Heads of international organizations and foreign policy leaders from around the world met in Berlin, Germany on July 15 and 16 to discuss the future of international security and cooperation. Convened by the Managing Global Insecurity Project (MGI) and the Bertelsmann Stiftung, the event -"Responsible Sovereignty: International Cooperation for a Changed World" -was the MGI project's fifth and capstone advisory group conference. The Berlin meeting was convened by three members of MGI's Advisory Group - Strobe Talbott, Brookings President; EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana; and Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference - in partnership with Gunther Thielen, Chairman and Chief Executive of the Bertlesmann Foundation.

Also in attendance were the co-directors of the Managing Global Insecurity Project, Stephen J. Stedman, CISAC Senior Fellow and Director of the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies at Stanford University, Carlos Pascual, Brookings Vice President and Director for Foreign Policy, and Bruce Jones, Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the New York University Center on International Cooperation (CIC). The MGI advisory group is made up of U.S. Bipartisan and international leaders.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon; German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier; and Rajendra Pachauri, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change opened the event. Notable international officials and other participants included Mohamed El Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency; former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin; former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov; former Indian Foreign Minister Lalit Mansingh; and former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata. Also present were Francis Deng, Ban Ki-moon's Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide and the originator of the idea of Responsible Sovereignty in the 1990s.

The meeting brought together high-level representatives from influential nations with members of the MGI Advisory Group and world leaders on climate change, nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, and conflict prevention and response. In particular, the session focused on the idea that all states, whatever their politics and interests, share duties to their citizens and to each other in tackling common threats like terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and global climate change. The goal of the Berlin session was to generate momentum toward a 2009-2010 campaign to expand global partnerships and rejuvenate international cooperation to address today's most pressing global challenges.

FSI senior fellow Stephen Stedman reviews John Bolton's book, Surrender Is not an Option, in the July/August issue of the Boston Review. "The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale," he writes. "Imagine Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand."

One of the more remarkable underreported stories of 2008 was a speech in which the State department’s legal adviser John Bellinger admitted that there “are also realities about the International Criminal Court that the United States must accept.” He also stated that the Bush administration would work with the Court to maximize its chances of success in Darfur. Bellinger did not say that the United States might actually join the Court, but acknowledged that it enjoyed widespread international support and legitimacy, and that the United States could fruitfully cooperate with it on areas of mutual benefit.

Neither mea culpa nor volte-face, the speech nonetheless indicates the distance the administration has traveled in seven years. While Bellinger’s oratory went largely unnoticed by foreign policy wonks and the attentive public alike, it did not escape the scrutiny of John Bolton, who dismissed it as Clinton-era “pabulum” and reflective of “the yearning the Rice State Department has for acceptance” by academics and foreign intellectuals. He added ominously, “the fight resumes after Jan. 20.”

Bolton has been a powerful influence on Republican foreign policy for the last twenty years. Before his appointment as ambassador to the United Nations in 2005—which was achieved without Senate confirmation—Bolton dominated arms-control policy in the first Bush term. He killed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, negotiations with North Korea, and the Biological Weapons Convention verification protocol. During the Clinton years, he campaigned tirelessly from his Heritage Foundation perch for missile defense and against global governance, which he seems to equate with global government. In 1998, when then-Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan released a report critical of both the United Nations secretariat and member states for the failure to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, Bolton chastized Annan for having the temerity to criticize governments for what they did or did not do in the former Yugoslavia. He added menacingly: “I think if he continues down this road, ultimately it means war, at least with the Republican Party.”

Bolton came of age politically during Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. The future policy heavyweight was a high schooler in Baltimore at the time. He honed his conservatism at Yale College and Yale Law School, ducked Vietnam through a National Guard posting (“looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation”), and got his first taste of Washington as an intern to Spiro Agnew. During the Bush Sr. presidency, Bolton was Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs in James Baker’s State Department, and was one of the first people who Baker called when he needed a posse of chad-disputing lawyers in Florida in November 2000. Bolton’s name keeps showing up in various articles about the fight inside the Republican Party for the soul of John McCain’s foreign policy.

All of this makes it imperative to read his memoirs, which clarify the stakes in the forthcoming election. Although it is hard to imagine Bolton in a McCain administration—his memoirs offend so many within his party, across the aisle, and overseas, that Bolton could not win Senate confirmation for capitol dog-catcher—Bolton will be plotting, pressing, and pushing to force McCain’s foreign policy back to the unilateralism of George Bush’s first term, when the war on terror meant never having to say you’re sorry. And there are important national security posts that do not require Senate approval.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand.

To Bolton, the United Nations is a “target rich environment,” and I had a front row seat to watch his gunslinging. In 2005 I served as Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. I was responsible for developing member-state support for his efforts to overhaul the United Nations. In that capacity, I was in Brussels in March 2005 when President Bush nominated Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. One high-ranking EU official recoiled in horror, and, to share his agita, repeated two of Bolton’s more famous lines: that “UN headquarters could lose ten floors and no one would know the difference,” and that “there was no United Nations.” How in the world, the official asked, could such a man be Ambassador to the United Nations?

Amidst nodding heads and shared pained looks, I offered that if I could pick the ten floors, I would agree with Bolton. Moreover, I said, any sentient being who spends time in Turtle Bay—the Manhattan site of the United Nations—will at some point in frustration say to themselves that there is no United Nations. Bolton’s sin was to say it publicly. Finally, I suggested that John Bolton was irrelevant: “If the President of the United States and the Secretary of State want a strong, effective United Nations, then Bolton will have to deliver. If they don’t, you could have John Kerry as the U.S. ambassador, and nothing will happen.”

Oh well; win some, lose some. Which is what Condoleeza Rice is rumored to have told a friend who asked how John Bolton could have possibly been nominated for the position under her watch.

Or more accurately, I was half right, half wrong. Reading this book, one can almost feel sorry for how unsuited Bolton was for his new job. For four years he had been the point man for breaking American commitments abroad, insulting allies and enemies alike, ditching the ABM Treaty, and unsigning the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (“my happiest moment at State”). In the heady days of the first Bush administration, when it believed the United States was so powerful it could get anything that it wanted without friends, partners, or institutions, Bolton was the “say no” guy, a job he performed with great brio. How could he know that in 2005 his big boss, the President, and his nominal boss, the Secretary of State, would actually decide that international cooperation was necessary, and that maybe we should start worrying about America’s free fall in world opinion? A pit bull in the first term, Bolton would be a yap dog in the second, grating on the Secretary of State, the President, and most American allies.

Almost sorry, for whatever else you say about John Bolton, he is not of the “we can disagree without being disagreeable” school of American politics. This is one of the nastiest, pettiest memoirs in the annals of American diplomatic history. Among the many targets of insults and catty remarks are former and present U.K. ambassadors to the United Nations Emyr Jones Parry, Adam Thomson (“I could never look at or listen to Thomson without immediately thinking of Harry [Potter] and all his little friends”), and John Sawers; recent U.K. foreign ministers; just about every UN civil servant mentioned; indeed, just about every U.S. civil servant mentioned, along with countless journalists and politicians.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz’s classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand. Bolton, usually singlehandedly, takes on what he calls the High Minded, the Normers (those who create international norms of behavior or try to “[whip] the United States into line with leftist views of the way the world should look”), the EAPeasers (career State Department officials who advocate negotiations with North Korea), the Risen Bureaucracy, the Crusaders of Compromise, the Arms Control True Believers, and the EUroids.

The book has the formulaic allegories typical of the genre—the young, innocent female (Kristen Silverberg, Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs) driven to tears after being berated by the cold-hearted career bureaucrat (Nicholas Burns); the noble knight (Bolton himself) fighting against the political higher ups who care only about “positioning themselves” (Rice) or their legacy (Colin Powell). And of course Bolton’s plaintive cries that the 2005-06 changes in administration policy occurred against the will of the President. One sees the peasants now: ‘If only the King knew what was happening, this would never go on.’

Now add a heaping dose of xenophobia. Foreigners, appeasing foreigners, foreigners claiming to know us better than we know ourselves: all loom large in Bolton’s memoirs. He insults the former Swedish foreign minister and President of the General Assembly Jan Eliasson as not only having “an ethereal Hammarskjöldian vision problem, but also a Gunnar Myrdal problem, yet another foreigner who ‘understood’ us better than we did ourselves.” (This is the Myrdal who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with Friedrich Hayek, and whose classic book on race, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, was cited in Brown v. Board of Education.) At one point in his belittlement of a Bush political appointee, a special assistant to Condoleeza Rice, no less, Bolton adds that she was “a naturalized citizen originally from Pakistan,” in case we wondered why she could not possibly understand America’s real foreign policy interests. In Bolton’s worldview Zbigniew Brzezinski is probably a naturalized American citizen originally from Poland; Henry Kissinger, a naturalized American citizen originally from Germany.

In the Bolton universe, you want Iran and North Korea to be referred to the Security Council, so that when it fails to unite behind a resolute strategy, the United States is then free to take the tough action it needs to take. And in the case of North Korea, Bolton is clear about what that would be: “unilateralist, interventionist, and preemptive.” Is it any wonder that when it came to Iran and North Korea, our allies and adversaries were loathe to refer them anywhere near Bolton?

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was prompted by the supporters of the Goldwater campaign. Bolton strides right off the pages of Hofstadter’s essay:

He is always manning the barricades of civilization . . . he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

According to Bolton, we do not need diplomats who negotiate, seek common ground, and strive for cooperative solutions. We need litigators who will go to the wall defending American interests, who will understand that when others say no, they mean no, and that therefore compromise is illusion. But in a world where the United States needs international cooperation for its own peace and prosperity, what comes next? Bolton’s answers are laughable—we stick with our “closest friends in the United Nations”—Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands. Or we forge a new alliance with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to overcome the parasitic and paralytic EU. The road to global primacy runs through . . . Wellington?

There are, of course, some glaring contradictions in the memoirs. Bolton is known as a sovereignty hawk and he spells out the content of that doctrine as “greater independence and fewer unnecessary restraints.” The job of civil servants, politically appointed or career, is “to implement the president’s policies.” So it comes as a double shock when we find Bolton handing a draft Security Council resolution to the Israeli ambassador, in case the ambassador wants to ask his Prime Minister to appeal directly to Bush or Rice to change President Bush’s policy on Lebanon.

Another example concerns Bolton’s recurring beratement of UN officials for forgetting that they work for the member states. He then describes how one Under-Secretary-General, American appointee Christopher Burnham, surreptitiously showed him budget documents that put the United States at an advantage in budget negotiations. It is hard to see how you can have it both ways. Either UN officials serve all member states equally or the organization is up for grabs to the most powerful state.

But it is the big betrayal that is at the heart of the book. Facing a quagmire in Iraq, a faltering coalition in Afghanistan, a nuclear armed North Korea, the possibility of a nuclear Iran, and a war against terror that was creating more, not fewer, terrorists, Condoleeza Rice convinced President Bush that maybe they should stop digging a bigger hole for American foreign policy. And that meant actually trying diplomacy in North Korea, Iran, and the Middle East.

The losers were John Bolton and his acolytes; the winners were the professionals like Nicholas Burns and Christopher Hill. Faced with defeat and repudiation of the failed policies he advocated, Bolton’s response is familiar and tiresome: the professionals had secretly hijacked the president’s policy; the Secretary of State cares more about appeasing foreigners than protecting American interests.

The moment of reckoning for Bolton and for the President that nominated him is not described in the book, but it took place two months after Bolton left the administration. When the United States and North Korea reached a deal in February 2007 that holds the promise of denuclearizing the country, Bolton tried to scuttle it. Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, “I’m loyal to the original policy.”

What did Bolton achieve at the United Nations? Very little, which was fine by him and fine by the cast of nonaligned Ambassadors who oppose a more effective international organization. I asked one of them in December 2006 if he was happy that Bolton was leaving. He said, “No, we’ve learned how to deal with Mr. Bolton.” When I sought clarification, he said, “Look, Bolton comes in and asks for the sun, the moon, and the stars, and we say ‘no.’ He then says, ‘I told you so’ and leaves. Everybody is happy.”

Which returns us to the question of why anyone would want to wade through these 500 self-serving pages. The best answer: to remind yourself of the stakes of this upcoming election and why the United States needs more old-fashioned diplomacy and less paranoia and arrogance. A McCain presidency might not eschew diplomacy, but in the political free-for-all that is the Republican party, Bolton and his minions are always there, ready to denigrate any agreement or compromise, to sabotage and subvert real diplomacy.

Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, "I'm loyal to the original policy."

To understand the stakes, consider the little known and even less appreciated record of American negotiations with North Korea since 1994. Between what was called the “Agreed Framework” that brought North Korea back into the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1994 and the end of 2000, the United States and North Korea reached twenty agreements on a wide array of issues. Certain of these agreements foundered in implementation, but an objective assessment shows that some of the noncompliance stemmed from constraints placed by American domestic politics.

The Bolton strategy killed the Agreed Framework, hoping through threats, sanctions, and use of force to end the North Korean regime. Unfortunately for Bolton—fortunately for the rest of us—our ally South Korea and our necessary partner China did not want to deal with the consequences: either a war or a collapsed, deadly state on their borders. In the end, they did not have to because North Korea left the NPT, developed a nuclear bomb, and tested it, bankrupting the Bolton policy and producing the sharp change of strategy that has born fruit in recent North Korean steps to end its nuclear program.

Writing about the successes of American negotiators in bringing North Korea and the United States back together in February 2007, former State Department negotiator Robert Carlin and Stanford Professor Emeritus John Lewis have described why Bolton and his crowd loathe diplomacy is loathed by Bolton and his crowd, and why it is so necessary:

Diplomats strive to put down words all of them can swallow and hopefully their superiors in [the] capital can stomach. Written agreements are difficult to reach. The pain often comes not so much in dealing with the other side but in dealing with your own. Unless you are dictating terms to a defeated enemy, you are going to have to compromise on something, probably several somethings, that will make many people unhappy. That was done for the February 13th agreement, and there is no shame to it.

John Bolton did much damage to American interests in the first Bush administration, but he was implementing the president’s policy. President Bush deserves the blame for putting Bolton in a position to continue hardming American interests even when the overall direction of policy changed.

Given that many countries treated the United States as radioactive in 2005; given that trust and confidence in the United States were at all time lows; given that our record was one of a violator of international law and human rights; President Bush, had he truly wanted to start to move the United States out of the hole he had been so assiduously digging, would have had to send to the United Nations an ambassador with extraordinary listening skills, who could work across various international chasms, rebuild respect for American diplomacy, and, yes, advocate agreements that would make a lot of people unhappy. Someone, in fact, a lot like our present Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, a naturalized citizen originally from Afghanistan. Instead he sent . . . Yosemite Sam.

So back to January 20. A new American president will take office with grinding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nuclear-armed North Korea, an Iran headed that way, and crises in Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, and Pakistan. Our foreign policy is anathema; our reputation in tatters. Throw in big issues like global warming, non-proliferation, catastrophic terrorism, and a potential pandemic of a deadly new influenza. It is hard to see how any of these crises or issues can be solved without sustained international cooperation and strong international institutions. Take global warming: protecting Americans from its ravages will depend on exercising sovereignty to strike deals with other countries whose domestic behavior threatens us and whose security our domestic behavior threatens. A narrow view of sovereignty as the ability to do as we damned well please will be—quite literally—the death of us all.

Surrender Is not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad
by John Bolton. Threshold Editions, $27.00 (hardcover)

 

Excerpted from Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006

Preventing the unthinkable ongoing crisis with Tehran is not the first time Washington has faced a hostile government attempting to develop nuclear weapons. Nor is it likely to be the last. Yet the reasoning of U.S. officials now struggling to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions is clouded by a kind of historical amnesia, which leads to both creeping fatalism about the United States’ ability to keep Iran from getting the bomb and excessive optimism about the United States’ ability to contain Iran if it does become a nuclear power.

A U.S. official in the executive branch anonymously told the New York Times in March 2006, “The reality is that most of us think the Iranians are probably going to get a weapon, or the technology to make one, sooner or later.” Military planners and intelligence officers have reportedly been tasked with developing strategies to deter Tehran if negotiations fail.

Both proliferation fatalism and deterrence optimism are wrong-headed, and they reinforce each other in a disturbing way. As nuclear proliferation comes to be seen as inevitable, wishful thinking can make its consequences seem less severe, and if faith in deterrence grows, incentives to combat proliferation diminish.

Deterrence optimism is based on mistaken nostalgia and a faulty analogy. Although deterrence did work with the Soviet Union and China, there were many close calls; maintaining nuclear peace during the Cold War was far more difficult and uncertain than U.S. officials and the American public seem to remember today. Furthermore, a nuclear Iran would look a lot less like the totalitarian Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China and a lot more like Pakistan, Iran’s unstable neighbor—a far more frightening prospect.

Fatalism about nuclear proliferation is equally unwarranted. Although the United States did fail to prevent its major Cold War rivals from developing nuclear arsenals, many other countries—including Japan, West Germany, South Korea, and more recently Libya—curbed their own nuclear ambitions.

THE REASONS WHY

The way for Washington to move forward on Iran is to give Tehran good reason to relinquish its pursuit of nuclear weapons. That, in turn, requires understanding why Tehran wants them in the first place.

Iran’s nuclear energy program began in the 1960s under the shah, but even he wanted to create a breakout option to get the bomb quickly if necessary. One of his senior energy advisers recalled, “The shah told me that he does not want the bomb yet, but if anyone in the neighborhood has it, we must be ready to have it.” At first, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini objected to nuclear weapons on religious grounds, but the mullahs abandoned such restraint after Saddam Hussein ordered chemical attacks on Iranian forces during the Iran-Iraq War.

The end of Saddam’s rule in 2003 significantly reduced the security threat to Tehran. But by then the United States had taken Iraq’s place. In his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush had denounced the governments of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as members of an “axis of evil” with ties to international terrorism. After the fall of Baghdad, an unidentified senior U.S. official told a Los Angeles Times reporter that Tehran should “take a number,” hinting that it was next in line for regime change.

Increasingly, Bush administration spokespeople advocated “preemption” to counter proliferation. When asked, in April 2006, whether the Pentagon was considering a potential preventive nuclear strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, President Bush pointedly replied, “All options are on the table.”

AGREED FRAMEWORK IN FARSI

A source of inspiration for handling Iran is the 1994 Agreed Framework that the United States struck with North Korea. The Bush administration has severely criticized the deal, but it contained several elements that could prove useful in the Iranian nuclear crisis.

After the North Koreans were caught violating their NPT commitments in early 1993, they threatened to withdraw from the treaty. Declaring that “North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb,” President Clinton threatened an air strike on the Yongbyon reactor site if the North Koreans took further steps to reprocess plutonium. In June 1994, as the Pentagon was reinforcing military units on the Korean Peninsula, Pyongyang froze its plutonium production, agreed to let IAEA inspectors monitor the reactor site, and entered into bilateral negotiations.

The talks produced the October 1994 Agreed Framework, under which North Korea agreed to eventually dismantle its reactors, remain in the NPT, and implement full IAEA safeguards. In exchange, the United States promised to provide it with limited oil supplies, construct two peaceful light-water reactors for energy production, “move toward full normalization of political and economic relations,” and extend “formal assurances to [North Korea] against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the U.S.”

“The way for Washington to move forward on Iran is to give Tehran good reason to relinquish its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”By 2002, the Agreed Framework had broken down, not only because Pyongyang was suspected of cheating but also because it believed that the United States, by delaying construction of the light-water reactors and failing to start normalizing relations, had not honored its side of the bargain. When confronted with evidence of its secret uranium program, in November 2002, Pyongyang took advantage of the fact that the U.S. military was tied down in preparations for the invasion of Iraq and withdrew from the NPT, kicked out the inspectors, and started reprocessing plutonium.

President Bush famously promised, in his 2002 State of the Union address, that the United States “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Yet when North Korea kicked out the IAEA inspectors, Secretary of State Colin Powell proclaimed that the situation was “not a crisis.” Bush repeatedly declared that the United States had “no intention of invading North Korea.” The point was not lost on Tehran.

If Washington is to offer security assurances to Tehran, it should do so soon (making the assurances contingent on Tehran’s not developing nuclear weapons), rather than offering them too late, as it did with North Korea (and thus making them contingent on Tehran’s getting rid of any existing nuclear weapons). As with North Korea, any deal with Iran must be structured in a series of steps, each offering a package of economic benefits (light-water reactors, aircraft parts, or status at the World Trade Organization) in exchange for constraints placed on Iran’s future nuclear development.

Most important, however, would be a reduction in the security threat that the United States poses to Iran. Given the need for Washington to have a credible deterrent against, say, terrorist attacks sponsored by Iran, a blanket security guarantee would be ill advised. But more limited guarantees, such as a commitment not to use nuclear weapons, could be effective. They would reassure Tehran and pave the way toward the eventual normalization of U.S.–Iranian relations while signaling to other states that nuclear weapons are not the be all and end all of security.

Peaceful coexistence does not require friendly relations, but it does mean exercising mutual restraint. Relinquishing the threat of regime change by force is a necessary and acceptable price for the United States to pay to stop Tehran from getting the bomb.

What nuclear threats do we face today? America went to war because its leadership believed Iraq had nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. We are reminded daily of the potential dangers of Iran turning its quest for nuclear energy into a weapons capability. We are locked in a deep struggle to get North Korea to give up its nuclear status demonstrated in last fall’s test. Concerns about Russia’s nuclear arsenal are resurfacing. And, we are constantly reminded that we must wage America’s “war on terror” to avoid the nexus of international terrorism and nuclear weapons.

All nuclear threats are not alike. How do these and other nuclear threats compare in terms of severity or likelihood? And how can we effectively address them? It is useful to think of today’s nuclear threats at three levels. First is an all-out exchange of nuclear warheads—hundreds of them—that would destroy civilization as we know it. Next is a limited, but still disastrous exchange—tens of warheads —that would create levels of destruction not seen since World War II. The third level is the use of one or several nuclear bombs, which would threaten our way of life. Reframing the nuclear threat in this way allows us to gauge our level of concern and formulate meaningful preventive strategies.

An all-out nuclear exchange could occur today only between the United States and Russia, which still maintain many thousands of warheads in their nuclear inventories. A nuclear war between these two countries represents the only existential threat to the United States.

The end of the Cold War rendered this threat highly improbable but not impossible. An accidental or unauthorized launch followed by a response is still possible. To eliminate this threat, the United States and Russia should follow through on detargeting and commit to de-alerting their nuclear forces—to remove them from high alert status that allows a launch within minutes to pre-identified targets.

The two nations should commit to making major reductions in their nuclear stockpiles and eventually eliminating them. In the midst of the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev reduced their stockpiles and even came close to an agreement to lead the world in abolishing nuclear weapons. Last January in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, George Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn called for a renewal of that vision by outlining steps to be taken now.

To move more rapidly toward much smaller numbers, I would add that leaders in both nations should undertake a zero-base nuclear assessment that would answer this question: If you were creating a stockpile from scratch today, how many weapons would you need to meet the current threat? Such a calculus would yield much lower numbers than trying to decide how many weapons you can live without. U.S. and Russian nuclear postures toward China should also carefully avoid provoking a Chinese nuclear buildup.

An exchange of tens of nuclear warheads is somewhat less improbable than nuclear war between Russia and the United States. But at this level, potential confrontations include nuclear exchanges between India and Pakistan, or between the United States and China—over Taiwan, for example, or on Russia’s southern border, or in the Middle East, between Israel and possibly Iran in the future. To limit the possibilities, it is crucial to stop more countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. The fewer fingers on the nuclear trigger, the better.

The United States should play a leading role in reinforcing the nuclear nonproliferation regime, centered on the 37-year-old Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which allows a country to come within a whisker of building a bomb. A global expansion of nuclear power will pose additional challenges to the system. We need new rules of engagement for expanding nuclear power, including viable international controls on uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing.

To encourage non-nuclear weapon states to keep their end of the NPT bargain and refrain from acquiring the bomb, the five nuclear weapon states must show a greater commitment to working in good faith toward eventual elimination of their arsenals, as pledged under Article VI of the treaty.

Security guarantees from the United States and other nuclear weapon states can help curb some countries’ nuclear ambitions by alleviating fears of invasion by major world powers or by regional foes. India and Pakistan—two nuclear weapon states that aren’t parties to the NPT—should continue to pursue confidence-building measures to avoid miscalculation and potential nuclear war. We should help realize the nuclear-free zones that states are calling for in the Middle East, on the Korean peninsula, in Central Asia and in as many other regions as possible.

The United States and other states with nuclear weapons can also lower the risk of limited war by declaring a no-first-use policy, reserving nuclear weapons only as weapons of last resort.

The use of one or several nuclear bombs today is more likely than it was during the Cold War. If detonated in a big city, the damage would be catastrophic. Humankind would survive such a catastrophe, but it could gravely threaten our way of life. A country or a terrorist group in possession of a rudimentary nuclear bomb could deliver such a weapon in a van, boat, or plane. North Korea could do so, in desperation; Israel could do so in response to an existential threat; and under current doctrine, the United States or Russia could do so in response to a chemical, biological, or radiological attack. More likely, and hence of greater concern, is that terrorists would use a nuclear bomb, if they could get one.

The most likely route for terrorists to acquire a bomb is to devise one from stolen or diverted fissile materials. Theft or diversion of a ready-made weapon is far less likely.Building a rudimentary bomb is not easy but is judged to be within the capabilities of some sophisticated terrorist groups if they are able to obtain fissile materials.

Although it is widely recognized that keeping bomb materials out of terrorists’ hands is essential, the difficulty of doing so, especially from a technical standpoint, is not well understood. Only a few tens of kilograms of plutonium or highly enriched uranium are required for a bomb, yet almost 2 million kilograms of each exist in the world today, and some of it is not adequately secured. Securing these materials requires greater commitment to nuclear materials safeguards by all countries that possess them. It calls for greater urgency to protect and eventually eliminate highly enriched uranium in research reactors and facilities around the world. Bilateral or multilateral sting operations to intercept nuclear black market trade may help locate material already outside of state control. International cooperation in building databases and detection systems will improve nuclear forensics and attribution.

Each level of nuclear threat implies a different strategy of prevention. But three common aspects emerge as priorities for national and international policymaking:

• The fewer nuclear weapons, the better.
• The fewer fingers on a nuclear trigger, the better.
• Keeping fissile materials out of terrorists’ hands is essential.

Finally, this is not a problem for the United States alone to solve. It can only be solved through international cooperation.

CISAC faculty member John W. Lewis argues in the Boston Globe that the North korea diplomatic initiative launched by President Bush in October 2006 will come to naught if the administration fails to follow through on promises it made to encourage Pyongyang to destroy its nuclear weapons programs.

The diplomatic initiative launched by President Bush in the wake of North Korea's nuclear weapon test in October 2006 has made substantial progress in rolling back the nation's drive to become a nuclear power.

That success, however, will be for naught if the administration fails to follow through on promises it made to encourage the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to destroy its nuclear weapons programs. The United States must honor its commitments in order to begin normalizing relations with North Korea.

Unfortunately, a recent barrage of criticism against the administration's policy aims to derail this process. Even as Pyongyang has taken more than 80 percent of the required steps to disable its Yongbyon nuclear weapons facilities, the fulfillment of US obligations has stalled.

The critics who want to stymie all forward movement, are, for the most part, the same specialists who can take credit for jettisoning in 2003 the agreement with North Korea, known as the 1994 Agreed Framework, which had stopped its plutonium production for almost a decade. Only after the collapse of the Agreed Framework did the North Koreans process the fissile material needed to build and test nuclear weapons. Three years later, in 2006, the president adopted a more realistic policy that is now under attack.

Many of the policy's critics denounce a declaration of the North's nuclear programs that has not yet been finished and argue that we must have clarity about North Korea's role in the construction of a Syrian nuclear facility and its uranium enrichment path to nuclear weapons.

Whatever the role of Korea in the Syrian reactor project, that facility no longer exists. Israel destroyed it last September.

Last year, the United States downgraded from medium to low its confidence level that North Korea continues to pursue a uranium enrichment program. In October, Pyongyang allowed US inspectors into a missile factory, where it said that aluminum tubes suspected of being used in that program were being remade into missile parts. North Korea handed over aluminum samples that later showed traces of enriched uranium, but analysis was inconclusive.

The United States apparently has secured Pyongyang's agreement to pursue these types of "clarifying" activities. Moreover, China has agreed on the importance of a verification regime aimed at assuring a "complete and correct" declaration, and a key goal of the next round of talks would be to fashion that regime.

Recent developments are even more impressive. On May 8, the North Koreans passed to a US State Department official a trove of 18,822 pages of operating records for the Yongbyon 5MWe reactor and reprocessing plant, which date back to 1986. That is 18,822 pages more than we ever had before, and begins a verification process previously impossible.

Also, the International Atomic Energy Agency and US nuclear experts have overseen the shutdown and continuing disablement of all key plutonium production facilities at Yongbyon. Discussions have been held to ship out the monitored unused reactor fuel rods.

If diplomacy is to succeed, Washington needs to begin delivering on some of the promises it has made as part of the Six-Party agreements. It must move toward normalizing relations with Pyongyang: That means beginning "the process of removing the designation of the DPRK as a state-sponsor of terrorism" and starting to "advance the process of terminating the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act with respect to the DPRK."

We know that North Korea seeks better relations with the United States to create the environment essential to facilitate economic recovery, give it more diplomatic space, and smooth the way for an upcoming political succession. Since the New York Philharmonic concert in Pyongyang last February, it has begun portraying the United States in a more positive light to its own people, laying the groundwork for a major breakthrough in relations with the United States.

This breakthrough is needed if the United States is to achieve its ultimate objective: to cap, roll back, and completely eliminate the North's nuclear weapons program.

Critics in Washington, like those in Pyongyang, are afraid of exploring the future and only want to cling to the past. That isn't the way out.

John W. Lewis, professor emeritus at Stanford University, is coauthor of "Negotiating with North Korea: 1992-2007."

Ohio Wesleyan University presented CISAC Co-Director Scott D. Sagan with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree during its 164th commencement ceremony on May 11. The citation accompanying the honor states: "Scott D. Sagan's grandfather, J. Waskom Pickett, a bishop in the United Methodist Church, served as a missionary in India and advised his grandson on the importance of helping to make the world a better place. Sagan's father, the late Dr. John Sagan-a beloved 1948 Ohio Wesleyan graduate, OWU trustee, and vice president/treasurer of Ford Motor Company-often mentioned the student's Golden Rule: 'Find out what you enjoy doing most, and then figure out a way to get paid for that activity.' Dr. Scott Sagan has found great enjoyment-and success-in following both his father's and grandfather's advice: his career has combined his love of research and teaching about international relations with influential policy work that has reduced the danger that nuclear weapons pose to the United States and to the rest of the world."

Sagan, a professor of political science, "is one of the most widely cited scholars of international relations in the United States," the citation states. "His seminal publications have shaped the way scholars and policy makers have thought about the risks of nuclear terrorism." In addition, CISAC, which Sagan has helped lead for the past decade, "is widely recognized as one of the world's preeminent university-based think tanks conducting policy research on global security matters."

Ohio Wesleyan is a private, undergraduate liberal arts college in Delaware, Ohio.