Nuclear Proliferation and U.S. Responsibilities

Nuclear Proliferation and U.S. Responsibilites

by John Holdren

The nuclear test series conducted by India and Pakistan constitute a far-reaching calamity that's bad for the two countries, the region and the world. In transforming India and Pakistan from dormant and undeclared nuclear-weapon states to active and declared ones, the tests turn the two countries into prospective targets as well as origins of nuclear strikes. The tests also will trigger sanctions that will sour relations and slow economic and environmental progress; promote re-examination of nuclear options by other threshold states; imperil the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; and deal a dangerous blow to the worldwide nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear arms reduction regimes.

This calamity cannot be blamed on India and Pakistan, alone, however. The United States and the other established nuclear-weapon powers are culpable too, for failing to sharply devalue the currency of nuclear weapons in world affairs in the aftermath of the Cold War. Yes, the U.S. and Russia have reduced the number of nuclear weapons in their combined nuclear stockpiles more than two-fold from the Cold War peak of 70,000. But the arsenals remain immense and the two countries give every sign of planning to maintain formidable nuclear forces indefinitely.

It is particularly telling that the U.S., possessing the most powerful conventional armed forces in the world and faced with no plausible non-nuclear military contingency with which these forces could not easily cope, still has not found it possible to say that nuclear weapons are of no use to us except to deter others from using theirs.

Instead, seven years after the disintegration of our one serious military rival, the U.S. retains a stockpile of more than 11,000 nuclear weapons and has no specific plan or timetable for reducing this number below 6,000 or 7,000 (even assuming the ratification of START II by the Russian Duma). In addition, the U.S. has failed to make a commitment to seek a global prohibition on nuclear weapons on any time scale— not in 20 years, not in 50, not in 100.

The U.S. has not even agreed to relinquish the "right" we have long asserted to resort to the use of nuclear weapons before anyone uses them against us. U.S. doctrine for employment of nuclear weapons remains "first use if necessary," which includes a considerable ambiguity about whether we would feel free to use nuclear weapons in retaliation against (or even in preemption of) a chemical or biological attack by a country that does not have nuclear weapons.

U.S. non-proliferation rhetoric therefore has a certain "do as we say, not as we do" ring to it. And it sounds all the more hypocritical given that the United States has no hostile neighbors and has almost no enemies, while some of the countries we expect to refrain from acquiring or brandishing nuclear weapons have neighbors that are not only hostile but nuclear armed.

Even some of the simplest steps that nuclear-weapon states might have promoted to take the luster off these weapons as emblems of major-power status have been neglected. We have not, for example, bestirred ourselves to admit a single non-nuclear weapon state to permanent membership in the UN Security Council. All of the permanent members possess nuclear weapons. Can we really be surprised if countries aspiring to recognition as major powers decide that becoming a declared nuclear-weapon state is a prerequisite?

The nuclear explosions in India and Pakistan should serve as a wake-up call for those who believe that a handful of countries could succeed in claiming the right and the requirement to deploy nuclear forces indefinitely while other countries refrain. If the global non-proliferation bargain embodied in the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is not to unravel completely, the U.S. and the other declared nuclear-weapon states must move more decisively toward keeping their side of that bargain.

America is in a position to lead the way. We should declare that nuclear weapons are a plague on the planet, that they should be prohibited from the possession of all states and that we are committed to achieving the conditions that would make such a prohibition possible within decades. We should also say that, in the interim in which the United States continues to possess nuclear weapons, we will not under any circumstances use these weapons against a country that has not used them first.

Through sins of omission and commission alike, the U.S. has been an accomplice in the follies of India and Pakistan. It is not obvious that more leadership and less hypocrisy from the U.S. and the other established nuclear-weapon powers would have tipped the balance against testing in these two countries. But it ought to be plain that the intransigence of the major weapon states in relation to their own nuclear arsenals strengthens the hands of pro-nuclear weapon factions in threshold states, weakening the case against these weapons and providing an additional push toward proliferation. If we do not move to correct this, we increase the chances that the recent nuclear follies will not be the last.