The global project to limit the spread of nuclear weapons has been remarkably successful since the world’s nonproliferation architecture took shape in the 1960s, several nuclear policy experts told a recent Harvard Kennedy School audience. But they sounded much more skeptical about chances for containing the deadliest weapons in years ahead—and their concerns reached beyond nuclear bombs.
Future arms control will demand more creative policy approaches and determined diplomacy to contend with fast-changing weaponry and technology, panelists argued. China’s rise as a nuclear power evidently marching toward strategic weapons parity with the United States and Russia further complicates the security landscape now that the world has no major strategic arms limitation treaties in force. The last U.S.-Russia nuclear arms accord, New START, expired in February.
Longtime nuclear scholar Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and founding dean of the Kennedy School, reminded the audience at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum of the world’s basic achievement in arms control. Nine countries had nuclear weapons in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy warned that the number could soon grow to 15 or 20 or 25 nuclear-armed nations—nuclear anarchy—if nothing was done. Today, 60 years later, just nine countries have nuclear arsenals.
But Allison said the constraints on proliferation face multiple risks. “I think we will see, unfortunately, that the combination of the way the world has evolved and the way we’ve played our hand will—in the absence of something as dramatic as what Kennedy actually inspired—lead over the next decade to a point where nine will not be the number at the end of the next decade,” Allison said.
Matthew Bunn, the James R. Schlesinger Professor of the Practice of Energy, National Security, and Foreign Policy who directs the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs’ Project on Managing the Atom, the Kennedy School’s locus for nuclear policy research, said China’s nuclear arms surge “is a huge challenge over the next decade,” with no signs of restraint. “The conversation among many who are involved in nuclear decisions in Washington is not about what’s the next round of reductions; it’s about should we leave the New START limits behind and start building up our nuclear forces to respond. So I think there is a very serious danger that we’re going to be in a new—probably more slowly moving, but still a new—nuclear arms competition.”
“Meanwhile we’ve got President Trump announcing this Golden Dome missile defense, which leads both Russia and China to think maybe they need more measures to overcome American missile defenses,” Bunn added. “And you’ve got space and counterspace, you’ve got artificial intelligence and cyber, you’ve got precision conventional weapons that can carry out some strategic missions. And so you have this whole set of non-nuclear technologies that are making nuclear balances more complex at least, and possibly less stable. The next round of nuclear negotiations for sure is going to be more complicated than the past.”
“The conversation among many who are involved in nuclear decisions in Washington is not about what’s the next round of reductions; it’s about should we leave the New START limits behind and start building up our nuclear forces to respond.”
Kennedy’s stark warning and call to action in 1963 helped spawn the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency as the treaty’s enforcement and monitoring arm. Former U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA Laura Holgate, now a senior fellow at the School’s Belfer Center, said that intense political wrangling at the IAEA in recent years has limited its effectiveness. She said a longstanding consensus among the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the “P5” nuclear powers) had enabled effective diplomacy and monitoring of nuclear programs over the years by the Vienna-based IAEA. But now, “that consensus among the P5 is no longer there. Russia is actively working to undermine the independence, the technical capability and credibility, and the tools that the IAEA uses for verification.”
Meghan O’Sullivan, the director of the Belfer Center and the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs, who served as moderator, said Holgate had pointed to a serious challenge: “how the great power competition has really impacted the efficacy of so many international institutions, and the IAEA is obviously among them.”
O’Sullivan co-chaired a bipartisan task force along with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Nuclear Threat Initiative that issued a report last year on ways the United States could help avoid “nuclear anarchy” and strengthen the nonproliferation system.
The April 15 Forum was the first in what will be a series of convenings honoring Albert Carnesale, a former HKS dean and Harvard provost with a long track record in advancing nuclear arms control treaties and policies. Carnesale was in the audience and drew affectionate tributes from all five panelists for his encouragement of their work and his contributions to the field of nuclear security. Daniel Poneman, a Belfer senior fellow and former U.S. deputy energy secretary, introduced the panel with his own salute, recalling his days as a Harvard undergraduate research assistant to Carnesale 50 years ago.
Rose Gottemoeller, the William J. Perry lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, said nuclear negotiators should move forward in finding ways to tackle what she called the older “hardware problems,” such as limits on nuclear delivery vehicles, launchers, numbers of warheads and submarines. Gottemoeller, former U.S. under secretary of state for arms control, agreed with Bunn that “we have this massive number of new challenges out there.” She pointed to one example: “How do we put guardrails on certain types of space-based capabilities? We just have to think hard. I call that the software, which is much more complex.”
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Photography by Martha Stewart