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September 16, 2009
Exclusive: Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction
When the Bush administration took office, the specter of proliferating nuclear weapons was high on its agenda. During the previous decade, six key nations acquired, tested or sought nuclear weapons, including North Korea, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and India. Except for the last two, all were signatories to the NPT or Non Proliferation Treaty, in which they pledged not to acquire nuclear weapons.
The past policies inherited by the new administration were seriously inadequate to the task they faced. Part of the problem was the conventional wisdom over the extent and nature of these weapons programs. For example, while Libya’s chemical weapons program was a brief concern in 1996, its nuclear program was considered largely non-existent. North Korea’s 1994 nuclear agreement with the U.S., Japan and the Republic of Korea was widely hailed as comprehensive and a success. As for Iran, the U.S. and the European Union had sought to deal with the mullahs through economic engagement and trade. In addition, the intelligence community missed the nuclear bomb tests of Pakistan and India, largely because U.S. policy had soft-pedaled Pakistan’s nuclear program in order to secure its participation in the comprehensive test ban treaty, while India was still not divided from its past close association with the Soviet Union, making approaches from the United States difficult.
Particularly troublesome was not only the inherited policy framework, but also the conventional assessment of how serious were the possible nuclear threats coming from these rogue states. This issue has been shielded from examination largely because much of the comment about proliferation matters is fixated on the charge that the British and American Governments “sexed up” the threat assessment of Iraq’s weapons in order to justify using military force to compel compliance with nearly twenty UN resolutions.
Although this charge has not withstood closer scrutiny, it has forced a less than careful examination of the previous assessments of the threats from other rogue states. I believe much of the intelligence community and many policy makers, including the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Administration in charge of enforcing the NPT, systematically “sexed down” the nuclear threat from rogue countries, in some part due to policy maker’s preference to see these problems “go away.” In the case of North Korea, some officials believed their own press releases about the apparent success of the counter proliferation effort called the Agreed Framework with North Korea.
What is at least interesting and in my view worrisome, is that since 2001, the Bush administration discovered, for example, what turned out to be a very extensive Libyan nuclear program, with thousands of centrifuge shrouds, and private and government suppliers’ networks far more extensive than any previous assessment had even hinted at, reaching all the way to Pakistan and China. Compare by contrast “Deadly Arsenals” published by the Carnegie Endowment just a few years ago, where the very idea that Libya had a robust nuclear weapons program was dismissed out of hand.
The Bush administration also uncovered intelligence showing a North Korean dual track effort at acquiring nuclear weapons with a uranium enrichment program running parallel to their Yongbon nuclear reactor. The North Koreans have since announced they are nearing completion of such a capability. The previous administration had the courage to admit that the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea, brokered in large part by former President Carter, was a fraud, and had lulled the U.S. and its allies to sleep under the pretense that the North Korean nuclear program was safely contained.
In addition, the administration discovered that while publicly proclaiming their adherence to a missile test moratorium, the North Koreans were actually shipping their rocket engines to Iran for testing, a stealth policy that allowed the North to both continue development of their missiles and at the same time win brownie points with the U.S. disarmament community that touted the test moratorium as evidence of North Korea’s good will.
The previous administration also inherited little if any framework for properly assessing or containing Iran’s nuclear programs. The European Union was committed to maintaining its economic ties to Iran, and avoided intrusive (and thus effective) IAEA inspections that might lead the matter to the United Nations Security Council and possible mandatory sanctions against Iran. The policy in the recent past has been to secure IAEA inspections, hope the Iranians are telling the truth, and then express shock and dismay when the Iranians shortly thereafter admit to even more violations of the NPT or program elements they previously had denied.
In the one area where bipartisan support was fairly robust, such as the Nunn-Lugar program to dismantle nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, the last defense budget requests submitted by the Administration to Congress contained over $1 billion for such programs. The program helps secure, in part, nuclear weapons junk in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, to prevent its proliferation to, in large part, rogue states. The previous administration also secured pledges of $17 billion toward a $20 billion goal, to expand the program over a decade. Some parts of this effort have been successfully completed. The current budget before Congress contains hundreds of millions in new and additional spending for such efforts. Despite the previous administrations efforts, critics have found fault even though the programs had been accelerated and completed in some respects faster than had been previously planned.
Looking back over the past decade, much of the criticism of the Bush administration’s counter proliferation efforts belies a hypocrisy that is astounding when examined closely. The severest critics of the Bush administration were the same strongest supporters of the admittedly weak counter proliferation efforts in the Clinton administration with respect to these rogue states. They were enthusiastic supporters of the North Korean deal, and were sharply critical of any and all who even hinted that the North Koreans were not keeping their part of the Agreed Framework bargain. And these same critics apparently do not count the successful elimination of the Libyan nuclear program and the reduction by some sixty percent of our strategic nuclear arsenal under the Moscow Treaty.
The Bush administration also successfully eliminated any chance the newly liberated Iraqi people will get back in the nuclear business. The Libyan government has come clean, as we have noted, giving up not only its nuclear weapons program, but its chemical and biological weapons program as well. This extraordinary breakthrough was outlined in detail by DCI Tenet is testimony before Congress but nearly ignored by the “drive-by” media.
On Iran, the IAEA kept trying to give the Mullahs a clean bill of health, and the Mullahs keep embarrassing the IAEA, as further and further details of yet another nuclear program in Iran surface. Now IAEA says they are stalemated and that indeed Iran’s program looks very much as if it is geared toward building nuclear weapons. Whether the events in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq if successful in ending terrorism have any impact on Iran is unclear. Iran says it will negotiate and discuss an end to nuclear weapons, but not its own nuclear program! We will have to wait and see.
On North Korea, early critics were insistent the Bush administration compromise and sign a deal because of that country’s arsenal of 2-3 nuclear weapons, generally believed to be the case around 2001-02. When the administration insisted on the complete dismantlement and elimination of the entire nuclear program, these same critics immediately back-tracked, claiming a freeze was all in good order because no one really knew whether the North really had nuclear weapons or not. When the Bush administration secured an agreement among the parties – other than North Korea – that a verified elimination is the only acceptable outcome – critics once again blamed the administration for the North’s refusal to even consider such a deal with its insistence that while it doesn’t have a secondary enrichment program, it nonetheless has the right to keep one!
The administration inherited a policy described by Rich Lowry of National Review as “trust but don’t verify” from the previous administration. The Clinton’s own proliferation czar candidly admitted the Bush administration should have thrown away the previous administration’s counter proliferation plans. Although many problems inherited in 2001 remain even after nearly a decade, especially the North Korean and Iranian proliferation dangers, much has been cleaned up by a tough and energetic approach by an administration to an old problem, including the proliferation security initiative, a cooperative effort to interdict nuclear smuggling and trade. We have seen a North Korean ship turned back thought to be smuggling nuclear material to Burma and a Russian ship, apparently carrying ballistic missile technology to Iran. In addition, the U.S. and British uncovered and hopefully eliminated an extensive rogue suppliers market for nuclear materials that appeared to have been centered in Pakistan.
The effort to end nuclear weapons programs in nations legally committed never to build them but committed to securing them nonetheless requires more than negotiations in Geneva or Bonn or New York. Diplomacy, without the required enforcing military power begins to look a lot like prayer or wishful thinking. A whole host of tools, including missile defense, export controls, arms control, deterrence, dissuasion, interdiction, and yes, regime change, are all part of the diplomatic, military and political elements that will make up an effective counter proliferation policy. This previous administration moved a number of critical steps in the right direction, and the removal of wicked dictators in Afghanistan and Iraq played no small part in the success to date.
We still face key proliferation problems in Iran and North Korea. There may indeed be some important lessons in the milestones achieved over the past decade as well as the continued failures to disarm Pyongyang and Tehran. Those lessons may very well be that coercive economic diplomacy – especially a complete divestment policy – as well as the use of military force, so easily dismissed as unnecessary, may very well be the only credible options left on the table.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Peter Huessy is President of GeoStrategic Analysis, a defense consulting company in Potomac, Maryland.
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