In the Fall of 2002  I drafted an essay that became a Cato Institute Policy Analysis paper on why invading Iraq was a bad idea. In essence, the paper used rational actor theory to propose that there were better ways to address the threat to US security interests posed by Iraq, to the extent such threats existed, than by going to war. Now, seven years later, it is interesting to revisit the subject.

What made me think about this the recent discussion about a surge for Afghanistan. General McChrystal’s suggestion that 40,000 additional troops need to be introduced into the theatre raised quite a stir in the news. However, there seems to be a widespread opinion among military leaders that the 40,000 could not begin to be introduced until the new year, and could not fully be in place until late next year (presuming that they would all come from the US.) Perhaps President Obama’s delayed response is due to an attempt to figure out where they could get these troops in a reasonable timeframe. It is telling that despite a budget of over half a trillion dollars (not counting supplementals) and a military of over three million people when all branches and reserves are included, we cannot come up with 40,000 troops. Of course, few of the three million are relevant to the task at hand (i.e. sending F-16 mechanics or submariner firemen to Afghanistan is not that useful), but this raises a question for another day about why our military seems to be so ill-tailored to the wars it fights. However, the point to note here is that we can’t come up with 40,000 troops because many of the relevant troops are either in Iraq, already in Afghanistan, or are momentarily  rotated out of one of our two war zones long enough to keep their private lives in order and their sanity intact.

Let me acknowledge first that I, at least, was as fooled as anyone about the likelihood that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and /or programs for WMD. Readers of past posts will note that I place little stock in the ability to know or predict behavior absent first-hand knowledge. Despite the sound advice of Sun Tzu that we cannot know an enemy’s capabilities (much less their intentions) without first-hand information (e.g. through spies) and that such knowledge cannot be derived from oracles, humanity still thinks it can – except our oracles are probabilistic risk models. That said, in the absence of certain knowledge one is forced to make a best guess based on a reasonable reading of past actions and the available  indicators. I maintain that, given the uncertainty, it was not unreasonable to think that Iraq had WMD, and, at any rate, the advice given was optimal whether Iraq had WMD or not. The fact that Hussein did not have WMD by no means invalidates but rather bolsters the core message of the paper that (even believing that there were chemical weapons or worse) the threat to US security interests was overblown, and, to the extent these threats existed, they could be handled more effectively without force.

The question at hand here is whether we are better off having attacked Iraq, and I would maintain that we are certainly not at the moment. If, unlikely as it may be, we are threatened tomorrow by an actual threat to our existence or fundamental strategic interests we would be slow and hard-pressed to respond because we are stretched thin by the war in Iraq. True, there is one less dictator in the world. Nice as that may sound, as long as that dictator is not ruling the US, it is not a good measure of whether US interests are improved.

One issue to consider is the threat posed by the perception of the US as a “high capability – low will” state. I don’t suspect we have any enemies that think the capability of the US military is anything but extremely high. Our military is technologically without peer, and is, at best, matched by few in terms of the level of training and morale of forces (I would contend that an all-voluntary military is a force-multiplier unto itself, particularly after spending so much time studying the Russian system and its influence on combat-effectiveness when I was a graduate student .) However, there is also a perception that the US has a limited stomach for warfare, and will not see its engagements through to the end. This problem is created when a country is a little too fast-and-loose in going to war. Its danger is that it decreases the perception of other states of the cost of conflict with America and makes them more likely to engage in activities that may be viewed as threatening.

Frankly, I am astounded at the relatively slow erosion of support for conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that is, I presume, a mix of the influence of the 9-11 events on the national psyche and a detachment of the average American to these distant wars. The erosion is present none-the-less. It is not unreasonable that American support for the war in Iraq has diminished. The outcome of the conflict fundamentally affects the way people in Iraq live but not substantially how Americans live, and so it is a given that people over there will be willing to fight long after our will wanes. You may remember hearing a line during the political debates to the effect that ”Timelines to withdraw would be a boon to insurgents and radical elements”. I hate to break it to those critics, but whether we leave now, next year, or in 20 years, some radical element will be around to claim victory. 

The US needs to look at war more like it looks at nuclear war. In other words, it is an extreme action against dire attacks against the national existence or critical national interests and should not be engaged in lightly, and that, having made the decision, we will fully accept the consequences of war and see the conflict through to a definitive end. War as a means to reach limited objectives such as tweaking the world into a more palatable form – as I would suggest was the case in Iraq – is a dangerous game. 

Unfortunately, we are really only mid-course in the conflict in Iraq, so knowing the degree to which we will be better or worse off after than before the war remains unclear. If our government (both the Bush and Obama administrations) is correct in its prevailing presumption that we can leave an Iraq that is democratic, stable, and friendly to the US we may end up better off. However, we live in a world where uncertainty is inexorable, and there are other scenarios, that we cannot accurately judge the likelihood of, that may make us worse off. The most prominent of these alternative scenarios is that the Shia majority takes control and reciprocates against a minority that oppressed them for decades. Under this scenario, we will have essentially built an Iraq – Iran alliance that will make any involvement we have in the Persian Gulf region more challenging and may shake up regional stability.

Iran’s President Ahmedinejad has a lot to keep straight. When he’s inside Iran, the Holocaust didn’t happen, but when abroad it did happen (no, may have happened?) – but is irrelevant to today’s world. Is it any wonder that it would have slipped his mind to mention to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran was building another uranium enrichment facility until, once again, Tehran was caught with its hand in the cookie jar.

This does answer a question that I’ve asked many times, which is how Iran intended to get from its current position to having a nuclear weapon without the intervening event of having its offending nuclear infrastructure bombed to smithereens. There were essentially two paths available to an Iran bent on having the bomb. The first was to build yet another covert facility (which is apparently what Tehran chose to do.) The second, and this is the one I’ve never heard a convincing explanation of the process by which it could succeed, would be a “strategic breakout” of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. The idea of strategic breakout is to get all your ducks in a row, and then withdraw from the NPT and kick inspectors out of the country / remove surveillance equipment. The problem with this is that it is essentially saying “we’d like to build our atomic bomb now, please leave us in peace.” While it is true that they could get a lot of their affairs in order, there would seem to be plenty of time between their announcement and the production and machining of the requisite material to allow a country to bomb the facilities into oblivion, perhaps even with a Security Council resolution in hand.  The second covert facility was the only path I’ve ever suspected was workable, though there have been proponents of a strategic breakout scenario.

This building of covert facilities only to have them discovered has got to get prohibitively expensive at some point. I’m not saying Allah is trying to send you a message, Mr. Ahmedinejad, but maybe you should consider it a hint. Allah might just find an Iran with a nuclear weapon to be as disturbing a prospect as the rest of us do.

The Iranian “President”, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, in an interesting move, has called for an investigation into the death of Neda Agha-Soltan – the sweet-faced young lady that the world has been watching bleed out on the streets of Tehran  on low resolution footage available through YouTube. I think there is a high probability that his course of action will blow up in the hairy faces of the Iranian leadership.

Let me be the first to predict the investigation’s findings. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), possibly in conjunction with Britain’s MI-6, inserted a covert team of snipers that shot the girl in order to stir up trouble. The intelligence agencies of these Western governments decided to to this after they succeeded in an Internet blitz to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Ahmedinejad’s landslide victory.

Now, as I have said in past posts, I am no great believer the predictive ability of even the most revered experts when it comes to the behavior of other humans. However, in this case, I feel safe in that there is only one tack that Ahmedinejad is taking. This song and dance goes roughly like this, there is no significant dissent in Iran. That’s right dissenters, not to mention gays and lesbians, are not indigenously occurring phenomenon within the borders of Iran. Rather , this is all a foreign-led attempt to drive a wedge through the state of Iran so that the imperialists can topple a legitimate government.

This might have been a sound strategy, if anyone were listening. It’s true that there are plenty of Iranians who have reason to resent the United States and Britain. If you happened to be a political prisoner of the Shah or a torture victim of the SAVAK, you might legitimately hold ill-will toward the governments that helped to prop up that regime. Furthermore, whatever America’s involvement was in facilitating a coup against the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, it gives credibility to the claim of imperialistic meddling in Iran’s domestic political affairs. (This is precisely why countries like the US have to have the courage of their convictions to not undermine democratically elected scary governments in favor of friendly, but domestically brutal, dictators. Selective respect for the institutions of democracy and rule of law is a mistake with a long shadow.)  So, given this history, this strategy might be the means to create an “us against them” mentality in the populace that would heal divides. However, no one seems to be taking the rhetoric seriously.

This approach is not working for a couple reasons, I believe. First, it is a young population and they know their experience with an oppressive and, on some fronts [e.g. the economy], incompetent government, but they have only the stories of old-timers about imperial interference in their country (though the perception about operations in Iraq may be a different matter – not that there was any love lost between Iranians and Saddam Hussein.) People weight their own experience more substantially than they do history book chapters. Second, as I have discussed in past posts, it becomes increasingly more difficult each day for tyrants to control the flow of information. We live in an era in which a run-of-the-mill cel phone is a window to the rest of the world.

Given the lack of traction his strategy is achieving, I think that the scripting of investigation results will be a big mistake for Ahmedinejad and the Ayatollah Khamenei. Trying to twist the girl’s death to their own advantage could raise the stakes to a “torch and pitch-fork” level of volitility. Any path Ahmedinejad takes, other than the unlikely route of taking responsibility for the incident and submitting the gunman to legal justice, will further raise animous of the citizenry and reduce the government’s legitimacy. Even if it wasn’t a pro-Ahmedinejad malitiaman that killed Neda Agha-Soltan, the government’s legitimacy is so low that it would impossible to convince the people of it.

There is a lot of debate in the US about what the American approach should be toward Iran. President Obama has argued that if America takes sides, it could only help Ahmedinejad and Khamenei, and I suspect this is correct. Others argue that the US should be supporting Mousavi, but that seems to be the same mistake  we fell into in the 50’s. Regardless of the approach taken, we definitely don’t want to what we did in Hungary in 1956 and Iraq in the 1990’s. That is, we don’t want voices telling the opposition there will be support for bold action, and then failing to follow through. This is another lesson that I hope the US government has learned.

Is Iran on the verge of a revolution? Can Kim Jong Un maintain power if his father transfers it to him in the near future? Are we seeing the leading indicators of America’s decline in conditions like debt that is completely out of control, failing business giants, the crippling costs of persistent asymmetric warfare, and looming unaddressed crises such as the mathematically infeasible pay-go social security system? What will the rise of massive high-growth emerging economies mean for world affairs? What will the world look like politically, economically, and diplomatically 3 months from now?; 6 months?; 1 year?; 2 years?  

We are living in interesting times. We could be on the precipice of some very major changes to the international system. Sometimes change is slow and evolutionary; sometimes it is faster and more revolutionary; and, rarely but occasionally, the conditions evolve to converge to the point where it is catastrophically instantaneous. There is a vigorous tug of war in progress between inertia and the winds of change.

I would love to be able to make some definitive predictions about what the world will look like next year. Like the vast majority of people, I am motivated by discomfort with uncertainty to want to think that I can have a grasp on how events will unfold. However, the lesson (an unintended lesson to be sure) that has most stuck with me in completing graduate degrees in International Relations and Economics  is that anyone who thinks they can predict the future unfolding of large-scale political and economic events is full of crap. This will no doubt be considered heresy to many who have made lucrative livings because we (as a species) would rather pay millions to someone who makes an incorrect prediction than to accept that we have no idea what will transpire. One can read papers that misapply probabilistic and statistical models in some of the most elite scholarly journals because even the most educated of our society are addicted to thinking that the future can be known in a system whose level of complexity remains beyond our capacity to unravel.

My advice to those trying to get a handle on the future, save your soothsayer money, hedge your bets, and enjoy the ride.

Source: Kay Chernush for US State Department

The State Department’s 2009 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report was released on Tuesday (June 16, 2009.) The TIP is part of a laudable effort to fight one of the most heinous stains on the current state of humanity, which is that the buying and selling of human beings continues to take place around the world. Released with the report was an online photo album of pictures taken by Kay Chernush. Most of the photos, like the one above of a Nepalese mother in search of her daughter, show the human dimension of this injustice. 

The idea behind the TIP is simple. States are ranked into tiers according to their level of compliance with a stated set of standards for combating trafficking. Those in the lowest group are subject to possible sanctions in addition to the potential national embarrassment of being seen as one of the most backward countries in the world (and the presumed indirect effects of this status, such as the fact that people are less likely to want to be tourists in, do business with, or generally associate with your country.) The report states that measures with concrete effects like the number of prosecutions, convictions, and length of prison terms are given deference over symbolic activities like conference-hosting or information campaigns in determining in which of the three tiers a nation is placed (compliant, partially compliant, or not compliant).

I do have one potential concern about the TIP report itself. Despite the fact that the report lays out the ranking criteria and discusses methodology (though vaguely), I remain worried that the TIP classification is politicized. While countries like Cuba, North Korea, and Iran offer a wide variety of defects and challenges to global security, from what little I know of the trafficking issue, they don’t come to mind as the worst violators as their Tier 3 rankings imply. There is a great danger in politicization of the list because it must be seen as legitimate to have any influence on behavior. If the TIP report is seen as just another outlet for the US to badmouth the countries it has problems with in general while saying nice things about those it likes or is courting the favor of, then no one will take it seriously, and states in violation will feel no compulsion to change their behavior. My worries stem from an observation about the State-sponsored Terrorism list, and how it is sometimes used in ways that are unrelated to terrorism. I fear that we will be negotiating bumping North Korea and Iran up a level in coming years in exchange for changes in their nuclear policies without any discernible change to their policies on trafficking.

My skepticism may be falsely rooted, due both to the fact that there can legitimately be a great disparity between volume of trafficking and ranking, and that the methodology of how various criteria are weighted or scored is not clear. The first issue revolves around the fact that countries are being graded on perceived compliance efforts, and not the scale of the problem in the country. There are good reasons for doing it this way (besides the fact that if volume of traffic were the primary criteria I suspect the United States would have to place itself on the bad boys list.) The idea is to reward moves in the right direction, and punish lack of rules and enforcement on trafficking. Therefore, you don’t want to keep countries with high trafficking volume but active campaigns for defeating trafficking in the 3rd tier, neither do you want to reward small countries who are not effective in fighting this crime but whose trafficking level is small because of reasons unrelated to the government’s efforts.

However, if there are many high volume of trafficking countries among those on the full and partial compliance (Tier I and II) lists, it might be telling about the efficacy of these enforcement efforts. It might tell us that, for the past nine years the activities to increase arrests and prosecutions have not staunched the flow. The report shows each country’s tier rank over time. It would be interesting to know: a.) how the trafficking level of countries that have moved up to Tier I have changed over time; b.) what has happened to the overall level of trafficking (i.e. is it being reduced or just shifted into other countries?) Unfortunately, I think it is probably difficult to have faith in models projecting trafficking amounts because it is not like these criminals are filing monthly reports to some data clearinghouse, and projections based on interdictions and arrests may be confounded by more effective criminal methods or any number of other causes. Even indications gleaned from interviews or interrogation with arrested criminals may not be trustworthy if there is an incentive for the prisoner to be deceptive.

How would one strategically combat human trafficking? The idea is to recognize and realign the incentives. In other words, one needs to get an accurate and honest picture of what is driving this behavior, and then restructure the costs and benefits so that the incentives no longer remain conducive to engaging in these activities. While the increased enforcement activities by governments realigns incentives by increasing the costs of trafficking, there will never be enough resources available to eliminate the problem in that way.

 The TIP report, and accompanying sanctions, recognize STATE incentives (e.g. to be a member of the global community in good standing) and may potentially realign them. There has been success in recent years in states heavily utilized (as origins, destinations, or transhipment points) for trafficking in making efforts to combat these activities, and some portion of this progress may be attributable to US and global pressures. However, the problem remains alive and well because the core motives are not recognized or eliminated.

While the State Department report is a positive step as far as it goes, it (when combined with public policy more broadly) does not leave me sanguine about the fight against modern day slavery. This lack of optimism is rooted in the fact that deep structural incentives exist to engage in this behavior that are not countered by existing activities.  One of these structural drivers is poverty, and, the fact is, we don’t have a good idea of how poor nations and regions can be brought to significantly higher standards of living. The few countries that have succeeded in going from Third World to First World are anomalies, rather than the product of well-understood Macroeconomic policies. Another structural factor is that many countries, including the United States, have extremely untargeted approaches to sex trade regulation. I suspect that this has greatly exacerbated the sex slavery problem by eliminating a prostitution labor supply of willing adults of sound-mind who stay out of the market solely because they consider themselves law-abiding citizens.

By an “untargeted” approach to sex trade regulation, I mean one akin to the Prohibition Era with respect to alcohol. This is in contrast to a much more effective present-day policy that is targeted toward preventing usage of alcohol that creates a danger to the health and well-being of those other than the (uncoerced) drinker. Prohibition, as we all know and most will admit, was an unmitigated disaster. Prohibition spawned its own violent crime, people died drinking low-grade “bathtub gin”, and, most importantly, people still drank alcohol because the demand was still there. On top of that, the few unscrupulous characters that were most willing to break the law were handed a very high profit margin oligopoly. Fortunately,  the country learned its lesson vis-a-vis alcohol prohibition and rescinded the law with the 21st amendment. Unfortunately, we haven’t made the leap to applying the lesson very similar issues.

While I am skeptical of its feasibility of implementation on the grounds of the deeply rooted religious mores of the US and other countries, I would advocate an approach similar to that taken with alcohol. Instead of trying to prohibit every sexual act of a commercial nature, you put your limited resources into a targeted fight against exploitation, slavery, and abuse. In other words, a woman or man who society would deem capable of making sound decisions for themself (i.e. a mentally-competent adult) would be able to choose prostitution as a job or career path. If they thought they needed assistance, they could hire security or an agent and pay them a pre-negotiated rate as any other employer would pay an employee. What would not be legal would be for any person to force a person to select this job, or to insinuate themselves as a “protector” or “manager” who would dictate what pay is received by the working party. Like other businesses, the prostitute would be free to determine what clients he or she took on, how many in a period, to set a price on a take it or leave it basis, and to cancel the transaction for cause. In essence, regulations would exist to prohibit force, fraud, or the illegal use of third-party property (conducting this business in a place against the owner’s wishes.)

What does this do for society? First, given a demand that we have no reason to think will go away soon (sex drives are pretty much biological imperatives, and some fraction of the population will either be undesirous, or unable, to meet these needs with a person with whom they share a relationship), the influx of voluntary participants would reduce the incentive for abducting and enslaving people. Second, if someone were trying to force another person into prostitution or to exploit them, the victim would have a clear legal recourse. Third, the vast sums of risk premium money associated with illicit activities that attract violent criminals into the market would not exist, and we might expect a few less shoot-outs in the world. Finally, if there were activities resulting in societal costs remaining, you could tax them to regulate them.

No one is more aware of the impermanence of power than old revolutionaries. Individuals who helped topple a government know that angry young men and women, spitting images  of themselves in their former glory, have a vast capacity to turn energy and passion into the death knell of an ineffective, corrupt, or abusive regime.

One approach to ensuring longevity and stability of a new government, as codified in the documents of America’s Founding Fathers,  is to accept the power of people to determine their own governance through democratic elections, rule of law, and limitations on the length and number of terms that office holders can serve. Another approach is to rely on propaganda, brutal suppression, targeted vote buying, and cultivation of cults of personality to maintain a passive populace. Authoritarian regimes have been dying off in the modern era, but are still more common than one would like. However, we are seeing interesting times for a couple of world’s remaining non-democratic revolutionary-born governments including, most notably, Iran and North Korea.

In essence, a non-democratic revolutionary government needs to create a successor to the divine right of kings argument. This argument was historically used to convince people of why they should accept rule by tyrannical forces who showed little or no interest in the citizenry’s well-being. This is unless, of course, you are a country such as Iran where the ”god-as-guarantor of earthly governors” argument still holds sway.  

Communist governents are noted for attempting to delude the people that they, as the citizenry, are, in fact,  in power- or in the process of being handed the reigns of power. One need look no further than the adoption of names, such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea(there are at least three things wrong with that name), to see the great effort made to convey to an oppressed people a false sense of empowerment. If truth-in-advertising ruled, Kim Il Sung would have named the country the Tyrannical Kim Dynasty House of Famine in Korea, but this would not have kept the pitchforks at bay. Communist regimes tell the members their populace that they are, as George Orwell described, all equal- except in that “some pigs are more equal than others.”  Of course, when you have no power, you are keenly aware of it, and so this leaves control of information, movement, and assembly as the true means by which the old revolutionaries keep from becoming the  former revolutionaries.

In some sense, the Ayatollah Khamenei’s dictates about how election dissent will be handled seem promising. He has suggested the possibility of an investigation, and has taken actions designed to calm civil unrest pending an investigation. However, he has also asked the foreign press to leave. This is, of course, precisely the thing a government does if it wants to crack heads with impunity, and without losing all appearance of legitimacy abroad. Khamenei seems to be hedging his bets by leaving open a variety of counter-revolutionary activities (note: I am not using this term in the manner that it has come to be used by Communist regimes, which is to say that a counter-revolution is any revolution that throws Communists out on their butts)  designed to ensure the theocracy holds.

I suspect the odd behavior of North Korea of late is also tied to regime control concerns. In this case, Kim Jong Il wants to continue the dynasty begun by his father, but his chosen successor is untried and vulnerable. Kim Jong Un needs to establish some credibility quick or the days of the House of Kim may be numbered. Of course, Kim Jong Il came upon a sure-fire strategy to keep the people from rising up. It includes all the usual element such as spying on them, beating any dissenters down violently, and building a cult of personality,  but it goes further to ensure that the population is starved half to death and are too busy foraging for sustenance to organize an opposition. However, the military will remain a threat unless Kim Jong Un’s primacy can be established.

It may be true that there isn’t any reason to expect that Iran’s position on its fuel cycle facility policy will change  regardless of who wins tomorrow’s election. After all, the Ayatollah Khamenei is the Supreme Leader, and does dictate policy on issues at that strategic a level. However, with Mr. Mousavi holding his own, we may yet see what can happen without the Howard Stern of heads of state in the Presidency of Iran.

It may, in fact, be a test case for the role of harsh rhetoric in international diplomacy. Are acrimonious words just for the benefit of domestic consumption and devoid of any influence on foreign policy outcomes. Or, on the other hand, can less vitriol translate into gains at the negotiating table? With both a US and Iranian leadership that is less prone to engage in harsh language, will we see progress toward reduction of the threat or not?

The 32nd Session of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) is going on June 8-9, 2009. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) would prohibit all nuclear tests. A 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) outlawed testing of nuclear explosive devices in space, underwater, or in the atmosphere, but left open the option of subterranean tests.

The CTBT is being talked about more these days with a US administration that supports its implementation and a Congress more likely to ratify. However, the US is only one of nine Annex 2 states that must ratify the CTBT for it to enter into force. Of course, among the nine is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK.) Should it come down to North Korea holding things up, there would probably be adequate support for amending the Treaty requirements to eliminate the need for their cooperation. The Kim government has demonstrated a desire be an outlier from the non-proliferation and disarmament regime by withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as well as by being the only state to conduct tests in recent years.

However, that still leaves seven Annex 2 countries that have not ratified the Treaty including: China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, and Pakistan. All of these states are within the regime, and their participation will be critical. Of these, Iran provides an interesting case. Its ratification of the CTBT might be made part of a negotiated agreement that would end opposition to their fuel cycle facility development provided they enact Additional Protocols to ease concerns about diversion. Iran can convincingly argue that they have a right under the NPT’s Article IV to develop a fuel cycle infrastructure to support the nuclear power plant they have under construction at Bushehr, and in the realm of isotopic separation medical technology as well as fuel cycle arguments apply. However, there is no reasonable explanation for opposition to nuclear explosive testing unless you desire to retain the capacity to build  nuclear weapons. That is, if their intent is truly the peaceful use of nuclear energy and medical isotope development as they have said, they should have no objection to prohibitions on testing. The myth of a utility to be gained from Peaceful Nuclear Explosions (PNE) seems to have long since been put to bed.

Other opponents, such as Egypt and India, object primarily on the basis that the CTBT might help to institutionalize a “have – have-not” division with respect to nuclear weapons. If such countries are true to their word, their perception of the US and Russia’s good-faith efforts to disarm will be critically important to obtaining their ratification. I remain skeptically that the CTBT can enter into force, but am interested in the views of others.

It is interesting to note that, despite the fact that the CTBT has not entered into force, the verification system consisting of four types of monitoring stations (Seismic, Infrasonic, Hydro-acoustic, and Radionuclide stations that measure the force and direction of an explosion through the ground, air, and water respectively, plus determining the nuclear nature of the test [i.e. radionuclide stations]) is up and running with partial capacity. While the system is not yet completely on-line, it has been useful in providing information about the two North Korean nuclear device tests.  

On April 5th, President Obama gave a masterful speech in Prague, the later half of which was devoted to the topic of nuclear disarmament. The speech began with an homage to people who acted on a belief that change could be achieved against an overwhelming sentiment that it could not (referring, of course, to the Cold War), and then implied that people of the same ilk were needed to advance disarmament in a similar manner.

Those wishing to see any momentum that may have been created by this speech derailed could hardly ask for better intervening world events. North Korea conducted its second test of a nuclear device, and, in the process, displayed an improved capability had been achieved. Following the nuclear test, they proceeded to set off short-range missiles like  some sort of Independence Day display, and it appears that they are preparing for a long-range missile test in up-coming weeks. Meanwhile, the Iran front remains unchanged. In other words, the Iranians are getting progressively closer to having an infrastructure that would support making weapons-grade fissile material in sufficient quantities within a reasonable time period, and this is making many countries (re: Israel) really unnerved.

It might be argued that such events are a potential boon to disarmament because they underscore the nature of the threat and give impetus for positive action. After all, nonproliferation is unlikely to go anywhere without the major nuclear weapon states showing progress toward disarmament. If the 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference turns out to be a carryover from 2005, then we can expect backward and not forward momentum on nonproliferation. 

Unfortunately, I suspect that current events do not bode well for advancing the agenda President Obama laid out in his Prague Speech. Nuclear weapon states will only ease their grasp if they feel relatively safe from the threat of attack by states. I emphasize “by states” because I don’t think world leaders give much sway to deterrence as a strategy against nuclear terrorism, but they are pretty confident about the value of deterrence against states. While the threat of nuclear terrorism may (or may not) be on the rise, I don’t think that is a non-starter for disarmament. However, the same cannot be said of risk from states.

As the President stated, nuclear disarmament is not likely to be achieve quickly. There were a number of steps that were laid out that are considered intermediary steps including: reduction of the relevance of nuclear weapons to overall security, bilateral reductions between US and Russia, enactment the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), verifiable implementation of the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT), strengthening of inspection authority, development of a fuel bank, and progress with North Korea and Iran.

The question is whether all of these are necessary, and, if so, whether any of them are intractable. Take, for example, the question of verifiability of the FMCT. The Bush Administration dropped this treaty supposedly because it was “impossible” to verify. The present administration seems to take as a forgone conclusion that it can be verified. This tells us one of two things. The best case scenario is that the two camps are working under different assumptions about what constitutes a minimally acceptable level of verification. I say this is the “best case” because there would ostensibly be underlying facts that could be agreed upon, and, therefore, there would be a map to understand what would be necessary to move towards a negotiated agreement (e.g. what technological developments.) The worst case is that politics is leading the facts and science- in which case there may be no room for agreement. By “politics leading” I mean that either the Bush Administration started from from the position that they did not want to support the FMCT and found arguing the unprovable case of non-verifiability a good means to quash it, or the Obama Administration started from the position that they wanted the FMCT and knew it required arguing that it was, in fact, verifiable, or, given the possibility that no one knows the answer yet, both of the above. If this is the case, then there is no incentive for either side to reduce ambiguity, and little prospect for moving forward.

When there is a point of intractability, one needs to determine whether there is a new approach to the subject that can be taken, and what it might be. Too often there is a failure to recognize points of intractability, and then to be creative about how to change the underlying conditions to one where progress is possible.

No doubt many will dismiss this discussion as pie-in-the-sky talk.  After all, given both the right of sovereignty enjoyed by nations and the fact that places like Russia, China, and the United States are big and nuclear weapons are relatively small, one will never be able to be completely certain that no nation is cheating on the requisite agreement. Consider how long it took to determine that there weren’t stocks of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, which was a physically smaller country than most of the existing nuclear powers and which was under the complete control of US forces.Without certainty of compliance with the disarmament agreement by others, nuclear weapon states may not have the confidence necessary to eliminate their weapons.

As they teach in International Relations Theory courses, states exist in an anarchic self-help environment. In other words, all they can count on to keep them safe is their own capabilities. If a cheater is allowed to gain the advantage of unilateral possession of nuclear arms, other states’ survival is put at risk.

Furthermore, a single cheater would be particularly disconcerting because of what the experience of history teaches us about stability under varying  numbers of weapons states. This experience suggests that a world of multiple nuclear weapon states tends to be stable against their use, but a world in which a single state has nuclear weapons is not. When the US exclusively held nuclear weapons it used two, but during the sixty year period in which at least two states had them none were used.

Assuming that it is correct that there will never be  complete confidence that cheating impossible, can disarmament occur under an imperfect verification regime?   In other words, is perfect verification a necessary condition for elimination of nuclear weapons? There are, of course, two answers to this question. One is the empirical answer, and only time will tell what the answer to that question is. The other is a more hypothetical answer based upon whether the threat posed by a unilateral cheater in an otherwise disarmed world seems to be greater or lesser than the threat of continued possession and proliferation of nuclear weapons. The empirical question, however, may be influenced by the results of the counter-factual analysis and so the assumptions that guide us in this analysis must be well thought out.

If it is possible that there will be cheaters, and at least some states believe they have an incentive to cheat, we must assume that there will be a cheater or cheaters. What exactly is the perceived advantage that would incentivize states to cheat, and how could they capitalize upon it? That depends on how they view the utility of nuclear weapons and for what purpose they would intend to press their advantage. For some purposes, (e.g. deterrence and coercion), the cheater has to be transparent about his illicit arsenal in order to make the strategy work, and the act of taking a transparent stance creates some vulnerabilities. If the cheater assumes that others are also cheating, and that it cannot know who is cheating, then its possible strategies are quite limited, because attempts to coerce may be met with deterrence by another cheater and attacks, whatever their purpose, may be met with massive retaliation.

People often point to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) as the exemplar of arms control agreements. However, the prohibition of Chemical Weapons maybe seen as relatively simple because the usefulness of such weapons had come into doubt. The employment of chemical weapons in World War I showed that the user could become the victim with an unanticipated wind change, and it was difficult to take advantage of weapons to gain ground because one had to operate in the same protective equipment that the enemy did when moving into the territory or wait until the agent cleared.

The question at issue is wherein the advantage of nuclear weapons lies, and to what degree a cheater could capitalize on said advantages. Historically, the greatest utility of nuclear weapons was derived from the ability to deter others from attacking. For this objective nuclear weapons seem well-suited. However, deterrence neither requires nor particularly benefits from cheating, and a cheater will not be able to both maintain its unilateral advantage and pursue a deterrent strategy simultaneously anyway. In the long-run, the cheater’s security declines. Why? Nuclear states will have the capacity to reconstitute their programs. The cheater must be transparent about having nuclear weapons in order to deter the opposition from (a presumably conventional) attack. However, as soon as the cheater admits to having nuclear weapons, other states (both friend and foe) have an incentive not only to reconstitute, but to ally against the rogue proliferator. Furthermore, it is not certain how well a nuclear deterrent works against conventional threats. An opponent may not believe that the cheater state will engage in such a severely over-the-top response to a conventional attack, particularly if it is of limited objectives, as nuclear warfare.

A second possibility is that the cheater will use the weapons for coercive purposes. In other words, the threat of use of nuclear weapons will be used to pressure a country to do something that they otherwise would not. This objective does potentially lend an advantage to a cheater (provided that the cheater is confident that the one he is attempting to coerce did not cheat as well). However, a country using nuclear weapons to coerce must be transparent that about having weapons and about what they want. In stating this openly, they are likely to become an international pariah, and, in the long-run states will reconstitute arsenals against them.

A third possibility is that the cheater would use nuclear weapons as part of of a war strategy aimed at taking over another country’s sovereign territory. In other words, the cheater employs nuclear weapons against an enemy in an attempt to eliminate their capacity to resist so that their possessions can be overtaken. Depending upon the target, it may be difficult to achieve such an objective with a small arsenal, and it will be quite difficult for the cheater to maintain a large arsenal without a high risk of being caught. Furthermore, one may eliminate quite a bit of the value of the territory that one seeks to control by way of the effects of the nuclear weapons (e.g. the spread of radioactive material, fire damage, blast damage, and electromagnetic damage.)  

The final, and most disconcerting, possible strategy for the cheater would be essentially a terrorist motive. To elaborate, the cheater might try to strike fear into the hearts of its opposition in order to achieve a political or cultural impact beyond its ability to attain by traditional means. Such a strategy would almost certainly succeed in uniting the world against one, but this remains a concern. Such a nation could expect retribution, because such an act could not be allowed to stand without creating a race to the worst possible behavior.

It may be true that it is the non-state actor and not the state actor that is the biggest point of concern in this day and age. However, if anything global disarmament reduces the non-state threat because such nations do not have ready made arms or fissile material to acquire, and their limited capabilities make construction from scratch virtually impossible. Certainly, there is no reason to believe that maintaining a nuclear deterrent force is a useful strategy against non-state actors. Deterrence may not work because such actors, even if they are rational enough to be eager to avoid their own exposure to the risk of nuclear attack, may not believe such a threat is credible. Non-state terrorists may reasonably conclude that a state will not engage in massive retaliation against a population of mostly innocent people to get at a few combatants.

There are a great deal of complex issues that must be faced in carrying out disarmament. Among these are that the regime must be set up in such a manner as to make cheaters believe that they cannot prosper. This means the verification system must be thorough, but, further, that the world will stand against cheaters and take whatever action necessary to ensure that they cannot capitalize on there illicit gains.