Abstract
Transparency in Nuclear Warheads and Materials: The Political and Technical Dimensions Edited by Nicholas Zarimpas, Oxford University Press, 2003, 296 pages; $70
If irreversible nuclear disarmament is to be achieved, the devil will certainly be in the details. Beyond any groundbreaking agreement between countries seeking either the reduction or complete divestiture of their military nuclear assets lays the daunting task of verifiably eliminating stockpiles without spilling nuclear secrets or compromising national security. Grand visions of disarmament quickly boil down to the contentious minutiae of tags and seals, container tracking, and access rights to assure all parties that no one is cheating.
Successfully negotiating nuclear transparency is therefore essential to any effective arms control or disarmament regime, and Nicholas Zarimpas, former leader of the project on military technology and international security at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, sets out to provide a comprehensive survey of the topic in this collection of essays by 12 authors. Though certainly not the first to assess prospects for nuclear disarmament, Zarimpas's genuine innovation and contribution is that he splits evenly the selections for his volume between politics and technology, properly reflecting their inextricable roles in putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle.
On the political side of the issue, the authors paint a bleak picture, lamenting the sorry state of nuclear arms control after the apparent abandonment of future Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) negotiations. The book offers several explanations for the present malaise, ranging from French researcher and defense ministry adviser Camille Grand's suggestion that nuclear transparency is “highly dependent on historical traditions and administrative habits,” to Carnegie scholar Alexander Pikayev's assessment that increasingly divergent U.S. and Russian security objectives mean that “formal bilateral nuclear arms control has partially lost its importance for both states and a deadlock has resulted.”
Yet, other than Swedish defense researcher Gunnar Arbman's insightful look at how the 183 countries without nuclear weapons conceive of nuclear transparency, little on the political front is noteworthy here. The dim future of START and the utter lack of verification measures in START's heir apparent, the 2002 Moscow Treaty (the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty), are by now well-trodden topics. Additionally, each author dutifully plods through the political history of transparency in nuclear arms control agreements, from START to finish. One expository article would have sufficed, but the salient points in this book must wait to emerge until the history lesson is over.
Fortunately, politics represents only half the story in this volume, and Zarimpas's neat division between policy and technical matters highlights the inequality of progress in these two areas. In sharp contrast to the descriptions of political lassitude in nuclear arms control, the six essays devoted to technical developments crackle with ingenuity and the promise of adding more tools to the disarmament kit.
The thorny problem in nuclear disarmament regimes is finding a way to verify the irreversible destruction of nuclear weapons, given that “much of the information to which inspectors would have access through their observations … is classified and must not be revealed without a government-to-government agreement that authorizes an exchange,” as Princeton researcher Oleg Bukharin writes. Discrete technical measures that provide only enough data to assure that commitments are being met–without disclosing sensitive information–need to be implemented.
Tools such as secure algorithms, nondestructive assay devices, and different types of “information barriers” provide nimble solutions to some of the most intractable problems of disclosure and verification. Thanks to the work of scientists and technicians, these tools are becoming increasingly viable, as arms control expert Steve Fetter, physicist Richard L. Garwin, and other contributors point out. It's a good thing, too, for as Garwin writes, “Nuclear disarmament agreements would be more seriously considered if there were tools for providing adequate nuclear transparency.”
By presenting a broad survey of the tools for advancing nuclear transparency, the book injects a fresh perspective into a debate too often mired in solely political concerns. Science may have a long way to go before it invents itself out of the nuclear weapons quagmire, but it is trying.
Ultimately, Zarimpas's effort to provide a working overview of political and technical aspects of nuclear transparency is complicated by the authors' differing understandings of the value and function of nuclear transparency. Whether nuclear transparency is a necessary precondition for negotiating arms control, a tool used to assure compliance, or an end in and of itself is contested throughout the book. Nonetheless, whatever role nuclear transparency is cast in, the technical aspects of the book remain essential.
As more tools become available for implementing nuclear transparency in the furtherance of disarmament, the lack of political will to negotiate such agreements becomes ever clearer. The U.S. decision to end support for verification measures in the proposed Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty highlights the moribund state of nuclear transparency. The sad reality is that the technical dimensions featured in Zarimpas's book provide a good road map to a destination no one seems much interested in reaching.