Correspondence

No state left behind: combatting non-state acquisition of chemical weapons

William Alley and Jessica Jones (“An Analysis of the Threat of Malicious Chemical Use by Nonstate Actors,” 22.3/4, September/December 2015, pp. 301-20) find that non-state actors are more likely to use “crude” chemical weapons (CW), including toxic industrial chemicals such as chlorine or pesticides, rather than “traditional” chemical weapons, such as mustard or sarin gas. The authors conclude that successful efforts to counter non-state CW proliferation and use must differ substantially from those used against state programs, which are poorly equipped to mitigate the threat posed by nonstate crude chemical use. Their data supports these conclusions. However, their data extends only from 1970 to 2012, thereby excluding recent episodes of the use of militarized, traditional CW by the Islamic State (IS) organization. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, stated on February 9, 2016, that IS used sulfur mustard in an attack in Syria in August 2015.¹ Mr. Clapper explained that IS made and deployed the CW, and has the potential to continue to do so; a subsequently reported attack on the Syrian airbase in Deir Ezzor with mustard gas delivered by rockets appears consistent with this warning.² It is evident that IS favors the use of militarized traditional CW, apparently drawing on weapons or precursors acquired from captured state stockpiles.

Alley and Jones’s concern over the effectiveness of CW nonproliferation and counterterrorism efforts is valid. More should be done to counter crude CW proliferation among non-state actors. But whatever form these efforts should take, they should not come at the expense of addressing states’ CW programs. If IS offers any indication, non-state actors with an interest in battlefield applications of CW will seek to progress to more sophisticated threats over time, and will take advantage of existing state programs to do so. This problem can be mitigated using existing mechanisms, such as those provided by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Nothing is likely to be more effective against this high-end non-state threat than redoubling efforts to bring remaining states into the Chemical Weapons Convention, verifying their declarations, and completing the timely destruction of CW stockpiles.

Clarity, not ambiguity, is behind NPT success

It is with great interest that I read Daniel Khalessi’s “Strategic Ambiguity: Nuclear Sharing and the Secret Strategy for Drafting Articles I and II of the Nonproliferation Treaty” (22.3/4, September/December 2015). Khalessi aims to answer the central question in the debate over the compatibility of NATO’s nuclear arrangements and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT): namely, how did the United States gain Soviet agreement to a viable NPT while protecting and preserving NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements in Europe?

Khalessi posits that the Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s strategy of using deliberately vague language in Articles I and II enabled the United States to achieve this aim. He bases this conclusion on a close reading of newly and previously declassified US sources, along with previously explored books and articles on the topic, which together constitute an important addition to the existing body of scholarship on this topic.

Building on his previous work, Khalessi’s article is of special relevance today, and goes further than most in answering Russian accusations that the United States and its non-nuclear NATO allies are violating the NPT through joint training and the shared nuclear planning process.³ Previous works on related topics have addressed the evolution of NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements, the history of the NATO Multilateral (Nuclear) Force (MLF), the multilateral aspect of NPT negotiations, the influence of the Warsaw Pact in the NPT negotiations, or the dynamics of the US and USSR negotiating teams, but none has comprehensively covered the question of the legality of NATO nuclear-sharing arrangements and the NPT.⁴

The article goes into great detail to explore the NPT negotiating dynamics within three related contexts: 1) the internal US government dynamics, 2) the internal NATO dynamics, and 3) the negotiations among the states. This is a good point of departure, but (as discussed later) each dynamic could use more detailed analysis, and, in the third context, the internal dynamic of the Eighteen-Nation Disarmament Committee (or ENDC, the predecessor to the contemporary Conference on Disarmament) is omitted. Khalessi discusses the internal dynamic within the Johnson administration—among the president, the National Security Council staff, the Department of Defense, and various factions within the State Department. His examination of NATO focuses mainly on the influence of the relationships between the United States and a few of its allies—notably the United Kingdom and West Germany—on NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements and its interaction with the NPT. On the negotiating states, he focuses almost exclusively on the closed-door US-USSR negotiations, largely leaving aside the multilateral debates within the ENDC and the UN General Assembly First Committee on Disarmament and International Security.

Khalessi’s analysis focuses on the critical year of 1966, noting the contextual security environment and NATO’s defensive arrangements during the early stages of the Cold War. He rightly points out the central role of the US proposal to share peacetime control over nuclear weapons as part of a NATO MLF, as well as the competing UK Atlantic Nuclear Force, as a focus of conflict in all three contexts. Sharing control of nuclear weapons in NATO during peacetime—known in the broader literature on NATO as the “hardware solution”—was intended to strengthen the alliance and give European allies a bigger voice in defense matters. However, the “hardware solution” proved divisive with some allies and with the Soviets—particularly regarding the potential for West German access to nuclear weapons—and the United States instead settled upon a “software solution” that included forward nuclear basing and allied planning, training, and consultation.

Khalessi’s narrative breaks the most new ground when he describes the exchanges between US and USSR negotiators during the breakthrough sessions from September 24–30, 1966, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. These intense negotiations were led by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, supported by full delegations that included the top American and Soviet negotiators from the ENDC, William Foster and Alexei Roshchin. Both sides agreed that non-nuclear-weapon states—particularly West Germany—should not have control over nuclear weapons. Once this was made mutually clear, it became possible to agree on text for Articles I and II that preserved NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements. Khalessi describes the negotiations between the delegations in detail, with both sides agreeing upon the concept and then simplifying or creating constructive ambiguity that would allow both sides to agree—crucially, without publicly disagreeing about the content and meaning of the treaty. These details are not widely known, and Khalessi rightly highlights their importance.

Khalessi’s analysis of the September 1966 negotiations provides important insights into how the United States and Soviet Union worked constructively, deliberately, and painstakingly to understand the concepts behind NATO’s existing nuclear-sharing arrangements and to find language that would prohibit any type of “hardware solution,” but with enough ambiguity to prevent the Soviets from publicly endorsing NATO’s defense arrangements. Any daylight between the sides would have been fatal. Without such an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, the NPT would not have been possible, resulting in a far different global security and nuclear proliferation situation today.

Khalessi’s sources, methodology, and assumptions lead him to a conclusion that falls somewhat short of a full understanding of US intentions and the results of the negotiations. His sources focus a bit too extensively on the (quite excellent) cache of documents he retrieved from the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, though a few key documents from that archive were absent from his citations. These documents add substantially to the debate, but are provided without a broader context. This is important, because there were diverse and divergent voices within the administration throughout this period, with factions within the State Department fighting for and against the MLF, sometimes in front of NATO allies. Quoting a cable is not the same as knowing who the author was, what the author thought, or the context of the cable’s content. In addition, Khalessi begins with the conclusion that the United States sought ambiguity from the start, avoiding specificity as a tool to preserve NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements. This conclusion harms his analysis in three ways.

First, he omits an analysis of the impact of the debates within NATO and the ENDC on NPT negotiations. The discussions within the NATO alliance were far more robust and critical to shaping the US position on the NPT and nuclear sharing than Khalessi’s examination of the dynamics within the Johnson administration or between the United States and West Germany would suggest. His statement that it was “unclear how NATO would react if other states decided to engage in similar sharing arrangements” is addressed comprehensively in the now-unclassified records of the NATO North Atlantic Council, including extensive debate over whether the Warsaw Pact had a similar sharing arrangement. In addition, the ENDC debates included extensive discussions of NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements, along with a host of other contentious issues in the text, particularly regarding verification. Second, NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements were in flux throughout this period; the MLF debate ended with the December 1966 formation of the Nuclear Defense Affairs Committee and the Nuclear Planning Committee, which provided a public recognition of the death of the “hardware solution.” And third, NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements were front-page news throughout this period. The public nature of this debate is demonstrated in contemporaneous press reports, public parliamentary hearings, and other sources. It is hard to argue that NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements were a matter of ambiguity when one could read about it extensively, citing US officials and NATO communiqués, as well as the transcripts of the ENDC. Regardless, the text was understood by all parties as not requiring the United States to remove its nuclear weapons from Europe, and the NATO communiqués and declarations on its nuclear-sharing arrangements were both public and clear (not to mention the debates on the topic in Congress and allied parliaments, as extensively reported in the press).

By omitting the sources that were public at the time (e.g., news reports, NATO communiqués on its nuclear policies, transcripts of the ENDC meetings), it is quite easy to get a distorted view of what the negotiators would have known about each other’s positions, as well as what the other negotiating parties of the NPT would have known. It is clear that the Soviets were worried—with reason—about whether West Germany would be successful in seeking nuclear weapons. As Oliver Bange of the University of Mannheim and others have shown, some West German politicians were prone to making unfortunate public pronouncements during the NPT negotiating period on how many nuclear weapons West Germany needed during.⁵ The MLF seemed like a step in that direction. Thus, the United States tried, through several means, to assure the Soviets that MLF was not the preferred option, including through selective leaks to newspapers and the occasional public statement, including, critically, the joint statement by President Johnson and West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard during the negotiations in New York in September 1966.⁶ At the same time, the United States clearly sought to move away from ambiguity in discussions with the Soviets, discussing both the specifics of NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements and a word-by-word analysis of the draft NPT text to test if both sides could agree that the treaty would not inhibit NATO’s “software solution.” This seems the opposite of ambiguous. The NPT text necessarily would not stipulate all that is allowed.

This leads me to my major criticism of the article. The reason the United States and the Soviet Union retreated to a hotel room in New York during that critical week in September 1966 was because the Soviet premier and the US president agreed to submit a joint draft NPT to the ENDC as soon as possible and eliminate any chance of public US-USSR disagreement about the scope and meaning of the text. This agreement to submit a joint treaty text, after years of Soviet complaints about NATO’s sharing arrangements, meant that all other parties within the ENDC expected the Soviets to come up with a text that prohibited the MLF and any other form of nuclear proliferation. The United States and Soviet Union jointly submitted a draft NPT to the ENDC and UN General Assembly on August 24, 1967, accompanied by a speech by the Soviet negotiator that claimed the draft closed all loopholes and paths to nuclear proliferation. This joint submission provided the impetus for the other members of the ENDC to move on to other issues in the NPT, including peaceful nuclear explosions and safeguards. The agreement reached by the United States and the Soviets to cease public complaints about NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements, which stopped conclusively after September 23, 1966, was critical to the success of the treaty’s negotiation.

Finally, the last two paragraphs of the article on the current debate within NATO are unsupported by the text. They are interesting, and posit some new ideas, but these are in no way supported by what came before. My recommendation to the author is to continue his work, but also to read the ENDC transcripts, the North Atlantic Council meeting notes on the NPT draft text, and contemporary press reports. These all could help in providing further insights on this fascinating, relevant, and important topic.

Notes

1. Jack Moore, “CIA Director: Isis Has Used and Can Continue to Make Chemical Weapons,” Newsweek, February 12, 2016, <www.newsweek.com/cia-director-isis-has-capability-continue-chemical-weapons-use-425749>.

2. Reuters, “Islamic State Militants Use Mustard Gas in Attack on Deir Zor Airport – Syrian State TV,” April 5, 2016, <http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-mideast-crisis-syria-militants-idUKKCN0X12G3>.

3. Daniel K. Khalessi, “The Ambiguity of Nuclear Commitments,” PhD diss., CISAC Stanford, 2013, pp. 49-84; Mikhail I. Uliyanov, prepared statement for the 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, General Debate, New York, April 27, 2015; <www.un.org/en/conf/npt/2015/statements/pdf/RU_en.pdf>.

4. For example, see Tom Nichols, Douglas Stuart, Jeffrey D. McCausland, eds., Tactical Nuclear Weapons and NATO (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2012); James Solomon, The Multi-Lateral Force: America's Nuclear Solution for NATO (1960-1965), A Trident Scholar Project Report No. 269 (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Academy, 1999); Mohamed I. Shaker, The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Origin and Implementation 1959-1979 (New York: Oceana Publications Inc., 1980), Volume I; David Selvage, “The Warsaw Pact and Nuclear Nonproliferation 1963-1965,” Working Paper No. 32, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2001, <www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACFB0E.pdf>; and George Bunn, Arms Control by Committee: Managing Negotiations with the Russians (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).

5. Oliver Bange, “NATO and the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Triangulations between Bonn, Washington, and Moscow,” in Andreas Wenger, Christian Nünlist, Anna Locher, eds., Transforming NATO in the Cold War: Challenges beyond Deterrence in the 1960s (London: Routledge, 2007), pp.162-80.

6. “US Drops Nuclear Pact Plan,” International Herald Tribune, December 13, 1964, <http://iht-retrospective.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/1964-u-s-drops-nuclear-pact-plan>.