NPEC Mission

Since the advent of nuclear weapons, America has placed combating the spread of strategic weapons at the very top of its list of foreign policy objectives. Yet, for so important a topic, America’s fight against such proliferation has proven largely ineffective.

Powerful public officials may intone gravely about curbing the spread of dangerous technology, but when confronted with cases that require tough action or sacrifice, concessions are the norm. Busy policy makers often find the reasons behind stemming the flow of “destabilizing technology” or promoting international “norms” too nebulous and abstract. In contrast, confronting a nation acquiring strategic arms poses real and negative risks. Thus, policy officials normally avoid taking firm stands until such problems have advanced to an unmanageable level.

As a result, when policy officials finally take action, their efforts frequently prove ineffective or counterproductive. For example, America’s initial response to Iraq’s, Iran’s, and North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons capabilities sought to allow “civilian” nuclear activities in exchange for ineffective inspections. This did little to stop these programs. Yet, in the absence of sounder alternatives, we can expect more of this sort of bargaining with nuclear-interested states, such as Saudi Arabia, which will likely only make matters worse.

“Dangerous technology” is dangerous because it can be rapidly converted into strategic weapons and no existing inspection regime can effectively prevent its diversion. By failing to recognize this and making such technology available over the last 70 years despite these risks (under the U.S. Atoms and Space for Peace programs), the United States and its allies have made it possible for nations to “safeguard” their way to strategic weapons capabilities. To keep chemical, biological, missile, and advanced computing and information technology from falling into the wrong hands, peaceful end-use pledges and occasional inspections won’t be enough.

Unfortunately, neither the United States nor the developed nations that depend on U.S. guidance have come to terms with this. The long-term implications of maintaining our current strategic weapons-related policies may prove perilous. At a minimum, new nuclear problems with and between Iran, Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea, and South Korea will worsen, as will America’s ability to cope with civilian and military nuclear demands of friends, such as Poland, Turkey, Japan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

More daunting still is how Russian and Chinese military assertiveness alongside their nuclear, space, missile, drone, cyber, and information warfare modernization efforts will challenge the U.S. and global security. A significant part of these challenges are technological. An even larger part is conceptual: The world is now transitioning away from century-old air war theories to new or fifth generation warfare concepts.

The former rely on the threat of aerial obliteration of military, industrial and political concentrations of capital to deter and win wars. The latter promises to disable nations without obliterating them by collecting, sharing, and exploiting information to undermine the will of the enemy and paralyze it in war by pinpointing and disabling specific communications, command, financial, and critical infrastructure nodes. This new form of warfare will require sharing information much more freely than before.

To successfully transition from old, massively destructive warfare strategies to new, more discriminate ones, the United States will need to prevent nuclear weapons from spreading and possibly being used. This will demand that the U.S. reevaluate its long-standing strategic policies and change its most trusted military routines.

First, these efforts will encounter tremendous bureaucratic inertia. Second, both the press and academia tend to focus on the most urgent or narrow aspects of military scientific challenges. Policy makers, academics, and the media lack the broader, more practical perspectives necessary to give meaning to this analysis and to suggest sensible ways out of our proliferation predicament.

To develop effective strategic policies that busy policy makers can implement, it is necessary to shift the focus of the current debate away from academic stability arguments and traditional concerns about maintaining international norms to the more pressing strategic weapons-related problems now emerging and the solutions they will require.

• Why might a “little” strategic weapons proliferation be so worrisome?
• Where has U.S. nonproliferation policy been effective; where has it failed; and how does this history relate to our current problems?
• What new security alliance structures and nuclear sharing arrangements are best to replace Cold War arrangements as we adopt new generation warfare capabilities?
• How are Cold War arms and export control concepts still relevant? How are they unhelpful?
• When is it more realistic to monitor dangerous strategic technology that we want to prevent from being militarized than to try to discourage these activities or does monitoring these activities, in effect, make them legitimate?
• How sound are the economic or developmental justification for the world’s advanced nations to continue to offer the world’s lesser powers sensitive nuclear and space technology for “peaceful” purposes?
• Can progress in promoting liberal democracy and market economies among developing nations significantly reduce these nations’ demand for strategic military systems or is this a false hope?
• To what extent might transitioning to new generation warfare strategies that rely on unmanned weapons, space-based systems, information warfare, and advanced computing and secure communications push weapons of mass destruction into the background or not?
• How might the transition to new generation warfare demand increased sharing of classified information between military commands, with allies, with private contractors, and the public? And what new forms of information warfare and campaigns might new generation warfare require?
• What kinds of new diplomatic military restraint initiatives should the United States and its allies pursue as it makes this transition?
• What long-term strategies must the U.S. and its friends employ against the most implacable strategic foes (e.g., North Korea, Iran, Russia, China)? Is regime change required in each case? If so, how is this to be accomplished without all-out war?
• How should these strategies differ from those we might employ to restrain states we have warmer diplomatic with (e.g., Pakistan, India, and Israel)?
• How, if at all, should the United States change its strategies?

The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center’s (NPEC) aim is to address these questions and explain why US policies need to change to answer them correctly. NPEC will convey its message not only to current policy makers, but also to the next generation of officials through advanced courses, policy workshops, wargaming simulations, monographs, articles, podcasts, social media, and books.

NPEC aims to promote a deeper understanding of the relevance of various perspectives on proliferation. NPEC will bring together Congressional staff, administration officials, and the press to discuss pressing proliferation policy issues with NPEC’s monograph authors and other academic specialists at a series of nonproliferation policy forums.

Given the breadth of support any significant change in US nonproliferation policy will require, NPEC will take care to avoid partisanship. All of NPEC’s activities involve key administration officials, diplomatic staff from allied nations, Congressional staff, national security experts, the press, government contractors, academics known for their work in the proliferation field.