Is nuclear zero the best option?

• Author: Sagan, Scott D.
• Position: The Great Debate - Viewpoint essay

Yes: Scott D. Sagan

Every time Barack Obama announces that he is in favor of a world free of nuclear weapons, the nuclear hawks descend. Soon after his inauguration, former-Reagan administration Pentagon official Frank Gaffney proclaimed that the president "stands to transform the 'world's only superpower' into a nuclear impotent." After Obama promised in his 2009 Prague speech that "the United States will take concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons," former-Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger declared that "the notion that we can abolish nuclear weapons reflects on a combination of American utopianism and American parochialism." And when the president won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, in part for his embrace of the disarmament vision, Time Magazine even ran an essay entitled "Want Peace? Give a Nuke the Nobel."

Obama is right to declare, loudly and often, that the United States seeks a world without nuclear weapons, and the administration is right to be taking concrete steps now toward that long-term goal. Indeed, by proclaiming that America seeks nuclear zero, Obama is simply reaffirming that we will follow our treaty commitments: states that joined the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) agreed "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament." And since Article 6 of America's Constitution says that a treaty commitment is "the supreme Law of the Land," at a basic level, Obama is simply saying that he will follow U.S. law.

The abolition aspiration is not, however, based on such legal niceties. Instead, it is inspired by two important insights about the global nuclear future. First, the most dangerous nuclear threats to the United States today and on the horizon are from terrorists and potential new nuclear powers, not from our traditional Cold War adversaries in Russia and China. Second, the spread of nuclear weapons to new states, and indirectly to terrorist organizations, will be made less likely if the United States and other nuclear-armed nations are seen to be working in good faith toward disarmament.

Nuclear weapons may have been a dangerous necessity to keep the Cold War cold. But scholars and policy makers who are nostalgic for the brutal simplicity of that eras nuclear deterrence do not understand how much the world has changed. The choice we face is not between a nuclear-flee world or a return to bipolar Cold War deterrence; it is between creating a nuclear-weapons-free world or living in a world with many more nuclear-weapons states. And if there are more nuclear nations, and more atomic weapons in global arsenals, there will be more opportunities for terrorists to steal or buy the bomb.

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The threat of nuclear-armed terrorists is not new. In 1977, the Red Army Faction in West Germany attacked a U.S. military base hoping to steal the tactical nuclear weapons there. The Aum Shinrikyo apocalyptic cult in Japan sought recruits in the Russian military in the 1990s to get access to loose nukes and only settled on using sarin-gas chemicals in the Tokyo subway when their nuclear efforts failed. Today's threat is even more alarming. It is well known that Osama bin Laden has proclaimed that Islamic jihadis have a duty to acquire and to use nuclear weapons against the West. And al-Qaeda is known to have recruited senior Pakistani nuclear scientists in the past and may now have "sleeper agents" in Pakistani laboratories to help in that effort.

The easier-to-acquire radioactive dirty bomb with its concomitant threat to kill up to one thousand people and create environmental havoc is already a reality. In 2004, Dhiren Barot, a veteran of jihadi campaigns in Kashmir, was arrested in London. He admitted to plotting attacks against the New York Stock Exchange and the World Bank and possessed detailed plans to acquire nuclear materials from ten thousand smoke detectors for a radiological device. In a report sent to al-Qaeda central, Barot wrote that "estimated casualties [would] be in [the] region of 500 long-term affected if dispersed in [a] busy area (Inshalla)." A homegrown dirty-bomb threat has also emerged: in 2009, James Cummings, a neo-Nazi in Belfast, Maine, was discovered to have started collecting low-level nuclear materials.

The even-more-destructive terrorist-nuclear-weapons danger is looming on the horizon. Terrorists are not likely to be deterred by threats of retaliation. Stopping them from purchasing a nuclear weapon, or stealing one, or getting the materials to make their own is a much better strategy. If aspiring nuclear-weapons states--such as Iran and Syria (and some suspect Burma)--get nuclear weapons in the future, the danger that terrorists will get their hands on one will clearly increase. And if the United States and other nuclear-weapons nations are seen to be hypocritical, by not following our NPT commitments and maintaining that we (but only we) are responsible enough to have them, it will reduce the likelihood of ensuring the broad international cooperation that is needed to reduce these proliferation risks.

Officials in the George W. Bush administration believed that there was no link between U.S. arsenal size or military posture and nonproliferation decisions made by non-nuclear-weapons states. The Obama administration's new Nuclear Posture Review maintains that the connection is strong, even if it is often indirect and...