Testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform; Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs:

Thursday, February 14, 2008
10 am
2247 Rayburn House Office Building

I am grateful for the opportunity to testify on this important subject. As someone who served as a commander in the Israeli army, and lived in the Middle East for 21 years, I have some first-hand knowledge of our subject, in addition to having studied it for forty years beginning with a book Winning Without War published in 1964.

Dealing with homeland security we are advancing on 3 fronts: (a) Hardening the targets; (b) neutralizing the terrorists before they can get us; and (c) preventing the worst attacks—nuclear ones. We are spending too much on the first front, which is a bottomless pit; we cannot succeed on the second front because fighting terrorists overseas generates more terrorists. We do the least where we should do most: preventing the truly catastrophic attacks, massive terrorism, turning one of our cities into a radioactive desert.

On the first front, we face an almost endless list of security challenges: our borders are far from sealed; the Coast Guard badly needs new equipment; the Real ID program is behind schedule; nuclear reactors, water resources, dams and bridges are not adequately protected; hospitals have not been prepared to handle the kind of patient surge that would occur after a biological attack; and on and on. Given that we have 300 million visits a year by foreigners, if we going to rely on hardening the targets, including preventing terrorists from entering the US, we are sure to fail. I am not saying we should not invest on this front, but that we must realize the severe limits of what can be achieved.

On the second front, the measures that must be undertaken to hunt down terrorists in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Gaza tend to feed the alienation of young locals (which, of course, has many other sources). As a result, for every terrorist we kill, at least several others are lining up. We may suppress them in this or that area only for them to pop up in some other places.

Again we cannot sit back and let them prepare their attack in equanimity, and we can and must disturb their operations and delay attacks. But we must also realize that this approach will not spare us from future attacks.

Hence, one comes to the difficult conclusion that we must focus on avoiding the worst attacks. This is akin to holding that if you cannot avoid traffic accidents, despite all welcome efforts to introduce seatbelts, airbags, child seats and other such measures, you would want to at least avoid a fifty car pile-up. Only that, in this case, if even a small nuclear device is exploded, we are talking about the equivalent of a hundred thousands care pile up, that is 100,000 causalities or many more.

On the domestic front, granting top priority to preventing massive attacks entails several changes in policy: subjecting to border controls the millions of recreational vessels that leave and come to US coasts but are now not subject to normal border controls; ensuring that the people who work in ports pass security clearances; providing better counter-measures against speedboats and identifying all small aircraft that enter US space with an order to shoot down those that do not identify themselves.

On the international level, I strongly disagree with the four senior statesmen who have recently called for total and complete nuclear disarmament. The pursuit of such a dream will delay that what must and can urgently be done. The focus should be on the states from which terrorists may acquire nuclear weapons and the material from which they can be made—namely, failing and rogue states. Thus, we currently need to worry much more about Pakistan and even Russia than, say, about the nuclear weapons of France or the Plutonium accumulated by Japan

The best way to prevent the theft or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons and the materials from which they can be made-- is to remove them from failing and rogue states. Hence, we should adopt an overarching concept of deproliferation (or ‘rollback’), in which nuclear arms are removed for failing and rouge states rather than providing better security over such weapons, by better guarding them and by inspecting dual use assets to ensure that they used only for civilian purposes. Similarly, we need less reliance on safeguarding dangerous materials and more on blending them down, or removing them to safe-havens.

Accordingly, we need to immediately supplement and gradually replace the regime of inspections—which seeks to ensure that assets that can be used for both civilian and military purposes will be used only for civilian ones—with one that seeks the removal of all such assets and their replacement with assets such as LEU and light water reactors, which cannot be directly used to make nuclear arms.

There are important precedents for such a deproliferation approach in the removal of nuclear arms from Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, in past successes dealing with Libya, in the (yet to be tested) current progress dealing with North Korea, and in several elements of the Cooperative Threat Reduction programs, and the Global Threat Reduction Initiative.

We should enhance these threat reduction programs by according them much higher political priority and greater budgetary and administrative allocations. Nations leading such deproliferation efforts should be encouraged to proceed with all deliberate speed by offering nations of greatest concern various positive incentives, such as other sources of energy or support to convert or shut down facilities using HEU. Sanctions should be employed only if such positive inducements fail.

If a nation is willing to put on the table its nuclear weapons program in exchange for a non-aggression treaty and other assurance that its government will not be overthrown by the use of force, as has been repeatedly reported that both Iran and North Korea suggested, this is a deal well worth exploring.

Furthermore, the deproliferation approach calls for dismantling, replacing, and banning the trade in and use of the means from which nuclear arms can be made, especially highly enriched uranium (HEU). Here the PSI can play a major role.

Priorities must be set even within this third front. Overreaching and over-promising produces their own dangers. Hence, one should note that although plutonium and spent fuel must also be deproliferated, we observe that these materials seem less attractive means for would-be nuclear terrorists to employ as they are much more difficult to handle than ready-made bombs and HEU. Hence, removing HEU, banning the construction of reactors that use it, and otherwise suppressing it, should proceed as quickly as possible even if the same arrangements cannot be made in the near future for plutonium and spent fuels.

While international supply and ownership of HEU is preferable to national control, it is not fully compatible with the deproliferation approach as it relies on inspections to ensure that HEU will be used for only civilian purpose by those to which it is allotted, and as it assumes that the buy-back of plutonium and spent fuel can be reliably implemented.

The norm that condemns nations who set out to develop nuclear arms should be reinforced and not undermined. This is especially needed now as a new nuclear ‘itch’ is in evidence. Japan, several nations in the Middle East and several in Latin America (such as Brazil), are all reconsidering their nuclear postures. I strongly reject the notion that “good” governments can be trusted with nuclear arms. Any proliferation anywhere is a threat. All nations that are considering nuclear arms production should be persuaded and otherwise discouraged from pursuing such nuclear ambitions

We should be particularly concerned with the lack of enforcement available under the NPT: the cumbersome process by which findings must be approved by the IAEA board and than submitted to action the UN Security Council. Hence, even if calls for action survive a veto by one power or another, their implementation is still contingent on action by national powers. Hence the importance of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) which provides a particularly valuable (and little known) model for a new global architecture that is both robust and considered legitimate (even blessed by UN resolution 1540).

In conclusion I note that our pluralistic, democratic system—the best there is, but not without flaws—has a hard time setting priorities. Each constituency legitimately pulls the nation is the direction it holds dear. As a result, our security system often looks like a patch-work rather than a carefully laid–out, over-arching plan. Theoretically the Office of Management and Budget and certain Congressional committees should work out such an overview, but—to put it carefully—this is not always the way it works. Maybe Homeland Security needs something similar to the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, a bi-partisan commission to set priorities which then will be voted up or down but not re-arranged. I realize that this is very unlikely to take place, but my job is to call them the way I see them. The nation would be best served if we realize that we have many more security needs than we can possible serve and hence setting priorities, indeed triage, is vital.

Amitai Etzioni is professor of International Relations at The George Washington University. He is the author of, most recently, Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy (Yale, 2007) (www.securityfirstbook.com).