The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  U.N. inspections went downhill from there, Butler wrote:

  Iraqi propaganda began21 to have its effect at the UN Secretariat. Kofi Annan’s senior staff increasingly argued that the source of the problem in regard to the disarmament process was not Iraq, or Saddam Hussein, or his weapons—but UNSCOM. It was argued that UNSCOM was run by a bunch of out-of-control cowboys, a posse bent on frontier justice. Annan’s trio of envoys helped confirm this view. They returned with videotapes, provided by Baghdad, of UNSCOM staffers interviewing Iraqi officials, tapes edited to make our inspectors appear like latter-day inquisitors.

  By January 1998 it was clear to Butler that Saddam Hussein had decided to block further inspections. “Saddam had every reason22 to believe,” UNSCOM’s last chairman noted, “that Russia, and possibly France and China, would support him vigorously within the Security Council.” In addition, “Iraq was receiving signals from the UN secretary-general and the UN Secretariat that they would be amenable to some kind of diplomatic solution. Their motivation was to see sanctions come to an end and the political problem of Iraq dissolved; true disarmament was apparently of secondary concern.” The United States and Britain began augmenting their forces in the Persian Gulf to support UNSCOM with bombing if necessary. In a speech on 17 January, Saddam demanded that sanctions be lifted within six months regardless of whether or not Iraq had been certifiably disarmed. Back in Bahrain on 21 January after eight and a half hours of harrowing negotiations with Tariq Aziz, Butler turned on the TV in his hotel room and “stood transfixed, watching23 the first reports from Washington about an alleged sexual affair between the president of the United States and a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.” Butler’s U.N. security guard stopped checking the room for bugs and watched with him. “Jesus, boss,” the guard said finally, “it’s Wag the Dog.”*

  Clinton hardly needed the Lewinsky affair to prompt him to take military action against Iraq. He had begun his second term the previous January with a high 60 percent approval rating and a NASDAQ gaining by double-digit percentages from year to year. “Many Republicans were frustrated and demoralized,”24 wrote the analyst Christian Alfonsi. “The prospect of four more years out of power was a dreary and disquieting one to them. How to create the conditions for an eventual Republican restoration was the question of the hour. They could hardly fault the president on his stewardship of the American economy. They turned, then, to his stewardship of American foreign policy, and to the theme that the Clinton administration was failing to confront the emerging national security threats of tomorrow.” Threat inflation had been the predominant Republican strategy of the Cold War years, holding Democratic president after president to single terms; Clinton was the first Democrat to win a second term since Franklin Roosevelt. If threat inflation worked so well with the Soviet Union, there was every reason to think it would work again with Iraq—especially when even Butler and his UNSCOM/IAEA colleagues had been unable to determine definitively if Iraq had or had not completely destroyed its arsenals of WMD and the machinery of their manufacture.

  Iraq, unable to prove a negative, and unwilling to reveal its weakness to the United States, Iran, or Israel, had decided to reject inspections even though it understood that the consequences might be renewed American bombing. American neoconservatives, for their part, had been clamoring for regime change in Iraq since as early as the late summer of 1996, when former under secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called for the United States to move “beyond containment”:

  Saddam Hussein is a convicted25 killer still in possession of a loaded gun and it’s pointed at us. Saddam is driven by a thirst for revenge in his personal struggles with individuals … as well as with countries. He never forgets and is determined to get his enemies, however long it takes. Should we idly sit by with our passive containment policy, and our inept covert operations, and wait till a man with large quantities of WMD and sophisticated delivery systems strikes out at us at a time of his choosing?

  Since UNSCOM and the IAEA had failed to locate any such “large quantities of WMD and sophisticated delivery systems” across five years of hard-won inspections, it was pure chutzpah on Wolfowitz’s part to invent them or exaggerate their quantity for his threat-inflated scenario. Even the language of his argument—“strikes out at us at a time of his choosing”—prefigures the language of the arguments that George W. Bush would eventually make to justify regime change in Iraq.

  Après Wolfowitz, le déluge: The editor William Kristol and the Afghani RAND Corporation strategist Zalmay Khalilzad urged “deposing Saddam” in The Washington Post in November 1997. Kristol and the historian Robert Kagan, cofounders of the neocon Project for the New American Century, extended the argument with an essay in Kristol’s Weekly Standard claiming that “the only sure way26 to take Saddam out is on the ground. We know it seems unthinkable to propose another ground attack to take Baghdad. But it’s time to start thinking the unthinkable.”

  Brent Scowcroft, who had been George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, responded immediately to the Kristol/Kagan argument with an op-ed in The Washington Post, associating it with Cold War–era threat inflation:

  The Kristol/Kagan analysis27 of containment as a policy (containment leads to detente, and detente leads to appeasement) calls to mind a debate that raged during the first half of the Cold War. Critics insisted that containment would merely provide the Soviets the time they needed to build up their forces to the point at which they could destroy us. These critics argued that since a war was inevitable and containment only served to strengthen the position of our enemies, we should attack them preemptively and destroy them while we could. Our victory in the Cold War proved these critics wrong, and provides a powerful case that a policy of containment—implemented with strength, determination and patience—can serve core U.S. national security interests. And if containment could produce a peaceful end to the Cold War on our terms, surely it can be sufficient to deal with threats posed by Saddam Hussein.

  The following day, Time published an article by Scowcroft and the president he had served, called “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam.” In it the two men predicted disastrous results of a cavalier invasion—results that in fact would occur:

  We would have been forced28 to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well.… Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different—and perhaps barren—outcome.

  One week after the news broke of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Project for the New American Century sent the beleaguered president an open letter signed by Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, William Bennett, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Robert Zoellick, and others who would be major players within two years in the administration of George W. Bush: “We may soon face a threat29 in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War,” the letter began ominously. It asked Clinton “to enunciate a new strategy that … should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.” Containment was eroding, the signers argued; the U.S. could no longer depend on its Gulf War coalition partners; its ability to ensure that Iraq wasn’t producing WMD had “substantially diminished” because of Iraq’s resistance to inspections. Even if full inspections were to resume, “the lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets.” That meant the United States would be unable to determine “with any reasonable level of confidence” whether or not Iraq possessed W
MD. Spinning up from one hypothetical to the next, the letter added doom on doom:

  Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard.

  Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.… Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater.

  Here in brief, early in 1998, more than three years before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, was the basic argument the administration of George W. Bush would use to justify starting a second war against Iraq in 2003 and forcing Saddam Hussein from power. It would be possible later to question if Iraq might have reconstituted its WMD during the five-year hiatus when the U.N. was barred from inspections; both Butler and Blix told me they had initially believed that Iraq had done so when the U.N. prepared to reenter the country for inspections in 2003. But the war had already been framed by its chief instigators in 1998, when years of inspections were just coming to an end, when all Iraq’s nuclear materials and infrastructure had been discovered and destroyed, and when the relatively primitive state of Iraq’s missile development was obvious—when, in other words, there was no threat to the United States to justify an invasion. The authors of the 1998 letter did not dare to make such a claim, but pointed instead to the supposed vulnerability of American troops in the region, of Israel, and of the supply of Middle Eastern oil.

  A classic example of threat inflation, the neoconservative assault on Clinton at a time when he was beleaguered by revelations of personal scandal was effective. It led him, the following September, to sign the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided support for “efforts to remove30 the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” Since the act directed Clinton to designate “one or more Iraqi democratic opposition organizations” to receive assistance in deposing Saddam, it was not yet George Bush’s full-scale war. It started the clock on that war, however, by setting regime change as “the policy of the United States” and assigning primary responsibility for achieving that policy to an organization that would soon prove itself incapable of doing so, Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. As with many government projects, from new fighter aircraft to Army Corps of Engineers dams, once the goals were defined and the funds invested, setbacks along the way then simply became reasons to redouble the effort. And since doing so cost more money, which only Congress could provide, new and more extreme threats had to be concocted to justify the added expense.

  IN THE MIDST OF international maneuvering with and over Iraq that winter and spring of 1998, the Hindu nationalist BJP returned to power in India in late March as part of a minority coalition government, with Vajpayee again prime minister, and immediately began clandestine preparations to conduct a series of nuclear tests.

  India had been one of only three states that voted against the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty at the United Nations in September 1996—Bhutan and Libya were the other two, with Pakistan abstaining. At that time, wrote George Perkovich, “The government believed31 that India needed only the capacity to assemble and deliver quickly a nuclear retaliatory blow to an adversary, and such a capacity existed in the strategic enclave’s undeclared possession of perhaps two dozen or more fission devices, which could be delivered by air force units that had by now practiced the necessary operations.” The strategic debate continued in India, however, about whether air-delivered twenty-kiloton fission bombs were adequate to deter China and, more insistently, about what India required in order to be recognized as a great power along with the five NPT-acknowledged nuclear-weapons states.

  The BJP was determined to resolve the argument in favor of full nuclear-power status, and made “inducting” nuclear weapons one of its campaign pledges (but did not define what “inducting” meant or specify a timetable). Mindful of its previous thirteen-day tenure, it moved to revive nuclear testing immediately after it won a vote of confidence on 28 March, despite the burdensome cost such testing would impose in the form of international sanctions, a cost the U.S. would estimate at $2.5 billion.32

  A coincidental event early in April hardened the BJP’s decision: Pakistan tested its Ghauri missile, a design based on the North Korean Nodong (itself an adaptation of the U.S.S.R.’s Scud) developed by engineering affiliates of the Pakistani bomb-maker A. Q. Khan. With a 900-mile range and the capability of carrying a 425-pound warhead, the Ghauri for the first time put India’s major cities under threat of a missile strike from Pakistan. One Indian commentator called the Ghauri trial “the last straw,” and Vajpayee made the final decision to test33 three days after the launch. Bill Richardson, the U.N. ambassador and a Clinton troubleshooter, on a late-April mission to broaden and renew U.S. relations with India, encouraged the Indians not to respond hostilely to the Pakistani missile test. In a private conversation, Richardson asked the Indian minister of defense, George Fernandes, “George, there aren’t going to be34 any surprises on testing, are there?” And Fernandes, a minor-party leader and self-described pacifist who had not been included in the nuclear-decision loop, responded, “Absolutely not.” Richardson judged his mission a success. Only after the Indian tests did he realize that Vajpayee must have already committed to them at the time of Fernandes’s reassurance, since they required a month or more to prepare.

  The BJP had covered its tracks by announcing an extensive three- to six-month national-security review (and implying that any nuclear-testing decision would await the results) even as the country’s nuclear scientists covered their tracks at Pokhran by burying test cables, moving equipment during coverage gaps of the two U.S. KH-11 Keyhole satellites that monitored the area, visiting the test site in disguise, and relying on shifting sand to conceal signs of activity.

  Although U.S. intelligence was aware that India was moving toward testing, it failed to predict the timing of the tests themselves and was surprised and embarrassed when they occurred. India conducted five tests across two days, Monday and Wednesday, 11 May and 13 May 1998: three tests on Monday and two more on Wednesday. Each round of tests was fired simultaneously because the test devices were positioned only one kilometer apart. “We needed to make sure35 that the detonation of one did not cause damage to the other,” the chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. R. Chidambaram, explained at a 17 May press conference, “since the shock wave has a time travel in milliseconds. So [we] went in for simultaneous detonation. It was also simpler—use one button to blow three. We had close-in seismic measurements and accelerometer data also.” The AEC announced36 that the 11 May devices, exploded in test shafts 328 feet below the desert surface, had yielded 12 kilotons, 0.2 kilotons, and 45 kilotons. One of the scientists who observed the tests said afterward, “I can now believe stories37 of Lord Krishna lifting a hill.”

  The first two Indian test devices were fission designs. Chidambaram insisted at the press conference that the 45-kiloton device was a true two-stage thermonuclear design despite its low yield.

  The 13 May tests yielded 0.5 and 0.3 kilotons. Chidambaram said that the yields had deliberately been limited to prevent damage to nearby villages, the closest of which was only about th
ree miles away. The tests had actually been fired under sand dunes rather than in boreholes. The fissile material used was “completely indigenous,” the AEC announced. (As of 2010, India had conducted no more tests.)

  The U.S. intelligence community did predict the Pakistani follow-on tests of 28 and 30 May, but Pakistan essentially announced them in advance in its angry response to the Indian tests. During the debate before the Defense Committee of the Pakistani cabinet (DCC), A. Q. Khan argued that his Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) should conduct the tests rather than the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). “Dr. Khan reminded38 the DCC,” wrote a Pakistani journalist, “that it was KRL which first enriched uranium, converted it into metal, machined it into semi-spheres of metal and designed their own atomic bomb and carried out cold tests on their own. All this was achieved without any help from PAEC.… Dr. Khan went on to say that since it was KRL which first made inroads into the nuclear field for Pakistan, it should be given the honor of carrying out Pakistan’s first nuclear tests and it would feel let down if it wasn’t conferred the privilege of doing so.” The PAEC, however, had built the test site in the Ras Koh Hills, at Chagai, in Balochistan, in the west of Pakistan wedged between Afghanistan and Iran, and Khan’s bomb design had come from China. In the end both organizations were allowed to participate.

  On 28 May, fifteen days after the last Indian test, Pakistan fired five devices simultaneously in a fishhook-shaped horizontal shaft drilled into a mountainside in the Ras Koh Hills. The announced yields were one device of 25 to 36 kilotons, one of 12 kilotons, and three of less than one kiloton each. The Southern Arizona Seismic Observatory (SASO), however, which recorded the seismic signals as they passed through the earth and around the world, estimated the total yield of all five 28 May tests at only 9 to 12 kilotons, and perhaps that was the reason that Pakistan fired the device on May 30 in the Kharan Desert, about ninety miles south of Ras Koh. It had an announced yield of 12 kilotons that the SASO estimated at only 4 to 6 kilotons. At the end of the series, one more fission device remained emplaced at the Kharan desert test site unfired. (As of 2010, Pakistan, like India, had conducted no further full-yield nuclear tests.)