Nuclear Weapons: An Evolving Threat	4 min 10 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime
Chemical and Biological Weapons	4 min 00 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime
Counter-proliferation	2 min 54 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime

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Transcript

Nuclear Weapons: An Evolving Threat

I am a senior defence analyst at RAND. I am the research leader for military strategy for structure and counter-proliferation. I worry about strategy issues, how the Defense Department ought to organize itself—some areas we refer to as capabilities-based planning, risk management, those kinds of things. I also deal with how you would set up your forces, what kind of forces you should have, and then in particular the problems of weapons of mass destruction. Those are some of the principal areas. I work not only with the Pentagon but also with the military commands, over in Korea, the Persian Gulf with our Central Command, with our Strategic Command and other organizations—specific commands, in order to help them coordinate their activities within the overall Defense Department.

In the Cold War, and especially from the U.S. perspective of the Cold War, we initially looked at nuclear weapons as a U.S. dominance. Then as the Soviets built their nuclear weapons force, we changed, and we really thought about nuclear weapons in the sense that if we could deter Soviet use of nuclear weapons we had basically solved the problem. So we established a concept called assured destruction, which was that if the Soviets attacked us with nuclear weapons, we would destroy the Soviet cities and industrial capacity—which obviously they would not want to have happen. Since they could then turn and do the same thing to us, it was referred to as mutual assured destruction, or MAD. The irony was, if you think about destroying each other’s cities and urban population, it’s not a very moralistic approach. But the number of weapons was so large that we had to think of a way—we couldn’t just defend ourselves.

In the post-Cold War era, the threats that we are facing from most countries are very small threats. The Chinese may have a dozen or two dozen ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles] that could reach the United States. The North Koreans don’t have any today, but they have theatre missiles and probably five to 20 nuclear weapons. That is a magnitude that you can defend against. So a lot of the U.S. emphasis has moved away from an assured destruction approach to a defensive approach, or a protection approach. Combined with that, we now think about retaliation not against populations but against opposing military forces—not just their nuclear but also potentially conventional forces—and that is directly out of U.S. strategy right now.

The U.S. is very anxious to control nuclear weapons. The other thing about the Soviet Union was that we were pretty sure they were not going to give nuclear weapons to terrorist groups. We are not very sure about that with the North Koreans, the Iranians, who have maintained long associations with terrorist groups and probably would do that at some point. North Korea has said it would do it at some point. So we are very concerned that weapons could proliferate to terrorists, who are very difficult to deter based on threats of retaliation, and who would have every incentive to use those weapons against the United States.

So the concern at this point in time is that the proliferation which has occurred to nation states like North Korea, and potentially like Iran, could then spread to terrorist groups. We would then face a whole new problem in terms of trying to prevent that damage. And the focus of those people is not “in theatre” or away from the U.S. homeland—they want to hit cities in the U.S. homeland.

Chemical and Biological Weapons

With chemical weapons we have the Chemical Weapons Convention, and with biological weapons we have the Biological Weapons and Toxin Convention. The Chemical Weapons Convention has more means for verification. The Biological Weapons Convention has really very little. It is an “on your honour” kind of system. What we have learned with countries like North Korea, and others, is that it is pretty easy to violate those conventions and to build capabilities if you want to. The United States thought the problem was going away in the eighties. And in the late eighties and early nineties, we got a couple of defectors out of the Soviet biological weapons programs and found out those programs were absolutely immense, and the Soviets had decided to simply disregard the convention. So the United States’ sense has been much more sceptical about that and concluded that while those conventions are nice for the countries who are willing to abide by international law, other countries aren’t. We have to be prepared to counter these threats in other ways as well.

The problem with biological weapons is that they are also easy to make, potentially. Not easy to make real effective, but easy to make, so that you can have at least some quantity. As a result, it is very difficult to control. You can’t do it based upon satellites looking down and trying to observe who is making biological weapons. By and large, you just won’t see it that way.

It is going to be very difficult to control the dissemination of these, and increasingly we are worrying that “the cat is getting out of the bag” and starting to spread these weapons. We are therefore concerned that it is not just arms control that has to be our key action; we have to take broader action.

Canada, like the United States, has major medical research and does have access to some of the biological agents that can be used to grow biological weapons. So Canada needs to have its own internal controls—which you have put in place—to try and control the spread of those diseases. Because people simply need a little bit of a seed to then grow large quantities of different agents. That is a major concern on the biological side.

On the chemical side it’s an industrial process, and you need to control the picking up of the industrial capabilities, just like the United States. It only takes a few countries around the world who violate those controls to lead to the spreading. Canada is cooperating with the United States to try and maintain worldwide control. But the issue is broader than that. We recognize, with Canada, that people around the world are not doing what they’ve said they are going to do. So we have set up some activities, like the proliferation security initiative—which Canada is a major participant in—to try to be able to intercept the transfer of those technologies, or those weapons, should that occur. In that regard, Canada is a very valuable counterpart to the United States. Having its own intelligence mechanisms, having its own resources to potentially help in this process, and relationships with countries and industrial organizations, and so forth—it allows the spread of the right kind of influence and the right kind of access to try to stop the spread of these weapons.

Counter-proliferation

Non-proliferation traditionally means efforts to try to stop the transfer of technologies or weapons to countries that don’t currently have them. So with nuclear weapons, non-proliferation would stop the transfer of nuclear weapons or related technologies.

Counter-proliferation says that that may have already happened. North Korea may well already have nuclear weapons; Iran is moving in that direction. Once they have it, we don’t just give up and say, ”Oh well—sooner or later they are going to use it.” We need to be prepared to counter the effects of those weapons. That can be everything from protective activities, like masks and suits that protect you from a chemical or biological weapon, to what we refer to as active defences—the ability to shoot down ballistic missiles... Or better control of our borders by interacting on our visas and other mechanisms that the State Departments run in order to prevent individuals coming into our countries who are not authorized to be there—things to intercept the import of those activities... Other activities where we might actually need to go out and destroy caches of those things that we find. For example, if North Korea were to collapse tomorrow, it has an immense quantity of those materials around its country. Who is going to go in and clean it up? Somebody has to. It would be very dangerous if we didn’t.

Fundamentally, these states are in part interested in their own security, but they are also interested in exerting influence. Whether you are talking about Iran or North Korea, the appearance of empowerment is extraordinarily important to those governments. We can’t help them become empowered as a counterpart to them having weapons of mass destruction—you don’t give a mafia boss more power just because he is getting extra weapons. You have to decide that that has to stop. You can give them security by making agreements not to attack them and not to do other things to them. But it’s difficult to give them all they think they are going to get with weapons of mass destruction. What we have to do is to say, ”There are some things we can give you, but there are other things you are not going to get. But that is against the risks that you take by taking these actions and potentially causing great damage to our countries.