Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East

Author: Etel Solingen, University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation
Panelists: Doyle McManus, Washington Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times, Gary Samore, Council on Foreign Relations (National Security Council 1995-2001), and an official with the U.S. intelligence community

When: Thursday 24 January 2008
Where: University of California Washington Center, Rhode Island Avenue, Washington DC

Attempting to answer the question: Why have some states opted for nuclear weapons while others have renounced them?

Solingen's remarks:

Conventional wisdom is less applicable than commonly believed. She mentioned Argentina, South Africa, and Brazil as countries that joined the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) in the 1990s after pursuing (and in South Africa's case, obtaining) nuclear weapons, which are said to enhance power, ensure survival, and add caution to international relations. She believes this view overpredicts proliferation, and went on to list empirical anomalies with neorealist theory with regard to nuclear weapons.

• Insecure states do not always go after nuclear weapons


• An external threat isn't a prerequisite for those who do pursue a nuclear capability


• Alliance pressures don't explain the decision to go after or abstain from developing nuclear weapons


• The domestic context of the state is key in alliance success and foreign policy


• Coercion against nuclear-pursuing states does not work to make them abandon their programs


• Overall, neorealism fails to explain too many cases

Her thesis: domestic orientations to the global political economy have important implications for nuclear paths:

• Democracy and openness to international trade provide incentives for economic integration


• There are lower costs for inward-looking regimes to pursue a nuclear capability, as they are suspicious of the international community and focused on domestic growth


• A cooperative regional environment provides for state-level economic growth and makes sanctions more of a threat


• It is necessary to construct a huge nuclear infrastructure complex -- technology, industry, bureaucracy, military -- with funds that would otherwise spur peaceful economic development

Nuclear states are more likely from inward-looking regimes (North Korea vice Japan, Iran vice Jordan), and the protectionism common to the Middle East explains why so many states have had nuclear programs over the past several decades.

Inward-looking states that evolved to international engagement, such as South Africa, Brazil, and Taiwan, have all divested their nuclear programs. Global trade leads to denuclearization as the stakes of condemnation get higher than the benefits of peaceful cooperation. In the cases mentioned, export-led industrialization was beneficial. In the case of autarkic goals, nuclear weapons are still seen as desirable.

Thus, domestic models are crucial to explain nuclear policy. They are filters through which leaders define security and provide a better foundation for non-proliferation aimed policy.

McManus' Remarks

He wondered whether a longing for prestige was a driver toward nuclearization, and made a distinction between prestige and respect. France, for instance, desires a place at the great power table, and equality with the world's leaders. Their nuclear arsenal grants them a say in global affairs that otherwise would likely be denied them.

• Loud coercive efforts and harsh penalties tend to strengthen the nuclear-pursuing regime by distracting the populace from domestic concerns (as can be seen in Iran today)


• Silent coercion, through banks, trade sanctions, or veiled threats, tends to refocus the domestic agenda and can result in election upsets, even in states with restricted democratic institutions. This can change the environment sufficiently to make nuclear weapons seem undesirable.


• Question of norms: to what extent do countries want or need to comply with international norms? Referenced Kissinger, Shultz, et al arguments for total nuclear disarmament as an attempt to change the international landscape.

Samore's Remarks

• Noted that realism/structuralism is a very efficient approach to analysis, but agreed that the domestic situation of a state seeking nuclear weapons is key.


• Policy issues:


• North Korea: commented on their determination. Isolationist yet needy for recognition. Not likely to disarm under current regime, yet authoritarian enough to have no democratic process at all. How should the international community proceed?


• Regime change is the most effective instrument for non-proliferation according to this information, but aftermath of Iraq invasion shows drawbacks of approach.


• Is it possible to manage East Asia away from proliferation? There are countries who hedge with a peaceful nuclear capacity, like Taiwan and South Korea, that still grants them the fissile material necessary for nuclear weapons. Fuel-cycle technology and uranium enrichment is the major stumbling block. If that's solved, what is to keep these countries from reacting to a changed security dilemma with over nuclearization?


• In the Middle East, Iran is driven by status issues. They have complicated internal dynamics. No united coalition to apply international pressure (cf, Russia and China in the UN Security Council). Again, what can the United States do?

U.S. Intelligence Official's Remarks

He detailed the contributions of the book as two-fold: theoretical and practical.

On the theoretical level:

• Looking beyond monocausal explanations of proliferating behavior.


• How much variable integration was discovered? Look at relationship of security to domestic orientation to technical capabilities.


• Pointed out deficiencies of neo-classical realism.


• Wondered about organizational theory's role in the author's explanations.

On the practical level, he felt that this work provided a critique of current policies, and a point of departure for policy makers. If they have a correct understanding of the forces driving nuclearization, there's at least an improved chance of getting their inducements or punishments to change state behavior. He felt the work debunked commonly accepted wisdom and provides a more accurate picture of real life. In the intelligence community, and much of academia, there's a split between functional and regional expertise. He noted that the case studies and analysis show patterns of domestic behavior across regions, demonstrating that they're not unique.

As to current U.S. policy, trade and globalization efforts make sense in this context. It attacks myths of "great power" status accruing to states pursuing nuclearization, pointing out the pariah status of North Korea as an example. In addition, he said that security incentives or guarantees would hold a weaker position under this theory, making American alliances less effective tools of power.

Questions:

These were the big insights from the question and answer session at the end of the session:

• When asked why she didn't examine India or Pakistan as part of her case study, Solingen replied that she wanted to compare like regions, and both Northeast Asia and the Middle East were multipolar, in comparison to the bi-polar subcontinent (I'd quibble with that a bit, and argue that China plays an enormous role in relations between India and Pakistan, but she's right in that it's not a multipolar environment). But even so, India's "peaceful" nuclear explosion in 1974 was at the height of their protectionist era, while they've reduced trade barriers and liberalized their economy now, well after they reached nuclear weapons status.


• Norms were much less explanatory than expected in the Japanese case. More practical considerations ruled their rejection of nuclear weapons, although it was noted that their technical know-how and large civilian nuclear power industry mean it would be only a matter of months if Japan decided to create nuclear weapons.


• Prestige derived from economies is balanced against prestige from nuclear weapons. Democracy vice autarky.


• There has to be a separation between the pre- and post-NPT eras. The UK and France acquired a nuclear capability, while Sweden rejected it in favor of neutrality (a sort of prestige in its own right).


• There can be unintended effects of policy, and it was suggested that one must differentiate between use of nuclear weapons vice acquisition.


• Small numbers of warheads and short timelines ("sprint" breakout capability) dominate proliferation concerns and have a disproportionate impact on world affairs.


• There was a brief discussion of perception and reaction to US government statements that reminded me of strategic communications issues raised by the long war.

Turmoil in Islamabad

In the midst of a political crisis that could spark into civil war, a timely discussion of Pakistan's history as a nuclear power took place at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last Friday.

Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, the authors of Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, an investigation into American-Pakinstani relations and the arms-trading network established by disgraced scientist AQ Khan, presented primarily a chronology of Pakistan's nuclear program and supposed American intelligence and policy failings rather than focusing on the spread of technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. I would have been more interested in the implications of the latter, but found some decent nuggets of insight amid the name-dropping and editorial opinions.

Notes from the Authors' Presentation:

• The stop/start nature of American and European relations with Pakistan have influenced the country greatly, and in fact parallel the evolution of Pakistan's nuclear program.


• After India explodes a "peaceful" nuclear bomb in 1974, the West tried to prevent Pakistan from following suit, but was ineffective.


• Once the Mullahs took power in Tehran, the Carter administration decided Pakistan could act as a potential bulwark to the Iranian threat. Nothing came of this stance, but it indicated the type of thinking that was taking place amid corridors of power.


• The Reagan administration believed that the U.S. could live with a Pakistani nuclear program, so long as it remained secret.


• During the 1980s, Western aid flowed liberally to Pakistan, but after the fall of the Soviet Union and their withdrawal from Afghanistan, the money dried up. In response, Pakistan turned to Iran, and there may have been nuclear trades in the early 1990s.



• (Partial) Chronology of Pakistan's nuclear program:


• 1978: created weapons-grade uranium


• 1986: hot test of Pakistani weapon by China at Lop Nur


• 1988: weaponized bombs for deployment on American-made F-16 fighter jets


• 1998: underground nuclear test in Lahore, in response to India's detonations



• A changing thesis in the Pakistani military (the most professional and reliable institution in the country) held that they must seek more reliable allies, as well as cash, beyond Chinese technological assistance. At one point, Pakistan tried to create a security buffer with Afghanistan and Turkey to counter India. And of course, China's aid is largely caused by their determination to keep India occupied with its north-western borders rather than its north-eastern edges with Tibet. A quote about this period: "Marketing the cash cow of uranium enrichment."



• The AQ Khan network was pitched as a defiance of the West, including a scheme to sell a ready-made bomb to Iraq that ultimately went nowhere. Iran was dissatisfied with the centrifuges Khan provided, rating them as sub-par technology. He held meetings with Syria and the Saudis, both of whom were looking for warheads. Other travel to African nations was related to attempts to decentralize the program, in terms of both storage and labor. Now-unemployed scientists from South Africa's nuclear program were approached by Khan.



• Per Benazir Bhutto, in 1993 she sought a deal with North Korea to obtain No Dong missiles for reverse engineering (the Ghauri MRBM is the No Dong, so Pakistan eventually did add North Korean missiles to their arsenal). She brought blueprints back from a trip to China, an action that had political ramifications that would later be used against her. The tone here was almost opening mocking of Bhutto, which disturbed me.



• When Libya agreed to relinquish its WMD programs and allow for international inspections in December 2003, its nuclear program was determined to have come wholesale from Pakistan.



• The authors attempted to draw links between the September 11th attacks, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and WMD proliferation, but their narrative was confusing and their evidence non-existent (the book might have more convincing proof). They believe that the focus on AQ Khan as a rogue agent outside the control of the Pakistani government was a deliberate choice to deflect suspicion from what might have been deliberate government policy. Much was made of the fact that Khan has never been directly questioned by the West.



• The Waziristan region became a haven for Al Qaeda and the Taliban by 2006, as is well known. The authors asserted that despite President Musharraf's promises, there has been no de-radicalization of Pakistan – in fact, Islamist elements have been strengthened in certain areas. Pakistan is still purchasing dual-use components in large quantities, perhaps to sell. They're also poor at tracking their fissile material – as many as 40 drums of HEU might be missing.

Comments, Questions, and Answers:

In general, an extraordinary session, with experts from the U.S. government including a former ambassador to Pakistan challenging the authors' interpretation of events.

• Q: Strangeness of no red flags going up in the 1990s regarding Pakistan's proliferation. Was there some motive on the part of the U.S. government for keeping quiet? A: Not as far as they could determine.



• Comment: Nothing went in and out of Kahuta without ISI (the Pakistani intelligence service) approval. AQ Khan's movements were monitored beginning in 1999 when Musharraf took power, yet proliferation continued well after Khan's "retirement" in 2002. This was not a one man operation.



• Comment: Many holes in the evidence, leading the authors to an interpretation. Proposed that there's another way the story could make sense, closer to Musharraf's claims. Regarding access to Khan: it's not usual to grant third parties open access in nuclear cases (example of the Rosenbergs). Asked the audience to keep an open mind with regard to the two narratives available. AQ Khan was an accomplished liar unless presented with incontrovertible truth contradicting his position.



• Comment: The book assumes that U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction is both omniscient and infallible – not true. There were and are differences of opinion within the intelligence community about Pakistan's nuclear program, including a genuine belief that we didn't know what was going on.



• Comment re: accuracy. Musharraf is linked to bin Laden, yet this is contradicted by the chronology presented in Musharraf's memoir. Gul's (Pakistani general?) account of their nuclear program should not be taken as gospel. Questioned credibility of evidence.



• Q: Is part of the motivation for Pakistan's nuclear program that they are facing East, not West? Have to consider India and role of Kashmir conflict (see above for my point on China and how they've propped Pakistan up to keep India occupied).



• Comment: Uranium trade with North Korea came about in part because Pakistan couldn't pay for the technology they desired on a cash basis.



• There are limits of American influence on Pakistan's policy. How could we shift the country? Must look at role of China, coercive threat to withhold military aid, make clear distinction between Pakistani people and unpopular, illegal government. Why must the equation be Musharraf or Islamists? The two are cooperating, not adversarial.



• Q: Is Pakistan safer because of its nuclear arsenal? There was a deterrent effect in a 2001 crisis with India, but on three other occasions, nuclear weapons have heightened tensions. Not enough is known about the Pakistani or Indian arsenals.



• Comment: Reactive nature of American policy, and the power of inertia even in the face of tumultuous events.

Events remain tumultuous, of course, with Musharraf's crackdown on the legal system and opposition political parties marking his increasing unpopularity. He's been ineffective at tamping down Islamist activity, perhaps by design. Moderate forces are the ones protesting. Hopefully, this crisis will have a positive outcome, but Pakistan's nuclear weapons add to the danger.



Audio of the discussion is available at http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_events/task,view/id,1419/

No Peace Dividend

I'd been skeptical of the conclusions drawn in this report ("The Human Security Report 2005"), which were publicized at the end of 2005. For one thing, the excerpts I read didn't seem to take certain types of violence into account - terrorism, insurrection, etc. For another, the methodology described seemed less than rigorous. Fred Kaplan has delved into these issues in an article on Slate. It's good reading, and elaborates on the perils of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete or narrow sets of data.

Conflicts in Africa and the Middle East have not gone away, although Latin America has certainly gotten more stable since the end of the Soviet Union. Even there, though, there are rivalries and competing interests that make military action a possibility today. The Balkans are more stable than they were in the early and mid-1990s. Asia has not seen war for a while, but North Korea's precarious economic situation and the multitudes squabbling over possession of the Spratly Islands could change that at any time.

I've been pondering writing about Iran's nuclear ambitions in the context of their larger ballistic missile and WMD programs. Watch this space.

[transferred from a now-defunct location]

Sixteen Years

Sixteen years tomorrow. I can still recall sitting at the foot of my parents bed, watching their TV and sobbing at the sight of East and West Berliners celebrating together, a glorious scrum that didn’t care about anything other than being able to touch their sundered countrymen. I was sixteen then, and now another lifetime has passed yet the emotions can be felt again at a mere reminder. Over forty years of separation, the grand experiment of communism demonstrated to be an absolute failure. When given the choice, the citizens who were supposed to be equal, supposed to be the owners of industry and agriculture, decided that the messiness and the abundance of capitalism was a far better way to live. Democratic capitalism: the combination of representative government and free-market economics, based on the primacy of the individual over the group. Not that capitalism is without fault, but that it is superior to any other system that humans have imagined. Self-interest drives the betterment of individuals, spurs them to achieve great things, amass fortunes, spend money to fuel the cycle again and again. Consumerism, yes. But wouldn’t you rather have overwhelming choice than none?

It was a victory of ideas. Timothy Garton Ash writes about ruling elites in The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague:

Yet none of this would have stopped them if they had still been convinced of their right to rule. The third, and perhaps ultimately decisive factor [in the overthrow of communism] is that characteristic of revolutionary situations described by Alexis de Tocqueville more than a century ago: the ruling elite’s loss of belief in its own right to rule. A few kids went on the streets and threw a few words. The police beat them. The kids said: You have no right to beat us! And the rulers, the high and mighty, replied, in effect: Yes, we have no right to beat you. We have no right to preserve our rule by force. The end no longer justifies the means!

In fact the ruling elites, and their armed servants, distinguished themselves by their comprehensive unreadiness to stand up in any way for the things in which they had so long claimed to believe, and their almost indecent haste to embrace the things they had so long denounced as ‘capitalism’ and ‘bourgeois democracy’.

Ideas have power. Ideas drive change, perception, life as we know it. Without a framework with which to view the world, stimuli would overwhelm us in a chaotic rush of sensation. Concepts. Paradigms. Models. They can be false, they can be proved misguided and wrong, and yet their power persists with some. Francis Fukuyama wrote soon after the fall of communism that it heralded the “end of history” since liberal democracy was the only viable system of government. Sadly, the events of September 11, 2001 proved him wrong – Islamic fundamentalism has raised the banner of challenge to all Western civilization.

Yet it seems right to pause for a moment and remember the giddy joy of November 9, 1989, even if Ash describes it as a resumption of normal life:

Everyone has seen the joyful celebration in West Berlin, the vast crowds stopping the traffic on the Kurfurstendamm, Sekt corks popping, strangers tearfully embracing—the greatest street-party in the world. Yes, it was like that. But it was not only like that. Most of the estimated two million East Germans who flooded into West Berlin over the weekend simply walked the streets in quiet family groups, often with toddlers in pushchairs. They queued up at a bank to collect the 100 Deutschmarks ‘greeting money’ … offered to visiting East Germans by the West German Government, and they went, very cautiously, shopping. Generally they bought one or two small items, perhaps some fresh fruit, a Western newspaper, and toys for the children. Then, clasping their carrier-bags, they walked quietly back through the Wall, through the grey, deserted streets of East Berlin, home.

It is very difficult to describe the quality of this experience because what they actually did was so stunningly ordinary. … Berliners walked the streets of Berlin. What could be more normal? And yet, what could be more fantastic! ‘Twenty-eight years and ninety-one days,’ says one man in his late thirties strolling back up Friedrichstrasse. Twenty-eight years and ninety-one days since the building of the Wall. On that day, in August 1961, his parents had wanted to go to a late-night Western in a West Berlin cinema, but their eleven year old son had been too tired. In the early hours they woke to the sound of tanks. He had never been to West Berlin from that day to this. A taxi-driver asks me, with a sly smile: ‘How much is the ferry to England?’ The day before yesterday his question would have been unthinkable.

… Everyone looks the same as they make their way home—except for the tell-tale Western carrier-bag. But everyone is inwardly changed, changed utterly. ‘Now people are standing up straight,’ says a hotel porter. ‘They are speaking their minds. Even work is more fun. I think the sick will get up from their hospital beds.’ And it was in East rather than West Berlin that this weekend had the magic, pentecostal quality which I last experienced in Poland in autumn 1980. Ordinary men and women find their voice and their courage--Lebensmut, as the porter puts it. These are moments when you feel that somewhere an angel has opened his wings.

The point about Poland in 1980 is well taken. When I was at George Washington University, studying for my M.A., I had the privilege of speaking with a former CIA official. He spoke off the record about investments the United States government to fight communism throughout the 1980s. Millions spent on arms for the Contras in Nicaragua, or for the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Yet the best investment, he said, was spending $100,000 to buy printing presses for Solidarity. Printing presses, that classic means of spreading ideas. It took a decade for those ideas to percolate, and required new leadership in the Soviet Union that would not send in tanks at the first sign of discontent, but how vast a change was wrought by logic and thinking?

People younger than I have no conception of life during the Cold War. They hear tales of massive defense arsenals, of spies lurking in the shadows, and can’t understand why. I was born almost a decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I can’t claim to have experienced the scariest times when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. Yet the 1980s were fraught with their own fears and Eastern Europe had been ground under the Soviet heel three times when they tried to rebel before (Hungary 1956 – the Soviets. Czechoslovakia 1968 – Warsaw Pact. Poland 1980 – martial law). Communism fall? I might believe in it as a matter of faith, but then it happened, a miracle of the highest order.

The years since have had challenges of their own. Integrating formerly command economies into a system where private industry rules supreme. The hardship of depressions, of incipient absolutism in some cases. Yet by 2000 three former members of the Warsaw Pact had joined NATO. Other countries had been accepted for membership in the European Union. One day in 1993 I browsed through the fine china section at a department store. I saw some beautiful goblets and picked them up to find the price. And there was a sticker saying “made in Poland” – the first time I’d seen anything from the former Warsaw Pact offered for sale.

The world has changed. We should remember how much.

[transferred from a now-defunct location]

September 11th and Iraq

An article in today’s Washington Post (Antiwar Activists Decry Media's Role in Promoting Pentagon Event), covers objections to news media support for a Department of Defense event “to remember the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and to support the troops in Iraq.” The article contained a quote from an anti-war activist: “Because they're promoting a lie, that the war in Iraq had anything to do with September 11."

Did Iraq’s leadership, did Saddam Hussein, meet with Osama bin Laden and help plan the September 11th attacks? No. However, Saddam’s hostile regime was directly responsible for the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, one of al Qaeda’s spurs to action. Iraq also continued to rouse Iran’s defensive impulses, causing further build-up of weapons in the region. And Iraq did flout United Nations sanctions to cooperate with weapons inspection teams, as well as international norms prohibiting assassination of national leaders. Iraq was a problem that was not going away prior to September 11th. Instead, leading nations around the world were allowing Iraq to slide back into civilized society, through their inaction over Iraq’s continued and escalating defiance of post-Gulf War rules.

After September 11th, the Bush administration decided to unseat the Taliban in Afghanistan – a worthy cause for reasons other than disrupting al Qaeda operations. Since the Taliban took power in the mid-1990s, they had systematically laid waste to human rights, especially with regard to women, and irreplaceable cultural artifacts. They were barbarians, and it is to the world’s shame that inertia allowed their rule to continue as long as it did. But Afghanistan is only one piece of the Middle East puzzle, a larger problem that involves numerous countries, authoritarian regimes, religious influences, economic stagnation, and the need to educate and employ a restless populace. For years, America was content to support the Saudi monarchy so long as oil continued to flow. That the house of Saud needed to hand over their mosques to Sunni fundamentalists to make the deal palatable was none of our concern. Until two towers collapsed, a wing of the Pentagon crumbled, and a plane’s wreckage burned in a Pennsylvania field.

Of course oil is the basis of American interests in the region. Were it not for oil, the fuel that drives the world economy, the Middle East would hold our attention as much as sub-Saharan Africa, which is to say not much at all. But a geological roll of the dice gifted the area with vital resources, and as preeminent nation in the world, the United States must ensure continued access to oil. To do that, a broader American strategy was put into place, one that could address both the growth of Islamic dissidents, the pool where al Qaeda finds recruits, and also the delicate political-military balance of the region.

Looking at the region after the fall of the Taliban, the next major nexus point was obviously Iraq. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait in 1990, had used chemical weapons on minority Kurds in the late 1980s, had invaded Iran early in the decade, leading to years of warfare and attrition. Negotiations had proven fruitless due to lack Iraqi cooperation – there was no information to indicate that the regime wanted to change internally, and their past history of evading arms control restrictions and creating illegal networks to funnel weapons into the country meant that any proclamation about disarmament was eyed with skepticism.

Given the horrid way the Ba’athist regime treated the Iraqi population, I cannot regret that they were overthrown. That insurgents and malcontents from the former elites proceeded to institute guerilla war was not unexpected, and better planning could certainly have minimized some of the post-invasion bombings and other disturbances. But now that the U.S. is involved in the country, sponsor of a new democratic government, we cannot afford to pull out before stability is achieved. Were we to do so, then the Osama bin Laden’s and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s of the world would sweep in and create another Taliban-era Afghanistan, a place where religious fundamentalists could plot their next attack on the degenerate West.

The war in Iraq definitely had something to do with September 11 – those attacks were America’s wake up call that the status quo in the Middle East could not be permitted to continue.

[transferred from a now-defunct location]

Conspiracy Theories

I don't believe in them, most of the time.

http://www.slate.com/id/2121212/

Conspiracy Theories

If you liked The Da Vinci Code, you'll love the Downing Street Memo.
By Christopher Hitchens

[transferred from a now-defunct location]