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MEETING
TODA
ODAY’S PROLIFERA
ROLIFERATION
CHALLENGES
with another, I hope, not too dangerous analogy. In March, 1861, Abraham Lincoln confronted a rebellious South.
Now, for Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, all he needed was to be left alone. He
could carry on his own government, collect taxes, cherish their sacred institutions. Lincoln needed the war.
Lincoln needed Fort Sumter—the casus belli—because he had to interfere with the confederate plans.
Similarly, we need to interfere with North Korea’s plans. It’s not enough for us to keep talking. We need to
force North Korea to make a choice now between continuing a program that threatens all of our security, in which
case they would face harsh measures that would put pressure on the very continuation of their regime, or to take
the other path of returning to compliance with global norms and one in which their future could be safe, secure,
and perhaps even prosperous.
Thank you.
MR. GALLUCCI: Thanks, Dan.
George?
MR. PERKOVICH: I live in a town where it’s referred to still as the War of Northern Aggression, so I’m not
sure about the analogy, Dan. I want to thank Daryl Kimball and Spurgeon Keeny, Jack Mendelsohn, who I see here,
for making ACA such a formidable organization that on a snowy, yucky, traveling day in Washington that you had
a turnout like this. I’d like to congratulate you and thank you for including me.
I’m going to talk about South Asia, meaning India and Pakistan. I’m going to look forward and talk about
policy approaches. I’m not going to look back. And I’ll probably be a little unorthodox, but it’s just because I think
the situation there is not going to be addressed through the orthodox ways that we think about arms control and
nonproliferation.
Let me start by saying that the operational objective in dealing with India and Pakistan today—and I would
argue in other nonproliferation cases, too—is to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. That’s the bottom line, and
from the standpoint of potential nuclear weapons use in South Asia, there are two threats that stand out right now.
The first and more important is the potential military conflict between India and Pakistan that could escalate to the
use of nuclear weapons, and that escalation, indeed the conflict itself, could come from inadvertence or it could be
purposeful. But it’s escalation that is the primary risk.
The second risk, I would argue, and it’s a formidable one, has to do with Pakistan’s stewardship over nuclear
weapons, nuclear materials, and the know-how that its scientists and engineers possess, and how that ties to the
problem of use is in part whether that know-how and those materials could pass into the house of less deterrable
actors. And those actors could be a successor government in Pakistan, they could be terrorists, or other states.
In terms of policy prescription, the most likely cause of deterrence failure would be an effort by one of the two
antagonists to try to change the territorial status quo of the other. In this case we’re talking about Pakistan as the
most likely instance or location where that effort to change sovereignty or territorial status quo would occur. And
here there is some cause of optimism, or at least we can specify what we think the problem is; namely, India
appears to recognize that it cannot change the territory that Pakistan controls. In other words, India has given up
on the idea of changing the current territorial status quo in Kashmir or in the region vis-à-vis Pakistan more
broadly. So the primary challenge then is to persuade Pakistan to accept the territorial status quo or at least to
accept that the territorial status quo cannot be changed by force and cannot be changed by Pakistan.
So if they both recognize that whatever they now have in Kashmir can’t be changed by the other physically,
you’ve done a lot to reduce the risk of nuclear war. Now you’re into a negotiating venue where you’re trying to
figure out the terms to formalize that—to adjust the boundary.
And that’s where a lot of people hope we are. As a result of the diplomacy last month, they’re going to have
talks in February to begin this process. One doesn’t want to be overly optimistic. There are many things that can go
wrong, but in part what you can argue is going on here is in fact this recognition by both sides that the territorial
status quo is going to have to be accepted. Let’s negotiate the terms and move on.
In terms of U.S. policy and what we can do, I think the U.S. should stay very closely involved and should be
thinking about structuring rewards and incentives if they go forward, but these latest developments happened
largely without the U.S. That’s a very good thing. I think it would be a mistake to exaggerate the importance of the
role the U.S. should play here, at least in the present.
The second big objective has to be to help prevent nuclear terrorism. And here we need to do, as perhaps we
are doing, focus not just on Pakistan, but on India as well and ensuring that they both have state-of-the-art policies
for securing their nuclear weapons, their nuclear facilities, their nuclear materials, and their scientists. And we’re
talking about whether it’s an informal or bilateral, but better if it’s a universal code of conduct regarding stewardship
of nuclear assets.
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