Regional Approaches to Proliferation Prevention -- Program Rationale -- The Stanley Foundation

Program Rationale: The Realities of Nuclear Proliferation since 1970

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime and its associated export control groups (Nuclear Suppliers Group and Zangger Committee) have an impressive record in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons technologies, materials, and components since its entry-into-force in 1970. In the 1990s, the NPT was further supplemented by the multilateral Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), which seeks to deny missile technologies and components to states that may have weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, as well as the Chemical Weapons Convention, which saw the creation of the global Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for verification and interpretation of the treaty for all members.

Since negotiating efforts for the NPT began in the 1960s, the treaty's creators and world leaders, including experts in the United States, have pictured the regime as applying equally to all countries, and a mechanism to prevent a massive spread of fully developed arsenals across the globe in all regions. NPT creators and foreign policy practitioners have assumed that the uncontrolled spread of weapons designs, fissile material production, reprocessing technologies, and advanced metallurgical industrial processes would inevitably lead to an untold number of nuclear powers on every continent on the globe. The treaty framework, as it was negotiated, implicitly embodied the "realpolitik" assumption that all states in the international system would pursue and acquire whatever advanced form of weapons technologies that they could feasibly attain, limited only by individual resource constraints and by the preventive efforts of other states. In this view, the "proliferation threat" was undifferentiated, applying not only to all states with serious bilateral disputes but also to countries without any real security threats on their borders. Because of this understanding of the proliferation threat, leaders and bureaucrats at the national level of policy, especially in the United States, attempted to implement the global regime by focusing almost entirely on technology export controls geared toward all nations. This version of the causes of and remedies for nuclear proliferation continues to exist at the highest levels of US policy even today.

However, this undifferentiated view of the proliferation threat was seriously flawed—something that is now increasingly being recognized. There are very specific and longstanding disputes in certain "hot" regions of the developing world that have defied the goals and methods of the regime ever since the treaty's inception. In three of these regions—the Middle East, South Asia, and Southern Africa—the treaty was already failing from the very moment it entered into force. In Northeast Asia and the Korean peninsula, partial failure of the regime was brought about in the late 1980s by the end of the Cold War and North Korea's increasing isolation after losing its only major power suppliers of economic and military resources, mainland China and the Soviet Union. For all of these cases, the undifferentiated view of the proliferation problem is now breaking down as the "opaque" nuclear programs of various countries in these particular conflict-torn regions are becoming publicly open and even officially recognized by those countries' leaders in open defiance of the NPT framework.

A quick look at the regions in question will help define and explain the purpose, justification, and assumptions of the RAPP program. In the Middle East, Israel's leaders had already decided to acquire a nuclear arsenal in the early 1950s and were well on the road to achieving this goal by the mid-1960s. Israel is now widely believed to have had a working nuclear warhead as early as 1970, the very year the NPT entered into force. Some expert policy analyses now put the total number of weapons in Israel's arsenal at anywhere from 200 to 400 munitions. This arsenal is strongly believed to include not only "strategic" warheads for delivery by airplanes and missiles but also "tactical" munitions in the form of nuclear mines, nuclear artillery shells, and airplane-delivered bombs. In turn, this "opaque" arsenal is often directly connected to the further proliferation of chemical and biological weapons (or weapons research programs) to Syria, Iran, Egypt, and Iraq. In part because of Israel's increasingly recognized nuclear capability, Iraq avidly pursued its own nuclear weapons capability, and Iran is believed by US intelligence agencies to be pursuing research and development programs toward this same end. Syria is believed to be pursuing both chemical and biological weapons research and development programs because of the Israeli nuclear threat. Many Arab and Persian Gulf states insist they will not ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention unless and until Israel accedes to the NPT, a reality that has weakened both regimes simultaneously in this volatile region.

In South Asia, India and Pakistan have never been signatories of the NPT. China's invasion and annexation of large swaths of territory in India's northeast frontier region in 1962, coupled with China's following successful nuclear test in 1964, directly fueled a committed nuclear research program in India that had weapons applications. China's aid of Pakistan in its 1965 war with India, and the fear of such aid in the 1971 war, led to an Indian decision to manufacture and explode a nuclear warhead in 1974. In turn, this Indian nuclear test, coupled with Pakistan's complete defeat in 1971 and its loss of eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh) due to Indian military intervention, directly led to a Pakistani decision to acquire its own arsenal. From the period of 1974 to 1990, both India and Pakistan steadily pursued the buildup of nuclear weapons materials, components, technology, and human expertise, and throughout the 1990s, successive Indian administrations regularly revisited the decision of whether to conduct more committed nuclear tests for the purpose of fielding an arsenal. This decision was finally made in 1998, and the resulting series of tests have potentially given India the ability to manufacture and deploy nuclear artillery shells, tactical bombs for short-range missiles and aircraft, and "strategic" warheads for longer-range missiles for possible use against China. Pakistan followed suit with its own tests in 1998 and is potentially capable of mating a "strategic" warhead to a missile that could cover nearly all the territory of India.

In the 1980s, with its economy failing and its military burden higher than ever, North Korea purposely set out to create a latent nuclear weapons infrastructure in the form of a comprehensive nuclear energy program. It constructed its own plutonium reprocessing capabilities and slowly acquired warhead designs and technology from its primary benefactors, China and the Soviet Union. Eventually, North Korea's worst fears were realized. As the Cold War wound down, China and Russia left it to fend for itself. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, North Korea found itself lacking in economic viability and surrounded by Western-allied or Western-friendly nations. Because of these extremely worrisome geopolitical trends, the nuclear weapons option apparently became much more salient as a foreign policy and national security instrument. North Korea became increasingly unwilling to cooperate wih the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the setup of an inspection regime for its reprocessing capabilities.

The long negotiation process with the IAEA finally failed, and North Korea's refusal to allow inspections turned into a full-fledged crisis in mid-1992 and nearly led to a US decision for more troop deployments and increased readiness for war on the peninsula. Only through the concerted diplomatic intervention of individual nations—primarily the United States, China, Japan, and South Korea—was North Korean rejection of the NPT and escalation to war avoided. Largely through US bartering (with help from China and South Korea), the Agreed Framework was created, a non-NPT example of a regionally based political, economic, and military confidence-building framework that took into account North Korea's energy needs and security worries.

South Africa is often listed as an NPT success by global and national leaders, but in reality it was a complete failure by the 1980s. The white minority government decided to manufacture weapons during the 1970s with assistance from Israel, test them in the late 1970s, and stockpile roughly six nuclear devices under strict apartheid control. The reason South Africa eventually "de-nuclearized" was not because of the constraints and obligations of the NPT regime, but rather because of wholesale change in government ideology and ruling ethnic composition, based on a domestic political deal worked out between the Apartheid regime and the leaders of the majority opposition. Once this complete political transformation had taken place, incessant border conflicts with all of South Africa's neighbors ceased, and the multilateral external threat from other hostile nations virtually disappeared. This allowed South Africa to join the NPT regime for the first time.

Finally, Taiwan and South Korea remain troubling potential candidates for "nuclearization." Both nations have repeatedly pursued nuclear weapons-related infrastructure during the 1970s and 1980s, and only through strenuous and covert US opposition did successive regimes in both countries decide to forgo the option. Furthermore, a majority or large plurality of retired South Korean generals have said in policy polls that if the Korean peninsula were finally reunited, they would favor an independent Korean nuclear capability, presumably because of the nascent threat from China and possibly also Japan and Russia.

All of these troubling cases have clearly demonstrated that a firm regional approach is needed to complement the largely successful global NPT framework. The international community has done little coordinated, coherent work on how to move forward with this agenda, beyond admonishing the offending non-NPT nuclear states in resolutions at UN forums and NPT PrepComs and conferences. New policy suggestions and practices are needed.