Thinking Strategically About Nuclear Nonproliferation

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You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst1 Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable. Oil supplies are stretched thin as climate cooling drives up demand. Many countries seek to shore up their energy supplies with nuclear energy, accelerating nuclear proliferation. Japan, South Korea, and Germany develop nuclearweapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt, and North Korea. Israel, China, India, and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.2

SUMMARY The White House’s Nuclear Posture Review needs to take into account the Pentagon’s present Deterrence Doctrine continued use that: relies on maintaining a large stockpile of hydrogen nuclear weapons at the ready for purposes of deterrence; includes the expansion of the Doctrine to include cyberspace; 3 and produces deleterious effects from the military’s continued use of the Doctrine on the NNSA’s (National Nuclear Security Agency) ongoing ability to achieve national and global non-proliferation objectives as promulgated by the Executive Branch and Congress in response to bilateral and multilateral treaties and agreements. If a Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) of the continued use of the present Deterrence Doctrine was performed, 4 these surprising outcomes may become evident concerning the Deterrence Doctrine, in its present weak form: the consequences of a failure of deterrence are unacceptably large; the probability of the failure of deterrence is beyond acceptable levels of risk; the present Doctrine of Deterrence is not appropriate for use in environments such as cyberspace;5 the present Doctrine of Deterrence in its weak form is a barrier to the efficacy of any nonproliferation objectives. In fact, it is highly unlikely that meaningful nonproliferation can be achieved as long as the Doctrine in its weak form persists as deterrence strategy across nations; the Doctrine creates an urgent need for ever increasing National Defense budgets that usurp necessary capital for other threats to the Nation, such as from climate change, solar storms that can disrupt the national electricity grid, protecting the domestic cyberspace, depletion of oil supplies, etc. LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 4.3 UNSOLICITED PROPOSAL DISCUSSION DOCUMENT --- June 5, 2009

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PROPOSITIONS The proliferation vs. nonproliferation game, 6 a non zero sum game, 7 as presently being played, is unwinnable. 8 We we call this game the Non Proliferation Game (NPG);9 If proliferation proceeds apace, the probability of a nuclear accident or nuclear terrorist attack or nuclear exchange between countries (“a nuclear event”) approaches certainty (P < 1.00) within probabilistic risk assessment planning periods of as few as 20-50 years;10 The consequences of a nuclear event range from the death of 500,000 people within 30 days and a few hundred billion dollars in medium-term economic damage to the extinction of life on the earth and the destruction of virtually all accumulated capital globally. The average case for a nuclear event (in this case, a terrorist attack with three nuclear devices on urban areas of the U.S. within 3-4 month period) is assumed to be a morbidity of 1,000,000 people total (within 5 years) and $1,000 billion/year in GDP losses from normal growth rates for a period of 7 years. Time, the length of time quantities of nuclear weapons and HEU (highlyenriched uranium) exist and are vulnerable to theft, is a factor driving the probability of a nuclear event towards certainty. Thus, time, quantities of nuclear materials, and level of security to avoid theft or misuse of these materials are determinant factors. Together, they account for about 45% of the factors that place the world at risk from a nuclear event occurring; The overriding driver for the near certainty of nuclear accident, terrorist attack, or nuclear exchange is the playing of an unwinnable game. This factor accounts for about 55% of the risk of a nuclear event; NPG, as presently being played, is unwinnable for four primary reasons: the game is inherently unstable. As like many other prisoner’s dilemma games, NPG requires large amounts of capital injected on a continuing basis to stabilize the relative positions of game players. This is capital unavailable to address human development, economic growth through technological innovation, and emerging national and global threats such as global warming;11 impetus to cheat in playing the game is determined by a weak form of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).12 We will call this new version: weak-MAD. Weak-MAD assumes my opponent will not attack my country if I possess nuclear weapons. 13 Also, my country will have higher prestige and better negotiating power on the world stage if I

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possess nuclear weapons or a credible threat as to my ability to produce them at any time of my choosing; 14 the advent of cyber warfare and cyber weapons development and present U.S. National Defense policy that relies on “full response options,” even response using nuclear weapons means that possessing a nuclear weapon capability is even more important requirement to stabilize national security;15 recent scientific work regarding global warming suggests that climate change will be much more severe and produce potentially catastrophic environmental impacts during this century. Thus, it becomes almost necessary for a state to posses nuclear weapons as a means to assure its position in the upcoming grab for ever more scarce natural resources, such as water, arable land, oil, capital, etc. 16 The present collapse of international finance and the advent of anthropogenic global warming reflects fundamental and structural inefficiencies in the markets that makeup the global economic system. As resources (freshwater, food, oil, CO2, etc.) are not allocated optimally in this economic system, national governments seek to protect their own interests. Countries that do not now posses nuclear weapons, seeing the landscape of strategic and economic decision-making now seek to acquire nuclear weapons or, at a minimum, the capacity to build nuclear weapons in order to secure their position in this precarious world order; 17 If nations continue playing NPG in the present economic environment, they will need significant additional resources, given the tensions among players of this game and the concurrent game of weak-MAD in order to actually decrease the probability of a nuclear event; Even with determined nonproliferation, as long as weak-MAD is operant, the probability (P) of a nuclear event grows, not lessens over time. This added risk will tend to create opportunity costs that put a drag on real GDP growth or may, at any time, destabilize the global economy should a nuclear event occur or be thought to be relatively more probable; An increased awareness of the probability of a nuclear event occurring might result in a change in the perception of relative world power, the introduction of ancillary technology such as launch capability or antiballistic missile defense, the repositioning of existing nuclear weaponry, the proliferation of nuclear weaponry or capability to build weapons, tensions between nuclear states over resources or in response to terrorism;

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Multilateral and bilateral nonproliferation treaties and agreements are necessary preconditions for NPG, but alone, are probably insufficient to adequately manage risk associated with proliferation driven by the weakMAD strategy. The weak-MAD strategy will tend to always overpower the NPG, in most game situations. Whatever is agreed to via treaty will tend to be subverted by the remnants of weak-MAD strategy; This also suggests that in bilateral disarmament from present levels, there may be a point beyond which disarmament actually increases the risk of a nuclear event occurring rather than decreases this risk as the number of nuclear weapons is reduced. 18 This is due to weak-MAD still being operative in a multiplayer game environment. This is not to indicate that bilateral disarmament should not proceed, but that this alone will be insufficient to adequately manage risk of a nuclear event occurring; What may be required most of all is to develop an alternative to the weak-MAD strategic initiative. Dedicated resources will be required to develop, try out, prove, and adopt another game; In all likelihood, it is possible that an alternative to weak-MAD may evolve outside of risk management strategies that are not primarily military strategic thinking. At least, a range of potential risk management games that are not limited solely to their strategic military value should be included for consideration as alternative to weak-MAD; The collapse of the normal functioning of global markets and international finance is a potentially destabilizing forcing function 19 in the weakMAD game that could push the NPG to a tipping point 20 toward nuclear proliferation; Given the state of the U.S. economy, nuclear events are of greater financial threat to the nation’s security. Terrorist attacks are more likely to be formulated with their economic impacts in mind and these economic impacts viewed as more important than the loss of civilian lives in an attack; In some respects, in the present economic environment, nuclear weapons and HEU comprise toxic assets with an economic ‘cost’ far beyond the cost to secure, store, and maintain this material. The purpose of nuclear weapons themselves is to destroy wealth. If they are ever used, there will be a reconstruction cost. Thus, to properly account for their existence at all, it would be proper to calculate an annual imputed insurance premium. This would be the economic cost for possessing a nuclear weapon, given its destructive potentiality and probability of being used, amortized over time.

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MAD BEGAN A S A N A S H E Q U I L I B R I U M G A M E21 MAD is a pernicious, expensive and dangerous game that has resulted from the unusual physics and particular technology of fusion nuclear weaponry.22 In 1950, with the Soviets close to having access to this technology, John von Neumann (1903-1957) and others argued for preventive war: First Use of the H Bomb and total annihilation of the Soviet Union. MAD is an alternative, No First Use strategy of deterrence through force. If both sides in a two-party game have adequate deterrence, then neither side will strike first if by launching an attack, the attacker would be destroyed in a counterattack. This game has two primary assumptions: (1) approximate parity so that neither side has an advantage for First Use, and (2) the players in this game are rational. 23 Provided these assumptions hold, MAD was thought to place the parties in a Nash Equilibrium where neither party would choose First Use. Thus, the world would be safe from nuclear annihilation. MAD QUICKLY B E C A M E A P R I S O N E R ’ S D I L E M M A G A M E24 By the mid-1960‘s, MAD may have become a prisoners dilemma with no Nash Equilibrium. Even though launching a First Strike might produce a devastating counterstrike, each party had an incentive to cheat; to break the equilibrium state, gain an advantage, and launch a First Strike that would potentially be decisive. Instead of rationality defining the game, fear of the other side caused each player to continually escalate to achieve an advantage. 25 Thus, an arms race ensued, with ever escalating choices that were supposed to produce an advantage to one player over the other. If the opposing player did not keep up, they fell behind and became vulnerable to a First Strike. This was an expensive game to play especially as it rationalized ever increasing budgets for conventional weaponry in order to fight wars successfully without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons.26 Weak-MAD became the default strategic game when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Also, a two-party game was no longer possible in a world with multiple players with nuclear weapons. WHY INVEN T I N G A N E W G A M E I S I M P O RTA N T & T I M E LY Weak-MAD and its overdetermining impact on NPG is a risk factor in economic recovery, addressing climate change, and succeeding at nonproliferation efforts.27 In formulating our national security strategy and national military strategy, developing an updated strategic framework defining the unique role of nuclear weapons in deterring threats to the United States, our key interests, and our allies is both timely and important. The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve System have allocated $11,000 billion of capital in the form of grants, loans, guarantees, and tax relief to address the melt-

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down of financial markets and to restart the domestic economy. This investment is put at risk should a nuclear event occur. The present nuclear deterrence framework for national security strategy needs to be rethought. ENDNOTES Italio Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) in William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 53. 1

Unclassified report by Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall and Peter Schwartz, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security” (October 2003). 2

3NYT

article on May 28th, “Pentagon Plans New Arm to Wage Wars in Cyberspace.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29cyber.html?_r=1&th&emc=th Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) is an analytical process that begins with two system design counterfactuals: (1) the magnitude (severity) of the potential adverse consequences of system failures; and (2) the likelihood (probability) of the occurrence of each potential consequence. The objective is not as a predictive exercise, but as a disciplined descriptive process that may identify and highlight budget requirements for a secure National Defense strategic policy. 4

Gen. Kevin Chilton, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, said “I think you don’t take any response options off the table from an attack on the United States of America,” Chilton said. “Why would we constrain ourselves on how we respond?.... “I think that’s been our policy on any attack on the United States of America.... “And I don’t see any reason to treat cyber any differently.” (“U.S. General Reserves Right to Use Force, Even Nuclear, in Response to Cyber Attack,” Global Security Newswire May 12, 2009). 5

With cyber weapons, there presently is no countervailing strategic ‘game’ doctrine for cyberspace, like MAD (mutual assured destruction), that has the potential to actually ‘deter’ First Use. The notion that the doctrine of nuclear deterrence can be retrofitted and used to deter cyber attacks is absurd. Because cyberspace threats can be initiated easily by privatized transnational groups, without the knowledge of national governments by rogue elements within the state, and the originating location of the attack readily masked and even transposed to a predetermined DNS, the threat of nuclear armageddon in response appears both unwarranted and unproductive From the branch of social science and mathematics that describes ‘game theory’ the study of strategic decision making in situations involving uncertainty. 6

A zero sum game always has winners and losers as the size of the pie is fixed; one person’s gain is another’s loss. A non zero sum game is a game where either party’s interests are not completely opposed as one player’s optimal strategy may also benefit the opposing player. (Poundstone, 51-2, 97-99). 7

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A game state where it is impossible for the player to win the game. The only options are restarting the game or stopping and deciding to play another game with different rules. Playing an unwinnable game is a zombie situation (Wikipedia). 8

The objective of ‘playing’ the NPG is risk management: to reduce the attendant risks of increasing the probability of a nuclear event in an environment where nuclear proliferation is occurring. 9

See Martin E. Hellman, “Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence,” The Bent of Tau Beta Pi, The Engineering Honor Society (Spring 2008) 14-22; Martin Hellman, “Soaring, Cryptography and Nuclear Weapons” (October 21, 2008) at http://nuclearrisk.org/soaring_article.php. 10

For example, an argument can be made that the arms race between the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. between 1946 and 1991 cost the world $45,000 billion (in current dollars). Global military spending has averaged about $1,000 billion a year in constant dollars since WWII, give or take a few hundred billion dollars each year. The point is that this is a very, very large amount of capital allocated for the purpose of keeping the world safe from aggression, all the while starving investments in freshwater availability, wastewater treatment, soil conservation, food availability, climate change preparedness, development of renewable energy, etc. An interesting game theory question is whether this amount of money was required to avoid all out nuclear war because the MAD game was so inherently unstable. 11

12

See below for a description of this strategic risk management game strategy.

For example, Mr Shamshad Ahmed, foreign secretary of Pakistan in 1998, who has been a staunch supporter of the bomb, observed recently, ‘If we were not a nuclear power, our fate would have been worse than that of Afghanistan’s.’ That is, citizens of other countries “are told that a nuclear-armed power is safe from an attack by foreign powers because of the danger of the nuclear conflagration it poses.” See Zubeida Mustafa, “How many ‘bombs’ will deter?” Dawn.com (27 May, 2009) at http://www. dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/ news/ pakistan/16-how-many-bombs-will-deter-hs-16. 13

Weak-MAD may be obsolete in a world with 8 nuclear states possessing ready parts and supplies for 12,000 nuclear weapons, 40 states capable of going nuclear at anytime, and nuclear proliferation with enough HEU for building 240,000 nuclear weapons in the future. 14

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The proliferation of nuclear power globally does not help nuclear nonproliferation objectives. For example, Russia's state nuclear energy company, Rosatom, has provided 80 tons of low-enriched uranium (LEU) manufactured into fuel assemblies to Iran for use in that country’s Bushehr reactor, according to Atomstroyexport, the Russian contractor building the reactor. Now, Rosatom will supply LEU from virgin uranium directly to United States utilities rather than through the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) that was previously given the monopoly by the US Department of Energy (DOE) to sell diluted, or blended-down, Russian weaponsgrade uranium processed by Rosatom. See ANDREW E. KRAMER and MATTHEW L. WALD, “Russian Uranium Sale to U.S. Is Planned,” Wall Street Journal (May 25, 2009) at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/world/europe/26russia.html ?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss. 15

For example, scientists from MIT have published peer-reviewed results in the Journal of Climate showing a 90% probability of global temperature will rise as much as 7.4 degrees Celsius, more than twice the previous projection from 2003 unless there is "rapid and massive action" on reducing global carbon emissions. "A 7.4C rise would mean severe ecosystem collapse worldwide, with total economic collapse in many parts of the world. The planet would face resource wars between people, and you can safely say many, many hundred of millions of people would die." Present estimates are that the morbidity of as many as two billion people are presently at risk. See http://www.desmogblog.com/mit-researchers-unveil-climate-roulette-wheel. 16

See Kurt Campbell, et. al., The Nuclear Tipping Point: Why States Reconsider Their Nuclear Choices (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004). The U.S. 2003 preventive war in Iraq only served to cement this new incarnation of MAD strategy. Director General of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, in a Guardian interview published Thursday 14 May 2009 indicated “that the current international regime limiting the spread of nuclear weapons was in danger of falling apart under its own inequity” resulting in the number of potential nuclear weapons states doubling in a few years “unless the major powers take radical steps towards disarmament.” 17

Also, “concerns about North Korean weapons proliferation were heightened recently with Pyongyang's underground test of a nuclear weapon and several short-range missile launches. Sales of short- and medium-range missile systems remain among North Korea's largest export earners, part of an arms trade that generates $1.5 billion annually for Pyongyang....North Korea's arms trade has focused on Iran and Syria, countries Washington views as state sponsors of terrorism, as well as Libya. Officials say North Korean arms have also been sold to nations allied with the U.S., such as Egypt and Pakistan, and to the military regime in Myanmar.” See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124347081988160711.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. As one example of a possible early step, Russia and the United States each have thousands of nuclear weapons, whereas a few hundred would more than deter any rational actor and no number will deter an irrational one. Either side could therefore reduce its nuclear arsenal with little to no loss in national security, even if the other side did not immediately reciprocate. In light of the growing specter of nuclear terrorism, a reduced nuclear arsenal could even enhance national security by lessening the chance for theft or illicit sale of a weapon. 18

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A forcing function is the process that moves a dynamical system from one state to another state. An interesting game theory question is whether this amount of capital was productively spent to avoid nuclear war between the USSR and the U.S. or was it instead necessary to spend this amount because the MAD strategy was inherently unstable? 19

All systems have a tipping point, a set of stresses (an overload beyond a threshold rate of change of inputs) beyond which they breakdown (loose complexity and cease to function within normal ranges) and sometimes collapse (recovery is uncertain). As failure proceeds, moments of contingency arise. 20

John Nash showed that John von Neumann’s minimax theorem also applied to non zero sum, non cooperative games. Cooperative games means that players can form coalitions where each other knows the other’s strategy beforehand. Non cooperative games involve each player formulating their strategy without each player knowing the other’s strategy. Even though this is the case, there is a way of playing the game rationally where each player will have no regrets at the outcome. They would not do anything differently, given how the other party played the game (Poundstone, 96-99). 21

Nuclear fusion weapons even today remain potentially the most destructive weapons ever invented and the greatest threat to global security. See Lifting the nuclear shadow: Creating the conditions for abolishing nuclear weapons, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, UK. 22

This follows from von Neumann’s minimax theorem that as long as the two rational players’ interests are completely opposed, they can settle on a rational course of action going forward in a zero sum game. An equilibrium is forced by an interplay between self interest and mistrust and a strategy can be devised for playing the game where there are no regrets, no matter what each player ultimately choses for game moves (Poundstone, 97). 23

A game defined by a strategy whereby one is rewarded for cheating, but if the other party also cheats, both players will be worse off than if they had cooperated (Poundstone, 120-1). 24

At the height of the Cold War, parts and supplies for 75,000 fusion nuclear weapons existed. It is not known with certainty at what level of reduction in nuclear warheads, destructive tonnage, and launchers that any meaningful lessing of the risk of a failure in deterrence significantly alters the consequences of such a failure. 25

Some historians of the Cold War (1950-91) like John Gaddis believe that MAD was a smart strategy. The argument goes that since no nuclear holocaust occurred during the fifty years of the Cold War, MAD worked. It was a smart strategy. But, was instead the massive amounts of capital spent to manage an inherently unstable game, human fortitude, and/or just plain dumb luck that prevailed instead? See John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: The Penguin Group, 2007). 26

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Nuclear war “cannot be won and cannot be fought” (President Ronald Reagan). Today it is conceivable for a poorly thought-out strategic policy choice that leaves the consequences of the failure of deterrence as it presently is or inadvertently increases the probability of failure of deterrence, the result of which makes a nuclear terror attack more probable, that could produce circumstances whereby, for example, instead of global GDP going from $60 to $240 trillion (in $2005 purchasing power parity) by 2050, it declines to $6 trillion (global GDP estimate is from U.S. Central Intelligence Agency). 27

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