As the 47 world leaders prepared to return home from the Washington ‘loose nukes’ summit, there were two leading schools of thought about what it accomplished. One, exemplified by Joseph Cirincione at The Daily Beast, hailed the summit as the beginning of the end of the Strangelovian era of nuclear terror. “Calculated subtlety and strategic depth,” gushed my friend Steve Clemons at Politico.com. They weren’t, on the other hand, having any of this at The Weekly Standard, where words like supine and absurd characterize the coverage.
With my customary wishy-washy centrism I see some merit in both points of view. On the plus side, this was not just another vacuous photo op of a summit. By convening the gathering and getting an agreement, however bland and however voluntary, on efforts to reduce ‘loose nukes,’ President Obama put some points up on the board — something he badly needed to do.
He also advanced one of the key themes in his strategy. The drive to tighten controls over existing stocks of dangerous nuclear materials is part of a larger emphasis in Obama’s diplomacy of repositioning the United States as a power that wants to promote nuclear disarmament. If you were a deeply cynical kind of person, the kind who values ‘calculated subtlety and strategic depth,’ you would note that President Obama’s nuclear diplomacy turns on a dirty little secret. Because of our overwhelming superiority in conventional weapons, the United States needs nuclear weapons less than anybody else. After all, if nuclear weapons disappeared from the face of the earth, other countries would be essentially defenseless before our non-nuclear military power.
This fact of life is good news for American diplomacy, and President Obama is right to press home the advantage. We can sincerely argue for the abolition of nuclear weapons; Henry Kissinger has done as much. It’s not a bluff, because with the right kind of verification — difficult as that might be to do — we could happily sign a treaty banning nukes and as long as nobody else cheated, we wouldn’t either. And in any case, it is perfectly safe: some of the other nuclear states need the ugly things much more than we do, so it is very unlikely that all our talk about nuclear disarmament will ever force us to give anything up. Russia and China are unlikely to put us to the test by agreeing to abolish their nuclear arsenals and submitting to intense inspections to make sure they stay in compliance.
In the meantime, talking about our sincere anti-nuclear vision is excellent politics. Public opinion around the world hates and fears nuclear weapons; why not harvest goodwill by coming out against them? More, the NPT (non-proliferation treaty) requires nuclear states to move toward disarmament. It also emphasizes the right of all states to the peaceful development of nuclear energy. If we want to strengthen the enforcement mechanisms in that treaty to help us deal with countries like Iran and North Korea in the future, it helps to show that we as a nuclear state are finally serious about the goal of nuclear disarmament — and sensitive to the needs of more countries to develop civilian nuclear programs. And it makes us look peaceful, reasonable and creative as we gear up for to put more pressure on Iran.
Beyond this, stressing his loathing of nuclear weapons and speaking eloquently of his hope that we can one day do without them is an excellent way for President Obama to burnish his international credentials as an agent of change in American foreign policy. Prisoners are still held at Guantanamo, drones are striking Pakistan, hit squads are being dispatched against Americans gone rogue, Europe feels ignored, and America’s two Middle East wars grind on. A cynical person could claim that the difference between the Bush and the Obama policies is more about presentation than substance: lipstick on a pig. Since the international perception that the United States is now a friendlier, nicer country under President Obama is often a useful asset for our diplomacy, it’s good to do and say things that build up this impression.
And, of course, nukes are bad and loose nukes are especially so. As the President pointed out, a lump of material the size of an apple could create hundreds of thousands of casualties. There are 1600 tons of highly enriched nuclear material in the world; that is a lot of apples. Assuming they weigh about five pounds each, there is enough stuff to make 640,000 lumps of mass death. Any steps, however halting in the direction of controlling this threat and creating more international cooperation about one of the greatest, most immediate threats we face should be applauded.
The summit was, in other words, worth having. It was a real diplomatic and political success and while it won’t save the world or end the specter of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists and rogue states, it did some good, benefited America’s international position overall, and nudged the ball down the field. It’s a concrete demonstration that a diplomatic approach different from the last administration can show results and it reassured a number of our friends and allies that the kind of responsible, patient and realistic American leadership they like is still around today.
But having said all this, there is less to the summit than meets the eye. The President’s critics are correct to point out that the countries whose nuclear programs we are really worried about weren’t there and weren’t impressed. Moreover, the biggest ‘accomplishment’ at the talks, China’s agreement to join discussions on a new sanctions resolution against Iran, is not very substantive. Both China and Russia know that their votes on an Iranian sanctions resolution are extremely valuable to the Obama administration; we should not expect them to sell these votes for anything less than the highest price they can get. (And the more the administration touts China’s agreement to participate as a big diplomatic victory, the higher the price the Chinese may think they can ultimately get for their vote.)
There’s a deeper and more troubling reality behind the summit. While it might look as if the Obama administration is making progress on proliferation issues and we are all getting safer, the reality is less encouraging. The world, unfortunately, is not becoming a safer place in which deadly weapons are better controlled and terrorists are going to find it harder and harder to get their hands on the bad stuff. We are moving in just the opposite direction: the amount of deadly material in humanity’s hands is inexorably increasing, and it will be harder and harder to keep it out of the wrong hands. The recent progress on the disarmament front is not a sign that the world’s long nuclear nightmare is coming to an end. It’s not even evidence that the rule of law and international goodwill can build a better, safer world in the twenty first century.
Here’s the problem: technological progress, the force that drives and enables our capitalist way of life, the basis of American prosperity and power, the tool that continues to conquer disease and extend our lives, and the only hope we have of enabling decent lives for all the billions of people on earth, is also responsible for making the world a more dangerous place. The same technological innovation and ingenuity which reshapes civilian life is also pumping out new and cheaper ways to kill people.
This is true at every level of the death business. Technology puts better, cheaper and more accurate weapons in the hands of saber-rattling armies in Africa or Middle East terrorist groups. It makes conventional missiles and warheads faster, more accurate and more powerful than ever before. It opens the door to new, more ‘efficient’ nuclear weapons and it creates new types of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. (Technology also puts the world’s political system under stress, accelerating the pace of social and economic change in societies all over the world, upsetting traditional political arrangements within societies and altering the international balance of power in unpredictable ways.)
Technological progress is what got us into the current proliferation mess to begin with. The fact that countries like Iran and North Korea can have successful nuclear programs is a reflection of the fact that nuclear weapons are much easier and cheaper to build now than they were in the 1940s when it took the world’s richest country and a consortium of the world’s greatest scientists to build primitive prototypes. In those days we didn’t have to worry about terrorists getting their hands on a weapon, either: the world’s tiny supplies of nuclear material were heavily guarded, and an effective nuclear device was closer to an SUV than an apple in size. Fifty years from now it’s going to be even easier to make the stuff and build weapons from it; that’s just the way ‘progress’ works.
Looking down the road, however, it’s not nukes that scare me the most. Biology is much more frightening than physics. Biology is the field where science is making the most rapid strides and the coming decades are going to see a biotech revolution that could be as revolutionary and disruptive as the Neolithic Revolution all those millenniums ago when people first figured out that whole farming thing. Genetically-engineered plagues that attack either humans or crops, biologically produced toxins that can be released into the water or the air: the possibilities unfortunately are nearly endless for weapons that in their potency make those nuclear apples look like duds.
Worse still, it’s likely that these weapons will be easier to make and that efforts to make them will be harder to detect. Iran and North Korea have not been able to conceal their nuclear programs and it has been possible to take countermeasures against them. (Sorry those centrifuges don’t seem to work as well as advertised, Mr. Ahmadinejad — and it’s a shame that those scientists keep defecting.) Enriching uranium still requires a major industrial effort and the purchase of specialized equipment and materials it is relatively easy to detect.
It’s likely, however, that building biotech weapons will be considerably harder to detect. A biology lab doing gene research leading to the production of plagues might not look all that different from a lab researching cures. Uranium comes from a handful of locations and the output of uranium mines can be monitored. The raw materials of biological weapons — bacteria — are abundant and widely distributed. As our ability to understand and manipulate genetic information increases, we are likely to live in a world in which fairly large numbers of people either have or can easily acquire both the know how and the raw materials to make devastating weapons. Pound for pound, genetically altered plague bacillus could be much deadlier than plutonium, much easier and cheaper to make, and much more likely to fall into the wrong hands.
None of this means that the President was wasting his time and our money at the Summit for Nuclear Security. We should do what we can, and taking steps, even baby steps, to reduce the danger of loose nukes is a good thing. But if summits like this one encourage the delusion, in heads of state or among ordinary voters, that an age of international stability and disarmament is upon us, then they could be a mistake.
The seas ahead are stormy, friends. Even as world leaders try to clear up the legacy problems of the twentieth century, the new and much more dangerous and perplexing challenges of the twenty first are taking shape.