22 February 2010

Playing Percentages

An Interview with Brent Scowcroft

 

Technicians work at Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran, a country that continues to enrich uranium that could be used for bombs.

Technicians work at Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran, a country that continues to enrich uranium that could be used for bombs.

Brent Scowcroft served as U.S. national security adviser 1974-1977 under President Gerald Ford and 1989-1993 under President George H.W. Bush and has served other Republican presidents from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. Scowcroft sees potential dangers in any attempt to achieve a world without nuclear weapons. He asserts that a better strategy would be to try to shape the world’s nuclear arsenals in a way that discourages their ever being used. Now president of the Scowcroft Group international business consulting firm in Washington, Scowcroft spoke to eJournal USA managing editor Bruce Odessey. This interview appears in the February 2010 issue of eJournal USA, A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.

Q: Why did the Americans and Soviets build up such huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the first place?

Scowcroft: Basically, our notion of nuclear weapons, that is, the value of nuclear weapons, was to make up for an imbalance compared to the Soviet Union in conventional forces. We hoped to make up for that deficit by the awesome potential of nuclear weapons.

And when the Soviets developed nuclear weapons in order to offset that advantage, I think we thought we had to in order to maintain an edge — in terms of quantity and quality — and that turned into vigorous competition.

Then we developed various devices to deal with that competition, such as the concept of mutual assured destruction, which emphasized the awesomeness of nuclear weapons, and that once you had destroyed the opponent as a viable society you didn’t need any additional weapons.

All of these facets got mixed together into what became the Cold War competition in nuclear arms.

Q: Now President Obama has reiterated the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. Still, some people in this country think this is a bad idea. What do you think?

Scowcroft: I think the concept has several serious flaws. First of all I think it’s unlikely that we could ever achieve it. Even trying to achieve it, I think, may get in the way of doing some more practical things to improve the stability of the nuclear world and to achieve a goal which I think is perhaps possible, and therefore may be more desirable, and that is to insure that nuclear weapons are never used.

In addition, while I don’t think we could ever get to zero, if we somehow did, and nothing else changed in the world, it could be a very perilous, unstable world. We cannot erase the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons and, in a world of zero, just a few nuclear weapons could make a tremendous difference. Therefore, I think it would be an extremely unstable world.

So I would instead focus on changing the character of the nuclear arsenals in a manner that would make it most unlikely that there would ever be a resort to nuclear weapons in a crisis. One of the fears in a crisis, for example, is that he who strikes first can destroy enough of the opponents’ weapons that he can survive a retaliatory strike. The character of the arsenals on each side can be constructed so that would be unlikely or impossible.

Q: Explain that.

Scowcroft: Let me illustrate. Let’s suppose that our nuclear arsenal was composed of 10 submarines with 200 weapons on each submarine. If you catch eight of those in port and can destroy them all with a few weapons, that could be a pretty attractive option. On the other hand, let’s say each side had a thousand single-warhead ICBMs, which means that it would take more than that to destroy them. So you would be worse off after a first strike rather than better off.

That is just an illustration of the kind of calculation that I think we ought to make in discussing the issue with the Soviet Union — developing a mutual nuclear force structure such that these weapons are never likely to be used.

Q: Aside from the United States and Russia, there are other nuclear-armed countries. So how would your strategy apply to those countries?

Scowcroft: I would first start with the U.S. and the Russian nuclear arsenals and later include the lesser nuclear powers. I would hope that there would be strong protocols in association with the reductions of the major powers, resisting the acquisition of nuclear weapons by new nations.

Q: There are existing protocols aimed to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons, but —

Scowcroft: To me it is all playing percentages. Whether our goal is zero nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons that are never going to be fired, the result would be the same: that nuclear weapons are not used. It just seems to me that measures designed that they’re never used are easier to deal with than zero.

Q: Whether it’s your strategy or the strategy of the Obama administration to have a world free of nuclear weapons, both require political will by a lot of countries. Where’s the political will?

 

Soldiers and citizens in Pyongyang celebrate a North Korean nuclear test.

Soldiers and citizens in Pyongyang celebrate a North Korean nuclear test.

Scowcroft: Nations acquire nuclear weapons for a variety of reasons. For deterrence, prestige, perhaps to threaten or coerce. And one has to accompany reductions or attempted elimination with elimination of the reasons that they are attractive to possess.

It’s not, I think, an accident that in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the exhortation to go to zero is accompanied by a similar exhortation of complete and universal disarmament. Now if one could get to complete and universal disarmament, ipso facto you would have zero nuclear weapons.

One of the things I worry about with zero as a policy goal is that you maybe skip over some of the things you can do to reduce the likelihood in the interim of making steps that will help reduce the possibility of nuclear war. Because the tendency is likely to be that if the goal is zero, we should try to get there directly and as quickly as possible. And if your process is simply one of reducing numbers, you could get to a point where you have a very unstable world, where the incentive in a crisis to strike first could be powerful.

Those are the kinds of things that make me lean toward a more cautious approach to the problem.

Q: How would any reduction or elimination be verified and enforced?

Scowcroft: It would have to be, especially at the beginning, quite intrusive. There’s no question about that. But if it’s intrusive at the margins, it is more likely to be able to be accommodated by the major powers than if it’s intrusive to the point that deception could yield critical advantage.

It would not be easy, no question about that. But we have counting rules now. And we have ways — they’re not perfect — we have ways to verify that each side has done what they commit to do. We can improve that, and we should.

Q: Isn’t zero nuclear weapons easier to enforce than some small number of nuclear weapons?

Scowcroft: Not necessarily. But you’re not going to go to zero at once, anyway. So even if you’re on your way to zero, you’ve got to verify that your measures to reduce have been carried out. And then even if you’ve reached zero, how do you police zero? Policing zero may be easier than policing numbers, but not necessarily. The whole verification issue is a problem regardless of the route you travel.

Q: We’ve been talking about states having nuclear weapons. What’s the safest way to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on nuclear weapons?

Scowcroft: I think as a practical matter we need to keep them out of the hands of terrorists long before we go to zero. That is an immediate problem, a problem where it is in the interests of the vast majority of countries to cooperate. Not everyone, certainly. But most. So there is a common incentive to keep nuclear weapons from spreading.

Q: Are you optimistic that the world can avoid nuclear war?

Scowcroft: Right now I am. I think the chances of a major nuclear attack are down dramatically. But that’s less because of the weapons themselves than the change in relationships among the powers that have nuclear weapons. I think that nonuse in itself creates barriers to use that help reinforce it. There is much we can do to induce countries that think they need nuclear weapons — like Iran, like North Korea, and others — to convince them that they don’t need nuclear weapons to feel secure.

I think we’ve made some progress on that. If you look back 20 years, there were many more countries aspiring to be nuclear powers than there are at present. We’re not out of the woods at all, and, if we fail in Iran, we have a huge problem. Because if Iran succeeds in saying it has the right to enrich uranium, then the result could be a stream of countries that don’t necessarily want nuclear weapons but want to be ready if they need them to deal with Iran — like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey in the region — and others elsewhere. We would then have a much more difficult world.

Q: How do you persuade Iran and North Korea that they don’t need nuclear weapons?

Scowcroft: I think the more dangerous case is Iran because of the nature of the region in which it is located. We must convince them that continuing to enrich uranium domestically, whether or not their goal is a nuclear weapon capability, will decrease, not increase their security. That is because other countries in the region would be likely to follow suit, with the result being a more threatening environment in that part of the world.

We should also offer, perhaps together with Russia, that we are prepared to work out a system where the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] would guarantee a supply of enriched uranium for fuel for power reactors without the right of a national veto as long as Iran meets the IAEA rules. That enriched uranium could be provided at prices Iran could not possibly match through domestic enrichment. And the IAEA would take back the spent fuel.

We have not yet gotten quite that far. We and the Russians are part way toward proposing such a deal. But for a country that isn’t determined for other reasons to have an enrichment capability, that would be a powerful argument.

Those are the kinds of things I would do. For North Korea, I would declare that we are prepared, if the DPRK would forgo nuclear weapons, to offer normal relations and provide, in conjunction with the Chinese and other powers, a security framework in which it can feel safe and unthreatened by the United States. It might not work. But I think it’s worth a try.

The opinions expressed in this interview do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.