Introduction

More than thirty years after the passage of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the record is mixed on the effectiveness of the non-proliferation regime. The end of the Cold War gave rise to a flurry of non-proliferation and arms control initiatives in the 1990s, including the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1994, the indefinite and unconditional extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1995, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996, and the ongoing negotiations for the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. Along with the declared U.S.-Russian commitments to deep cuts in their nuclear arsenals, these moves may be seen as contributing to the creation of a less dangerous world.

At the same time, however, there are both persistent and new threats to peace, particularly the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction through covert and overt means in potentially serious theaters of regional conflict. There are also uncertainties regarding the possible proliferation repercussions of the national missile defense system under consideration in the United States, the U.S. failure to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and Russia's mixed signals on nuclear weapons under the leadership of Vladimir Putin.

The United States Institute of Peace has attempted to make a limited but important contribution to furth ering the understanding of some of the most critical global and regional issues surrounding weapons of mass destruction and arms control, primarily through its grant program. Since its inception, the Institute has spent $2,190,372 on related topics, aimed at shaping intellectual debate and informing policymaking. This Peaceworks report highlights some of the recent key Institute-supported work in this connection, with a view to offering the most significant findings and policy-relevant conclusions.

The possible direct or indirect links between nuclear weapons and conflict, particularly as manifested by dangerous arms racing, unsustainable levels of militarization at the cost of social and economic development, nuclearization by unstable or failing state s, illicit trafficking in nuclear technology and materials, and safety lapses in nuclear weapons control, all have to be taken seriously whet her deterrence is believed to work or not. In addition, emerging challenges from chemical and biological weapons pose other dangers, particularly as they relate to terrorism.

The centerpiece of the nonproliferation regime, the NPT, continues to face a serious challenge in the wake of the 1998 nuclear tests by India and Pakistan. While the precise impact of India's and Pakistan's nuclear tests on the effectiveness of the NPT is open to interpretation since neither of the two countries is a signatory, the treaty's inability to respond to the new status of these countries in any meaningful way could call into question its relevance under changing conditions. Israel's undeclared nuclear status continues to pose a dilemma for the NPT as well. Critics of the NPT argue that the treaty not only is discriminatory but also has been overtaken by events. Its advocates counter that, although the NPT may be an imperfect instrument, it is the only instrument available.

While this particular debate, which is at once legal and political, is not likely to be settled anytime soon, the thrust of U.S.-led global non-proliferation efforts has diversified in recent years beyond the NPT, ranging from the military sanctions response in the case of Iraq to the more economic incentive-based approach taken toward North Korea. There is also an array of in formal and formal arrangements fashioned by the nuclear weapon states that seek to dampen proliferation through technology denial regimes and export controls such as the Missile Technology Control Regime and the Waassanaar Agreement, which superseded the Cold War-oriented Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM). With the end of the Cold War, the main targets of these measures are the so-called states of concern (formerly dubbed "rogue states"). Despite these efforts, there is a lingering feeling that current regimes are not fully add ressing some of the most critical issues such as the NPT holdouts, states of concern that are NPT signatories, and the double-edged sword of technology diffusion. The need for new thinking may be greater than ever.

In an effort to encourage innovative thinking, the United States Institute of Peace has supported projects that relate to the functional aspects of non-proliferati on, as well as those that are more regionally focused. The eleven projects featured in this report have been partially or fully funded by the United States Institute of Peace, but by no means do they constitute the entirety of the Institute's activity in this area, which comprises eighty-two grants over the past fourteen years.

These eleven projects have been selected chiefly on the basis of their timeliness and/or salience to current concerns, with the intent of contributing to ongoing debates in the field. The selection has also sought to achieve a regional balance. In addition, because the projects showcased here are drawn from successful grant awards, the spectrum of topics covered is inevitably limited. For example, although the debate over the national missile defense system is on the rise at the moment, there is at present no grant project that looks directly at this issue and its implications for arms control. This is likely to change in the future, particularly as projects that focus on security in East Asia and Russia consider the impact of U.S. missile defenses.

Generally, this publication has attempted to be as widely representative of the broader pool of grants as possible. It should also be recognized that the project summaries by the project directors in this Peaceworks report provide only a glimpse into the larger body of research being undertaken by them, much of which is likely to result in published articles and books or has already done so.

This report begins with a consideration of the varied approaches and tools that have been developed to meet the challenges posed by weapons of mass destruction. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, and Kevin O'Neill, deputy director, take stock of the overall achievements of non-proliferati on efforts and pronounce it a relative success story. They note that despite President John F. Kennedy's prediction that more than twenty countries would have the nuclear bomb by the 1970s, the reality is that only eight countries are currently known to possess nuclear weapons. Yet Albright and O'Neill caution against undue complacency, especially in the face of potential developments that could well throw off course, if not reverse, the apparent momentum for arms reductions. As they see it, two critical problems are looming in the background: Russia's ongoing economic crisis and its implications for Russia's security stance, and the national missile defense system being pondered in the United States that could stimulate other countries to add to their arsenals or to develop countermeasures.

John Simpson, head of the Programme to Promote Nuclear Nonproliferation (PPNN) at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, concentrates on the NPT, viewed by many as the linchpin of nonproliferation efforts to date. Simpson highlights several key weaknesses of the NPT structure, which he sees as deriving mostly from the lack of any permanent institutions for monitoring and verification and for providing secretariat and information services to member-states. In place of such institutions, a conference of the parties meets every five years for assessment and review. Simpson describes how PPNN attempts to brid ge this institutional gap through its publications and seminars. The author suggests that the work of the NPT Review Conference in May 2000, which held particular significance as the first Review Conference since the 1995 indefinite extension of the NPT, was especially aided by the preparatory work of PPNN.

Denial of technology to would-be proliferators is an approach that has been used extensively, but it poses a continuing dilemma for all sides given the "dual-use" (i.e., civilian and/or military) nature of advanced technologies. Richard Speier, formerly with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the U.S. Defense Department, was directly involved in the various phases of the multilateral talks that led to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). He takes a close-up look at the negotiations behind the MTCR, an informal agreement among key suppliers of missile technology that appears increasingly to be taking on the force of a treaty. Speier first focuses on the struggles within the U.S. government to hammer out an acceptable position before getting others to sign on and then distills a set of lessons for the development of new regimes in the future.

On technology transfers, Jean Pascal Zanders of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Sweden extends the discussion to biological weapons of mass destruction, specifically the structure of the future protocol to the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. This protocol will have to strike a balance between ensuring that states are not impeded from access to important technologies, on the one hand, and creating effective safeguards against illicit transfers, on the other hand. Zanders describes the difficulty of maintaining this fine balance under the twin imperatives of globalization and the biotechnology revolution in the contemporary period and suggests how new mechanisms of control may be designed.

Jean Krasno and James S. Sutterlin of United Nations Studies at Yale, Yale University, provide an account of the United Nations' unprecedented foray into physically eliminating a member-state's capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction through the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq. The authors look carefully at UNSCOM's information gathering and intelligence functions, which came under increasing scrutiny over time. They evaluate UNSCOM's experience and consider its utility as a new model for future nonproliferation action. They conclude that while UNSCOM was largely successful in achieving its objectives, it is highly doubtful that the constellation of forces that allowed UNSCOM to be created will be replicated anytime soon.

While weapons of mass destruction are a cause for concern in any context, their actual or potential presence in regions that are already plagued by volatility, undemocratic governance, and extremist tendencies creates a sense of added urgency. The second part of this Peaceworks report presents research and analysis conducted by grantees with regional expertise, who at times offer findings that do not necessarily accord with conventional wisdom.

The question of strategic stability in a nuclearized South Asia is closely analyzed by Shaun Gregory of the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, with particular attention given to the question of whether a sufficiently robust command and control system that meets the requirements of stable deterrence can be put into place in India and Pakistan. Gregory finds that the simplicity of the two countries' nuclear posture greatly reduces the demands on their command and control arrangements. For example, without the need for NATO-style complex targeting and precise escalation control inherent in a flexible response approach, India and Pakistan can fashion a limited system within their means. Nevertheless, Gregory puts forth a number of propositions from his research that suggest that neither Delhi nor Islamabad should be especially sanguine or relaxed about their respective nuclear arsenals.

The possibility of nuclear weapons in the Persian Gulf region continues to create a good deal of anxiety, and Geoffrey Kemp, director of the Regional Strategic Program at the Nixon Center, constructs several scenarios for the future of Iran's nuclear weapons capability, with an eye toward how the regional and international environm ents might interplay with Iranian domestic politics in determining the direction of policy. Kemp points out that Iran's regional threat perceptions, particularly its fears about U.S., Israeli, and Iraqi military potential, which are critical in driving its nuclear policy, are likely to continue no matter who is in power in Tehran. One of Kemp's main conclusions is that a political rapprochement between the United States and Iran is likely to provide the "breathing space" for any regime in Iran to seriously reconsider the benefits of exercising a nuclear option.

Russia has been a key conduit of nuclear and missile technology to the developing world, including regions of instability, and the issue of Russia's evolving export policies on sensitive technologies is taken up by Vladimir A. Orlov, founder and director of the Moscow-based Center for Policy Studies in Russia (PIR Center). Orlov assesses Russia's declaratory export policies against actual practice, with the aim of finding ways to narrow the gaps that exist. A major obstacle, Orlov believes, is that in the transition from a command economy to a competitive market system, Russia is viewing the defense technology export market as one of its few comparative economic advantages. He suggests that weak enforcement of the law, shortages of technical equipment, and a lack of a nonproliferati on culture at most enterprises together work against the effectiveness of export restrictions that do exist. In addition, Orlov notes that at the broader level one of the most difficult problems to tackle is the brain drain from Russia.

As a member of the nuclear club, China has tended to send mixed signals about its participation in regional and global nuclear arms control, as exemplified by its ambivalent behavior during the CTBT negotiations. Alastair Iain Johnston, professor of government at Harvard University, explains China's shift from resistance to ultimate acceptance of the CTBT by applying a sociological approach rather than the conventional realist model. Johnston portrays Chinese strategies vis-a-vis the CTBT as being consistent with China's sensitivity to social pressures affecting issues of reputation, status, honor, and prestige; had China been driven purely by strategic arguments, it would not have accepted the CTBT, which is likely to freeze Chinese warhead modernization at a stage that could impinge on its future refinement. Socialization into the international community then may be seen as having greater import than believed, even when ostensibly vital security interests are at stake. One critical but uncertain challenge that tends to concern the public and policymakers alike is the possibility of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) falling into the hands of terrorists. A less public but no less acute problem relates to the security and control of the stockpile and flow of weapons-grade fissile material in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The third part of this Peaceworks report considers the prospects of these emerging but ambiguous threats.

Gary Bertsch and Igor Khripunov at the University of Georgia paint a grim picture of current Russian safeguards of surplus nuclear material, noting that in the past the system had relied heavily on "guards, gates, and guns," as well as on the high prestige accorded to workers, in order to ensure that material was not illegally diverted. The economic upheavals beginning in the 1990s, together with the shrinking of the country's social safety net, have created an entirely different environment, one marked by low morale and social unrest at nuclear facilities. Bertsch and Khripunov trace the path stolen material might take in Russia, from nuclear complexes to customs services and overseas, and find little room for confidence in the ability of legal and physical safeguards to halt the theft of nuclear material. The authors argue that the challenge of controlling Russia's surplus fissile material should be a global concern and call for greater foreign assistance, especially from the United States, in meeting that challenge.

Jessica Eve Stern's research on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction suggests that the debate on this issue needs to move away from the two extreme ends of the spectrum: the optimism that terrorists will never use such weapons and the pessimism that large-scale attacks are inevitable. Stern, based at Harvard University, considers several criteria that groups that are candidates for using unconventional weapons must possess and finds that the motivational, organizational, and technical constraints against the use of WMD are eroding. Yet WMD attacks have been rare, and Stern offers a number of possible explanations. She concludes that terrorists are most likely to rely on low-tech operations and assassinations rather than on the catastrophic attacks that we worry most about.

This overview is only indicative of the broad backing that the United States Institute of Peace has provided to scholars and policy analysts across the world who grapple with the seemingly intracta ble but vital problem of weapons of mass destruction. The Institute believes that a realistic and dispassionate understanding of the issue, which tends to stoke deep fears and passions, is a prerequisite for developing effective policies and countermeasures. Despite the enormity of the challenge, it seems imperative that such responses be both consistent with changing realities and acceptable to the larger international community. The primary objective of this Peaceworks is to report on some of the ways in which the Institute is playing a part in shaping the outcomes of this debate.