The most obvious way of manifesting that coercion is by taking Iran to the Security Council and getting an Article 7 sanction and with that sanction putting political and economic pressure on Iran to change course. To provide some disincentives for the nuclear weapon program, you could counterbalance incentives that they already have. But there are real barriers to getting an Article 7 sanction from the U.N. First and most fundamentally, both Russia and China, who obviously would have to agree to this, believe that an Article 7 sanction against Iran would simply be used by the United States to go from there to military action and therefore they’re very reluctant for that reason to do that. Secondly, without putting too fine a point on it, if this requires the cooperation of Russia, Russia’s not in a very happy mood with the United States today, not the least of which because of the speech that Vice President Cheney gave in Lithuania a week ago. So there are reasons to believe that it’s going to be very difficult to get that Article 7 sanction from the U.N. But we should proceed anyway.

But I must say that even if we did that, given these considerable incentives that Iran has for going nuclear, that leads to the consideration that what if any out there surface. It is difficult to do that, but probably doable in some sense. In the sense that if the United States, if they made that strike, could undoubtedly setback the program for a length of several years. But I want to be very clear; it would not be a simple surgical strike. It would probably need to be repeated and it would probably in effect be the beginning of a long war. A war which has global implications. In short, I think the unintended consequences of that strike would be horrific. I could spend the whole time talking about the arguments and capitalizing on what I think are probably undesirable consequences. Well, can we simply say, Iran is going nuclear, get over it. In which case we would begin the strategic adjustments, the kind I was talking about with North Korea. Again, nuclear defense comes to people’s mind, in fact in the last week we were reading the paper about the United States proposing a nuclear defense system in Europe to defend against that stuff.

Again, I say the primary threat is not one of Iran putting the nuclear weapon on a missile and firing it at us or at anybody else. The primary threat is that the weapons or the technology or the fissile material would lead to terrorists and the bombs would end up in our cities or European cities via truck and not via missile. While saying that I am in favor of the Proliferation Security Initiative, I would have no faith in it as an answer to this problem. I have the same problem about deterring them. I think Iran is quite deterrable from firing a nuclear missile at Germany or at the United States. But I don’t know how to deter the terrorists. I have the same problem with identifying who are they. So they are essentially the same generic problems which I listed in regards to North Korea, but there is one important difference. There is a new problem here, which I think is unique to Iran that does not exist with North Korea. Even if the United States decides to accept a nuclear Iran, what assurance do we have that Israel would accept that same conclusion. I think that there is every possibility that Israel could independently decide to take a pre-emptive attack if they see that we have decided to accept it. Some people in this town have talked approvingly of that, saying oh that’s fine, Israel is going to pull our chestnuts out of the fire. I have issue with that statement. If Israel conducts that strike, everyone in the Arab world and the Muslim world will believe that the United States is implicated, even if that is not validated. Finally, Israel cannot do as effective a job as the United States could do. So I would see an Israeli attack would be the worst of all worlds and I strongly recommend against either encouraging or even admitting it if we were able to stop it.

Well, I’m going to sum up comments both on Iran and North Korea. The mistakes are enormous. Our diplomacy has been a total failure. As a result the situation has deteriorated to such a point that no attractive alternative is available to us. The least bad alternative is engaging with our allies in direct talks and try to create a course of pressures. In order to create a course of pressures we require an Article 7 sanction from the U.N. and I think probably to get that, the United States has to take regime change off the table. That’s why our allies are holding back. Not only do they not favor that action, they find it to be immensely counterproductive. So I would favor moving forward with direct talks, taking regime change off the table, creating the conditions for more force in developments at the talks, and considering the alternatives only after a long and serious effort has been made.