Is Nuclear Zero the Best Option?

Sagan Says Yes

Scott D. Sagan
Sept-Oct 2010

EVERY TIME Barack Obama announces that he is in favor of a world free of

nuclear weapons, the nuclear hawks descend. Soon after his inauguration,
formerReagan administration Pentagon official Frank Gaffney proclaimed
that the president stands to transform the worlds only superpower into a
nuclear impotent. After Obama promised in his 2009 Prague speech that the
United States will take concrete steps toward a world without nuclear
weapons, formerSecretary of Defense James Schlesinger declared that the
notion that we can abolish nuclear weapons reflects on a combination of
American utopianism and American parochialism. And when the president
won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, in part for his embrace of the disarmament
vision,Time Magazineeven ran an essay entitled Want Peace? Give a Nuke
the Nobel.
Obama is right to declare, loudly and often, that the United States seeks a
world without nuclear weapons, and the administration is right to be taking
concrete steps now toward that long-term goal. Indeed, by proclaiming that
America seeks nuclear zero, Obama is simply reaffirming that we will follow
our treaty commitments: states that joined the 1970 Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT) agreed to pursue negotiations in good faith on
effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early
date and to nuclear disarmament. And since Article 6 of Americas
Constitution says that a treaty commitment is the supreme Law of the Land,
at a basic level, Obama is simply saying that he will follow U.S. law.
The abolition aspiration is not, however, based on such legal niceties. Instead,
it is inspired by two important insights about the global nuclear future. First,
the most dangerous nuclear threats to the United States today and on the
horizon are from terrorists and potential new nuclear powers, not from our
traditional Cold War adversaries in Russia and China. Second, the spread of

nuclear weapons to new states, and indirectly to terrorist organizations, will

be made less likely if the United States and other nuclear-armed nations are
seen to be working in good faith toward disarmament.
Nuclear weapons may have been a dangerous necessity to keep the Cold War
cold. But scholars and policy makers who are nostalgic for the brutal
simplicity of that eras nuclear deterrence do not understand how much the
world has changed. The choice we face is not between a nuclear-free world or a
return to bipolar Cold War deterrence; it is between creating a nuclearweapons-free world or living in a world with many more nuclear-weapons
states. And if there are more nuclear nations, and more atomic weapons in
global arsenals, there will be more opportunities for terrorists to steal or buy
the bomb.
THE THREAT of nuclear-armed terrorists is not new. In 1977, the Red Army
Faction in West Germany attacked a U.S. military base hoping to steal the
tactical nuclear weapons there. The Aum Shinrikyo apocalyptic cult in Japan
sought recruits in the Russian military in the 1990s to get access to loose
nukes and only settled on using sarin-gas chemicals in the Tokyo subway
when their nuclear efforts failed. Todays threat is even more alarming. It is
well known that Osama bin Laden has proclaimed that Islamic jihadis have a
duty to acquire and to use nuclear weapons against the West. And al-Qaeda is
known to have recruited senior Pakistani nuclear scientists in the past and
may now have sleeper agents in Pakistani laboratories to help in that effort.
The easier-to-acquire radioactive dirty bomb with its concomitant threat to
kill up to one thousand people and create environmental havoc is already a
reality. In 2004, Dhiren Barot, a veteran of jihadi campaigns in Kashmir, was
arrested in London. He admitted to plotting attacks against the New York
Stock Exchange and the World Bank and possessed detailed plans to acquire
nuclear materials from ten thousand smoke detectors for a radiological device.
In a report sent to al-Qaeda central, Barot wrote that estimated casualties
[would] be in [the] region of 500 long-term affected if dispersed in [a] busy
area (Inshalla). A homegrown dirty-bomb threat has also emerged: in 2009,

James Cummings, a neo-Nazi in Belfast, Maine, was discovered to have

started collecting low-level nuclear materials.
The even-more-destructive terrorist-nuclear-weapons danger is looming on
the horizon. Terrorists are not likely to be deterred by threats of retaliation.
Stopping them from purchasing a nuclear weapon, or stealing one, or getting
the materials to make their own is a much better strategy. If aspiring nuclearweapons statessuch as Iran and Syria (and some suspect Burma)get
nuclear weapons in the future, the danger that terrorists will get their hands
on one will clearly increase. And if the United States and other nuclearweapons nations are seen to be hypocritical, by not following our NPT
commitments and maintaining that we (but only we) are responsible enough
to have them, it will reduce the likelihood of ensuring the broad international
cooperation that is needed to reduce these proliferation risks.
OFFICIALS IN the George W. Bush administration believed that there was no
link between U.S. arsenal size or military posture and nonproliferation
decisions made by non-nuclear-weapons states. The Obama administrations
new Nuclear Posture Review maintains that the connection is strong, even if it
is often indirect and hard to measure:
***By demonstrating that we take seriously our NPT obligation to
pursue nuclear disarmament, we strengthen our ability to mobilize
broad international support for the measures needed to reinforce
the non-proliferation regime and secure nuclear materials
worldwide.***
There are now many signs that the Obama administration is correct in its
assessment that progress in disarmament enables progress in
nonproliferation. The April 2010 Nuclear Security Summit brought forty-six
countries to Washington where they reached agreement on a number of
concrete steps to better protect nuclear materials from terrorists. And in stark
contrast to the Bush-era 2005 NPT Review Conference, which ended in
failure, the May 2010 review took place in a cooperative atmosphere and
produced a final document that called on all states to sign onto improved

safeguards for their reactors, and encouraged governments not in compliance

with their treaty commitments to change their ways. The successful efforts to
get additional rounds of sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council can
be credited, in part, to the new spirit of cooperation, including the progress on
arms-control agreements between the United States and China, and the
United States and Russia.
SEVERE CHALLENGES to global zero remain. It will be critical that all states
have increased confidence that final disarmament agreements will be enforced
and that any new nuclear proliferator will not be tolerated. Fortunately, in a
nuclear-free world, the former nuclear-weapons states would have far
strongermutualincentives to punish and reverse any new states decision to
acquire atomic bombs. Ironically, it is precisely because nuclear-weapons
states have such large arsenals today that they sometimes succumb to the
temptation to accept new proliferators. In a disarmed world, such
complacency would be more obviously imprudent, thus encouraging the oncenuclear-armed states to enforce nonproliferation.
Verification at zero (or at low numbers for that matter) is an obvious
challenge. Even if better verification technology is created, there will remain
the problem of what to do if an erstwhile nuclear nation is caught secretly
preparing to rearm. A way around this is to accept the fact that all former
nuclear-weapons states will retain the option of reversing course. Ironically,
this capability will be both reassuring and deterring: reassuring because it
enables states to begin taking the final steps toward total nuclear disarmament
even in the absence of complete confidence that the process will be successful;
deterring because each state will know that even if it can reverse its final
disarmament steps, so can the others. In short, there will still be a latent form
of nuclear deterrence even in a nuclear-disarmed world.
Finally, there is the question of ballistic-missile defenses. During and
immediately after the Cold War, many saw these systems as destabilizing
because as long as a governments nuclear security was dependent on the
ability to retaliate with devastating force after an attack, if an adversary hitting
first could use even limited defenses to reduce the effectiveness of second-

strike retaliation, mutually assured destruction no longer held. Managed

mutual-missile-defense deployments in the future could, however, permit the
final steps of disarmament to take place with less concern about cheating in
the immediate term and could provide more confidence in the ability of
governments to respond in a timely manner to successful rule breaking by
another state.
THE NUCLEAR-WEAPONS-FREE world will not be a world free of conflicts
of national interest; nor will it be a utopia in which governments never feel
tempted to cheat on their international obligations. A world without nuclear
weapons will not be a world without war. Indeed, the maintenance of global
zero will require that conventionally armed major powers be prepared to
enforce nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation commitments in a fair and
vigorous manner. Potential proliferators may have to be forced to be free.
In medieval times, European mapmakers placed the wordshic sunt
dracones(here be dragons) at the edge of the known world. Disarmament
critics today are like those medieval mapmakers, fearing that we are entering
unknown territory fraught with hidden nuclear monsters. But these dragons
are fantasies. The genuine strategic challenges we face in creating a secure
nuclear-free worldadequate verification, enforcement of violations and
mutual-defense deploymentsare challenges that can be met over time. And
the world we are heading toward if we fail to find safe paths to mutual and
verifiable disarmamenta world crowded with nuclear-weapons states and
terrorist temptationsis even more fraught with danger.

Is Nuclear Zero the Best Option?

Waltz Says No
Kenneth Waltz
Sept-Oct 2010

WAR MAY not pay, as British economist Norman Angell repeatedly claimed,
but the lesson proved a hard one for states to learn. Even with the horrors of
World War I fresh in their minds, European countries went into World War II
just twenty-one years later. Until August of 1945, violent conflict punctuated
the history of states, especially of those major and great.
When in short order the Soviet Union followed the United States into the
nuclear business with man of steel Stalin and in due course we will bury
you Khrushchev at the helm, many in the Western world thought that all hell
would break loose. Robert Maynard Hutchins, boy president of the University
of Chicago (he was thirty when he took over), and Bertrand Russell, eminent
in mathematics and rhetoric, proclaimed that in the nuclear age, world
government was the only alternative to world war. With nuclear weapons, war
presumably meant that civilization would perish and we along with it. Instead,
the alternative to world government proved to be nuclear deterrence, which
banished war among the worlds major nations through the long years of the
Cold War and ever since.
Certainly, violent conflict still exists, but it has been relegated to taking its
course in the periphery of international politics. The United States, in
particular, has been fond of beating up poor and weak states. In the twenty
years dating from 1983, we invaded six of them, beginning and ending with
Iraq. Yet since the end of World War II, states with nuclear weapons have
never fought one another. Testing propositions against historical events has
become a favorite indoor sport of social scientists. This is the only proposition
that has passed every test. One might think that the best, in fact the only,
peacekeeping weapon that the world has ever known would gain many fans. It
does not seem to have done so.

WE NOW have a president who wants to free us from the atomic bomb in the
hope of making the world a safer place. This zero option has intuitive appeal.
Nuclear weapons are immensely destructive. No defense against them is
possible. Why then should states not band together and agree to abolish them?
Why is the zero option not the best choice?
Abolishing the weapons that have caused sixty-five years of peace would
certainly have effects. It would, among other things, make the world safe for
the fighting of World War III. Like any dominant power, America is a looming
threat in the minds of many a leader. When the president of the United States
identified three countriesIraq, Iran and North Koreaas forming an axis of
evil, which President George W. Bush did in January of 2002, and when he
then ordered the invasion of one of them, what were the other two to think?
They had to believe that they might be next. What to do? How can any state
hope to deter a world-dominant power? To build a conventional defense
against the United States is impossible. Moreover, throughout history
conventional deterrence has repeatedly failed. Nuclear weapons are the only
weapons capable of dissuading the United States from working its will on
other nations.
To suggest to other states that Americas willingness to shrink its nuclear
arsenal should induce them to follow the example, or should persuade them to
give up their efforts to become nuclear states, is fanciful. For in spite of much
Obama rhetoric, the United States shows no intention of dropping its nuclear
forces below the second-strike level. The president, speaking to the people of
the Czech Republic, promised that we will take concrete steps toward a world
without nuclear weapons. He then followed that statement with this one:
Make no mistake: As long as these weapons exist, the United States will
maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and
guarantee that defense to our allies. That is, we will, as we should, continue to
maintain forces able to launch a devastating retaliatory blow even if struck
first. Nuclear arsenals may be reduced to very small numbers, but if they
remain at or above the second-strike level, the military relations of states
continue unchanged.

If somehow world leaders blundered into an agreement to go to zero, what

would any nuclear country with sensible leaders do? The answer can be given
in one word: cheat. Nuclear weapons are small and light. They are easy to hide
and easy to move. Nuclear warheads can be placed in small vans or small
boats and sent across borders or into harbors. Because a ban on all nuclear
weapons would be impossible to police and enforce, some countries would be
tempted to break the rules. Since some might cheat, all would have a strong
incentive to do so. Even worse, if the zero option were generally accepted, one
state or another might eventually come to believe that it faced a threat to its
very existence. A mad scramble to rearm with nuclear weapons would then
take place. As Thomas C. Schelling long ago wrote, Short of universal brain
surgery, nothing can erase the memory of weapons and how to build them.1
WITH THE dawn of the nuclear age, peace has prevailed among those who
have the weapons or enjoy their protection. Those who like peace should love
nuclear weapons. They are the only weapons ever invented that work
decisively against their own use. Those who advocate a zero option argue in
effect that we should eliminate the cause of the extensive peace the nuclear
world has enjoyed.
India and Pakistan provide an object lesson. When they tested their warheads
in May of 1998, journalists, academics and public officials predicted that war
and chaos on the subcontinent would ensue. The result, as I expected, was to
ensure a prolonged peace between countries that had fought three wars since
independence and continued for a time to spill blood in the conflict over
Kashmir.
That countries with nuclear capabilities do not fight wars against one another
is a lesson we should have learned. The proposition has held exactly where the
prospects for war seemed the brightest, for example, between the United
States and the Soviet Union, between the Soviet Union and the Peoples
Republic of China, and between India and Pakistan. New nuclear states are
often greeted with dire forebodings: Is the government stable? Are the rulers
sensible? The answers may be disconcerting. Yet every new nuclear nation,
however bad its previous reputation, has behaved exactly like all of the old

ones. The effect of having nuclear weapons overwhelms the character of the
states that possess them. Countries with nuclear weapons, no matter how
mean and irrational their leaders may seem to be, no matter how unstable
their governments appear to be, do not launch major conventional attacks on
other countries, let alone nuclear ones. Even conventional attacks can all too
easily escalate out of control and lead to an exchange of nuclear warheads.
With conventional weapons, countries worry about winning or losing. With
nuclear weapons, countries worry about surviving or being annihilated.
Nuclear weapons induce caution all around: think of the Cuban missile crisis,
or think of the external behavior of China during the frightful decade of the
Cultural Revolution.
THESE DAYS, everyone favors transparency. On the nuclear front the United
States is transparent enough. Transparently, it is in Americas interest to get
would-be nuclear states to foreswear the capability. Transparently, it is in
Americas interest to get presently nuclear states to reduce or, better yet,
eliminate their warheads. We are after all the worlds dominant conventional
power and have been for years. Are we willing to reduce the number of our
nuclear weapons? Sure; we have far more warheads than deterrence requires.
Would we be willing to reduce the number of our strategic warheads below
what we think necessary for a second-strike capability? Obviously not. We are
transparent on that one as well.

Thomas C. Schelling, The Role of Deterrence in Total

Disarmament,Foreign Affairs40, no. 3 (April 1962): 392.
1

Sagan Responds
Scott D. Sagan
Sept-Oct 2010

KENNETH WALTZ served in the U.S. Army in World War II, became
a ...leading proponent of realist balance of power theory during the Cold
War, and has consistently maintained since then that new proliferators will
also behave cautiously if they acquire the bomb. It is therefore not surprising
to learn that Waltz fears that nuclear disarmament would make the world
safe for the fighting of World War III, believes that the atomic bomb is the
best peacekeeping weapon ever invented, and deduces that the Obama
administration must, despite the presidents grand rhetoric, really have no
intention of moving toward global zero. What is surprising is that Waltz
exaggerates the peace-inducing effect of nuclear weapons, displays a strangely
apolitical perspective on the causes of war, completely ignores the risks of
nuclear terrorism and misrepresents Barack Obamas statements about
nuclear disarmament. Let me address these point by point.
Waltz claims that states with nuclear weapons have never fought one
another. Wrong. India and Pakistan, after testing nuclear weapons in 1998,
fought the 1999 Kargil War, in which over one thousand soldiers died.
Moreover, the Kargil War occurred notdespitePakistan developing nuclear
weapons but ratherbecausePakistan got the bomb. Pakistani generals
thought that their new nuclear arsenal was a shield behind which they could
safely sneak Pakistani soldiers into Indian-controlled Kashmir without
triggering a war. They were wrong, dangerously wrong. And Waltz is wrong to
ignore this history.
Waltz also notes that even with the horrors of World War I fresh in their
minds, European countries went into World War II. This is apolitical political
science. Didnt Hitler and the Nazi Partys ambition to create Lebensraum and
gain mastery of Europe have something to do with the outbreak of war?
Poland, England and France did not just stumble into war in 1939 and 1940.
They were attacked by an expansionist power led by a megalomaniac leader

who did not fear the consequences of war. (Indeed, by 1945 Hitler thought the
German people should be destroyed because they had proven themselves
unworthy of his leadership.) If the United States faced an aggressive leader
like Hitler today, I would certainly advocate the maintenance of a U.S. nuclear
arsenal for the sake of deterrence. But we do not now face that kind of threat
in Russia and China. And the possibility of leaders like Irans Ahmadinejad
getting nuclear weapons is precisely why the United States should work with
others to pressure would-be proliferators and prevent the spread of nuclear
weapons.
It is revealing that the word terrorism does not appear in Waltzs essay. He
may believe that terrorists interests in getting the bomb are exaggerated, or
that governments can easily protect their arsenals from insider or outsider
threats. But he is incorrect on both counts. Islamic jihadis, left-wing radicals
and apocalyptic cults have all tried to get nuclear weapons. More proliferation
will increase their chances of success. No wonder Waltz ignores this issue. He
has no credible way to address it.
Waltz cites Obamas Prague speech about America keeping nuclear weapons
as long as others possess the same capability as evidence that we are not
serious about disarmament. Wrong again. Obama was in fact emphasizing
that the United States will not disarm unilaterally and that the process will
take a significant amount of time. But if we can negotiate multilateral armsreduction agreements and create new verification technology, safe and secure
disarmament is possible. Waltz misinterprets Obamas nod toward realism as
hypocrisy.
Nuclear weapons have not been the best things since sliced bread. They have
been a mixed blessing, a dangerous deterrent. The Cold War witnessed many
close calls; new nuclear states will be even more prone to deterrence failures.
Living with nuclear weapons was a perilous necessity in the past. It should not
be repeated. Celebrating this dangerous condition is misguided.

Waltz Responds
Kenneth Waltz
Sept-Oct 2010

IN 1963 President John F. Kennedy famously speculated that by 1970 ten

countries would be able to deploy nuclear weapons and by 1975, fifteen to
twenty countries would have followed suit.1In fact, the number of nuclearweapons states peaked at ten when some of the successor states to the Soviet
Union were born nuclear, then the number dropped to seven, and now it
stands at nine with Pakistan and North Korea having joined what remains the
worlds most exclusive club.
Why have nuclear weapons spread so slowly? The answer is found not in the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but in the fact that most countries feel
sufficiently secure without adding nuclear weapons to their conventional
arsenals. If a country believes that its security depends on nuclear weapons, to
prevent it from acquiring them becomes almost impossible. President George
W. Bush among others announced that North Korea becoming a nuclearweapons state would be unacceptable. Yet when North Korea developed a
nuclear military capability, we quietly acquiesced. The alternative to
acceptance would have been to attack North Koreas nuclear facilities, and that
would surely have been unacceptable.
Sagan emphasizes that verification and enforcement of an agreement to create
a nuclear-free world would be required. If for a moment we imagine that
Sagans hoped-for world without nuclear weapons could be realized, what
would anyone do if a major state revealed that it had secretly rebuilt a
considerable nuclear arsenal? Would someone then attack the reborn nuclear
state using the only weapons it would have, that is, conventional ones? I think
not.
Sagan, having rejected legal niceties, would instead rely on international
pieties. If other countries believe that America is on the road to nuclear
disarmament, they will presumably jump on the bandwagon. The problem is

that no road leads from a world with a small number of nuclear-weapons

states to a world with none. Sagan believes that if the world does not become
nuclear weapons free it will soon be a world of many nuclear states. One
wonders why. Many more states can make nuclear weapons than do. Why
should one now expect a large number of new nuclear states to join the
hitherto-exclusive club? The old answer was that states seek the prestige that
members of the club enjoy. Little prestige, however, attaches to new nuclear
states when countries like Pakistan and North Korea already have them.
Strong statesthe old Soviet Union and Chinaare no longer seen as threats.
Sagan would have us transfer our worries to puny new nuclear states and
terrorists. We used to worry about the strong; now we should worry about the
weak.
Sagan emphasizes the perils that attend a world with many more nuclear
states, thus increasing the chances that terrorists would be able to steal or buy
nuclear devices. To find good words to say about terrorists is difficult.
Terrorists are a big annoyance and may occasionally do a fair amount of
damage. We all know about the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon
in which upwards of three thousand people perished. One thought, however,
gives comfort: terrorists are incapable of rending the fabric of society and of
occupying and administering territory. We should all heave a sigh of relief that
strong adversaries have been replaced by weak ones.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.,A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White

House (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
1

Scott D. Saganis the Caroline S. G. Professor of Political Science at Stanford

University and co-director of Stanfords Center for International Security and
Cooperation.
Kenneth N. Waltzis the Emeritus Ford Professor of Political Science at the
University of California at Berkeley and senior research associate at Columbia
Universitys Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. In 1999 he won the

James Madison Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political

Science Association.