"Toward A New Nuclear Policy: 
Reducing The Threat To American Lives" 
 
                                 Senator Bob Kerrey (D-NE)

Prepared Text -- Speech to the Council on Foreign Relations
 
                                     November 17, 1998
                                               
 
Good afternoon. At the beginning of this talk let me say I am
grateful for this opportunity to speak to you today and hope
that at the conclusion of my remarks you will feel some gratitude
as well. Either for my coming or my departure. It is an honor for
me to be introduced by Warren Rudman, with whom I had the great
honor of serving. Two other former colleagues, Jim Exon and Sam
Nunn, have been instrumental in helping me learn more about, and
keeping America safe from, nuclear dangers. They have my thanks as
well. Special thanks are also in order for other members of the
Council on Foreign Relations, especially my friend Skip Stein, who
helped organize this lunch. Michael Krepon of the Henry L.
Stimson Center in Washington has been generous with both his time
and his creativity on the topic I will address today, as
has Bruce Blair of the Brookings Institution and many others.
 
The most important business of the Federal government must be to
keep the people of the United States of America safe. The President
and Congress have the responsibility of assessing the threats to
our country and designing an appropriate response to minimize them.
 
At the dawn of our Republic the thirty- nine men who drafted our
Constitution defined this objective as "providing for the common
defense." They envisioned this purpose as little more than
defending our territory against outside invaders. Over time, as our
nation has grown, this mission has grown. We have learned from
bitter experience that our interests extend beyond our borders. We
have learned that diplomacy backed by a credible military force can
prevent wars from happening. We have learned that good intelligence
can help us build and direct that force so that threats are
accurately assessed.
 
In these times, devastatingly hovering over mankind are three
weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological. They
have the dynamics of plunging the world suddenly in an unimaginable
war aimed more at civilians than military casualties.
 
A commission created by my colleague, Arlen Specter, is engaged in
an in-depth study of this three fold threat. It is headed by
chairman John Deutch and its report is expected shortly. I hope we
have learned the importance and value of a credible military force
-- but I do not assume it.
 
The history of this century should keep us vigilant against the
tendency to want to disarm. We disarmed and came home after the
Great War, the war to end all wars. We responded to the military
actions of Japan and Germany with words which were not enough to
prevent 50 million people from dying in the Second World War.
Little remembered is this fact:  After the second world war we
slashed our defense budgets again. We withdrew our forces from
Europe and Asia. And though it is an open question as to what might
have happened to Eastern Europe had a credible military force faced
the Soviet Union or a credible force been close to the Korean
peninsula, there can be no doubt it would have had a deterrent
impact on the decisions made by Soviet and North Korean leaders.
They did not believe we would respond and so they acted.
 
Today the United States of America is the most important arbiter of
world peace. The measure of our success can be seen around the
world. More people are living in free and democratic nations than
ever before. The cold war is over. Today, when the word "Russia" is
spoken, we think of economic problems and not espionage or proxy
wars or nuclear weapons. The global economy -- frustrating,
confusing and challenging -- is making us more interdependent and
reducing the old territorial and military tensions between
nation-states. But please observe: It is the threat of conventional
force deployment which produced the Dayton Accords and the
agreement in Kosovo and, hopefully, Iraq's compliance with United
Nations Resolutions.
 
Still, threats remain. Not only do they remain, but the nature of
the threat has changed radically from what it was as recently
as 10 years ago. Because of that,there is a clear and present need
for constant re-examination of policies to ensure we are not using
yesterday's strategy and/or force structure on today's and
tomorrow's threats. Never before has thinking outside the old box
that confined our plans been so important.
 
That is my purpose here today: To step outside of the old way of
meeting the one threat with the potential of killing every single
American: nuclear weapons. I begin by describing that threat.
Consider this scenario, which could unfold by sundown today:
 
A peaceful scientific rocket is launched off the coast of Norway.
To the east, in Russia, radar operators mistake the launch for a
nuclear attack by the West. A deadly process -- nearly on
auto-pilot -- is triggered. Within minutes President Yeltsin has
been alerted of the attack. For the first time in history, the
Russian nuclear briefcase is activated. With thousands of nuclear
warheads on hair-trigger alert around the world, commanders tell
Yeltsin he has just minutes -- three minutes, five at most -- to
decide whether to launch a retaliatory strike against American
cities. Like a raft on a raging river, Yeltsin is being carried
away by events. Literally minutes before a retaliatory strike is
ordered, military commanders realize the rocket is peaceful. They
had been given advance warning of the scientific launch. They had
simply failed to pass it on to the duty officers who evaluate
warning indicators.
 
In the chaos, though, it is too late: After a breakdown in
discipline or communication within Russia's underpaid and poorly
equipped command structure, one SS-25 missile with a 550-kiloton
warhead has been launched at Chicago. The missile rockets north
over the top of the world, across the arctic pole, and inside an
hour detonates over Chicago within -- even on a bad day -- a few
hundred yards of its intended target.
 
The surrounding air is instantaneously heated to 10 million degrees
Celsius. The fireball shoots outward at a rate of a few hundred
kilometers per second. A mushroom cloud dozens of miles across and
high rips up from the explosion. Everything within miles of the
detonation site is vaporized. In the immediate blast zone nearly
everyone is killed. The radius of destruction reaches out for
miles. Even in the farthest reaches of the blast zone, structures
are severely damaged, thousands are dead, half are injured and most
survivors have suffered second and third-degree burns.
 
If that sounds like a fantasy cooked up in a Hollywood studio,
consider this: According to public reports, every event I have just
described to you, right up until the actual launch of one missile,
occurred on January 25, 1995, with the Soviet Union three years in
the grave.
 
This scenario will probably not happen, but it most assuredly
could. It is at least as plausible as any number of other threats
that absorb the attention and rhetoric of our policy makers. And as
important as it is to mount a good defense against terrorism,
narcotics traffickers, or political instability in the Middle East
or Balkans, they are pale worries in comparison to the number of
Americans who would die if just one of Russia's nuclear weapons
were to be launched at the United States. Chinese weapons get more
attention today, but it is Russia's, not China's, that are accurate
and capable of being launched across an ocean and hitting a hard
target.
 
The topic of this speech is reducing nuclear dangers. By the end of
it, I intend to leave you with three ideas:
 
     First, the several thousand nuclear warheads on Russian soil
are the gravest, most imminent threat to the security of the United
States.

     Second, our old policies of arms control and deterrence no
longer work and may be increasing the danger, both by making
nuclear threats worse and by diverting money and resources away
from the conventional forces that are the key to our safety in the
post-Cold War world.

     Third, we are confronted by both an urgent danger and an
urgent opportunity. The danger is obvious; the opportunity is not.
The opportunity is a window of time during which we can
significantly reduce the danger nuclear weapons pose to American
lives. But this window is closing. We must act now, and we must act
boldly. 
 
I call this nuclear threat to your attention with such an urgent
tone because I fear that Americans, amidst our well earned joy
in the victory of freedom in the Cold War, have been lulled into a
false sense of security about it. What America needs from its
leaders today is not a lullaby, but a wake-up call. I am not here
to tell you to cast off old suspicions, but to replace them with
new ones, suspicions in many ways graver than the old ones and less
curable by the incentives for rational behavior on which our
strategy of deterrence has historically relied. We need a new
nuclear policy to confront new nuclear dangers.
 
What are these new nuclear dangers?
 
I see four scenarios in which nuclear weapons threaten American
lives. First is an authorized launch, which is to say a deliberate
attack by Russia on the United States. Even in the unlikely event
of a throwback totalitarian regime in Russia, there is little
reason to fear such an attack. Second is the acquisition of weapons
in the Russian arsenal by rogue groups or individuals, whether they
be terrorist states or their clients or simply a disgruntled
Russian soldier. Third is an accidental launch, like the one I just
described, based on technological error or miscalculation. Fourth
is another country acquiring nuclear weapons, either through
proliferation or their own nuclear program.
 
Today we must deal with nuclear threats differently. The policy of
Mutual Assured Destruction, or deterrence, protected us from the
old threat -- deliberate attack. But it does not protect us from
these new ones. In fact, I will argue, it makes them worse.
 
The underlying assumption of deterrence is rational behavior on the
other side. None of these potential new nuclear powers -- whether
they be terrorist groups or rogue states or desperate individuals
-- can be counted on to respond rationally to the threat of
retaliation.
 
In addition, leaving nuclear missiles on hair-trigger alert is a
recipe for miscalculation caused by events controlling leaders
rather than leaders controlling events. In the case I mentioned to
you earlier, President Yeltsin had a matter of minutes to react.
The combination of hair-trigger alert, deadly weapons and the
potential for human or technological error is a combustible mixture
with lethal consequences.
 
The threats either of proliferation or the seizure of nuclear
materials by criminals inside Russia are real. Russia's economy is
failing, creating an economic incentive to proliferate. The
physical and human infrastructure responsible for safeguarding her
nuclear arsenal are in dangerous disrepair.
 
You do not need the warnings of a senator responsible for oversight
of our highly secret intelligence community to know this threat
exists. According to the Los Angeles Times, last month a
19-year-old Russian sailor killed eight crewmen on his nuclear
submarine near Murmansk, seized control of the sub and held it for
20 hours. Said one former Russian Navy captain: "It is really scary
that one day the use of nuclear arms may depend on the sentiments
of someone who is feeling blue, who has gotten out of bed on the
wrong side and does not feel like living. The probability of this
today is higher than ever before."
 
Mutual Assured Destruction is no deterrent to such problems, and
the massive, redundant arsenals this policy has produced may be
making them worse. Our maintenance of a nuclear arsenal larger than
we need provokes Russia to maintain one larger than she can
control. In the wake of these kinds of threats, from proliferation
to loose weapons, keeping massive nuclear arsenals far in excess of
what we need is an accident waiting to happen. Every weapon we
maintain that we do not need to defend ourselves provokes the
Russians to maintain another to match it. This is a simple
mathematical proposition: If what we most fear is a mistake, rather
than a deliberate attack, the probability of that threat grows with
every weapon in the arsenal of either side. In this environment,
every nuclear weapon in those arsenals is like another round loaded
into the chamber in what is a literal and deadly game of Russian
roulette.
 
Nor can the United States ignore the power of our example in
influencing others' behavior. Our heavy reliance on these weapons
... despite the vastly diminished threat they were created to deter
... has helped make nuclear arms the Rolex wristwatch of
international relations: a costly purchase whose real purpose is
not the service it provides, but the prestige it confers. It was
status, not just security, that the one billion citizens of India
sought in electing a government that had made clear its intention
to make their nation a nuclear power. It is nationalism, not just
national security, that has hogtied START TWO in the Russian Duma.
 
And, finally, the passing of Cold War threats has given rise to new
ones, ranging from ethnic or regional conflict to international
terrorism. The $25 billion we reportedly spend every year to
maintain our nuclear arsenal is diverting resources from those real
and imminent threats to fight an old one. If America is to be
engaged in the world today, it will be with the threat or use of
conventional, not nuclear, force. Maintaining massive nuclear
forces while trimming the conventional forces that are the real
tool of American leadership is an act of retrenchment at a time
when the world desperately needs our engagement.
 
By alerting you to these dangers, I do not mean to disparage the
extraordinary Russian experiment with democracy. Russia's progress,
economic and political, must be measured in decades, not years. The
courageous pro democracy leaders there are navigating a complex
obstacle course of domestic politics, international diplomacy and,
most important, the friction between new ideas and the old.
 
Indeed, I underscore our friendship with Russia to suggest that
history presents no better time than right now to reduce nuclear
danger. But that opportunity comes with this warning: At the dawn
of the millennium, history travels in high gear at high speed. The
rapid pace of change within Russia and around the world will not
shift into neutral while we debate whether to seize this
opportunity. I expect our friendship with Russia to endure. I
expect their experiment with democracy to succeed. But the road to
that destination will take us around a few curves, into a few
potholes and over a few speed bumps. We know what our relationship
with Russia is like today. We can predict, but cannot know, what it
will be in a year, or two, or five, or 10. We do not know whether
the circumstances for reducing nuclear dangers will be as favorable
then as they are now, and therefore it is incumbent on us to act
boldly and to act swiftly. History will judge us harshly if we
ignore this opportunity when it is open to us.
 
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, process has taken us
in the right direction. It has marked a steady series of steps back
from the brink of nuclear conflagration. But even after START ONE
is fully implemented and six thousand warheads are left, the walk
back to that brink would be a short trip. More important, I fear
the pace of change in Russia could overtake us and the opportunity
before us could close before the START process has time to run its
lengthy course. This process takes so long because its safeguards
were erected under a cloud of fear of a first strike by a Cold War
enemy. The result is a cumbersome treaty, more than 250 pages long,
that makes the journey back from the brink long, laborious and
expensive.
 
Today our open friendship with Russia and the technology of
intelligence allow us to move more swiftly. We need a new nuclear
policy that protects us from new nuclear dangers, and we need a new
framework for enacting it that moves at the pace of world change
and can seize this opportunity before it is gone.
 
To that end I am proposing the following:
 
First, the President of the United States should work with Congress
to remove legislative restraints on reducing deployed strategic
U.S. forces below the START ONE level of 6,000 warheads. This
deployed arsenal no longer serves our national security interests,
and it is provoking Russia to maintain an arsenal that undermines
our national security interests.
 
Simultaneous with this request, the president should agree with
Republican leadership to build a defined, rigorously tested
strategic missile defense. He should make clear to Russia's leaders
we would build it for accidental and rouge nation threats.
 
The president should couple this request with a request for such
funds as necessary to make certain Russia knows that Nunn-Lugar
will be fully funded to go to START THREE levels.
 
Second, acting in his capacity as Commander in Chief and in an act
of international leadership, the President should immediately order
the reduction of American nuclear forces to no more than the
proposed START THREE levels. The two thousand to
twenty-five-hundred nuclear warheads that would remain are more
than enough -- many, many times over -- to destroy any nation, any
where, any time, that threatens us. And the diversity of our triad
-- nuclear weapons on air, land and sea -- protects us against the
risk of a first strike destroying our capacity to retaliate. If we
can reduce farther without endangering our security, we should.
 
Third, because the complete and verifiable dismantling of those
weapons will take time, the President should immediately stand down
weapons in excess of START THREE levels from their hair-trigger
alert. Warheads should be physically separated from delivery
vehicles. Our national security will not be endangered by leaders
having two days, rather than two minutes, to make life-and-death
decisions about nuclear war. While this proposal would apply only
to warheads in excess of START THREE levels, we should seriously
explore the possibility of the United States and Russia standing
down all forces from hair-trigger alert.
 
Fourth, this reciprocal reduction to START THREE levels should be
only a way station, not an end point. We should continue to
supplement the START process with a series of mutual, transparent
and reciprocal steps between the United States and Russia to reduce
nuclear arsenals and alert levels. We should be willing to go as
low as Russia wants to go, as low as we can verify they are going,
and as low as we can go without risking our security either from
Russia or other nuclear powers.
 
To enable this process of mutual, transparent steps, we should
greatly expand funding for the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat
Reduction program. We should spend whatever is necessary to help
Russia dismantle and secure her nuclear arsenal. Nunn-Lugar is one
of the great acts of post-Cold War statesmanship, and it defies
understanding that we are engaged in a year-to-year battle to fund
it. If we can spend $25 billion a year on a nuclear policy that is
making people less safe, surely we can spend a fraction of that on
an investment that is making us more safe.
 
There is precedent for action like I have described. On September
27, 1991, with the Soviet Union still intact and before the Soviet
parliament ratified START ONE, President Bush went on national
television to announce he was ordering the elimination of thousands
of tactical nuclear weapons, deactivating 450 ICBMs, standing down
our bomber fleet, and ordering a stop to Pentagon development of a
short-range ballistic missile. President Gorbachev reciprocated
nine days later. Likewise President Clinton showed courageous
leadership by first unilaterally rescinding our nuclear testing,
and, second, by providing the leadership that culminated in the
signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty at the United Nations. I
will urge the Republican Senate leadership to bring that treaty up
for Senate approval as soon as possible.  Today it is clear Russia
not only wants to follow our lead, but must. Russia's own defense
minister recently said, publicly, that Russia is thinking of its
long-term nuclear arsenal in terms of hundreds, not thousands. Our
action would give Russia the confidence to do what the unbearable
cost of maintaining nuclear arsenals already dictates that she must
do.
 
The approach I have outlined would have the following benefits.
 
First, a bold gesture of friendship and leadership that does not
threaten our security would give Russia the confidence to
significantly reduce her own nuclear arsenal, strengthen the
position of our pro-democracy friends there and send a signal to
the world that nuclear weapons are a sign of peril, not prestige,
in the post-Cold War era.
 
Second, by reducing the number of nuclear weapons around the world,
we would reduce the new nuclear dangers of accidental launch,
proliferation or acquisition by rogue groups or individuals.
 
Third, by de-alerting weapons in excess of what we need to defend
ourselves -- and perhaps the rest of the world's arsenals -- we
would reduce the new nuclear danger of total war being dictated by
a time-line that prevents rational deliberation.
 
Fourth, our reduction of our own stockpile would free money and
resources to confront other, newer, threats, from regional war to
ethnic conflict to international terrorism. We would, quite simply,
be getting more safety for less money. This last point is crucial.
The $25 billion a year it is estimated we spend maintaining our
nuclear arsenal adds far less value to the safety of Americans
today than $25 billion spent on our Army, Air Force, Navy and
Marine Corps and the intelligence gathering that support these and
other pillars of our national security infrastructure.
 
No President can take such bold action without domestic support.
Our ability to forge a new nuclear policy for the post-Cold War era
hinges on our ability to thaw the Cold War between those on
opposite sides of the ideological divide in our own country. We
must realize that we share a common goal: reducing nuclear dangers.
I am eager to build partnerships that seize on that common ground
while reducing ideological differences. If, for example, some of my
Republican colleagues will support me in seeking steep cuts in
nuclear arsenals, I am open to working with them on the deployment
of a defined, rigorously tested missile defense. Whether it be
through this or other means, those with a common goal -- reducing
nuclear dangers -- must find common ground. If we elevate
imagination over ideology, we can do it.
 
Imagination seems like a good note on which to end this speech. I
opened by telling you we need a new nuclear policy to confront new
nuclear dangers. I close by telling you that to do it, we need
something that isn't new at all. The same courage, creativity and
leadership that won the Cold War are exactly the ingredients we
need to keep our people safe in its aftermath. It is clear to me
that our nuclear arsenal and the policies which controlled these
weapons of mass destruction helped keep our safety and the world's
peace for 40 years. It is equally clear that we need a new policy
-- one which will seize an opportunity to make the world safer
still. 

Thank you.