Former Secretary of Defense explains why we now have greatest threat of nuclear war ever
Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, how safe is America, or the world, from nuclear catastrophe? Not very.
That’s the gloomy message from former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who has spent the past quarter-century focused on reducing the risk of nuclear disaster.
Part of the risk, of course, is there are now many more groups intent on inflicting mass destruction that we saw in the Sept. 11 attacks. But the seemingly old-fashion risk, that of a nuclear confrontation between nuclear powers like the United States or Russia, has not gone away either.
Another reason for concern: America and its closest nuclear competitors — Russia, China, India and others — are locked in an arms race intent on developing better, faster, more destructive weapons. In the U.S. defense officials have already warned Congress that they will need enormous sums, up to $450 billion over 20 years, and more beyond that, to overhaul America’s aging and still-dominant nuclear arsenal. That means requests for new bombers, new subs and new missiles.
This all comes at the tail-end of a presidency that began, back in 2009, with an April speech in Prague in which President Barack Obama promised to work toward a nuclear-free world.
Why do you say that we’re now at greater risk of nuclear disaster than ever?
It’s been true for a good many years, we just haven’t understood that. … To understand why I say that, I have to break it down into categories of what a catastrophe might be.
The one we think of most is another nuclear holocaust. We think of the danger that we had during the Cold War of a nuclear holocaust. That danger is returning. It’s returning because of the continually worsening relations with Russia. But it’s not as bad as it was during the Cold War — yet. So I don’t mean to suggest the nuclear war is more likely than it was during the Cold War though it is more likely than it is thought to be.
In the meantime, we’ve got two new dangers that did not exist in the Cold War. One of them is the risk of a nuclear terrorist and the other is that of a regional nuclear war. For example, between India and Pakistan.
When you add those two into the equation, then the danger of some nuclear catastrophe becomes greater.
With regard to the risk of nuclear terrorism, is it simply because there are more people in the world who wish us harm? Or, has nuclear technology changed in a way that makes it easier to accomplish such an attack?
Both of those are true. The first is due to the rise over the last few decades of radical jihadism. We’ve faced terror groups for a good many decades. But typically, they would conduct terror instances to make a point and draw attention to themselves. They were not out for mass killings. When 9/11 occurred, we realized, we are now confronted with something different.
In the case of Al Qaeda, they were out to kill as many Americans as they could. The number on 9/11 happened to be a few thousand. We also know, they had a project trying to get a nuclear bomb, which happily they did not succeed in. The first and most important point is, there are now terror groups practicing radical jihadism who are out to kill vast numbers of Americans in the thousands or hundreds of tens of thousands instead of just a few dozen. That’s new. That’s just developed in the last several decades.
What also is new is that the access to fissile material has probably increased in the last few decades. More countries now have nuclear weapons. With the access to nuclear weapons in Pakistan and North Korea for example, that opens up more avenues by which a terrorist could get the fissile material by which he could make a bomb. And maybe even get a bomb itself.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, a year ahead of Bill Clinton taking office. You were his defense secretary. You said then that your top priority was to track down thousands of nukes – the so-called loose nukes problem — in the former Soviet republics. Did you succeed?
Besides Russia, which had the capability of taking care of those weapons adequately, there were now nuclear weapons and a good many nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine. In total, there were several thousand nuclear weapons. These were not under any adequate control. That was my top priority when I became secretary. That problem had arisen a year earlier than that.
We got rid of all of those. Every one of them. All of those nuclear weapons were dismantled … and in fact, that uranium is being used in American reactors through General Electric.
What has happened since then?
Since then India and Pakistan have built nuclear arsenals and North Korea has built a nuclear arsenal. Iran has had a nuclear program, which fortunately was short-stopped before it got to a nuclear arsenal.
But that presents many more opportunities for a terror group to get access, if not to a bomb itself, at least the fissile material from which they could perhaps make a bomb. It’s much more dangerous now, because of the proliferation to those countries, particularly to Pakistan and North Korea, the ones I worry most about.
Specifically, what threat do these new national arsenals pose?
The more (nukes) there are in the world, the harder it is to keep track of for sure. But I worry about some countries more than others. I worry about Pakistan because we know there are within the Pakistani military, you might say renegade groups, who owe an allegiance to radical jihad and not to the government.
To this point, the government has kept that under control, but that is a particular danger that doesn’t exist in other countries. In the case of North Korea, the danger is, this is a country that for a number of reasons, not the least the sanctions we imposed on them, is desperately poor. They might try to sell their fissile material or even bombs if somebody can pay them enough for it.
There are two very different dangers there, but they’re both very real.
In the early decades of the Cold War, we heard a lot about so-called tactical nuclear weapons. We are hearing more about that now, again. Can you talk about that?
I am very much concerned about that. The idea that you can use a little bit of nuclear weapons, as a small-yield nuclear weapon, and contain it at that point, is extremely dangerous. Nobody that I know of, no government that I know of, has a credible strategy for preventing the escalations for a full-scale nuclear war. Any use of nuclear weapons has a very high danger of escalating to full use of nuclear weapons…
Many of these tactical nuclear weapons have the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. It’s a confusing point to really refer to them as tactical when you consider the enormous damage they do. Even the lower-yield ones can do an enormous amount of damage.
This is a very dangerous idea. I’m very much opposed to the use of tactical weapons, most importantly to a policy by which we might purport to use tactical nuclear weapons, on the unproven theory that they would not escalate to a major war.
How did the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons — raised again during the George W. Bush administration — first gain traction?
I’m sorry to say the United States was the one who really introduced the idea of tactical nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, we were confronted in Europe from the Soviet Union that had about three times the size of the conventional military forces that we did.
As we thought, they had aggressive ambitions. Therefore, we believed our NATO forces would be swept right back to the Channel if the Russian forces moved in. We developed tactical nuclear weapons and we deployed them in Europe and we had a policy that if the Soviet Union attacked in Germany, we would use them…
We no longer have a policy of using tactical nuclear weapons to defend Europe…
When I was the Undersecretary of Defense in the late ’70s, my primary focus was developing a set of conventional weapons, stealth and precision munitions and precision reconnaissance systems so that our conventional forces, even though smaller than those of the Soviet Union would be able to adequately defend without nuclear weapons.
That program was successful and the demonstrations are successful of the program was made in Iraq, where those new highly effective conventional weapons in three or four days time defeated quite a large and well-equipped army, the Iraq Army.
So we have long since abandoned this policy ourselves. But the really bad news is that today Russia seems to have embraced a policy of using tactical nuclear weapons for that same purpose. If they feel their conventional forces are inferior or being overwhelmed by opposing forces, they would then use tactical nuclear forces to offset the other side’s damage.
President Obama has recently proposed a massive overhauling of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. What does he have in mind? Does it make sense to you?
As long as Russia is adopting belligerent and aggressive policies in Europe against our allies, in which they see nuclear weapons as a part of that policy, then we have to maintain a strong deterrence…
So we will have some modernization program. I’m questioning the nature of the program. I do not think we should simply reproduce what we did during the Cold War, because that was 30 or 40 years ago when you conceived, designed and built other weapons and a lot has changed since then.
What do you make of the nuclear threat with North Korea?
We had an opportunity, I believe, to stop the North Korean nuclear program before they built an arsenal. That was back in 1999 and 2000…. [But] During the time of [George W.] Bush’s presidency, they developed a nuclear weapon capability and actually tested a couple of nuclear weapons. In the last eight years under President Obama, they’ve tested more nuclear weapons and started building an arsenal.
I don’t think we’re going to be able to get an agreement now. It was one thing getting them to agree not to build an arsenal, but it’s a much, much harder task to get them to agree to give up an arsenal they all ready have.
This Q&A was conducted, edited and condensed by Dallas Morning News editorial board member Michael Lindenberger. Email: mlindengerger@dallasnews.com
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