The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  These facts are obvious but their implications have been blurred. There is no doubt that, if the peoples of the world were more fully aware of the inherent danger of nuclear weapons and the consequences of their use, they would reject them, and not permit their continued possession or acquisition on their behalf by their governments, even for an alleged need for self-defense.

  Nuclear weapons are held by a handful of states which insist that these weapons provide unique security benefits, and yet reserve uniquely to themselves the right to own them. This situation is highly discriminatory and thus unstable; it cannot be sustained. The possession of nuclear weapons by any state is a constant stimulus to other states to acquire them.

  (The last sentence quoted, of course, is a consensus version of the axiom of proliferation that Butler stated more succinctly in Monterey.)

  The U.S. secretary of defense, Robert Gates, in the last months of George W. Bush’s second term as president, rephrased the Canberra Commission’s axiom from a nuclearist point of view. In doing so, he inadvertently confirmed it. In an October 2008 speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Gates said, “As long as others have23 nuclear weapons, we must maintain some level of these weapons ourselves.” The reasons Gates gave for maintaining a nuclear arsenal were “to deter potential adversaries and to reassure over two dozen allies and partners who rely on our nuclear umbrella for their security, making it unnecessary for them to develop their own.” Gates may have noticed the obvious weakness in his argument—that eliminating nuclear weapons would eliminate any nuclear threat from “potential adversaries”—because he added the secondary condition that our allies and partners (implicitly, those who have not acquired nuclear weapons) need our protection—or else, Gates speculated, they would proliferate themselves. But such extended deterrence was revealed long ago to be a deceit, as Henry Kissinger notoriously cautioned a NATO conference in Brussels all the way back in 1979:

  We must face the fact24 that it is absurd to base the strategy of the West on the credibility of the threat of mutual suicide.… The European allies should not keep asking us to multiply strategic assurances that we cannot possibly mean, or, if we do mean, we should not want to execute, because if we execute we risk the destruction of civilization.

  In fact, states have sought nuclear arsenals when they perceived their existence to be threatened, a perception that any program of nuclear elimination must address. (States have gone nuclear secondarily for “prestige,” a wasting asset in a world that increasingly stigmatizes nuclear possession and is likely in the course of time to make such possession a crime against humanity.) Extended deterrence would survive in a world without nuclear weapons, bilaterally or through regional security alliances such as NATO, but it would be conventional. No nuclear power in any case has used nuclear weapons against an opposing belligerent, either conventionally or nuclear-armed, in more than sixty years. Nations, including the United States and the former Soviet Union, have preferred to accept stalemate and even defeat, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan, rather than escalate to nuclear war. Is there better evidence of the military uselessness of nuclear weapons than six decades of futility?

  “How do you prevent states from seeking nuclear weapons?” Butler asked rhetorically. “No state should have them,” he told me. “Then, by definition, no one will seek to get them.”

  Expressed so abstractly, the Canberra Commission’s fundamental argument for nuclear elimination sounds naïve. What about cheating? Wouldn’t there always be an advantage to be gained in a world without nuclear weapons by cheating—by clandestinely building or reconstituting a nuclear arsenal, or simply by holding back a few nuclear weapons when other states reduce and then eliminate their own? Such in fact has been one major argument that nuclearists have offered against nuclear elimination: that it will be impossible to guarantee that all nuclear weapons have been eliminated and no new ones devised.

  The Canberra Commission’s answer to that fundamental fear was verification, but it understood that verification could never be conclusive. A world without nuclear weapons would be a world living with a degree of risk of cheating. How much risk the parties to nuclear zero would be willing to accept is a political question. But that is nothing new, the commission’s report pointed out:

  Effective verification is critical25 to the achievement and maintenance of a nuclear weapon free world. Before states agree to eliminate nuclear weapons they will require a high level of confidence that verification arrangements would detect promptly any attempt to cheat the disarmament process.… A political judgment will be needed on whether the levels of assurance possible from the verification regime are sufficient. All existing arms control and disarmament agreements have required political judgments of this nature because no verification system provides absolute certainty.

  Butler expressed this argument to me more colorfully in a telephone conversation. “What about rogues26 and criminals? The answer is, they couldn’t bust the system because we would use conventional means to prevent them. The world would rise up against such people.”

  Monitoring for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty27 had already reached such a sophisticated level by 2006, when the monitoring network was only 60 percent complete, that more than twenty CTBT seismic stations detected the first North Korean nuclear test of 9 October as far away as South America, even though its explosive yield was less than one kiloton. Besides 170 seismic stations arrayed across the world, the CTBT’s monitoring system includes eleven hydroacoustic stations capable of hearing the explosion of a fifty-pound TNT test charge ten thousand miles away; sixty infrasound stations listening for low-frequency sound waves from above-ground nuclear tests; and eighty radionuclide stations sniffing for bomb-derived radioactive particles and radioactive noble gases. Once the CTBT is fully in force, wrote the Science magazine reporter Daniel Clery, “its executive council,28 if faced with a suspected test … can call for the CTBT’s ultimate verification measure: an on-site inspection. Within days of a suspected test, a team of up to 40 people can be on the scene and scouring an area up to 1000 square kilometers using overflights, mobile radionuclide detectors, microseismic arrays to detect aftershocks, gamma-ray detectors, ground-penetrating radar, magnetic and gravitational field mapping, and electrical conductivity measurements.”

  What if a suspected violator refuses to cooperate? That would be a material violation of the CTBT, potentially invoking a full range of responses from the international community, up to and including invasion. Richard Butler’s world that would “rise up against such people” is no peacemaker fantasy. It’s the world of this narrative, the world you’ve been reading about, acting imperfectly but with steady determination and increasing confidence on behalf of nuclear limitation and foreclosure: from Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Ronald Reagan’s initiatives to end the Cold War, to the voluntary disarming of the former Soviet republics and the securing of nuclear materials, to the U.S. and Russia’s deepening mutual arms reductions, to the long effort to roll up Saddam Hussein’s nuclear-weapons program, to the up-and-down negotiations with North Korea that have nevertheless prevented another Korean war, to international diplomatic pressure brought to bear effectively on India and Pakistan, to the persistent march forward of negotiations toward treaties to limit nuclear testing and proliferation. Revolutions are not imposed by fiat; they move from conception to reality in the practical experience of accomplishing them and living them through. Working through the day-to-day challenges of a world finally freed from the burden of a long, polarizing ideological conflict, hardly aware of where we were going, we find ourselves in the second decade of the twenty-first century well along the way to eliminating nuclear weapons once and for all.

  IT SHOULD COME AS no surprise that resistance increases as we approach closer to that goal. In the years since the Canberra Commission issued its report, other commissions have offered proposals for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Hans Blix chaired a Swedish-sponsored international commissi
on in 2006, Australia’s Gareth Evans an international commission cochaired by Japan and Australia in 2008. Inspired by the Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik in 1986, the U.S. statesmen George Shultz, Sam Nunn, Bill Perry, and Henry Kissinger came together twenty years later at the invitation of Shultz and the physicist Sid Drell to organize an ongoing program for advancing the elimination of nuclear weapons. They have sustained it with public statements, extensive analysis, and private discussions with national leaders in the United States and abroad. Barack Obama endorsed their call to eliminate nuclear weapons when he became president. All these various groups and individuals, and many others besides, have agreed fundamentally on both the need for nuclear elimination and the political and technical steps necessary to achieve such a transforming goal.

  “For fifteen or twenty years now,” Butler told me in frustration in 2009, “we have not lacked clear knowledge of the nature of the problem, of its urgency, and of the steps that can be taken to solve it. What we’re confronted with, however, is political cowardice—politicians kicking the ball down the road. ‘We agree with you,’ they say, ‘but we have a few rednecks among our constituents. Can we do it after the next election?’ However one skins the cat, it comes down to this: As long as nuclear weapons exist, they will proliferate, they will be used, and any use will be catastrophic. We know exactly what needs to be done. We could do it in a morning. All the nuts-and-bolts stuff might take another five or ten years.”

  Whether it will be done depends on the political courage of national leaders, in the United States first of all. Barack Obama pledged to make reducing and eliminating the world’s lethal stockpiles of nuclear weapons a central goal of his administration. In the spring of 2009, the new young president of the United States told the world from a public square in Prague:

  The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. No nuclear war was fought between the United States and the Soviet Union, but generations lived with the knowledge that their world could be erased in a single flash of light. Cities like Prague that existed for centuries, that embodied the beauty and the talent of so much of humanity, would have ceased to exist.

  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.

  Obama then reformulated Richard Butler’s axiom of proliferation as an assertion of personal and American responsibility:

  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.

  Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. And as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.

  So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.

  We won’t do it in a morning, and the nuts-and-bolts stuff, given mutual suspicions, will probably take more than five or ten years. Obama’s first secretary of defense, Robert Gates, outspokenly opposed it, as did a host of political and military-industrial leaders who feared cheating or a decline in government largess or who balked at giving away the long-standing political advantages of threat inflation.

  India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea are the hard cases, though each has security needs that the world community must sooner or later organize to meet. India and Pakistan began pursuing confidence-building measures, with some success, after a near-nuclear war over Kargil in 1999. Israel is willing to discuss joining a Middle Eastern nuclear-free zone, though its terms for doing so are demanding. North Korea continues to pursue an alliance with the United States that might provide it with light-water reactors to boost its electrical supply.

  Will eliminating nuclear weapons make the world safe for conventional war? If by conventional war one means massed tanks and foot soldiers, such war is already obsolete. Bill Perry’s high-tech battlefield sensors and precision weapons, demonstrated with increasing effectiveness in two wars between the United States and Iraq, made it so. The onrushing trend in military armaments is toward what one analyst calls “weapons of precise destruction.”29 Even ICBMs can now be fitted (if they must be) with conventional warheads; when a missile warhead can be delivered via GPS within a three-foot circle across five thousand miles, a small charge of high explosives will do. Nuclear weapons, never weapons of warfare except in the grandiose imaginations of air-power fantasists, have reverted to their original function: They are terror weapons. Are we terrorists?

  So-called collateral damage—killing civilians in the course of military attacks—is increasingly condemned in a world in which it has become increasingly visible to television, cell-phone cameras, and the Web. More fundamentally, every large population in the world has passed through at least the first stage of the demographic transition; with declining birth and death rates, families produce fewer children; as numbers of children per family decline, parents are progressively less willing to see their children pressed into military service to be slaughtered in war. The demographic transition signals increased global economic well-being, itself a stimulus to negotiated rather than belligerent relationships between groups and nations. That technological and economic interconnection fosters nonviolent relations has been a questionable argument in favor of technological advance, but it appears today finally to have reached a takeoff point.

  Such a change on a world scale finds precedent in the progressive decline in private violence in the West across six hundred years as governments centralized, established professional armies, and restrained the Hobbesian violence of the commons. The middle class emerged demanding protection in exchange for the taxes it paid; ordinary citizens gained access to courts of law for the nonviolent settlement of disputes. Homicide rates were on the order of 50 per 100,000 people in medieval Europe; social control over private violence limits those rates to about 1.5 per 100,000 in Europe today. (They are higher in the United States, partly because of the ubiquity of guns, but not much higher—5.6 per 100,000 in 2007. They are highest in states where governments are weak and social controls inadequate—50 per 100,000 in Sierra Leone, 49.1 in El Salvador, 20 in Kazakhstan, 16.5 in Russia.)

  The tightening web of social controls over public violence is just the interconnected net of national and international efforts I have described in this book. If it seems stumbling and ad hoc, it is no more so than were social controls over private violence as they began to emerge in early modern Europe. This time around, with that history behind us and with modern resources and communications (and a far greater threat to the human world looming over it than private violence ever was), the transition will not require six hundred years. If not in my lifetime, probably in the lifetime of my children, and certainly in my grandchildren’s lifetimes, weapons of mass destruction will be outlawed, as Blix’s commission, among other entities, has already notably proposed. In time, possession of a nuclear weapon will be judged a crime against humanity. Such a judgment would only codify what is already an evident fact.

  I BEGAN THIS WORK of writing the history of the nuclear age in 1979, when I was forty-two.
It appeared to me then—it appeared to many people then—that the future would burn out in nuclear holocaust if the nuclear powers continued on their reckless course of waging bitter ideological conflict behind incendiary palisades of missiles and bombs. I had been a novelist before and a magazine journalist; I brought no special knowledge to the work, only a commitment as a citizen to understand and to witness to my convictions.

  Early in my research, long before the Internet, I happened to be scanning the shelves of a Midwestern library for books that might inform me about the numbers of deaths from twentieth-century wars. One title caught my attention, a slim volume with the curious name Twentieth Century Book of the Dead. I pulled it down from the shelf, opened it, and was immediately drawn in. Its author was a Scotsman, Gil Elliot. A few pages along, with quiet ferocity, he redefined the whole ugly twentieth-century business of war and mass killing:

  It is absurd to look upon30 the hundred million or so man-made deaths of the twentieth century as the “cost” of the conflict, as though they were the casualty returns of a field commander. They are more directly comparable with the scale of death from disease and plague which was the accepted norm before this century. Indeed, man-made death has largely replaced these as a source of untimely death. This is the kind of change that Hegel meant when he said that a quantitative change, if large enough, could bring about a qualitative change. The quality of this particular change becomes clear if we connect the present total of deaths with the scale of death inherent in the weapons now possessed by the large powers. Nuclear strategists talk in terms of hundreds of millions of deaths, of the destruction of whole nations and even of the entire human race. The moral significance is inescapable. If morality refers to relations between individuals, or between the individual and society, then there can be no more fundamental moral issue than the continuing survival of individuals and societies. The scale of man-made death is the central moral as well as material fact of our time.