ABSTRACT
Concern about the proliferation and next use of nuclear weapons has been a central issue for the United States and other governments since the dawn of the nuclear age.After the United States detonated nuclear devices at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 that led to Japan’s surrender and the end of the SecondWorldWar, attention focused quickly on when the Soviet Union would acquire its own devices.When the Soviets detonated their first device in 1949, it was still a shock to Washington where most informed observers thought it would take another 5-10 years.The US leadership, of course, was unaware at that time of the extent of Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project, espionage that permitted Soviet scientists to pursue effective paths to bomb design while avoiding dead ends. The British detonation in 1952 followed by the French in 1960 then led the famed British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow to predict that there would be a dozen countries capable of building atomic bombs within six years. Further, he asserted that if they did it was a “mathematical certainty” that, within ten years, some of these weapons would be exploded through “accident, folly, or madness.”1 While perhaps highly plausible at the time, these prognostications have proven incorrect and demonstrate the inherent difficulty in foreseeing accurately future trends in nuclear threats. This chapter focuses on the most apparent nuclear threats among states and nonstate actors and also considers the impact of new technologies and cooperation among current and potential proliferators. A global nuclear threat assessment can begin with a review of the initiatives of the Obama
administration to address these issues since 2009. President Obama inherited a nuclear threat “map” that included four declared nuclear-weapon states since Snow’s prediction: China (1964), India (1998), Pakistan (1998), and North Korea (2006) where the dates indicate when each state detonated its first nuclear device and declared itself a nuclear weapon state.2 This brings the official “nuclear club” to eight. But this number is inaccurate since Israel is widely believed to have developed and deployed a nuclear arsenal of perhaps one hundred or more nuclear weapons, dating back to the 1960s, although it has never detonated a device nor declared itself a nuclear weapon state.3 Thus there were nine nuclear weapon states when President Obama took office in 2009. Before Obama took office, in 2007 and again in 2008, four distinguished former US
national security officials – former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee Sam Nunn – co-authored two widely noted opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal endorsing the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and offering several steps toward its realization.4 These statements, at least in the eyes of many, legitimized the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world for the first time in the nuclear age. As a presidential candidate, Senator Obama endorsed the idea in a sweeping summary of his
proposed approach to American foreign policy.5 Once elected president, Obama delivered a major address in Prague in April 2009 laying out his vision once again, now with the force as the chief executive of the United States.6
