This whole subject is sometimes shrouded in a fog of fear and confusion and politics, but there is a lot of good news you should know about this subject. It’s not all bleak. For example, there are now half the number of nuclear weapons in the world today as there were just fifteen years ago. We have slashed nuclear arsenals from their Cold War peak at some sixty thousand nuclear weapons to about twenty-seven thousand nuclear weapons. More countries have given up nuclear weapons programs in the last fifteen years than have tried to acquire them. There are fewer countries with nuclear weapons programs now than there were fifteen years ago. Far fewer countries with ballistic missiles programs now than there were just fifteen years ago. Fewer numbers of ballistic missiles. Chemical and biological weapons have largely been eliminated from state arsons with a few holdouts that we’ll discuss. In other words, for most of the past fifteen years, all of the arrows on proliferation, most of the arrows on proliferation have been going down.

So there’s these trends towards reducing the number of weapons, reducing the number of states with weapons and then there are these countertrends of some countries popping up. India, Pakistan for example. Now North Korea and Iran. But it is a much more complex picture than the Daily News may lead you to understand. Here’s what I mean. Let’s take a look at chemical weapons.

In World War II, every belligerent nation had chemical weapons or chemical weapons programs. This was the first of the so-called weapons of mass destruction, introduced in World War I by the Germans, quickly copied by the French and British. Tens of thousands of soldiers killed by these weapons. When I was in the Staff of the House of Services Committee in the late 1980s, one of the big debates was over whether the Army should develop a new generation of chemical weapons. Big-eyed bomb they called it. Binary bomb that would combine two relatively inert gases, harmless gases in flight, to produce a deadly nerve engine. We had to have it the Army said. Vital to U.S. national security if we did not have a chemical weapon response in kind to the Warsaw Pact, soldiers would die.

In 1991, George H.W. Bush ended that debate by saying that no one should have chemical weapons. He went out and negotiated the Chemical Weapons Convention, which now over a hundred and fifty countries have signed and most states have started giving up their arsenals. United States is destroying the thirty thousand tons of chemical weapons that were once considered vital to our national security. The Russians are destroying their forty thousand tons. Most countries have given this up. Even this year, little Albania disclosed they had a secret catch of weapons and have given them up. We are now worried primarily about these countries you see on the map. China, who had signed this treaty for example, who we worry may be cheating on it. Same with Iran. And then the countries in the Middle East: Egypt, Syria, and Israel that have not ratified this treaty and most likely, still have some chemical weapons.

Biological weapons. The next most deadly weapon in this category. A virus, bacteria. That’s what these weapons are. Living organisms designed to cause bodily harm. Could kill thousands of people if released effectively in a military fashion. Again, during World War II, every major power had these weapons or programs to develop these weapons. Only Japan used them by dropping infected fleets over occupied China. No one else did. In fact, aside from that one instance, there has never been a case where biological weapons have been used in combat.

In 1969, then President Richard M. Nixon decided that we did not need the very sophisticated biological weapons that we had. We then had an arsenal that was sufficient to kill every man, woman, and child and most food crops in the world. Richard M. Nixon unilaterally started destroying our biological weapons. We negotiated the Biological Weapons Convention and said these are evil weapons nobody should have. One hundred and sixty countries have now signed that treaty. They are largely gone from state arsenals. We now worry about these countries such as Russia in dark blue as you see on the map, who signed the treaty, but we suspect has implemented it imperfectly. That is, they may still have some. China, which there are some suspicions about. Again Iran and some other countries that have not yet signed or not yet ratified this convention including again Egypt, Syria, and Israel. All of whom may have biological weapons or weapons agents. The rest of the world has largely given these weapons up. That is, they are not, as far as we know, in anyone’s active military stockpile.

Now it gets more complicated. Nuclear weapons. In 1960 when John F. Kennedy was campaigning for President he debated then Vice-President Richard Nixon and he attacked Nixon from the right on national security issues. He said that Nixon and Eisenhower hadn’t done enough to protect the United States’ national security; in particular, they had not been able to get a comprehensive test band treaty to end the atmosphere of nuclear tests that the United States and the Soviet Union were then conducting. There were then four countries with nuclear weapons: United States came first, Soviet Union quickly followed in 1949, Great Britain in 1952 with our help, and France had a test in 1960. But Kennedy warned that unless we did more, much more, by the middle of that decade, by the end of the President’s first term, there could be fifteen, twenty or twenty-five countries with nuclear weapons because the trend was clear. The U.S. was deploying these. The Soviets were deploying these. It became the thing to do. If you were a serious nation, you would have these in your arsenals. For security, for prestige, for status, or simply to hedge. Simply to hedge. Fortunately for us, Kennedy did something about this, he started negotiating the Non-Proliferation Treaty. He couldn’t finish the job. Lyndon Johnson did. Johnson couldn’t sign it. Richard Nixon did. And we began this forty-year process of bi-partisan cooperation. Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives working together to build this non-proliferation regime. And it has worked very well. Not perfectly by any means. We have speed laws. Speeders still speed. I did on the way here. But that doesn’t mean we repeal the laws. People still kill each other, but we have laws against murder and that is the norm. That is the importance of this regime.

For all the reasons people get weapons, want weapons, and want the technology to develop these weapons, what these laws do is set the norm. Set the expectations for the world so that NPT and related treaties turned around the expectation instead of everyone acquiring these weapons, everyone turned away from these weapons. Countries made the decision for their own national security reasons, but now we had an international norm. A guidepost. A direction. Everyone was walking down that non-nuclear road together. The deal was that these countries considering it would give up the nuclear weapons options and that in exchange, those who already had them would work towards eliminating them. Second part of that deal was that those countries that had nuclear technology for peaceful purposes – reactors, medical research – would share that nuclear technology with those states that promised not to develop nuclear weapons. Every country in the world has now signed this treaty except for four: Israel, India, and Pakistan who have stayed out of it and North Korea that’s just left it and now we are negotiating their return. Most of the countries who have signed this treaty and remain non-nuclear weapon states, one hundred eighty three non-nuclear weapon states, believe what the treaty says. That we should get rid of nuclear weapons. In fact, most of the American public believes that. An AP poll this year showed that sixty-six of the American public agreed with the statement that no country should have nuclear weapons. No one. When they were asked, how about United States and its allies have nuclear weapons and we stop everyone else from getting them. Only thirteen percent agreed with that statement. But that is effectively our national policy right now.

The American public and most of the world is decidedly non-nuclear weapons. They do not like these. They don’t want them. They don’t see a need for them. That’s why most of the world is white in this map. You layer in ballistic missiles. This was a big threat that people worried about before 9/11. Before 9/11 this was the security imperative of the Bush administration. In the month before 9/11, six Cabinet level officials visited Moscow. Not to talk about terrorism. Not to talk about getting rid of Russia’s nuclear materials, but to get Russian agreement to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Treaty, which Richard Nixon had negotiated back in the 1970s. That was their priority because they said there was an eminent danger of a ballistic missile attack with a nuclear weapon.

This map shows you the countries we are worried about. There are some thirty countries with ballistic missiles, but as it turns out, nineteen of them only have short-range ballistic missiles. This is a part of the analysis you have to do as a consumer of this intelligence. As future policymakers, you have to understand the threat information that you are being given. Take apart this threat assessment. Don’t accept it at face value. There are thirty countries with ballistic missiles. Yes, yes, yes, but how far can they go? About twenty can only go across the boarder to their neighbors. Then over here, you can see on the map, we have the declared arsenals of the five nuclear weapon states. These are the only true trans-oceanic systems that can go across the Atlantic or Pacific. We then are worried about this handful of countries, these six countries that have intermediate ballistic missile programs and have charted them up here. Intermediate meaning one thousand kilometers, two thousand kilometers, three thousand kilometers, and up to reach out from their region so if successful for example, Iran probably could develop a ballistic missile that could hit parts of Europe, but when you look at those circles, you notice one thing. Those circles are way over there and the United States is way over here. There is not an eminent ballistic missile threat to the United States from any new nation with the very, very slight possibly that North Korea could develop a missile that could hit parts of the Hawaiian Highland Chain. That’s basically the ballistic missile threat we face today. It’s a regional threat, less a national threat.

Now we’ve put it all together for you. And one of the things you notice about this map is that proliferation is not spread uniformly around the world. It’s not like dropping a drop of ink in a water glass. It does not spread evenly. Instead, and I noticed this as I was doing the analysis and putting this map together for the first time, the countries we are worried about follow this ark of crisis; they go through the middle East, down south Asia, and then up to northeast Asia. In other words, they’re in those areas of the world where there are still major unresolved economic, political, and territorial disputes that make some of these states think they can gain a strategic advantage by acquiring one or more of these weapons. And that tells you something about how you have to solve this problem. It can’t just be treaties. It can’t just be military action or export controls or norms. You have to solve the underlying regional conflicts that give rise to this proliferation imperative or you’re never going to solve the problem.

Does anybody think that India and Pakistan are going to give up their nuclear weapons without resolving cashmere? Or that Israel is going to give up its nuclear weapons without a regional peace agreement? And a peace agreement with the Palestinians in particular or that North Korea is going to give it up? And this is the test case we can now watch and judge whether I am right about this. Whether North Korea is going to give it up without security assurances and an integration into that northeast Asian economic and security community. Here’s another way to look at it. When you start looking at the problem not from fear and distortion, but who’s exactly got what. What are we talking about? You can see that there are fifteen countries right now with some of these weapons. In dark blue, you see the countries that actually have nuclear weapons. Light blue, North Korea may have these weapons. Iran has a program that might develop the technology for these weapons. Biological, again we are down to about two countries really that we really worry about, but actually have still these weapons and some others in light blue that we are concerned about and in yellow other research programs. And here in the chemical, the same thing. Handful of countries. Then we added this red category for the countries that have weapons and are destroying them including little Albania, South Korea, Libya’s giving them all up. And you realize this is a limited, contained threat, but a relative handful of countries. Some of these countries are quite large, China, Russia, the United States, but for a relative handful of countries, this is a knowable threat.

It is not spreading around the world. This is not a question of everybody having the increased ability to get the technology and therefore, if they can build it, they will. No. Many, many countries can build these weapons. They have made the political decision not to do so which changed the recent years as U.S. policy approach towards this. The last ten, fifteen years, policy approach has been put this way. What we are worried about were the weapons. The approach was to get rid of the weapons. As long as they had the weapons, they might be used. As John F. Kennedy said, “We have to abolish the weapons of war before they abolish us.” So when Clinton spoke this way, he spoke of the number one security threat being the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

George W. Bush has changed the formula. He talks about the number one threat being outlawed regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. He changed the formula from what to who and this fit in to an overall view of what the proliferation threat was. A growing threat. A more dangerous world than the one we lived in. And it was focused on a small number of outlaw states. Do we stay apart from the treaties or use the treaties as a cupboard and cheat on the treaties, which is why there was a general tendency to move away from these treaties that provided what they considered an illusion of security, a cover for cheaters, and at the same time, inhibited American freedom action. They looked at these multilateral forums as a place where the global deputations were tearing down the American Gulliver.

So what we have to do he said is focus on this nexus of these states, weapons of mass destruction and non-state terrorist actors. According to that theory, we could then go eliminate the regimes. That’s where we would break the proliferation chain. That’s how we would solve the problem. An action-oriented agenda detailed in the National Security Strategy established in 2002 and then the National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction also in that year. A strategy that picks and chooses good guys and bad guys, but there is a problem with that strategy. The good guys and bad guys keep changing. Iran used to be a good guy. We sold Iran their first nuclear reactor. When Iran turned bad, by our terms, Iraq was a good guy. We armed Saddam. He was our buffer against the expansionist, fundamentalist Islamic threat. Pakistan is a good guy now, but for my money, Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world. They have enough material for about fifty nuclear weapons. They have armed Islamic fundamentalist groups operating in their territory. Osama bin Laden, very likely is located somewhere in the Pakistan area or around its borders. If Musharraf’s motorcade is ten seconds slower next time – there were two assassination attempts on him in the last year – what happens to Pakistan? What happens to the weapons? What happens to the scientists who know how to build the weapons?

Of course, you have the problem of maintaining this double standard. We pick and choose. It’s okay that Israel nuclear weapons. It’s not okay that Iran has nuclear weapons. It’s okay that India has nuclear weapons. It’s not okay that North Korea has nuclear weapons. It’s okay that we have nuclear weapons. It’s not okay that Iraq has nuclear weapons. On fact, Iraq is pursued as our number one threat. We have to go to preventive war to reduce to zero the possibility that Saddam Hussein might have nuclear weapons. Brestensky had an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune.

And if there is one thing I would recommend you do when you leave here is to not go to my website, although that is a good thing to do. It is not to buy deadly arsenals or pick up a free copy of Universal Compliance. It’s go read Brestensky‘s op-ad. It is the most devastating critique that I have seen today of this administration’s foreign policy and when I share and I cannot say it in the words that he says it with, as he has a stature that I lack. He puts his finger on the problem. The proliferation problems have gotten worse in general, over the last five years. There are success stories and I will get to those, but overall, the overall impact is that we now have a more dangerous proliferation problem and one that has the possibility of cascading out of control. Not just for this first reason, but for the lessons that Iran and North Korea took from the attack. Remember Iraq was the model. Iraq was the answer when John Bolton, Secretary of State, was asked what lesson should Iran and North Korea draw from the invasion of Iraq, he said, “Take a number.” And that was the idea. That we would knock off Iraq, we would show that there was a cost to be paid for pursuing these programs for opposing the U.S. and that the other nations would be coerced into compliance. Not necessarily by military action against Iran. Even then, many people thought all we need to do is take over Iraq and we can inspire a revolt. The Middle East was seen to be in general to be a house of cards that we could knock down.

Brestensky’s other point is in his proliferation agenda about India. That the decision to assist India’s nuclear program, which is driven by geo-political reasons to enlist India’s support in a containment strategy against China, establishes this double standard. And this is the problem. You cannot have this double standard. You can’t convince your kids not to smoke if you have a two-pack-a-day habit and you are constantly extolling the benefits of smoking and inviting your friends in to smoke. It’s just not going to work.

Let’s took another look at this bad math problem that they have. When you see these assessments being presented to you, these statements being presented to you, don’t take them at face value. Do a little work. Think them out for yourself. Look at the variables here and judge is this equation correct? It is not correct. It seems like it should be. Most dangerous groups – terrorists - plus most dangerous weapons plus most dangerous states must equal the most dangerous threat. If you believe this, then the administration’s policy flows from it, then you should take military action, you should narrow the point of attack. Maybe you do need new nuclear weapons to go after those deep underground bunkers in North Korea or Iran. Forget these international treaties, let’s develop coalitions of the willing and we’ll do what we have to do to eliminate these bad guys. The most important thing is to take them out, but that math is wrong. It is not correct.
All you got to do is think about it. If you are Osama bin Laden and you want a nuclear weapon, which we believe he does, where do you go? You don’t go to Iran. They don’t have a nuclear weapon. You don’t go to Iraq. We know they don’t have a nuclear weapon. You don’t even go to North Korea. If they have some and there is some doubt about that, very unlikely they will give up what they have worked so hard to get. You go, just like Willie Sutton, the bank robber in the 1930s. When he was asked, “Willie, why do you rob banks?” he said, “that’s where the money is.”

You go to where the weapons are. Where are the weapons? The weapons are in warehouses in states of the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia. The weapons are in Pakistan. The material highly in which uranium is scattered around the world. There are some forty-six countries that have uranium in University research reactions. We just airlifted thirty-one kilograms from a university. It looks like this place except they have a nuclear reactor with bomb-grade material in it lightly guarded. And there are four to six countries like that.

So what you realize is that the correct equation is terrorists plus these weapons of mass destruction plus any state arsenal. Unless you find that it is a little bit more chemical weapons more terrible, biological weapons a little bit more terrible are not the catastrophic threat we really worry about. It’s really only the nuclear weapons. One bomb in one crate. One city gone. So that’s the correct equation. That leads to a fundamentally different policy orientation. One that seeks to contain the material. If you want to prevent nuclear terrorism, and we all do, we can do it. The programs are in place. We know where this material is or at least most of it. We can secure it and eliminate it before the terrorists get there.

So what we need to do is develop a new policy synthesis and this is what we do in Universal Compliance Companion Study. It’s free. If you want a copy, just email us or just download it from the website. We have a booklet here describing it. We’re trying to take the best of the Bush administration approach. And there is a lot of good stuff in there, Proliferation Security Initiative, for example, Resolution 1540, mainly the orientation on compliance, on enforcing compliance. They are absolutely right. We spend so much time gathering signatures on treaties and not enough time enforcing these treaties. We take the best of that approach and marry it back up with the best of the existing treaty regime. And most important, establish universal standards that we can all adhere to. We start off with a threat assessment that looks not at just terrorism, although that is our number one threat.

I am going to fly through this very quickly, but all of this is in the book. Look at where the terrorism threat is. What you are worried about. We also are worried about the second great danger, which is the emergence of new states. Not because Iran and North Korea are going to attack us with a nuclear weapon, deterrence is live and well. They know what would happen next. It’s because of what would their neighbors would do. What do their neighbors do? Saudi Arabia cannot allow Iran to get the political, military, and strategic benefits of a nuclear arsenal. It would match it. Perhaps through its close connections with the Pakistani nuclear program. What would Turkey do or Egypt or for that matter, a new Iraq if there is a new Iraq, a country that used to have a nuclear weapons program? You have this proliferation, chain reaction that goes out of the region and would cascade around the world. And let’s not forget the twenty-seven thousand nuclear weapons that still exist, many of which are a hair-trigger alert. We have about two thousand, five hundred nuclear weapons on ICBM ready to launch in fifteen minutes still today. Still. Cold War is over. The weapons remain. We still have the basic Cold War posture. Too dangerous. No reason for it.

And finally, the fourth great danger is regime breakdown. That this entire network collapses and we are left without the norms and we’re are left without the verification. We are left without the Nobel Peace Prize winning International Atomic Energy Agency. The whole thing collapses. They are all interrelated and a development in one of these areas influences a development in the other. It’s a complex problem. It’s like playing three-dimensional chess. You have to pay attention to the developments on all of these three levels and when you move a piece on one level, it affects movement on the other board. If North Korea actually consolidates as a nuclear weapon state, it affects the regime, it affects decisions in our arsenal – whether we’re going to continue reductions or not or develop new weapons – and of course it presents a new source of supply for the terrorists. One example of that interaction.

So you have to construct a defense in depth of this multi-faceted problem. And we came up with six principles for it. Make non-proliferation irreversible. The Bush administration is right. It’s got to be a lot harder for countries to withdraw from the NPT. We couple that with de-value nuclear weapons. The smoking problem I mentioned. As long as we keep insisting that these are vital to our national security, then why should Iran think any different? Everyone has to walk down that non-nuclear road together. Secure all nuclear material. You prevent nuclear terrorism by draining the nuclear swamp. Secure the material before Al Qaeda can get to it. Stop illegal transfers. The Proliferation Security Initiative of the Bush administration is a good program to help do this. The export control regulations that they are championing through the U.N. Resolution 1540 are another good one. And as we mentioned, commit to conflict resolution. Engage in the Middle East. Engage in South Asia. The six party talk is an excellent example on how to do this. Exactly the right approach to be taking for the North Korea problem. And for us, it solved a three-state problem. It solved the India, Pakistan, Israel problem. We have proposals for how to do that. We can’t let those countries drift forever outside the global non-proliferation regime.