Social Science Research Council

NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION AND DISARMAMENT THROUGH THE LENS OF 9/11
By Gregory Mello

Post-September 11 events have tended to crystallize a number of latent constellations in American society. I would especially emphasize first our shallow sentimentality, which in its breadth, lack of depth, and intensity is a product of the modern advertising and entertainment industry; our irrational fear, grown from its existential roots by more-or-less the same economic interests; and our sense of powerlessness with respect to the public sphere. All these were amplified by the media's treatment of what we now call, iconically, "9/11." And not just amplified - these qualities have also been rather skillfully harnessed to produce a broader acceptance of violence in service of the state. Perhaps what most unites the various social and political sequellae of 9/11, what most guides their incorporation into real institutions and policies, and what most affects progress on nonproliferation and disarmament, seems to be a now-rising investment in what might be called the intellectual culture of violence. This ideology of violence is in polar contrast to the coercive component of law, which by definition at least aspires to apply equitably to all. The normative idea of "might makes right," and not just the sometime practice of it, has gained considerable ground against the norm of "right makes might." Since progress in our field requires serious investment by a broad range of actors in the equitable rule of law, investment in the theory and practice of lawlessness, whether under the banner of empire, reprisal, or counterproliferation, is in direct opposition to our work.

It is very possible to underestimate the gravity of this situation, and I think we generally do. It is not just that this or that policy is being put into place. There is also a deliberate and increasingly-skilled cultivation of fear, hatred, and the acceptance of violence. These emotions, broadly held, are politically necessary when viewed from the managerial perspective so favored in Washington today. Beneath the ideological veneer of a Richard Perle or a Paul Wolfowitz or a George Bush, in order for their ideas to be translated into policy, there must be an eruption of some very primitive emotion in the society, like a rising pluton of molten rock. So, it is not about this or that policy - it is about the idea of policy as a deliberative act at all. Even the phrase "September 11" often seems to carry with it the presupposition that our situation is somehow fundamentally new, and what is most importantly new is that "old-fashioned" restrictions on our actions are now gone. It is the novelty itself, the absence of guideposts, which counts. This is not policy as much as it is anti-policy.

All this is profoundly dangerous, and more so than in the past, for two main reasons. The first is that the potential quantity of politicized emotions, which can be released from the populace, is now very large - larger, perhaps, than can be easily comprehended from within either the assumptions of liberal modernity, which these same emotions gravely threaten, or even from within the managerial paradigm that has gained so much currency, so to speak, in Washington. The practitioners of modern state power, which is increasingly well-tuned to the market-driven processes of the mass media, can be likened to physicists learning to create nuclear fusion: in principle there is no limit to scale - no limit, that is, within our democratic system.

The economics of the media aside, an important underlying reason why we find ourselves in this situation is that our objective security position is weak. We read in the newspaper, for example, that a competent microbiologist could in theory create a devastating super-plague by modifying smallpox a little, and could do so without prior detection if supplied with stolen or saved smallpox. And now we have had a bioterrorism attack involving multiple murders from a criminal element connected to our own biodefense establishment, conducted for self-serving political purposes. Both of these are very new situations. It is not clear that technical capabilities, now available to states or terrorists, are strictly compatible with the social and political developments of the last few centuries. Overall this situation gives enormous political power to those who can authoritatively call the terrifying demons from the wings, or authoritatively calm them.

The second main reason the ideology of violence and its associated mass emotions are more dangerous than before is that we in the United States have never before attempted to manage the entire planet in quite this way. We are in the process of moving further along the "hard power" solution to the security problem, choosing forms of security enforcement that are extremely coarse-grained (e.g. at the level of entire states) and extremely violent. The technological dynamism that allows us this hubris empowers our enemies much more than it does us. It also makes our society physically and economically fragile with respect to asymmetric war. Attempting to impose U.S. desires on other countries will not be a finite project in time, space, or money, nor can it be a successful one, and it will bring us to grief in proportion to those ambitions.

Increased legitimization of violence by the state damages the possibility of its opposite, renewed investment in human dignity, which surely will be necessary, even if not sufficient, for security. As must by now be clear, this-or-that security program is not likely to be successful outside the context of a renewed commitment to justice. No inspection regime can be intrusive enough unless it is also part of a process that empowers societal verification based in specific social norms and laws - say, against weapons of mass destruction, necessarily applied to all countries. Paradoxically, it is this very softest power which is most hardheadedly necessary for security "after 9/11." Global surveillance, global domination, even global inspections, if resented in target countries and unaccompanied by a moral vision that emphasizes human dignity and self-determination, will not work, and will very likely feed on its own failure.

Does then the rising U.S. investment in violence, threatened violence, and the ideology of violence make overt progress in nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament impossible? Not really. But we need to clarify just what it is we are trying to do, and at the same time summon the moral force to deep, fundamental human values, not just offer ideas or expertise within our professional specialties.

What I principally mean is this: We work to prevent nuclear proliferation, to prevent proliferation of other weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and we also work on nuclear disarmament. But just below the surface, these goals often diverge. There are important differences in our approaches, not just in tactics or methods but also in goals and substance, the principal difference being just how tolerant we are of WMD in our own countries, especially here in the United States, the most powerful country in the world.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the central legal instrument in our field, set into law what was already necessary in politics and in logic: that a nonproliferation regime must be founded upon a norm of non-possession of nuclear weapons and a commitment, albeit vague as to time, to be rid of them. The requirement to achieve nuclear disarmament has been interpreted by the International Court of Justice to be a binding commitment that applies to all nuclear weapons states. As a ratified treaty, it is also binding U.S. law. The broad outlines of the policy question regarding disarmament have been settled, then, for more than three decades. Or have they?

In July of this year, staff at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and the Center for Defense Information (CDI) published a joint guest editorial, which said that nuclear weapons should only be used against, say, Iraq as "the option of last resort." In other words - and here we are in "the post-9/11 environment" - two major arms control organizations working in our field said it could be all right for the U.S. to use nuclear weapons - say, to prevent other countries from acquiring them or in reprisal for WMD use. What has changed since 9/11, in this case? Perhaps nothing, or perhaps there has been some drift toward legitimizing nuclear possession and even also nuclear use. I do not mean to pick on the FAS or CDI because the problem is much broader than just one or two organizations or authors. But surely we must be aware that many, perhaps most, members of the arms control community have quietly, perhaps without thinking about it in these terms, begun to walk away from the NPT.

Of course everyone supports norms of nonproliferation. It is the other side of the equation, where the U.S. government does not already spend billions of dollars of its own money each year, which we are shirking. Elite nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are simply not investing much in disarmament. Can the nonproliferation regime established under the NPT stand long without this investment?

Doubtless it is in regard to the WMD programs of one's own country, and not that of others, that one has the greatest standing and obligation to act affirmatively for nuclear disarmament. Given the governmental interest in other countries' WMD programs, disarmament is also the primary place where private philanthropy is uniquely needed. It is generous for private donors to support work that parallels that of multi-billion-dollar federal agencies, but is it really such a unique contribution?

Our collective nuclear agnosticism and programmatic neglect regarding the legitimacy of our own nuclear weapons have hurt us and, if not corrected, will hurt us more. We have been hurt by the doomed strategy, which sought a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) through the tactic of giving substantially more money, control, and freedom from oversight to the very institutions that had always opposed the treaty, namely the nuclear weapons laboratories. The purpose of the program being funded in the labs was to maintain and improve nuclear weapons forever, a goal that was in violation of explicit language in both the CTBT and the NPT and yet was supported by the arms control community. Sure enough, the labs then effectively argued that "forever" was a long time.

The strategy of giving money to one's political opponents in order to defeat them was never cognizable on the activist "street," which limited popular support for the treaty, and in the end it did not make enough sense in the Senate either. With elite NGO voices mostly long silent on the legitimacy of nuclear weapons themselves, there were some 13 senators who felt free to say, without any cost to their careers, that they were afraid that the CTBT would forestall development of new nuclear weapons by the U.S. No one reminded them of the NPT.

After the CTBT, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was the next to go. Many people worked very hard to save this treaty, but if nuclear weapons were legitimate, then most Americans could not understand why defenses against them should not be legitimate as well. The technical defense of the treaty was superb, in cases heroic, but it could not by itself prevail.

There can be little doubt that, as result of our collective practical agnosticism on this point, the legitimacy of nuclear weapons is now higher in the U.S. than it has been at any time since, say, the Cuban missile crisis. The environmental problems of the weapons complex are gradually moving off the front page, the older contaminated workers are dying, and the nation is preparing to build brand new weapons manufacturing facilities at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, in Albuquerque, plus whatever site wins the current competition to be the next Rocky Flats, a.k.a. the "Modern Pit Facility." There is essentially no protest from the arms control community on this issue, despite a massive and ultimately quite successful grassroots investment in foreclosing pit manufacturing capability in the 1980s and before. This new facility, if built, is all about what former Livermore director Johnnie Foster calls "end-to-end work" for the whole nuclear weapons complex. The time has long passed when one nuclear project could be played off against another, if indeed there ever was such a time. Time and history are sharpening our choices. How have events since 9/11 changed our work? We ourselves hold the answer to that question.


For the past ten years, Gregory Mello has been the director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a non-profit, research-oriented, nuclear disarmament organization based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. An engineer and regional economist by training, he is the author of several articles on aspects of the U.S. stockpile stewardship program. Mr. Mello and his colleagues at the Study Group have been instrumental in disclosing ongoing nuclear weapons design and deployment activities, and have worked to reform aspects of the U.S. nuclear weapons program through research, analysis, publication, litigation, public education, and lobbying. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University.