U.S. President George W. Bush signaled a possible shift in U.S. policy on Iran yesterday, potentially leaving open the door to a compromise with Tehran over its nuclear capability, experts told Reuters (see GSN, May 31). Iran is “not to be trusted when it comes to highly enriched uranium — or highly enriching uranium,” Bush said at a press conference. “Our policy is to prevent them from having the capacity to develop enriched uranium to the point where they’re able to make a nuclear weapon,” he said. Some experts interpreted that remark as allowing for the possibility that Iran could be permitted some limited nuclear capability short of the level of uranium enrichment needed to build a bomb. Bush may be “giving himself some wiggle room, preparing the ground for a compromise solution with Iran that would allow them to do part of the enrichment but well short of anything that could give them weapons capability,” said Joseph Cirincione, nonproliferation director at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Clearly you would prefer they (the Iranians) not do anything (in terms of the nuclear fuel cycle), but for the negotiations to work it has to be a win-win situation,” Cirincione said. White House spokesman Scott McClellan, however, said Bush’s comments should not be read as a switch in U.S. policy. “Our position hasn’t changed,” he said, and another senior administration official supported that view. “We’re against (the Iranians) acquiring the technology that would allow them to have a nuclear weapons program,” the official told Reuters (Adam Entous, Reuters, May 31).
By James Kitfield, National Journal
WASHINGTON — By the waning months of 2003, the Bush administration had honed its post-Sept. 11 doctrine of pre-emptive war to maximum sharpness. Earlier in the year, the United States had toppled the Iraqi regime in a three-week military campaign of intense ferocity, sending Saddam Hussein to join Osama bin Laden and the Taliban's Mullah Omar in the realm of the hunted. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, having dropped out of sight for 50 days during the initial weeks of the Iraqi Freedom campaign, went back into hiding for nearly six weeks in the fall of 2003, apparently fearing he was next in line as a candidate for regime change. During this time, the mullahs of Iran, finding themselves bracketed on the west and east by U.S. military forces, offered uncharacteristically conciliatory gestures and statements designed to accommodate a superpower on the warpath. In December 2003, Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi renounced his weapons of mass destruction programs altogether. By the end of the year, the administration reported that nearly two-thirds of al-Qaeda's top leadership had been captured or killed, as had 43 of the 55 most-wanted fugitives from Saddam's Baathist regime. The “axis of evil” was cowed and on the run. Other countermeasures, many of them focused on military options and coercive pressure, supported President George W. Bush's strategy of aggressively confronting the threat of terrorists and rogues who might arm themselves with weapons of mass destruction, most notably nuclear weapons. For the first time, the Defense Department’s Strategic Command, the headquarters for strategic nuclear forces and long-range bombers, was given “global strike” responsibilities that included being prepared to destroy from the air WMD programs found anywhere on the planet. The U.S. Special Operations Command, meanwhile, received primary military responsibility for targeting terrorists around the world and greater freedom to accomplish this mission. The Bush administration also invested more than $30 billion in a national missile defense system designed to intercept incoming nuclear-tipped missiles, even as it pursued the development of a new generation of nuclear “bunker-buster” bombs to threaten underground facilities and WMD programs in rogue states. Finally, the administration created the Proliferation Security Initiative designed to interdict doomsday weapons and materials on the high seas or in transit from rogue-nation proliferators. Certainly, the Bush administration did not altogether abandon the more traditional and defensive policies of deterrence and dissuasion through diplomacy. The thrust of the Bush Doctrine is revealed, however, in the remarkable fact that not once in three years of war, and threatened war, after 9/11 has the administration ever agreed to enter into direct negotiations with the leader of an “axis-of-evil” country. Such a record stands in stark contrast to the philosophy of “hold your enemy close” that drove Washington to engage with the Soviet Union and negotiate almost constantly with it during the Cold War. With minor exceptions, administration officials have also spurned repeated entreaties by European and Asian interlocutors to show greater flexibility and offer more carrots to reach negotiated settlements on WMD programs. As The Washington Post reported last year, Vice President Dick Cheney himself interceded to quash the internal debate on whether to offer North Korea more incentives to abandon its nuclear weapons program. In doing so, Cheney gave a succinct summation of the Bush strategy: “We don't negotiate with evil. We defeat it.” And for a brief, shining moment in late 2003, it indeed seemed possible that the Bush administration's aggressive new strategy might actually shatter the nexus of rogue states, terrorists, and weapons of mass destruction that it identified as the greatest threat to the security of the American people. “As part of the offensive against terror, we are confronting the regimes that harbor and support terrorists and also could supply them with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons,” Bush said in his January 2004 State of the Union address as he outlined successes against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Iraq, and Libya. “The United States and our allies are determined: We refuse to live in the shadow of this ultimate danger. ... America is committed to keeping the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous regimes.” Rogues Strike BackOver the past year, however, growing rumblings suggest that the rogues and the terrorists sense strategic weakness in Washington and are forcefully pushing back. Iran has threatened to withdraw from stalled talks designed to freeze its long-hidden uranium-enrichment program, for instance, and Tehran is said to be harboring al-Qaeda fugitives and meddling in Iraqi internal affairs. Although Syria has pulled its troops out of Lebanon — a move Bush officials have gotten some credit for — the administration also says that Syria has become a witting conduit for foreign jihadists seeking to kill American soldiers and scuttle Iraq's nascent democracy. North Korea — after recently test-firing a missile that U.S. intelligence officials say could possibly carry a nuclear warhead — has taken steps indicating it intends to separate additional weapon-grade plutonium from its nuclear reactor. It has also given some indications that it may soon test a nuclear weapon. Data released by the State Department in late April also revealed a dramatic surge in both the number of terrorist attacks worldwide last year and the number of deaths they caused — from 625 in 2003 to 1,907 in 2004. Even more ominous are figures indicating that individual terrorist attacks are becoming increasingly lethal: More than 1,000 people were killed in just 10 terrorist spectaculars, six of them perpetrated by al-Qaeda or associated groups. Meanwhile, U.S. military forces are straining mightily under the burden of bloody counterinsurgency and security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military recruitment is down nearly across the board, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, has publicly conceded for the first time that those ongoing missions would impair the Pentagon's ability to respond to future crises, whether in Iran, North Korea, or elsewhere. With the recent congressional passage of an $82 billion emergency supplemental bill, the price tag for those operations is now more than $200 billion, and rising. At the same time, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has profoundly damaged the credibility of the United States as the leader in the global effort against nuclear proliferation and rogue states. In March, the bipartisan Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction — known as the Robb-Silberman commission for its co-chairmen, former Senator Charles Robb of Virginia and federal Judge Laurence Silberman — issued its report reviewing intelligence on Iran, Libya, and North Korea as well as Afghanistan and Iraq. The document outlines failures and inadequacies so woeful and pervasive that many experts believe that U.S. intelligence is manifestly incapable of supporting a doctrine of pre-emptive war. All of this suggests to some analysts that the time of maximum U.S. coercive pressure has passed. The United States, they fear, is now entering a period of increased vulnerability to nuclear proliferation, brinkmanship, and terrorism. If so, this calls into question some of the underlying tenets of the assertive Bush Doctrine. “The Bush Doctrine always ran the risk that some countries might rush to acquire nuclear weapons to deter us from pre-emptive war,” said Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. That risk grew, and the Bush administration lost critical momentum and leverage, he said, after it failed to find any stockpiles of nuclear or nonconventional weapons in Iraq. Forced to continuously justify an unpopular war on secondary grounds, the Bush administration confronted dwindling international support just when it was becoming clear that the burden of stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq would prove far more onerous than it had anticipated. “Iran and North Korea both realize that the United States is bogged down in a counterinsurgency war that is costing hundreds of billions of dollars, and they sense that the international community has no stomach for joining us in threatening another war of regime change,” Krepinevich said. “Both Tehran and Pyongyang have thus apparently decided to close their own windows of vulnerability by acquiring nuclear weapons quicker.” The Cold War logic of nuclear deterrence no longer exists, he said, and the United States is confronted with the strong possibility that nuclear weapons will end up in the hands of rogue states, or even nonstate actors, who will act far less responsibly than the Soviet Union. “That scenario could lead the United States down a lot of dead-end streets, where we really have no good options in terms of deterring or pre-empting nuclear weapons, or even retaliating effectively if one is used against us. And given that we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks, just imagine how the United States might react if 300,000 Americans were killed in a nuclear detonation.” Bush's aggressive counterproliferation strategy may have run up against the limits of coercion and a strong current of unintended consequences, but few quibble with the White House's fundamental calculation that a potentially catastrophic confluence of nihilistic terror, rogue regimes, and nuclear weapons remains the greatest threat facing the United States. The question raised by recent setbacks is what combination of traditional deterrence and containment on the one hand, and coercion and pre-emption on the other — of soft-power carrots and hard-power sticks — can best counter the threat. Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser. “I think we are facing a very serious problem, though I would differentiate it by pointing out that North Korea is far more menacing than Iran because its leadership is demonstrably pathological and very capable of ruthless violence and horrible brutality,” Brzezinski told National Journal. “Iran may be led by a bloody-minded theocracy, but it is also a serious, historically rooted country with a great imperial tradition. The larger point is that if you go around telling countries that you are going to change their regimes and call them part of a terrorist ‘axis of evil,’ what kind of incentive do they have to accommodate our wishes, even if we had such a proposal? In a sense, our belligerent demagoguery and exaggerated predictions of catastrophe are reducing the probability of a peaceful accommodation.” A Harder LineEven before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration left no doubt that it planned to transform a U.S. strategic posture that it saw as a relic of the Cold War. The top echelons of the administration's defense and national security establishments were filled with arms control skeptics — many from the Reagan administration — who had long argued that instead of being constrained by Cold War-style treaties, the United States should unilaterally reconfigure its strategic forces for a post-Cold War era of greater uncertainty. In their view, traditional arms control treaties were inherently unverifiable and lulled signatories into a false sense of security. In its first months in office, the Bush administration thus embraced the Senate's 1999 rejection of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, although the White House continued a voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing; argued for research and possible development of new, specially tailored nuclear weapons; and announced its intention to withdraw from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia to begin construction of a national missile defense. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration moved with even greater urgency to replace the old arms control architecture and the largely defensive notion of Cold War deterrence. In their place, Bush administration officials began to focus on capabilities that would coerce and possibly pre-empt rogue states and terrorists. In January 2002, Bush unveiled this doctrine in his State of the Union speech, broadening the global war on terrorism to include rogue regimes that sought chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons that might threaten the United States. He singled out an “axis of evil” that included Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The administration later codified the tenets of pre-emption in its keystone foreign-policy document, the 2002 “National Security Strategy of the United States.” “We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side,” Bush told the nation in the 2002 State of the Union. “I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer.” The new Bush Doctrine and strategic architecture was further reinforced by the classified “Nuclear Posture Review,” which was delivered to Congress in January 2002. The review not only called for the development of new low-yield bunker-busting nuclear weapons that could potentially destroy buried facilities. The review, for the first time, envisioned their possible use against non-nuclear states that might be developing chemical or biological weapons. It named North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya as possible targets. The review was followed later with a secret “Interim Global Strike Order” directing Strategic Command to take responsibility for attacking hostile countries developing weapons of mass destruction, and to maintain readiness for such an event. “The National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction,” released in December 2002, further fleshed out the Bush Doctrine. The strategy reiterated the U.S. military's need to detect and possibly strike pre-emptively an enemy's WMD programs. It also called for the expansion of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a multinational program designed to interdict nuclear weapons and other WMD-related materials in transit from proliferating countries. Taken together, the series of strategy documents and initiatives did indeed signal a fundamental departure from the more defensive, Cold War strategic posture of containment and deterrence. “In the Cold War era, we knew our enemy and had a common doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction,’ and we had relatively good visibility of his strategic weapons via satellites to help verify arms control agreements,” said Peter Huessy, president of Geostrategic Analysis, a defense consulting company. “Fast-forward to the present day. We have no deterrent relationship with Iran or North Korea, and no transparency into weapons of mass destruction programs that frequently surprise us. In that situation, you constantly face this dilemma of time: When will they get a nuclear weapon? Should I sit back and pray that deterrence doesn't break down? What if it looks like they may be preparing to threaten or destroy an American city? That possibility, while not likely, may be so catastrophic that a U.S. president is compelled to act pre-emptively to take out the threat. No apologies.” But the Bush Doctrine of coercion and confrontation has so far failed to produce the desired results in North Korea and Iran. And analysts are increasingly questioning some key pillars of the Bush policy. After the setbacks of the past year, the strategy has come under renewed scrutiny even within the Bush administration. National Security Council officials have been unable to bridge the gap between hard-liners arguing for outright regime change in Iran and North Korea and moderates pushing for negotiated changes in those regimes’ behavior. “In the case of Iran and North Korea, it's still unclear whether the Bush administration is willing to offer a deal and take yes for an answer, and that represents the real limitations and risks of the pre-emptive model of regime change,” said Robert Litwak, a former member of the National Security Council who now directs the International Studies Division at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “Until we resolve that fundamental ambiguity in our policy toward Iran and North Korea, tensions will persist,” said Litwak, speaking at a conference hosted by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. “Neither of those nations will accept U.S. security assurances, because they continue to believe our objective remains regime change.” Going UndergroundIn a world where the old ideas about nuclear deterrence don't seem to work anymore, it is the job of U.S. strategic analysts to figure out how to maintain America’s edge against potential enemies. For more than 20 years, Paul Robinson has watched as one country after another has sought to burrow beyond the reach of U.S. bombs and the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or “SIOP,” the nuclear-targeting document that served as the blueprint for the Cold War standoff of “mutually assured destruction.” Robinson, as director of Sandia National Laboratory and the former head of Los Alamos Laboratory's nuclear weapons program, has been privy to all of the classified intelligence. When the United States displayed its overwhelming conventional military superiority and precision-bombing prowess during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and in the 1999 Kosovo conflict, it encouraged even more frantic burrowing activity on the part of rogue regimes. In one study Robinson participated in, U.S. analysts could even differentiate between tunnels designed to put facilities out of reach of U.S. conventional bombs, and those that burrowed much deeper, sometimes into the side of a narrow canyon or an inaccessible mountain. The analysts had little doubt that these regimes wanted to put the buried facility beyond the reach of a U.S. nuclear weapon. As someone who had spent his adult life studying the complex calculus of nuclear deterrence, Robinson had reached an unavoidable conclusion: With each new tunnel, the United States’ ability to threaten the doomsday weapons programs and other military facilities of potential adversaries was slowly being nibbled away. “Deterrence is an evolving process, and if you don't reinvigorate it when conditions change that degrade your ability to hold certain targets at risk, then your deterrent posture is undermined,” Robinson said in an interview. “With relatively cheap tunnel-boring machines, countries such as North Korea ... are building sanctuaries from our arsenal. Data showing that our bombing of Serbian underground facilities in 1999 was almost totally ineffective also suggest that conventional bunker-buster bombs may never be robust enough to threaten these targets. So we can simply accept that our deterrent posture is deteriorating, or we can do something about it.” What the Pentagon would like to do about it is to develop a relatively low-yield — to reduce collateral damage — bunker-buster known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. The penetrator could be dropped on any of the estimated 1,400 underground sites containing probable WMD facilities or command-and-control centers. Such tunnels and underground facilities exist in more than 70 countries, including the United States itself. North Korea's tunneling exploits in particular are legendary, as evidenced by the discovery to date of four tunnels under the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. North Korea apparently designed the tunnels to funnel thousands of troops quickly to the south in the event of war. Bush administration officials correctly point out that nothing in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty bans development of such new weapons by nuclear weapons states, and that the Clinton administration had already repackaged an existing nuclear warhead into something called the B-61 “bunker-buster.” “The B-61 was designed to penetrate frozen soil, and I want to study whether we could harden a nuclear weapon sufficiently to penetrate a few meters of rock, so that a future president who wanted to hold these underground facilities at risk would have that option,” Linton Brooks, director of the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, told National Journal. Brooks rejects the idea that a U.S. president would ever lightly consider use of a nuclear “bunker-buster,” whatever its yield. Nor does he believe that developing such a weapon runs counter to the spirit of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. “This idea of delegitimizing nuclear weapons sounds good philosophically, but who are we kidding! These are the most awesome weapons ever devised, and as long as they exist, we have to take nuclear deterrence into account,” said Brooks. “I consider this argument — that we should just let them atrophy and not maintain an effective deterrent — a dangerous approach.” Who Is the Rogue?The debate surrounding the Bush administration's push for new nuclear bunker-busters highlights, however, just how unsettling it is for the rest of the world when the lone superpower alters a long-standing, carefully calibrated strategic equation of deterrence and nuclear nonproliferation and moves toward one of coercion and potential nuclear pre-emption. Many countries see the Bush approach as a violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, particularly Article 6: “Each of the parties to the treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” Even the Republican-controlled Congress is not entirely comfortable with the shift in nuclear doctrine. Last year, Congress zeroed out the Bush administration's request of $27.6 million to research the nuclear earth penetrator. “Ultimately, Washington must strike a balance between conflicting goals: maintaining a modern nuclear weapons posture on the one hand, and curbing the spread of nuclear weapons on the other. The Bush administration has not struck this balance well,” declared John Deutch, who was the director of central intelligence and a deputy defense secretary in the Clinton administration, writing in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs. In the article, Deutch criticizes administration officials for implying that the United States might consider a nuclear first strike, and for proposing the nuclear bunker-buster. “The tone of this proposal ignores the indirect effect that new U.S. warhead research programs have on international attitudes toward nonproliferation,” Deutch warned. Many arms control experts believe that the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption, and its publicly stated desire for new nuclear weapons, is largely behind the acrimony displayed at last month's NPT review conference in New York City (see GSN, May 31). The conference was marked by testy exchanges between the nuclear “have-nots” and the United States in particular. That ire was communicated repeatedly to a task force of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which talked to officials in 20 countries to elicit comments on its recent report, “Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security.” Although new nuclear bunker-busters might prove militarily useful in pressuring and potentially pre-empting a few outlaw states, most people viewed as hypocritical the idea that the United States — this era's overwhelmingly dominant military power — needed to build new nuclear weapons while it continued to pressure non-nuclear and weaker states to forswear them in accordance with the nonproliferation treaty. “Everywhere we went in our travels, we heard from countries that were upset with the United States for failing to adhere to earlier agreements to diminish the role of nuclear weapons in security policy,” said George Perkovich, a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment, speaking at a recent conference in Washington. “We came to conclude that many nations now fear the exertion of U.S. power more than the potential failure of the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Because the United States is seen as having the most power, we bear a special responsibility in terms of convincing the world that universal compliance with nonproliferation rules and norms applies to us as well. Otherwise, the rules-based system of nuclear nonproliferation that we helped build will become illegitimate and collapse.” Interdiction at SeaWhen the German-owned freighter BBC China exited the Suez Canal in early October of 2003, it was carrying five containers, each 40 feet long, listed on the ship's manifest as “used machine parts.” The parts in question had been produced by a factory in Malaysia based on Pakistani designs, and had transshipped through a front company in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Their ultimate destination was Libya. Unbeknownst to the captain of the BBC China, his ship and its unusual cargo were about to become the objects of one of the most successful nuclear counterproliferation operations in history. Because U.S. and British intelligence agents had successfully penetrated the black-market network in nuclear weapons designs and materials orchestrated by scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan — the “father of the Pakistani bomb” — they knew that the BBC China was actually carrying parts for advanced centrifuges designed to separate weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb. The problem was how to act on that intelligence. In an earlier case, for instance, U.S. authorities had interdicted a shipment of missiles from North Korea bound for Yemen. But lacking clear standing in international law to confiscate the cargo, they had to eventually let the missiles proceed to their destination. Only a month before the BBC China exited the Suez Canal, however, Bush administration officials had joined 10 other countries in announcing a “statement of interdiction principles” behind a novel program called the Proliferation Security Initiative. Those 11 core countries, which have since been joined in PSI-related activities and exercises by more than 50 other nations, agreed to share intelligence and cooperate to interdict weapons of mass destruction and related materials in transit from proliferating countries. So, while a U.S. naval vessel shadowed the BBC China in the Mediterranean, U.S. officials contacted counterparts in Germany, who ordered the ship diverted to Italy. Both nations are core PSI member states. Once the ship docked in Taranto, Italy, intelligence agents confiscated the centrifuges. Partly on the strength of evidence collected from the BBC China, U.S. officials persuaded Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf days later to finally roll up Khan's nuclear smuggling network. Shortly before, Libyan President Qadhafi had renounced his nuclear weapons program. As a result, the Bush administration had a poster child for its new, pre-emptive approach to counter-proliferation, embodied in the Proliferation Security Initiative. This approach relies on an ever-changing “coalition of the willing” operating within existing international and national laws, but free of the bureaucratic red tape and consensus-building requirements typical of multilateral organizations. “From the outset, we conceived of the PSI not as an institution in the normal sense — it has no headquarters, no charter, no president, and it doesn't make rules,” says a senior Defense Department official. “Rather, it's an activity that each of the members can participate in as they wish, according to their capabilities and legal jurisdiction in the case at hand. That avoids the dynamic of multilateral decision-making in many organizations, where you inevitably settle on “least-common-denominator” solutions in order to reach a consensus, and any reluctant country can veto action. The PSI doesn't suffer from that defect. We do things. We don't [just] talk about doing things.” Intelligence a Necessary IngredientThe Proliferation Security Initiative actually originated with secret, ad hoc interdiction efforts in the Indian Ocean in 2001 designed to capture al-Qaeda terrorists fleeing the U.S. military's dragnet in Afghanistan. The success of those operations persuaded Bush administration officials to create a similar, slightly more formal activity to interdict weapons of mass destruction and related materials in transit, basically as a “backstop to national export controls,” said the Defense Department official. After Bush announced the establishment of the initiative on May 31, 2003, in Krakow, Poland, the United Nations essentially endorsed the idea. It later concluded that the initiative was consistent with U.N. Resolution 1540's insistence that all states “must take cooperative action to prevent illicit trafficking in nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, their means of delivery, and related materials.” The reach of the initiative expanded dramatically after cooperating officials signed “boarding agreements” with Liberia and Panama, two nations that routinely issue “flags of convenience” for much of the world's commercial merchant fleet. Ships covered under these agreements, when combined with the merchant fleets of PSI members, add up to nearly 50 percent of the world’s commercial shipping, now subject to PSI boarding, search, and seizure. U.S. officials are currently negotiating to extend the effort’s legal reach further by strengthening nonproliferation measures in current maritime law, specifically in the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts at Sea. Member nations have also practiced air and land interdictions as part of the PSI program. U.S. officials concede that the initiative still has major gaps in its effort to halt nuclear proliferation. If a rogue state such as North Korea, for instance, were to transport weapons or materials under its own flag to a nation outside the PSI program, members would probably have no standing in international law to search or seize the vessel. Perhaps the greatest limitation in the PSI program is evident from a close reading of the BBC China interdiction. U.S. and British intelligence agents had by then penetrated deep into the Khan network. They knew where the centrifuges were milled, who ran the UAE front company, and when the equipment would be sent to Libya. They had copies of bank transfers and detailed travel itineraries for Khan and his middlemen. Indeed, without precise intelligence, the entire BBC China operation might have fizzled, or have even led to an embarrassing international incident. Much the same could be said for the entire Bush strategy of aggressive counterproliferation and the doctrine of pre-emptive war. A Slam Dunk?Just before leaving for Iraq in the summer of 2003 to take charge of the United States' 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, the body tasked with finding Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction, David Kay was made privy to the most recent U.S. intelligence. Having closely following the prewar debate on Hussein’s WMD programs, and having spent extensive time in Iraq in the 1990s as a former chief U.N. weapons inspector, Kay had little doubt that Saddam's regime was hiding WMD stockpiles. As he reviewed the classified intelligence dossier, however, Kay had a sinking feeling. Not only did the intelligence fail to make the “slam-dunk” case that CIA Director George Tenet had privately boasted of before the war, but much of the intelligence data amounted to leftovers from what Kay and his U.N. team had collected dating back to the early and mid-1990s. He was reminded of an old Peggy Lee song: “Is That All There Is?” During the months of directing the Iraq Survey Group, Kay grew only more worried. The U.S. case for Saddam's nuclear weapons program was based on scant, “single-point” data supplied by sources of questionable veracity; little of it stood up to additional inspections and extensive questioning of Iraqi officials. By January 2004, Kay reported his conclusion that while Saddam had violated the letter of U.N. resolutions by failing to reveal all of his activities to U.N. inspectors, the Iraqi president had possessed no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S.-led invasion. “The Achilles' heel of a doctrine of pre-emptive war or bombing strikes is that it requires really sound and complete intelligence, because if you can't precisely locate a target, you can't kill it,” Kay told National Journal. Given the intelligence failures on Iraq's WMD, “can you imagine the military telling a U.S. president that it wants to take out a deep bunker with a nuclear weapon? It strikes me that there's no way in hell any president is going to approve that, knowing now what we do about Iraq,” he said. “And if you read between the lines of the Robb-Silberman report, it’s a safe assumption that our intelligence on WMD programs in Iran and North Korea is no better than what we had on Iraq.” Indeed, for anyone concerned about the potential spread of nuclear weapons to rogue states and terrorists, the March 31 Robb-Silberman report makes for harrowing reading. In great detail, the report traces the history of bad information about Iraq and what it calls “one of the most public — and damaging — intelligence failures in recent American history.” That failure has struck a major blow to U.S. credibility on the issue of weapons of mass destruction, and has shaken the very foundations of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption and coercion. Lindsay Moran, a former CIA agent who was drafted into the Iraq intelligence effort in the months preceding the war, quickly surmised the greatest failure. A colleague who was also on the case, Moran recalled, said, “The biggest secret we have is that we don't have any Iraqi agents.” Moran was speaking at a recent conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “Given that U.S. leaders were publicly making a case at that time for going to war with Iraq, we both probably should have been horrified. Instead, we chuckled in the spirit of cynicism common in the agency. It was no surprise inside the CIA that we didn't have any Iraqi agents on the payroll.” Does the United States now have better intelligence about the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea? While that chapter of the Robb-Silberman report is classified, the commission's conclusions are not reassuring: “The flaws we found in the intelligence community's Iraq performance are still all too common. Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors. In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or 10 years ago.” Bush has pointedly declared that America refuses to live in the shadow of “this ultimate danger.” Silberman, when asked by a reporter recently whether U.S. intelligence had sufficiently pierced the information darkness to allow the United States to strike pre-emptively at the threat, was noncommittal. “You know, that's a really interesting question,” he said. “But the answer lies outside the scope of our report.”
By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — The U.S. House of Representatives last month voted to reinstate an independent advisory committee to the Energy Department agency responsible for developing and sustaining U.S. nuclear weapons, encouraging a reversal of a Bush administration decision to close it down two years ago (see GSN, April 7, 2004). The administration quietly terminated the 15-member National Nuclear Security Administration Advisory Committee in July 2003, after it had completed a study of various technical and management issues related to the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Agency chief Linton Brooks said at the time the panel was no longer needed. The 35-page study was stamped “For Official Use Only” and withheld from public release for two years, though the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act requires public access to such reports (see GSN, Aug. 13, 2003). The National Nuclear Security Administration released the report in March 2004, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Global Security Newswire. The document critiques Bush administration initiatives to shorten the estimated preparation time for conducting a live nuclear weapons test and to research and develop new nuclear weapons capabilities. It also criticizes the agency’s procedures for determining whether a live nuclear test is needed. The Republican-led House Armed Services Committee on May 18 approved language accompanying the fiscal 2006 defense authorization bill that “encourages” the agency administrator to “consider reinstating the advisory committee to assist the NNSA in its deliberations on the important challenges it faces.” The House passed the bill on May 25. “The committee recognizes the complexity and importance of the NNSA’s mission, and notes it faces important decisions about ensuring the reliability of our nuclear stockpile, exploring new initiatives such as the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, and maintaining a high level of security in a cost-effective manner,” according to the language, which was proposed by Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.). “The committee further recognizes the value of sound, balanced information and counsel from independent, credible sources on a range of technical and security matters,” it says. The first NNSA administrator, John Gordon, appointed the committee in 2001, and former U.S. Strategic Command Commander Henry Chiles led the panel.
The International Atomic Energy Agency appears set to recommend approval of a request from Saudi Arabia to sign a Small Quantities Protocol, an agreement that would limit agency oversight of Saudi nuclear activities, the Associated Press yesterday (see GSN, May 5). An IAEA document, provided to AP by a diplomat at the agency, requests that board members “conclude ... and subsequently implement” the agreement and adds that monitoring of Riyadh’s activities would be held to “a minimum.” The Small Quantities Protocol allows Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty member states to forgo reporting possession of up to 10 tons of natural uranium and 2.2 pounds of plutonium. The rule also allows new nuclear facilities to be kept secret until six months prior to operation. Under the deal, Saudi officials would inform the U.N. nuclear watchdog of their nuclear status, but the agency would not have immediate authority to contest or verify that information. Diplomats said the agency’s Board of Governors is expected to approve the arrangement at its June 13 meeting, AP reported. While Riyadh has denied pursuing a nuclear weapons program, links over the last 20 years have been found to prewar Iraq’s nuclear program and to former top Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, AP reported. It also has shown interest in Pakistani nuclear-capable missiles, according to AP. Several diplomats said the agency preferred a stricter monitoring system and remained concerned about potential abuses. The agency has “recently drawn member states’ attention to a remaining weakness in the safeguards system, namely the problems posed by Small Quantities Protocols,” said IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky. He said “possible remedies” would be discussed at the agency’s next Board of Governors meeting slated to begin June 13 (George Jahn, Associated Press/ABCNews.com, May 31). While there has been no recent indication of a nuclear effort by Saudi Arabia, according to several Western diplomats based at the agency, Iran’s nuclear status could alter regional security expectations, the New York Sun reported. “They are certainly behaving like they have something to hide,” Gerald Posner, author of Secrets of the Kingdom, said of Saudi Arabia. “Even a rudimentary [nuclear program]” should raise alarm, according to Posner. It “might have been acceptable in the pre-9/11 world, but should not be tolerated by the United States government or any European government now,” he said (Benny Avni, New York Sun, June 1).
U.S. President George W. Bush said yesterday that diplomatic options to address North Korea’s nuclear drive remain viable, Reuters reported (see GSN, May 31). “It’s either diplomacy or military. And I am for the diplomacy approach,” Bush said. “And so for those who say that we ought to be using our military to solve the problem, I would say that while all options are on the table, we’ve got a ways to go to solve this diplomatically,” he said. “It’s a matter of continuing to send a message to Mr. Kim Jong Il that if you want to be accepted by the neighborhood and be a part of those who are viewed with respect in the world, work with us to get rid of your nuclear weapons program,” Bush said (Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters, June 1). South Korea praised Bush’s statement. “It is significant that President Bush has confirmed his commitment to resolving the nuclear issue peacefully, through diplomatic means,” said Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Ban Ki-moon (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, June 1). Kwon Jin-ho, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun’s national security adviser, is scheduled today to meet his U.S. counterpart, Stephen Hadley, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington ahead of a June 10 summit between Roh and Bush, the Financial Times reported. “Whether North Korea returns to the negotiating table or not depends on the U.S. attitude. Pyongyang’s biggest concern is a U.S. security guarantee of its regime. But Washington’s stance on that is not clear,” said Koh Yoo-hwan, a professor at Dongkuk University in Seoul. Koh added that Roh is likely to ask Bush to make a more specific offer to North Korea (Song Jung-a, Financial Times, June 1). Many experts believe North Korea has one or two atomic bombs, but they are probably too large for Pyongyang to deliver them by ballistic missiles, AFP reported today. “North Korea might have developed one or two … nuclear bombs, but if it did, it may not have the technology to launch them on a missile,” says a recent South Korean National Intelligence Service report. “We believe North Korea has not acquired enough technology to miniaturize nuclear bombs which must weigh less than 500 kilograms to be mounted on a missile,” the report adds. However, former top Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has admitted to assisting North Korea in its nuclear program, and that cooperation reportedly included provision of warhead designs to Pyongyang, AFP reported. Khan also claimed to have seen a North Korean missile carrying a nuclear warhead. “That is not impossible,” said Kang Jungmin, a South Korean nuclear analyst, adding that leading experts believe Pyongyang may have developed crude atomic bombs similar to those dropped on Japan by the United States during World War II. Other experts believe North Korea has weaponized its missiles. “The argument that they don’t have a missile delivery system is spurious, according to most experts,” said Nicholas Reader, an analyst with the International Crisis group (Charles Whelan, Agence France-Presse/News24.com, June 1).
University of Texas regents have set aside $1.2 million to finance the school’s joint bid with defense contractor Lockheed Martin to take over management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Daily Texan reported today (see GSN, May 26). The money is expected to pay for salaries, consultants, travel expenses and supplies. “The work of Los Alamos is fundamental to our national security,” said James R. Huffines, Board of Regents chairman. “As one of the finest institutions in the country, we have a duty to pursue this proposal.” The partnership between Lockheed and the University of Texas is expected to be finalized this week, according to a university spokesman (Zachary Warmbrodt, Daily Texan, June 1).
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