Global Beat Syndicate: Drifting Apart: Saudi Arabia and the United States?

By Thomas Graham, Jr. and Damien J. LaVera

WASHINGTON--With each new leak and revelation about the new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), one thing is increasingly clear: a strategy designed to enhance national security will likely achieve just the opposite. The Pentagon is presenting a radically new vision of the world and America’s role in it. The NPR seems to formulate a new national security paradigm described by one analyst as "unilateral assured destruction." This means the United States will reserve every conceivable option in efforts to deter the use of weapons of mass destruction.
The NPR apparently assumes that the best way to deter the use of weapons of mass destruction by other countries is to develop a range of capabilities to preempt or respond to such an attack. This range would include nuclear and non-nuclear weapons that the report collectively labels "offensive strike systems." Most likely, this would require the design and testing of new types of nuclear weapons.
Without question, national security requirements should dictate the character of our nuclear arsenal and the roles assigned to it. But all defense and intelligence spending is intended to enhance our national security, and the only approach that enhances rather than weakens U.S. security is to limit the role of nuclear weapons exclusively to deterring the use of other nuclear weapons. This requires neither a large nor a diverse arsenal.
So then, how do we best to deter seemingly "undeterrable" leaders? And are certain leaders, states, and sub-state groups undeterrable?
Clearly, the best way to address this concern is to do everything possible to keep weapons of mass destruction away from such leaders. The primary way to do this is to further strengthen all global nonproliferation regimes and efforts. Reducing the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and blurring the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons will have precisely the opposite effect.
We don’t discourage states from seeking weapons of mass destruction by threatening to attack with those same weapons. We do so by stigmatizing such weapons and emphasizing their lack of operational utility. For more than 30 years this simple, straightforward notion has been at the core of U.S. national security policy.
In 1968, the United States signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and now almost every nation in the world—including Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Syria, cited in the Posture Review as possible targets of nuclear attack—has agreed to permanently forswear nuclear arms. The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, signed by more than 100 nations, prohibits possession and production of biological weapons. The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention does the same for chemical weapons. Together, these three agreements stigmatize the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and establish barriers to their acquisition.
For more than 30 years, beginning in the late 1960s with the strategic arms limitation talks, the United States has worked to first cap, then cut, nuclear arsenals. Global nuclear stockpiles have subsequently been cut by more than two-thirds.
For 24 years, Washington has tried to delegitimize and devalue nuclear arms. In 1978, we renounced the option to use nuclear weapons against states that don’t have them, thus sending the unequivocal message that nuclear weapons have only one realistic function: to deter the use of other nuclear weapons.
But for the last 15 months, the Bush administration has apparently been determined to tear apart an approach that for decades has been the basic fabric of our national security policy. It cast aside the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which set the conditions for major cuts in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. It has agreed to further arsenal reductions, but has so far refused to make this permanent by agreeing to verifiably and transparently eliminate "reduced" weapons, preferring instead to maintain an apparently permanent reserve.
Now the administration seems to be reconsidering the 24-year old decision to provide assurances to non-nuclear weapon states that we will not use nuclear weapons against them—and that is now coupled with the Pentagon’s NPR plan for new weapons to fill new roles for use against new targets. These assurances are a central part of the bargain that has made the NPT work so well for so long. Repudiating them is a direct assault on the NPT.
The course set forth in the NPR is thus dangerous and unsettling. Developing war-fighting roles for nuclear weapons lowers the threshold for their use, makes them more attractive to other countries, sabotages the NPT and makes it likely that—unless we change our current course—nuclear weapons will spread globally. Nothing could possibly be worse for U.S. national security.
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Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr., president of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security (LAWS), is a former Acting Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Damien J. LaVera is the Director of Programs and Communications for LAWS, a Washington, D.C.-based non-partisan, nonprofit organization promoting sound nuclear policies.