To Move the World (22 page)
Authors: Jeffrey D. Sachs
Cynics from the 1950s onward argued that a non-proliferation treaty would be a scrap of paper at best, and an opportunity for subterfuge at worst. Why would a mere paper promise to abjure nuclear weapons take precedence over what a government saw as its national interest? Yet in retrospect, the treaty has been relatively effective, far more so than the doubters imagined.
At the time of signing, there were five nuclear powers: the United States, Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. From then till now, dozens more have had the technological know-how to become nuclear powers. Yet since the signing of the NPT, not a single signatory has become a nuclear state, and only four non-signatories have joined the nuclear club: Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. One country, South Africa, embarked on a nuclear program but later renounced it, signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1991. Several others, including South Korea and Taiwan, were successfully pressured by the United States to drop nuclear programs.
By 1995, the NPT’s great value was evident, and the initial twenty-five-year period of the treaty was extended indefinitely. How exactly had it accomplished its ends? According to one leading observer, Thomas Graham, it was the new “international norm against nuclear-weapon proliferation established by the NPT”:
In 1960, after the first French nuclear-weapon test, there were banner newspaper headlines, “Vive La France.” Yet, by the time of the first Indian nuclear explosion in 1974, the test was done surreptitiously, India received worldwide condemnation and New Delhi hastened to
explain that this had been a “peaceful” test. What had intervened was the NPT. It converted the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a state from an act of national pride in 1960 to an act contrary to international law in 1974.
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Nuclear proliferation remains a grave threat, of course. The Indian and Pakistani armies face off against each other in Kashmir, and the two countries have often bitter relations. North Korea continues to threaten South Korea, and the threats include unleashing its missiles. Israel lives defiantly among unfriendly neighbors and views its nuclear weapons as a critical deterrent. Iran is widely suspected by many of building a nuclear bomb and has been declared by the UN to be in violation of its NPT obligations regarding inspection of nuclear sites.
Moreover, the basic commitment of the nuclear powers to move toward a nuclear-free world has not been fulfilled. The nuclear powers retain vast arsenals, and though they are markedly reducing their stockpiles of weapons, they have not convinced the world that they are truly moving to a nuclear-free world. This lack of adequate follow-through by the major nuclear powers seriously undermines the norm of non-proliferation, and could eventually convince still more countries to become nuclear powers. Fortunately, some of America’s leading foreign policy voices have recently endorsed the realism and importance of a nuclear-free world in line with the original aspirations of the NPT.
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On a political level, the test ban treaty also marked a watershed. The U.S.-Soviet showdown in Europe was significantly calmed for the next twenty years, until tensions soared again in the early 1980s with President Ronald Reagan’s arms buildup and the U.S.
deployment of new intermediate-range missiles in Europe.
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Most important and positive, Germany would never again play the same role as the flashpoint of superpower controversy.
Three major elements produced the thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations. First, the clear decision by Kennedy to keep nuclear weapons away from Germany resolved one of the greatest sources of Soviet fear and U.S.-Soviet controversy. Kennedy had faced down Adenauer, and Johnson finally pulled the plug once and for all in 1964 on the MLF proposal for nuclear sharing among NATO members. Second, the final break in Soviet-Chinese relations in the 1960s, which deteriorated to the point of armed conflict along the border in 1969, dramatically changed the geopolitical context of the Cold War. The U.S.-Soviet relationship became one side of a three-sided relationship that now included China as a nuclear power independent of, and indeed hostile to, the Soviet Union. And third, the Kennedy-Khrushchev achievement of the PTBT created a powerful worldwide demonstration that peaceful coexistence was possible and could contribute to fruitful diplomatic achievements with mutual gains.
Sadly, the easing of external tensions did not lead quickly to an easing of the repressive Soviet system, either internally or in Eastern Europe. Internally, the Soviet Union entered a long period of economic stagnation in the 1960s and then outright decline in the 1980s. The continuing arms race, which shifted resources from the civilian economy to the arms buildup, certainly poisoned morale inside the Soviet Union. And when the reduction of East-West tensions led Czechoslovakia to experiment with its Prague Spring in 1968, Soviet tanks crushed the attempted liberalization. Throughout Eastern Europe, any signs of liberalization were met by a harsh crackdown.
The high point of U.S.-Soviet détente came in the early 1970s. President Richard Nixon and Chairman Leonid Brezhnev negotiated agreements on strategic arms control as well as the basic principles to govern bilateral relations. Simultaneously, Nixon
began the process of normalizing relations with China with his remarkable visit to Beijing in 1972. The United States recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1979, which in turn was followed by a surge of bilateral economic relations.
The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) from 1969 to 1972 culminated in three main agreements signed by Nixon and Brezhnev. The first, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, put a limit on the deployment of ABM systems. The second, the Interim Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, froze the number of strategic ballistic missiles for a five-year period. The third, the Basic Principles of Relations Between the United States and the USSR, established key principles to govern bilateral relations.
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The SALT I talks were immediately followed by the SALT II talks, which extended from 1972 to 1979.
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SALT II aimed to limit the number of nuclear delivery systems (missiles and bombers), the construction of new missile launchers, and the deployment of new types of strategic offensive weapons systems. In short, it attempted a more general limit on the still-burgeoning quantity and quality of strategic nuclear weapons. Yet although the SALT I treaty was overwhelmingly ratified by the U.S. Senate, SALT II was never approved; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan six months after it was signed led President Jimmy Carter to withdraw the treaty from Senate consideration. More generally, the gains of détente had already been deeply undermined even before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Why? Most important was the drift of political power on both sides back toward the hardliners, showing again how the dynamics of confrontation can easily get out of the control of leaders on both sides, as hardliners on each side gradually get the upper hand, playing on and stoking the fears of the public. American hardliners claimed that the continuing Soviet nuclear buildup after 1963 was proof of Soviet intentions of a first-strike capacity and global domination. They blasted Presidents Nixon, Ford, and
Carter for endangering U.S. security by making deals with the enemy. Hardliners on the Soviet side claimed the same about the United States. Each side viewed the other side’s actions as aggressive rather than defensive.
Ronald Reagan came to office in 1981 vowing to avenge supposed U.S. losses in the Cold War and to restore U.S. power and influence. He quickly ushered in major increases in U.S. military outlays, stepped up CIA operations on many fronts, created a new missile defense initiative and a proposal to upgrade intermediate nuclear forces in Europe, and engaged in aggressive rhetoric against the “evil” Soviet empire. The period from 1981 to 1985 marked a clear intensification of the Cold War.
Reagan’s plans to build new missile defenses (the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” as it came to be called), and to deploy upgraded intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, in response to preceding Soviet deployments of its SS-20 missiles, were particular causes of tension. For two or three years, with Europe bitterly divided over whether the United States should in fact deploy new intermediate-range missiles, and as Reagan kept up a blistering rhetorical attack on the Soviet Union, many Soviet officials surmised that the United States was moving toward war. The mood briefly seemed to approach the worst days of confrontation during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Many on the Soviet side were strongly convinced that Reagan was preparing for nuclear first strike. The Doomsday Clock had it right when it put the minute hand at just three minutes to midnight in 1984. As the clock keepers noted at the time:
U.S.-Soviet relations reach their iciest point in decades. Dialogue between the two superpowers virtually stops. “Every channel of communications has been constricted or shut down; every form of contact has been attenuated or cut off. And arms control negotiations have been reduced to a species of propaganda,” a concerned Bulletin
informs readers. The United States seems to flout the few arms control agreements in place by seeking an expansive, space-based anti-ballistic missile capability, raising worries that a new arms race will begin.
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Kennedy’s goals 5 and 6, which called for the actual dismantling of nuclear weapons systems, did not come to fruition during the Cold War, though there has been notable progress since 1991. Some argue that the test ban treaty might even have accelerated the nuclear arms buildup in the first years after signing. Before 1963, atmospheric testing was contentious and politically difficult. Once the tests went underground, the public ignored them. The nuclear weapons industries in the United States and the Soviet Union might have thereby gained rather than lost room to maneuver. The arms control agreements reached in the 1970s and 1980s had some restraining effects on the size and type of the nuclear arsenals, notably on anti-ballistic missile systems, but the number of warheads on the U.S. side remained extraordinarily high, around 25,000–30,000 until the mid-1980s. The Soviet Union even surpassed the United States, its stockpile rising from 4,000 warheads in 1963 to 45,000 in 1986.
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This dramatic Soviet buildup from 1963 to 1986 is shown in
Figure 2
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Figure 2. U.S. and Soviet Nuclear Warheads, 1946–2012.
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Notes: For the years 1946–2009, total nuclear warheads. For 2010–2012, total warheads minus those awaiting dismantlement. Note that all data are estimates, including uncertainties about the numbers of warheads awaiting dismantlement.
On the U.S. side, Kennedy promised the Joint Chiefs of Staff an immediate step-up in underground testing as part of the “safeguard” provisions. As soon as the treaty was initialed, the United States commenced Operation Niblick, a series of forty-one underground tests at a Nevada testing site. From then until 1992, when the program was finally shut down, the United States conducted a total of 684 underground tests. These tests were used to design and promote new weapons systems and for the continued (and expensive) upgrading of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
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While the total number of U.S. nuclear weapons declined slightly from around 28,000 in 1963 to around 21,000 in 1990, the delivery capability of the U.S. arsenal soared with new deployments of increasingly sophisticated land-based and submarine-based ballistic missiles.