Reducing the Nuclear Threat: Lessons from Experience

George P. Shultz

American Nuclear Society Meeting
November 11, 2013

My thesis:

1. The existence of nuclear weapons poses an existential danger to everyone in the world.

2. As we consider future developments, we must be ever vigilant of our, and our allies', national security interests. We emphasize steps, such as getting better control of fissile material, as marking the way forward. We know that as long as there are nuclear weapons, the United States must have an arsenal that is safe, secure, and reliable.

3. Great progress has been made since 1986 in sharply reducing the number of nuclear weapons and in creating an atmosphere where further progress seemed likely — a golden moment.

4. Right now, and rather abruptly, that atmosphere has changed sharply, with new threats of proliferation and use. So the question I put before you is: What can we learn from the earlier positive experience? What has gone wrong and where do we go from here?

Let me start with a brief history.

Concern about the threat posed by nuclear weapons has preoccupied the United States and presidents of the United States from the beginning of the nuclear era.

President Truman introduced the Baruch Plan — a radical call for international control of nuclear weapons. The plan was stillborn with Soviet opposition.

President Eisenhower, in a 1953 address to the United Nations General Assembly, called for negotiations to "begin to diminish the potential destructive power of the world's atomic stockpiles." He pledged that the United States would "devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life."

At the end of the Eisenhower administration, the United States had 20,000 nuclear warheads and the Soviet Union 1,600. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy spoke eloquently in favor of a nuclear-free world. But at the time of his death, the United States had 30,000 nuclear warheads and the Soviet Union had 4,000.

President Johnson negotiated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and started what became the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). But as he left office, China had tested a nuclear weapon to become the fifth nuclear state, and the Soviet arsenal had increased to 9,000 weapons.

President Nixon succeeded in negotiating the first limitations on strategic offensive forces, but by the time he and his successor, President Ford, left office, the US arsenal had 26,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union's arsenal had grown to 17,000.

President Carter, concerned about nuclear weapons, negotiated a second SALT Treaty but withdrew it from the Senate in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. By the time he left office, the Soviet Union had 30,000 nuclear weapons and the United States, 24,000.

President Reagan, early in his administration, asked the Joint Chiefs to tell him what would be the result of an all-out Soviet attack on the United States. The answer: it would wipe us out as a country. Would he retaliate? Yes. And he said many times, "What's so good about keeping the peace through an ability to wipe each other out?"

So Reagan decided on what was regarded as a radical and unachievable objective: he called for the elimination of intermediate- range nuclear forces (INF) (the Soviets had 1,500 deployed and the United States had not yet deployed any). He also called for cutting in half the number of strategic weapons on each side. He publicly advocated the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. In 1983, the INF negotiations failed and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) put into effect a prior decision to deploy intermediate-range weapons if negotiations failed. The Soviets withdrew from negotiations. Tensions rose. Talk of war filled the air. Reagan, early in 1984, spoke in a conciliatory way about prospects for a better world. Gradually, the situation settled down and arrangements were made for the resumption of the annual visit by Foreign Minister Gromyko to Washington at the time of the UN General Assembly, a practice that had been discontinued by President Carter after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Tensions began to subside and arrangements were made and successfully implemented in January 1985 to resume arms control talks. At this point, Mikhail Gorbachev came on the scene as the new general secretary of the Soviet Union. The first meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev took place in Geneva in November 1985. The main, and important, result was a change in atmosphere. The joint statement issued by Reagan and Gorbachev exclaimed, "A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought."

At the time, Soviet warheads outnumbered US warheads, and the total number of nuclear weapons in the world, including Great Britain, France, and China, came to about 70,000. Then came Reykjavik.

Reagan and Gorbachev met in a small room in Hofdi House for two full days of talks. I was privileged to sit with President Reagan and my counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, was beside General Secretary Gorbachev. Momentous developments were discussed and potential agreements identified. We were on the way to agreeing on the elimination of intermediate-range weapons and cutting in half strategic nuclear arms to equal levels on a satisfactory bomber-counting rule. At the end, they did not close any deal at that time because Reagan and Gorbachev disagreed about the issue of strategic defense. Nevertheless, we had seen the Soviets' bottom line and the agreements subsequently came into effect. Little noticed at the time, but of deep significance, was an agreement reached in an all-night session between the first and second days of the meeting, negotiated by Roz Ridgway with Sasha Bessmertnyk, that human rights would be a recognized, regular item on our US-Soviet meeting agendas. This was a signal, not well recognized at the time, that the Soviet Union was ready for deeper changes, as subsequently advocated by Gorbachev.

I went to the United Nations on December 7, 1988, to hear Gorbachev give an address. The headline from his statement was the withdrawal of Soviet conventional forces from Europe, but I thought the most important message was that, as far as he was concerned, the Cold War was over.

The Cold War died, but died hard in the United States, as debate raged between President Reagan and me, observing that change was taking place in the Soviet Union, and others like former President Nixon and CIA Director Robert Gates, who thought we were wrong and naïve, and that the Soviet Union could not change. Our point of view prevailed in the end.

A golden decade or so followed, and by 2006, nuclear weapons had been reduced to...