Abstract
During last year's presidential campaign, can-didate George W. Bush said he would take U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert and make unilateral reductions in the arsenal. But the new administration's evolving Nuclear Posture Review (npr) suggests that these promises are unlikely to be kept. Even if they were, the intent would be to preserve the nuclear game rather than move toward a world without nukes.
Because of its bureaucratic nature, it is doubtful the posture review will produce anything inspiring. And while changes for the U.S. armed forces are being called a “transformation” or a “revolution,” the npr is being undertaken in isolation from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's larger military review. There will be no “out-of-the-box” thinking about how to get beyond the Cold War nuclear model.
The Washington arms control community is equally uninspired. Outside government, a pack of long-standing nuclear experts dominated by former Clinton and Carter administration officials is preparing its own review. Although the arms control community may disagree with the administration on a number of issues—including the number of warheads needed, the technical feasibility of defenses, the need for binding treaties, and the value of de-alerting forces—the “consensus” view of both camps is that nuclear weapons are here to stay.
The outcome of the Bush administration's npr is not preordained, but there are substantial organizational, financial, and political reasons why the non-governmental community will have little impact on it.
While organizational reductions are creating a more monolithic nuclear camp in government, non-governmental groups continue to proliferate. “The funding base is being decimated by the number of groups that exist,” says one long-time observer of the Washington nuclear scene. The way traditional foundations fund arms control work encourages fractionation, resulting in smaller and weaker groups that are incapable of countering the government monolith.
When foundations aren't starving the good organizations to pay for the bad ones, they are latching on to whatever issue of the moment seems to attract the most media attention. This strategy, in place since the end of the Cold War, has clearly failed. Disarmament-oriented foundations have damaged their cherished cause by funding an uninformed nonproliferation cottage industry. These groups proselytize with great energy about loose nukes, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction. But their message serves largely as an adjunct to that of the threat-mongers on the inside—a background noise of exaggeration that feeds the notion that nuclear weapons remain essential in an ever more dangerous world.
The success of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (icbl) reinforced the foundations' strategy by encouraging the dream that newspaper headlines could spawn the next “million mad march.” The arms control and anti-nuclear communities are forced to be niche-oriented to retain funding, but the anti-mine campaign's success was largely due to the unification of effort. The icbl also seized the public's imagination by presenting its issue as a real world problem. Its proposed solution was uncompromising and heartfelt—qualities unheard of in the world of arms control.
If the fate of the earth were actually in question, the sclerotic state of arms control would be tragic. But people don't take to the streets to protest the Bush administration precisely because they think the stakes are so inconsequential.
As the new team in Washington puts a chill on relations with Russia and China, isolating the NPR from military reform insures that nukes continue to generate tension. Flights by U.S. EP-3 planes near China, for example, are not just for passive surveillance; the aircraft also collect information used to develop nuclear war plans.
Out-of-the-box thinking might recognize that the revolution in conventional military forces, information warfare, and soon-to-emerge directed-energy weapons are displacing nukes. But neither the priesthood on the inside nor the proselytizers on the outside have a broad enough vision to see where the world is really moving.