What is the impact of the events of September 11 and the subsequent "war on terrorism" on nuclear issues? The "war on terrorism" is a handy political moniker for what the United States must learn to do in response to changes that have actually been taking place over several years. Some of the US responses to date have been wise. Some need a new look. Perhaps most important, in some areas, the United States and other countries have not responded and may be at a loss to respond, given the constraints on their policies. Some of these lacking responses provide the most important items on the post September 11 security agenda. In what follows, I will give one view of what these are and what to do about them.

I begin with nuclear terrorism, particularly the possibility of using nuclear weapons for terrorist purposes. The next section addresses the related issue of nuclear proliferation to state and non-state actors. The events of September 11 have given a new twist to that issue. There is a relationship between the possibility of nuclear weapons getting into terrorists' hands and the problems in Iraq, South and Central Asia, and North Korea. The following sections deals with an item that is no longer high on the US political agenda but which is tied to proliferation and terrorism and has a greater long-range potential for causing trouble, the incipient nuclear rivalries around the world. In closing, I suggest some elements of a desirable nuclear posture to deal with some of the problems outlined.

STANFORD, Calif.— More than 100 hostages are dead after Russian authorities used an unidentified gas to incapacitate terrorists holding 750 people in a Moscow theater. Nearly all of the deaths were due to the gas, which Russian authorities have so far refused to identify.

Press coverage has rightly emphasized grief and the question of why antidotes were not immediately available. It has then focused on whether the Russians' use of gas was a violation of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention. But this focus, while important, risks overlooking the big picture when it comes to Russian chemical weapons.

The Chemical Weapons Convention is a global treaty with more than 170 signatory nations. It bans the production, acquisition, stockpiling, transfer and use of chemical weapons -- the first arms-control treaty to outlaw an entire class of so-called weapons of mass destruction. It also requires its signatories to declare and destroy, by certain deadlines, the chemical weapons they possess.

Since the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons in war -- a reaction to gas attacks in World War I -- the world has struggled to ban these weapons. In part, this is because of their indiscriminate nature.

After Sept. 11, 2001, it seems all the more important to eliminate stocks of such weapons because access to them could confer such power to terrorists. In a world with 70,000 metric tons of chemical weapons agents, some of which may be vulnerable to terrorist theft, the verified elimination of these weapons will be a step toward greater security for all. This is true despite the disturbing fact that Iraq, North Korea and certain other nations are not parties to the convention.

The weapons convention permits the production and use of riot-control agents for law enforcement purposes. Until the Russians inform us of the agent used, whether they were in violation of the convention will remain uncertain. But renewed attention to Russian chemical agents should focus on a more important issue. Russia retains some 40,000 tons of chemical warfare blister agents and nerve gas. It is required by the convention to destroy them, and the United States and European nations have agreed to help. But American efforts under the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program are stalled in Congress.

The Cooperative Threat Reduction program began in 1992. It provides expertise and funding to help the former Soviet Union secure and destroy nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and materials. Progress with chemical and biological weapons has been especially slow, and the Russians have too often been less than forthcoming.

Of particular concern has been the Russian stockpile at Shchuch'ye, a town near the southern border with Kazakhstan. The Shchuch'ye stockpile contains nearly two million artillery shells -- and hundreds of missile warheads -- filled with nerve gas or other chemical weapons. Although stockpile security has been upgraded with help from American financing, the threat of insider theft remains real. Many of the shells are in working condition, and they are small and easily transportable.

Cooperative Threat Reduction funds have paid to design a plant for construction at Shchuch'ye to destroy these weapons securely and safely. The Pentagon wants $130 million for construction in the new fiscal year. Russia, its economy still weak, won't do this without American assistance. But the program is currently stalled in a Congressional conference committee due to a disagreement over granting the president authority to proceed with the project.

The Bush administration's new national security strategy has emphasized the destruction of weapons of mass destruction by pre-emptive strikes if necessary. But at Shchuch'ye alone, the United States could destroy more than 5,000 tons of ready-to-use weapons of mass destruction through a different kind of pre-emptive strike -- action by a Congressional committee.  

A joint Stanford University-Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory team of scientists, nuclear engineers and arms control experts has concluded in a new study that North Korea's compliance with the 1994 Agreed Framework can be verified to a satisfactory degree of accuracy. Special effort, however, will be needed from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as support from the US, the Republic of Korea (ROK), Japan and perhaps other countries. Most importantly, cooperation and openness from North Korea are essential.

The 1994 Agreed Framework (AF) between the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has become the centerpiece of recent US efforts to reduce the threat of conflict on the Korean peninsula. Under the AF, the US and its allies (mainly South Korea) will provide the DPRK with two large nuclear-power reactors and other benefits such as annual shipments of fuel oil for the generation of electricity until the nuclear-power reactors being built for that purpose are able to do so. In exchange the DPRK will declare how much nuclear weapon-usable material it has produced; identify, freeze, and eventually dismantle specified facilities for producing this material; and remain a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and allow the implementation of its safeguards agreement.

The AF is now being carried out according to a complex and currently delayed schedule. Fuel oil shipments have been provided to the DPRK, the site for the two nuclear-power reactors has largely been prepared, and construction has begun on some components. The DPRK, for its part, has declared some nuclear weapon-usable material and has identified and frozen some facilities for producing this material.

As emphasized in President Bush's statement at the White House on March 7, 2001, verification is an essential part of any agreement with North Korea. How well can it be verified that the DPRK has no access to nuclear weapon-usable material? What is the potential impact of delays, disagreements, and lack of cooperation on verification? The United States and the international community must answer these questions if the nuclear-power reactor project is to proceed as planned.

The report analyzes in detail both the task of safeguarding the nuclear-power reactors to be provided and also that of dealing with known or suspected nuclear-materials production facilities in the DPRK. Scenarios governing both DPRK cooperation and possible non-cooperation, up to and including abrogation of the agreement are considered.

The challenges of verification examined in this report must be met if a necessary minimum of trust is to be established between the parties and the rewards of the agreement are to be realized. The authors believe that the challenges can be met under the conditions outlined in this report, but that special effort on all sides will be needed to meet them.

The proliferation of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is now the single most serious security concern for governments around the world. Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James J. Wirtz compare how military threats, strategic cultures, and organizations shape the way leaders intend to employ these armaments. They reveal the many frightening ways that emerging military powers and terrorist groups are planning the unthinkable by preparing to use chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in future conflicts.

Distinguished specialists consider several states and organizations that have this weaponry: Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel, as well as the Aum Shinrikyo cult. The contributors expose plans for using unconventional weapons, highlighting the revolutionary effects these arsenals might have on international politics and regional disputes.

Book description:

The basic logic of preventive diplomacy is unassailable. Act early to prevent disputes from escalating; reduce tensions that could lead to war; deal with today's conflicts before they become tomorrow's crises. Yet as we look at the record of these first years of the post-Cold War era, it is quite mixed. There have been some preventive diplomacy successes and opportunities that have been seized by major powers and international organizations to help preserve and protect the peace. But there also have been other opportunities that have been missed, with some of the century's most deadly conflicts the result. This study examines ten major post-Cold War cases including Croatia-Bosnia, Rwanda, the Baltics, Russia-Ukraine, Macedonia, and North Koreato assess the key factors contributing to both the success and failure of preventive diplomacy. The method of case study analysis employed is based on the work of Alexander L. George. Authors include both leading academics and prominent policy officials with first-hand knowledge

Book chapter in Opportunities Missed, Opportunities Seized: Preventive Diplomacy in the Post-Cold War World , B.W. Jentleson, ed., Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

The nuclear nonproliferation regime was challenged in 1998 by nuclear-weapon tests in India and Pakistan, by medium-range missile tests in those countries and in Iran and North Korea, by Iraq's defiance of UN Security Council resolutions requiring it to complete its disclosure of efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and by the combination of "loose nukes" and economic collapse in Russia. Additional threats to the regime's vitality came in 1999 from the erosion of American relations with both China and Russia that resulted from NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia--with additional harm to relations with China resulting from U.S. accusations of Chinese nuclear espionage and Taiwan's announcement that it was a state separate from China despite its earlier acceptance of a U.S.-Chinese "one China" agreement. Major threats to the regime also came from the continued stalemate on arms-control treaties in the Russian Duma and the U.S. Senate, from a change in U.S. policy to favor building a national defense against missile attack, and from a Russian decision to develop a new generation of small tactical nuclear weapons for defense against conventional attack.

This paper will discuss the effect some of these developments had on the 1999 Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) meeting of Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) parties to prepare for review of the NPT in 2000, and speculate about their likely future effect on the regime.

Nuclear war is generally believed to bring risks of destruction out of proportion to any gain that may be secured by the war, or to any loss that may be averted, except perhaps for the loss of national independence and group survival. Nuclear-armed states, however, continue to project military force outside their own territory in order to carry out rivalries for power and influence. Will these rival power projections lead to war, as they often did in the past? If not, how will they be resolved? This paper makes the case that, because of the recognized destructiveness of nuclear weapons, rivalries among major nuclear-armed states for power and influence outside their own territory are not likely to lead to central war among them, but that definite lines separating zones of exclusive security influence, such as prevailed during the Cold War, will reappear where circumstances prevent
other compromises. This conclusion does not hold in the case of nuclear powers that are centrally vulnerable to conventional attack from each other: in that case, nuclear deterrence is less likely to be stable. Where lines are established, they may facilitate rather than prevent cooperation in dealing with the next century's global problems.