TESTIMONY
OF
ASHTON B. CARTER
CO-DIRECTOR
PREVENTIVE DEFENSE PROJECT
JOHN F. KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
BEFORE THE
HOUSE
ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE
UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
REGARDING
SEVEN STEPS TO OVERHAUL COUNTERPROLIFERATION
March
17, 2004
Mr. Chairman and Members of
the Armed Services Committee, thank you for
inviting me to appear before you today.
Today I would like to step back a bit and
look beyond today’s proliferation hotspots –
North Korea, Iran, the A.Q. Khan network,
the “missing” WMD in Iraq – to the
underlying policies and programs of the
United States for counterproliferation
(CP). I was deeply involved in launching
the Pentagon’s CP Initiative almost ten
years ago, when there were few of us hawks
on this subject. The way you have framed
this hearing is a reminder that dealing with
the so-called “rogues,” though vitally
important, is not the totality of the CP
policy we need.
No
Silver Bullets: A Comprehensive Approach to
Counterproliferation
A clear
indication that our approach to countering
proliferation should not begin and end with
the rogues is that most of the nearly 200
nations on earth have not, in fact, resorted
to weapons of mass destruction (WMD). There
are but a few rogues, fortunately. In one
of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous novels,
Sherlock Holmes sees a vital clue in the
fact that a dog at the scene of the crime
did not bark. In a similar way, we
should see a clue to one aspect of a
successful CP policy in the fact that such
countries as Germany, Japan, Turkey, South
Korea, and Taiwan have not resorted
to WMD. They have not because they were
dissuaded from doing so by a stable
alliance relationship with the United States
that offered better security for them than
WMD. This is something the United States
has been doing right and should keep doing
right; later I will return to this point,
because I have some concerns about the
health of our alliances and partnerships.
Other
nations have foregone WMD as part of a
disarmament agreement like the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty that ensures them
that if they forego WMD, their neighbors
will also. If disarmament regimes can be
strengthened and updated so they offer
credible protection, they too can play a
vital role in CP.
When
dissuasion and disarmament fail and a nation
heads down the road to WMD acquisition,
focused diplomacy by the United
States can sometime reverse its course.
Recent decades give many examples: Ukraine,
Kazakhstan, and Belarus after the collapse
of the Soviet Union; South Korea and Taiwan
in the 1980s; Argentina and Brazil in the
1990s; perhaps Libya in recent years.
Some
proliferators cannot be turned back. At
that point our approach must be to deny them
the means to make WMD: keeping the worst
weapons out of the hands of the worst
people, to paraphrase President Bush.
Export controls, covert action, the new
Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), and
the highly successful Nunn-Lugar program all
contribute to the strategy of denial.
Sometimes dissuasion, disarmament,
diplomacy, and denial don’t work, and
despite our best efforts proliferation
occurs. It was important to me during the
time I served in the Defense Department that
U.S. efforts to counter WMD not end when
nonproliferation had failed, and that is one
reason we coined the word “counterproliferation”.
At that point we need to offer protection to
our forces, people, and allies against use
of WMD. Elimination of hair-trigger alert
postures, improved permissive action link
(PAL) type technology, and other defusing
measures can reduce the chances of
accidental or unauthorized use of WMD –
from Russia, for example, or between India
and Pakistan. With respect to deliberate
use, the United States should continue
its current policy of threatening
“overwhelming and devastating” retaliation
against anyone who uses nuclear, chemical,
or biological weapons against us, since in
at least some cases deterrence might
be effective. Where deterrence fails,
defenses – ranging from chemical suits,
inhalation masks, and vaccines to ballistic
missile defense (BMD) – are needed.
Finally, where the risk of use of WMD is
imminent, preemptive destruction of
hostile WMD might be a necessary last
resort.
Mr.
Chairman and Members of the Committee:
dissuasion, disarmament, diplomacy, denial,
defusing, deterrence, defenses, destruction
– what the Department of Defense calls the
“8 D’s,” are the tools of a comprehensive
counterproliferation policy. Besides being
an easy jog to the memory, the 8 D’s are a
reminder that there is no silver bullet for
counterproliferation – not preemption
(destruction), not arms control
(disarmament), nor any other single tool.
From listening to the public debate one
might come to believe that one of these
tools holds the key to protection against
proliferation. But the dynamics driving
proliferation in different countries are
different enough that no single label or
doctrine can cover them all. One might also
infer from the public debate that the 8 D’s
are competing, alternative “doctrines.” In
fact we need them all.
Ingredients of a Needed Overhaul of
Counterproliferation
Today a
CP “hawk” should be trying to strengthen all
tools in the toolbox – all 8 D’s. Many of
them are in need of fundamental overhaul.
One problem is that some date to the Cold
War, when counterproliferation was a “B
list” problem compared to the “A list”
confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Another problem is that we have not heeded a
lesson of the attacks of 9/11:
counterproliferation and counterterrorism
are inseparable in the 21st
century. We must be concerned not only
about what Kim Jong Il might do with nuclear
weapons he obtains from the plutonium he is
reprocessing, but also about the other hands
into which North Korea’s nukes might some
day fall – either through sale or in the
chaos of a collapse of the North Korean
regime. The half-life of plutonium 239 is
24,400 years; surely the North Korean regime
will not last that long. Today’s
proliferation threat is tomorrow’s
catastrophic terrorism threat. Who among us
would not give a great deal now to return to
the 1980s and stop the Pakistani nuclear
program, which might be “talibanized”
sometime in the future – truly a nightmare
scenario?
9/11
should have caused us to overhaul our
approach to counterproliferation as
fundamentally as our approach to
counterterrorism. But so far the “worst
people” have gotten more attention than the
“worst weapons.”
The
counterproliferation hawk’s agenda would
have seven priorities, which together cover
all of the “8 D’s.”
1. Strengthen alliances and
partnerships. I indicated earlier that
the prospect of being embedded in a stable
security relationship with the United States
has been critical to preventing
proliferation in such countries as South
Korea, Turkey, Taiwan, and Ukraine. This
underappreciated benefit of America’s
security partnerships is another reason to
avoid the temptation to make a virtue of an
Iraq war necessity, the so-called “coalition
of the willing.” Compared to standing
partnerships and alliances, such coalitions
do not serve U.S. interests well. Alliance
partners train together to interoperate, so
when they go to war they are not only
willing but able to make a
contribution to combined operations.
Alliance partners routinely exchange threat
assessments, making them more likely – not
certain, to be sure, but more likely – to
share our view when we believe use of force
is necessary. And finally, alliance
partners stably tied to the U.S. for their
defense are unlikely to adopt a drastic,
purely national approach to their defense
like acquisition of WMD. For all these
reasons, we should reject the notion that
the United States can operate effectively
through “coalitions of the willing” and use
that concept only as a last resort when we
have no success in leading our allies in our
direction.
2. Expand the scale and scope
of Nunn-Lugar. Nunn-Lugar is now
recognized to be not just a DOD program
focused on the former Soviet Union, the way
it began a dozen years ago, but a novel
approach to eliminating WMD of wide
applicability. At the time the United
States formed a coalition against al Qaeda
after 9/11, it should have formed a parallel
coalition against WMD based on the
Nunn-Lugar approach. In fact, such a
Coalition Against WMD Terrorism was proposed
at the time by none other than Senators
Lugar and Nunn. The United States missed a
major opportunity to transform
counterproliferation while it had the
attention and sympathies of the world.
It is
not too late to expand the scale and scope
of Nunn-Lugar. The expansion would plan for
and fund: the final and complete
safeguarding of all former Soviet fissile
materials, in weapons and non-weapons forms;
bolder inroads into former Soviet biological
and chemical stockpiles and facilities;
collection of all significant caches of
highly enriched uranium worldwide,
eliminating these “sleeper cells” of nuclear
terrorism; complete and verifiable
elimination of WMD programs in Iraq, Libya,
Iran, and North Korea as and when
circumstances permit; promulgation and
adoption of world-class standards for
inventory control, safety, and security for
all weapons and weapons-usable materials;
strengthening border and export controls;
and devising cooperative international
responses (NEST teams, radiological public
health measures, forensics, and so on) in
the event of an incident of nuclear
terrorism.
Nunn-Lugar is much praised but little funded
in Washington and other capitals. Here in
Washington there are tenacious opponents in
Congress and even in the administration –
two and a half years after 9/11’s
unmistakable wake-up call, and despite the
fact that President Bush has voiced his
support for the program.
3. Update and upgrade the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The
NPT is sometimes disparaged because, it is
said, the “bad guys” can ignore it with
impunity (since it has inadequate
verification and enforcement provisions) and
the “good guys” would be good with or
without an agreement. This contention is
wrong for two reasons.
First,
the world does not divide neatly into “good
guys” and “bad guys” in regard to
proliferation behavior: there is a
substantial “in-between” category. This
group has been represented over time by
Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus (which
chose to forsake the nuclear weapons they
inherited from the Soviet Union); Argentina
and Brazil (which mutually agreed to give up
nuclear their nuclear programs); Taiwan and
South Korea (which chose U.S. protection
over nuclear weapons); and South Africa
(which changed regimes and thus its sense of
external threat). In all these cases, the
allure of greater international acceptance
if they abandoned their nuclear ambitions
and signed the NPT was one of the deciding
factors.
Secondly, it is important to note that
agreements like the NPT are, in fact, useful
even in dealing with the “bad guys,” in an
indirect way. When it becomes necessary for
the United States to lead action against the
rogues, the international consensus against
WMD embodied in arms control agreements
provides a framework for the United States
to marshal the support of other nations.
While
the NPT has great value in its current form,
its provisions can and should be
strengthened. One problem is that the
concept of a so-called “peaceful atom,”
dating to the 1960s when the NPT was
negotiated, constitutes a huge loophole in
the regime that must be closed. A short
time ago, the New York Times
published an op-ed authored by William J.
Perry, Brent Scowcroft, Arnold Kanter, and
myself proposing a way to plug this
loophole. I have attached that op-ed to
this statement. My co-authors testified
with me before the Senate Armed Services
Committee, and we elaborated our
recommendation for this policy change at
that time. I was pleased that President
Bush included this concept in his recent
speech at National Defense University, and I
hope he follows up vigorously to implement
it. A second problem with the NPT is the
weaknesses of its verification and
enforcement provisions, which also need to
be addressed.
Arms
control plays a limited role in the
counterproliferation toolbox. But in this
it is not different from all the other
tools. Each tool has its limitations, but
also its place. The United States should be
taking the lead in fixing the NPT, not in
disparaging it.
4. Make
counterproliferation an integral part of
Pentagon Transformation. In the 1990s
the term “counterproliferation” was coined
in the Pentagon to signify that contending
with WMD was an important DOD mission in the
post-Cold War world. A number of
counterproliferation programs were created
within DOD to try to focus research,
development, and acquisition on producing
non-nuclear counters to WMD on the
battlefield. Nuclear retaliation for use of
WMD against U.S. troops was always an
option, but not all opponents will
necessarily be deterred in this way, and in
the event of WMD use against us the
President deserves better options than
firing U.S. nuclear weapons.
Over
time, the counterproliferation programs were
expanded to protecting rear areas – ports
and airfields in the theater of war –
against chemical and biological weapons
attack. Subsequently, the technologies for
protecting allied rear areas were recognized
to be applicable to protection of the U.S.
homeland from WMD attack. Thus, by 9/11,
DOD was recognized as the lead agency in the
federal government for developing and
fielding technology for countering WMD
wielded by both state and non-state actors,
both on foreign battlefields and on U.S.
territory. Examples of counterproliferation
programs, both research and acquisition,
were chemical and biological warning
sensors, improved vaccines against bioattack,
individual and collective protective
coverings, special munitions for attacking
and neutralizing enemy WMD, radiochemical
forensics, and active defenses such as
ballistic missile defense.
Today
the Pentagon is quite rightly devoting a
portion of its growing budget to
“transforming” the military to anticipate
future threats and field dramatically new
technologies. But the core of the effort
remains long-range precision strike, close
integration of intelligence information with
operations, and closer working of Army,
Navy, and Air Force units together in
“joint” operations. These worthy
transformation goals for conventional
warfare have not been matched by any
comparable counter-WMD emphasis. DOD’s
counterproliferation programs remain small
and scattered among the Services, OSD,
“joint” program offices, and the Defense
Threat Reduction Agency. Excluding missile
defense, these programs amount to only a few
billion out of the $400 billion defense
budget, far too small a fraction given the
importance of the mission.
Counterproliferation needs more resources
and a clearer management structure in DOD.
5. Increase focus on WMD
terrorism within the Homeland Security
program. A similar observation can be
made about the priority given to WMD in the
new homeland security agencies and budget.
If the worst kind of terrorism imaginable is
WMD terrorism, why is so small a fraction of
the new homeland security program devoted to
innovative efforts to prevent and respond to
WMD terrorism?
6. Weigh carefully the pros
and cons of further innovations in the U.S.
nuclear arsenal. An important question
for counterproliferation is whether or not
U.S. deployments and doctrine for its own
nuclear arsenal influence the spread of WMD
elsewhere in the world. For the most part,
the influence is marginal, both pro and
con.
It is
unlikely that Pyongyang’s or Teheran’s
calculations, let alone al Qaeda’s, are
significantly dependent on whether the
United States has 6000, 3500, or 2200
deployed strategic weapons (these are the
numbers permitted under the last three
rounds of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms
control), retains tactical nuclear weapons
deployed in Europe, researches or develops
earth-penetrating or other new types of
nuclear weapons, or has a doctrine that
either threatens or foreswears nuclear
retaliation if chemical or biological
weapons are used against the U.S. or its
allies.
On the
other hand, countering North Korean and
Iranian WMD ambitions can be assisted with
the support of other nations. Defeating al
Qaeda absolutely depends upon cooperation by
foreign governments in intelligence and law
enforcement; in this area a unilateral
option is not available. International
support for these U.S.-led efforts against
WMD is influenced, again perhaps only at the
margin, by U.S. nuclear policy. To the
extent that the United States suggests a
growing reliance of its own on nuclear
weapons for security, it makes the job of
marshaling international cooperation in a
coalition against WMD terrorism or an
overhaul of WMD arms control more
difficult.
Also, as
described previously, we need to worry not
only about the “rogues” but about the
“in-betweens.” Their decisions about
nuclear weapons are probably more strongly
influenced by their perception of the
nuclear “order” that we represent and lead,
and that is reflected in our own conduct.
The fear
that the United States would or could use
nuclear weapons is a deterrent against
use of WMD by proliferating governments,
and a means of destroying WMD before it can
be used against us. But the United States
has another tool of deterrence and
destruction besides nuclear weapons – its
unmatched conventional military power.
Terrorists, for their part, are likely not
deterred by threats of punishment at all.
The
marginal costs of emphasizing the role of
U.S. nuclear weapons in its own security
should therefore be weighed against the
marginal benefits of modification of the
U.S. nuclear posture to strengthen our
capabilities for deterrence and
destruction. Recently the United States has
embarked on three changes that do not meet
this test.
One
adjustment has been to combine nuclear
weapons, missile defenses, and long-range
conventional weapons into a “new Triad,”
replacing the traditional nuclear “Triad” of
land-based missiles, submarine-based
missiles, and strategic bombers. This
construct accomplishes little in practice,
but it has the detrimental and misleading
effect of suggesting to the outside world
that U.S. presidents will regard use of
nuclear weapons and use of conventional
weapons as differing only in degree rather
than in kind.
Another
change with little obvious benefit is to
accelerate the schedule for the resumption
of underground nuclear testing. The new
schedule allows weapons scientists to test
at the earliest time they can be ready to
gather useful data from the detonation.
Given the stakes involved, the primary
driver of the schedule for resuming
underground testing should be military
necessity, and on this score, the case for
the change has not been made.
The
third important modification is to embark on
research and development of a new type of
earth-penetrating nuclear warhead,
ostensibly to destroy deeply buried WMD
facilities. Again, the military rationale
for this move is not strong, since the
United States already has earth-penetrating
nuclear weapons and the focus on munitions
begs the larger question of finding such
targets in the first place. The political
enormity (and much of the fallout
contamination) of a decision to cross the
nuclear divide would not be much reduced by
changing the design of the nuclear weapon.
The benefit of this innovation in U.S.
nuclear programs is therefore modest.
The
optimal U.S. military strategy would be to
seek to widen and prolong the huge gap
between U.S. conventional military
capabilities and those of any other nation,
to strengthen DOD’s counterproliferation
programs to give the President better
non-nuclear counters to WMD, and to use
transformational technology to narrow rather
than widen the range of circumstances in
which this nation would have to resort to
use of nuclear weapons.
7. Overhaul WMD Intelligence:
The Specter of Policymaking in the Dark.
No policy tool – neither preemptive
destruction, nor disarmament arms control,
nor missile defense, nor denial – can be
effective if the existence and nature of WMD
efforts is unknown or imprecise.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld became
convinced in the course of his work on
ballistic missile proliferation before he
took office that adequate intelligence on
WMD programs is unlikely to be present in
most cases. Given the stakes, he concluded,
the U.S. must assume the worst in
formulating its policy responses. This
logic, encapsulated in the maxim “absence of
evidence [of WMD] is not evidence of
absence,” was the main intellectual argument
in the Rumsfeld Commission report leading to
the deployment of a National Missile
Defense. According to this maxim,
intelligence regarding the timetable for the
development of an intercontinental ballistic
missile threat originating in Iran or North
Korea was uncertain enough that it was
deemed imprudent for the United States
merely to be prepared to deploy a missile
defense within a few years (the Clinton
administration policy), but instead
necessary to undertake deployment
immediately.
I myself
applied the same logic to the need for a
preemptive war in Iraq. I believed it was
safer to assume Saddam Hussein was trying to
fulfill his long-demonstrated quest for WMD
than to interpret the scanty intelligence
available as evidence of a scanty WMD
program. I still believe my judgment to
support the invasion of Iraq was sound on
the basis of the information available at
the time. But we now know that the overall
picture that information painted was
incorrect.
The
matter of pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s WMD
is the subject of several ongoing inquiries,
and my purpose in raising it is not to
anticipate their results but to point to the
larger issue of how to improve WMD
intelligence in general.
WMD
activities are inherently difficult to
monitor. It is comparatively easy to
monitor the size and disposition of armies,
the numbers and types of conventional
weaponry like tanks and aircraft, and even
the operational doctrines and plans of
military establishments (since these
generally need to be rehearsed to be
effective, and exercises and training can be
monitored). By their nature, WMD
concentrate destructive power in small
packages and tight groups. Both the
manufacturing of chemical and above all
biological weapons can take place in
small-scale facilities. The plutonium route
to nuclear weapons requires reactors and
reprocessing facilities that are large and
relatively conspicuous, but the uranium
route can be pursued in facilities that are
modest in size and lack distinctive
tell-tale external features.
A
profound question bearing upon all of the 8
D’s is therefore whether adequate
intelligence is likely to be available to
make any of them effective; or,
alternatively, whether WMD spread is by its
nature too difficult to monitor. If the
latter is true, the world is doomed to a
perpetual situation reminiscent of the
“missile gap” of the 1950s, where
uncertainties outweigh certainties and
policymaking is forced into worst-case
scenario mode.
The
uncertainties of the 1950s missile gap were
substantially dispelled by the invention of
satellite reconnaissance. The Soviet
Union’s missile silo construction and flight
tests were visible from space. Today, there
are some emerging intelligence technologies
that will potentially make a substantial
contribution to the collection of quality
intelligence on WMD. They are “close-in”
technologies as opposed to
“from-the-outside-looking-in” like satellite
photography. They are described in rough
outline in an article I wrote for
Technology in Society, which will be
published soon and which I have appended to
this statement.
But no
technology in the offing holds the promise
of lifting the veil of WMD activities
completely the way satellite photography
lifted the veil from the Soviet Union’s
nuclear missile and bomber programs.
Accurate intelligence on WMD would therefore
be enhanced by four additional ingredients,
two that are matters of policy, and two that
are matters of intelligence community
management.
The
first ingredient is active cooperation by
the parties under surveillance. Just as the
Soviet Union allowed overflight of its
territory by satellites, governments around
the world will have to allow greater access
to their territory, facilities, and
scientists if there is to be any kind of
accurate underpinning of
counterproliferation. At a minimum,
governments that wish to avoid suspicion
(and thus coercion and even preemptive
attack) will need to allow the kind of
access promised to U.N. inspectors in Iraq
before the 2003 war. Access involves the
ability to inspect facilities by surprise,
take material samples for forensic analysis,
install monitoring equipment, and other
physical means. It must be complemented by
required data declarations, document
searches, and interviews of scientists.
These are tall orders, since they involve
compromises with sovereignty and legitimate
military secrecy for the nations inspected,
but they are the only way North Korea’s WMD
ambitions will be verifiably eliminated, or
Iran’s nuclear power activities fully
safeguarded.
The
second ingredient must be the shifting of
the burden of proof from the international
community to the party under suspicion. To
make an inspection system of carefully
managed, if not totally unfettered, access
based on active cooperation succeed, it must
be the responsibility of the inspected party
to dispel concerns, and not the
responsibility of the United States or the
international community to “prove” that
dangerous WMD activities are underway.
Third,
since proliferation is essentially a
scientific activity, we also need to
increase the number and level of technical
training of the scientists and engineers in
the intelligence community, as well as the
linkages between the intelligence community
and the broader scientific community.
Finally,
a great spur to quality and motivation of an
intelligence effort is a clear link to
action. Since 9/11, as you know, the
counterterrorism intelligence effort has
become more “actionable.” To simplify
somewhat, the counterterrorism effort has
moved from producing papers characterizing
terrorist groups to supporting operations to
interdict terrorists. As the
counterpoliferation efforts gets more
operational through covert action, the PSI,
expanded Nunn-Lugar, and verifying WMD
elimination in Iraq, Libya, and hopefully
elsewhere, the demand for “actionable”
intelligence will increase. If history is
any guide, the intensity and quality of
collection and analysis by the intelligence
community will increase in response.
Taken
together and with urgency, I am optimistic
that such steps to overhaul our WMD-related
intelligence effort can provide accurate
intelligence to undergird all of the 8 D’s.
* * *
Mr. Chairman and Members
of the Committee, the war on terrorism and
the war on proliferation are strongly linked
in the 21st century. But they
are not identical. So far we are waging the
war on terrorism much more vigorously than
the war on WMD, attacking the “worst people”
much more than the “worst weapons.” I hope
this hearing contributes to an overhaul of
counterproliferation that is as far-reaching
as the overhaul of counterterrorism that
began on 9/11, and that the measures I have
recommended provide an agenda for action.
