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ADDRESSING
FUTURE
ARMS
CONTROL
AND SECURITY
PROBLEMS
A last point about missile nonproliferation. I talked at the beginning about cruise missiles versus ballistic
missiles. There is a serious terrorist threat that is emerging in the area of cruise missiles, and that is taking
relatively small, cheap airplane kits, some of which you can buy over the Internet, and converting them by other
kits to an unmanned air vehicle, or a remotely piloted vehicle, and using them to dispense such weapon agents as
anthrax.
Cruise missiles are 10 times as efficient as ballistic missiles in delivering chemical or biological agents
because they can pattern the delivery of them. This is a very serious threat, and to my mind it is the most serious
threat combining the dangers of both terrorism and missile proliferation.
GENERAL EUGENE HABIGER: Catherine, did Richard go over his time?
MS. KELLEHER: Just a bit.
GEN. HABIGER: Well, that does not surprise me. Richard and I were classmates at the National War
College and he used to do the same thing, and that was 20 years ago. Some things never change, right, Richard?
It’s daunting to be up here with Richard and Matt. Richard and I and another Air Force colonel published
a paper as a part of our end of year project at National War College; a classified paper on nuclear proliferation in
the Middle East. Two things. We won an award and our names are imprinted forever in the rotunda on one of the
pillars on a brass plate saying we wrote this awesome paper. And we were prophetic in that we predicted the
evolution of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India. The whole premise of our paper was what would happen to
that region if nuclear weapons were introduced. That was the only time I’ve been clairvoyant. I hope to never do
that again.
I want to talk about three things: the abolition of nuclear weapons, the current state of our war-fighting
capabilities in nuclear weapons, and nuclear weapons strategy in the future.
My wise mother used to tell me, never say never. But in the case of the total elimination of nuclear weapons,
in [my] view it’s never going to happen. And that’s unfortunate. We signed the [nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
(NPT)] in 1968. Article VI of that treaty is very, very clear: under certain conditions nuclear weapons will go away.
Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
I think the window of opportunity we had as a world, as a universe, occurred in June, 1946, when President
Truman sent Bernard Baruch to the United Nations with a proposal to the newly created United Nations Atomic
Commission to do away with nuclear weapons, and then to put the enriched uranium and plutonium under
international control. Unfortunately that was voted down by the Soviet Union, and I think that was the primary
window of opportunity we had. The NPT is a good treaty. I think it’s a good thing that we have it out there. But in
my view we’re not going to see the end of nuclear weapons, and that’s unfortunate.
When I was a commander-in-chief, I had Paul Robinson, who was the former U.S. ambassador in the arms
control arena and now runs the Sandia National Laboratories at Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a group of
fellows and gals that advised me as the commander-in-chief in a group called the Strategic Advisory Group. It’s
been around for many years. I said, Paul, go out and look at the world from a war-fighting capability, where we
have—and this was back in 1996—6,000 nuclear weapons and going down to some very low number. What are
the things, what are the pitfalls, what are the stop lights, what are the green lights we have to consider?
And the bottom line that he came up with was that things change dramatically as you get to lower and lower
levels of nuclear weapons in terms of their utility and the way they’d be used. We went away from the concept of
wiping out each other’s societies. Mutually assured destruction went away, fortunately. But as you get down to
lower and lower levels of nuclear weapons, and again, I’m going to use the Soviet-Russia case, and I’ll talk about
that more in a minute—as you get down to a level, say, of around 1,000 or so you’ve got to go back to city-busting
because you don’t have enough weapons to have any military utility.
But the bottom line that came out of that study was the concept that a sudden appearance of a few nuclear
weapons will cause only a minor blip on the radar screen in a world with several thousand nuclear weapons. But
their appearance in a world without nuclear weapons would have profound effects. That’s the bottom line. As
you get down to lower and lower levels of nuclear weapons, the appearance—the sudden appearance, the
sudden, unexpected appearance, whether through cheating or whatever, would have a profound effect.
As we get down to lower and lower levels of nuclear weapons, I would submit that we need to get into the
multilateral mode. Virtually all of the discussions so far have been bilateral, the United States and the Russians.
It’s now time for us to get other nations involved as we get down to lower and lower levels. So I see a world at some
point in the future to be at a few hundred nuclear weapons for the United States, for Russia, for China, and
hopefully far less for other countries.
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