George Perkovich

The Plutonium Genie

Plutonium is one of the most dangerous materials on earth. Ten pounds are enough to make a crude nuclear weapon; one-thirty thousandth of an ounce will cause cancer if inhaled. Plutoniums lethality is measured in millennia, not decades or days. Its most prevalent form has a half-life of 24,000 years. With plutonium, the odds are against humankind. If nation states continue the costly production and use of plutonium, they risk weapons proliferation, environmental devastation and human health damage. These odds should banish plutonium as too dangerous to continue being produced. Building on the international nonprolifer ation regime and current practices in the nuclear industry, a more comprehensive and specific regime must be constructed to manage plutonium and speed its elimination. All forms of plutonium can be made into weapons, although some mixes of isotopes are less desirable to weapons designers. The release of plutonium into the environment poses health and environmental risks. These risks might be more tolerable if plutonium held unques tionable economic value in the foreseeable future. But no proven technology exists to generate electricity from plutonium at econom ically competitive costs. Countries determined to remain on the commercial nuclear path need not use plutonium; fuels made of low-enriched uranium suffice. Unlike plutonium or highly enriched uranium, these fuels are not

Modi’s Strategic Choice: How to Respond to Terrorism from Pakistan

Indian decision makers face a strategic conundrum: how to deter and/ or respond to future terrorism emanating from Pakistan. The dilemmas are manifold: punitive action may assuage the desire of an angry public for revenge, but too heavy a response may motivate actors in Pakistan to escalate attacks in India; while a weak riposte is unlikely to convince Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders to alter their long-standing embrace of conflict against India by proxy. Both the Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the Manmohan Singh governments faced this conundrum in January 2002 and November 2008, respectively, following the attacks by Pakistan-based militants in Delhi and Mumbai. Both chose to exercise restraint rather than strike back. The groups that conducted the Delhi and Mumbai terror attacks in those years continue to operate in Pakistan. It is reasonable to assume that the Narendra Modi government, like its predecessors, will face a major attack on Indian soil attributed to such groups. Modi’s self-styled reputation as a tough man and strong leader— borne out by his decision to disproportionately retaliate to Pakistani shelling across the Line of Control in Kashmir in fall 2014 —increases the perception that, this time, the Indian government will choose a military response.

Chapter Two: Verifying the Transition to Zero

Nuclear disarmament is firmly back on the international agenda. But almost all current thinking on the subject is focused on the process of reducing the number of weapons from thousands to hundreds. This rigorous analysis examines the challenges that exist to abolishing nuclear weapons completely, and suggests what can be done now to start overcoming them. The paper argues that the difficulties of ‘getting to zero’ must not preclude many steps being taken in that direction. It thus begins by examining steps that nuclear‐armed states could take in cooperation with others to move towards a world in which the task of prohibiting nuclear weapons could be realistically envisaged. The remainder of the paper focuses on the more distant prospect of prohibiting nuclear weapons, beginning with the challenge of verifying the transition from low numbers to zero. It moves on to examine how the civilian nuclear industry could be managed in a nuclear‐weapons‐free world so as to prevent rearmament. The paper then considers what political‐security conditions would be required to make a nuclear‐weapons ban enforceable and explores how enforcement might work in practice. Finally, it addresses the latent capability to produce nuclear weapons that would inevitably exist after abolition, and asks whether this is a barrier to disarmament, or whether it can be managed to meet the security needs of a world newly free of the bomb.

Chapter One: Establishing Political Conditions to Enhance the Feasibility of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons

Nuclear disarmament is firmly back on the international agenda. But almost all current thinking on the subject is focused on the process of reducing the number of weapons from thousands to hundreds. This rigorous analysis examines the challenges that exist to abolishing nuclear weapons completely, and suggests what can be done now to start overcoming them. The paper argues that the difficulties of ‘getting to zero’ must not preclude many steps being taken in that direction. It thus begins by examining steps that nuclear‐armed states could take in cooperation with others to move towards a world in which the task of prohibiting nuclear weapons could be realistically envisaged. The remainder of the paper focuses on the more distant prospect of prohibiting nuclear weapons, beginning with the challenge of verifying the transition from low numbers to zero. It moves on to examine how the civilian nuclear industry could be managed in a nuclear‐weapons‐free world so as to prevent rearmament. The paper then considers what political‐security conditions would be required to make a nuclear‐weapons ban enforceable and explores how enforcement might work in practice. Finally, it addresses the latent capability to produce nuclear weapons that would inevitably exist after abolition, and asks whether this is a barrier to disarmament, or whether it can be managed to meet the security needs of a world newly free of the bomb.

India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation

This comprehensive history of how the worlds largest democracy, India, has grappled with the twin desires to have and to renounce the bomb, has been updated with a new afterword which takes into account the developments from late-1999 to February 2001. Each chapter contains significant historical revelations drawn from scores of interviews with Indias key scientists, military leaders, diplomats and politicians and from declassified US government documents.