Vital Interests: This forum is to bring attention to important issues within the foreign policy and security realms. One which hasn’t been getting a lot of attention lately is nuclear proliferation. In fact it is still a major threat -  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has the doomsday clock at two minutes to midnight. What is your take on the risk? 

Jim Walsh: I certainly think that this is as dangerous a moment in nuclear history as we've had, at least since the end of the Cold War. So going back decades. The fundamental truth is: no human being should have the ability to, in one quick decision, destroy the country or even the entire planet. We still have roughly 10,000 nuclear weapons around, scattered across any number of governments and under the control of men who have strengths and weaknesses.

As we've seen these strengths and weaknesses play out recently, there have been situations in which Iran and the United States came very close to a conflict. Relations between the United States and China have deteriorated rapidly, in some cases over issues that China feels are of vital interest, like Taiwan.

Also we have seen, in addition to the leaders and the crises, a breakdown in institutions which have traditionally helped to reduce the nuclear threat. If you go back, there were two great moments in atomic history when citizens around the world stood up, pushed back and insisted that their governments change. 

In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s,  people around the globe came out in the face of nuclear danger and then again in the mid-1980s. As a result of that, we had a number of significant agreements and treaties that helped tamp down, in some cases directly reduce, the risk of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. 

Those barriers to proliferation and nuclear exchange are now being cast away as people turn to other pressing issues such as climate change, local conflicts, and divisive national politics. The grass-roots pressure of the past is absent. As a result, the United States has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, from the Iran nuclear agreement, and from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the Russians. We have announced that we're going to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty and on and on it goes. 

Over the past seventy years we built laws and institutions to help reduce nuclear danger and now we're turning our backs on them. In the world today, we have a large number of weapons of mass destruction, leaders whose judgment is of some concern, and the decay, perhaps even the end of, nonproliferation and disarmament institutions.  It is indeed a perilous time.

VI: Do you agree we are experiencing a “new abnormal” because the United States is pulling back from playing a leadership role in designing and supporting global agreements that advance a safer and healthier planet?

Jim Walsh: That has been generally true for this administration. In particular its true for the Paris Climate Accord, United States/NATO relations. In the nuclear arena,  the president has announced withdrawal after withdrawal, with each brick being torn down in a regulatory regime that took decades to build. Like the invasion of Iraq, it's easier to invade than it is to rebuild. It is far easier to tear up an agreement then to forge a new one.

If the president is re-elected, he'll continue on this path of tearing up agreements left and right. If a Democrat is  elected, I think there's still a question about what the response will be to this new environment of nuclear proliferation and lack of arms control.There is a lot of uncertainty, regardless of who wins.

VI: As the United States withdraws from nuclear treaties and arms agreements, are any alternatives being articulated? Or is this solely about preserving sovereign rights and having more flexibility in American nuclear policies with regards to new weapons technology?

Jim Walsh: Let's just be honest. The answer is no, to alternatives. Take the Iran nuclear agreement  - the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The president said the United States was pulling out because he wanted to negotiate a better deal. To date there have been no new negotiations. 

Other parties did not follow us out of the agreement. Normally, the United States leadership stakes out a policy and expects its allies to follow along  - that did not happen here. All the other parties have so far stayed in the JCPOA, although it is fraying. The JCPOA is anchored in a U.N. Security Council resolution and international law, that has not changed. 

When withdrawal from the JCPOA  was first announced, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo listed 12 pre-conditions that Iran would have to meet before any new negotiations would take place. That sort of melted away at a certain point. The closest to any dialogue happening was at the last UN General Assembly meeting, where a possibility was floated that  Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Trump might chat for a while. The U.S. trashed that opportunity. 

The United States not only withdrew from the JCPOA but they also announced punishments for those countries that stayed in the agreement, who abided legally by their obligations. 

Withdrawal from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), resulted almost immediately in the United States testing intermediate range missiles, something  prohibited by the agreement. I would say the president has been quite clear that his philosophy of nuclear weapons is, generally, we have to have more than everyone else. 

President Trump doesn't understand the complexity of nuclear weapons at all. Much of his stand on nuclear weapons is rooted in politics rather than national security. It is about the appearance of looking tough, of being tough.

I cannot discern any hidden grand negotiation, any negotiating strategy.  We haven't seen the new replacement for the INF, no replacement for all the other agreements that we've broken or walked away from. I'd like to say, yes, there's something in the back pocket here but there's no evidence of that.

VI: Then we have the situation with  North Korea’s nuclear program where great  progress was talked about but was any made?  

Jim Walsh: I think , as we move into 2020, that's another area that might become dangerous. Chairman Kim announced last January that there was a deadline in U.S./ North Korean relations and, if there hadn't been progress in a year, Kim strongly hinted that North Korea would return to nuclear and long range missile testing.

We've had no progress. I think part of that blame belongs to the North Koreans, who seem to have avoided working group level efforts, which are required to build a strong agreement. I think they just wanted to get the president in the room, negotiate something with him right then and there. Who ever is to blame, come January or February, we may be in a situation where North Korea has resumed nuclear testing and then how will the president react to that? I just don't know.

VI: In terms of proliferation, you have talked about the 10,000 nuclear warheads currently held by the United States and Russia. Besides North Korea, what other countries with nuclear capabilities are poised for conflict, like India and Pakistan?  If Iran moves develops a nuclear weapon, then will there also be a Saudi bomb? What does the next five years look like in terms of more weapons and more countries developing nuclear capabilities?

Jim Walsh: I'm actually more concerned about the states that have nuclear weapons than the ones that might get them. Part of the reason why we're in the predicament we are in today is no one even thinks about nuclear weapons. People talk about climate change. Climate change is an incredibly important issue but the truth is, there's only one thing that could destroy the planet today. One thing and one thing only that's controlled by human beings and that is nuclear weapons.

We won the Cold War, we had this tremendous success but success is a funny thing. As a consequence of winning the Cold War, and the Soviet Union breaking apart, we forgot about the nuclear problem. As citizens, we shifted from worrying about nuclear weapons, regardless of who owned them, as a danger to everyone regardless of where they are, to proliferation. The focus then is: this other guy might get a nuclear weapon, this other guy who doesn't have one, that we don't like, might get one in the future, therefore completely bypassing the rather stark danger that's staring us in the face, which is the 10,000 that already exists.

I think there is a path in which Iran might end up a nuclear weapons state. It has not made that decision, it does not have an active nuclear weapons program. It halted its nuclear weapons efforts in 2003. But I think if the United States attacks Iran and bombs its nuclear facilities, there's a very strong possibility that they will respond by making a nuclear decision and pursuing nuclear weapons and kicking out inspectors. I don't think we can discount that as a possibility -  but I'm more worried about the countries that already have nuclear weapons because you have a nuclear arsenal that is operational.

You mentioned India and Pakistan. As you know Mr. Modi, the leader in India, is a Hindu nationalist. Modi is in complete political control in that country and has taken that status and used it to break with decades of established Indian policy to directly intervene into Kashmir. I think he's doing this because he perceives that the Pakistanis are weak and are unlikely to respond and that may be the case, but that may not be the case. You have two nuclear weapons states, a very sensitive topic in Kashmir, there could be terror attacks between the two that could set off an escalation that could be very dangerous.

I think it is unlikely that the U.S. and Russia will get into a nuclear competition but Gorbachev wrote an op ed the other day, worrying aloud about the U.S. and Russian move from a cold war to a hot war. I don't think that's likely but it's possible. 

Israel has nuclear weapons, China has nuclear weapons and they're not looking for a nuclear fight but, especially around issues like Taiwan, there are red lines for the Chinese.

There is a further acceleration of an arms race and the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons capabilities. More powerful weapons and complex weapon systems are being developed that then have their own consequences over which we have little control. A lot is in the mix at a time of high uncertainty and high instability.

VI: At the end of the Cold War with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there were concerns about dirty bombs and suitcase bombs. The United States and its allies made great efforts to locate and collect these weapons.  Can terrorist groups, non-state actors, get their hands on these things?

Jim Walsh: I think it is a low probability risk. Again, it's much more likely that the nuclear-weapon states will use nuclear weapons, rather than non-state actors. I would draw a big distinction between dirty bombs, which are essentially conventional weapons that spread radioactivity but are not nuclear weapons, that's why they're called a trash bomb. You could take some conventional explosives and rather than putting some radioactive material from a hospital in the bomb, you could put some poison or some industrial chemical in it. It's basically the same thing but most of the people who die from a dirty bomb attack will die from the conventional explosives, not exposure to radioactive materials.

Were a terrorist able to actually acquire or build a crude nuclear device, even crude, it would have enormous consequences. Thus, President Obama and other world leaders were attentive to locking down and reducing the amount of nuclear material that could be used for a bomb, trying to get that out of the system. They've made some progress there but that's still a possibility. As long as there's HEU, as long as there's highly enriched uranium, then there's a possibility that it could end up in someone's hands. HEU doesn't require that much additional work to fashion it into a weapon. Again, I think the possibility is low. It doesn't really match your terrorist groups' natural talents or their organizational structure. 

The big challenge is recognizing reality for what it is, which is, to stop forgetting that the United States and Russia have most of the world's nuclear weapons and more than enough to destroy the planet and the others can destroy their parts of the world too. 

You're right to bring up the terrorist threat because that's what happened. After the Cold War, the initial frame was proliferation, not nuclear weapons, but bad countries that might get the bomb. Then, after 9/11, it switched again, the frame to nuclear terrorism, the idea that terrorists might get the bomb. In both those cases, that frame said, "The people who are going to solve this for you are the government". 

They took agency away from people and said, "The government's going to solve the Iran problem. The government's going to solve the nuclear terrorist problem. You just stay back at home and don't worry about this, we're going to take care of it".

That has led to decades of amnesia and, thus, the complete falling out of nuclear issues in public opinion surveys. No one mentions them. People don't think they have a problem, or will respond, "Well, there's nothing I can do about that." Therefore ignoring important periods in American history where that was not the case. It's a pathology of the post Cold War that we all tell ourselves that we can't do anything about this terrible problem of nuclear proliferation.

VI: What about modernization? Is there a next generation of nuclear weapons? There were recent news reports about the new Russian technology, hypersonic missiles with unlimited range, their Skyfall project that will soon be operational. What is reality and what is fiction?

Jim Walsh: I think there is a lot of hyperventilation about hypersonic. The United States announced under President Obama a major modernization program. Just to be clear, modernization does not simply mean making sure the stuff we have works, that's called reliability. That's what the policy makers will talk about. 

Buried in modernization is not only reliability but also enhanced capabilities, new capabilities, building nuclear weapons that do things that haven't been done before. No one's thinking about, "What impact does that have on strategic doctrine? Does it make a more stable nuclear balance or less stable nuclear balance?" Again, in some ways parodying the president, those in charge of the nuclear weapons complex and the production of those nuclear weapons in the department of energy and in the Pentagon, they are all about more is better

If there's a capability, we want it, not thinking about what the consequences of those capabilities are. There are some capabilities you might get that, yes, you would have it and the other side won't and, isn't that great? Except  that, because you have that advantage, your adversaries are more fearful. They then engage in risky behavior or miss-identify what you're doing and take counter-actions that actually make war more likely. 

Just having new capabilities doesn't make you safer. You have to figure out what their impact is on decision makers and the adversary. In the old days, your own survival depended on your ability to fend for yourself, to have defenses like moats and walls or to have armies to repel the attacker. In the nuclear age, your survival depends on the wisdom of your adversary. That is not true of conventional weapons.

VI: The United States’ partner in non-proliferation and standing up to Russia used to be Europe. That premise and support for the NATO mission are being called into question, however. French President Emmanuel Macron and others are calling for a European Defence Force. Do you think that is the direction Europe is heading in and would this force have nuclear capabilities?

Jim Walsh: Well, it's back to the future or whatever, or the future to the past. There were discussions about that concept in the 1950’s and the 1960’s. I think that's more talk than action, I don't think the Europeans are itching to develop their own nuclear weapons capability, particularly at a time when Europe and NATO are divided between, for lack of a better phrase, the old Europe and the new Europe, or what might better be characterized as fully democratic, wealthy countries and the newer members who have issues.

I don't expect NATO to rush into the nuclear game, or all the Europeans to go rushing to set up as an independent force. You asked about technology's modernization, we discussed the U.S., India, and Pakistan are going through their second generation nuclear technologies. You mentioned hypersonic weapons being developed by Russia and China, I doubt what I hear coming out of Russia. You hear lots of bold claims and I continue to be deeply skeptical. 

China is supposed to be working on hypersonic weapons. Just to be clear for readers,  we traditionally put nuclear weapons on a missile, for example, land-based, intercontinental ballistic missiles, the ones that fly into space and then land halfway around the world on their target.

VI: Or in submarines.

Jim Walsh: Yes launched anywhere in the oceans from submarines. Essentially, you can use nuclear weapons from any platform. But intercontinental ballistic missiles, just to draw the distinction between that and hypersonic, are lobbed up and go into space and then come down. Hypersonic nuclear weapons are much more like very, very long-range cruise missiles.

Hypersonic missiles don't enter space, they don't enter the upper atmosphere. They move at super fast speeds, that's the hypersonic speeds, but low in altitude. They're basically juiced-up cruise missiles and, therefore, more difficult to see coming in. 

When a ballistic missile is launched, it's lobbed into space, it's picked up by radar and the trajectory is identified. This is much more difficult with a low-flying, super fast weapon. Now, none of these have really been demonstrated, but certainly, people are working on them. 

The U.S. worked on one for a while and then thought it was a waste of time. I would say on that, it's unclear what the implications are with this potential weapon. Normally, we like to think - again, because we don't understand the logic of the nuclear age -  "Well, defenses are good. We should have defenses against nuclear weapons." Not realizing that, actually, that's not the way it works in the nuclear world.

Building defenses means you don't have mutually-assured destruction, which means one side is going to be suspicious that the other side that's doing all the defense, is actually planning a nuclear war, hoping to survive a nuclear war. 

In any case, the idea behind deterrence is a mutual vulnerability that you hope is stable. Now with hypersonic weapons, if that means that we are rendered defenseless, there's a possibility that that actually enhances deterrence, that no one will go about gambling at the edges because there's no defense against a nuclear weapon, so you're playing with the ultimate destruction.

Again, I think that we have a technology track where the planners are just trying to come up with new ways to do new things. The general attitude is, if we do new things, new ways with new technology for nuclear weapons, that's going to be great. My core point is, you don't know until you think it through. It can actually make things much more dangerous.

Certainly, building more nuclear weapons is destabilizing. Building more nuclear weapons is making the world more dangerous and further undermining the non-proliferation regime, in which countries that have nuclear weapons have pledged to move to zero, move to bigger numbers. This presents all sorts of political, technical, doctrinal and strategic implications that no one thinks about because all they're thinking about is, "Can we build the next widget that's faster, bigger, smarter, and more destructive?"

VI: Wasn't a major tenet of all nuclear strategy, the first-strike capability? Does the hypersonic start eroding that concept?

Jim Walsh: Well, it could. Of course, the U.S. is the only country in the world that has a counterforce, that is to say, first strike as its doctrine. Every other country has something closer to mutual-assured destruction. Now, the Russians may be changing that. 

All during the Cold War, we reserved the right to shoot first because if our conventional forces in Europe are overwhelmed by Soviet forces, if the Soviets come over the horizon and we fight them just with conventional means, we'll lose. So we reserved the right to use nuclear weapons first. 

The United States never really got rid of that doctrine and if you talk to military planners, as I have today in the Air Force, they say, quite unabashedly, that their doctrine is counterforce, that they expect to strike the other side first, to go after Russian nuclear missiles and hit them in their silos. 

If you're the Russians, that's probably going to make you nervous. Again this gets to the issue of stability and that your own survival depends on the wisdom of your adversary. It is probably not a good idea, from a security standpoint, to make the Russians nervous or force them to take actions that they feel they need to take to counter-balance your modernization and your actions and that's where we're at right now.

This is the fundamental dynamic that has been unleashed as the United States has abandoned long held nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament agreements, as we've walked back on what were firmly held and respected commitments. Now all countries are free to build new toys in whatever way they feel they want to. I think this is what they are currently doing. The great peril is the consequences have yet to be realized.

VI: That is a grim forecast. Presidential candidates will be challenged to come to grips with these nuclear realities when there are other global threats, like climate change, to consider. Do you think politicians and civil society can again be mobilized to provide remedies to these circumstances which potentially threaten human survival? 

Jim Walsh: I don't think it's a zero-sum game. I think if civilization is to survive, yes, we're going to have to walk and chew gum at the same time. We're going to have to deal with the nuclear threat and the climate threat. I think, for reasons I described earlier, for instance, after the Cold War, we just outright forgot about nuclear armageddon. 

I think there is good news here and it comes in two forms. One is history. We know as an empirical fact, in contrast to the thoughts that are in people's heads today, we know people have in the past, on at least two occasions, people from around the globe have forced governments to stop their behavior and to take action to reduce the nuclear danger. We know that can be done.

Effectiveness, having an impact, is certainly possible if we choose to act on that. In fact a bit of good news and, of course, it's wrapped in irony is, often danger and opportunity travel together. If you look at Google trends data, which began in 2004, at the search terms "nuclear weapons" and "nuclear war", you saw that nuclear weapons spike up and down and up and down from 2004 to 2018.

That was normally because Iran and North Korea are in the news. No one's asking about nuclear war. No one's worried about nuclear war. No one's thinking about it. Then, in October of 2016 for the first time in recorded data of Google trends, searches on nuclear war skyrocketed and surpassed those of nuclear weapons. Do you know what happened in October of 2016? A presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump where nuclear policy was discussed.

That was followed, subsequently, by Trump's Fire and Fury threat against North Korea in the summer of 2017. Interest in nuclear weapons spiked again after Trump’s UN General Assembly speech where he threatened to essentially launch a nuclear war against North Korea. That quickly dissipated - those windows opened and closed pretty quickly, especially in this day and age when the churn of news stories is at the highest rate ever, 

Paradoxically, I think Donald Trump has the potential to remind average Americans why no person, no human being, should have the ability to destroy the planet. I think as events play out with the possibility of North Korean resuming nuclear tests in January or February of 2020, as well as increasing tensions with Iran, there may be moments in which danger and opportunity again present themselves. Hopefully people will seize on this potential deadly peril and say, "This is crazy. We need to get back to protecting ourselves from the mistakes and impulses of others".

Jim Walsh is a Senior Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program (SSP). Dr. Walsh’s research and writings focus on international security, and in particular, topics involving nuclear weapons, the Middle East, and East Asia. Dr. Walsh has testified before the United States Senate and House of Representatives on issues of nuclear terrorism, Iran, and North Korea. He is one of a handful of Americans who has traveled to both Iran and North Korea for talks with officials about nuclear issues. Before coming to MIT, Dr. Walsh was Executive Director of the Managing the Atom project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Walsh received his Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.