Concerned about a “war by blunder,” Sam Nunn, the former U.S. senator from Georgia who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee, says he favors “tightening the screws in sanctions” on North Korea, but the U.S. needs to communicate with the country at the same time. In an interview with VOA Contributor Greta Van Susteren, Nunn favors modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, as set forth by the Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review. But Nunn, co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, questions the need for developing more low-yield nuclear weapons. Interview was conducted February 20, 2018.
Senator nice to see you, sir.
Good to see you, Greta.
Senator I want to go back to the Nuclear Threat Initiative and how you began, got involved in this, but I want to go back to 1991 what happened with the fall of the Soviet Union, when the Soviet Union was falling, tell me what you did?
Well I was chair of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator Luger was a big player on the [Senate] Foreign Relations Committee and I’m in Budapest, Hungary at a conference with Soviet Union representatives, European representatives. Gorbachev gets taken captive. For three days we wait to see what happens. He gets released, one of our Russian friends who had been at the conference calls me, says: “Come to Moscow, big things are happening.” I went to Moscow, I stayed about four days. I visited with Gorbechev. I watched the debate about the break-up of the Soviet Union. I visited with the “new military leaders” who were loyal to [Boris] Yeltsin and I said to myself on the way back: “This place is coming apart and it’s coming apart with thousands of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons materials and we’ve got to do something about it.” That led to the introduction of what became the Nunn-Luger bill. It passed in late 1991 after a very rough start but three or four months later the House and the Senate went along with it and it became known as Cooperative Threat Reduction, helping the former Soviet Union, not just Russia but the other countries that had nuclear weapons and there were four of them — not just Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan and they were very big arsenals and we helped all of them over the next ten, fifteen years to try to secure their nuclear weapons and materials. Try to prevent catastrophic terrorism and also to try to give some meaningful role in life to people who weren’t being paid very well — the scientists — that knew how to make a nuclear weapon — that did not know how to support their families.
Since that point when the Soviet Union fell and the legislature was passed to help contain or help secure nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, has the threat increased or receded?
I think the threat of a deliberate all-out war with a major party like Russia — deliberate, I’ll put the emphasis on that — has receded. I think the chances of a war by blunder, or a war because of cyber interference with command and control; a war because the United States and Russia escalate in some region like the Middle East or Ukraine; I think that kind of danger has gone up. And certainly the danger of catastrophic terrorism because the know how — the ability to make a crude nuclear weapon, not necessarily one that could be put up on a missile and fly through space but a crude nuclear weapon that could be put in the back of a truck or in a ship in a port, I think those dangers have gone up. So — deliberate war in my view, has receded, but war by blunder has increased in terms of risk and danger.
After 9-11 the 9-11 commission said that al-Qaida wanted to get their hands on a nuclear weapon. Obviously the know-how is, as you said, out there. The materials are out there, materials that are insecure in many nations and you’ve got the added part that terrorists often times suicide bombers don’t have that survival instinct. Does that increase your worry, does that make you feel that there is more of a danger or am I being an alarmist?