Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH:
David T. Johnson
MARKETING & OPERATIONS:
Mark Sugg
PRODUCERS:
Marguerite Arnold
Glenn Baker
Daniel Sagalyn
Stephen Sapienza
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Kathryn Schultz
SEGMENT PRODUCER:
Glenn Baker
NARRATOR:
Kathryn Schultz
VIDEO GRAPHICS:
Adam Luther
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
721
INITIAL BROADCAST:
6 February 1994
CONDITION OF USE:
Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" (Center for Defense Information).
Director, Center for Defense Information
NOAM CHOMSKY
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
WILLIAM COLBY
Director, Central Intelligence Agency, 1973-1976
DANIEL ELLSBERG
Nuclear Policy Analyst
LARRY KORB
The Brookings Institution Assistant Secretary of Defense, 1981-85
JANNE NOLAN
The Brookings Institution
JOSEPH ROTBLAT
Manhattan Project Scientist Pugwash International
Adm. STANSFIELD TURNER (USN, Ret.)
Director, Central Intelligence Agency, 1977-1981
Then, our enemy disappeared. The Soviet Union crumbled. The Warsaw Pact collapsed. Our former enemies are now recipients of US aid.
In view of these tremendous changes, some people are asking: Does the United States Need Nuclear Weapons?
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."
For the past 50 years, we have been developing war plans and arming our ships, our submarines, and our bombers, and our missiles with nuclear weapons. When we first built nuclear weapons, they looked like the weapon of the future and that we'd hardly need any other kind of weapons. Today there is a major question among senior military planners as to whether or not nuclear weapons really have any utility for our military forces today. Our program is about that subject and I know you'll find it very interesting.
NARRATOR: Fifty years ago, scientists began arriving in the New Mexico desert. Their mission was to develop and to build an atomic weapon before Hitler's scientists built one. Fortunately, the Germans never built "the bomb."
With Hitler's forces lying in ruin, destroyed by the conventional weapons of the Allies, the United States turned its attention to Japan. President Truman was told that he could save tens of thousands of American lives by bringing a quick end to the war with the ultimate weapon: the atomic bomb. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in August 1945.
Five months later, the United Nations met for the first time. Early on, it recognized the grave danger that nuclear weapons posed. In the United Nations' first resolution, the member nations unanimously voted in favor of abolishing nuclear weapons. This resolution was widely ignored.
The "genie" was out of the bottle. Military planners had the ultimate weapon. One airplane carrying one bomb could destroy one city. The United States built even more nuclear weapons in an attempt to stem the spread of communism and to check Soviet influence.
President JOHN F. KENNEDY (in televised address):
"In view of the Soviet action, it will be the policy of the United States to proceed in developing nuclear weapons to maintain this superior capability for the defense of the free world against any aggressor."
NARRATOR: The United States and Soviet Union hurriedly armed for war, each trying to develop and stockpile more destruc-tive weapons. Many argued that nuclear weapons would deter war.
President RONALD REAGAN (22 November 1982, in televised address):
"What do we mean when we speak of nuclear deterrence? Certainly we don't want such weapons for their own sake. We don't desire excessive forces or what some people have called 'over -kill.' Basically, it's a matter of others knowing that starting a conflict would be more costly to them than anything they might hope to gain."
NARRATOR: The United States and Soviet Union each spent more than one trillion dollars on nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons increased the danger of nuclear apocalypse and left a toxic legacy of radio-active pollution. The Department of Energy now estimates that cleaning up this environmental mess could cost us $200 billion or more. And, as we are discovering today, the nuclear fever of the past led our government to conduct radioactive tests on unwitting civilians in secret experiments.
But, times have changed. The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact are gone. Germany is united. Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin have ordered that their nations' nuclear missiles no longer target each other.
WILLIAM COLBY: I think we overdid the nuclear threat, quite frankly. I think there's a mindlessness in the whole buildup of nuclear power between both the Soviets and ourselves.
NARRATOR: William Colby was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1973 to 1976.
Mr. COLBY: I think we are very fortunate human beings to have survived the last 30 years. We had 25,000 nuclear warheads aimed at us and we aimed 25,000 nuclear warheads at our adversaries.
NARRATOR: The United States built 70,000 nuclear weapons, more than 50,000 of which have since been disassembled. At the height of the Cold War the United States maintained a nuclear arsenal of more than 30,000 nuclear weapons. Today, with no enemy in sight, we have roughly 17,000 nuclear weapons, ready for war.
Maintaining these weapons and the ability to fight a nuclear war continues to be very costly. This year alone the United States is spending $31 billion to prepare to fight a nuclear war against a now-defunct enemy.
Today, eight nations admit possessing nuclear weapons: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. All told, these nations possess more than 48,000 nuclear warheads, with total explosive power equal to nearly one million Hiroshima bombs.
Secretary of Defense LES ASPIN (Pentagon, 29 October 1993):
"The old nuclear danger was the possibility of thousands of warheads from the Soviet Union. Now that threat has subsided, but the arsenal still exists. The new nuclear danger stems from the possibility of a handful of nuclear weapons in less reliable hands."
NARRATOR: In the Fall of 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin officially launched the Clinton administration's review of nuclear forces and policy. This review is charged with examining how many nuclear weapons we need, if any, and what their role will be. The report is due in the Spring of 1994.
Secretary ASPIN (same briefing):
"Today, we are beginning to address the question of our nuclear forces and the nuclear policy. One era has ended and a new one has begun. The world has fundamentally changed. We are responding with the first nuclear policy review in 15 years."
NARRATOR: The primary role of nuclear weapons during
the cold war was to deter the Soviets from attacking the
United States or its allies with the threat of massive nuclear retaliation. It was also argued that in order to protect Western Europe, US-led allied forces needed thousands of battlefield nuclear weapons to counter superior conventional military forces of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union.
Then-Representative LES ASPIN (D-WI) (Commencement Speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1 June 1992):
"Nuclear weapons were the big equalizer -- the means by which the United States equalized the military advantages of its adversaries. ...But the Cold War is ended and now the Soviet Union has collapsed. The United States is the biggest conven-tional power in the world. There is no longer any need for the United States to have nuclear weapons as an equalizer against other powers."
NARRATOR: Noam Chomsky has distinguished himself as both
an outstanding linguistics professor at MIT and as a leading commentator on US foreign policy. Dr. Chomsky contends that the United States wanted nuclear weapons so that it could intervene militarily whenever and wherever it wanted without fear of reprisal.
NOAM CHOMSKY: What the United States does with nuclear weapons -- what it has done with nuclear weapons is exactly what was intended in the early days; namely, create a kind of highly intimidating posture, what was sometimes called the "nuclear umbrella," under which conventional forces can be used to project power as intervention.
NARRATOR: The United States maintains troops in many countries throughout the world ready for combat. Since 1945 the United States has intervened in virtually every region on the planet. Dr. Chomsky finds this pattern of intervention highly disturbing.
Dr. CHOMSKY: I'm not even sure we need a pistol if those are going to be our purposes. I mean, I think that a country should have a capacity to defend itself, but I don't see the United States under any threat.
NARRATOR: Janne Nolan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the celebrated author of several books on nuclear policy and the spread of nuclear weapons. Dr. Nolan is not con-vinced of the need to maintain nuclear weapons.
JANNE NOLAN: The general perception among military planners is that nuclear weapons are needed as a residual deterrent against what are increasingly remote contingencies. The possi-bility of using nuclear weapons in an actual planned war is, I think, close to zero.
NARRATOR: But with the Soviet Union shattered and the Warsaw Pact dead and buried, who are we deterring with nuclear weapons?
Admiral EUGENE CARROLL, Jr.: The deterrent that we must retain for the foreseeable future is against Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, France, Great Britain, China. They are the nuclear states and we must be prepared, as unlikely as it is that any of them would even think about using weapons against us, to retaliate with overwhelming force.
NARRATOR: Retired Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll is director of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. Admiral Carroll is quick to point out that although we may need some nuclear weapons today, we'd all be safer if everyone destroyed their nuclear weapons.
Admiral CARROLL: In the long run, the goal is to do away with nuclear weapons altogether because the United States will be far safer, far more secure if no one has nuclear weapons.
NARRATOR: In 1991, Inside the Air Force uncovered this Pentagon report, entitled "The Role of Nuclear Weapons in the New World Order." The report states that: The US also must seek not merely to deter attack on powerful allies and friends, but where possible, to dissuade them from seeking nuclear weapons of their own.
When President Clinton visited the Demilitarized Zone in Korea in 1993, he made it perfectly clear that should North Korea ever use nuclear weapons, it would be tantamount to national suicide.
President BILL CLINTON (11 July 1993, Korean DMZ):
"It is pointless for them to try to develop nuclear weapons because if they ever used them, it would be the end of their country."
NARRATOR: Many military analysts believe that nuclear weapons are unnecessary to deal with Third World nations, like North Korea.
Admiral CARROLL: They can in no way threaten our national security and we can retaliate or even preempt with our conven-tional forces and absolutely overwhelm North Korea without a single nuclear weapon in our hands.
LARRY KORB: This is a problem that is 99 percent political or diplomatic and maybe one percent military.
NARRATOR: Larry Korb was an assistant secretary of
defense in the Reagan administration. Dr. Korb has since gained prominence for his insightful views as a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution.
Dr. KORB: We certainly need to be concerned about the spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons technology, ballistic missile technology, because that could create chaos in the international system. But in most cases, the way to deal with that is through diplomatic solutions. And the way to do that is for the United States to exercise its own moral leadership by cutting its own nuclear weapons and stopping this outlandish arms sales all around the world.
NARRATOR: Professor Joseph Rotblat is a well-respected scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb.
JOSEPH ROTBLAT: The argument used now -- that in order to prevent this danger, we also should have nuclear weapons -- I believe it's the worst possible prescription.
NARRATOR: As president of Pugwash International, which has been bringing together scientists from East and West since the 1950s, Professor Rotblat finds US concern with the spread of nuclear weapons highly hypocritical.
Dr. ROTBLAT: I cannot believe in a world in which, in the hands of some nations, nuclear weapons is seen as a guarantor of peace, while in the hands of other nations, they're seen as a danger to peace.
NARRATOR: Many military analysts believe that we may not need nuclear weapons because of our powerful conventional weapons. As it showed in the Gulf War, the United States can destroy any target and defeat any enemy with its vast array of powerful nonnuclear weapons.
Retired Admiral Stansfield Turner was director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Carter. A former Rhodes Scholar, Admiral Turner is an insightful and highly respected foreign and military policy analyst.
Admiral STANSFIELD TURNER: Now that the Cold War is over, there is no country on this earth that can match us with conven-tional military power. We showed that against Iraq. Now if we maintain that military edge in conventional power, we should never be pressed against the wall where we say to ourselves we've got to use nuclear weapons in order to win.
NARRATOR: Conventional weapons may deter better than nuclear weapons, argues Paul Nitze, the influential and experienced former deputy secretary of defense. In his recent Washington Post article, Ambassador Nitze asserts that:
"It may well be that conventional strategic weapons will one day perform their primary mission of deterrence immeasurably better than nuclear weapons, if only because
we can and will use them."
NARRATOR: Why have we been reluctant to use nuclear weapons?
Admiral CARROLL: The problems of nuclear weapons are unending and there are no benefits. Up until 1955, I was like Joe Citizen. I thought that nuclear weapons were good. They kept the peace. They made the United States powerful. But in 1955, I trained as a weapons delivery pilot for the US Navy and, by 1956, I was standing watch on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, ready to go behind the "iron curtain" with a nuclear weapon and destroy a target. But to destroy one marginal military target, a supply center, the one weapon would have also killed 600,000 people. You can't justify fighting with that type of destructive power.
NARRATOR: War is about killing people and destroying things. Nothing does this more effectively than nuclear weapons. The indiscriminate and uncontrollable nature of nuclear weapons, however, makes these weapons unusable.
Admiral CARROLL: If you go to war and use nuclear weapons, you destroy everything that the war is about, and so no one wins. You end up with radioactive rubble and destruction beyond imagination.
Admiral TURNER: You cannot win wars by using nuclear weapons. The side effects are too great.
Mr. COLBY: Over the last 15 years, we've not been playing with death and destruction, we've been playing with the possible elimination of life on Earth, except for a few worms down in the mud somewhere. Because if any number of those weapons had gone off, civilization would have gone and most humanity would have gone by the radiation and all the rest of it.
We see the result of a very small exposure of nuclear power with Chernobyl. And you found residue all over Northern Europe. Now that wasn't even a bomb; it was just a little leak.
NARRATOR: General Colin Powell, while chairman of the Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated the military useless-ness of nuclear weapons. According to General Powell, nuclear weapons are "a wasted investment in a military capability that is limited in political or military utility." [23 September 1993]
NARRATOR: The United States built 70,000 nuclear weapons and only detonated two in war. Those two bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people in 1945.
Admiral CARROLL: Since that time, we have never found a reason or an excuse to use a single nuclear weapon. Even though, for example, we were engaged in a protracted war in Korea, even though we went down to a serious national defeat in Vietnam, not one of our 30,000 nuclear weapons was useful.
NARRATOR: Why didn't we use nuclear weapons in Korea or Vietnam?
Admiral TURNER: For us to have used nuclear weapons against a very small, weak Asiatic state, after we had already used weapons against a different Asiatic state in World War II, would have been a real political disaster, I believe.
NARRATOR: There was nothing that could be gained by using nuclear weapons in these wars, adds Admiral Carroll.
Admiral CARROLL: You can't destroy a guerrilla-type operation -- an unconventional war force -- with nuclear weapons unless you're willing to just level the nation.
NARRATOR: The United States currently maintains 17,000 nuclear weapons. Although reductions are planned to cut the US arsenal by two-thirds early in the next century, the weapons that the United States plans to keep will continue to pose a grave threat to the world.
Secretary of State WARREN CHRISTOPHER (before Senate Foreign Relations Committee):
"Even the remaining one-third of our strategic forces are extremely powerful and have a capacity to destroy civiliza-tion as we know it several times over."
NARRATOR: The end of the cold war and the continuing threat of nuclear annihilation have brought the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons back into focus.
General COLIN POWELL (10 June 1993, at Harvard University):
"Under agreements that we have negotiated just over the past few years and will come into effect by the end of the decade, we are bringing the number of our nuclear warheads down from over 20,000 when I became chairman four years ago to just over 5000. And today I can declare my hope and declare it from the bottom of my heart that we will eventually see the time when that number of nuclear weapons is down to zero and the world is a much better place."
NARRATOR: But is the notion of a world without nuclear weapons purely hypothetical? Some people are convinced that the nuclear genie is out of the bottle and can't be put back in. Noam Chomsky, however, dismisses this as mindless rhetoric.
Dr. CHOMSKY: The genie out of the bottle doesn't mean anything. The doomsday machine genie is out of the bottle, too.
[Film Clip from "Dr. Strangelove" (Columbia Pictures)]
"Dr. STRANGELOVE": The doomsday machine is terrifying? It's simple to understand and completely credible and convincing."
"General BUCK TURGINSON": Gee, I wish we had one of those doomsday machines.
Dr. CHOMSKY: Doomsday machines are possible. Does that mean we have to have a doomsday machine? I mean, these are just mind-less claims. Just the fact that it's possible to do something wildly destructive doesn't mean you must have it available.
Dr. NOLAN: Of course, you cannot disinvent the technology and expertise to make nuclear weapons. You would need very ambitious and very reliable international institutions and a high degree of cooperation by the majority of nations to have a credible nonnuclear arrangement.
Dr. DANIEL ELLSBERG: A world without nuclear weapons is, I think, the only world in which this species and other forms of life will survive in the long run, but it'll be quite awhile before we get to that. I think a more immediate question is how close could we get to zero in the relatively short run?
NARRATOR: Daniel Ellsberg is a seasoned nuclear policy analyst. He wrote the guidance for the general nuclear war plans for President Kennedy.
Dr. ELLSBERG: No state in the world has a legitimate reason for having as many weapons today as France now has, and that's about 600 weapons.
NARRATOR: Best remembered for his role in the release of the Pentagon Papers which revealed the Pentagon's pattern of public deceit in the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg sees a new priority in security today.
Dr. ELLSBERG: To bring the same sense of urgency and priority to the task of ending the era of nuclear weapons that the United States gave to the problem of creating nuclear weapons with the first Manhattan Project, which in three years, from 1942 to 1945 --it's 50 years ago -- gave the world a nuclear weapon. The task now is to rid the earth of nuclear weapons and to approach that in a set of realistic stages.
Admiral CARROLL: We must lead the way, not by telling other people to behave and get rid of their weapons, but by getting rid of our weapons, and getting a comprehensive test ban treaty, getting an extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
NARRATOR: Admiral Turner suggests that the United States begin by cutting back its own nuclear arsenal.
Admiral TURNER: In July of 1992, General Powell, the chair-man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that if we had 3500 nuclear weapons, warheads, we would be perfectly safe even if the Soviet Union had 20,000. Let's go to 3500 tomorrow, regardless of what the Russians do. And then as they come down, well, let's us go to 1000. Let's lead the pack downward, because we want to get to zero.
Dr. ELLSBERG: We could get, in fact, very close to zero and maintain and improve our national security relatively quickly in company with the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union and with other nuclear states.
The Russians, up till now at least, under Gorbachev and so far under Yeltsin have shown great willingness to talk about going with us to very, very low numbers.
NARRATOR: Some nations have already given up their nuclear weapons. South Africa admitted that it built six nuclear weapons, but claims to have dismantled them before signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1991. The presidents of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine have agreed to give up the nuclear weapons which they inherited from the former Soviet Union.
In 1991, Brazil and Argentina gave up their race for nuclear weapons and agreed to not build, acquire or deploy nuclear weapons.
Dr. NOLAN: The examples of South Africa, Brazil and Argen- tina show how countries internally and for domestic reasons can come to the conclusion in their self-interest that their nuclear programs are costing them more than they are providing any benefit.
NARRATOR: Countries have banded together to outlaw other weapons. Biological weapons were banned in 1972. An agreement banning chemical weapons was signed in 1993.
Dr. NOLAN: I think you could certainly see nuclear weapons as belonging in the category of weapons that have no -- have limited military utility and pose untold risks to countries outside of the countries that might be using them and to noncom-batants, that they belong on the scrap heap of history along with chemical and biological weapons.
NARRATOR: Joseph Rotblat suggests that the United Nations Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, which successfully nego-tiated the ban on chemical weapons, now consider the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Dr. ROTBLAT: It's much more difficult to police the acquisition of chemical weapons than nuclear ones, and yet all these nations have agreed to it. Therefore, I see no reason why we should not try to do the same with nuclear weapons, and this is I think the step which we should now take.
Admiral CARROLL: We should never lose sight of the objec-tive of the world without nuclear weapons, which will be safer, more secure, cleaner in every respect for our children and grandchildren.
NARRATOR: Regardless of the difficulties and seemingly insurmountable hurdles which lie
ahead, one thing is certain: The military utility of nuclear weapons has greatly diminished and
may have disappeared.
Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, it's pretty obvious that we in America are still arming ourselves and planning to use nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are by agreement of most military planners the most destructive weapons that we have in our arsenal. They kill more people and destroy more things at less cost than any other weapon. But ironically, we're learning that nuclear weapons may not even be usable in the years ahead. And it is somewhat surprising to find our military people gradually moving away from nuclear weapons and perhaps to a time when we can eliminate all of our nuclear weapons from our arsenal and the arsenals of the world.
Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.
[End of broadcast.]
(C) Copyright 1994, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.