Former presidents, advisers weigh in at conference “The Presidency in the Nuclear Age’

Panel on presidency in nuclear age at JFK library

BOSTON — President Barack Obama should learn from the experience of previous U.S. leaders when grappling with thorny nuclear issues ranging from the ambitions of Iran and North Korea to the threat of terrorism, experts told a forum on the shaping of American foreign policy in a nuclear age.

The conference Monday at the John F. Kennedy presidential library called “The Presidency in the Nuclear Age,” examined issues faced by U.S. presidents from the dawn of the nuclear arms race, through the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold War and disarmament efforts, and up to present efforts to stem nuclear proliferation.

Theodore Sorenson, a top adviser to President Kennedy, said JFK demonstrated that a chief executive should not act hastily in a crisis.

“A president doesn’t just take one option, such as a pre-emptive strike or invasion … he wants to know what all the options are before acting,” said Sorenson, recounting the careful deliberations in 1962 that ultimately led to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev dismantling the Cuban missiles, preventing a confrontation that could have escalated to nuclear war.

Sorenson said Kennedy took the time necessary to learn all of his diplomatic and military options — even the possibility of taking no immediate action at all.

“If the decision had been made in 24-48 hours, I think it’s quite likely that a different decision would have been made,” said Graham Allison, an author and defense policy expert from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

JFK’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, told the audience that one could not help but notice the parallels between past and current conflicts in the nuclear age. She noted how the recent satellite photos of a hidden nuclear facility under construction in Iran were eerily reminiscent of the spy plane photos that first disclosed the presence of Soviet missile sites in Cuba.

“The question then, as it is now, is not whether nuclear weapons and the materials needed to build them are being developed,” Kennedy said. “It’s really how, through the use of diplomacy and international law, we can prevent these materials from getting into the wrong hands, and ever being used against innocent civilians.”

The daylong conference included videotaped statements from former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the latter reflecting on his own administration’s successes and failures in the area of nuclear disarmament, and warning that the world is fast losing its “impetus to nonproliferation.”

“I think it is unlikely that any country that gets nuclear weapons would knowingly initiate the use of them, even Iran,” Clinton said.

“But every time you have nuclear weapons in more hands, you increase the chances of accidents and you increase the chances that unscrupulous people will either sell or steal material … and give it to terrorists or criminals who could use the nuclear weapons in small dirty bombs.”

Kenneth Adelman, who served as director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Ronald Reagan, warned that presidents and world leaders must avoid the “illusion” of progress in nuclear disengagement.

Speaking during a panel discussion “The Cold War and the Nuclear Arms Race,” Adelman criticized the SALT I and SALT II treaties of the 1970s as examples of good intentions without concrete results. He said SALT only placed limits on nuclear weapons that were far above what the U.S. and Soviet Union were building at the time.

“If you were to restrict me from high jumping 6-feet-2, I can live with that, because I don’t high jump 6-feet-2, I don’t high jump 5-feet-2,” said Adelman.

He also chastised the conference’s host, the Kennedy library, for not including in an accompanying arms control exhibit the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) treaty, signed by Reagan in 1987. Adelman said was the only treaty that ever eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons.

Kennedy School of Government professor Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state for political affairs in the George W. Bush administration, praised Obama for pursuing negotiations with Iran over that country’s nuclear ambitions.

Even if those negotiations fail, however, it needn’t be a pretense toward war, said Burns, noting that the Cold War taught the world that it was possible to control “malevolent” nations through containment and deterrence.

But Allison noted that deterrence isn’t an option when it comes to terrorists bent on suicide to achieve their aims and that unlike nation states, terrorists who might use nuclear weapons “don’t have return addresses.”