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Best of Intentions: America's Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation

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"...Best of Intentions provides a timely and well-reasoned history of U.S. attempts to prevent the spread of nuclear materials. Henry Sokolski has succeeded in setting forth the current dilemmas facing present-day decision makers and making a compelling analysis of where past policies have gone right or wrong."
Representative Edward J. Markey, (D-Massachusetts), Co-Chairman of the House Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation

"...informed and trenchant...offers valuable insights and presents important challenges - not only to those who have advocated prior non-proliferation initiatives, but to those who contend that there are better options..."
Alton Frye, Vice President, Council on Foreign Relations

"Henry Sokolski has done us all a great service by parsing, briefly and succinctly, the tangled history of nonproliferation, and relating it to the problems we face today."
James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency

"This is an outstanding survey, analysis and critique ...a vitally important addition to the reading lists and libraries of scholars, policymakers, and others having an interest in U.S. national security strategy, technology transfer, arms control and proliferation."
Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

"For any Democrat or Republican wishing to rethink what our nonproliferation policies should be, Best of Intentions is the place to begin."
William Kristol, Editor, The Weekly Standard

"...an indispensable primer on a long and crucial battle we may now be losing."
Peter W. Rodman, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs

"A fascinating history and penetrating critique of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy."
Frank Von Hippel, Princeton University, former arms control advisor to the Clinton Administration

"...raises fundamental strategic questions that must be addressed...a thoughtful, welcome provocation."
George Perkovich, author, India's Nuclear Bomb, director of the Alton Jones Foundation

"The Scrapbook is pleased to report the publication of a fine new book by Weekly Standard contributor and weapons-technology expert Henry Sokolski. Best of Intentions is a significant work of scholarship: the first comprehensive history of American efforts to stop the global spread of strategic weapons capabilities since World War II. Any self respecting grown-up will want to buy a copy immediately."
The Weekly Standard

"...This sobering analysis is must reading for scholars and policy makers alike."
Henry Rowen, Stanford University, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs

"...a reference work no serious student of these matters should be without."
Gordon C. Oehler, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency's Nonproliferation Center

A history of U.S. efforts to stop the expansion of nuclear arms "ownership" is not novel. One that treats both vertical proliferation, for old owners' stockpiles, and horizontal proliferation, to new owners, is unusual. So too is a work that is conceptual yet succinct. Henry Sokolski, the Pentagon chief of non-proliferation policy in the first Bush presidency and executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, delivers on both counts. Best of Intentions looks at the results of arms control policies, which often involved unintended consequences-but consequences that Sokolski shows nonetheless follow from their authors' thinking. Ultimately, however, the character and designs of regimes owning weapons of mass destruction is Sokolski's most portentous theme.

Best of Intentions is intended, it appears, for undergraduate and early graduate-level students, though policy analysts would do well to read its treatment of arms control doc-trines and instruments-both carrots and sticks. Sokolski has a certain under statement manifest both in succinctness and, occasionally, in subtlety, which may leave the not so nimble behind.

Sokolski draws lessons from five cases: the Baruch Plan rejected by the Soviet Union; Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" initiative, which paved the way for the inadequate" safeguards" regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency; the1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) based on bargaining with nuclear have-nots; proliferation technology control regimes such as the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and the Australia Group on Chemical and biological weapons; and counterproliferation policy in the1990s, which prepared military means to eliminate emerging weapons of mass destruction (WMD) arsenals.

Sokolski draws three lessons from these cases. First, strategic assumptions shape initiatives. For instance, he attributes the NPT's effort to reward nations promising to desist from acquiring nuclear arms with access to ostensibly civilian nuclear technology to 1960s ideas on "finite deterrence" and an attendant right to acquire civilian nuclear technology. He offers a unique critique of the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea, which he demonstrates shares the premises of the NPT, hatched a quarter-century earlier. Second, Sokolski highlights the risks of basing nonproliferation initiatives on wrongheaded assumptions about the sources and nature of future wars. Finally, he suggests that horizontal proliferation can only be reduced when the nuclear "haves" reduce their vertical proliferation-but only "without increasing the world's access to ever larger and more uncertain amounts of strategic materials and capabilities."

Sokolski offers corrective prescriptions for the future. He insists that quid pro quo for nonproliferation promises must be banished because they encourage efforts to acquire WMDs to get a reward. Also, he calls for a centrist position on export controls between existing voluntary consultation regimes and a new version of the Cold War COCOM, whereby nations "could deny any export (listed or not) to Any destination and expect this denial to be upheld (i.e., not undercut) By other members until they met to learn why the denial was made . . . [so that] incremental agreement might be reached on a substantial number of items and destinations."

The book has several particular strengths. It offers rich portraits of doctrines, such as the Mutual Assured Destruction balance of terror and the early Clinton Administration paradigm of "cooperative security," as alternatives to either export controls or missile defense. Sokolski brilliantly shows how the premises of initiatives like Atoms for Peace led to perverse results. Also, his critique of "carrots" is quite convincing. For instance, he asks about one incentives-based policy of the 1990s:"Wouldn't including both proliferation suppliers and consumers into organizations that had relatively free trade in sensitive technology simply turn existing proliferation technology denial regimes into proliferation breeding grounds?"

Indeed, in style, the book's objective and balanced tone is welcome, despite strong normative implications. For instance, Sokolski writes, "Atoms for Peace may have gotten the relationship between vertical and horizontal proliferation wrong but at least it recognized that there was a connection." And once again, conciseness is a strength of this veritable primer -- including informative documentary appendices on the cases.

The best insight the book offers, though, is emphasized in the last Chapter of the text. The "intentions" highlighted in the title are important when it comes to countries the United States is seeking to constrain from acquiring WMDs. What really matters is not so much the deadly capability of other nations, but their intent in acquiring that capability. As such, regime-type is all-important. Authoritarian states that take the lives of their own citizens lightly typically take the use of supremely deadly force against other countries lightly as well. Therefore, the United States should seek a world filled with more benign neighbors, because "a world of Canadas is a world not at war." Democratic states either forego WMD arsenals, or pose no danger if they do acquire them.

By implication, non-proliferation policy must focus on the demand side, not just the supply side. Sokolski observes that "in the 1980sand very early 1990s, Taiwan, South Korea, Ukraine, Argentina, South Africa, and Brazil all foreswore or dismantled their nuclear weapons or long-range missile programs." Why? He believes that it is because they became more democratic-typically with a little push from the United States. Going beyond reliance on globalized trade to inevitably yield political liberalization, the author asserts that active democracy-promotion is the best nonproliferation policy.

Hence, Best of Intentions contributes to multiple sets of literature. It belongs to the rich literature on nuclear doctrines, but breaks new ground in dissecting U.S. nonproliferation policy initiatives. In particular, the work belongs to an under developed literature critiquing prevailing deterrence and arms control theory by emphasizing how intent, rather than capability, matters most to nuclear peace.

More generally, Best of Intentions contributes to the literature on ideas, and not just books dealing exclusively with nuclear doctrines. It adds to the literature on U.S. foreign policy doctrines. Finally, the work links nonproliferation to the literature on the democratic peace and the importance of democracy-promotion. This final contribution may be even more crucial than Sokolski intended.

The Weekly Standard May 7, 200l Scrapbook, page 3 Book Notes

The Scrapbook is pleased to report the publication of a fine new book by Weekly Standard contributor and weapons-technology expert Henry Sokolski. Best of Intentions is a significant work of scholarship: the first comprehensive history of American efforts to stop the global spread of strategic weapons capabilities since World War II. Any self-respecting grown-up will want to buy a copy immediately.

Best of Intentions: America's Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation -- A Practical Primer

As reviewed in ORBIS Summer 2001, By Mark T. Clark,Ph.D., Director of National Security Studies, California State University at San Bernardino.

Henry Sokolski, in his Best of Intentions, expressly eschews the search for the causes of proliferation and instead prefers to evaluate efforts to prevent proliferation in the first place. A former military legislative analyst in the Senate and an official in the Department of Defense during the first Bush administration, he currently heads the nonprofit Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C. His interests, therefore, lie in the search for practical answers to policy questions, not in the development of theory per se. He proposes to determine how effective U.S. and international efforts have been in curbing proliferation, and specifically intends to "identify and weigh the premises of U.S. nonproliferation policies (p. xii).

His book is divided into seven chapters, the first and last of which deal with the history and future of nonproliferation. The five central chapters are analytic histories of the major nonproliferation policies: the Baruch Plan, the Atoms for Peace Program, the NPT, proliferation technology control regimes, and the U.S. Counterproliferation Initiative. According to Sokolski, each of the initiatives had distinct assumptions that were built upon an assessment of the strategic dangers that needed to be avoided at the time, and each was designed to correct the failures of its precursors. He further argues that "[t]o the extent each characterized the strategic threat properly, they produced nonproliferation measures that were sound. To the extent that they did not, they encouraged measures that were impractical or that actually compounded the proliferation threats they were supposed to reduce" (p. xii).

How U.S. leaders characterized the strategic threat makes for an interesting approach to the periods under examination. It also reminds the reader that there is always a strategic context to policy, and favored solution to perceived problems. In other words, policymakers' assumptions about the world tend to influence their responses to it. For example, after World War II, American policy makers worried that the spread of nuclear weapons would inevitably generate undeterrable wars against which no defense was possible. Since the United States would not be able to deflect potential offensive nuclear wars, it sought to retain sole ownership of nuclear weapons. The Baruch Plan that was offered to the United Nations in 1946 provided, among other things, that anything critical to nuclear bomb making be turned over to the control of an international atomic energy authority, a meritorious proposal in itself. However, the United States' exaggerated fears of undeterrable offensive nuclear wars made it crucial for the country to maintain it sole nuclear monopoly until thorough safeguards were in place - and that condition alone provided the Soviets with the reason to reject it.

The drafters of the Nonproliferation Treaty of l968 had their own strategic assumptions, which continue to fuel debate over nonproliferation policies today. At the heart of the first three articles of the NPT are concerns about the horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons, that is, the spread of nuclear weapons to nonnuclear states. The original Irish proposal in l958 reflected the early fears that the addition of new nuclear powers would lead to international instability, making nuclear war more likely. Before the NPT was finished, however, negotiators began fearing the effects of vertical proliferation, that is, the accumulation of nuclear weapons by the superpowers targets against one another, which could lead to accidental or unauthorized nuclear war. Today some states refuse to sign the NPT unless and until the major powers move more drastically toward disarmament. In the meantime, the dangers of horizontal proliferation continue to grow.

Sokolski's history and analysis would seem to be premised on political realism. In the concluding chapter, however, his prescriptions for new nonproliferation policies reflect a different theoretical bent. Since there are limits and weakness to all the previous policies, he argues, new initiatives must focus on issues more lasting than technological or military contingencies. The next counterproliferation campaign must be anchored in larger policies that distinguish between liberal and hostile illiberal regimes in an effort to broaden, over the long run, the "zones of peace" and shrink "zones of conflict." In other words, Sokolski relies on a form of the "democratic peace theory," which suggests that democracies do not wage war against other democracies. This idea has broad acceptance among American political leaders, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush.

Sokolski and Best of Intentions deserve credit for accomplishing the politically impossible: Clarifying the last half century of U.S. strategic arms control and nonproliferation in a manner that both the Right and Left can support. This is no mean trick. How many books on this subject get featured not only in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, but the Weekly Standard; get endorsed by Conservatives including Bill Kristol and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey and liberals such as Democratic Congressman Ed Markey; and have receptions thrown for them by both the liberal Carnegie and the Conservative Heritage Foundations? Other than this book, none that I know of. How could this happen? No mystery here: The book is unusually well written and to the point. More important, it makes a very critical, nonpartisan point: Every U.S. effort to control the spread of strategic arms has presumed some vision of the next war that has either been wrong or overtaken by events. As such, the U.S. needs to focus its next arms restraint campaign less on dubious military predictions and more on the political and economic trends toward markets and liberal democracy that are both sounder and more positive. Indeed, Best of Intentions' effort to detail the past assumptions of U.S. policy makers is first rate reading for anyone smug enough to assume that the U.S. has done the best that it can to prevent armageddon. Clearly, it has meant well but there is room for improvement. For any student or official interested in clarifying this point or who is anxious to get on with this project, Best of Intentions is the best (and a most bipartisan) place to begin.