A world without nuclear weapons - Kenneth L. Adelman's address before the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University

US Department of State Bulletin, Jan, 1987

A World Without Nuclear Weapons

Address before the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University on November 13, 1986. Mr. Adelman is Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Since the Reykjavik meeting betweenPresident Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev, a lot of people have begun to take a fresh and serious look at an old question: would we be better off in a world without nuclear weapons? Over the past few weeks there have been numerous articles on the subject in such publications as Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. I detect something of a sea change out there. Commentators who usually devote their column inches to telling us how desperately we need a new arms control agreement have suddenly taken to telling us how desperately we need nuclear weapons. Since Reykjavik, everybody seems to be learning to love nuclear deterrence.

What about this question? Is it reallypossible to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely, and would we be better off in a world without them? These are serious issues for arms control. They are serious issues for our national security. The elimination of nuclear weapons has been, at least, a distant goal of our arms control and disarmament policy since the beginning of the nuclear era. But I think we have always understood that it was not a simple or immediate goal.

Problems of Eliminating Nuclear Weapons

Today, I think it would be useful toremind ourselves of some of the problems it would entail. So let's imagine, for a moment, a world in which nuclear weapons were about to be completely eliminated. What kind of world would this be? What kinds of problems would we face?

Soviet Superiority in ConventionalArms. The first problem we would face is Soviet superiority in conventional arms. In Europe right now there is a serious imbalance in conventional forces between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. At present, the Warsaw Pact has a formidable margin of superiority--almost twice as many divisions, nearly two-and-a-half times as many tanks, and nearly five times the number of artillery pieces in place in Europe. On the purely conventional plane, NATO forces are outnumbered and outgunned. Reinforcements can obviously be brought from the United States, but that is a complicated task, and even then the Warsaw Pact enjoys a considerable edge. That is why deterrence in Europe continues to depend on nuclear weapons and cannot be anchored on conventional forces alone.

This is nothing new. Ever since1945, when the United States rapidly demobilized its armed forces, we have depended, and Western Europe has depended, on U.S. nuclear weapons to deter Soviet aggression. Time and again over the years we have reaffirmed the need to strengthen conventional forces. And we have made some progress, insufficient progress but some nonetheless. But the imbalance remains.

Under these circumstances, toeliminate the nuclear threat would be to weaken our deterrence of Soviet aggression. The first task we would face were we to proceed in a steady way to eliminate nuclear weapons, therefore, would be to right the balance in conventional arms. This may be difficult, for despite the greater wealth of the West, we are still free peoples. And free peoples do not easily choose to commit large increases in current defense spending, even if only to match expenditures by totalitarian states.

Verification. The second problemwe would face is that of verifying a total ban on nuclear weapons. The verification problems posed by such an agreement would be truly monumental. For the past 15 years in arms control, we have relied on national technical means to verify compliance. We have been dealing with many provisions--for example, gross totals of fixed missile silos--that are comparatively easy to verify. These methods of verification have serious limitations. As we look a short distance down the arms control trail, we can see new verification problems emerging. Mobile missiles already pose a problem for verification. Warhead limits pose a problem for verification. As the technological trend moves in the direction of smaller and more mobile systems, these verification problems will only increase.

But these hurdles--by no meansinsignificant ones--pale in comparison with the huge difficulty of ensuring against clandestine production of nuclear weapons themselves. The verification problems posed by this idea take us back to the kinds of issues we first confronted 40 years ago, when the United States proposed the Baruch Plan to the United Nations. The Baruch Plan was our first nuclear arms control initiative, a comprehensive proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons and place all atomic energy activities under control of an international authority.

Had it been accepted by the SovietUnion in 1946, the Baruch Plan would have been a major undertaking even then. But at that time, circumstances were so much simpler. In 1946, when we proposed the Baruch Plan to the United Nations, we had a monopoly on atomic weapons.