Best of Intentions: America’s Campaign against Strategic Weapons Proliferation by Henry D. Sokolski. Praeger Publishers (http://www.green wood.com/imprints/index.asp?ImprintID=I8), 88 Post Road West, Westport, Connecticut 06881-5007, 2001, 184 pages, $19.95 (softcover).

Don’t be fooled by this book’s thin size, its soothing green color, or the strangely incongruous photo of a bulldozer on its cover- this small gem packs a mighty wallop. With great economy of prose and penetrating insight, Henry Sokolski distills the roots, foundations, and implications of American policies designed to counter the proliferation of strategic weapons since World War II. In its recounting of this story, his book is a powerful and disturbing reminder that the unstated but foundational assumptions or unintended consequences often leave the most enduring legacy of any policy. But by culminating with specific, useful guidance on crafting the next campaign against weapons proliferation, Best of Intentions goes beyond simply warning today’s policy makers to avoid these common inconsistencies and pitfalls.

Sokolski has struggled long and hard with nonproliferation issues during his career both inside and outside the government. A former military legislative analyst in the Senate and deputy for nonproliferation policy for Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney from 1989 to 1993, Sokolski now heads the nonprofit Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C. His book reflects these years of solid effort and presents mature, well-honed arguments that will prove useful to newcomers and experts alike. Best of Intentions is divided into seven chapters and provides the most important of its source documents in five appendices. Sokolski includes a short chapter that describes and analyzes each of the five major US nonproliferation efforts since 1945: the Baruch Plan, Atoms for Peace Initiative, Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, proliferation-technology control regimes, and Defense Counterproliferation Initiative. Of course, much of this is familiar ground, but Sokolski’s seasoned judgement has enabled him to strip away the chaff yet very clearly and succinctly lay out the goals, resulting policy, and fruits of the policy for each of these major initiatives. For example, Sokolski shows how assumptions in the late 1940s and early 1950s that nuclear weapons would provide "an unqualified advantage to the aggressor" drove US policy makers to conclude that the spread of even a small number of nuclear weapons "would inevitably lead to war" (p. 14). These assumptions were the foundation for both the Baruch Plan and the Atoms for Peace Initiative. In the Baruch Plan, they were the most important rationale for removing the Soviet Union’s veto power in the United Nations Security Council and for making the stringent inspection regime operational in the Soviet Union before the international authority established full control over the US nuclear arsenal. In a similar way, these exaggerated fears that growth in the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals (vertical proliferation) would inevitably lead to aggressive nuclear war contributed to the Eisenhower administration’s failure in the Atoms for Peace Initiative to appreciate the danger of spreading the capability to produce fissile material to other states (horizontal proliferation).

In particular, Sokolski emphasizes how the last three major initiatives flowed directly out of the previous approach and were designed to correct the perceived weaknesses in that approach. He traces the roots of the NPT to two sources: the Irish Initiative and finite deterrence. Sokolski labels the 1958 Irish Initiative at the United Nations as the "first NPT bargain": "Weapons states should not furnish nuclear weapons to nonweapons states, and nonweapons states should refrain from trying to acquire them" (p. 43). Beginning in the late 1950s, the first NPT bargain was undercut by the emergence of a new concept known as finite deterrence- the idea that states with very small nuclear arsenals can effectively deter attacks by states with larger nuclear arsenals by threatening to retaliate against the attackers’ cities. Sokolski also shows that it is a small step from finite deterrence to the concept of "nuclear rights" or the notion that states deserve to be compensated for forgoing nuclear-weapons development. Rather than the "grand bargain" emphasized by many analysts, Sokolski sees the NPT as a quite inconsistent mixing of these two positions. He questions the benefits of finite deterrence and peaceful nuclear power while highlighting the weakness of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection regime. Sokolski then explains how these weaknesses in the NPT moved the United States to create proliferation-technology control regimes beginning in the 1970s. When India (even though it had not signed the NPT) used "civilian" US, Canadian, and Western European reprocessing as well as heavy-water technology and hardware to create the "peaceful" nuclear device it detonated in May 1974, the United States responded by creating the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), a secret and explicitly discriminatory regime. As Sokolski explains, the NSG was just the first of these new discriminatory control regimes. During the 1980s, the United States spearheaded efforts to create the Australia Group for control of chemical and biological weapons and the Missile Technology Control Regime to control aerospace technology and hardware transfers. But by the 1990s, the weaknesses and inconsistencies in these technology control regimes triggered the final major initiative that Sokolski examines: the Defense Department’s Counterproliferation Initiative (CPI) of December 1993. He explains how initiating the CPI meant the United States was questioning the fruit of nonproliferation and recognizing at least some inadequacies in all previous nonproliferation efforts. The CPI caused bureaucratic squabbling, particularly between the State Department and Defense Department, until the National Security Council stepped in to broker a set of definitions in January 1994 that limited the scope of the CPI to a subset of all US nonproliferation efforts. The CPI thus evolved from a wide range of offensive and defensive measures designed to counter a variety of strategic military technologies to a more narrow focus on ensuring that US forces are capable of deterring and prevailing against enemies armed with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons as well as the ballistic missiles to deliver them.

In his final chapter, "The Next Campaign," Sokolski examines how future nonproliferation efforts might be made more effective. He begins by using some of the major themes that emerge from his case studies to critique current nonproliferation efforts. Sokolski sees the concept of finite deterrence as a major determinant of the shape of the Agreed Framework of 1994, under which the United States indicated that North Korea should receive a set of light-water nuclear reactors in return for remaining subject to IAEA inspections. He is very critical of the agreement and questions whether finite deterrence is a sound way to assess the North Korean nuclear threat or whether key premises of the NPT remain sound in the post-Cold War era. Likewise, Sokolski sees disturbing parallels between the Baruch Plan and current US policy toward proliferation activities in Iraq and Iran. As the United States designs future nonproliferation campaigns, Sokolski calls for policy makers to consider several general and specific principles. To the extent possible, these campaigns should attempt to distinguish between safe and dangerous activities; include timely warning criteria; sharply limit unsafe dual-use exports; promote marketlike, case-by-case approaches to supplier control regimes; and recognize and deal with the relationship between vertical and horizontal proliferation. Sokolski emphasizes the linkages between the last issue and the NPT by reiterating that viewing the relationship between vertical and horizontal proliferation through the lens of the Irish Initiative is "sound" but that viewing it through the finite-deterrence lens is "quite frightening" (p. 107). Sokolski closes with a strong appeal for the United States "to explicitly distinguish between progressive and illiberal regimes, something no previous nonproliferation initiative has yet done. More important, the next campaign should work in a fashion that actually promotes progressive over illiberal rule" (p. 111). In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US nonproliferation efforts must also focus directly on the most dangerous and least deterrable threat: the axis of evil between states armed with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, such as Iraq, and terrorist networks, such as al-Qaeda.

Lt Col Peter L. Hays, USAF
Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C.