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 Mr. Henry Sokolski, Executive Director, Nonproliferation Policy Education Center

First comment, it looks very different up here than it does out there. I can’t see any of you, not a single one. [laughter] So I’d like to say it’s good to see you, but I can’t.

What adds to surreal quality of this side, I think—And I'm reminded of Mr. Iklé’s comments—is the abstract quality of our discussion today. I studied at the University of Chicago under Albert Wohlstetter and one of the first things he taught us is that it’s bad business to take verbs and turn them into nouns, that's deterrence, which comes from the verb to deter. Now, I'm going to talk about nonproliferation which is the case where you took a verb, to proliferate, and turned it into a noun, proliferation, and then you put the word “non” in front of it. We’ve got to somehow break out of these abstractions, I think Dr. Ikle is right.

And towards that end, I’ve got a presentation I was going to give, I made 20 copies because I thought there’d be 20 people here and turns out there are more. You're spared as a result, you don't have to see this thing. But there are two pictures that I can’t resist presenting because unlike words, pictures animate. I don't know whether the person in the projection booth manipulating the graphs can play by number, but what I’d like to see first is the last picture, possible proliferated future. I think it’s important to understand how bad things can get and what we’re most worried about. So I put this together.

Now, a lot of people on this panel have talked about preventing countries from going nuclear. I think they're optimists in two respects. I don't think we’re going to know when countries “go nuclear.” What we’re going to have is a lot of countries that are nuclear-ready, and I think Ash Carter’s comments about fuel cycles gets to this point and we’ll talk about that a bit more shortly. But the fact of the matter is there are going to be nations like France in the ‘50s like Iran now, like North Korea maybe now, but certainly in the ‘80s, where you're not going to know if they have nuclear weapons or not but you have to worry that they could get them very, very quickly.

Now, why do we care? Well first, we like having our way. And by the way, as an American, I like that too. [laughter] I'm pro-American. So why is this a problem? The problem is this. In this world, you will know who your friends are, but you won’t know what they’ll do when the chips are down. I have a very dear French friend here, so I won't use the example of France. We could use some other example, but our imaginations can cover that problem. If you go back to World War I, people misunderstood what they were capable of. That world is not all that different than the kind of nuclear ready world I am talking about. Now, in a world like that, we’ll listen to the State Department say, “Don’t worry, we have special understandings with this country and that country.” By the way, this is not an environment for strong alliances, it’s an environment for people going their own way. And you’ll listen to the military planners say, “You know, we have a way to neutralize this and neutralize that, we have good intelligence, better than you think.” Unfortuantely, we’ll make mistakes, we’re human.

You certainly can’t keep the cable traffic coherent in this kind of world even with a large State Department. And the military challenges this world presents is not something that military science addresses very well, either.

Now, let’s go to the chart before this one. This is the world today, it looks pretty good. You have the U.S. being the largest ball because it can actually conduct war almost by itself against a fair number of small countries and succeed. These other countries can’t. Now, in the ‘50s when they were trying to figure out these nuclear rules under the NPT, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, they worried about the possible strategic interactions between nuclear states because they said look at all the interrelations and it’ll be very hard to track. But we solved this. It’s very ingenious how we solved this. What we’ve done is say, well, we’re the only country that matters and these other countries matter too because they have nuclear weapons. But it only our bilateral relations between that matters and nothing else. So we’ve made them all into allies with the exception of China. Russia, India, Israel, even Pakistan and NATO are either strategic partners or Non-NATO allies. I didn't put North Korea down there because the unification ministry in South Korea says it’s not sure if the DPRK has nuclear weapons yet, so we have got to wait. Which is my point: you're not going to know which a good number of suspect states for a long time.

Now, I was going to talk about the value and limits of the NPT. There's been a lot of discussion about Article VI. It talks about reducing or engaging in good faith negotiations to reduce the arms race and to disarm nuclear weapons. And usually, when you talk to somebody on the Left or you talk to somebody on the Right or a hawk or a dove and you talk about the NPT and bargains, they talk a lot about Article VI. And I think Elaine raised a good point, About whether it matters if you have more or less and how that relates to alliances now isn’t so clear and whether you get rid of more of them, someone’s going to get rid of theirs seems pretty doubtful. My guess is military science is going to encourage us to reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons that we have. That's the way it’s worked basically since the ‘70s, and arms control sort of catches up to accuracy and reduced yields and things like that, and so the stockpiles get smaller.

But in general, this has been the way people talk about the nuclear rules. I think that's a mistake. The way in which we need to start worrying about the nuclear rules I think has to do with a criticism of the NPT, which is not just that alliances have blocked more proliferation than the NPT, which I think it makes some sense. But this other point or critique is that the IAEA, which is the watchdog, they call it, of these rules really can’t detect covert nuclear activities. Certainly, if you take a look, the first case of Iraq in ’91, North Korea in the ‘80s, Iran most recently, their covert nuclear programs embarrassed the IAEA. It wasn’t the IEA that found out about these covert programs, they had to be told. They had to be told externally and told very late in the game. If you will, I call those little nonproliferation Pearl Harbors. I mean, it’s just sort of knocked us off our feet and we’ve been trying to recover ever since.

But there is a bigger, slow, big Pearl Harbor that a friend of mine, Robert Zarrate just wrote about and the Roberta Wohlstetter warned about nearly a half century ago. And I think Ash, you were talking about that. And that's where you’ve got a world full of nuclear-ready countries and you don't know who’s on first. You don't know who you can count on and you don't know what they're capable of, and you make a mistake and you start a war that'll last for a long time and will involve the use of nuclear ammunition. That's the worst. That, at a minimum, is something everybody in this room and their brother and sister should be trying to figure out how to prevent.

By the way, where's the first chart with the title page? Yeah, this is important because it has my center’s web site on there and all that good stuff. [laughter] But the title of today’s presentation is The Security Case for a Tougher Reading of the NPT. Now, everybody knows how—Most people here are old enough to remember the 1980 debate between Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan. And the very last question was what do you think is the most important issue? And Mr. Carter said, “Well, I talked with Amy, my daughter, ten year old daughter, this morning about that. And she said, ‘Daddy, the most important problem is nuclear nonproliferation.” And after that I wasn’t able to function as a serious male, you know. I say, “Well, I work on nonproliferation.” “Oh well, it’s an Amy Carter issue.”
[Laughter]

You’ll notice, though, we’ve got seven people here who think this is serious now. Something’s changed. I'm a Republican.

__: Democrat.

Mr. Sokolski: You're a Democrat? Well, there's still time. [laughter] But you're a good Democrat.

__: For me or for you?
[Laughter]

Mr. Sokolski: Well, that's a good point, too. But the point I'm trying to make is now people take this kind of crappy arms control stuff a little more seriously. A little.

Let me tell you, though, where we are, and this gets to the limits and the problems of the rules of the NPT. Albert Wohlstetter, I keep saying Albert’s name because he really did so much on this and he is still worth reading, he had one thing he told us. He said we really need to make sure we don’t make our mistakes hereditary. And the way we do this in Washington is we say, well, we made that mistake with regard to that country, whether it’s Israel or Japan and letting them reprocess or whatever it is, and so we can’t change anything. We have to keep going and make more exceptions. I would say if we understand those charts properly, and if we believe those charts matter, we got to knock that off and we got to recount and rethink what we’re doing.

In particular, I would raise two questions about the rules and how we read them. Must we continue to read the treaty’s requirement that countries be assured access to peaceful nuclear energy and be able to get cooperation from other countries to produce it as granting a per se right to any nuclear technology, much less the guaranteeing the states and the means to come within days of having a nuclear arsenal? That’s how we currently read the NPT but should we? Fuel making is particularly dangerous and in countries where you don't know whether they have a covert fuel making capacity like Iran, even a reactor is dangerous because it brings with it great feed stock of lightly enriched urarnium and spent reactor fuel needed to make bomb material. And so, you know, people ought to make some distinctions technologically. You need to think about the the country too.

Also, must we continue to encourage the IAEA to attempt what it cannot do? Which is monitor these fuel making facilities like the large reprocessing plant about to be open up in Japan. This Japanese machine makes like 500 bombs worth of nuclear weapons usable material a year when it comes on line. We are pretending that the IAEA can detect a diversion in enough time to prevent it from being completed. There's no way the IAEA can do that. To give you some idea, every year that the plant operates, it lose track of 250 kilograms, or 50 bombs worth of nuclear weapons usable plutonium. It will go missing every year in the pipes, they're going to say. No one’s going to know where it went.

Also, must we continue to go along with the idea that the IAEA is going to be a nuclear spy agency and find bombs in Iran? We need to ask whether we, on the other hand, shouldn’t be encouraging it to do what it can do better, which is material accountancy for certain key declared nuclear materials. It can’t have the agency try to do everything.

Also, I think listening to people critique the NPT rules and critique the capacity of the IAEA is okay, but then you got to say, “All right, what are we going to do different?” In that regard, I think if you could go to chart six, an NPT right to the entire fuel cycle, and then I guess I’ll cease and desist. This chart is an eyeful, so you’ll have to come up and get one of these 20 copies if you're really interested. You know, I hear people on the Right and the Left constantly say that the NPT gives countries like Iran the right to the entire fuel cycle. This is one thing that our Department of State’s legal division and the Iranian Foreign Ministry are in agreement on. They're both wrong. I say this as somebody who’s studied and read the entire negotiating history of the NPT, and it’s ten years worth of reading because it took ten years to negotiate it. It never, ever said that, and it never, ever meant that. And it is wrong to argue that it does.

Enrichment reprocessing, which are key fuel making processes, they're not even mentioned in the NPT. And there were attempts to make it a duty to allow the entire technology of reactors and fuels to be transferred. The Spanish and Mexicans tried to get it into the treaty, and it was rejected explicitly. There were even Swedish negotiators who announced their interest in setting forth criteria against nuclear fuel making. In other words, you had to pass certain economic and certain safeguards criteria before you can even get near this. But they never negotiated that, which brings me to the conclusion that there is no per se right to anything, it depends, and there's no per se prohibition, it depends. And it depends on two criteria. How risky is it, and how economically imperative is it?

We have not locked on to making that argument quite yet. What we’ve said is, well, if you're caught in technical violation of the rules, we are going to try to prevent you from getting access to nuclear technology if we don’t like you. I mean, if you're Egypt and you're South Korea and you violate the rules, we won’t take you to the U.N., but if you're Iran, reasonably, we should try. By the way, I'm in favor of going to the U.N. on that. But the problems are our arguments are pretty weak. What it means is that if there's another country after Iran that follows all the rules and tries to get the fuel cycle, we’re going to be in a terrible situation trying to get them in front of the U.N. It's going to be very, very tough.

So these rules have to be read in a much more sensible, tougher fashion. If we fail, I think we will have a world full of nuclear-ready nations. But there is nothing hereditary about this mistake. It is identifiable, it is locatable, and it is remediable, something that can be redeemed. I once asked Congress, could you just do a sense of the Congress resolution that that is not the way to read the rules. This costs very little, Congress does this all the time. And we can speak clearly to the history.

If you do, you will have a good number of challenges, which I haven’t burdened you with to try to make these rules apply not only to others, but oh my God, to us. Here's the good news: you will only save money if you apply some of these rules because mostly the dangerous activities are very uneconomic. And if you can save money and be safer, you should do it. The rules, in short, need to be read properly, they not inherently the problem. But they can be if we continue to make the hereditary mistakes we’re making in the way we read them. So with that, Congressman?

Questions and Answers

Audience: Thanks, David Roop from Global Security Newswire. Regarding comments that Mr. Carter and Mr. Miller made about how our nuclear—The suggestion that our nuclear arsenal doesn’t really play into the calculations of potential adversaries, I think Mr. Miller’s elaboration on that was that nuclear proliferation is driven by regional tensions. But can’t you say that the U.S., because we’re a global power and have a presence in the Middle East and right on the border of Iran, is a regional concern in that area? Hasn’t the U.S. been North Korea’s preoccupation for the last 50 years? And isn’t Iran concerned about our intentions now?

And then sort of the broader point is we’re trying to negotiate disarmament with North Korea and the Europeans are trying to negotiate disarmament with Iran or stop their development. And doesn’t what we do in terms of our doctrines that we’re telegraphing out and the types of systems that we have in development undermine those efforts? Thanks.

Mr. Sokolski: Well, there is one way in which U.S. nuclear policy directly affects the spread of nuclear weapons, and it’s in the civil sector, for sure. We told the Shah, “You could have 20 or more reactors and your processing,” this under the Carter Administration. The largest number of Indian participants in the atoms for peace program, talk about a misnomer, were the Indians. They all came to Argon or Caven, you name it.

Now, we are on the cusp, and it doesn’t get much attention because it’s not exactly in the Department of Defense, so it doesn’t get the attention of security people, but we’re right on the cusp because of the problems with spent fuel storage in trying to find—I love this phrase—A final solution. It’s really a bad phrase. We’re going overboard in thinking about promoting reprocessing and in our enthusiasm to talk about how eventually we’re going to have lots of nuclear power, we’re talking now even when we have a 20 year surplus in fuel making capacity, of piling on more capacity in the short run .

What we do on these things matters directly, and I think this example of India is spot on. I mean, you cannot have it every which way without someone saying forget it. I mean, at some point people notice. And I do think we are going to have to have a reckoning, and I suspect you're right, Congress will be busy next year.

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.

Mr. Sokolski: Two comments. One, R&D is always to be urged, particularly when you're up against what's seen in many cases to be the limits of physics. It’s not easy to detect highly enriched uranium if it’s broken down and shielded. This is true even of plutonium, it is something where you have to get pretty close. This is the reason why people at Harvard and even people not at Harvard say get the material, put it somewhere where it’s very hard to get at or make it unusable.

In that regard, it would be nice to make less highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium. And we shouldn't get too fancy about this. Some people say, well, you can separate plutonium and maybe mix it with one other element and then that's okay. I think if there's not an economic reason to do these things, and for the most part there aren’t, stay away.

Regarding the IAEA as a second comment, the IAEA has about 250 inspectors. They're looking at about 500-odd facilities and they have a budget of about $150 million. Does anybody know what the TSA has a budget, roughly? Five, six billion? That's about one million or more dollars per fielded agent. Now, the false alarm rate that's tolerable from the nuclear industry is no more—They won't allow a false alarm rate of anything higher than 5 percent. Do you know what the false alarm rate at Dulles Airport is? It’s about 99.99 percent. You can’t talk about the legitimacy of governments turning on preventing nuclear terrorism, talk about the expansion of nuclear power and have an institution like the IAEA functioning at these relatively low funding levels. That's got to change. You rhetoric’s got to change, you got to tone down the nuclear terrorism rhetoric, or you tone down the boosterism of nuclear power, or you grow the agency and you make it much more serious than it is and you limit it to what it can really do, and you keep it away from the things it doesn’t know how to do, and you warn people don’t get into those activities. Right now, however, we are neither fish nor fowl on these points, that’s got to change if we're serious.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: We have time for just a few more comments from the panel, we’re going to have to stop quickly. Henry is next, and then Barry.

Mr. Sokolski: Here's where some of what we learned from the Cold War might be useful. There once was a very fearsome nuclear competitor. We knew he had weapons, we did not go to a hot war with him, we competed. That regime no longer is. Now, I know everyone wants to talk about, well, what about nuclear terrorism? There was a Collier’s magazine cover in 1950 showing a Soviet tramper with a nuclear bomb in is hold in New York harbor. There are certain things you have to let go of, like we let go of that threat, too, because it was there and we said, “Well, we can’t do much about it.” Now, I don’t want to argue quite that way because it’s so obnoxious, but I do think that we need to think about how we can compete effectively rather than obsess about what we can’t do anything about.

Let me just say a few words about Iran. There is a study, it’s called “What Needed Now: A Plan B for Iran,” it's on my website, I recommend it. It’s pretty good. [laughter] Now, one of the things in there, using this phrase which I’ve used as well, it’s a good one, “prepare the battle ground for competition,” what you want to do is deprive the other fellow of any of the advantages he might perceive he’ll gain from going nuclear or having nuclear weapons so that he might not even choose to do that, and if he does he doesn’t get anywhere. And in fact, one of the key things, the center—What do they call it, the center of gravity? That was the previous panel, wasn’t it, the center of gravity.

Dr. Carter: Schwerpunkt in German. That's what it talks about.

Mr. Sokolski: Okay, that too. I’m for that, I think. [laughter] Now, in the case of Iran, we know where it is. It’s geographic and economic and it’s the Straits of Hormuz. They think, and rightly so right now, that they have us over an oil barrel. That if somehow traffic through that straits is interfered with, we’re going to lose, as estimated recently, 7 percent of GDP within 90 days. Now, admittedly, they need to get gasoline from India refined and they need to get through the straits as well to export their oil, but they have stockpiled perhaps a year or two years worth of cash to keep bribing the key families in Iran that you must bribe to keep in power to run that place. That's the argument.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Turns out, if you talk to oil people, there are a number of pipelines you can connect and it doesn’t cost much to connect them. If you also put in what's called anti-drag agents into the pipes, and you put a factory on the Saudi peninsula to make these agents, you can flow all the oil out of the Gulf region except the Iranian oil without going through the Straits of Hormuz.

Now, if you did that, the impact, if Iran interfered with traffic in the straits, would be less than one percent, roughly the GDP impact we've suffered with high gasoline prices already. Why does that matter? Well, it’s something you should do just for due diligence if you're in the oil field anyway, and it’s something the Iranians will notice, and they should.

Also, there are a lot of rules about anti-slavery, anti-drug, anti-smuggling that are enforced by lots of naval combatants in the gulf, including Iran, and also, I'm proud to say, New Zealand has a ship there too. Now, could be that navies need things to do because they have too many ships and they don’t have enough to do with them? Well, leave some ships every time you do an exercise. This gives you the flavor of the kinds of things you should be doing, actually in a way that will be very difficult for the Iranians to complain about.

So it’s that kind of thoughtfulness that you have to engage in now and start thinking about a long-term competition where you have steps like this.