The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  Butler and his government hoped to see the NPT indefinitely extended, but he no more wanted the free ride of the nuclear powers to continue than the NAM states did. “The treaty had served34 the purpose of maintaining their exclusive club brilliantly,” he wrote, “in spite of the fact that they had never kept their side of the treaty bargain.… Their problem [now] was that they needed the agreement of those they had steadfastly rejected or ignored—the non-nuclear-weapon states.” Their initial strategy “was to behave as bullies, [but] the bullying hit the wall; it did not work. So another solution had to be found.” Butler played a central part both in formulating that solution and in negotiating it. He and his delegation developed a conceptual outline for what became “a series of documents35 on nuclear disarmament and what could be simply described as a prescription for generally better behavior, in the future, by the nuclear-weapon states.”

  The idea of supplementing the NPT with a further agreement among the treaty parties emerged from the Australian government’s concerns that Israel’s nuclear status might become a central and fatal issue at the conference (even though Israel was not, of course, participating). To forestall such a disaster, his government asked Butler to visit Israel several months prior to the conference “to seek its cooperation.”36 As he described it, “I spent two days in Jerusalem in a series of talks at the Israeli foreign ministry. At the end, I obtained agreement that, in conjunction with the conference, Israel would issue a statement that it supported the objectives of the treaty.” Butler had his brainstorm on the way out to the Middle East:

  It was during the long flight37 to Israel that I, along with one of my colleagues from Canberra, designed the concept of documents on future work under the NPT, separate from the extension decision, but to be adopted with it as a means of solving the overall 1995 extension problems.

  We subsequently handed this package to the South African delegation in New York and asked them to promote it, if they agreed with the approach. We judged that their influence would be considerable because of their new post-apartheid and post-nuclear-weapons status. South Africa agreed and then played a major role in the subsequent negotiations.

  After three weeks of hard negotiating by twenty countries including the five declared nuclear-weapon states, Butler wrote, “the possible final form38 of these documents was emerging, but the countries were by no means agreed.” Butler decided to pull together a core group somewhere outside the oppressive U.N. basement where the conference had been meeting (the group included Graham and Dhanapala):

  At the request of others,39 that move, on the second to the last night of the conference, was to the dining room of my apartment at Beekman Place, the residence provided to me by the Australian government.…

  I invited sixteen key players: the five nuclear-weapon states, the leaders of the non-aligned movement, some Western non-nuclear-weapon states, and Iran. Dinner started late, well after 9 p.m., fueled by not excessive quantities of Australian wine. The table conversation moved slowly from the periphery of the issues to the core. It established, above all, that the moment was serious. The nuclear-weapon states would have to agree to the draft documents or the NPT would not be extended without a vote [i.e., it would not be agreed upon by consensus]. If there was a vote, the extension would almost certainly go through, but the vote would be seriously divisive, the numbers would be poor.…

  We moved from the table into the sitting room where I had set out sixteen comfortable chairs and, of course, coffee. At about 2 a.m., agreement was reached. All would agree to the package of documents. All would implement them faithfully. We would all pass the word around next day, and twenty-four hours later, when the documents were printed, meet in a formal session of the whole conference to adopt them.

  Graham summarized succinctly what was included in the package that acquired the official name “Statement of Principles and Objectives for Nonproliferation and Disarmament” when it was adopted late on the last day of the conference:

  a CTBT by 1996,40 a fissile material cutoff treaty, and reaffirmation of Article VI commitments;

  continued pursuit of nuclear weapons reductions leading toward eventual elimination;

  additional NWFZs [nuclear-weapons-free zones], including one in the Middle East;

  enhanced verification; and

  universality of NPT membership.

  A NWFZ in the Middle East and universality of NPT membership were obvious allusions to Israel, but also perhaps to Iraq, which was still resisting complete disclosure to the IAEA and suffering under sanctions as a result. And for all the NPT members, these commitments were political, not legal, meaning that a state could terminate them when its political circumstances determined it to do so. At least they prevented a state from claiming that the matter was purely domestic. “Though [political commitments] do not41 give rise to legal responsibility,” a textbook of international law explains, “they may … have a significant bearing on the international legal rights and obligations of the states concerned.”

  As both Graham and Butler, from their differing perspectives, had hoped for and worked to achieve, the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference came to consensus on indefinitely extending the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and attaching to that document the politically binding “Statement of Principles and Objectives” designed to hasten accomplishing its goals.

  AS IF TO UNDERLINE the importance of the work advancing in Vienna and New York, a convoy of black Mercedeses crossed the border from Iraq into Jordan on the night of 7 August 1995 carrying Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel, his immediate family, and a small crowd of relatives into exile. Kamel had been the general in charge of the Iraqi atomic-bomb program. Two weeks after his arrival in Amman, on the evening of 22 August, he met with a delegation of UNSCOM officials for a three-hour debriefing. UNSCOM’s executive chairman, Rolf Ekéus, was present, as was the IAEA nuclear expert Maurice Zifferero, an UNSCOM chemical weapons specialist, and a representative of Jordan’s King Hussein who served as an interpreter.

  In the notes taken by the chemical weapons expert, Ekéus proposed to Kamel that the meeting begin with “the nuclear issue.”42 Zifferero took over and asked Kamel first of all for his “explanations on the full abandonment of the nuclear weapon programme by Iraq. Original Iraqi documents indicated that the programme had been terminated in January 1991 due to damage by coalition raids.” Kamel started with the Osirak reactor that the Israelis had bombed in 1981 and went on to describe both the subsequent electromagnetic isotope separation program and centrifuge-development efforts using both high-strength maraging steel and carbon fiber. He said they had studied “12 ton, then 9 ton43 and then 5 ton” implosion bomb designs; the “main aim,” he added, “was to deliver [the weapons] by aircraft or missile.” These “were only studies,” he said. “All the time they worked to make it smaller but had never reached a point close to testing.”

  Zifferero was skeptical of Kamel’s claim that only studies had been involved; he pointed out to Kamel that Iraq had invested a great deal of money in uranium enrichment. Without quite explaining the prodigality of the uranium program, Kamel repeated that “the reason for these studies was to use less uranium,” adding, “they had only a few centrifuges so they could not produce a lot.”

  The discussion moved on to biological weapons, then missiles and then chemical weapons, all of which Kamel admitted Iraq had been developing. Then, late in the debriefing, as he was explaining why the Iraqi leadership had chosen not to use chemical weapons against coalition forces in the 1991 war—“They realized that if chemical weapons were used, retaliation would be nuclear”—Kamel said plainly what the administration of George W. Bush would later obfuscate and deny: “All chemical weapons44 were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.”

  THE MOST IMMEDIATE major goal of the NPT extension conference’s “Statement of Principles and Objectives” was the Comprehensive Nuc
lear-Test-Ban Treaty. That treaty had been under negotiation at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva since January 1994 with the full support of the Clinton administration. Shortly after the NPT extension conference, and following the election of Jacques Chirac to the presidency of France in May 1995, France announced that it had stopped testing too soon and intended to conduct a series of eight tests in the South Pacific east of New Zealand. “This provoked a huge protest in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan,” Graham wrote. “In New Zealand, French restaurants changed their names; Australia cancelled some major defense contracts (and a national union of prostitutes announced that one could no longer speak of the French kiss). Japan threatened to cut off all trade. Chirac was quoted in the press as complaining to an aide, ‘Why didn’t someone tell me that this was the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima?’”

  The French president reversed his country’s policy early the following year, announcing a new posture of minimum deterrence that included ending tests and closing the French test site in the South Pacific, supporting a zero-yield CTBT, signing the third of three nuclear-weapon-free-zone protocols, halting production of HEU, and unilaterally reducing France’s deployed nuclear arsenal by 15 percent. “In retrospect,” Graham wrote, “the French tests were one of the best things that happened to the CTBT negotiation. As a result of this experience, the French really got religion.… They became one of the strongest supporters of the CTBT, having been one of the most recalcitrant.”45

  There was a battle as well within the U.S. weapons and defense bureaucracies over allowing tests up to some yield limit—Perry proposed five hundred tons—but Clinton agreed to support stockpile stewardship with an initial budget of $4 billion in tacit exchange for zero yield. (Not everyone was happy with the quid pro quo. Graham visited Los Alamos and found a hostile if generally polite audience. “Several of them,”46 he told me, “said the government had betrayed them. ‘They made a deal with us,’ one said, ‘that we would be able to work on nuclear weapons for our entire careers and they betrayed us.’ That didn’t seem like a very rational argument to me. Right at the end of the questioning, Sig Hecker stood up and made a really gracious speech. He said, ‘The CTBT is national policy, a moratorium is national policy, there are good reasons for it, and here’s what they are and we should support it.’ I went to lunch with him afterward and told him, ‘You know, Sig, I strongly support the CTBT, but you may recall that a predecessor of yours, Harold Agnew, used to complain that people had forgotten what nuclear weapons are like because we don’t have atmospheric tests any more. I wouldn’t be against having an internationally supervised atmospheric test once every five years or so. To remind people how awful these things are.’ Sig said, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking the same thing.’”)

  By July 1996, all the declared nuclear-weapons states had joined the testing moratorium, but negotiations had bogged down over Chinese, Russian, and British insistence that threshold nuclear states, India in particular (which had conducted its so-called peaceful nuclear test in 1974, its first and, in 1996, still its only), had to be necessary parties to the treaty for it to enter into force. The compromise the delegates found—requiring all states that were members of the Conference on Disarmament (CD) and had nuclear facilities on their soil to be signatories—would hold the treaty hostage to at least India’s and North Korea’s signatures. Both India and North Korea were still holdouts as late as 2010.

  The entry-into-force compromise, Graham wrote, failed to placate the Indians, who announced in August “that they would break47 consensus and block the treaty from being sent to the United Nations to be opened for signature, as was the CD practice.” Rather than allow the years of work on a comprehensive test ban to founder on India’s resistance, reported Keith Hansen, a member of the U.S. negotiating team, “countries favoring the Treaty48 devised a plan to get it to the UN General Assembly in New York.” Richard Butler went to work:

  For the subsequent month in New York, I held a recurring round of meetings with every member state of the United Nations to discuss and seek support for a procedural device I designed that would allow an identical treaty to the one negotiated in Geneva to be put as a resolution to the UN General Assembly. I met with member states three times in their regional groups, totaling some sixty meetings, before I was satisfied that the proposal would win.

  Butler’s “procedural device” involved submitting the draft resolution to the United Nations as a document for the General Assembly to consider, noting that it was, in Butler’s words to the Assembly, “identical—identical—to that negotiated by the Conference on Disarmament.” There was nothing that India could do, Hansen wrote, “other than to complain that the Treaty had been ‘hijacked’ out of Geneva and to try to defeat the Treaty in the General Assembly in New York, where only a majority of positive votes was required to adopt a resolution supporting the Treaty.”

  The Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty won that majority; it opened for signature at the United Nations in New York on 24 September 1996. Bill Clinton was the first to sign it. The American commitment gave Butler great personal satisfaction:

  I stood just feet away49 from President Clinton as he entered the first of what would be signatures by seventy-one states on the day the CTBT was opened for signature. I reflected on how twelve years earlier, a year after I had been appointed Australia’s first ambassador for disarmament, the Reagan administration had privately approached the prime minister of Australia and asked that I be removed because of my strong advocacy for the CTBT. The then director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Kenneth Adelman, nicknamed me “Red Richard” during that period.… For the record, Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke rejected the Reagan administration’s demand.

  By 2010 the CTBT had not yet entered into force, partly because the United States Senate in 1999 had voted against its ratification. U.S. politics took a radical turn to the right in 1994 with the election of Republican majorities in both the U.S. House and Senate for the first time since 1953. Congressional resistance to moving away from dependence on nuclear weapons paralleled renewed strategic insecurities between India and Pakistan in the final years of the last decade of the twentieth century.

  * With a half-life of only 12.3 years, tritium has to be replenished at the rate of about 5.5 percent per weapon per year as it decays into helium.

  * Still unnegotiated in 2010.

  * The NAM includes among its members Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

  THIRTEEN THE DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK

  INDIA HAD RESISTED allowing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty draft to be forwarded to the United Nations in August 1996—the resistance that Richard Butler and his colleagues had channeled around—partly to preserve its option to conduct developmental nuclear-weapons tests, including both boosted-fission (in which a fusion reaction in the bomb increases the energy of the explosion) and thermonuclear designs. It had been prepared to test late in the previous year, with devices actually emplaced in boreholes at its Pokhran test site in the Thar Desert, about 350 miles southwest of Delhi, but the preparations at Pokhran had been imaged by U.S. intelligence satellites. Frank Wisner, the U.S. ambassador to India, had actually shown the imagery to senior Indian officials in December 1995 to persuade them to desist. They did so, but learned in the process how to conceal their test activity from overhead observation.

  India abhorred the double standard built into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—“nuclear apartheid,”1 Indian political leaders called it. Prestige and international respect were important motives for Indian nuclear development. Acquiring a deterrent against both China and Pakistan was a powerful purpose as well, the more so since China had allied it
self with Pakistan and supported it with bomb-design information and testing. China had conducted a nuclear test as recently as 15 May 1995 (four days after the consensus agreement on indefinite extension of the NPT), flaunting its status as one of the privileged original five nuclear powers. Only if the original five committed to time-bound negotiations for nuclear elimination was India prepared to abandon nuclear weapons.

  With testing temporarily suspended in response to U.S. pressure, India’s several political parties debated whether to remain a nation with an ambiguous nuclear status and a minimum deterrent or to move on to become a full-scale, declared nuclear power. The price of doing so would be burdensome U.S. sanctions that would interfere with the nation’s ambitious program of economic development. Emphasizing how important the Indian defense establishment judged nuclear weapons to be, the hawkish Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) produced a manifesto during the campaign for parliamentary elections in May 1996 declaring that if it won it would “reevaluate the country’s2 nuclear policy and exercise the option to induct nuclear weapons.”

  The elections produced no clear winner among the parties, but the BJP won the largest number of votes. The Indian president gave the party fifteen days from the 16 May inauguration of its prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to build a majority coalition. Vajpayee immediately ordered nuclear testing to proceed. At least one test device3 was lowered into a shaft at Pokhran, activity which the United States once again detected and protested. “The scientists wanted no delay, recalling the setback they suffered in late 1995,” wrote George Perkovich, a historian of India’s nuclear program. He went on: