Center for International Policy

As printed in Bangor Daily News

July 25, 2006

Viewpoints: Double Trouble

However deeply serious and troubling the news is from Israel and Lebanon, it cannot obscure other challenges to peace. North Korea and Iran are both believed to be developing nuclear weapons, and the United States has no effective strategy to stop them. The policy of pre-emptive attack remains an empty threat, since U.S. forces are already stretched thin in unfinished wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

United Nations sanctions probably would be vetoed by Russia or China. Diplomacy has stalemated, with the United States refusing one-on-one talks. Economic incentives have been hedged with conditions and have had little appeal. And regime change looks like wishful thinking. The rogue regimes seem to gain popularity by standing up to the world's superpower.

Underlying this twin stalemate is the emerging fact that non-proliferation is a broken system. The eight current nuclear powers try to hang onto their strategic lead, while others want to join the nuclear club for reasons of national prestige and very real concerns about their nuclear neighbors. Not only North Korea and Iran, but also Japan, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and South Korea are edging toward nuclear weapons programs or could do so.

At the heart of the trouble is the neglect of a key provision of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty signed by 188 nations. In return for other states' not going nuclear, Article 6 committed the five original nuclear states to pursue "negotiations in good faith on effective measures relative to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament."

Far from honoring that promise, President George W. Bush has kept modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal and is developing smaller strategic nuclear weapons including the "bunker buster" for a possible strike against North Korea's or Iran's underground arsenal.

The developing U.S. nuclear force "seems designed to carry out a pre-emptive disarming strike against Russia or China," according to Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press in their article "The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy" in the journal Foreign Affairs.

With the old nuclear bargain so badly broken, is there any hope for getting the genie back into the bottle? Selig S. Harrison, a specialist in Asian security matters, says that what's needed is a new bargain "linking realistic negotiations with Pyongyang and Teheran with a parallel process of global nuclear weapons reductions." This would start with U.S.-Russian reductions but would also require steps to reduce and "delegitimize" the nuclear weapons of all eight existing nuclear powers.

One of these would be pledges by all nuclear powers not to be the first to use nuclear weapons. China and India have made these "no first use" pledges, but the United States, Britain, France, Russia and Pakistan refuse to do so. The United States and Russia would downgrade their nuclear alerts, and the United States would withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and promote regional nuclear-free zone agreements.

If these steps seem fanciful, keep in mind that nothing else is working. A nuclear-free world would be worth the effort.