STANSFIELD TURNER Nuclear Non-Proliferation After India and Pakistan T hus far the world’s response to the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan has not ventured from the anti-proliferation efforts that failed to dissuade those countries from becoming declared nuclear powers: treaties, sanctions, conferences and arm twisting. The most we can reasonably hope for from this is a return to the status quo ante but with seven rather than five declared nuclear powers. It will all too likely be only a matter of time before new Indias and Pakistans are knocking at the door. We need to be more ambitious. One possibility is to set out to undermine the position India and Pakistan have taken that nuclear weapons have utility, at the least the utility of enhancing a nation’s status on the world stage. We are in no position to refute that argument today because by both rhetoric and actions, the U.S., NATO and Russia confirm an even more extensive utility for these weapons. Despite being the most powerful of nations, the U.S. plans call for having 10,000 nuclear warheads almost ten years from now, even if the current arms control treaty is ful­filled; NATO insists on retaining the option of using nuclear weapons first if necessary to defend Western Europe against even a conventional mili­tary assault; and Russia recently retracted its pledge of no first-use of nuclear weapons. If we do not want the example of India and Pa­kistan to be contagious, we must de-emphasize the utility of nuclear weapons by reducing numbers the drastically and immediately and by renounc­ing the doctrine of first-use. The first can be achieved by a process termed strategic escrow; the other by presidential declarations. Under strategic escrow the U.S. would reduce the readiness of its nuclear weapons by removing, say, 1,000 warheads rom missiles and re-locating them several hun­dred miles away, inviting the Russians to place observers at the storage sites to count what went in and if anything were taken out. This process of verification would be straightforward and no treaty would be required. The warheads would not be destroyed and, so, formal approval by the Duma and Senate would not be necessary. It is the complex routine of negotiating, ratifying and executing treaties that results in such a glacially slow arms control process that the START II Treaty can take another ten years to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to 10,000 warheads. Strategic escrow will accelerate this process only if the Russians reciprocate that initiative. There will be strong resistance in Russia to doing that. If it prevails the U.S. will have lost nothing, as the warheads could be returned to the missiles. In time, though, the Russians almost must come around. Russians today readily acknowledge that their country cannot sustain an arsenal of even 1,000 intercontinental nuclear-armed missiles for more than another ten years. They can neither afford to refurbish their existing, but deteriorating weapons, nor build enough new ones to make much difference. President Yeltsin has already told the Duma that 1,000 warheads is all Russia requires. Once a process of strategic escrow is going, the U.S . and Russia could each reduce to less than 1,000 ready nuclear warheads in a matter of a few years. At about 1,000 however, it would be neces­sary to bring all other nuclear powers into the escrow process. That is, the two nuclear super­powers would not go so far into escrow as to have fewer ready weapons than any of the other six nuclear powers. At this point, a program of uni­lateral initiatives by one nuclear superpower and reciprocal steps by the other would have to be turned into a treaty incorporating Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel. The treaty would establish, just as does the START process, a goal for the total number of nuclear weapons to be held by each country. It would also pro­vide that in stages these eight nuclear powers would place the warheads for all of those weapons IPG 4/98 Nuclear Non-Proliferation After India and Pakistan 385