The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  I think that the proposition51 of going to Baghdad is … fallacious. I think if we’re going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad. We would have to commit a lot of force, because I don’t believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we’d have had to hunt him down. And once we’d done that and we’d gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we’d have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shia government or a Kurdish government or Baathist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? … It’s my view that the President got it right … that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

  The United States introduced a revolutionary new class of military systems into Desert Storm. They had been conceived and developed in the 1970s under the direction of William J. Perry, a tall, soft-spoken mathematician who had served as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering in the Carter administration. The best known of Perry’s innovations was the Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk, the sixty-five-foot-long, black, bat like attack bomber configured with radar-dispersing facetings and coatings so effective that its radar reflection was comparable to a small bird’s. Although Nighthawks flew thirteen hundred sorties during Desert Storm and delivered twenty-one hundred bombs, of which 81 percent struck within ten feet of their aim points, not one of the futuristic new planes was even damaged by antiaircraft fire, much less shot down.

  Other innovations that Perry tallied in a postwar report included space satellite systems “used to generate data52 for maps, locate military units, identify military systems and pinpoint the location of the air defense and command-and-control installations of the Iraqi forces”; tactical reconnaissance supplied for the first time by AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft using radar for all-weather air surveillance and air-traffic control and JSTARS (joint surveillance and target attack radar system) aircraft for detecting and locating ground vehicles such as tanks; night-vision systems; global-positioning systems (GPS); high-volume satellite communications systems; digital radios; and laser-guided missiles and bombs. “Operating together,”53 Perry wrote, “these systems made a vital contribution to shortening the war, to dramatically reducing coalition casualties and to reducing Iraqi civilian casualties.” Compared to Iraqi losses (“tanks destroyed,54 prisoners captured and, not least, casualties incurred”) coalition losses “were so lopsided—roughly a thousand to one—that there is virtually no historical precedent.”

  Perry saw these transformations as a promising new kind of nonnuclear deterrence. “While it is certainly not55 as powerful as nuclear weapons,” he argued, “it is a more credible deterrent, particularly in regional conflicts vital to U.S. national interests”—the only kind of conflict that the United States was likely to encounter in the post–Cold War world. “It can play a potentially significant role in deterring those regional conflicts that would involve the confrontation of armed forces (as opposed to guerrilla wars).… It should strengthen the already high level of deterrence of a major war in Europe or Korea.” Former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy concurred with Perry’s assessment in a lecture, commenting, “Our wisest defense experts56 have understood for a long time that the threat of initiating nuclear warfare has been declining in military value.… In the final analysis of strategy, politics and morals we are better off keeping [nuclear weapons] unused except in deterrence.”

  The nuclear threat was declining in value in part because injuring and killing large numbers of civilians, in an era of live television reportage from war zones, was fast becoming politically embarrassing to the leaders of democracies; the mass killing that nuclear weapons produced would generate horror on a world scale. Even as precision weapons shortened conventional wars and reduced civilian casualties, they raised expectations of limiting conflict to combatants and infrastructure. Limited war, by definition, was not nuclear war; it was war fought for limited objectives.

  George H. W. Bush was proud that the U.S. had shown restraint, but as a World War II veteran he also missed the satisfaction of a clear victory. Limited war, he wrote in his diary on 28 February, means “no feeling of euphoria.57 I think I know why that is. After my speech last night [announcing the Iraqi surrender], Baghdad radio started broadcasting that we’ve been forced to capitulate. I see on the television that public opinion in Jordan and in the streets of Baghdad is that they have won. It is such a canard, so little, but it’s what concerns me. It hasn’t been a clean end—there is no battleship Missouri surrender. This is what’s missing to make this akin to WWII, to separate Kuwait from Korea and Vietnam.” Well, Bush consoled himself, “when the [Iraqi] troops straggle home58 with no armor, beaten up, 50,000 and maybe more dead, the people of Iraq will know. Their brothers and their sons will be missing, never to return.… Bob Gates told me this morning, one thing historic is, we stopped. We crushed their 43 divisions, but we stopped—we didn’t just want to kill, and history will look on that kindly.”

  THREE TRUE COURAGE

  IRAQ’S DEFEAT IN late February 1991 offered the world a unique opportunity to track down and eliminate the troublesome country’s weapons of mass destruction. By its aggression against Kuwait, Thomas Pickering would say, Iraq “had forfeited any capacity1 on its part to resist or to non-comply with a very expansive program to root out and destroy … to provide permanent assurance to the international community that this particular proliferator … would no longer be a danger or threat to peace and security.”

  The obvious organization to carry out this program of inspection and destruction, at least as far as Iraq’s nuclear infrastructure was concerned, was the International Atomic Energy Agency, an independent body responsible to the United Nations that had long experience with conducting nuclear inspections. The U.S. government, however, was sharply divided in its opinion of the IAEA’s competency for such an assignment. One faction favored the IAEA to carry out inspections in Iraq; another favored appointing a special U.N. commission instead. “There were those who2 looked at the creation of a special commission as a threat to the IAEA,” recalled Robert Gallucci, a State Department Middle East specialist who became involved in the dispute. “Those of this view had, I would say, a principal objective of preserving the role of the IAEA in the international community. In other words, the proliferation problem and the IAEA’s role in it were bigger than the Iraqi problem, and we shouldn’t go fix the Iraqi problem and destroy the Agency in the course of doing that.” With the NPT extension conference coming up in less than five years, the IAEA needed a victory, the agency’s Dimitri Perricos explains. “For the international community3 to just disregard the IAEA as an effective organization capable of doing the inspections in Iraq could have a serious effect on the way that the NPT and its indefinite extension might be considered over the next five-year period.” Another faction, Gallucci noted, argued to the contrary “that the [IAEA]4 had failed in Iraq, and that it was structurally incapable of dealing with Iraq. I think that some of these critics also held a belief that the agency really wasn’t up to doing what it was supposed to do more generally … and this led to some bloodletting within the U.S. government.”

  The solution Pickering and others found was to create a special commission directly responsible to the U.N. Security Council (rather than through the U.N. secretary-general and his sluggish bureaucracy), to assign responsibility for IAEA participation to the IAEA director general personally rather than to the agency as a whole, and, most significant in Gallucci’s view, to give the executive chairman of the U.N. special commission “the responsibility to designate5 sites not declared for inspection by the Iraqis.
This led to inevitable, intermittent tensions [with the IAEA]—that’s possibly an understatement.” Resolution 687 was hammered into shape during discussions with the British, the French, the Chinese, and the Russians. It authorized the creation of a United Nations special commission, UNSCOM, which would oversee the destruction of Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons production complexes. At the insistence of Britain and France, the IAEA was assigned responsibility for “nuclear weapons or nuclear-weapons-usable material6 or any subsystems or components or any research, development, support or manufacturing facilities related to the above,” with “the assistance and cooperation of the Special Commission.” That formulation embedded the conflicts over the IAEA’s mission and competence within the structure of the inspection process itself, whence they would emerge in the early weeks of inspections to complicate the organizations’ work.

  Gallucci had been called back to the State Department in March 1991 from teaching at the National War College to work on drafting Section C of Resolution 687, the section concerned with “the destruction, removal or rendering harmless” of Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons (if any) and weapons-related facilities. At the War College, he told an audience later, he had been busy “twisting middle-aged minds7 … when Iraq invaded Kuwait and the coalition put together Desert Shield. I got to watch that from the War College. I even got to watch Desert Storm from the War College, which was a really good place to watch it from.”

  A trim, witty, combative forty-five-year-old in 1991, Gallucci had a longstanding interest in preventing nuclear proliferation. Brooklyn-born, Staten Island–raised, Hollywood-handsome, he had cut his teeth at State in the 1970s working on preventing Pakistan from acquiring a nuclear arsenal. It was one of many Sisyphean assignments he undertook in his years of government service, after which, as he liked to joke, he always got promoted. Working for the United Nations was hardly a promotion—“New York is such a little sideshow for Washington,” the Swedish diplomat Hans Blix once told me—but Gallucci had nevertheless been brevetted to the U.S. mission immediately after the Iraq cease-fire to draft the necessary Security Council document.

  Gallucci’s father had immigrated to the United States from Italy. His mother’s heritage was Italian as well, making him, he said, “sort of first8 or one-and-a-half-generation” American. As a high school student he had been strongly affected by the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In his senior year of high school he read the U.S. diplomat Robert D. Murphy’s lively 1964 memoir of Second World War experiences, Diplomat Among Warriors, “and I was,” he recalled, “ever since then, fascinated by war … [by] a diplomat’s view of war and a diplomat’s role in war. I was very impressed with that, and I think that had a lot to do with the direction I ultimately headed in my life.” Nuclear war—“the magnitude of the destruction9 and the need to do something about it”—was a focus of his concern during college, when he studied international relations, but he turned his attention in graduate school at the end of the 1960s to the Vietnam conflict, writing a Ph.D. dissertation about its bureaucratic politics.

  Along the way, he lost faith in the abstractions of political science. He wanted to do policy, the real thing, and in 1974 he left teaching for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In 1978 he moved over to the State Department, served in the field as deputy director general of the Sinai peacekeeping force from 1984 to 1988, then returned to Washington to his National War College post.

  The Security Council approved Resolution 687 on 3 April 1991; Iraq acceded to it officially three days later. His duty done, Gallucci returned to Washington, assuming he could resume teaching, “but I was told10 I was mistaken. I was told that I was the perfect person to help make sure that the right people ended up in the right places, and that this special commission got off to a good start. So I was given three quick objectives. The first was to go up and establish [UNSCOM].” The second was to promote the appointment of a Swedish diplomat named Rolf Ekéus as executive chairman. “The third: I was to be the deputy executive chairman.”

  To find out what a special commission might do, Gallucci checked in with the State Department’s international organization bureau, where he learned that “there are lots of commissions11 doing lots of different things, but there had never been a commission established that was supposed to go over to another country—a country that the United States had just defeated in a war, and where there might be some hostile feelings—and destroy their weapons of mass destruction.”

  Back in New York, Gallucci took a call from David Kay in Vienna. A Ph.D. in international affairs from the University of Texas with years of experience in managing nuclear development, Kay was then Blix’s bulldog at the IAEA for UNSCOM. “I had never met David12 before,” Gallucci said later. “To my recollection, he was very agitated on the phone, and he wanted to get the inspections going right away. He argued that the IAEA was ready to begin inspections; it was in a big hurry to get out there. I told him that UNSCOM was not ready; we didn’t have anything in place yet, in terms of capability or support. He did not want to hear any of that. The IAEA wanted to get going, because its reputation was on the line.”

  Kay’s concern, he told me, was that “the U.S. military was anxious13 to get out of Iraq, there were these hanging accusations about WMD, and I thought if we didn’t start inspections soon and we left Saddam in control we weren’t going to find anything. You just have to start inspections while there’s heat and support behind them. So when I called up Bob, I told him, ‘We don’t have a lot of time.’ The U.N. system in particular is constitutionally very difficult to move fast.” After they talked by phone, Kay flew to New York to meet Gallucci. “Bob told me, ‘Well, what we’ve got to do is watch out for the U.N. process. It’s the mushroom theory—keep them in the dark and feed them shit.’ So we immediately formed a bond. We decided we were going to do this job the right way and get really intrusive inspections going—intrusive compared to the usual IAEA inspection regime, which was based on permission.”

  The IAEA, which grew out of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech at the U.N. in 1953, both supports the development of nuclear power and attempts to prevent nuclear proliferation. It had long conducted “safeguard” inspections to verify that nuclear materials such as enriched uranium were not being diverted from civilian applications to nuclear weapons. Safeguard inspections were required of signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But since safeguard inspections involved only sites that a state formally declared, and inspectors gave advance notice of their intention to inspect, they depended for their credibility on the state’s willingness to cooperate—like paying your taxes, Blix liked to say. That limitation was adequate when the materials and equipment involved had been provided under IAEA auspices, since the inventory was known at the outset and the only question was diversion. With a clandestine proliferator like Iraq, the system broke down. As Jay Davis, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who served as a technical adviser to UNSCOM, testified at a Congressional hearing in 1993:

  Many of the IAEA staff,14 and some of its leadership, were burdened by the perceived need to protect the Agency’s role, to defend its past performance in Iraq, and to protect themselves from criticism (and possible career damage) within the Agency. Institutionalizing leadership for the [Iraq] nuclear inspections in the Agency made it difficult to remove timid leaders and resulted in an opening between UNSCOM and the IAEA that made possible both information loss and Iraqi political intrigue. The IAEA has been accused of being both politicized and of suffering from clientitis. From my perspective, both these accusations are justified. The IAEA shows little appetite for intrusive inspection or aggressive behavior, both of which are essential to this inspection regime.

  The inspections that Kay and Gallucci wanted to demand of Iraq fell well outside IAEA custom, though they were well within UNSCOM’s mandate. “We had a different view,”15 Gallucci explains. “We were dentists here, a
nd we were about to go pull some teeth.”

  There could be no inspections of any kind until UNSCOM was up and running. “The first thing we needed16 was inspectors,” Gallucci said. “For inspectors, I need experts. So I called the State Department and they told me that I had better plug into the Defense Department. So they gave me the numbers in DoD. I was in the politico-military bureau [of the State Department], so of course I was very comfortable talking to the Department of Defense. I had a very comfortable conversation in which my interlocutor told me, in sum: ‘We’ve had a discussion about supporting the Special Commission. It is the DoD’s view that we, on behalf of the United States, led the coalition in the war. You, on behalf of the State Department and the UN, can lead on behalf of the peace. Have a nice day.’”

  Gallucci had a similar experience when he approached the U.S. intelligence community. “Not only did they not show up,”17 he says, “but they were aggressive about not showing up.” Cooperation came later when UNSCOM began producing results; at the outset, “a lot of people walked into the room intent on telling me how much they were not going to tell me. I still had my clearances, but as soon as you start working on assignment to the U.N. you are persona non grata. You are not going to get anything. It was a very cold reception.” Resourcefully, Gallucci turned to other governments—“permanent members of the Security Council principally, and then others”—to loan him experts in each of the weapons areas that UNSCOM needed to inspect: chemical, biological, missile, and nuclear. Nuclear inspection was the expertise which the United States contributed most extensively, “because we had our national laboratories to support us.” No one wanted to do explosive-ordnance disposal (EOD), a vital but dangerous task in a recent war zone. Gallucci resorted to searching out EOD contractors in the Yellow Pages. “There were two groups along the Beltway. I hired them, and then I had to buy them insurance.”