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CCD Board Member Mark Palmer and Patrick Glen Discuss Dictators and Nuclear Weapons
December 13, 2011 | Printer Friendly

In a December 12 opinion editorial, CCD Board Member Mark Palmer and Patrick Glen discuss the relationship between nuclear disarmament and the existence of dictatorships. In “Toward a Dictator-Free World,” Palmer and Glen state that we cannot achieve a “nuclear-free world” as long as dictatorships remain. Citing the examples of China, Iran, and North Korea, the coauthors write that weapons of mass destruction impede the establishment of democratic governance, international cooperation, and peace.

To read Palmer and Glen’s piece, please see below:
Dictators made the 20th century the bloodiest in human history, with over 100 million deaths directly caused by Stalin, Hitler and Mao. Armed with nuclear weapons, the 21st century's dictators could kill upwards of a billion people. That's why it's folly to think we can ever achieve a "nuclear-free" world—as President Obama seeks, echoing President Reagan and, more recently, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn and others—without first achieving a dictator-free world.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei clearly considers nuclear weapons central to his vision for dominating the Middle East and destroying Israel. North Korea's Kim Jong Il, running a failed state, sees the continuing possession of nuclear weapons as his one strength, the key to remaining personally in power. It is an illusion to believe he will negotiate it away. China has shown little interest in joining Russia and the United States in major reductions from current levels. And since the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, Russia has refused to agree to a plan for a nuclear-free world without constraining the very missile defense systems which would help make it possible.

Recognizing these barriers does not mean we should simply sit back and wait for dictators to fall; there is much we can and should do to control and reduce the number of these weapons of mass destruction. But the closer we get to a nuclear-free world, the more difficult will be the challenge presented by dictators who possess them.

We will never be able to trust and verify that dictators have not hidden away a sufficient number of weapons to cause us catastrophic damage. The so-called Great Tunnel of China—3,000 miles of tunnels hiding a huge arsenal of nuclear warheads and bombs—is just the latest reminder of the lengths to which an authoritarian regime will go to conceal these weapons. Despite our best intelligence efforts, estimates of the current Chinese stockpile vary wildly, from 400 to 4,000. We face similar problems in determining what Iran and North Korea have.

Achieving a dictator-free world would massively simplify the verification challenge and open the road to the total elimination and prevention of return of these weapons. Nuclear-armed democracies are not threats to world peace. Democracies have freedom of the press, representative government and publicly known and debated defense budgets. Hiding nuclear weapons programs is qualitatively much more difficult and massively less likely.

But is it possible to create a world without dictators? Is the world destined always to have strong men and monopoly parties, or can these species be made extinct? While history is certainly not unidirectional, and freedom must be won and protected, it is encouraging that the number of "Not Free" countries (as measured by Freedom House) is now down to 47 out of 194 nations.

The foreign policy establishment's near-total pessimism about various countries' prospects for democracy has often proven wrong over the past half-century, with dozens of supposedly rock-solid dictators being ousted by their own people, all too often without much support from the democratic world.

Strongly supporting democratic movements inside dictatorships reinforces rather than contradicts our goal of a nuclear-free world. Our best allies are the Iranian, North Korean, Chinese and other captive peoples who want a more just, prosperous, peaceful and free life. Engaging them as well as the regimes that oppress them is not only possible but essential. The dictators assume we are working for their downfall even when we aren't. Actually helping the forces of freedom will add no additional burden to the arms control process; it will give us added leverage.

So let us commit ourselves to achieving a dictator-free world and a nuclear-free world—recognizing that we can make progress on both fronts simultaneously, but that we cannot get to zero nukes without first making the last dictator retire.

Mr. Palmer, a former director of the State Department's Office of Arms Control and Disarmament, is author of "Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). Mr. Glen, a lawyer, is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center.