February 5, 2000
Nuclear Anxieties in a New World
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By JUDITH MILLER
lthough the cold war is over, some arms control analysts say that the threat of a nuclear war is actually greater now.
While Russia and the United States continue to reduce their massive strategic nuclear arsenals -- from 4,700 each in 1992 to between 2,000 and 2,500 in 1998 -- the Kremlin's Security Council approved a disturbing shift in military doctrine yesterday that increases Russia's reliance on nuclear weapons.
Theorists debate such basic issues as whether a germ attack warrants a nuclear reply.
Rather than threatening to use nuclear weapons only "in case of a threat to the existence of the Russian Federation," Russia now says it will use them "if all other means of resolving the crisis have been exhausted," an apparently lower threshold.
Meanwhile, the Clinton administration says that at least 12 nations have acquired, or are trying to acquire, germ weapons.
"The likelihood of a nuclear weapon being used now is greater than at any time other since the Cuban missile crisis," says Thomas Graham Jr. a former high-ranking arms negotiator who heads the Lawyers Alliance for World Security, a nonprofit arms control group in Washington.
Reuters
A Chinese missile on display amid tensions with Taiwan. While not all scholars agree with Mr. Graham's particularly grim assessment, these developments have been forcing arms control theorists to rethink some of the basic precepts about how to operate in a world filled not just with nuclear weapons, but with other means of mass destruction as well. Should the United States, traditionally a champion of agreements banning the use of such weapons, threaten to use nuclear weapons to deter a devastating chemical or biological attack on itself or its allies? If deterrence fails, how should it respond? Would it punish a rogue state by launching a nuclear attack?
If the answers to such unsettling questions are not obvious, they are not meant to be. For almost a decade, America has relied on a doctrine called "calculated ambiguity" about its nuclear intentions in such cases, or what Michael Krepon, president of the Washington-based Henry L. Stimson Center, calls "ominous ambiguity."
While the Clinton administration says that the ambiguity is deliberate, at least some of it reflects a continuing lack of consensus within the nuclear establishment about how and when nuclear weapons should be used, despite a series of major policy reviews by the administration.
Janne E. Nolan, the director of international programs at the Century Foundation, argues in "An Elusive Consensus," a slender volume published last year by the Brookings Institution, that the nuclear world has dramatically changed and that American nuclear doctrine has not kept up.
Since the advent of the nuclear age, nuclear strategy has been based on the premise that the only way to deter an attack is to prepare for the use of nuclear weapons in war. Following that logic, American military planners in the 1950's quickly built a nuclear force capable of destroying 70 Soviet cities with 133 low-yield bombs, says William M. Arkin, a nuclear weapons analyst and co-author of "Nuclear Battlefield" (published in 1985).
Reuters
Ukrainian soldiers on the country's western border training for a gas attack. By the mid-1950's, however, the thinking changed and the ability to destroy all Soviet cities -- and have American cities obliterated by Moscow -- was deemed insufficient to guarantee deterrence. American theorists thus developed a new strategic view that American nuclear weapons had to be sufficient in number and variety to survive a surprise attack. These doctrines of "counterforce" and "second strike" fueled an explosion in numbers of warheads and weapons during the cold war.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, the Bush administration reversed decades of history and announced in 1992 that it was abandoning the concept of global war with the Soviet Union as the organizing principle behind America's military policy.
As a result, said Ms. Nolan, Washington unilaterally de-emphasized nuclear weapons and strengthened nuclear deterrence by, among other things, taking strategic nuclear bombers off alert, removing launch pins from long-range nuclear missiles, removing tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, and negotiating the Start II treaty with Moscow, under which the number of long-range nuclear-tipped missiles was reduced.
Ms. Nolan says the Clinton administration, too, has made some progress in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons and defusing the threat of nuclear war, by helping some of the former Soviet republics rid themselves of nuclear weapons and by winning support for an extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, under which nations without nuclear weapons vow not to acquire them in exchange for help with civilian nuclear programs.
But she also argues that the absence of presidential leadership has allowed for doctrinal drift and paralysis as deep-seated disagreements remain within the administration over how the United States should respond to what is essentially a new threat: the use of germ or chemical weapons against the United States or its allies.
The Associated Press
An Indian missile at a parade in New Delhi. A senior State Department arms control official says that treaty obligations legally prevent the United States from using chemical or biological weapons to respond to a germ or chemical attack.
That would seem to leave the United States with no choice but to use conventional bombs or nuclear weapons.
Mr. Graham said the United States had historically forsworn the use of nuclear weapons to deter any non-nuclear threats. But during the Persian Gulf war, the stated policy shifted. To dissuade Saddam Hussein from using chemical weapons, President George Bush sent the Iraqis a letter in 1991 warning that Washington was prepared to use "all means available" to retaliate against Iraq if it used such weapons. While memoirs by Mr. Bush, James A. Baker 3rd, Secretary of State at the time, and others subsequently stated that the United States would not have actually used nuclear weapons against Iraq, the letter was aimed at making him think the opposite.
"We issued an ambiguous threat that we hoped would work and it apparently did," said Mr. Graham. "But our calcuated ambiguity turned out to be a bluff. It won't be believed in the future."
The Clinton administration has followed a similar course. Over the years, it has repudiated the use of nuclear weapons in a growing number of cases, all the while facing pressure to expand those commitments. For example, as part of an effort in 1995 to get nations without nuclear weapons to swear off acquiring them, the United States and four other nuclear powers pledged never to use such weapons against a treaty signatory -- unless they were attacked by a nonnuclear treaty member allied with a nuclear state. There was no exception for an attack that used biological or chemical weapons.
Nonetheless, the administration injected an element of ambiguity into its policy in 1996 when it learned that Libya was building an underground chemical installation. Citing a little known rule of international law known as "belligerent reprisal," which holds that a country can suspend its arms control commitments if it is attacked by another country in violation of international law, the administration warned that it would not limit its retaliatory options if it was attacked by chemical or germ weapons.
Mr. Graham says that the belligerent reprisal doctrine has given the administration the military flexibility the Pentagon demanded in what was a fierce internal battle. But even this "out," he warns, is limited. The doctrine requires that any response to an attack be "proportionate" to the attack itself and essential to prevent another attack. Given these constraints, he concludes, a nuclear response to a germ or chemical attack on America would almost never be legal or justified in the world's eyes.
How to resolve this quandary is still being quietly debated. Last week the Washington-based Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute issued a report based on the recommendations of some of the nation's leading defense analysts -- including R. James Woolsey, a former C.I.A. director; Robert B. Zoellick, a senior official in the Reagan and Bush administrations and a foreign policy adviser to the presidential aspirant George W. Bush; and Ronald F. Lehmann II, a veteran defense official now at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Although everyone agreed that the threat of biological weapons was increasing, the 11-member group disagreed sharply about whether nuclear weapons should have a role in retaliating against or deterring a germ attack on the United States or its friends.
Some panelists wanted Washington to declare explicitly that the United States would not be the first to use a nuclear weapon against a biological or chemical threat, arguing that there were good conventional alternatives that would not violate promises Washington has made to nonnuclear nations or undercut treaties to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. Others countered that the best way to deter attacks was to keep all military options open.
"It's obviously one of the toughest issues -- the only issue on which even a rough consensus was not possible," said Michael Moodie, a former arms negotiator and the institute's president.
The lack of a consensus on the wisdom of clarifying the American position means that the current American policy -- threatening an "absolutely overwhelming" and a "devastating" response to an unconventional attack -- is likely to continue. "Ambiguity suits everyone's purpose," said Philip Zelikow, a former White House official and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. "So does the absence of public debate."
In reality, one senior official said, doctrine matters mainly to defense theorists. "It doesn't really matter what your policy is. In the real world, you're going do what you have to do."
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
