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EDITOR'S
NOTE: On Tuesday night President Bush put anti-proliferation
on the top of the nation's agenda, warning "time is not on
our side." Rich Lowry wrote a piece on this issue called "Delay
or Die?" in the December 3, 2001, issue of National Review,
reprinted below.
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1946, U.S. delegate to the U.N. Bernard Baruch had an idea. All
nations would be prohibited not just from seeking to develop nuclear
weapons, but from building nuclear power plants that might create
fissionable material appropriate for a bomb. Instead, an international
authority would maintain a monopoly over nuclear activity, and the
U.S. would eventually relinquish its weapons. U.N. Security Council
permanent members would lose their veto over any action to enforce
these restrictions, because, when it comes to nukes, "to delay
may be to die."
Today, with
worries about Osama bin Laden or other terrorists gaining access
to the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and the thousands of
tons of fissionable material rattling around the world, Baruch's
urgency may again seem appropriate. But his prescriptions don't,
even as the spirit of them lives on in U.S. policy. The Baruch plan
went nowhere in the U.N., but it still can be seen as a sort of
high-water mark for post-war arms control. Then, the fantasy of
non-proliferation at least still seemed shiny and new. It has been
steadily discredited ever since. The Baruch plan was the first shot
in what would become an ever more tolerant and open-minded attitude
to non-proliferation, pioneered by the Eisenhower administration,
enshrined in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and finally brought
to its appalling nadir by the Clinton administration. In the Age
of Osama, it is time to acknowledge that non-proliferation is mostly
a failure. It has restrained some nations — Japan, Ukraine,
etc. — from acquiring nuclear weapons, but the overriding lesson
of the last half-century is that weapons technology will always
get through: through to the state that is willing to lie, cheat,
and pay enough to get it.
The U.S. should
now adopt a tougher, more clear-eyed approach to the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction and missile technology. It should
concentrate less on the universalist goal of bringing all states
under sweeping arms-control plans on an equal basis, and focus instead
on a frankly discriminatory objective: denying weapons to the states
— most of them Islamic — that are hostile to the West.
This would be more practical than the grander efforts of the past,
but it too would be doomed, eventually, to failure (although mere
delay has its value). When rogue governments succeed in acquiring
these weapons, the U.S. will have to punish or topple them, on the
theory that the act of proliferation can't be eliminated but occasionally
noxious governments can.
There should
be no illusion about what is at stake in the proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction. The U.S. should oppose it not because these
weapons are inherently evil or because we seriously seek a nuclear-free
world, but rather because their spread represents a diminution of
Western power. As Samuel Huntington puts it in The Clash of Civilizations,
"The proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction
is a central phenomenon of the slow but ineluctable diffusion of
power in a multicivilizational world."
In fact, much
of it has occurred with anti-Westernism as its implicit rationale,
as China in particular seeks to undercut American dominance. "Weapons
proliferation is where the Confucian-Islamic connection has been
most extensive and most concrete, with China playing the central
role in the transfer of both conventional and nonconventional weapons
to many Muslim states," Huntington writes. China and Russia
have been the suppliers, with Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea
— all terrorist states to one degree or another — the
primary recipients. The Pakistani nuclear program, for instance,
is almost entirely a Chinese production. And the Russians have been
playing the same role for Iran.
Western naivete
has, over the years, helped push proliferation along, as Henry Sokolski
argues in his book Best of Intentions. Eisenhower's Atoms
for Peace program spread nuclear reactors around the globe "to
serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind," with little thought
to the possibility that they might serve the war-making pursuits
as well. The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, which sought
to maintain the exclusivity of the nuclear club, is similarly starry-eyed.
It talks of "the inalienable right" of signatories to
develop nuclear technology, and urges "the fullest possible
exchange of equipment, materials, and technological information
for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy." Cheating? Don't be
silly. Sokolski quotes a Dutch NPT negotiator explaining that for
parties to the treaty there should be "a clear presumption"
that nuclear material and know-how won't be diverted to weapons
programs.
This remarkable
faith in the trustworthiness of every NPT nation is why signing
the treaty was Iraq's first step toward acquiring a bomb. According
to Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi scientist who defected, Iraq used the
presumption of innocence to acquire the hardware and knowledge for
its massive nuclear program, with the International Atomic Energy
Agency lending a hand. Hamza writes: "Few of Iraq's suppliers
— or the IAEA itself — ever bothered to ask a simple question:
Why would Iraq, with the second-largest oil reserves in the world,
want to generate electricity by burning uranium?"
IAEA inspectors
were easily deceived and manipulated, partly because any particularly
aggressive inspector would simply not be invited back. Not just
the NPT, but most arms-control agreements — the chemical and
biological weapons conventions, for example — rely on inspecting
the uninspectable. As Kathleen C. Bailey writes in a paper on bioterrorism
for the National Institute for Public Policy, "Biological weapons
facilities can be small, temporary, and without distinguishing features;
there is no current means to detect a clandestine biological weapons
production capability, absent serendipitous discovery." This
is the problem with inspections generally: They can be guaranteed
success only in the case of a nation not bent on frustrating them.
This circularity
applies to arms-control agreements more broadly: They work so long
as no one wants to violate them, in which case they simply don't
work. The danger is forgetting this, and mistaking the sentiments
and assurances that come with signing an agreement — which
are so comforting and high-minded — with reality. This was
a mistake that the Clinton administration inflated almost to a strategic
doctrine: Don't verify, if you can trust instead.
Non-proliferation
agreements are most effective when they are composed of like-minded
nations determined to deny technology to a specific enemy, e.g.,
the Coordinating Committee (CoCom) of Western nations that sought
to keep advanced military technology from the Warsaw Pact. The Clinton
administration instead wanted to transform such organizations from,
as Sokolski puts it, "like-minded discriminatory organizations
to norm-based efforts that increased members' access to technology"
— in other words, it sought to include the proliferators in
the agreements in the hopes that it would somehow reform them.
So, instead
of cracking down on Moscow's missile proliferation, for instance,
the administration made Russia part of the Missile Technology Control
Regime (MTCR), even as the Russians were flouting its terms. The
EU wanted the Russians in so that they could be a permitted market
for European aerospace sales, while the administration argued that
their membership would modify their behavior. When Moscow's behavior
was resolutely unmodified — it continued to proliferate to
Iran and Iraq — the administration rewarded the Russians with
various contracts and subsidies anyway.
Meanwhile,
at the administration's urging, China bulked up on treaties and
agreements. It signed the NPT, the Chemical Weapons Convention,
and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and it (sort of) joined the
MTCR. All these Good Housekeeping seals made it easier for China
to acquire Western weapons technology, harder to punish it for any
transgressions. And did nothing to stop its proliferating. As an
important 1998 Senate report, "The Proliferation Primer,"
put it, Beijing still managed to be "the principal supplier
of weapons of mass destruction and missile technology to the world."
As with Russia,
the Clinton administration not only failed to punish the Chinese
for their violations, it often rewarded them. After Beijing sold
anti-ship missiles to Iran, Sokolski writes, the White House approved
"hundreds of millions worth of sensitive U.S. missile-related
exports to the very Chinese firms known to be proliferating missiles."
Such was the pattern.
Russia and
China-even if the Clinton administration mishandled them-are at
least major states susceptible to U.S. influence. Now, thanks partly
to their handiwork, proliferation is so far advanced that an isolated
basket case like North Korea has graduated from weapons consumer
to weapons supplier. The North Korean No Dong missile has become,
as a result of Pyongyang's salesmanship, the missile of choice in
the Third World. The Pakistani Ghauri and the Iranian Shahab-3 are
both really No Dongs. Iran, in turn, has been able to market missile
technology acquired from North Korea to Syria, as the daisy chain
moves from rogue to rogue.
Despite this
dismaying picture, the U.S. must still do all it can at least to
slow proliferation. Instead of ambitious global agreements and conventions,
the U.S. should seek to create a CoCom-style regime focused on stopping
proliferation to the bloc of nations that are most likely to use
or threaten to use a weapon against the West or leak one to a terrorist:
Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, North Korea, and even our rent-an-ally
Pakistan. One reason the success of the CoCom wasn't duplicated
after the Cold War was that there was no agreement on who the enemy
was; now there should be.
The effort
should spread in concentric rings, beginning with tough export controls
here in the U.S. No one-not businessmen, not politicians, not our
allies-likes export controls, since they necessarily mean forgoing
cash: but some things are just more important. The argument against
controls is often that the technology in question is available elsewhere,
so why not have American-supplied Libyan poison-gas plants rather
than German? But we should lead by showing our own willingness to
spurn certain profits. Meanwhile, European allies like Germany and
France need to be convinced that joining the war on terrorism means
recognizing that some export markets simply aren't worth having.
Finally, we should urge nations that are loitering on the outskirts
of the civilized world to choose up sides. Russia may choose the
right way, China probably won't.
But there are
limits to what can be done to stop the spread of weapons technology.
Non-proliferators are in the position of anti-drug warriors, constantly
involved in a futile effort to keep supply from meeting demand.
It inevitably will. Then what? When supply-side non-proliferation
fails, demand-side counter-proliferation should fill the breach.
The best way to end demand for weapons of mass destruction is to
seek the end-through diplomatic, economic, and military means-of
the governments that want them. Iraq should be the easiest case.
After years of flouting U.N. resolutions and international inspections,
after stockpiling tons of chemical and biological agents and seeking
a nuclear bomb, Saddam's regime should be made into a demonstration
of the consequences of seeking weapons of mass destruction: It should
be destroyed.
This would
have an important educational effect. The reason governments seek
weapons of mass destruction is that they know these weapons will
increase their power. If they are shown that the pursuit of these
weapons could also end their power, they might alter their calculations.
In this light, aiding the Iranian opposition is a more important
act of non-proliferation than getting President Khatami's signature
on some agreement. In a similar way, missile defense can change
the cost-benefit equation of acquiring missile technology by undermining
the utility of ballistic missiles. So, this supposedly dangerously
"unilateral" initiative-American missile defense-buttresses
the cause of non-proliferation. Other unilateral actions, such as
preemptive strikes on the model of Israel's take-out of an Iraqi
reactor in 1981, or covert operations to sabotage technology shipments,
can also repress proliferation in a way that gaudy treaties cannot.
None of this
will be easy. It will require Western self-confidence, moral clarity,
and, above all, military superiority. The cause of keeping our enemies
from attaining weapons is achievable only with lots of weapons of
our own: an enormous conventional military superiority, a credible
nuclear deterrent, and-as a fail-safe-missile defense. But adopting
this more muscular, realistic approach to non-proliferation is as
urgent as the other kind seemed in 1946. In the words of Bernard
Baruch, "to delay may be to die."
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