Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

36th Annual IFPA-Fletcher Conference on
National Security and Policy
Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Forces in 21st-Century Deterrence: Implementing the New Triad

December 14-15, 2005
Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel
Washington, D.C.

December 15 - Session 4

Address by Congressman Adam Schiff, Democrat, 29 District of California

Robert, it’s great to join you and I appreciate the invitation. You said at the outset that I'm sitting to your far right, and I'm comfortable with that. But of course that means I'm sitting to the far left of the entire audience, and I'm less comfortable with that.
[Laughter]

But at the outset, I thought I heard Barry say with respect to the title of the forum today, does the New Triad strengthen or weaken nonproliferation, the answer was yes it does. And that reminded me a little bit of what one of my Georgian colleagues like to say when there's a difficult issue that comes up, he’ll say, “This is a really important issue, this is the seminal issue of the day. There are strong points to be made on both sides. I have the best of friends on both sides of this issue, this is not a time to temporize, this is not a time to equivocate, this is a time for action and I stand with my friends.” [laughter] And I stand with my friends here today.

I, on this topic, really try to start out at the starting point, what's the most immediate threat that we face? And on this issue, I agree with the President. I think that the most immediate threat we face is that of nuclear terrorism. This was something that the President talked about going back to the first Presidential debate with Senator Kerry. It was a sentiment Senator Kerry expressed as well. And I think they both had it right. But I think that informs a lot of the discussion we’re having about the New Triad and its impact on proliferation and our own national security.

Some weeks ago, Jim Woolsey testified before a subcommittee and I asked him if a nuclear weapon went off tomorrow in Washington or New York or elsewhere in the United States, who would the number one suspect be? And his answer, after a moment, was al-Qaeda. And I think that's exactly the right answer. But if that's the correct answer, that's the most immediate threat, then I think we have to ask whether we are prioritizing our expenditures and our policies in a way that is designed to meet that threat? And I'm not sure that we are. North Korea and Iran are very significant threats, but in the short-term they are mostly threats as proliferators of nuclear material, technology or expertise rather than someone who’s going to launch a missile in our direction. And the major impediment to al-Qaeda, which has already expressed very clearly its desire to attack us with a nuclear weapon, in documents that are akin to Osama bin-Laden’s “Mein Kampf,” he talks about this being a religious duty of Muslims to attack us in this way. There's no doubting the desire of al-Qaeda, the only impediment really is the access to the material. The technology to fashion a crude weapon is old and not difficult to assemble. Cal Tech is in my district, I like to say that any two grad students from Cal Tech could design a bomb.

But getting the material is still problematic. And if this is our top security threat, then stopping the wrong people from getting that material ought to be our number one security priority. And I think that would argue in favor of a much more vigorous, cooperative threat reduction program than we have. It also, I think, would argue very strongly in favor of a massive effort for a global cleanup of highly enriched uranium that we would identify our most vulnerable sites around the world and we’d prioritize those and calculate the amount of time it would take to secure, blend down, or destroy these sites and materials as soon as possible.

If indeed al-Qaeda is the number one threat from a nuclear point of view, then the number one delivery system we need to be concerned about is a crate, not a missile, at least in the near term. Which again ought to have consequences in terms of how we allocate our national security resources. Is the portal technology that we’re trying to develop and still very imperfect more of a priority than national missile defense, if the most likely avenue of smuggling in or attacking us with a nuclear weapon is not a missile, in fact, in the near future. Is it a higher priority to invest more in our intelligence budget? After all, once the material is obtained, keeping it out of the country with a country as large and as porous as we are is a Herculean task, most vividly described, I think, by the Chancellor of UCLA who when asked, “How would you get a nuclear bomb in the country?” said, “Well, one way, you could smuggle it is in a bale of marijuana.” And that to me highlights the magnitude of the problem or the challenge.

But even if we look at the mid term or the longer term threats to national security and we weigh them against the New Triad and the implementation of these policies, I think we have to ask ourselves what balance makes us most safe? What balance of nuclear weapons makes us most safe? Is it the current nuclear and conventional advantage that our country enjoys, which is enormous in both respects? Or would it be a new balance of where we have a better and more diverse, more versatile nuclear arsenal? But others possess crude nuclear weapons. Is that a balance that is more in our national security interests? Or would a new balance with a reduced arsenal, with a reduced Russian arsenal, with nuclear weapons that are not on hair trigger status? With a North Korea and Iran that are somehow walked back into a much more vigorous and much more verifiable NPT than we have currently be a national security balance better for the country?

Now, if the answer is that we’re less secure if others have nuclear weapons even if our nuclear arsenal is better, it doesn’t necessarily answer the question of whether we should improve our nuclear arsenal nonetheless. And Ash and Frank expressed, I think, the view that what we do with our nuclear arsenal has very little impact on our adversaries. And while I don’t disagree with that premise, I think there is still something missing. And that is it may have a very considerable impact not on our adversaries, but on our allies. What we do, the view we take on the ABM Treaty or the test ban treaty or on the nuclear bunker buster or other nuclear issues may have a profound impact on Russia, on Britain, on France, on Germany, on China, on other parties that we are relying on to refer Iran to the Security Council, that we are relying upon to put pressure on North Korea. And so it may have a very considerable impact on whether we can marshal the kind of strong, muscular, international regime to crack down on proliferation to make the PSI initiative really as strong as it needs to be.

And there are opportunity costs, I think, of an expansion or a diversification of our nuclear arsenal that shouldn’t be disregarded. And no one can ever say definitively that the development of a new particular nuclear weapon will cost us the commensurate development of a nuclear weapon somewhere else. You can’t say if we agree to do away with the idea of a bunker buster that we can assure that North Koreans won’t develop the bomb or more bombs than they have now, or that Iran won’t develop the bomb.

But I do think the nature of the leadership we bring to the nuclear issue around the world will determine whether we can build a new and much more powerful consensus around the world to stop the proliferation of nuclear material. And I think that when you measure the New Triad and the way it’s been implemented against these priorities, it’s a very mixed bag. I don’t think that we have devoted the greatest resources to our greatest threat, that of al-Qaeda getting nuclear material predominantly from somewhere in the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union. We have shifted from stopping proliferation in some respects to supporting certain proliferation among allies like India. And that may be, if not replaced with a newer, stronger nonproliferation regime, very problematic. And probably the most important issue the Congress will wrestle with this year, or this coming year, is India and the proposed agreement with India and what will that mean in terms of the NPT and our broader nonproliferation efforts?

Certainly there have been some positive aspects of the administration’s policies and the New Triad in this area. The PSI has been positive, the GTRI, Global Threat Reduction Initiative, I think has also been positive. The Nuclear Supplier’s Group work has been positive. It certainly hasn’t been uniformly negative, but we have missed some tremendous opportunities and the NPT review which came and went in New York, and if you didn't notice, it was for good reason, I think it was a tremendous missed opportunity. There is no need, I think, either to interpret the NTP as we have in the past, as Henry points out, to somehow convey a guarantee of the right to enrich and enjoy all of the aspects of the fuel cycle. But there are also opportunities to really change the character of the NPT, to have vigorous, new enforcement mechanisms of the NPT. There's no limit to what can be done. And some of the issues that have been put forward by Al Verde and others may be unworkable, or they may be very workable.

But there's no other country in the world that can lead on this issue, that can come up with a very different, much more powerful regime than this one. And I think that we cannot look at our own nuclear decisions in a vacuum without considering how they affect our ability to rally the rest of the world to crack down on proliferators. We’re having enormous difficulty getting the rest of the world with us on Iran and North Korea, and if we can’t get them with us on Iran and North Korea, where the violations are so apparent, then when can we? And what are we going to do about the more difficult cases?

So I frankly don’t underestimate our own power militarily or diplomatically, notwithstanding the challenges involved. I think we can have a radically stronger NPT, nonproliferation regime, I haven’t given up on that. And I would hate to see us not use every tool in our arsenal to make that happen. So I think that the current triad policies, as they’ve been broadly implemented, have been mixed in terms of the proliferation situation. And I think we spend 90 percent of our time focused on areas of the nuclear threat that are not the most immediate. And if we look forward into the future and we look at what the worst case scenario might be, and we step back to the present and ask ourselves why didn't we do what was necessary to stop al-Qaeda from getting nuclear material, that, I think, dictates a course of action for us now that is somewhat different than we’ve embarked on in the last four or five years. And with that I will conclude and turn it back to you.

Questions and Answers

Audience: Hi, I'm Liz Stanley from Georgetown University. I’d like to ask anyone on the panel to address the possibility technologically and politically of maybe developing a sensor network, to put sensors. If the big problem is this material getting in the hands of non-state actors, putting sensors in all of the different reactors, research and production reactors, all over the world. Obviously, the IAEA might not like this, but I’d love to hear some feedback or ideas about that.

Congressman Schiff: Thanks, Robert. I was just going to add, and I can’t comment too much on the technical aspect of it, although I assume that it technologically would be a much easier hurdle than the challenge of trying to cover our own borders and ports, but I agree with Ash that its primary utility would be with those that are cooperating with us to keep this stuff out of the wrong hands, which would have considerable value. And just when you look at the number of sites of highly enriched uranium around the world in the civil sector, to have a further tool in the box to monitor whether any of that gets out, would be I think extremely valuable.

Politically within the Congress on an issue like this and more generally on the cooperative threat reduction program, and you could do this as part of the CTR program, the political challenge for the advocates in the Congress is that some of my colleagues view this as all kind of soft stuff. It’s not a new weapons system, it’s not—Some of it is Department of State stuff, some of it’s Department of Energy stuff, some of it’s DOD, but they view it in a different way. And there's also kind of an old Cold War philosophy that whatever we invest in cooperative threat reduction, particularly vis-à-vis Russia, is more money the Russians can put into their own defense and arsenals.

My own point of view on this, and I always think of the same image, I'm not sure why, is leaving a loaded gun on the table and knowing that whoever comes into the run to pick up that gun is going to either shoot me or shoot my Russian friend. If it’s al-Qaeda, they’ll shoot me, if it’s a Chechen, they may shoot my Russian friend. And even though my Russian friend may be doing as much as I’d like to take the loaded gun off the table, if it can be used to kill me, I’d say it’s a good investment. But we do have to overcome some of this resistance in the Congress on any issue like this and we’ve had some successes. We’ve gotten rid of some of the anachronistic certification requirements on Russia before we can do some of our CTR work there. So we have made progress, but it’s slow moving in the Congress.

Audience: Ash, I think there's a difference between North Korea having one or two nuclear weapons and 10 or 15 nuclear weapons because in the second case, they’d be more willing to transfer that. Could you, in the context of a course of strategy or a carrot strategy, how would you—Can you sketch out some of your thoughts about how you would engage to try to discourage transfer?

The second, with regard to Elaine, I hesitate to push back on Elaine a little bit because when I do, 99 times out of 100, she’s right and I'm wrong. [laughter] But with regard to RRW, I’d like to argue that there’d be a little bit more—There could be an important element of assurance in connection with that program. And the reason why I say that is the laboratory directors have told us their concerns about our ability, not over the next year or two or three, but over the next two or three decades, about our ability to sort of assure the safety and reliability of this stockpile developed under the Cold War under fairly stringent military requirements. And therefore, they’ve recommended that we proceed on this RRW approach as a risk management tool to help us understand whether it’s feasible to move on this new path as a hedge against the possibility that their concerns bear out over two or three decades. I think this can be an important element of assurance in the context, not necessarily over the next two or three years, but over the five, ten, fifteen years. So I’d like your thoughts on that a little bit.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Ash, would you like to begin and then Elaine?

Dr. Carter: Sure. Well, John, I think you're absolutely right, the more they have, the greater the chance that they would regard some as surplus. Our old joke, and you remember this, when they thought we had one, maybe two, and people would say, “What are you going to do if the North Koreans test a nuclear weapon?” our answer was, “Tell them to test the other one.” [laughter] That joke’s not funny anymore, but the only trying I want to say is that that's only one route that I worry about with North Korea, the deliberate diversion.

The North Korean regime sells drugs, it counterfeits money, dollars, and I don't know when I say the North Korean regime exactly what I mean there. There are people who are free to do those kinds of things within that system, and my guess is that we’ll find when North Korea collapses what we found in Iraq, which was that our standard mental image of the dictatorship where it’s a pyramid, you know, and the big man’s at the top and he calls all the shots, and that wasn’t the way it was. It was rotten, it was rotten from below and people were freelancing and following their own interests much more than they were following Saddam Hussein who was, by the way, writing novels more than he was focused on technical programs.

And my guess is we’ll find something similar in the North Korean case. And therefore, if you lift up that rock, I don't know what you find under there and I don't know who’s doing what in an AQ CON type mode. And finally, this can’t go on forever, this situation where you have a communist, a Stalinist throwback in the modern world with a per capita GDP which is now, what, two orders of magnitude below the South Korean. It can’t go on forever, and that means at some point there's going to be a reckoning, a collapse, potentially a cataclysmic change of some kind. And in that context, we’ll have the same worries we have with the Soviet Union. So count the ways that North Korea is a disaster.

And then we get to deliberate use. And I know there's been discussion here, I gather, today about deterring North Korea. Well, as I told you, I don’t want to be in that circumstance and I’d consider it a massive failure that we’re as far down that road as we are. The problem of deterrence with respect to North Korea isn’t us deterring them, it’s them deterring us, that was Barry’s point. Nuclear weapons are the weapons of the week, and my concern is what are we going to do if they threaten Japan or use them against Japan? The problem with deterrence with respect to North Korea is not deterring them, it’s us being deterred from action. So everywhere you look at this problem of North Korea, it’s a mess. It’s a serious, serious setback. And of course, Iran’s going to be a long way before it’s at that point. So to me, North Korea rivals nuclear terrorism as a right up in your face current problem.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Before I turn to Elaine, Adam, did you want to say something about what Ash said?

Congressman Schiff: I’ll wait until after Elaine.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: Okay, Adam, you're next and you had your introduction.

Congressman Schiff: I did, but since Ash brought it up, I'm going to tell my own Kissinger story. He had testified some months ago at a hearing of the International Relations Committee on the Mideast Peace Process, and by the time I had the opportunity to ask a question, pretty much all the questions on the peace process had been exhausted, so I asked him about Iran and nuclear weapons instead. And Kissinger started out by saying, “I don't want it presumed that because I'm here to testify about the Mideast peace process that I am necessarily an expert on all matters. But I am, so I will be happy to answer your question,” and he did.
[Laughter]

I just wanted to, in answering the question, highlight one of the linkages that we’ve touched on earlier. And that is in terms of North Korea, the India proposed agreement, most people tended to view the impact of the India proposed agreement on the NPT for the philosophical reasons that Frank mentioned, can we be arguing to countries that they should be part of the NPT when we’re ostensibly rewarding countries that are outside the NPT? But there's another aspect of that, too, and that is the not so hidden or open secret in terms of the India agreement, is that whatever proliferation problems may accompany this agreement, there's a commensurate benefit by having India bulked up as a nuclear bulk work against China.

Now, if this is true or if this is the Chinese perception, that we want this deal with India because we see them as a good counterweight to China, you can imagine how that would incentivize (sic) China to help us in North Korea. And does anyone doubt that both that if China were seriously determined to get North Korea to walk back from its nuclear program that we could anything but succeed? Does anyone conversely believe that if China wasn’t willing to help us, we could nonetheless force North Korea to walk back? I don’t think we can do it without China, and I think we can do it with a heavily motivated China, and I don't think China has been yet strongly enough motivated, although it's at a constructive role. It hasn’t applied the kind of pressure North Korea, I think, necessary to get results. But how we handle this proposed agreement with India will not only affect how other nations feel about the NPT, but it will affect China’s willingness to go to bat on North Korea. And I think we have to view these issues not in isolation, but mindful of all of their interrelationships.