#7
Chicago Tribune
October 31, 2001
A great nuclear opportunity
By Stansfield Turner.
Retired Adm. Stansfield Turner, a former director of the CIA, is the author of "Terrorism and Democracy"

It could have been much worse. On Sept. 11, the terrorists could have detonated a "small" nuclear weapon inside the World Trade Center. Not only the two towers and their adjacent buildings would have collapsed, but many more to a radius of more than a mile; perhaps 100,000 people would have lost their lives immediately and many more over time as a radioactive cloud would sail downwind depositing lethality hundreds of miles away. Preventing nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of rogue states and terrorists groups have been only an academic matter for most Americans. It now must become a matter of grave concern.

If we are to lead the world away from further proliferation of these weapons, we must drastically reduce the roughly 12,000 nuclear warheads we now have. We, the most powerful nation by far, cannot insist on weaker nations forgoing these weapons entirely if we need anything like 12,000 of them. Fortuitously, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed to look at reducing nuclear warhead inventories in the range of 1,500 to 2,000 each. That would be considerable progress, but with two reservations.

The first is that the numbers 1,500 and 2,000 do not include all warheads. Under the traditional counting rules, each side may retain any number of "spare" warheads, that is warheads not mounted on delivery vehicles, plus any number of smaller "tactical" warheads. Setting a number of 2,000 for instance, would likely result in an inventory of 5,000 total warheads.

The second reservation is that just pledging reductions to 1,500 to 2,000 is not enough. The U.S. can demobilize only about 2,000 warheads a year and the Russians probably less. We need to demonstrate a greater sense of urgency. Only if we do can we persuade the world that we are serious about downgrading nuclear weapons and that, hence, others do not need them.

Even more important, one likely source of proliferation is Russia.

Nuclear components and even weapons there are inadequately guarded. And we just cannot forecast what economic and political conditions within Russia will be like in the years ahead. It is very much in our interest that as many Russian weapons as possible be demobilized as soon as possible in order to reduce the risks of weapons being stolen, sold, fired accidentally, or fired by rogue officers without authorization.

We should certainly, then, agree to the 1,500 number the Russians proposed and set a date of only 18 months for neutering all other warheads. We could do that by separating the warheads from their delivery vehicles and removing them to storage sites at least 300 miles away to await demobilization. Doing this in 18 months would take a major effort, as sufficient storage space may not exist.

Concrete bunkers on remote military bases are all that is needed. Each side would invite the other to place observers at the storage sites. Thus, any moves to return warheads to their delivery vehicles before they are demobilized would be detected.

This process, known as "strategic escrow," would be a big step forward, but not nearly enough. We have no conceivable need for 1,500 ready warheads and we definitely do not want an unstable Russia sitting on any more of these than we can talk them down to.

Thus a second step we should take is to engage the Russians in negotiating a treaty to carry both sides to 750 ready warheads. At that level, whether we really need it or not, we would want the assurance of a treaty with provisions for verification. We have found over the years that such treaties are painfully slow to negotiate. We should, then, commence these negotiations almost simultaneously with the discussions on going down to 1,500 ready warheads.

Finally, at the point of 750, we would need to deal with the other six nuclear powers, all of which are believed to have less than 750 warheads each. Surely the present crisis has focused our attention on the grave dangers of nuclear weapons in the hands of Pakistan and India. It is in everyone's interest that all nuclear weapons of these six other powers be neutered by being placed in escrow. A third simultaneous negotiation should be started with that objective, plus a reduction of all nuclear arsenals to some number like 200 warheads. This could lead to a world in which, although there would be eight powers with nuclear weapons and all others without, there would be no weapons immediately ready to fire, and there would be international observers to warn of any preparations to fire.

These three steps are a big order. The World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings tell us the world faces a great challenge. As a result of those bombings, however, we are witnessing an unprecedented cohesiveness of the responsible nations of the world.

We need to take advantage of this and move rapidly to ward off the most ominous threat terrorists could pose.

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