THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: After the 50th Anniversary, What? by Richard L. Garwin Fellow Emeritus IBM Research Division Thomas J. Watson Research Center P.O. Box 218 Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 Tel: (914) 945-2555 FAX: (914) 945-4419 Email: RLG2 at watson.ibm.com (also Adjunct Professor of Physics, Columbia University) May 17-18, 1995 Notes for Presentations at Frankfurt University and University of Marburg GERMANY U158PPNW 060795PPNW DRAFT 1 06/07/95 We have already marked the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, May 8, and I am here because 1945 was also the beginning of the age of nuclear weapons. Of the two nuclear explosives thus far used in war, the first burst upon the consciousness of the world at Hiroshima August 6, 1945 (local time) with an explosive yield of about 20,000 metric tons of high explosive, killing at least 50,000 people. Three days later a nuclear explosive of similar power destroyed Nagasaki. The twin of the Nagasaki bomb had been tested in the desert of New Mexico as the "Trinity" shot July 16, unknown to all but a few hundred Americans in the Manhattan Project. After Nagasaki, there was not a single nuclear weapon left in the world. Trinity, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima weapons each derived its energy release from the conversion of just about 1 kg of heavy metal atoms into 1 kg of "fission products"-- atoms of about half the mass of a uranium atom. The Hiroshima "little boy" nuclear weapon contained as its essential core about 60 kg of the naturally occurring lighter isotope U-235, present (in historic times) as about 0.7% of any sample of naturally occurring uranium. That U-235, so far as we know, was created near the beginning of the universe but was separated in 1944-1945 at Oak Ridge Tennessee by an industrial process of unprecedented magnitude. In contrast, the Trinity and Nagasaki weapons each contained about 6 kg of the element plutonium ("Pu") previously unknown to mankind and newly created in 1943 for the nuclear weapon itself. On August 14, less than a week after the destruction of Nagasaki, the emperor of Japan in an unprecedented radio speech announced his decision to surrender, and World War II was over, worldwide. That very month saw the publication of the "Smythe Report" commissioned by General Leslie C. Groves, the commandant of the Manhattan Project, which provided an enormous amount of information about the construction and capabilities of nuclear weapons. The plutonium for Trinity and Nagasaki had been produced in nuclear reactors (now a commonplace), in which the abundant isotope of uranium, U-238, was converted by the capture of a neutron and the passage of time (more technically, by two successive beta decays) into Pu-239. That "neutron" was discovered in 1932 but was liberated in kilogram quantities in the reactor in which U-238 played no role, but U-235 supported a "nuclear chain reaction" in which the fission of U-235 gave rise not only to energy and to fission products but on the average to more than two neutrons. The nuclear weapon project in the United States benefitted greatly from analyses in the United Kingdom of the potential for making weapons by the use of nuclear fission, and also from the participation of British scientists in the Manhattan Project. The level of American science at that time was not world class, and the Manhattan Project profited enormously from the participation of those who had fled fascist regimes in Europe-- Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller, to name a few of the most prominent. Indeed, none of those could have remained in Europe, given the fact that their family or that of their spouse was Jewish. Now I should introduce myself a bit. In 1945 I was 17 years old, having been born in Cleveland, Ohio, part of the American "Midwest". My father had a Bachelor's Degree in electrical engineering in 1921, but the entire decade of the 1930s was an era of depression in the United States, with large-scale unemployment and desperation. We had nothing like the monetary hyper-inflation that so marked the history of Germany. However, my father worked as a teacher of "electricity" in the public high school in Cleveland, and had also a second job, nights, as a motion picture projectionist. Before her marriage to my father, my mother had been a legal stenographer. My family was far from the diplomatic center of Washington or the financial center of New York, although we were very concerned about the outbreak of war in Europe and the apparently insatiable desires of Adolf Hitler. I should say that until May 8, 1945, we had no idea of the extermination camps in Europe, and I believe that the emigre scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project did not know of them either. In fact, during the war the U.S. government hid from the American people whatever knowledge it had of such activities. I believe that the Manhattan Project scientists were motivated by the fear that Germany would obtain the nuclear weapon and with that conquer the world. They wanted, instead, to prevent further conquest and to restore civil order to Europe. In just the last few months one can read the assertion that the nuclear weapon was always intended for use against Japan but not a single one of those working on the Manhattan Project, to my knowledge, was of that opinion. They were racing to build the nuclear weapon lest Germany get it first. And there is no doubt in my mind that it would have been used against a German city and its military-industrial complex, had the atomic bomb been ready in 1944, or had the war in Europe still raged in August 1945. Indeed, the Allies learned very well the lesson of attack on civilian populations, and the initial abhorrence and reluctance to respond had vanished by the end of the war. The destruction of Dresden by incendiaries is a case in point. I graduated from high school in 1944 and enrolled in college in Cleveland (physics) from which I graduated in 1947. I then studied at the University of Chicago and received my Ph.D. in Physics (some harmless properties of atomic nuclei) in 1949. As a member of the faculty of physics at the University of Chicago, I then began a summer consulting arrangement at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in 1950, which was to last for many years. During these years I was intimately involved in nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons testing, and (as commented to me on my most recent visit to Los Alamos May 11, "In our modern parlance, you were the designer of the first hydrogen bomb." In 1951, during the Korean War, I spent three weeks in Korea and a week in Japan, with a colleague from the University of Chicago, to see whether we could determine some useful potential contributions from the newly formed Tactical Air Command. But it was clear to me that there was no use for nuclear weapons in the Korean conflict. And when I went to Southeast Asia in 1968 during the Vietnam War, it had also nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Indeed, although I joined the IBM Corporation in 1952, it was with a contract that gave me one-third of my time free to work with the U.S. government on matters of interest to national and international security, and after that I was thoroughly involved in both strategic and tactical military problems for the United States, and also in arms control. For instance, in 1958 I was on the official U.S. delegation to the U.N.-sponsored 10-Nation Conference on "Prevention of Surprise Attack" and also was involved in the first negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And that kind of involvement with the U.S. government has continued to the present day. But I want to talk about what happened in the world after the explosion of the first nuclear weapons, where we are now, and where we might (and should) be going. With experience as a physicist and a military technologist, and even in international negotiations and analyses of arms control, I fully realize that I am no authority on history, and some of you in the audience may see things quite differently from the way I do. I would be glad for your corrections and comments at the end of this talk. At the conclusion of the Second World War, military occupation governments were installed in Germany and Japan, and soon the Marshall Plan was offered to Europe, which, in my opinion, made a major contribution to the political and economic evolution of Germany. As I recall, the Marshall Plan was offered also to the Soviet Union, which declined, and who knows what might have happened had they participated. A reasonably enlightened U.S. military occupation government in Japan focused on creating a democratic system there, which has succeeded economically and politically. However, U.S. diplomacy was not so successful with the Soviet Union, our ally during World War II. The division of Europe endorsed at the Yalta Conference gave the Soviet Union free rein over Eastern Europe, and by reason of the reign of terror in the Soviet Union and the various purges, there was little understanding of the potential benefit of cooperation with the United States. Nor was the United States all wise. Notwithstanding the British contributions to the Manhattan Project, after the war the U.S. did not fully share nuclear (then popularly called "atomic") developments with the British, compelling the British (by reason of pride, not security concerns in my opinion) to develop their own nuclear weapon. Although the Manhattan Project scientists had predicted that it would take the Soviets about four years to produce a nuclear weapon, it was unexpected to the world public when the Soviet Union detonated their first nuclear explosion, "JOE-1", in 1949. Now we know from the writings of the Soviet nuclear scientists themselves, including Yuli Khariton, prime contributor to the Soviet nuclear weapon, that they were fully capable of designing independently a nuclear weapon, given the information from the Smythe Report; however, their fear of Lavrenti Beria and the "guidance" of Igor Kurchatov (with information provided by Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, a member of the British team at Los Alamos) led them to produce an essentially identical copy of the Nagasaki bomb for the first Soviet explosion. In the United States, the efforts of the "atomic scientists" as represented by the Federation of Atomic Scientists, resulted in a clear-cut civilian control of atomic energy-- of both weapons and nuclear power, while naval nuclear propulsion remained under military control. Of course, the U.S. nuclear power industry has grown up under private ownership, while in the Soviet Union both civilian nuclear power and nuclear weapons are under the same ministry of Russia, MINATOM, now led by theoretical nuclear weapon scientist Viktor Mikhailov. But 46 years intervened between the first Soviet nuclear explosion in 1949 and this discussion in 1995. A lot has happened in the interim, including the explosion by the U.S. of 1149 nuclear test devices, some 1100 by the former Soviet Union, 45 by Britain, 191 by France, 42 by China, and one by India. The United States tested a pure fission weapon with a yield of 500 KT, but such weapons are difficult to make adequately safe, and heavy and awkward to deliver. In 1951 Stanislaw Ulam (mathematician) and Edward Teller (physicist), both at Los Alamos, conceived a practical scheme of "radiation implosion" so that a small fission explosion could prepare and ignite a charge of thermonuclear fuel. Energy from the "primary" fission explosive is thus used to assemble and to compress a charge containing light isotopes (deuterium and perhaps tritium) that when sufficiently hot and dense can react with one another to form heavier isotopes (helium) with the release of energy. This thermonuclear or "fusion" reaction is of an entirely different nature from the fission reaction, in that the fission chain reaction with fast neutrons takes place perfectly well at ordinary temperature. The first thermonuclear weapon demonstration-- MIKE-- took place November 1, 1952, with a measured yield of about 11 megatons (11 MT), more than 500 times the yield of the first fission weapons. MIKE used liquid deuterium in its secondary, and some six Emergency Capability Weapons were built for aircraft delivery that also used liquid deuterium. By the next test series in 1954, the U.S. had changed instead to a solid thermonuclear fuel-- lithium deuteride, that was also to be used by the Soviets and eventually by Britain, France, and China. A whole series of lectures could be devoted to nuclear and thermonuclear weapons themselves, for which I obviously have no time nor authorization now. However, the initial concern and attraction of thermonuclear weapons was that their explosive power was essentially unlimited, and there were discussions of the practicality and utility of weapons of hundred megaton or even thousand megaton yield. As it turned out, the major impact of thermonuclear weapons was to allow a given stockpile of fissile material (U-235 or plutonium) to make many more weapons of 300 KT yield (for instance) than could be achieved with the pure fission design, and these two-stage weapons would be lighter, smaller, and safer than their fission counterparts of equivalent yield. There have been qualitative, quantitative, and political developments-- yes, revolutions. On the political side, the Iron Curtain descended upon Europe (as it was unforgettably named by Winston Churchill in his speech in the United States) dividing Germany and leading to the infamous Berlin Wall. The isolation of West Berlin, linked by a tenuous corridor to West Germany, and the Soviet-supported cutting of land contact between Germany and West Berlin led to the Berlin airlift. President Kennedy responded with a show of force, deploying 7000 nuclear weapons to Western Europe, including the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in "West Germany." The apparent division of the world into two nuclear-armed camps, with the Soviet Union and the United States as protagonists, led to the confrontation between NATO and Warsaw Pact (Warsaw Treaty Organization-- WTO), which in the West was perceived as a monolithic bloc with conventional (non-nuclear) forces (especially numbers of Army personnel) far exceeding those available to NATO. The NATO response was a greater dependence on nuclear weapons, ranging from tactical nuclear weapons fully equivalent to strategic weapons in yield, to shoulder-fired "bazooka" nuclear rounds. By 1962 nuclear weapon development and manufacture had long been consolidated in the Atomic Energy Commission, and an inspection mission of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives) showed serious deficiencies in safety and security of U.S. nuclear weapons within NATO, leading within less than a year to the installation of Permissive Action Links on many U.S. nuclear weapons deployed abroad. During the Kennedy Administration, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara tried to put U.S. strategic forces on a rational basis, which to a large extent resulted in "rationalizing" what existed or what could not be resisted, thrust upon the Administration by the U.S. Congress, or adopted by the political leadership for electoral advantage. Thus McNamara reported to Kennedy that he accepted the commitment to deploy 1000 Minuteman missiles when he had intended to have only 500, because had he resisted the Congress would have insisted on many more. I do not know the details of Soviet rationale for the number of nuclear weapons they deployed, but I do know some of the influences on both sides. The fact is that numerically U.S. nuclear weapons peaked at a number of about 33,000 in the 1970s, while Soviet nuclear weapons numbered 45,000 in 1986. Two influences were involved. First, so long as nuclear weapons were considered as strategic weapons (in the sense of strategic weapons at the close of the Second World War-- to attack the industrial infrastructure of the other side) there was a finite number needed. In fact, McNamara made this explicit in his statement that 400 weapons delivered against the Soviet Union would suffice to destroy 20-30% of the population and 50-70% of industrial capacity, and this he defined as an adequate "deterrent" of the Soviet Union against nuclear attack against the United States or its Allies. How, then, did one get to 15,000 or more U.S. strategic nuclear weapons? In part, this was the result of dividing by two independent factors, each less than unity, and perhaps much less than unity. These were the probability that a nuclear weapon would penetrate Soviet defenses (air defenses against bombers or projected ballistic missile defenses against our ICBM force), and also the probability that U.S. strategic weapons would survive to be launched in case of Soviet all-out nuclear attack. I must tell you that these were both taken very seriously by influential elements in the U.S. public and government, to the extent that even Secretary McNamara adopted not only "worst case planning" but "greater than worst case" responses. He should not have done this. The "missile gap" was an important element of the presidential election campaign of John F. Kennedy in 1960. At that time President Eisenhower knew that there was no "missile gap," and the United States proved to be far ahead of the Soviet Union in the deployment of ballistic missiles, even though the Soviet Union had launched the first Earth satellite (Sputnik 1) October 4, 1957. Indeed, the argument over "missile gap" was a tragedy, in view of the fact that President Kennedy's Science Advisor, Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner, was a thoroughly trusted advisor to the U.S. government, who (if he had not been allied with candidate John F. Kennedy) could readily have been informed of the intelligence data provided by the first CORONA satellite imagery, in August 1960, three months after the Soviet Union shot down the U-2 aircraft piloted by Gary Powers. Regarding the strategic counter-industrial requirement, fantasies were spun in the United States about the capability of the Soviet Union to deploy nationwide defense against ballistic missiles, even by integrating individual air defense units, and the like. At the same time, worst-case analyses over the years argued that potential Soviet ICBM nuclear weapon deployments could (with unprecedented accuracy) threaten the hardened silos of U.S. ICBMs, and the product of these two factors-- penetration against worst-case defenses, and survival against worst-case offense, fueled a mindless increase in nuclear warheads on the U.S. side. At the same time, the relative ineffectiveness of tactical nuclear warheads against military forces in the field (if one took seriously the commitment to using nuclear weapons against battlefield enemies) greatly escalated the number of tactical warheads required. The problem here was that the fruitful targets of conventional military operations to nuclear attack were very soon eliminated by the U.S. change to "pentomic" divisions, and the response of the WTO to the threat of tactical nuclear weapons. Thus, there was a virtual effect of tactical nuclear weapons in reducing military effectiveness on both sides, and greatly reducing vulnerability of deployed forces to nuclear weapons. Under this situation, a typical tactical nuclear weapon used against military forces in action might destroy three tanks. In general, in the confined battlefields of Europe, there would be far more civilian casualties than military casualties. But the greatest problem with "tactical nuclear weapons" was that such a nuclear warhead that might be expected to destroy three enemy tanks in battle and perhaps 20 military personnel, could be used to destroy many thousands of civilians. Since the strategic potential of tactical nuclear weapons was far greater than the potential against military forces, NATO superiority and sophistication and tactical nuclear weapons could trivially be nullified by WTO (that is, Soviet) use of nuclear weapons against far more important targets-- NATO cities. In the United States, the Kennedy Administration was brutally terminated with the assassination in Dallas of President Kennedy, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the Presidency in 1963, and was elected in his own right in 1964. By the election of 1968, the United States had clearly become bogged down in the Vietnam War, Secretary of Defense McNamara was encouraged to leave office, and Johnson refused to campaign for the Presidency. But in the Fall of 1967, Secretary of Defense McNamara gave a famous speech in San Francisco, noting that the deployment of ballistic missile defenses (BMD) by the United States would be a very bad idea, but in a very short addendum to his speech (printed separately in his collected papers!) McNamara said that nevertheless it would be desirable to deploy a very limited BMD against a Chinese ICBM threat that might materialize within a matter of weeks or months. In fact, it took more than a decade for the Chinese to test an ICBM. The defense technology community in the United States had been carefully watching Soviet experiments and deployments related to ballistic missile defense, and concluded that such defenses could rather readily be defeated by "penetration aids", which might consist of decoys, jammers, and the like, or (much more simply) of multiple warheads, separated from the launching missile, and capable of attacking various targets. Thus was born the MIRV (Multiple Independently targeted Reentry Vehicle). The very large number of U.S. strategic warheads on our missiles was directly a consequence of the fear of Soviet deployment of ballistic missile defense. Hans Bethe and I published an unclassified analysis of this technology in Scientific American of March 1968, showing how nuclear-armed BMD could be defeated by various penetration aids, especially by MIRVs and MaRVs-- Maneuvering Reentry Vehicles. If one considers the strategic confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States as a physical system with both positive and negative "feedback" it is clear that the existence of positive feedback in itself does not destabilize a system, and negative feedback in itself does not stabilize a system. It is the sum or resultant of positive and negative feedbacks that determines whether a system is stable or not. But the U.S.-Soviet confrontation was out of control, because especially in the United States democratic Congress and public perception, there was almost exclusive concentration or exaggeration of "worst-case analysis", which ignored the stabilizing feedbacks. Like a person addicted to alcohol ("alcoholic" in U.S. parlance), the U.S. response to a threat was to buy more nuclear weapons, whether that would really help or not. And it seems that was the action on the Soviet side until Mikhail Gorbachev. By the 1980s, when it was perfectly clear that there was no significant threat of WTO invasion of Western Europe, and by which time Soviet scholars and political figures had had 15 years of close contact with the West, U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23. 1983 announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The U.S. technical national security community, both within and outside government, as well as the Soviet Union, was caught totally unawares by this announcement, which in itself and by Reagan Administration interpretation promised to protect not only the United States but its Allies against missile attack, to the extent that if 10,000 were launched, not even a single nuclear warhead would reach its intended target. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he announced that the Soviet Union would not reply to SDI by deploying such a system, but would "respond by means that were asymmetric." By this he meant penetration aids such as those described in the 1968 Bethe-Garwin paper, and by attack on the SDI system deployed in space. OTHER INFLUENCES. At the same time that nuclear weapons were growing in numbers in order to counter defenses and to survive destruction before launch (DBL), they were, (not always admittedly), growing in numbers in order also to be able to destroy the opposing force. Clearly there was no end to this increase, and U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons were built about as fast as was possible. However, there was another quite different thread, and that was the attempt to limit by agreement the nuclear threat. I mentioned that I participated in 1958 in the "Conference on Prevention of Surprise Attack ..." and the beginning of the discussions to eliminate the testing of nuclear weapons. By 1963, these efforts resulted in the negotiation and entering into force of the "Limited Test Ban" for nuclear weapons, banning (to signatories) the testing in the atmosphere, in the oceans, and in space, of any nuclear explosive. This left unconstrained underground nuclear explosions. President Johnson met with his Soviet counterpart in 1968 together with Secretary of Defense McNamara, in Glassboro, Pennsylvania, launching the negotiations that led to the 1972 (Nixon era) accords. These were the "ABM Treaty" and the "Interim Agreement on Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms." Indeed, the ABM Treaty of 1972 has survived to the present day, although it was strongly resented (but not denounced) by the Reagan Administration. The Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms reduced potential growth of the strategic forces, and successive negotiations constituted the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START 1 and START 2) which commit the U.S. and (now) Russia to deploy no more than 3500 strategic warheads by the year 2003. Unfortunately, START does not limit "non-deployed" warheads, and the 1994 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) anticipates that the United States will have 5000 additional reserve warheads at that time. Russia would be allowed any number of reserve warheads. THE PRESENT. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, three of the former Soviet republics-- Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania-- although exceedingly small in population are sufficiently close to Scandinavia and to the West probably to survive on their own. I have neither time nor expertise to comment on the future of others of the NIS (Newly Independent States), except to note that I have been many times to Russia and December 1994 to Ukraine, and at times to the territory of Uzbekhestan, Georgia, Estonia, and Lithuania. As Germany knows from the integration of East Germany, it is not an easy matter to transform a society from the former Soviet model to a Western democratic, capitalist society, and East Germany was (if you will pardon my stating the obvious) a far simpler case than is Russia or many of the other former Soviet republics. The former East Germany had the same language as West Germany, and West Germany (I will call it "Germany" from now on) had a well defined and perfected legislature, system of laws, public order, and the like. With very few exceptions, these were extended intact to the unified Germany. But none of these facilitating features is present in the fSU (former Soviet Union). WHAT IS BEING DONE? At this moment, we have a very fragile democracy in Russia and a kind of bandit capitalism. Free enterprise exists not so such in production and transportation, but in buying goods made in the West and selling them in Russia. There is no coherent system of law or of the judiciary, and there is widespread fear, suspicion, and reluctance of Western organizations to invest in Russia for this reason. Nevertheless, this is a Russia of 150 million people, with at least 20,000 nuclear warheads. In my opinion, those in the Clinton Administration deserve high marks in perceptiveness (and substantially lower marks in execution) in recognizing the threat to international security of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The problem of "loose nukes" was clearly apparent to Assistant Secretary of Defense (Nuclear Security and Counterproliferation) Dr. Ashton B. Carter (formerly of Harvard University) and to Secretary of Defense William J. Perry. Senators Sam Nunn of Georgia and Richard G.Lugar deserve tremendous credit for their initiative in requiring $600 M per year to be allocated from the U.S. Department of Defense budget for "cooperative threat reduction" in the fSU. In reality, the previous year, then-head of the House Armed Services Committee (later to be Secretary of Defense for a year) the late Les Aspin had proposed taking $1000 M from the defense budget for a similar purpose, but his initiative was never enacted. To make a long story short, the United States and Ukraine have agreed that by 1996 all nuclear warheads in Ukraine will be returned to Russia. Among the republics of the fSU, only Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan have nuclear weapons, and Belarus committed before Ukraine to return all of its nuclear weapons to Russia. We can be confident that Kazakhstan will do the same, leaving Russia as the sole nuclear heir to the Soviet Union. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? The START-2 agreement will result in the elimination of MIRVs from land-based ICBMs in U.S. and Russia, and reduces one of the growth factors for the strategic force. The 1972 ABM Treaty, in principle, reduces the other. However, I have not noted the existence in the world of three other declared nuclear powers-- Britain, France, and China, each with a number of nuclear warheads in the range of 300-1000. The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has just been extended by the 1995 Review Conference in New York, to persist indefinitely, but there is no strict commitment on the part of the five declared nuclear powers (declared, in fact, in conjunction with the NPT itself) to reduce or eliminate their nuclear weapons. Although it is not one of the five NPT-designated nuclear powers, South Africa states that it had built six U-235 Hiroshima type weapons, from U-235 enriched in South Africa by an indigenous process, but that it destroyed these weapons and the nuclear material, and has demonstrated this to the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA). However, there are three other nations commonly accepted to possess nuclear weapon capability: Israel, India, and Pakistan. The Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 (not signed by Israel, India, or Pakistan) commits the non-nuclear signatories not to build nuclear weapons or to accept nuclear weapons, and commits the nuclear weapons states not to transfer or help to produce nuclear weapons in non-nuclear weapon states. The "club" of nuclear weapon states has expanded far more slowly than was anticipated in the 1960s. But in the last ten years the complexion of states and non-state entities has changed substantially. THE CURRENT & FUTURE AGENDA. We are now concerned with states that sponsor terrorism such as Libya, Iran, and perhaps Syria, and non-state groups present in the United States (for instance, the perpetrators of the bombing in Oklahoma City) and in Japan (those who perpetrated the chemical warfare attack in the Tokyo subways), and which have the property that they are less "deterrable" by threat of retaliation. Indeed, the United States has never been able to defend to a significant extent against nuclear weapons delivered either by aircraft or by missile (and still less by freighter ...). It has relied, really, on the threat to perpetrate against an aggressor "unacceptable damage". But how does one punish a nihilist? Or (as the joke goes) how does one punish a masochist? While it is essential to continue to stress the NPT goal that non-nuclear states should see their security improved by rejecting nuclear weapons and depending upon security guarantees, and that the nuclear weapon states reduce their nuclear arsenals and perhaps eventually eliminate them either totally or transfer them to the command of the United Nations, it is essential now to preclude the transfer of nuclear weapon capability to rogue states outside the NPT, to states within the NPT that do not honor their commitment to NPT like Iraq and North Korea, and to non-state entities such as the "militias" in the United States, militant religious groups, etc. I should say here that I have long advocated that the U.S. and Russia should reduce their nuclear warhead numbers by 95% or more, so that each would have a total of 1000 (including any reserve warheads). At the same time, Britain, China, and France should voluntarily limit their armories to 300 nuclear warheads each, and the world should take seriously the need to provide both negative and positive "security guarantees" to the non-nuclear states signatory to the NPT. A new problem derives in part from the successful negotiation of major reductions (by 80 or 90%, if not 95%) in U.S. and Russian nuclear weapon holdings. As a result, nuclear weapons in Russia and the fSU in general have become a burdensome waste rather than a prized weapon. Together with the economic dislocation prevalent in the fSU, and the desire of many wealthy non-nuclear countries (Libya, Iran, Iraq, and perhaps others) to possess at least a limited number of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon expertise, there is a serious problem that now-excess nuclear weapon material (Pu-239 and high-enriched uranium) will leak from the fSU to these countries, driven by individual penury in Russia and elsewhere, and the lack of civil law and common concern in the fSU. Indeed, this audience must be very familiar with the many instances in which real amounts of fissionable material (both plutonium and uranium) have appeared in Germany and the Czech Republic (together with a lot of other instances in which there has been deception or "scam" on one side or another). It is difficult to believe that these instances of seized fissile material constitute all of the material leaking from the fSU, and it is likely that a lot more has left or may be in flight. WHAT IS BEING DONE? I have previously mentioned the Nunn-Lugar funds for nominally "government to government" interaction between U.S. and Russian and other republics of the fSU, oriented toward "cooperative threat reduction." But the U.S. Department of Energy has also a program-- the "lab to lab" program, which more informally and perhaps more effectively connects the U.S. nuclear weapon laboratories with those in Russia. Advances have recently been made in MPC&A (Material Protection Control and Accountancy), and there are other instruments such as the International Science & Technology Center (ISTC) in Moscow, in which Germany had a founding role, now assumed by the EU. The ABM Treaty was a milestone in attempting to achieve international security by arms limitation. It constituted, in fact, a recognition of the technical necessity to accept the fact of U.S. vulnerability to Soviet nuclear weapons (and vice versa) so that the "deterrence by assured destruction" that was the criterion of Secretary of Defense McNamara for building U.S. strategic forces became explicitly a situation of Mutual Assured Destruction. An important consequence was that even without specific agreements to limit offensive strategic forces, there was no incentive for them to grow far beyond the number necessary for the assured destruction role. One of the divisors leading to the expansion of offensive strategic arms had been eliminated-- the potentially small fraction of warheads that would penetrate an unconstrained defense. Neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union showed much sense, though, in controlling the other factor that was well within their individual control. This other divisor related to Destruction Before Launch (DBL) in which only a small fraction of the strategic offensive force might survive a massive first strike against the retaliatory force. How is it that nuclear warheads of limited accuracy and reliability can threaten to destroy nearly all of the SOF on the other side? Because of a choice by the United States and then the Soviet Union to rely largely on missiles carrying multiple warheads, indeed multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles, MIRVs. With the evolution of the technology of nuclear weapons, and of missile systems, it became possible to make compact, light nuclear weapons and to divide the payload capacity of a large rocket into multiple warheads. These could be more flexibly assigned to destructive roles in the target area, and even in the unlikely case in which all the MIRVs on a given missile would be assigned to provide a large local area of destruction (mimicking that of a large single warhead) the three or ten MIRVs to do the job would overwhelm even an ABM system that could effectively deal with one large warhead. It is ironic that the United States, having considered the prospect of MIRVing its missiles, rejected advice during the negotiation of the 1972 Limited Offensive Agreement to ban MIRVs, which would no longer be necessary if ABM were banned. As a result, later U.S. claims that Soviet improvement of accuracy for their ICBMs was threatening a "first strike capability" against U.S. retaliatory forces ring particularly hollow; this was a vulnerability imposed by the United States on itself. Nixon's National Security Advisor (and later Secretary of State) Henry A. Kissinger acknowledged in a discussion with journalists that he wished he "had thought through the implications of a MIRVed world more thoughtfully ..." MORE POLITICAL OBSERVATIONS. In general the administrations of U.S. Democratic presidents have been more willing to pursue improvements in U.S. national security by means of arms limitation agreements, while Republican electoral campaigns and administrations have tended to emphasize achieving national security by increasing U.S. military capability. Thus, the 1980 Presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan explicitly featured a three-point program to build weapons to disarm the Soviet Union. In our two-party system, however, Democratic Administrations tended to be blocked from achieving their goals in limitation of Soviet arms (and corresponding limits on U.S. arms) by Republican opposition, and several times the actual achievement of such agreements occurred in a Republican presidential administration. Having won the presidential election in 1980, President-to-be Ronald Reagan was provided with briefings and information which showed him (much to his shock and horror) that the complaints he had been making about U.S. vulnerability to Soviet weapons were indeed valid. He found it more difficult to accept that this vulnerability was not a result of incompetence or cowardice on the part of the Democrats, but he began to struggle with the problem of improving U.S. security in a world in which there were tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, each of which had many times the explosive yield of the nuclear weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, the posture of mutual deterrence depended on this very vulnerability. On March 23, 1983, in a brief attachment to his speech regarding the defense budget, President Reagan called for "the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to ... give us a means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." Specifically, he was calling for a space-based defense including powerful lasers on satellites, to destroy Soviet missiles and their nuclear warheads in flight. Reagan had not discussed his Strategic Defense Initiative with his Presidential Science Advisory Committee, which had just completed a study of the potential of space-based defenses and decided that they had little to offer as a robust, effective defense against strategic weapons. Nevertheless, a massive study was soon organized to put some attractive flesh on the skeleton of the SDI concept, and a massive program was launched that would spend billions of dollars each year. The problem was not the impossibility of weapons on satellites that could destroy missiles in flight; the problems was that the satellites themselves were terribly vulnerable to destruction by the Soviet Union at any time. As already noted, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev eventually announced that the Soviet Union would not mimic an SDI deployment but would counter it by "means that are asymmetric." When that historic figure Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, he looked outside the military-industrial system for technical advice. Interestingly, President Eisenhower had done the same when he took office in 1953. Two of Gorbachev's principal scientific advisors, Evgenii Velikhov and Roald Sagdeev, had been meeting twice a year for several years with the Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, in a series of meetings that began in 1980, and of which I have been a member from the beginning. In the belief that national security is not always bought at the cost of national security of the other side, and that one cannot fool Mother Nature, the CISAC discussions had included topics like a comprehensive ban on nuclear tests, the potential for reducing numbers of nuclear weapons, the requirements and practicality of defenses against ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads, cutoff of production of nuclear materials, and the like. The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, and specialized Pugwash workshops had long considered such questions, and Pugwash deserves much credit for some of these favorable developments. It seems that only the personal encounter of Presidents Reagan and General Secretary (later President) Gorbachev persuaded Reagan of the humanity and sincerity of Gorbachev, and led Reagan to take seriously the opportunity and need for reduction in numbers of nuclear weapons. Reagan competed with Gorbachev in rhetoric favoring the elimination of nuclear weapons, and if not all nuclear weapons, then President Reagan wanted to eliminate the "fast flyers"-- the ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear weapons in 30 minutes anywhere on the globe. At this point I just note that U.S. Presidents and even Secretaries of Defense have often been ill informed about U.S. capabilities and also the capabilities of others, and I doubt that the situation was much better with many of the Soviet leaders. Just as it was Republican, anti-Communist President Nixon who was able to open U.S. relations with China 23 years ago, so it was Reagan who was able to convert Republican criticism of arms control into support for "real arms reduction" as exemplified by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty-- START 1 and START 2. SOME BACKGROUND. A 1977 VIEW. In a book published in 1977, Nuclear Weapons and World Politics, I provided a chapter "Reducing Dependence on Nuclear Weapons" as my proposal for the future (of the 1980s). As stated there, my purpose was to prescribe a viable posture from which nuclear weapon states could "1. Take effective measures against nuclear proliferation. "2. Hold expenditures on strategic military capabilities to a minimum, while still providing adequate security. "3. Avoid overemphasis on strategic threats-- which leads to the neglect of real and important problems that threaten the existence of national and world society-- thereby permitting the removal of nuclear weapons (to some extent) from the conduct of world politics, i.e., a reduction in their value as instruments of power politics. "4. Give individuals a feeling that the world of nations is understandable and controllable and that their own condition is improving. "5. Provide a stable foundation from which a Third Nuclear Regime might (but need not) evolve." This chapter recommended a nuclear regime based on deterrence of attack, rather than defense, the elimination of U.S. "tactical" or battlefield nuclear weapons and their replacement (with increased effectiveness) by dependence instead on conventionally armed cruise missiles guided by the Global Positioning System, GPS. On the political side, I recommended an international agreement for no-first-use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states, but not an absolute "no-first-use" agreement. I wrote "The United States can make known its intention to use nuclear weapons only in response to other's nuclear weapons without signing a formal agreement that would eliminate first use as even an extreme option, and therefore without reducing the uncertainty regarding American strategy that deters Soviet conventional aggression in Europe." I proposed also de-MIRVing the land-based missile force. Many of the recommendations have in fact been realized. That same 1977 book carries a useful Appendix by Franklin C. Miller that traces the U.S. thinking about its nuclear weapons from "bigger bang for a buck" to "massive retaliation" to "flexible response" to "damage limitation" to "assured destruction", to "mutual assured destruction" and to "assured retaliation." How much these terms had to do with reality is another matter, and later hopes for "mutually assured survival" as a result of SDI, for instance, departed even farther from fact. THE COMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN TREATY (CTBT). In just the same way that a military weapon is often used most effectively in a mode or mission not foreseen by its developers, the work that has gone into a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing was originally oriented toward slowing the arms race between the super powers by halting the effective development of advanced nuclear weapons. Later it was recognized and emphasized that a CTBT would inhibit proliferation of nuclear weapons, toward which goal it has considerable impact. However, as demonstrated by South Africa and probably by Israel and Pakistan, (and of course by the Hiroshima bomb which was used in combat without ever having been tested), it is not necessary to test to have some confidence in a reliable nuclear weapon system of conservative design. To my mind, the greatest benefit of a CTBT now and for the future lies in conferring some legitimacy on the continued possession of nuclear weapons by relatively few nations, and in providing evidence that the trend in nuclear weaponry is downward in numbers, of weapons that will not be improved qualitatively as time goes by. THEATER MISSILE DEFENSE AND BEYOND. The television broadcasts showing launch of the U.S. Patriot interceptor missiles against Iraqi Scud missiles attacking Israel and Saudi Arabia augmented both the desire for and the enthusiasm for Theater Missile Defense (TMD), to protect U.S. military forces, allied military forces, and friendly cities against attack by theater-range ballistic missiles carrying high explosive, chemical, biological, or nuclear warheads. Ironically, in part because Iraqi modifications to the Soviet-built Scuds to extend their range caused the missiles to follow a tight helical path as they reentered the atmosphere, only a very small fraction of the Scuds could have been destroyed by the Patriot "intercepts". I am persuaded of this having followed closely the work of Professor Theodore A. Postol of MIT, and the work of his critics. The nuclear-armed theater missile threat to U.S. forces is essentially nonexistent now, and there are many ways to deliver a nuclear weapon other than by ballistic missile. The first line of defense against chemical and biological weapons, delivered by missile or not, is to move urgently to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972 that entered into force in 1975. The nations of the world must also show that they are serious in expecting and enforcing compliance so that there will be no chemical or biological weapons ever used in warfare; their use would be a serious affront to the rule of law, whether or not they caused significant damage when used. In reality, BW attack on a city can be carried out by systems to disperse the BW agent, smuggled into the city. We have an example from the rather incompetent chemical agent attack on the Tokyo subways this year. However, it would be highly desirable to be able to defend against BW delivered by ballistic missile, aircraft, or cruise missile, even if there were an alternative hand-delivery route. The dispersal of BW from a ballistic missile reentry vehicle is not a simple matter, and the approach of choice is likely to be to package the agent in sub-munitions or bomblets, which themselves would be dispersed before they in turn dispense the agent. Probably the easiest way to accomplish this is not in the reentry at all, but during the ascent phase of flight, so-called Early Release of Submunitions (ERS) which negates any of the systems proposed for Theater Missile Defense, except those few that may have some promise of destroying the missile in boost or ascent phase. The primary line of defense for U.S. military forces against BW or CW attack is a passive means, of appropriate defensive garb and decontamination facilities. But the inclusion of the "requirement" to protect allied cities creates a difficult (and with ERS an insoluble) problem for terminal defense. A major problem with U.S. TMD programs is that there is a strong undercurrent in U.S. defense and political circles that wishes to eliminate the ABM Treaty, basing U.S. security on our supposed ability to defend effectively against the threats posed by possible adversaries, rather than simply to retaliate and thus to deter such attacks. But whether or not this is the objective of supporting major improvements in TMD, they would surely have the effect of forcing Russia to add penetration aids to their missile force, activities that Russia can ill-afford at present but that would effectively (but not assuredly) counter the defense. Many supporters of SDI have now written that they never believed that it would be a technically effective system, but that the intent was to create an arms race that the Soviet Union could not afford to continue, and they claim that the destruction of the Soviet political system came as a result of Soviet recognition that they could not afford to keep up with the U.S. militarily. Given that background, specific U.S. proposals to interpret the ABM Treaty now as permitting everything that had not been demonstrated against strategic missiles are unacceptable to Russia, and should be unacceptable to the United States. Such interpretation or amendment of the ABM Treaty would surely drive Russia to the creation of nuclear-armed ABM systems, and rightly so, because non-nuclear interceptors are too readily fooled in the vacuum of space where they would presumably operate. Just in the last week there have appeared newspaper articles quoting unnamed U.S. Defense Department personnel as advocating a "force on force" criterion for the acceptability of a TMD system: so long as it could be overwhelmed by a large Russian missile attack, it would be considered compliant with the ABM Treaty. The offense-defense reaction in peacetime between TMD and allied systems on the one hand, and the strategic offensive systems on the other, would create an entirely new arms race. It would begin, in fact, by forcing the lesser nuclear powers-- Britain, China, and France-- to increase their forces or to provide penetration aids to counter the kind of system that would be permissible under the U.S. proposal. I believe that the U.S. should accept the traditional self-imposed limitation by which the U.S. classed as non-ABM systems those in which interceptor speed was below 2 km/s, and intercepts took place below 40 km altitude. Anything else was classed as an ABM interceptor and its deployment was limited to the one allowable deployment area and its number to fewer than 100 interceptors. THE PROBLEM OF EXCESS PU. As a result of the START 1 Treaty and START 2 (which may or may not be ratified by the Russian Duma), and also various unilateral but coordinated statements and actions by Presidents George Bush and Boris Yeltsin, both the U.S. and Russia are engaged in the demilitarization and disassembly of nuclear warheads. In the United States this is proceeding at the rate of about 1800 per year, with the nuclear component of the weapon primary (the sealed "pit") being stored in individual containers in simple "igloos" at a U.S. Department of Energy facility at Pantex, in the state of Texas. We are informed that similar disassembly is proceeding at four sites in Russia. Plutonium is not only a material that can be used to make nuclear weapons, but it is also highly radioactive and dangerous to health and life, particularly when inhaled as small particles of the metal or compounds. In contrast, the high-enriched uranium (HEU) components of nuclear weapons have only this risk of proliferation or re-use, but do not pose a significant radiological hazard. In the United States, HEU components are sent to the plant at Oak Ridge where they were manufactured, and they will eventually be diluted with normal or depleted uranium to form fuel for commercial nuclear reactors. More than 50 tons of excess weapon plutonium will emerge from the disassembly of nuclear weapons in the United States, and an even larger amount in Russia, by the year 2003. In addition, at least 500 tons of HEU will appear in the same way. Note the magnitude of the "proliferation" problem-- the problem of the spread of nuclear materials and hence nuclear weapons or terrorist governments or groups: the rather arbitrary "50 tons" of weapon plutonium is enough to make more than 8000 Nagasaki bombs, and the 500 tons of HEU could be used to make on the order of 30,000 implosion weapons like those that constituted the early Chinese nuclear weapon force. These weapons-usable materials constitute an enormous risk, which has been the subject of intense study and activity in the United States since at least 1991. The Clinton Administration has recognized fully this problem, and the National Academy of Sciences CISAC published in January 1994 a significant study "Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium". The study was directed toward reducing the three hazards of excess weapon materials in Russia-- breakup, breakout, and breakdown. Breakup was the problem that the Soviet Union would fragment into a significant number of entities each possessing nuclear weapons. Indeed, through active diplomacy and perhaps good sense on both sides, all former Soviet tactical weapons were returned to Russia by 1992. Strategic weapon in Belarus have also been returned, and those in Ukraine and Kazakhstan will be transferred to Russia over the next few years. Breakout refers to the possibility that at some future time, Russia could use the weapon material from disassembled weapons to rapidly rebuild its enormous nuclear stockpile. We hope to cooperate with Russian in the use or disposition of the fissile material so that it cannot readily be reused. For instance, Russia has contracted to sell to the United States 500 tons of HEU over the next 20 years, blended to form normal low-enriched uranium fuel for commercial power reactors. Russian will receive $12,000 million for this material. Breakdown refers to the transformation of Russian society, the prevalence of crime, the tiny salaries that have resulted from the effects of inflation, and the consequent motivation and potential for theft of nuclear materials that would eventually (perhaps through a chain of intermediaries) provide the nuclear weapons materials to a government or non-state group that would make and threaten to use nuclear weapons in a terrorist mode. These concerns are being addressed by programs oriented to improve Material Protection, Control and Accountancy (MPC&A), and also by the potential for use of the nuclear materials. Germany may have considerable influence in this regard. I participated in March in a meeting in Bonn of the German-American Academic Council project concerned with Germany's role in helping to solve this problem-- especially in view of German expertise in fabrication of nuclear fuel. Our CISAC analyses have shown that it actually costs more money to use "free" weapon plutonium to fabricate fuel for a commercial power reactor than to spend all the money to buy equivalent LEU fuel. Nevertheless, however one disposes of weapon plutonium it will cost money, and burning weapon plutonium in commercial power reactors seems to be a perfectly sensible approach that could proceed commercially with a government subsidy in the range of $1000 M for 50 tons of weapon plutonium. CONCLUSIONS. "Cooperative Denuclearization: From Pledges to Deeds" is the title of a 1993 volume that describes the situation of the U.S. and Russia now. But what should be the agenda for the future? I think that the following are essential: 1. Implement the agreements to which we are committed and demilitarize and disassemble the nuclear weapons. 2. Safely store and dispose of the excess weapon plutonium and uranium. 3. Nuclear and non-nuclear states should take seriously their responsibility under the NPT, now made permanent by its indefinite extension May 11, 1995. In particular, this means to understand and to implement positive and negative security guarantees against attack by nuclear weapons. 4. As committed by the nuclear powers in the documents accompanying the extension of the NPT, a comprehensive ban on nuclear explosive tests should be signed (and enter into force) no later than 1996, and this CTB should ban also those tests of tiny fission yield known as "hydronuclear" experiments. Furthermore, the CTB should make no provision for "peaceful nuclear explosions" (PNE). Perhaps ten years after the CTB enters into force, there could be an international conference to discuss the potential utility, costs, and problems of PNEs, so that a separate treaty might possibly be negotiated if there were a compelling reason to do so. 5. The G-7 should make the investments and do the hard work required to further safeguard and secure nuclear materials in Russia and ensure that the same is true in the United States. 6. The world must then move on to a more durable system of protection against diversion of the plutonium in spent commercial fuel to weapon use, since that plutonium can be used to make nuclear weapons as well, contrary to the impression widespread for many decades. 7. As the demilitarization and disposal of weapon material proceeds, attention should be given to a next rung in descending the nuclear ladder in which the U.S. and Russia could maintain a force of 1000 nuclear warheads each, but without "reserve warheads". This should be accompanied by a limit or reduction (as the case may be) to 300 nuclear warheads each in the armories of Britain, China, and France. 8. The threat of missile attack should be addressed primarily by arms control means. A ban on weapons in space should be negotiated, which should include also a ban on antisatellite (ASAT) tests and ASAT use. U158PPNW 060795PPNW DRAFT 1 06/07/95