President Obama laid out an ambitious vision of a world without nuclear weapons when he first took office, but in the wake of the Islamic State, the Brussels terrorist attack and North Korea’s recent provocations, that goal seems as elusive as ever.
Delegations from more than 50 countries are gathered in Washington for the fourth nuclear summit during Obama’s time in office. He held the first in 2010, shortly after declaring that as the only nation to use a nuclear weapon, the U.S. has a moral obligation to lead the way in eliminating them.
Since then, the administration has touted its deal from last year aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program, and signs of progress toward reducing the world’s stockpiles of enriched uranium and fortifying nuclear facilities around the globe. The White House also cited new agreements under which China will downgrade more of its nuclear reactors, and work with the U.S. to reduce nuclear smuggling.
But nuclear security experts across the political spectrum agree that the president’s goal of a nuke-free world has been largely overrun by events, most notably the rise of a vicious brand of terrorism and fear that the Islamic State could attain enough nuclear material to make a dirty bomb and detonate it in a major western city.
Those fears escalated after Belgian authorities found secretly recorded footage of a senior Belgian nuclear official coming and going from his home during a search of the apartment of a suspect in the Paris terror attacks, a sign terrorists had their eyes on Belgium’s nuclear facilities. Just hours after the Brussels attacks, the government evacuated the nuclear facility and has since installed armed guards where just last month none existed.
North Korea, meanwhile, continues to move closer to building a nuclear weapon and taunts the United States, while Russian officials openly talk about unilateral strikes on the U.S. and Europe and decided to sit out the Washington summit this year. Pakistan also continues feverishly building its arsenal while rebuffing western attempts to slow it down.
“Nuclear catastrophe is greater today than during the Cold War,” William Perry, a leading non-proliferation expert who served as defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, said ahead of the summit during a forum at the Atlantic Council Thursday. “The policies this country follows are in no way commensurate with the danger.”
Perry, a fan of Obama’s nuclear summits and efforts to reduce nuclear material around the world, nevertheless said world events have prevented further progress.
“There’s a high probability over the next few years” of a nuclear terrorist attack, an event “waiting to happen,” he predicted. That threat, he said, is “much more consequential, two orders of magnitude more consequential than 9/11, and the social, economic and political consequences would be considerable.”
At the same time, he said the Russian stance on nuclear weapons is worse than during the Cold War because Moscow has thrown away any pretext against the possibility of a pre-emptive strike. The government is undertaking a major rebuild of their nuclear arsenal and is “almost flaunting it.”
“I have no doubt the U.S. is going to follow suit with it and we will have a nuclear arms race similar to the Cold War,” he said.
Obama acknowledged the challenges when he first broadcast his nuclear doctrine in a landmark speech in Prague in April, 2009.
“In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up,” he said.
In an op-ed ahead of this week’s summit, the president said he is the first to acknowledge his “unfinished business,” Russia’s violation of the major nuclear treaty, and the need for both Moscow and Washington to negotiate to reduce its stockpiles further.
“I said in Prague that achieving the security and peace of a world without nuclear weapons will not happen quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime,” he said. “But we have begun.”
But other experts place at least some of the blame for achieving only a fraction of what the president had hoped on the president’s own team.
Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and the author of Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late, said since the summits began, 12 countries eliminated weapons-usable material and many more increased the security around their supplies and joined conventions against nuclear terrorism.
But Obama failed to secure Senate approval of the nuclear test ban treaty, which he had promised to “immediately and aggressively pursue,” and largely failed to meet his goal of securing all nuclear materials within four years, Cirincione points out.
“The final summit will end with tons of material in 25 nations still unsecured, with a patchwork of policies, rather than legally binding requirements and universal standards,” Cirincione wrote in DefenseOne.com earlier this week.
While Russians refused to cooperate and Republicans in Congress blocked other efforts, Cirincione said the president’s biggest foe “was his own bureaucracy” and the “cynicism and careerism of his own appointees.”
“When Obama stopped pushing his nuclear policies in 2011 (save for Iran), the nuclear-industrial complex took over,” he wrote.
Even some of the biggest supporters of president’s nuclear de-escalation hopes acknowledge he has fallen short and the diplomatic community is experiencing “summit fatigue.”
“There have been successes in this process since 2010, but the overall objective of securing the most vulnerable nuclear materials in four years … I don’t think has been achieved,” said Sharon Squassoni, the director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ proliferation prevention program.
Russia’s decision to sit out the summit this year is probably the most serious setback because of the sheer magnitude of the country’s nuclear stockpile.
Olga Oliker, a CSIS senior adviser and director of its Russia and Eurasia program, points out that Russia and United States together hold 90 percent of the world’s highly enriched uranium, and more than half of the plutonium.
“There are a lot of areas where Russia’s absence is sort of the missing elephant in the room,” she said.
Other disarmament advocates argue that Obama may have one last chance for an anti-nuke swan song. Derek Johnson, executive director of Global Zero, responded to Obama’s op-ed with a call to immediate action. While he gave credit to the president for “modest cuts” to U.S. and Russian Cold War stockpiles and the Iran nuclear pact, he said there are still 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and that “we now risk losing ground.”
He urged Obama to reverse course on a “misguided nuclear spending spree” that is “utterly out of sync with the pursuit of a world without these weapons.”
With Russia trying to up the ante and fortify it’s stockpile, unilaterally disarming is an unrealistic prospect.
Still, Johnson argued that the president still has time to set something bold in motion, worthy of the vision he laid out in Prague, “something that the next administration can carry forward.”
“Your move, Mr. President,” he said.
