Book Description
Long discounted by arms control critics, traditional nonproliferation efforts now are undergoing urgent review and reconsideration even by their supporters. Why? In large part, because the current crop of nonproliferation understandings are ill-suited to check the spread of emerging long-range missile, biological, and nuclear technologies. Attempts to develop a legally binding inspections protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention, for example, were recently rejected by U.S. officials as being inadequate to catch serious violators while being prone to set off false alarms against perfectly innocent actors. Missile defense and unmanned air vehicle (UAV) related technologies, meanwhile, are proliferating for a variety of perfectly defensive and peaceful civilian applications. This same know-how can be used to defeat U.S. and allied air and missile defenses in new ways that are far more stressful than the existing set of ballistic missile threats. Unfortunately, the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) is not yet optimized to cope with these challenges. Finally, nuclear technologies have become much more difficult to control. New centrifuge uranium enrichment facilities and relatively small fuel reprocessing plants can now be built and hidden much more readily than nuclear fuel-making plants that were operating when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the bulk of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections procedures were first devised 30 or more years ago. This volume is designed to highlight what might happen if these emerging threats go unattended and how best to mitigate them. The book, which features research the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center commissioned, is divided into three sections. The first, Life in a Well-Armed Crowd, focuses on what a world proliferated with these technologies might look like. The first chapter, "Alternative Proliferation and Alliance Futures in East Asia" by Stephen Kim of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, projects how the United States, Japan, Korea, and China will relate and compete with one another as each becomes more competent to deploy strategic weaponry. The good news is that further proliferation and war in the Far East are not inevitable. The bad news is that it will take considerable effort to avoid this fate. Much is the same in the Middle East as Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute makes clear in Chapter 2, "Proliferation in the Middle East: Who is Next after Iran?" Here, the lynch pin for further proliferation is Iran. Certainly, if Iran is able to edge toward nuclear bomb making capabilities with impunity, Tehran's neighbors are likely to hedge their security bets by developing strategic weapons options of their own. This, then, brings us to this section's final chapter, "Nuclear 1914: The Next Big Worry." In it, I argue that the greatest security danger renewed strategic arms proliferation presents is not the increased chance of nuclear theft or terrorism, so much as the increasing difficulty small and large nations will have in determining who they can rely upon and how militarily capable they might be. In such a world, even the best plans and diplomatic hedging may be incapable of preventing miscalculation and war, much as was the case in 1914 with World War I. The book's second section, New Proliferation Worries, details three of the most important emerging proliferation technology threats we face-the spread of new biological, missile, and nuclear technologies. As detailed in Mitchell Kugler's chapter, "Missile Defense Cooperation and the Missile Technology Control Regime," the United States has a clear desire to encourage missile defense cooperation with its friends and allies even though key portions of the technologies in question are restricted by the MTCR. Mr. Kugler of the Boeing Corporation makes it clear that he believes the case for sharing this technology is stronger than the case for restricting it.