Fatal Choice: Nuclear Weapons and the Illusion of Missile Defense by Richard Butler

From the Publisher

We continue to face a choice with respect to nuclear weapons - either to move safely towards their elimination or to remain their victim. A forty-year effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons is breaking down, and the likely acquisition of these weapons by terrorist groups is growing. In Fatal Choice, Richard Butler, a well-known and respected voice on the subject of nuclear weapons, argues that we are poised on the verge of a second and much more threatening nuclear arms race than the one experienced throughout the Cold War. This threat is clearly reflected in nuclear weapons development by India, Pakistan, Iraq, and North Korea. The revival by the Bush administration of missile defense will not deal with the problem but worsen it. Butler outlines the steps that can be taken to give effect to the right choice on nuclear weapons. Now included in the preface is a discussion of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.

Publishers Weekly

Butler, an experienced and well-respected advocate of nuclear disarmament (he headed the U.N. Special Commission for disarming Iraq), offers a brief but comprehensive survey of nuclear weapons in today's world. He aims to make the available policy choices "understood by plain people in plain language." Butler first explains the regime of treaties and doctrines (such as mutual assured destruction) developed since the inauguration of the nuclear age in 1945. Given their horrific power, nuclear weapons have always been the most feared of the world's weapons of mass destruction. In response, as the author explains, nearly all nations have supported eliminating nuclear weapons, or at least preventing further proliferation. These goals have had only partial success, and currently Iran, Iraq and North Korea are seeking to join India, Pakistan and Israel in the nuclear club. As to the future, Butler warns against passive resignation to nuclear weapons as a permanent fixture of international life. He believes the world can rid itself of these weapons and proposes a program to accomplish this. The most striking feature of Butler's plan is forming a Council on Weapons of Mass Destruction, working parallel to the U.N.'s Security Council. Butler's council would have sufficient conventional military forces to take effective action against nations violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. International action of this kind, not the National Missile Defense advocated by the Bush administration which Butler sees as self-defeating forms the core of this thought-provoking argument against nuclear weapons. (Jan.) Forecast: Readers concerned with world affairs will find this more timely than ever, if they manage to catch word of it from the author's three-city tour and radio satellite tour. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

For over 35 years, Butler has worked to reduce the threat of nuclear disaster that has hung over the world for half a century. He served as the Australian ambassador to the United Nations and more recently as head of the U.N. Special Commission to disarm Iraq from 1997 to 1999. Based on his experiences in Iraq, he wrote The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Crisis of Global Security. Now, in a relatively short book, he summarizes the last 35 years of arms control efforts by the West and describes his role in struggling to craft an agreement among the small community of nuclear powers to restrict significantly the number of these dangerous weapons. Butler's book concludes with a call for the establishment of a Council on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which would be led by the United States and eventually result in serious arms reduction. In these times of terrorism at home and abroad, Butler's work resonates with the reminder that things could get much worse if we don't act. Recommended for most collections. Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The literal, political, and moral abomination of nuclear weapons are made abundantly clear by a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq-and a longtime fixture on the nuclear-disarmament scene, who suggests actions that would move us toward their eradication.

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The Problem of
Nuclear Weapons

Three years ago, I took a rest stop at Bombay, now according to the canons of Hindu nationalism renamed Mumbai. I was en route to New York, via Australia, from talks in Baghdad, held in my capacity as chairman of the UN Special Commission to disarm Iraq. I had chosen to stop in India because of my long engagement with and affection for Indian culture. I would have only one day, but I had thought that even a brief contact with the architecture, sounds, colors, and food of India would refresh my enduring affair with one of the greatest of human cultures. The talks in Baghdad had been hostile and tense. This heightened my expectations of my one day of indulgence in India.

    As I waited for my bag at the luggage carousel in the airport, I already felt the excitement of arrival. I was there, at last, in India, after an absence of some five years. My reverie was broken by a voice off to one side—"You are that wretched Butler."

    I looked around and saw an Indian man approaching me, pointing at me angrily. He was well dressed, forty-something, and apparently sober. My immediate thought was that I was about to get the "why are you persecuting the poor Iraqis" speech, once again. It proved to be not as simple as that.

    "Why are you so hateful of India," he demanded. I asked him what he had in mind and got my answer—the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

    Almost two years earlier,as Australian ambassador to the United Nations, in New York, I had tabled the treaty text in the General Assembly, where it had been adopted overwhelmingly. This had defeated India's earlier blockage of the treaty in Geneva and had involved several very public clashes between me and senior Indian officials. These actions had been widely publicized in India, including newspaper and television pictures of me as the main antagonist of India.

    I tried to explain to the man that I was not an enemy of India, quite the opposite. That was why I was in Mumbai, on my own time, with no official duties.

    He then explained to me, in terms as clear as any professional negotiator, that it was deeply wrong that the United States, for example, could insist that nuclear weapons were essential to the preservation of its security but refuse to allow the same to India.

    "Are we not threatened?" he asked. "We have a long border with China. It has nuclear weapons. It has attacked India in the past. It has occupied Tibet. Why should we not be able to defend ourselves against China?"

    I told him that the test ban treaty was a part of measures to control and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons, something I had understood all Indian leaders since Mahatma Gandhi had supported. It was not directed against India, as such.

    It was, of course, a touch fatuous to think that this airport argument would lead anywhere or solve anything. Indeed, my bag had by then arrived, and I wanted to be on my way into the city. Its end was, however, determined by my new friend.

    "I will not be detaining you any further. I am not a ruffian. But you must know that this nuclear colonialism will not stand. India's security is as important as America's. We fought for our independence from the British just as America did. We will defend it."

    In response to my last question, he said he was a shopkeeper, selling textiles and fine saris. The world he saw from his storefront had indelible features, including historic inequity between sovereign states. The latest form of this was expressed in ownership of nuclear weapons.

    In addition to its enduring interest in reproduction and the complex urges it engenders, humankind has shown and recorded a similarly deep interest in seeking to understand and, more important, characterize the period of history in which it is presently living. Both impulses search for the meaning of human life and seek to affirm it. The most recurrent characterization of history is that of modernism—the claim that our stage of development is the most advanced, the most evolved and that, specifically, we are liberated from the ignorance and error that shackled those who came before.

    The contention that the stage in which we currently find ourselves is modern is factual. How could it be otherwise? That this self-evident truth is repeated, as a mantra, and infused with finality reveals both a deep inner need and a damaging error.

    That inner need is to replace chaos or confusion with order. The error is that of passivity. These impulses are manifested in the attempts, repeated perennially, to identify an organizing principle of history.

     On the biological level, an example of this is the Darwinian conceptualization of natural selection and survival of the fittest. In the realm of human psychology, there are the competing ideas of the individual-centered development of personality identified by Freud and those of genetic determinism or behaviorism espoused by others such as Hans Eysenck and B. F. Skinner.

    Explanations for the puzzling question of why some parts of the world became industrialized and others did not range from emphasis on the role of the climate, hot versus cold, under which different groups of humans have lived, to varying circumstances of access to metals, food, or water. There are also theories about exposure to disease as an explanation for the rise and fall of civilizations and empires.

    Marx provided an explanation of history based on economic determinism and social class. Other theories assert that history has been determined by racial differences, the drive to acquire and exercise power, or the balance of military power. Of course, theological explanations for why things are as they are abound and are among the oldest of all explanations for human events and history itself.

    The last century came to be dominated by science and the belief in the measurement of everything, following Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and the other inventors of modern physics. This outlook prevails today. Indeed, it has been extended in ways its originators could scarcely have imagined.

    Perhaps above all, such theories are often glitteringly wrapped by their protagonists in the most seductive of all overarching rationales—the claim that what is occurring at any given time is simply the outcome of "human nature," a concept that is both the least precisely mapped and the most enduring of historicisms.

    Doubtless there are important elements of truth, and certainly fascination, in all such theories. The list just given is minuscule in comparison with the entire catalogue of various interpretations of the meaning of human history. Much more important, however, than the substantive content of such interpretations of history is the major error that this repeated act of interpretation can lead to in practical terms. It is resignation in the face of what is seen to be the inner mechanism of history: the view that there is nothing we can do about certain events, trends, or circumstances because they are determined by this mechanism, that this inner mechanism determines our human fate.

    Today, this error is on majestic display with respect to the justifications given for the existence of nuclear weapons, devices that have the ability to destroy all human life. It is majestic because all the features of the drive to make order out of chaos are in play: historicism, misrepresentation of facts, passivity, and resignation to our fate. This hardly makes ours the most modern of all times, though obviously it is. It puts us on par with those who insisted to Columbus that the earth is flat, and they were, of course, that era's most modern of gentlemen and scholars.

    What is most shocking about the various arguments that conclude that nuclear weapons are a given, embedded in the very nature of things, is that these weapons are the singular human invention capable of destroying the earth and all that lives on it. Our history deserves better than a resignation to them or an acceptance that we are compelled by nuclear weapons to a danse macabre.

    These speculations about the nature of things also raise, whether intended or not, the fundamental issue of the relationship between science and the public good. This can be summed up in a question: Is the fact that something can be invented and then made reason enough for it to be made? Some argue that the answer is always in the affirmative, but, again, this has not always been the case in practice. Judgments of whether a given technology serves a useful purpose, and whether or not it is ethical, have been key elements in considering the practical applications of research. The crucial connection between scientific possibilities and human values is now at center stage in the debate over the future applications of modern biology and genetics. And it has always been at issue in nuclear science.

    The salient facts of nuclear weapons are clear. They do not exist in nature. They were invented by humans. The decisions to make, deploy, and use nuclear weapons are made by individuals. It is possible to decide to do none of these things. The argument that we cannot disinvent what has already been invented is impeccable. It is typically deployed, however, in a deeply misleading way by implying absolute involuntarism—that we are compelled to make what we know how to make. There is no such compulsion. There are abundant examples of decisions not to make or use dangerous objects or substances precisely because they are too dangerous.

    A crucial example exists in the forty-some countries that could make nuclear weapons but have decided not to do so and have promised never to do so under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). One country, South Africa, made nuclear weapons but later disassembled and destroyed them. South Africa is now a non-nuclear-weapon state under the NPT. It clearly knows how to make nuclear weapons; it made them. It has committed itself never to do so again.

    The assertion that nuclear weapons are a permanent, ubiquitous feature of human life is an opinion, not a fact. To represent it as the latter is deeply misleading. All that can be said, as a matter of fact, is that they have existed for fifty-six years. It is also a fact that five of the eight countries that possess them have formally declared that it is their policy to eliminate them. The other three are ambiguous on the issue.

    An issue on which there is no lack of clarity is the danger posed by nuclear weapons. Yet, that danger has been continually misrepresented. The key misrepresentation asserts that nuclear weapons simply cause a larger type of explosion than is typically yielded by conventional explosives. This is wrong in a number of important ways.

    Nuclear weapons do not simply produce an explosion. They also release radioactivity, the human and environmental consequences of which are enduring and devastating. From the beginning of their development until today, the owners of nuclear weapons have sought to at least obscure, and in some instances deny and hide, this fact.

    Because of their enormous power, nuclear weapons have become the subject of an arms race. States have acquired greater numbers of more powerful nuclear weapons in the belief that this will assure other states that a nuclear attack would be met by a devastating response. This posture of deterrence, it is argued, ensures that nuclear weapons will not be used. Their only use, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which notably was against a non-nuclear-weapon state, occurred when nuclear deterrence was not yet relevant.

    It must be recognized that deterrence is and remains a theory, the truth of which necessarily has only a negative proof—that an event did not occur. This is hardly a sound basis for the long-term management of life. It would be more than a pathetic conclusion to the organization of human affairs if, one day, we had to admit that the theory had been wrong. This would not be a merely intellectual moment. It would be a disaster.

    There have been, and are today, arms races in conventional weapons, and those hold dangers, too. In pointing this out, the apologists for nuclear weapons sometimes remark that it does not matter much to a person how they are killed, just that they are or are not. Even this bitter observation is not true. To die slowly of radiation sickness is to die a particular death that would matter to that affected person.

    Apart from their hard-nosed, realist tenor, such statements seek to draw attention away from the mass destructive, indiscriminate, and radioactive capability of nuclear weapons, which ensure that their use would bring death and damage on a far wider and more enduring scale than conventional weapons. This mass destructive characteristic of nuclear weapons places them in a special category. The line between combatant and non-combatant, which according to both law and principle should be drawn, is removed.

    The evolution of the theory of deterrence—of national security based on the maintenance of a specific array and configuration of nuclear weapons—has led to a situation in which the major nuclear-weapon states, the United States and Russia, have put at risk all humankind and the viability of the earth in the name of their own security. The notion that the protection of a given civilization can justify jeopardizing all civilization defies logic and should be seen as morally repugnant.

    In response to this grave contradiction, the proponents of nuclear-weapon-based national security argue that this threat to all civilization and the planet is greatly exaggerated; they claim that they have it all under control. They point to the safety, communications, and command-and-control systems that have been established for nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, claiming that they are reliable and ensure that the truly dreadful would never happen. They say that the fact that it has not already happened is evidence for the validity of their claim.

    The least that could be expected from both the national security standpoint and the public interest is that there would, indeed, be such systems of control, and clearly much has been invested in this being so. This is neither remarkable nor is it a set of circumstances that should attract gratitude.

    History re-enters the picture at this point. Does what we know of the past justify faith in such control systems, when the there is so much at stake and the possibility of accident, miscalculation, and criminal or insane behavior is known to be recurrent? Clearly not. Given these facts and the unique and intolerable dangers posed by nuclear weapons, the more rational conclusion would be to seek to address the danger through the removal of nuclear weapons rather than to rely on the idea that control over them will never fail or that there will never be an accident, miscalculation, or terrorists use of them.

    There is the contention that there would be danger in the elimination of nuclear weapons, elementally, because of the notion that what has been invented cannot be disinvented, and it would be foolish to think otherwise. The usual extensions of this distressingly passive theory include the following: We might want to dispose of our nuclear weapons, but others may not or may cheat. That is, they might maintain them secretly. Others will always aspire to obtain nuclear weapons, especially rogues or terrorists. We would expose ourselves to great danger, or at least blackmail, if we eliminated our nuclear weapons.

    These are real concerns, and the work to address them would be complex, indefinite in duration, and not easily assured of success. But these arguments and concerns fall short of an abiding reality: Absent action by the key nuclear-weapon states to reduce their holdings of nuclear weapons, the impetus for others to acquire the same weapons, and thus increase the overall dangers posed by them, will never decline. In fact, it will grow, as indeed it has in the past and is today.

    The problem of nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons. Any serious attempt to address the problems they pose must focus on their very existence. The issues of their control and management are subsidiary. And as long as they exist anywhere, they will spread. The gentleman at Mumbai airport made this clear.

    Prevention of that wider dispersal of nuclear weapons—nonproliferation—has been a central goal of the nuclear-weapon states and an overwhelming number of others for thirty years. Work to that end has been remarkably effective, especially given the constant pressures toward proliferation that have existed.

    But this non-proliferation objective is by no means secure. Overt proliferation has occurred in Israel, India, and Pakistan, and covert programs for the acquisition of nuclear weapons have been under way in Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Iraq may already have succeeded in acquiring such a capability. It is to be expected that other countries have either conducted relevant work on nuclear weapons acquisition or are contemplating it. This is to say nothing of the real, but essentially incalculable, order of magnitude of possible acquisition of nuclear weapons by terrorist groups.

    These dangers need to be addressed. The vital question is by what means. The choices range from political and technical work to strengthen proliferation controls and make them universal on one end of the spectrum to military action to remove weapons development facilities on the other, or a combination of these measures.

    An approach to this task is suggested later in this book. What is important at this point is to identify the problem of the further proliferation of nuclear weapons. It demands a solution. At root is a debate about whether control over proliferation is possible and, if so, to what degree. Or, if it is not, then is the solution, as the United States now intends, to build new measures of defense against nuclear weapons?

    Control over the spread of nuclear weapons can be achieved. The means of control are available. These include restrictions over access to the relevant materials and technologies, inspection and other means of monitoring relevant activities, and the political and legal instruments to clarify ambiguous situations and remedy transgressions of non-proliferation norms if so required. Such control can be exercised if it is decided to do so, with determination.

    Preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons is supported by the overwhelming majority of states. By their actions, these states refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons themselves and seek to ensure through their relations with others, as in export controls, that proliferation does not occur.

    What has been less reliable is the willingness of the nuclear-weapon states to take action toward both reducing their arsenals and preventing proliferation, by denying access by others to nuclear-weapons technology and materials as well as enforcing non-proliferation norms.

    If the nuclear-weapon states fail to act in these ways, nuclear weapons will undoubtedly proliferate. A specific expression of this failure is the claim, principally made by advocates for the construction of defenses against the newly acquired missile and nuclear-weapons capabilities of other states, that the non-proliferation arrangements are unreliable and cannot be verified, and therefore defensive action must be taken.

    The resignation involved in this assertion is extreme. It implies that a law of cheating is both given and insuperable. But there is no such law, especially with respect to our purported impotence in the face of criminal behavior. What is at issue are actions and decisions that are entirely possible and lie within the reach of the actors involved. States can decide to break the rules and acquire nuclear weapons or not, and others can decide to prevent it or remedy proliferation as it occurs or not. None of this is written in the stars or dictated by an iron law of history or "human nature." It is all within the ability of humankind, of real people.

    The idea of defending against threats, whether those imposed by missiles and nuclear weapons or by other sources, has a clear basis in logic and law. The former requires little explanation; the latter is codified both nationally and internationally.

    In the case of nuclear weapons, however, the decision to build a national defensive shield raises serious issues, apart from the obviously enormous ones of the effectiveness of such a shield and its cost in both absolute and relative terms. These other fundamental issues reveal the elemental view of the world of nuclear weapons—the paradigm—that is in play.

    The established paradigm, to which the United States has previously given assent, can be summarized in the following terms. Nuclear weapons deeply threaten national security and international stability. The United States must therefore take action on three fronts: (1) maintain a quantity and quality of nuclear weapons able to deter their use against the United States, that is, a nuclear deterrent capability directed principally, although not exclusively, at Russia; (2) ensure that the threat posed by nuclear weapons does not expand through the emergence of new nuclear-weapon states or nuclear-armed terrorism, and for this purpose, strongly support the NPT and associated agreements; and (3) reduce the size of the problem through arms control and disarmament agreements. In the latter context, the United States would work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons as the overall solution, a commitment required of all nuclear-weapon states as a mainstay of the nonproliferation treaty.

    A new paradigm is now being asserted in the context of the proposed national missile defense system. It maintains that non-proliferation arrangements are no longer reliable, and it remains silent on any policy designed to address this concern. It calls for the building of defenses against the newly acquired weapons capability by rogue states and for further reductions in the strategic nuclear weapons of both Russia and the United States, but it is silent on the issue of elimination of nuclear weapons, even though that has been the declared policy of all administrations up to the present one. The United States will continue to rely on nuclear weapons as the fundament of its national security.

    This new paradigm expresses resignation from the job of strengthening non-proliferation arrangements, and it attempts to assign the blame for this to the treaties themselves, as if they had a life of their own—claiming that they are "hopelessly flawed." This resignation ensures that they remain flawed and places the specific protection of U.S. security vastly above any action by the United States to alter the security or threat environment. In fact, this paradigm abandons the U.S. commitment to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons and signals instead a national policy of indefinite reliance on nuclear weapons for protecting the security of the United States.

    The United States is not alone among the nuclear-weapon states in proclaiming a commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons while plainly behaving in the opposite direction. This hypocrisy on the part of the nuclear-weapon states is proving to be extremely dangerous. It will ultimately fail.

    The major predictable outcome of this paradigm shift in the thinking of the U.S. administration is to ensure that the dire circumstances cited as its justification, the clear outlines of which are only imprecisely discernible, will become a palpable reality. Existing nuclear-weapon states, particularly Russia and China, will not accept that the new U.S. defensive shield will have no impact on them. They will build new nuclear weapons in response. The states already on the way to acquiring nuclear weapons will continue down that path, possibly assisted by nuclear-weapon states, and they will be joined by others. The world will enter a new period of nuclear weapons development—a second nuclear arms race. It will do this because the strongest power, the United States, declared itself too weak, selfish, or frightened.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from FATAL CHOICE by Richard Butler. Copyright © 2001 by Richard Butler. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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