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Special Carnegie/CDI Conference: Comments from Bruce G. Blair, CDI President
Frank (Hoffman), your comment about the House of Commons reminded me of a panel I was on a week or so ago with Adm. Crowe in Florida. He was reflecting on terrorism, and recounting his early days in the Court of St. James as ambassador, and his initial foray into the IRA problem, the Irish problem. After a couple of weeks of brushing up on the subject, he was beginning to feel confident that he understood it, when he had a conversation with an old hand from Whitehall and was told, "If you think you understand the Irish problem, then someone hasn't explained it well enough to you."
That's sort of the way I feel about terrorism and many of the topics on the table today. I think we're all in an early phase of trying to think many of these issues through, and search our souls as well as our minds for some answers. I think I have a pretty easy assignment this morning, fortunately, that I'm going to take a crack at, and that's to relate Sept. 11 to the future of U.S. nuclear policy. I'll anchor my comments to what's been happening in recent months and now and days and the impact on U.S. review of nuclear policy. As many of you I'm sure know, the review has grouped our potential adversaries into three categories. Russia, China and the so-called "rogue" states and is trying to answer the question of what it takes to deter those countries from attacking the United States and our allies with weapons of mass destruction.
Now, it appeared clear to me before Sept. 11 that the administration's growing confidence in the future stability and democracy of Russia and in its cooperation with us would result in a major downgrading of the Russian threat in the review. Logically, of course, this would mean that U.S. strategic forces could be slashed and the list of Russian targets in the war plan could be dramatically shortened. It would allow the United States, and Russia, for that matter, to stand down their nuclear arsenals, to dramatically lower the alert status of their nuclear weapons.
I think Sept. 11, and Putin's solidarity with the United States on the matter of terrorism and how to respond to it, put a really fine bead on this conclusion. I think in the face of the new terrorist threat and the new U.S.-Russian alliance in fighting it, that you would be very hard pressed today to find a single soul anywhere in this city, or even in the Pentagon across the river, who believes that our security today is served by the current nuclear posture that keeps over 2,000 U.S. strategic weapons poised for launch on short notice against 2,260 Russian targets. Given that there's a dramatic, possibly tectonic, shift underway in our relations with Russia, I think the case today is quite compelling that we could reduce our arsenal to the same level that Russia is going to reduce its — which is soon to drop to 1,500 and go much lower over the next 10-15 years — and that an equally strong case could be made for a complete stand-down of both sides nuclear weapons.
Of course, we will maintain a nuclear infrastructure and sizeable arsenal - one that would offer some kind of hedge against a possible return of hostile relations. But, there's absolutely no persuasive reason at all to continue to operate nuclear weapons as though the United States or Russia might launch a massive, cold-blooded attack against the other.
So, the writing on the wall here is from U.S. Strategic Command and its Russian counterpart: its clear to me that they are no longer needed - no longer needed - and they could be disbanded. Their main purpose for the last 40 years has been to prepare to fight a large-scale nuclear war with each other, and there's simply no plausible scenario for such a war to ever occur. And so the weapons under their jurisdiction could quite easily, in my view, be absorbed by other commands and placed in a strategic reserve status.
Of course, there's the wild card in the deck here that has been dramatically re-shuffled of late, which is the missile defense program. That could de-rail this positive trend in our relationship. But, it's also clear that this spoiler, potential spoiler, is receding in its significance as Putin and Bush move closer to a compromise on both offense and defense.
Another wild card that's a evident, that I think will rear its head in the future in possibly an ugly manner, is Russia's close relations and arms sales to, or technology transfers to, countries that are designated by the United States as countries that sponsor terrorism.
Now, to China, where there is a stark contrast in our relations or the trend in our relations, compared to Moscow. With China, our nuclear relationship has clearly been worsening for some time. The "hawks" in the Bush administration have been portraying China as a growing security challenge to the United States. Therefore, presumably they're concluding in their review that China would be harder to deter from taking aggressively risky stances towards us. Of course, this trend preceded Bush. It took on its first really ominous notes in 1996 during the Taiwan Presidential election and China's aggressive military response to it. And our relations have deteriorated steadily ever since. In 1998, former President Clinton allowed China to be re-instated as a target in the American nuclear strategic war plan after a hiatus of nearly two decades of tranquil nuclear relations with China. And here too, of course, the missile defense program continues to aggravate the relationship.
The upshot is that I believe the review underway in the Pentagon, and hopefully soon to be released, almost certainly is going to downgrade the Russia threat and upgrade the China threat, leading to an expanded set of nuclear options and targets for China contingencies. That's speculation. But, that's the trend that I see.
A shift along these lines in nuclear planning away from Russia toward China would mean, for example, that U.S. nuclear bombers would operate, exercise more frequently around China's coastal borders - as would reconnaissance planes conducting intelligence missions around those borders.
U.S. submarines trailing Chinese warships would be more active in this zone and its even imaginable that U.S. Trident missile submarines would be reassigned, at least some of them, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. These sorts of changes obviously would be quite visible to China and would only add fuel to the tension. And if we move down this road, it seems very possible to me that China would emerge as our next "designated enemy" - setting the stage for more incidents like the EP-3 collision last spring.
On the other hand, the events of Sept. 11 drove home to all of us our need for partners in the world, including a partnership with the leading candidate to become our next "designated enemy" — China. Terrorism, I think, clearly has etched itself into the national psyche to such an extent that China has been displaced from this dubious distinction, and its support of the U.S. in the counter-terrorism operation in Asia will also work to take some of the rough edges off the Nuclear Review's conclusions toward China.
But, still I expect the review will place authoritarian China much closer to the "rogue" states than to democratic Russia. And coupled with U.S. missile defense, this will result in a bad nuclear dynamic between our two countries - a dynamic which, over say 15 years, could produce a Chinese strategic force that matches, if it doesn't overtake the Russian force and along the way revives the mission of the U.S. Strategic Command.
Now to the last category - the so-called "rogue" states, and, I think, clearly here even before Sept. 11 this review was certainly headed toward the conclusion that the U.S. would not be able to deter these states and therefore needs many other options besides deterrence to deal with the chemical, the biological and the potential nuclear threats that these states pose. U.S. options ranging from pre-emptive attack, first strike and missile defense, bolstered by such programs as ones to develop low-yield nuclear weapons to penetrate the earth and take out underground bunkers harboring such leaders as Saddam Hussein. Sept. 11th clearly, in my view, reinforced this view, this trend in our thinking about rogue states and how to deter them.
The review will almost certainly codify, if not expand, the role and missions of nuclear weapons in deterring chemical and biological as well as nuclear attacks by these states and sub-state actors. And this is leading the United States even further away from any "no first use" pledge. At the same time, I believe it's going to encourage other states around the planet to regard as legitimate their first use of nuclear weapons in the face of chemical or biological threats.
Now, stepping back, I think, from a more detached perspective on this, a case can be made even stronger after Sept. 11 that the military utility of nuclear weapons in fighting rogue states or terrorist enemies, whether or not our enemies unleash germs or chemicals or nuclear weapons against us, the military utility of our nuclear arsenal is virtually negligible.
Sept. 11 underscored the need, not for nuclear weapons, but for non-proliferation efforts that effectively thwart WMD aspirations of terrorist organizations and their sponsoring governments. So, instead of thinking about more permissive rules regarding the use of nuclear weapons in dealing with rogue threats, I believe the Bush administration should be charting, honestly, after Sept. 11, a vision of the world that denies every nation the right to possess biological and nuclear weapons. That is, I believe Sept. 11 begins to make a compelling case to take seriously the idea of universal biological and nuclear abolition.
But, of course, this isn't a very plausible political script. And, for the foreseeable future, probably the key mission in dealing with rogue states will fall under the general rubric of counter-proliferation and, of course, of non-proliferation.
Finally, turning to missile defense against rogue attack, actually, I had a few things to say that I'm not going to say because I've run out of time and I'm encroaching on the territory of the panel that's going to form after the break, anyway. So, I will leave my comments right there. Thank you very much.
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