“You might be able to prevent it—or you might not; the result isn’t clear, but you know that without doing something, the likelihood of it happening increases dramatically,” Nunn says. “The question is: Would you act?”
Turner has a false reputation for being purely impulsive. He has a penchant for wanting to act fast, yes, when he believes he has sufficient information before him, but impetuous, no. At every stage of his life, he has demonstrated a knack for surrounding himself with enormously gifted people not known for making rash decisions.
The man who planted a seed of obligation in Turner’s mind, at least as it pertained to nukes, was Tim Wirth. In early 2000, Turner was given an episode of 60 Minutes II to watch, a segment that focused on nuclear weapons threats.
Turner was riveted. Afterward, he phoned Charlie Curtis, a senior administrator helping Wirth run the UN Foundation, and asked him to give a blunt assessment of what he knew based on his own contacts within the intelligence community.
“I told Ted, ‘If you think the strategic posture of the US and Russia, with both countries still having warheads pointed at each other, is scary, I’ll tell you something that is really scary and that’s the vulnerability of nuclear and biological material to theft by those who want to do us harm.’ Of course, this was just prior to 9/11.”
Curtis, former defense secretary William Perry, and Nunn had developed contacts with Russians who shared their concerns about nuclear security not only in Soviet republics but across a roster that has grown today to include North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan. Curtis said the problem was getting anyone to listen outside the usual channels.
“Ted had made it clear in several speeches he had given that his ambition was to totally eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth in his lifetime,” Curtis said.
Turner, he noted, had just given $1 billion to found the UN Foundation on behalf of humanitarian problems. “He said he wanted to have an impact on nuclear dangers, too. And he wasn’t just saying it. He was serious. The growing risk of terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons or materials shook him up. He instantly saw what the potential outcome of it would be.”
Turner, who was neither a nuclear expert nor a politician, asked fellow Georgian Nunn in the months before 9/11: “What can I do?”
He told the former senator that if a catastrophe ensued, “then I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I had been in a position to do something and hadn’t. I would spend every moment for the rest of my life dealing with regret.”
Sometimes, governments need a push, and this forms a fulcrum in the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s genesis story. Turner approached Nunn with the idea of launching a private organization to help reduce these dangers to present and future generations. As a private citizen, Turner could not affect direct diplomacy between nations. That’s left up to elected leaders.
But Nunn was involved with former lawmakers, cabinet secretaries from both Republican and Democratic administrations, counterparts from the old Soviet Union who had become friends, and a range of diplomats.
“I think we could have an impact if we worked the back channels,” he told Turner.
Turner, Nunn, and former NTI president Curtis (today succeeded by respected nuclear expert Joan Rohlfing) undertook a six-month “scoping study” with experts around the globe to determine whether a nongovernmental organization could have an impact with the space that exists between different nation states. They determined that a private organization could indeed make a difference if it comprised the right people. NTI was established in January of 2001—supported by a pledge of a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of AOL Time Warner stock from Turner.
NTI does not function like the garden-variety think-tank or policy center typically nested on a university campus. It is respected by both national defense hardliners and veterans of the nuclear freeze movement. Why? Because just as Reagan and Gorbachev did, it believes a safer world, free of nukes, is possible.
Co-chaired by Nunn and Turner, its board of directors includes former US military and governmental leaders, Russian experts on security, members of the UK parliament, and academics and political figures from countries such as China, Japan, Jordan, India, and Pakistan. NTI also counts former US secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger as important allies. The esteemed circle of statespeople includes more than sixteen former secretaries of state, defense, energy and former joint chiefs of the military who served under both Democrat and Republican presidents.
“It’s a powerhouse group of individuals,” says former US senator Alan K. Simpson, who is troubled by how partisan wrangling is stymieing America’s ability to address dangers that need unified cooperation.
Today, NTI engages governments and thought leaders at the highest levels to improve global nuclear materials security and build a consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons, preventing their proliferation from falling into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world. NTI’s positions have been core elements of President Obama’s nuclear policies, appearing throughout his landmark speech in Prague in April 2009.
Obama said in that address:
Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.
Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city—be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague—could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be—for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival.
Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked—that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.
Turner proudly circulated copies of the speech because he knew NTI and friends had the ear of the president, who said at the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit attended by Nunn, Allison, and their cohorts: “The single biggest threat to US security, both short-term, medium-term and long-term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
For Nunn, his knowledge is based on experience. When he accepted the prestigious Hessian Peace Prize in Wiesbaden, Germany, in June 2008 for his work with NTI, Nunn shared a story. In 1962, when he was a twenty-four-year-old staff lawyer for the House Armed Services Committee, Nunn was sent on a three-week fact-finding trip to tour NATO bases in Europe. It coincided with eruption of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
As Nunn notes, if President Kennedy had elected to take out Soviet missile sites in Cuba, the prevailing fear was that it would trigger a nuclear war. Military bases in Europe would have been on the front lines of attack by Soviet weaponry.
“The fact that the fate of the world in the early 1960s was on the shoulders of a few people from both sides who had only moments to decide whether to launch, made a deep and lasting impression on me,” Nunn explains. “The survival of humankind has got to rest on firmer ground than that. From this early period of my life, I have been dedicated to doing everything possible to increase warning time for both sides and to take other steps to avoid the chance of nuclear war.”
At Ramstein Air Force Base during his visit there long ago, the senior commander for US Air Force operations in Europe at the time told Nunn that if the conflict broke out, he had only a few minutes to scramble all of his aircraft loaded with nuclear weapons. The planes would be primary Soviet targets because they were designed to deliver the first death blows to the enemy.
Pointing to the interview of former defense secretary Robert McNamara in Errol Morris’s documentary Fog of War, Turner and Nunn say civilization has been dodging bullets on nuclear security for too long. McNamara, who served under Kennedy, spoke of the tension that erupted with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba. Shortly before he died, McNamara warned that “rationality will not save us” if we are counting on it being an effective stopgap to nuclear war or terrorism.
He told Morris: “I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end [of the Cuban missile crisis]. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today. The major lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is this: the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations. Is it right and proper that today there are seventy-five hundred strategic offensive nuclear warheads, of which twenty-five hundred are on fifteen-minute alert, to be launched by the decision of one human being?”
Reflecting on McNamara’s words, Turner asks, “What if the future of the world rested on the intellectual capabilities and demeanor of people like Sarah Palin or Donald Trump or Michelle Bachmann?”
A dozen years after the Cuban missile crisis, Nunn was back in Europe touring NATO facilities again, this time as a newly elected US senator. He was alarmed to learn that NATO forces were prepared to use short-range battlefield nuclear weapons at a moment’s notice if it appeared the Soviets were going to invade Western Europe. Even the appearance of an invasion could trigger grave consequences if actions were misinterpreted.
“The bottom line is that in the event of a war, we would have, by necessity, moved up the ladder of escalation very rapidly,” he explains. “I spent much of my time in the Senate working to strengthen the conventional forces of NATO, so we could move away—both operationally and psychologically—from a strategy that emphasized first strike capability with tactical nuclear weapons.”
Although the philosophy shared by the Reagan Administration was controversial in some quarters, including the nuclear freeze movement, Nunn believed adamantly in a strong defense and mutually assured destruction—MAD—as the best deterrence.
“The premise was simple: If you know you’re going to be obliterated whether you launch your weapons first or last, you have a profound incentive never to use them at all. It was an understanding that we and the Soviets reached during the 1980s and for the time, it was effective. No one wins in a nuclear war.” It is contingent, however, on dealing with rational minds on both sides of the equation.
After the Soviet Union splintered, at the very end of Mikhail Gorbachev’s tenure, rogue members of the Russian military attempted a coup d’état that resulted in Gorbachev being placed under house arrest. “As President Gorbachev was released from house arrest following the failed coup, a Russian friend contacted me and said I needed to make an urgent trip to Moscow to meet with the new Russian leaders and President Gorbachev himself,” Nunn explains.
In previous meetings, Nunn always found Gorbachev to be candid and direct. “As I left the meeting, I asked him, ‘Mr. President, did you retain command and control over the Soviet nuclear weapons during the coup attempt?’”
President Gorbachev looked away and did not answer. “That was enough for me,” Nunn says. “Gorbachev was rational, but it was not clear who was in charge of the nuclear arsenal. The Soviet Union was coming apart. I believed that the end of the Soviet empire would speed the march of freedom and reduce the risk of war, but I left Moscow convinced that it would also present a grave global security challenge.”
Nunn trusted Gorbachev, but soon Gorbachev was out. Boris Yeltsin, known for his heavy drinking and erratic behavior, was now in charge. The fact that individuals like Yeltsin could find themselves in command of weapons that could end civilization is one of the reasons why Turner regards nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert among the most serious threats to humanity’s survival.
After the Berlin Wall fell, Turner admits that he lulled himself into believing nuclear dangers had diminished.
However, Nunn noted that the level of risk could be seen as even more perilous, because, to this day, the United States and Russia still have thousands of weapons pointed at each other. “We still have the risks associated with the large nuclear arsenals in the United States and Russia, coupled with the dangers of weapons or materials getting into the hands of terrorists,” he says.
Before Nunn retired from the Senate in 1997, he teamed with Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) to sponsor foresighted, bipartisan legislation known as the “Nunn-Lugar program,” to help the former Soviet republics secure and destroy their excess nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. At the time of the break-up of the Soviet Union, there was enough highly enriched uranium and plutonium stockpiled in warehouses to make between forty thousand and sixty thousand nuclear weapons. The material was scattered across 250 buildings in fifty different locations and eleven time zones. Plus, there were biological agents and chemical weapons, and thousands of scientists who knew how to harness them, many suddenly out of work after the Soviet Union collapsed.
The Nunn-Lugar legislation facilitated the dismantling of thousands of warheads in Russia, the removal of weapons from Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, and, notably, it made money available to pay the salaries of out of work engineers who perfected weapons of mass destruction that were never used.
In the post–Cold War world, Nunn said conventional wisdom saw fears about a nuclear exchange abating. Aside from the dangers of engagement between nuclear superpowers, the risk of a regional nuclear conflict has increased. Nunn points toward North and South Korea, Pakistan and India, and Iran and Israel as potential flashpoints.
But the biggest hobgoblin for Sam Nunn—“And it scares the bejesus out of me as well,” Turner says—is the specter of not one bomb reaching the hands of terrorists, but two, or more.
“Were they to get their hands on one bomb or able to assemble all of the pieces of a bomb, there is little doubt that they would use it,” Nunn says. “It’s horrible to think of an American city being hit, but there are other scenarios that would drag us and the rest of the world into a deeper nightmare.”
Nunn says it would commence a chain reaction of responses that would be difficult to contain, not only militarily. “Forevermore, humanity would be scared not only by what happened but be gripped in the paralysis of what could happen again. This would shake us to our core.”
“If they had another bomb and say, held another city hostage and then detonated it, you would never again know when the terrorists are bluffing or not.”
The effects would be massive flight from other likely target cities causing further unrest. Turner sees a parallel between the disarray caused by a nuclear event and the flight caused by climate change if coastal areas are inundated by rising seas and breadbasket regions turned into deserts. And while partisans try to cast doubt on the science behind climate change, there is little debate, within government intelligence circles, that the terrorist pursuit of fissile material is real.
In his book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, Graham Allison included example after example of illicit attempts to obtain nuclear material, and his file full of attempts and misses continues to grow. In a follow-up interview with me, he notes how an officer in the Russian Navy in 1993 burglarized a storage facility hou
sing fuel for nuclear submarines and left with pieces of reactor core containing ten pounds of highly enriched uranium. A year later, by accident, police in Czechoslovakia discovered eight pounds of processed uranium in a car in Prague. And in 2000, Georgian nationals had two pounds of the same valuable material when they were arrested near the city of Batumi. The odds alone would suggest some uranium or plutonium has slipped away. Securing it at its source of production and implementing a detailed and guarded line of provenance is a far safer and more efficient calculation than relying on stolen material somehow being discovered as it moves through a porous gauntlet. Certainly, terrorists know there are plenty of places to shop.
Allison is revered by leaders in both political parties and has been a master in devising war games scenarios, including those involving potential conflict with a nuclear Iran or North Korea. After Allison’s book was published, Turner received a copy. He cancelled appointments and ploughed through it in an evening.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he says.
Turner wondered if it was wise to publicly disclose how bad a nuclear event would be. A few colleagues said it could “give terrorists ideas,” make citizens scared, or induce a panic. Others accused Allison of exaggerating the threat, being a Cassandra and writing a jeremiad, but he, as a former assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton Administration, is used to hearing from those who try to minimize the danger.
In fact, Allison says, in the years prior to the al Qaeda attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, the Central Intelligence Agency picked up chatter exchanged among terrorists who fantasized about hastening their own “American Hiroshima.”
Osama bin Laden put out feelers, attempting to buy highly enriched uranium from agents in South Africa as far back as 1992. Chechen separatists, with cells operating in Russia and many of the former Soviet republics where former nuclear labs sat idle, were also contacted by al Qaeda representatives who wanted to acquire bomb-building materials and enlist nuclear engineers to package a device. Commandeering airliners and crashing them into the World Trade Center, Allison says, was actually al Qaeda’s second choice. “With regard to the plane attacks, some of us believed that terrorists could turn aircraft into missiles. We discussed it in the 1990s, but we were dismissed as being alarmist and fanciful. How do you surpass the terror that you inflicted on 9/11? You return to your original game plan, which is staging a nuclear event.”
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 25