Command and Control

The challenges that the United States has faced in the management of its arsenal should give pause to every other nation that seeks to obtain nuclear weapons. This technology was invented and perfected in the United States. I have no doubt that America’s nuclear weapons are among the safest, most advanced, most secure against unauthorized use that have ever been built. And yet the United States has narrowly avoided a long series of nuclear disasters. Other countries, with less hard-earned experience in the field, may not be as fortunate. One measure of a nation’s technological proficiency is the rate of industrial accidents. That rate is about two times higher in India, three times higher in Iran, and four times higher in Pakistan than it is in the United States. High-risk technologies are easily transferred across borders; but the organizational skills and safety culture necessary to manage them are more difficult to share. Nuclear weapons have gained allure as a symbol of power and a source of national pride. They also pose a grave threat to any country that possesses them.

In recent years an international movement to abolish nuclear weapons has arisen from an unlikely source: the leadership of America’s national security establishment during the Cold War. In January 2007, two former Republican secretaries of state — George Shultz and Henry Kissinger — along with two prominent Democrats — former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and Sam Nunn, the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee — wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that spelled out their goal: “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” Sidney Drell had given the group not only technical guidance but also encouragement to take a bold stance. “The world is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era,” they warned. The end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear terrorism, and the spread of nuclear weapons to countries like North Korea rendered long-standing notions of deterrence obsolete. The use of nuclear weapons had become more, not less, likely. And the two nations that control about 90 percent of those weapons — the United States and Russia — had an obligation to remove their missiles from hair-trigger alert, minimize the risk of accidents, reduce the size of their arsenals, and pursue abolition with the collaborative spirit that reigned, briefly, at the 1986 Reykjavik summit.

The campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons was subsequently endorsed by a wide variety of former Cold Warriors, including Robert McNamara, Colin Powell, and George H. W. Bush. It became part of America’s foreign policy on April 5, 2009. “Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked — that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction,” President Barack Obama said that day, during a speech before a crowd of twenty thousand people in Prague. “Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.” Obama committed his administration to seeking “a world without nuclear weapons,” warning that the threat of global nuclear war had gone down but the risk of a nuclear attack had gone up. Later that year, the United Nations Security Council voted to support abolition. The idealistic rhetoric at the U.N. has not yet been followed, however, by the difficult steps that might lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons: passage of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty by the U.S. Senate; major reductions in the Russian and American arsenals; arms control talks that include China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel; strict rules on the production and distribution of fissile materials; and harsh punishments for countries that violate the new international norms.