On the menu today: I would tell you about the new swing-state polls from the Wall Street Journal, but it’s just more of the same — they’re almost all close. Where Donald Trump or Kamala Harris leads, it’s by two percentage points or fewer, well within the margin of error, except for Nevada, where Trump leads by five percentage points. Instead, let’s turn our attention to the weightiest responsibility of the next president, “the button” and preventing any conflict around the globe from turning into a nuclear exchange.
The Nuclear Nobel
This morning, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese grassroots movement of atomic-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.” In its prize announcement, the Nobel committee emphasizes “one encouraging fact”:
No nuclear weapon has been used in war in nearly 80 years. The extraordinary efforts of Nihon Hidankyo and other representatives of the Hibakusha [the survivors] have contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo. It is therefore alarming that today this taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure.
Just about everyone agrees with the argument that nuclear weapons must never be used again. The question — with the planet and human civilization hanging in the balance — is how you achieve that goal.
When I was growing up, just five countries had (acknowledged) nuclear weapons: the U.S., the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China. Israel has never confirmed or denied the existence of its nuclear weapons, although every now and then some retired official will slip up and allude to the country’s possession of them.
India revealed it had a nuclear-weapons program in May 1998, and Pakistan revealed its own program a few weeks later. A. Q. Khan, widely called the “father of Pakistan’s nuclear program,” decided to have a bastard child of a nuclear program over in North Korea and put a lifetime’s worth of effort into attempting to further nuclear-weapons programs in Pyongyang, as well as in Iran and Libya. He was eventually caught, but the damage was already done:
An international effort led by British and American intelligence agencies uncovered parts of the Khan network at the start of the 2000s. It discovered a global web of scientists, front companies and factories that it believed had transferred weapons technology to Iran, Libya, South Africa and North Korea.
The great fear was that a terrorist organization such as Al Qaeda would buy or steal the makings of a nuclear weapon.
Mr. Tenet wrote that he confronted Mr. Musharraf in a New York hotel suite on Sept. 24, 2003, during a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.
“A.Q. Khan is betraying your country,” Mr. Tenet said he told the Pakistani leader. “He has stolen some of your nation’s most sensitive secrets and sold them to the highest bidders.” In his own memoir, Mr. Musharraf called this moment a profound embarrassment.
On Jan. 31, 2004, the government of Pakistan dismissed Dr. Khan. Shortly thereafter it announced that he had admitted helping the nuclear-weapons programs of Iran, North Korea and Libya. He confessed on national television four days later, saying his work was that of a rogue scientist and that his government never approved the sales or transfers of weapons technologies. The explanation was not widely accepted outside Pakistan.
If you put together a list of people who have made the world a more dangerous place since the end of the Cold War, Khan would be right up there alongside more familiar ones like Osama bin Laden, Qasem Soleimani, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Vladimir Putin. It’s enough to make you shout his name in anger.
The past generation’s efforts at nuclear nonproliferation have largely failed, at least when it mattered the most. No one would feel all that threatened by a Belgian nuclear-weapons program, or a Canadian one. The disarmament of Libya’s nuclear program counts as a genuine victory, and it is hard to believe the argument that Colonel Moammar Qaddafi’s decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction had nothing to do with his having watched a U.S.-led coalition topple Saddam Hussein’s regime because the West believed the Iraqi leader had WMDs. Nah, you’re right, fellas, I’m sure the timing of Qaddafi’s 180-degree turn was entirely coincidental. (Qaddafi spent his life raging against “Yankee imperialism,” but in the end, the Yankees got him anyway.)
But today, North Korea has an estimated 50 nuclear weapons, and Iran’s nuclear program has reached the point at which, “within about one week, Iran might be able to enrich enough uranium for five fission weapons.”
Only one country in world history has ever given up its nuclear arsenal: Ukraine. This was the result of a long and arduous process after the Cold War:
To solidify security commitments to Ukraine, the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances on December 5, 1994. A political agreement in accordance with the principles of the Helsinki Accords, the memorandum included security assurances against the threat or use of force against Ukraine’s territory or political independence. The countries promised to respect the sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine. . . .
Russia and the United States released a joint statement in 2009 confirming that the security assurances made in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum would still be valid after START expired in 2009. [Emphasis added.]
You can see how that turned out for the Ukrainians.
We don’t have any fantasy or science-fiction device that allows us to see into alternate timelines. But it is reasonable to conclude that if Ukraine had retained its nuclear weapons, Russia would have been much less likely to attempt an annexation of Crimea in 2014 or a full-scale invasion in 2022.
If Taiwan or South Korea had a nuke or two — or a couple dozen — the calculations for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or a North Korean invasion of or war against South Korea would become much more complicated.
South Korea is considered to be under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” of protection; Taiwan is not.
Taiwan nearly had a nuclear bomb. Back in the late 1980s, the island nation was allegedly one to two years away from developing a bomb when the U.S. scored a key defection: Chang Hsien-yi, deputy director at Taiwan’s Institute of Nuclear Energy Research, who had earlier been recruited by the CIA. Washington deemed a Taiwanese nuclear-weapons program too destabilizing and provocative to Beijing, and the resulting pressure from the U.S. government led Taiwan to shut it down.
Anyone who genuinely argues that unilateral nuclear disarmament will lead to a more peaceful world is operating with a geopolitical worldview akin to that of the Care Bears or My Little Pony.
The Nobel committee laments:
The nuclear powers are modernizing and upgrading their arsenals; new countries appear to be preparing to acquire nuclear weapons; and threats are being made to use nuclear weapons in ongoing warfare. At this moment in human history, it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.
Modernizing a national nuclear arsenal is not necessarily a bad thing and, in the current threat environment, is almost certainly a necessity for the United States. If Russia and China have the nuclear-weapon equivalent of the latest smartphone, and the U.S. has the nuclear-weapon equivalent of rotary-dial landlines, do you think that makes conflict more likely or less likely? What have we learned about what autocratic regimes do when they think they have a strategic advantage over a weaker foe?
In October 2023, the bipartisan U.S. Strategic Posture Commission released its comprehensive study of U.S. nuclear forces, the nation’s nuclear-armed foes, and geopolitical strategy. The commission recommended
fully and urgently executing the U.S. nuclear modernization Program of Record, . . . which includes replacement of all U.S. nuclear delivery systems, modernization of their warheads, comprehensive modernization of U.S. nuclear command, control, and communications, and recapitalizing the nuclear enterprise infrastructure at the DOD [Department of Defense] and DOE/NNSA [Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration].
The commission also noted that “the vision of a world without nuclear weapons, aspirational even in 2009, is more improbable now than ever. The new global environment is fundamentally different than anything experienced in the past, even in the darkest days of the Cold War.”
Note the Nobel committee’s lament: “New countries appear to be preparing to acquire nuclear weapons.” Well, again, the big question is what people are willing to do about it. In the list of nuclear-armed states above, you notice Iraq isn’t included. In 1981, the Israeli Air Force launched a strike on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in Osirak.
It was a controversial decision; U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim of Austria denounced the Osirak attack as a “clear contravention of international law.” The world later learned this was not the first time Kurt Waldheim had been hostile to a bunch of Jews.
The current president does not want a rerun of the Osirak attack, this time on Iranian soil:
President Joe Biden said Wednesday he will not support an Israeli strike on sites related to Tehran’s nuclear program in response to Iran’s missile attack on Israel.
“The answer is no,” Biden told reporters when asked if he would support such retaliation after Iran fired about 180 missiles at Israel on Tuesday.
If you want a hostile, autocratic, aggressive, unpredictable regime to not have nuclear weapons, somebody’s got to do something about it, and it’s gonna require, at minimum, secret computer-virus programs and the occasional remote-control machine gun meeting up with nuclear scientists.
These nuclear-weapon development programs aren’t going to stop themselves. Sanctions are not sufficient to prevent nuclear proliferation.
While conducting research for my next novel, I’ve run across a lot of reports, accounts, and studies indicating that our sanctions regimes against rogue states are leaky as a sieve. There are just too many avenues through which to move money, weapons, oil, sensitive technology, and anything else without authorities noticing.
Our sanctions on nuclear technology may hinder or frustrate regimes that want to build a nuclear arsenal, but they don’t halt the progress. They just make the task more complicated.
Telling the world about the devastation caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, as Nihon Hidankyo does, is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a sufficient deterrent. If you want a world where no one ever uses a nuclear weapon in conflict, you must keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the dangerous men who are reckless enough to contemplate using them.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, why Kamala Harris can’t “burn her San Francisco card” as one Golden State Democrat recommended.