CIAO DATE: 09/04

U.S. Nuclear Policy And Counterproliferation Conference: Introduction and Opening Remarks

Bruce Blair

Center for Defense Information

February 2003

Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning. My name is Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information. CDI is very pleased to be collaborating with Physicians for Social Responsibility on a subject that moved to the front burner faster than many of us expected. I, for one, did not anticipate the rancorous debate underway in the year 2003 over the legitimacy of the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons.

We have a terrific program today, featuring many of the leading thinkers and policymakers concerned with nuclear policy. In setting the stage for this morning’s first panel, let me make a few brief remarks about the issues as I see them.

American nuclear planning is not of a single mind. It is of several minds, depending on whether the country of interest is Russia, or China, or the pariah countries spinning on the axis of evil. In the latter case, the case of greatest interest today, American planning is very reminiscent of the 1950s view of the Soviet Union — the original ‘rogue state.’ No way were American policymakers back then going to allow U.S. security to depend on deterrence alone; we pursued every military tool and trick in the book, from options for first strike, preventive war, and preemption, to bomber defense, missile defense, and civil defense (now called homeland defense), to conventional strikes and covert special operations. Eventually we gave up on all these tools except mutual deterrence, because nothing else promised any real protection from the large and growing Soviet arsenal. In the end, the United States organized its nuclear security around the concept of mutual deterrence; since all else failed us, we had no choice but to declare the Soviet Union ‘rational’ and settle for deterrence–based security.

The same 1950s thinking is evident today. In the cases of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, no way are policymakers ready to settle for a deterrence–only security policy. We are mainly retrieving all those previously discarded tools such as preventive war, preemption, missile defense, and civil defense. Today, Strategic Command in Omaha is having a field day planning nuclear strikes against those and a dozen other upstart countries, most of which are non–nuclear countries.

Nuclear planning is an extremely conservative business. The genesis of this extensive planning against more than a dozen countries that potentially threaten the U.S. with chemical or biological as well as nuclear weapons goes back decades. North Korea targeting goes way back to the 1950 and 1960s. Iran got on the hit list in the 1980s. But it was the Clinton team that most consciously fashioned the policy of reserving the right to use nuclear weapons to deal with chemical and biological threats. It was the Clinton White House that signed the directive that lowered the nuclear threshold to deal with chemical and biological threats, and that restored China to the U.S. strategic war plan after a hiatus of nearly 20 years.

This enduring conservatism in nuclear planning is even evident in our continuing nuclear relationship with Russia. It’s been over a decade since the Soviet Union collapsed, and yet the vast bulk of our alert strategic missiles remain aimed at Russia with thousands of them ready to fire within two minutes. We continue to prepare to fight a large–scale nuclear war with Russia at a moment’s notice, to destroy about two thousand targets in Russia. We still fly spy planes around Russia’s border looking for holes in air defenses through which U.S. strategic bombers could fly to drop nuclear bombs on Russia. Our attack submarines still trail Russian missile submarines whenever they go on patrol (according to Russian active–duty Naval officers who reported this to me in December 2002). Russia, for its part, maintains a similar hair–trigger posture aimed at the United States.

I hope and trust that the presentations and discussions today will help us intellectually get out of this rut before we dig ourselves deeper into it. We seem to be headed down the wrong path, moving farther and farther away from Les Aspin’s wise dictum that U.S. security would be far stronger in a nuclear–free world even if that meant giving up all of our own nuclear weapons. I think the Bush team has drawn the wrong lessons from our tragedy of 9–11 if it means we are going to develop a nuclear bunker buster, increase our readiness to resume underground nuclear testing, build a new factory to produce the nuclear cores for as many as 200 bombs per year, and craft war–fighting options for using nuclear weapons preemptively against non–nuclear states.

Getting out of this rut will require more than criticism of the existing Bush administration policy. We need new ideas and strategies for preventing proliferation that draw on U.S. and our allies’ ‘soft power’ — diplomatic, economic, human rights and democratic values. We need a ‘soft power’ strategy to replace military power as the dominant approach to fighting proliferation, and terrorism. I look forward to hearing our speakers and audience’s ideas along these lines.