| Home > Events > 2nd National Symposium > Stansfield Turner Envisioning World-Wide Disarmament
Admiral Stansfield Turner DR. HAMBURG: I want to get started with this afternoon's session where we're going to be looking at the issue of "Setting Strategic Priorities: Health Professionals in a Belligerent World." We're going to begin the session, however, with someone who is not a health professional, but who has been a very, very important leader in the realm of intelligence and in terms of his leadership around issues that very much bear on how we can address the problems of terrorism in our society and contain such threats as the nuclear threat and now the biological threat. His name is probably not unfamiliar to everyone in the room -- Stansfield Turner. He is a distinguished graduate of Annapolis, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and had a distinguished career in the military. In February 1977, President Jimmy Carter nominated him to be the Director of Central Intelligence, and he was responsible there for developing new procedures for closer oversight of the intelligence community by Congress and the White House. He led the intelligence community in adapting to a new era of real-time photographic satellites and instituted major management reform at the CIA, among his many, many accomplishments. On the completion of his duties at the CIA, in January 1981, President Carter presented him with the National Security Medal, an honor well earned. He has taught at Yale University and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He is on the faculty at the University of Maryland at College Park, and he is currently teaching at the Naval War College. He has written several important books on topics of great relevance. Secrecy in Democracy discusses the problems of conducting secret intelligence activities in our open democratic society; Terrorism and Democracy, which discusses how a democracy can respond to acts of terrorism without undermining its democratic principles; and Caging the Nuclear Genie: An American Challenge for Global Security, which I gather originally focused on the issue of controlling nuclear weapons, but he has now revised it and added a new chapter focusing on the biological weapons threat. He is going to be talking to us today to provide his perspective on that issue, how we can approach the issue of worldwide disarmament. He comes at it from a unique perspective, and I think will begin our afternoon session in a very, very thoughtful and stimulating way. (Applause.) ADMIRAL TURNER: Thank you, Peg. I want to say how pleased I am that Peg didn't tell you how Jimmy Carter came to appoint me as Director of Central Intelligence. (Laughter.) ADMIRAL TURNER: You see, I was not his first choice. When his first choice didn't pass muster with the Senate, he searched and searched the whole country for two weeks, and he looked for the most qualified man or woman around. He came up with me. The fact that we were classmates at Annapolis had absolutely nothing to do with it. (Laughter.) ADMIRAL TURNER: Now when D.A. Henderson called me and asked me to join you in this two-day conference I was excited, so excited that I didn't level with him. I didn't tell him about the dangers of asking a retired Admiral to speak. (Laughter.) ADMIRAL TURNER: You may have heard the adage in the Army, "Old Generals never die. They just fade away." Well, old Admirals never die also. They just keep on telling sea stories. (Laughter.) ADMIRAL TURNER: So if you think we're going to keep this at 30 minutes, D.A., you've got another -- (Laughter.) ADMIRAL TURNER: -- thing coming. The topic, though, worldwide disarmament of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, is one that can be handled very briefly. I don't see it. I don't see worldwide disarmament coming in anything like the foreseeable future. The world just isn't ready for the kind of intrusive inspection regimes that would be needed to ensure against cheating. You heard last night from Ambassador Butler the catastrophe we had in Iraq. Here we had the United Nations, its Security Council, with these various mandates to allow outside inspection to keep that country from having or developing weapons of mass destruction, and we've let it go. Great shame, because here was an opportunity for a precedent, a model that we could have established to lead us towards worldwide disarmament in this area. Now, if we can't have disarmament in the foreseeable future, the next best thing we can do is to ensure that nobody actually uses these weapons. Now, the focus of this conference has been largely on what to do if they are used, and I understand that. This morning we heard some reference to deterring the use of these weapons, and I'd like to focus for a little bit this afternoon on three steps that I would suggest we should, as a country, consider in order to reduce the probability that anyone, a rogue nation or terrorist group, will invoke or use weapons of this sort. And one of these recommendations specifically points towards the medical and health care professions. Point number one, the United States needs to establish a regime of punishments for the use of weapons of mass destruction. We don't want anyone thinking about using these and not understanding that there's going to be a price to be paid at some point. We didn't exact any price from Iraq when during the war with Iran, from 1979 to 1988, she severally used chemical weapons. We exacted a very small price from Pakistan and India in 1998 when they tested nuclear weapons. We put on an embargo, but we lifted it very quickly when the grain lobby in the United States said, "We'd rather sell grain to these people than punish them for moving forward with weapons of mass destruction." I think this does indicate that we have a good ways to go still in heightening consciousness in the United States towards this problem, because it's always going to be difficult to get grain lobbies and others to forsake profit in order to discourage the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we've got to elevate that latter in the scale here in order to get ourselves into a better position the next time something like this happens. I want to acknowledge, though, that it's got to be done delicately, because we can overexcite; we can overalarm people. I don't think it was helpful when the Secretary of Defense of several years ago put a bag -- 10-pound bag of sugar -- I think it was smaller than 10 pounds, but, anyway, a bag of sugar on the table on TV and said, "If this were anthrax, it could kill all of Washington, D.C." More alarming than informative. I would suggest that we should, as a nation, develop, discuss, agree on, a range of possible punishments for the use of weapons of mass destruction. They would range from mild to severe. The point, though, is to have already had discussion on these, to have already agreed on the general scope of this before a crisis erupts, so that there is a consensus within the country that it would also, because we'd have a range of these, let us fit the punishment to the crime. And it would make it easier to ensure that the one we selected, or the ones we selected, would have broad public support, here and possibly in foreign countries. Now, my list of what these candidates could be is not comprehensive, but let me just suggest. You could start with taking the country to the World Court. You could move on to cutting off World Bank and IMF funding for them. You could sever their airline connections with the outside world, not let their airlines land on our fields, not let our aircraft fly into theirs. We could embargo some portions of trade. And, finally, we could do a total embargo of trade. In any particular case, whenever we were ready to execute, we would try to persuade other nations, other responsible nations in the world, to join with us, and to exercise the same punishments. What would they have to lose? Well, they would have good relations with the country involved. They wouldn't be able to maintain those. But most of the countries that would think of using weapons of mass destruction are pariahs anyway -- the Iraqs, the North Koreas, and so forth. Secondly, of course, they, too, would lose commercial opportunities, and this will be difficult to overcome. But, again, it depends on how well we've prepared the case, how well we've tried to condition international opinion as well as national opinion on the importance of deterring the use of these weapons. I doubt that we could do this by sitting down tomorrow and trying to negotiate some broad treaty because there would be too many compromises. There's too many uncertainties. There's too many indefinitenesses in such a treaty. We've got to wait and do it on a case-by-case basis and bring together for each case an ad hoc grouping of nations that will exercise this power. My second suggestion concerns ensuring that we have the best intelligence possible about the development and possible use of weapons of mass destruction. Now, there are a number of ways to get intelligence on any subject -- satellite photographs, electronic intercepts of signals and messages going around the world. And these can be useful, even in cases like something as easy to hide as development of chemical and biological weapons. But we generally look more in this area towards human intelligence, and it, of course, is intended to be something where you can get right inside the other person's network and find out what they're planning to do. Now, there are some difficulties in these kinds of situations, however. And let me give you an example. I was having lunch with a former CIA operative just a few days after Iraq attacked Kuwait in 1990. And we were reading criticism in the newspapers in those days that the CIA and the intelligence community had not predicted this attack. And people were saying we should have had an agent inside Saddam Hussein's inner circle to tell us what he was planning to do. Well, I said to my friend George, "George, what's the chances that we could ever penetrate and get somebody on the inside of a Saddam Hussein inner circle?" And George absolutely instantaneously put up his hand and said "zero." That's a tough nut to crack. But it doesn't mean you don't try. You never know when you'll just happen to make out. But there's another approach entirely to human intelligence that we should not overlook in this kind of a situation. And this is the open contacts that go on all the time between U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries, even countries as hostile as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea -- their tourists, their businessmen, their academics, their professional organizations that have conferences, and such forth. Let me tell you a little sea story here. I warned you about too many sea stories, but I didn't tell you what a sea story is. A sea story is something a sailor imagined happened in his past and he now tells about with exaggeration. (Laughter.) ADMIRAL TURNER: In 1977, when I took over as Director of Central Intelligence, we had just completed a year's worth of examination of the CIA by two committees of Congress, a committee appointed by the President. And these investigations had come up with some activities of the CIA in the '50s and '60s which they did not think were appropriate. One of those was the use of American citizens in the course of collecting intelligence. And, most particularly, there was outrage that the CIA had used some U.S. media people, as well as academics, businessmen, tourists, and others. I spent a good deal of time in my first few months in office trying to sort this out and establish what our policies would be in response to this considerable criticism. I ended up with the wrath of the media on me for a long time, because I refused to exclude the media totally. I said we would be cautious about ever asking media people to help us, but that we would not renounce it. They were American citizens, and they were patriotic, too. And if they might help us, I would be willing to call on them, and I did once when we had hostages incarcerated in Tehran. Well, amusingly, a few months after taking office I went to London to call on my counterpart, the head of MI-6. Much of the CIA's procedures and programs had been modeled on the British intelligence system, and so I was really looking forward to having my first conversation with this senior spymaster of all spymasters. We went to his home for dinner. We sat down afterwards beside a fire, and I waited anxiously for what his advice to me as a brand-new novice in this field of intelligence would be. "Stan, are you tapping all the information that's available in the American business community?" I was shocked. Here was the spymaster of spymasters saying to me, "Are you using open intelligence rather than spies?" And he went on to say, "Well, look, there's no point in taking the risks and paying the costs of putting a spy into a situation if the information is already available inside your society. You've got to find a way to get it out, to pull it together." Well, this was logical enough. It obviously had to be tempered with the culture of our society as opposed to the culture of British society. But I took his point. And I'm suggesting to you this afternoon that today intelligence on chemical warfare and biological warfare is a field where you, in the medical, health care, public health fields, can make a real contribution. You may have contacts with your counterparts abroad that could be very helpful. Yesterday, we heard from Amy Smithson that when she was interviewing Russians about biological warfare she learned that numbers of them were "teaching" in foreign countries. Well, knowing where those people were going, and what kinds of individual skills they took with them, are important clues to help us keep track of what's going on in biological warfare. There's not enough to make a case. There's not enough to draw firm conclusions from. But then you add them to another clue. A businessman comes back and finds out that Germany is selling centrifuges to Iraq, and you put these two together and you begin to build enough evidence to let you draw a useful conclusion and one that could lead to some national action on the subject. Somebody, of course, have got to be the collecting point and pull all of these together and collate them. That has to be the CIA. And they have to, if they haven't, set up -- and I certainly hope they have -- a body to do this, to be the collecting point. Your organization, the Center for Civilian Biodefense, and other professional groups can be important contributors to this, help the CIA bring these fragmentary clues together from which you can pick -- put together a picture. Intelligence itself is really the art of doing picture puzzles when you've only got about 40 percent of the pieces of the puzzle with which to work, and you have to draw the whole picture. Now, it will always be controversial to bring innocent people into the spying business. But I would suggest to you, in this case, intelligence can indeed be our best defense -- our best defense against weapons of mass destruction being used. But it is a tough nut to crack, and it can't be cracked just with the ordinary intelligence processes Thirdly, my last suggestion concerns nuclear weapons. There is one big difference between the way we deal with biological and chemical weapons on the one hand and nuclear on the other. We have renounced the use or possession of biological and chemical weapons as a country. We have not done so with nuclear weapons. In fact, we have insisted that we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons first if it seems to be in our interest to do so. I would suggest to you it will never seem to be in our interest to do so. First of all, if we think about using a nuclear weapon against another country that has nuclear weapons, there is no way you can hope not to receive at least one nuclear detonation in retaliation. And I don't believe the American public would want to sacrifice any one city of the United States in order to achieve something overseas by our initiating the use of nuclear weapons. Secondly, you may think about using a nuclear weapon against a non-nuclear state when you don't have to run the risk of retaliation. I would suggest here, though, that any use of a nuclear weapon, no matter what its size, would be disproportionate to the provocation, even to the provocation of an attack with biological weapons. I think we, the public, should urge the next President, whoever he -- or maybe she -- will be -- (Laughter.) ADMIRAL TURNER: -- urge the next President to have a recount -- a recount -- (Laughter.) ADMIRAL TURNER: -- a recount on this policy of preserving the right of the first use of nuclear weapons. There's a real benefit in renouncing that policy. It's the benefit of opening up the possibility of going to really low numbers of nuclear weapons. I'd like to make sure you understand that this afternoon somewhere in the United States arsenal there are about 12,000 nuclear warheads. That's a lot more than anybody in a right mind can possibly think of needing or using. And yet we are going down in increments that are so small it doesn't make a big dent here, and we have no plan today -- despite all you read in the newspapers about arms control agreements, we have no plan for the United States to have less than 10,000 nuclear warheads seven years from now. That's absurd. But as long as we have this fiction that we will order our military to use these weapons first, our military will understandably be reluctant to go to truly low numbers, because they want to be prepared to fulfill what we tell them to do. And they'll say there's this contingency, there's that contingency, that six more contingencies might arise, weapons might deteriorate. On it goes, and we will never get down to truly low numbers like a couple hundred warheads, which is, in my opinion, all we need for our national security. Now, why would I raise this issue of reducing nuclear weapons in a conference on bioterrorism? It's because we need to keep our eye on three balls at once -- chemical, biological and nuclear. No one can predict which one is going to be employed, if any, so we need to be consistent in emphasizing our opposition to the use of any one of them. It's important that we not drive some rogue state or some terrorist group into thinking, well, they shouldn't use these kind -- this kind of weapon of mass destruction because we're going to retaliate and punish them for it, but we're not that anxious about this other one. And we drive them to using it. We must be consistent across the board. I admire very much what you're doing in the Center. I admire very much what you all are committing by coming here for two days and discussing this important topic. And, yes, this is an emphasis and a conference on bioterrorism, but I do urge you as we go forward to keep these three topics in balance because we must defeat the use of any of them. Thank you.
(Applause.)
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