The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  Blix told me about one strategy he used to push back against the American pressure to declare Iraq in material breach: He asked the CIA to give him a list of its most suspicious sites first. It did; he sent in his inspectors; nothing turned up. “What we came to discover,”45 he wrote later, “was that no sites given to us by intelligence were ever found to harbor weapons of mass destruction.”

  While Blix was finding nothing at exactly the places where the CIA believed he should have found hidden WMD, CIA director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin presented what they called “The Case”46—against Iraq—to Bush, Cheney, Rice, and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card on 21 December. Bush was underwhelmed by the presentation, a thin gruel of chemical-weapons precursor agents, test stands for medium-range rockets, drones capable of reaching Azerbaijan, meetings between Saddam and his nuclear scientists. As Bob Woodward reconstructed the CIA presentation, “Bush turned to Tenet.47 ‘I’ve been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we’ve got?’” Tenet responded, famously, “It’s a slam dunk case!” According to Woodward, Bush judged Tenet’s basketball-slang reassurance “very important” and sent the CIA’s leadership off to find some lawyers to juice up the presentation. “Needs a lot more work,” Woodward quoted Bush. “Let’s get some people who’ve actually put together a case for a jury.”

  Much of what followed is well known. Condoleezza Rice published an op-ed in The New York Times on 23 January 2003 titled “Why We Know Iraq Is Lying.”48 It claimed that Iraq’s December weapons declaration, twelve thousand pages long, “fails to account for or explain Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad,” a guarded reference to the discredited report of the yellowcake deal. Bush himself, in his 28 January State of the Union Address, repeated the familiar litany, none of it supported by credible evidence: ties to Al Qaeda, an “advanced nuclear-weapons development program,” mobile biological weapons labs, aluminum tubes “suitable for nuclear-weapons production,” and the sixteen words attributing the Niger deal report to “the British government.” Bush built his disastrous war on Nigerien yellowcake never mined or shipped and Chinese aluminum tubes with the exact specifications of an Italian artillery-rocket casing that Iraq was trying to reverse-engineer.

  On the last day of January 2003, in the Oval Office, the president of the United States told the prime minister of Great Britain and his advisers that war was inevitable and had already been “penciled in for 10 March.” According to a British eyewitness, Bush then calmly discussed ways of provoking war if the U.N. failed to authorize military action, including flying a U.S. U-2 spy plane over Iraq painted in U.N. colors to provoke antiaircraft fire, turning up an Iraqi defector prepared to brief the press about hidden WMD, or assassinating Saddam Hussein.49

  The double bind in which Iraq found itself and of which the Bush administration took advantage was the decision, after 1991, to destroy its WMD without keeping records of having done so. “How much, if any, is left50 of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and related proscribed items and programs?” Blix asked the U.N. Security Council rhetorically in a briefing on 14 February, continuing,

  So far, UNMOVIC has not found any such weapons, only a small number of empty chemical munitions, which should have been declared and destroyed. Another matter—and one of great significance—is that many proscribed weapons and items are not accounted for. To take an example, a document which Iraq provided suggested to us that some 1,000 tonnes of chemical agent were “unaccounted for.” One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist. However, that possibility is also not excluded. If they exist, they should be presented for destruction. If they do not exist, credible evidence to that effect should be presented.

  But having secretly destroyed the weapons and items, Iraq had no records to produce, while Blix could not certify Iraq to be in compliance so long as records were lacking. Worse, the U.S. insisted any materiel that Iraq could not prove it had destroyed must be assumed to still exist, hidden somewhere in a warehouse or perhaps underground.

  And so it came again to war between Iraq and the United States, a war driven this time by deep fear of further terrorist attacks on the American homeland, “the first case of a war,”51 as Blix would say later, “the primary aim of which is to secure verified disarmament.” (But Blix would add, “It is hard to resist the reflection52 that in terms of lives and suffering, property and money, the war was a very costly way of concluding that there were no WMD.”) As the international community moves seriously toward nuclear disarmament in the decades to come, such a war might well be a last resort against a resistant proliferator. It was not a last resort in 2003. It was a war of convenience for the frightened leadership of a nation that Blix would describe that year as “evidently the superior military power in the world: Mars on the Earth,” a war engaged prematurely, before the U.N. inspection process was complete. It did not, of course, end when and as its instigators expected.

  SADDAM HUSSEIN WAS captured on 13 December 2003. Across the next six months, as he waited in prison for trial, he was interviewed at length by an Arabic-speaking FBI agent, George L. Piro. Piro wrote that he won the former Iraqi dictator’s confidence by “spend[ing] several sessions53 discussing non-threatening topics [which] allowed Hussein the opportunity to talk freely and boast of past accomplishments.” The FBI agent then gradually introduced more challenging subjects into the interviews. By the twenty-fourth interviewing session, the former Iraqi dictator was willing to explain why he had expelled the U.N. inspectors from Iraq in 1998, the decision that had set him up for charges that he was hiding clandestine stocks of WMD. Not at all, he said in Piro’s paraphrase:

  Even though Hussein claimed54 Iraq did not have WMD, the threat from Iran was a major factor as to why he did not allow the return of the UN inspectors. Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq. In his opinion, the UN inspectors would have directly identified to the Iranians where to inflict maximum damage to Iraq.… Hussein indicated he was angered when the United States struck Iraq in 1998. Hussein stated Iraq could have absorbed another United States strike for he viewed this as less of a threat than exposing themselves to Iran.

  Hussein also acknowledged to Piro “that when it was clear that55 a war with the United States was imminent [i.e., in the summer of 2002], he allowed the inspectors back into Iraq in hopes of averting war. Yet it became clear to him four months before the war that the war was inevitable.” He told Piro ruefully that he had wanted to have a relationship with the United States “but was not given the chance, as the United States was not listening to anything Iraq had to say.”

  Nor was the United States listening to the United Nations in its rush to war. Mohamed ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council on 27 January 2003, four days before George W. Bush informed Tony Blair that the war was “penciled in for 10 March,” that the casus belli for such a war would be removed in a matter of months. “To conclude,” he said, “we have to date56 found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program since the elimination of the program in the 1990s.… Provided there is sustained proactive cooperation by Iraq, we should be able within the next few months to provide credible assurance that Iraq has no nuclear weapons program.” Those few months, the reserved Egyptian lawyer added, “would be a valuable investment in peace, because they could help us avoid a war.”

  The primary reason the Bush administration chose not to delay its war with Iraq was not, as the administration claimed, to end combat before the brutal heat of Middle Eastern summer made conditions difficult for U.S. troops. Two or three months’ delay—from March to May or June—with the prospect of forestalling a war that could be expected to produce hundreds of thousands of Iraqi military and civilian casualties should have been an easy humanitarian call for an administration that professed to believe it would be welcomed by the Iraqi people wit
h open arms. A more self-serving reason that Bush and Cheney decided to cut short the U.N. inspection process was the one reported by Christian Alfonsi in his book Circle in the Sand: to avoid allowing the war to run into 2004, a U.S. presidential election year:

  Cheney had absorbed two57 bitter lessons from the first Bush administration’s failed confrontation with Iraq in 1992. The first was that Saddam invariably grew more aggressive when the United States was distracted by other security concerns. The second was that it was impossible to muster the domestic and international support for major U.S. military action during a presidential election year.…

  In Cheney’s mind there were two necessary predicates to these lessons: a final showdown with Iraq would have to take place in 2002 or 2003, not during the election year of 2004; and because Saddam’s entire strategy for survival would be based on delaying U.S. action until 2004, no accommodation by Iraq, not even acceptance of robust UN weapons inspections, could be allowed to forestall American military action.

  The United States and its thin “coalition of the willing” began bombing Iraq on 19 March 2003. The brief war that followed forced regime change, but by most other measures it was a profound disaster. No weapons of mass destruction were found, nor any active program to produce them. About five thousand American and coalition combatants were killed and an equal number of Iraqi combatants. Civilians fared far worse; reliable estimates of war-related civilian violent deaths (such as the Iraq Family Health Survey and the Associated Press) put the number at around 100,000–150,000 through June 2006. More than 4.7 million Iraqis were uprooted. Much of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed and has had to be rebuilt at American expense. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and his associate Linda Bilmes estimate the cost to the United States of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including projected costs for lifetime medical treatment of U.S. casualties, as $3 trillion. Only the Second World War cost more—$5 trillion in 2007 dollars.58

  The tragedy, Hans Blix told me ruefully one day, was the waste of lives and treasure. “After the war,”59 Blix said, “Kofi Annan and I sat down and estimated the cost of disarming Iraq by inspection versus disarming by war. We estimated that inspection would have cost eighty million dollars—and would have worked as well.”

  SIXTEEN THE TWILIGHT OF THE BOMBS

  THE DEBACLE OF THE George W. Bush years extended beyond a poorly planned, profligate war justified with inflated threats. The Bush administration also officially withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to pursue ground-based missile defenses, continuing the Republican strategy of championing dubious defensive systems over negotiated arms controls. It left the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty unratified, collecting dust on the Senate floor. It abandoned the Clinton administration’s imminent grand bargain with North Korea in favor of belligerent confrontation, to which the beleaguered Communist state responded by withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and crafting and testing its first nuclear weapons. It lifted sanctions on Pakistan imposed to penalize that South Asian country for going nuclear. It sought to develop nuclear “bunker-buster” bombs as well as so-called mini-nukes and to prepare the way for renewed nuclear-weapons testing. It agreed to help India develop its nuclear infrastructure outside the NPT, to supply it with five hundred metric tons of uranium per year, and to allow it to extract plutonium from its spent fuel.

  Yet despite the Bush administration’s demonstrated distaste for arms negotiations, it pursued major reductions in the number of weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, aligning its efforts with Russia and even embodying them in a treaty when its former Cold War foe insisted. From about 10,000 warheads on U.S. delivery vehicles at the end of the Cold War, the Bush administration had reduced the numbers by January 2009 to about 2,600, while Russian warheads had been reduced from 15,000 to about 4,800. The two countries maintained extensive reserves, however, so that their actual combined nuclear arsenals were estimated as of January 2009 to comprise not 7,400 but 22,400 warheads, 96 percent of world inventory. (Seven other nuclear-weapons states accounted for the remaining 4 percent: France, about 300 nuclear weapons; China, about 240; Britain, about 185; Israel, about 80; India, about 60; Pakistan, about 60; North Korea, fewer than 10.)1

  In the absence of major conflict, current or foreseeable, between the U.S. and any other nuclear-weapons state, these reduced but still excessive numbers of weapons are a burden and a danger, disconnected from the promising realities of the post–Cold War world. They are expensive, costing the United States alone more than $50 billion a year to maintain—although such a large allocation to U.S. defense contractors may partly explain why the nuclear arsenal continues to be held at such a high level long after the end of the Cold War. “By way of comparison,”2 wrote the nuclear-stockpile expert Stephen Schwartz, “the 2008 nuclear weapons–related ‘budget’ exceeds all anticipated government expenditures on international diplomacy and foreign assistance ($39.5 billion) and natural resources and the environment ($33 billion). It is nearly double the budget for general science, space and technology ($27.4 billion), and it is almost fourteen times what the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has allocated for all energy-related research and development.”

  Besides maintaining large nuclear arsenals, the two leading nuclear powers have kept considerable numbers of their loaded nuclear weapons on high alert, “waiting,”3 wrote the analyst Michael Mazarr, “to retaliate instantly against attacks that no one anymore expects to come,” risking accidental or inadvertent use.

  Much of this inertia on the U.S. side has represented politics as usual, the continuing standoff between Republicans and Democrats over national security policy. During the George W. Bush years in particular, menacing largely replaced diplomacy as the American strategy of choice, and not only Iraq was threatened with war but also Iran and North Korea, the three nodes of Bush’s “axis of evil.” In its final months, however, the Bush administration rejected Israel’s proposal to bomb Iran’s developing nuclear facilities on its own and America’s behalf, acquiescing instead to an Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip during the U.S. presidential interregnum intended to stop persistent Hamas mortar and rocket attacks launched from Gaza into Israel.

  The Bush administration’s showy belligerence had concealed a surprising lack of interest in nuclear policy. The ambassador and arms negotiator Linton Brooks was appointed head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in May 2003. In 2007, shortly after he left office, he told me that with the exception of the president himself, “the administration’s leadership4 has not paid very much attention to nuclear issues.” That was particularly true at the Pentagon, Brooks said. “So nuclear things were left to lower levels. I think part of it is simply that Rumsfeld’s agenda was transformation, and he never thought nuclear weapons were very important. Then 9/11 happened and with the intensity of that, none of his senior people spent any time on nuclear weapons. So the issue devolved down into the bureaucracy, which led on the one hand to a sort of Cold War attitude of ‘We can’t give up anything,’ and on the other hand to the present status”—in 2007—“where the principal deputy under secretary for policy, Ryan Henry, really thinks nuclear weapons are the Coast Guard Auxiliary, they’re the horse cavalry, they were important once but they’re ancient history now.”

  Brooks attributed the large reductions the U.S. agreed to make beginning in 2004 to Bush himself. “It’s not something the bureaucracy generated and the president approved,” he told me. “The bureaucracy generated something much bigger and the president sent it back, saying, ‘I said “lowest level” and that’s what I meant.’ So his instincts were good.” Not only a Cold War mentality drove the administration’s opposition to arms negotiations, Brooks added. “It’s also the ideology. It sometimes looks like the answer to any economic problem for this administration is tax cuts for upper-income brackets. The defense analogue is national missile defense. If the North Koreans are making threats, the solutio
n is national missile defense. If bin Laden wants to kill us, the solution is national missile defense. This administration is very skeptical of arms control. They have a good argument that arms control is for adversaries and we don’t want the Russians to be adversaries, so it’s inappropriate. But they’re also just generally skeptical of its benefits. Paul Wolfowitz told me once that when it would help you can’t get it, and when you can get it you don’t need it. So I think the combination of, one, the threat isn’t there; two, nuclear weapons are yesterday’s news; and three, the distraction of 9/11—well, except for the problem of nuclear terrorism, the administration hasn’t thought much.”

  THE PROBLEM OF nuclear terrorism is more obscure and more complicated than it has been seen to be within the U.S. government and in the media. Rumors of a large number of missing Soviet-era “suitcase” bombs, rumors given credence in the late 1990s in public statements by the retired Russian Army general and presidential candidate Alexander Lebed, have faded with Lebed’s death in a helicopter crash in 2002. Since the thirty-kilogram backpack weapons probably depended on tritium gas injection to boost their otherwise minimal yield, and tritium has a short half-life, any such weapons stolen in the last days of the Soviet Union would be defunct by now, good at best for a nasty radioactive fizzle. Russia has officially denied any loss of backpack nuclear weapons. Had such weapons made their way to Chechnya, as the Russian press speculated, they would certainly have been used by now.

  No nuclear weapons are known to have been stolen in any country since their first development by the United States in 1945. Whether this fact is testimony to the quality of the security that nuclear weapons are rightly accorded in every country that has them, or whether thieves judge attempting to acquire such complicated, dangerous, and well-guarded explosives not to be worth the risk remains to be seen. U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons are outfitted with complicated physical and electronic locking mechanisms with defensive features that may be deadly; weapons in countries such as Pakistan are protected the way South Africa’s were, by being stored partly disassembled, with their fissile components divided among several locations in guarded bunkers or vaults. The theft of a nuclear weapon anywhere would activate every resource the international community could muster, with shooting on sight the minimum rule of engagement.