To create and implement a more comprehensive and enduring plan for nuclear disarmament we must address a broad range of issues: socioeconomic factors (especially economic inequality and instability), collective security needs, energy policy, and the whole range of issues related more directly to the research, development, testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons, including the environmental and public health consequences of those activities. A great deal of the problem lies in the extremely inequitable world military and economic system, in which the powerful make and enforce rules for the weak, but change or break rules with impunity when they find it expedient.

For these reasons, the achievement of enduring nuclear disarmament will be a long and complex process. Further, the process must ensure, to the extent possible, that reversion to a nuclear-armed state after the complete elimination of nuclear weapons (or in the words of the International Court of Justice, nuclear disarmament "in all its aspects") will not happen.

Hope for drastically reducing nuclear dangers in the short term by creating an effective moratorium on nuclear weapons use and threats arises largely from the fact that nuclear weapons are undermining the security of the powerful themselves. Indeed, the nuclear weapons states are the ones most at risk today of devastation from these weapons. Yet, achieving even a moratorium will require a huge effort to convince recalcitrant nuclear establishments.

Still, a nuclear weapons moratorium will not by itself lead to enduring nuclear disarmament even if it is codified in a treaty. The latter will require broad reforms to make the world's political, economic and security arrangements more equitable and democratic. It will also require a global energy system that can respond to the challenges of simultaneously meeting economic, environmental, energy, and nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament goals. Without these changes, a treaty banning nuclear weapons is likely to contain provisions allowing withdrawal from it and maintenance of production and testing facilities, all of which would create long-term dangers and security risks that would be difficult to reverse.

How to change the underlying power relationships sufficiently to achieve a satisfactory and enduring nuclear disarmament treaty is beyond the scope of this newsletter. But we cannot fail to point out that our analysis as well as the experience of past treaties clearly indicates that at least modest reforms towards global economic equity and greater democracy in the international order are needed to make nuclear disarmament irreversible. For example, fewer than 400 people control more wealth than two billion of the world's poorest. History shows that such inequality is incompatible with preserving peace or with democracy. On the contrary, repression, militarism, and violence of all kinds are an inevitable consequence of a system in which child laborers produce toys they cannot purchase, and farmers fruit they cannot afford. The inequity of the NPT has clearly played a role in nuclear proliferation in South Asia. It continues to exacerbate proliferation pressures in the Middle East.

It is necessary to recognize the connections between these issues in order to define enduring nuclear disarmament, to set forth the conditions under which it is likely to endure, and to outline the steps that will be needed to get there. We will address the connections of militarism and economic injustice to nuclear weapons and environmental destruction in future issues and publications.

In this article, we will briefly address four of these areas: global security arrangements, financial and institutional inertia, nuclear power, and the economic crisis in Russia.

Global security arrangements

While agreements are in place to ban chemical and biological weapons, the United States and possibly other countries have plans that include vast qualitative leaps in other armaments and techniques of warfare. Specifically, the United States is planning or considering extensive changes in non-nuclear warfare techniques that go under the general rubric of "revolution in military affairs" or "RMA." For instance one study states:

The Pentagon's plans include the domination of space. For instance, the long-range plan of the US Space Command, extending out to the year 2020, has the following "vision" for, "dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment" (emphasis in the original):

Plans for the domination of space include plans for ballistic missile defenses seeking the following as an "end state":

There are legitimate security issues involved in space, such as protection of commercial satellites. These parallel older, still crucial issues such as protection of sea-lanes for commercial shipping. But plans such as those described above, which explicitly include the deployment of ballistic missile defenses, will make it even more difficult if not impossible to achieve nuclear disarmament. Global security arrangements can and must be made without the militarization of space.

On broader questions of global security, the world is now dominated either by NATO or by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, all of whom are nuclear weapon states and also hold the only veto power in the UN on security questions. Further, it is clearly recognized in Russia and elsewhere that nuclear weapons are the card that provide status on the world stage, separating a country from, say, Indonesia (the most commonly cited example). While nuclear disarmament is clearly in the interests of all the world's people, including those of Russia and the United States, this argument is unlikely to carry the day in the face of explicit plans by the United States or any other country to dominate the world.⁴

It seems clear from the foregoing that qualitative restrictions on non-nuclear weapons and other military systems, as well as more democratic global security arrangements, must be pursued to improve the chances of achieving nuclear disarmament.

Financial and institutional inertia

In every nuclear weapons state, nuclear establishments have successfully argued to maintain large flows of money into the nuclear weapons complexes under the cover of national security. From the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to the "stockpile stewardship" programs of the 1990s, money has been a principal concern.

While the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a complex one, considerations relating to money were crucial.⁵ The Manhattan Project had spent $2 billion of precious wartime resources and had nothing to show for it even as World War II was drawing to a close. Project leaders, including General Leslie Groves, who headed it, were very concerned that unless the Project was shown to have contributed something to the war effort, they would be relentlessly investigated. Indeed, in March 1945, James Byrnes, who was Secretary of State when Hiroshima was bombed, wrote to President Roosevelt in his capacity as Director of the Office of War Mobilization that "if the [Manhattan] project proves a failure, it will be subjected to relentless investigation and criticism."⁶ Showing that nuclear weapons contributed to the war effort was crucial to proving that the project was not a failure. The weapons were used as soon as they were ready and the weather permitted. Thus, from the earliest days of the nuclear age, money was one of the most powerful forces driving the use of nuclear bombs.

Closer to our own time, spending on nuclear weapons design and testing as part of the US "stockpile stewardship" program is greater than average Cold War spending levels. And China's long insistence during the negotiations for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on retaining the option of conducting "peaceful nuclear explosions" (eventually given up) was at least partly the result of pressure from its own laboratories to continue to spend money in this area. The numbers of weapons that were built, the inter-service rivalries, and the idea that each part of the military had to have its own "deterrent" capacity can all at least partly be traced to the magnetic pull of money. The amounts of money involved and the context of these spending decisions has been discussed in a recent detailed book, Atomic Audit.⁷ The US government itself has never conducted such an audit. Neither has the government of any other nuclear weapons state, so far as we are aware. It will be difficult to change direction on this front.

Part of the problem is that some disarmament goals may involve an increase in the amount of money going to nuclear establishments; for example, for clean-up and for managing nuclear materials. This consideration has not been effectively brought into the policy discussion.

Aside from the amount of funds, there is significant resistance within nuclear establishments, especially among some scientists, to working on such issues instead of nuclear weapons design and production. Weapons design and testing functions often re-appear dressed up as peaceful applications. For instance, one proposal, (to all appearances no longer active), by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory would have used one-kiloton underground nuclear explosions to generate electrical power. About two million such explosions per year would be required to generate just 20 percent of US electrical energy supply. The scientists observed that such explosions would have to be exempt from the proposed CTBT.⁸ The current version of this idea is to use smaller pure fusion explosions, which would be in violation of the CTBT. This problem should be addressed by a firm, unwavering, and unequivocal commitment at the level of the heads of government and international bodies, buttressed by vigilance at the grassroots, that there shall be no reliance on nuclear explosions for any purpose whatsoever.

Nuclear power

Continued reliance on nuclear power is another complex obstacle to nuclear disarmament. Nuclear power was developed as a tool in the ideological competition of the Cold War⁹ and developed in tandem with nuclear weapons programs. A fundamental problem is that the technologies needed for each are largely the same, as are the materials. Second, and at least as important, the bureaucracies and scientific establishments that have created nuclear weapons have a large overlap with those promoting commercial nuclear power. There has been a modest amount of separation in the United States over the last 25 years, but even that is being eroded by proposals to make tritium for weapons in power reactors and by projects for converting surplus weapons plutonium into a reactor fuel.

Long-term development of nuclear power from fission will likely depend either on plutonium-239 or uranium-233 (derived from thorium-232) as a fuel, both of which can be used in weapons in separated form. This presents a serious problem for disarmament efforts, as the presence of commercial plutonium and/or uranium-233 stocks would lower the political and financial barriers to reverting to a nuclear-armed state. In fact, nuclear establishments may use nuclear power as a cover behind which to maintain readiness to resume nuclear weapons production. Such a possibility was explicitly raised in 1946 by J. Robert Oppenheimer, chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, in the context of a convention on international control of nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament:

Finally, if nuclear power continues to be a source of energy, nuclear terrorism would continue to pose risks, even if disarmament is achieved.

Although a complete phase-out of nuclear power is a process, like disarmament, that will take a considerable time, plutonium separation can be stopped immediately. It should be - there is neither a military nor commercial rationale for it. An orderly plan for the phase-out of nuclear power in a manner compatible with electric power system reliability and with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions should be carried out. Of course, this means that no new nuclear power plants should be built (see SDA Vol. 6 No. 3).

Economic crisis in Russia

The economic crisis in Russia is, in many ways, similar to economic crises in many other countries. The reforms that we discuss below are also needed for broader goals of economic equity and democracy. But in Russia these problems have become joined to the nuclear crisis. The risk of nuclear black markets arising from the economic crisis in the former Soviet Union and especially Russia has been recognized for some years. But over the past year, the crisis has greatly worsened.

The roots of the crisis are complex and involve both domestic and international factors. They are political as well as economic. For instance, the "privatization" of national assets put vast resources into a few private hands through the close links between government and the people who got control of the assets. These assets are now being used not only for private profit but, by all accounts, to channel foreign exchange earnings into illegal exports of money. Such illicit foreign accounts may now hold a vast amount of Russia's wealth, frustrating domestic and international attempts at reform.

The international reform attempts have themselves come under fire for favoring rich speculators and rash and inequitable privatization over employment and wage stability. The formulas of the International Monetary Fund, which are supposed to restore the economy to health, have at best been ineffective and at worst a part of the problem.¹¹

Since 1997, the Russian economic crisis has been coupled to that in Asia. Now several problems, domestic and foreign, are reinforcing one another at a rapid rate, contributing to the danger that Russia might disintegrate. In part, the fate of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and of nuclear materials sufficient to make many more, hangs precariously on economic formulas that do not seem to work, even as they worsen the living conditions for ordinary people. Only continued large-scale exploitation of the vast natural resources of Russia has prevented the situation from being even worse. It is noteworthy that the fall in oil prices has been an important factor in the deterioration of the Russian economy over the past year.

A moderate reform of international currency and banking rules to curb the most egregious practices is now urgently needed to reduce the risk that Russia will disintegrate. These same measures are also needed to reduce financial speculation that is contributing to the risk of collapse in other countries as well. To be sure, such reforms cannot address many internal political and financial issues connected to the economic, and potentially, the nuclear crisis. But they are an essential condition to reverse the drain on the Russian economy that has been a major factor in preventing Russia from applying the revenues from exports to domestic economic development.

IEER's Disarmament Plan

On the adjacent page, we set forth IEER's suggestions for nuclear disarmament measures. The measures apply to the five nuclear weapon states that are NPT signatories as well as India, Pakistan, and Israel, unless specific countries are named or a particular state does not possess the types of weapons and/or materials specified.

We recognize that this is an extensive list. It is our view of what it will take to implement the nuclear disarmament clause of Article VI of the NPT. Given the present state of leadership and politics in the nuclear weapons states, the serious problems in US-Russian relations, and conditions in South Asia and the Middle East, it is unlikely that the entire list of measures will be implemented (barring transformative events within the nuclear weapons states).

The dangers of accidental nuclear war, nuclear black markets, or regional nuclear war are, however, so great that it is imperative that governments take certain actions within the next year to ensure that we actually get to the next century with reasonable prospects of long-term survival. Thus, several urgent steps are outlined first, from among those in the more extensive list of short-, medium-, long-term and continuing measures. (Go to IEER's Disarmament Plan)

ENDNOTES

1. See for instance a paper by a professor and an analyst at the US Army War College, Steven Metz and James Kievit, "Revolution in Military Affairs: From Theory to Policy," at http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usassi/ssipubs/pubs95/rmastrat/smrmastc.htm

2. United States Space Command, Long Range Plan: Executive Summary, Foreword signed by General Howell M. Estes III, Commander in Chief, US Air Force, March 1998, p. 4.

3. Ibid., p. 8. (emphasis in the original).

4. A former CIA official has noted, in reference to the US bombings in August 1998 of targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, "In our understandable frustration, are we resorting to a modern form of the same 'gunboat diplomacy' that proved so counter-productive for the dying European empires at the end of the 19th century?" Raymond Close, "Hard Target: We Can't Defeat Terrorism With Bombs and Bombast," The Washington Post, 30 August, 1998, Outlook Section, p. C5.

5. For details, see Arjun Makhijani, "Japan: 'Always' the Target?", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 1995.

6. James F. Byrnes, "Memorandum for the President, March 3, 1945," Record Group 227, Modern Military Branch, National Archives, Washington, DC.

7. Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998). Specifically, see pages 151-160, and 184-89. At one point, a US Army official estimated that the Army alone needed 151,000 nuclear weapons (p. 189). One analyst, John Midgely, Jr., has noted that "by the mid-1960s, the nuclear battlefield was merely a facade, useful in justifying procurement but lacking any explicit military rationale" (p. 155, note 114). Atomic Audit is available from the US Nuclear Weapons Costs Study Project, The Brookings Institution, (202) 797-6030, www.brookings.org/press/books/atomic.htm.

8. Abraham Szoke and Ralph W. Moir, "A Practical Route to Fusion Power," Technology Review, July 1991, pp. 21-27. See also a letter about this proposal by Arjun Makhijani, Technology Review, February/March 1992.

9. Arjun Makhijani and Scott Saleska, The Nuclear Power Deception, (Takoma Park: Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, 1996). To be published as a book by Apex Press, New York, in 1999. Also forthcoming in Russian and French editions.

10. J. Robert Oppenheimer, "International Control of Atomic Energy," in Morton Grodzins and Eugene Rabinowitch, eds., The Atomic Age: Scientists in National and World Affairs, (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 55.

11. Third world debt has worsened in the last decade and a half by repeated application of the IMF formulas. It has gone up from about $600 billion in 1982 to about $2 trillion today (current dollars). For a discussion of the international monetary system, see Arjun Makhijani, From Global Capitalism to Economic Justice, (New York: Apex Press, 1992), chapters 3, 11, and the Appendix.