Nuclear Weapons for All? The Risks of a New Scramble for the Bomb

The global financial order has been shaken. Could the global system to prevent nuclear proliferation be next?

Amid the pressures of the Cold War, the United States led the construction of an international system meant to encourage the secure use of the atom for energy and other peaceful purposes and discourage the spread of nuclear weapons to more countries. Then, as now, a breakdown of that system would heighten the risk that events of epic lethality—and untold victims—would, at some point, ensue.

As Barack Obama becomes president, worry about just such a breakdown is mounting among nonproliferation specialists and foreign policy strategists across the political spectrum. Warns Joseph Cirincione, author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons and president of the Ploughshares Fund, "We're on the verge of a system collapse."

That view is not extreme. It has, instead, become alarmingly mainstream. In December, an interim report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States put it this way: "It appears that we are at a 'tipping point' in proliferation. If Iran and North Korea proceed unchecked to build nuclear arsenals, there is a serious possibility of a cascade of proliferation following. And as each new nuclear power is added the probability of a terror group getting a nuclear bomb increases."

The growing fears of nuclear terrorism and the nuclear ambitions of Iran, North Korea, and perhaps other upstarts are likely to drive major changes in U.S. national security policy during the Obama presidency—and some unusually active nuclear diplomacy. "On the nuclear front," says former Defense Secretary William Perry, "President Obama will face a daunting set of problems, none of which can be solved unilaterally."

In aiming for big changes in America's nuclear posture and its approach to nonproliferation, Obama will almost certainly encounter resistance from parts of the national security establishment. One flash-point issue will be whether to replace many of America's nuclear warheads with more modern variants—even as the overall number of such weapons comes down.

But Obama will also find surprising bipartisan support for making a historic policy shift that until recently would have been seen as little more than a liberal pipe dream: coming out in favor of the eventual abolition of all nuclear weapons. This proposal, long dismissed as utopian and impossible, would be pursued painstakingly over decades, and the United States would maintain its nuclear deterrent as long as other countries kept their nukes. But the idea has won critical support from former senior Republican and Democratic statesmen not known as naive peaceniks.

In the Wall Street Journal last year, "the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons" was urged by Republicans George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and Democrats Sam Nunn and Perry. The four argued that proclaiming that vision as policy "is the only way to build the kind of international trust and broad cooperation that will be required to effectively address today's threats."

They and other specialists see the goal as central to protecting the nonproliferation system, as well as to promoting efforts to reduce and better control fissile materials. The vision of eventual nuclear abolition is a key part of the nonproliferation system and its cornerstone—the 1968 Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons—and was critical in attracting the support of the nuclear "have-nots."

This new push is gathering support overseas and late last year spawned a "Global Zero" advocacy campaign. The most important backer for the goal is probably Obama himself, who during the campaign vowed, "Here's what I'll say as president: America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons."

In some respects, the interlocking nonproliferation system of treaties, agreements, export controls, and security alliances has fared better than might have been expected. In 1963, President John Kennedy warned that if trends persisted, there could be 25 nuclear-armed nations by the close of the 1970s. Today, there are nine, including the five originals: the United States, Russia (previously the U.S.S.R.), Britain, France, and China. Four other countries now have nuclear weapons but operate outside of the NPT: India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.

And there are successes. Decades ago, a smattering of countries started but then abandoned weapons research efforts. They include such states as Switzerland, Sweden, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, and Argentina. Apartheid-era South Africa actually built bombs before dismantling them. Saddam Hussein's Iraq had run an ambitious nuclear weapons research effort before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. And, more recently, a foreign policy triumph during the administration of George W. Bush was the verified, negotiated elimination of Libya's nuclear weapons program. Much of its atomic equipment and materials was shipped from North Africa to U.S. facilities at Oak Ridge, Tenn.

The Bush administration has also been able to focus international attention on preventing proliferation at the United Nations and through efforts to interdict suspect shipments of nuclear gear through its Proliferation Security Initiative. At the same time, the bipartisan Nunn-Lugar program dating from the early 1990s has funded efforts to secure nuclear materials and facilities and employ weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union.

And yet more than 17 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world's nuclear weapons still total more than 25,000—some 95 percent of them in Russia and the United States. More than 40 countries hold a portion of the nearly 3,000 tons of fissile material. "This nuclear legacy is the result not only of the Cold War," write Ivo Daalder and Jan Lodal, two nuclear policy thinkers and former U.S. officials, in a recent Foreign Affairs article. They also blame U.S. administrations with "nuclear policies and thinking [that] have remained essentially unchanged."

What are changing, however, are the nuclear threats. The trend lines, for the most part, look bad, and the list of challenges starts with North Korea and Iran.

Despite plenty of tough U.S. rhetoric and hopes for regime change, North Korea during the Bush years has expanded its estimated nuclear stash from one or two bombs' worth of plutonium to perhaps eight. The secretive, hard-line communist government has broken into the world's de facto nuclear club, having conducted one underground test blast in 2006 and pulled out of the NPT. A six-nation negotiating process produced a deal for eventual denuclearization, and the North has stopped producing plutonium. But Pyongyang has refused to deal with questions about a possible, parallel uranium enrichment program and seems intent on dragging out the talks and reaping more economic and political gains. More than six years after the nuclear dispute erupted, there is no confidence that North Korea is even willing to shed its nuclear materials, in the end. The problem is landing squarely in Obama's lap.

Bush administration officials had hoped that the U.S.-led war on Saddam's Iraq would impress the likes of North Korea and Iran to quickly negotiate away their nuclear programs. If anything, the effect may have been closer to the opposite—stiffening their resolve to take the nuclear road in order to block any U.S. bid to force regime change.

Iran over recent years has been building up a uranium-enrichment operation that will soon be running 4,000 centrifuges, with tens of thousands more planned. A separate plutonium program is also underway. Iran remains defiant, undeterred by three United Nations Security Council sanctions resolutions. It has also limited its cooperation with the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, which is supposed to monitor the Iranian program. Bush for a while resisted joining European-led diplomacy with Iran, then relented, though with minimal direct contact with Iranian officials. Diplomatic efforts are now stalled, as Iran seems to be sitting tight, waiting for an expected initiative from Obama.

Though Tehran insists its programs are for energy and research, it might be able to produce its first weapon in two to five years if it moved that way. The Iranian quest for nuclear know-how and fuel is already stirring interest across the Middle East in harnessing the atom. A nuclear breakout could well spark a genuine arms race in a region plagued by Islamic militancy and terrorism, much of it directed against the region's own governments. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey have shown a recent interest in nuclear energy, and so has the United Arab Emirates, which just inked a nuclear cooperation deal with Washington. Syria apparently also has been considering some kind of nuclear option. A building reportedly designed to house a reactor was leveled by Israel's Air Force in 2007. U.S. officials say the Syrians received North Korean technical help, and the IAEA detected uranium at the site. The alleged North Korean hand is stoking worries that nuclear breakout states might further proliferate their technology and perhaps materials.

Nonproliferation specialists are also concerned about the precedent set by the Bush administration's pact with India for civilian nuclear cooperation. Approved by the Senate in October, the potentially lucrative arrangement overturned three decades of nonproliferation practice that barred nuclear trade with New Delhi because of its nuclear tests and refusal to join the NPT. Bush sought an exception for India, reflecting its emergence as a future democratic great power with friendly ties to the United States. He argued that bringing India's civilian facilities under inspection would aid nonproliferation efforts. But critics believe the U.S. shift blew open a hole in the wall against proliferation, giving other countries reason to believe that they, too, can seek nuclear weapons and then win exceptions.

U.S. tensions with a resurgent Russia are also endangering nonproliferation work. Russia, which possesses more than half of the world's nuclear weapons, is deemed essential to countering proliferation. If terrorists ever manage to trigger a nuclear blast, Russia could well be the unwitting original source of the fissile material, as Graham Allison, a Harvard expert on nuclear terrorism and former Pentagon official, has argued.

Washington and Moscow have been unable to agree on renewing a major arms control treaty that expires in December. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, signed in 1991, set lower limits on the number of missiles and bombers and established key verification procedures necessary for further reductions. After the Russian invasion of Georgia last year, Bush also dropped a civil nuclear cooperation deal his officials had worked out with Moscow only three months earlier. Russian officials contend that Washington has been seeking unilateral advantage in its moves on arms control and missile defense.

Looming over all those problems is the risk of nuclear terrorism. Al Qaeda's interest in procuring nuclear materials is long established. Reports of attempted thefts, missing nuclear materials, and unimpressive security around some atomic sites persist. The revelations of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan's secret nuclear-supply network have deepened fears of weapons diversion.

Obama has laid out perhaps the most ambitious antiproliferation position by a U.S. president in decades. He plans to lead an effort to secure all nuclear weapons materials at vulnerable sites within four years—the "loose nukes" problem. He also aims to expand interdiction efforts and help countries stop theft or diversion of nuclear gear. On Iran and North Korea, he has spoken of waging diplomatic campaigns that are "tough but direct," shaking off the Bush administration's self-imposed restrictions.

At the same time, Obama says he will undertake considerable other nuclear diplomacy: setting out the goal of ultimately eliminating nukes, negotiating new arms control measures with Russia, seeking a global ban on the production of fissile materials for weapons, and pushing for Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, signed back in 1996.

There is yet more reason for a major nonproliferation drive now: Nuclear energy is seemingly on the verge of a historic comeback. With climate-change worries and expectations that oil and gas will be very expensive over the long run, a wave of new nuclear power plants may be coming, and more nuclear fuel will be needed. The technology to produce nuclear fuel for power plants is essentially the same as that for fashioning weapons-grade material. Nonproliferation experts believe it is essential to strengthen the system of controls before nuclear reactors start popping up in a host of new countries.

The combination of growing risks and political opportunities is coming together just as Obama takes office. "This is the moment," says Cirincione.