America is sleepwalking through history, armed with nuclear weapons.
The Cold War left us with a massive inventory of weapons we no longer need, an
infrastructure we can no longer use or maintain, and no thought of where our
future lies. A shrinking community of nuclear experts holds on to a massive and
aging inventory as a security blanket for a future they cannot define. That same
community now advocates the development of a weapon (the so-called Robust
Nuclear Earth Penetrator, or RNEP) that commands no conviction from either the
military or the broad policy community. In short, we are nowhere.
Last year Congress, led by Rep. Dave Hobson (R-Ohio), chairman of a
House Appropriations subcommittee, rejected the administration's plan for RNEP.
Hobson rightly asked, "What is the administration's overall plan?" and he has
yet to get an answer that makes any sense. The plan he seeks is not some
micro-agenda for testing components of a new design but rather a comprehensive
plan for keeping America a credible nuclear power in the future. We have now
gone a decade without one.
Before we decide what new things to buy, the country needs a national
debate about the role of nuclear weapons and their contribution to our security.
The global security environment has changed dramatically, and we need new
thinking, thinking that is not mired in the battles over nuclear forces that
date from the 1980s and 1990s. To stimulate that national debate, I offer these
points.
First, there is an important reason the United States must have nuclear
weapons: Other nations have them, and more seem to want them. We still must
deter potential opponents, avoid nuclear intimidation by other powers and
prevent strategic surprise by aspirant nations. America also extends its
deterrence to many allies so that they do not feel compelled to build nuclear
weapons of their own. Thus we must maintain a credible nuclear deterrent force,
as well as theoretical and operational knowledge of nuclear weapons superior to
that of anyone else.
Second, the current inventory of nuclear weapons is grossly oversized
and ill-suited for whatever the future might bring. These weapons were designed
for an earlier age. While the force is quite capable today and provides a
reliable deterrence, its credibility will erode as it ages.
Third, we do better to hedge an uncertain future by maintaining
competent design teams and building new weapons at low production rates than by
holding on to a massive inventory of aging weapons.
Fourth, while many of my colleagues and associates do not share this
view, I believe we should commit to retiring all our existing nuclear
warheads and building a small number of new-design weapons in their place. I do
not believe there is any sustainable political support for building new weapons
when we continue to hold on to more than 8,000 warheads. If we start with the
premise that the weapons of the past should be retired and dismantled, we can
start fresh in our thinking about what kind of force we need for the future and
how large it should be. I suspect that it will be a very small
inventory.
Fifth, we must minimize the risk that nuclear weapons might fall into
the hands of terrorists. There is no greater priority in the global war on
terrorism. We can accomplish this by reducing the availability of nuclear
weapons and material on a global basis. This is an urgent requirement.
Consistent with it, we should start now to reconfigure the U.S. nuclear
production complex to dramatically reduce its size. We should not start
producing new weapons until we have a much smaller, safer production
complex.
Sixth: Russia still holds on to even larger inventories of nuclear
weapons than we do, in the false belief that this compensates for its current
conventional weaknesses. This is counterproductive. After all, Russia has
hostile terrorist forces on its borders and has experienced terrorism directly
on its own soil. The greatest danger it faces stems from its huge nuclear
inventory. Both the United States and Russia must lead the world to smaller
inventories. But the United States has a much better basis for making this
argument if it takes the lead.
Seventh, any approach to building new warheads for a future arsenal
needs to be integrated into a comprehensive program that minimizes the
attractiveness of nuclear weapons to nonnuclear countries, encourages the
reduction of excessive inventories among nuclear states, and strengthens the
controls over nuclear stocks and material. This requires that we return to the
fundamental goals that shaped adoption of the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty
and retool them for today. Simply skimming over things in periodic review
conferences -- such as the one scheduled to start today -- is another example of
sleepwalking.
Finally, I do not believe we need to test the existing arsenal of
weapons. The Energy Department's Stockpile Stewardship Program is adequate to
that limited task, though I recognize that experts I trust argue that at some
point we may need to test in order to validate the knowledge base underlying our
current certification process. This problem will disappear, however, as we
retire the current inventory.
Almost all technical experts believe we probably do not need to test
new-design weapons to have high confidence in their effectiveness. But if we
completely retire all existing systems, I think we should test the new weapons
to demonstrate to the world that they are credible. Such testing need not be
extensive. And while I acknowledge that testing is widely seen as a provocative
act, it can be made acceptable internationally so long as it is preceded by a
commitment to retire our entire existing inventory.
The actions I recommend would probably save a considerable amount of
money, but that isn't why I support them. They are necessary if we are to have a
reliable deterrent in the future and a diminished risk of nuclear terrorism.
This is an area in which we need to scrap the past and start from scratch. The
time for sleepwalking is indeed over.
The writer, a former deputy defense secretary, is president of the
Center for Strategic and International
Studies.