Joseph Cirincione

DATE January 28, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Joseph Cirincione discusses the chief UN weapons
inspectors' report to the UN Security Council and some of the
potential problems of an invasion of Iraq
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Yesterday, the chief UN weapons inspectors issued their report to the UN
Security Council. Hans Blix, the chief inspector for biological and chemical
weapons, said that Iraq appears not to have come to genuine acceptance of the
disarmament which was demanded of it. Secretary of State Colin Powell said
time is running out. President Bush is expected to make the case for war in
his State of the Union address tonight.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a report yesterday
titled "Iraq: What Next?," assessing the weapons inspections. My guest,
Joseph Cirincione, is one of the authors of the report. He directs the
Carnegie's Non-Proliferation Project. He worked for nine years in the US
House of Representatives, serving on the staff of the Armed Services Committee
and the Committee on Government Operations. Cirincione is a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic
Studies. I spoke with him this morning.

So what do you think are the most important findings of the weapons
inspectors' report?

Mr. JOSEPH CIRINCIONE (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace): Hmm.
They really gave us a dual message. One part of it, which the president has
picked up on and many of the papers are headlining, is that Iraq is not
complying with the inspections. They are not coming forward and giving us all
the information, making their scientists available to us and not embracing the
idea that they truly are disarming. The other message is that, on the other
hand, Iraq is not obstructing any of the inspections, nothing like what we
experienced in the '90s, where the inspectors are able to go everywhere and
see anything. And what they're asking for is more time.

I think the most important message that the inspectors are delivering is that
they think they can get the job done if they can get two things: one, time,
and, two, more Iraqi cooperation.

GROSS: Now Hans Blix, in his report, has said that Iraq has refused to tell
where its stores of anthrax and VX nerve gas are or where its illegal missiles
are. It's failed to account for 6,500 chemical bombs that could contain as
much as a thousand tons of chemical agent. It's refurbished a missile plant
that had been destroyed by weapons inspectors in the past and has illegally
imported chemicals that could be used for weapons. So this sounds like some
pretty bad news actually, doesn't it?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Sure. There's no question that Saddam has a lot to answer
for. Most of us who have been tracking this for a long time assume that he
has chemical and biological weapons, or at least agents for those weapons, and
he hasn't explained what happened to large quantities of these chemicals and
biological agents that he produced during the 1980s. It doesn't mean--and the
inspectors point this out--it doesn't mean that he necessarily has them. It's
just that we have these open questions. And until we have proof that they're
gone, we have to assume the worst.

GROSS: Now Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, who's heading up the nuclear inspections, says that there's no
evidence that Saddam Hussein has resumed its nuclear program. What's the
importance of that finding?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: That was a very interesting comment. He's telling us that in
the 60 days that he's been there--and remember, these inspections are just
getting started--they found no evidence of Iraqi production of nuclear weapons
materials. And this is something that he knows about very well because the
IAEA team went in and dismantled all the Iraqi facilities, starting in 1992,
and including in 1998. They took out all the uranium that he had and have
been monitoring the situation from afar since then. He also offers a very
tantalizingly, hopes will be a compelling, offer to Saddam. He says at the
end of that sentence that if he gets fully Iraqi cooperation, he thinks the
IAEA could certify in a few months that Iraq does not have a nuclear weapons
program.

GROSS: What is the importance of that statement in determining whether it's
time to go to war or not?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Well, the weapon that we're most worried about is the nuclear
weapon. Chemical weapons are terrible; biological weapons are deadly. These
things can kill hundreds, thousands of people, but they don't change the
strategic balance. Saddam had chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s.
It didn't make any difference. He wasn't seen as a threat to the United
States. It's the presence of a nuclear weapon that would change the strategic
balance in the Middle East, and be a weapon that could potentially destroy a
United States city.

It's hard to make a nuclear weapon. You do need a large-scale facility. It's
difficult to hide such a facility. It's difficult to hide the hundreds of
scientists you need working on these weapons. So if the inspectors are
telling us that they believe that with more cooperation, they can verify that
Saddam does not have a nuclear weapon and is not working on a nuclear weapon,
then that really is a powerful statement about how successful this operation
has been in containing the threat, in freezing Saddam in place and ensuring
that he is not now working on a program and, thus, does not pose an immediate,
significant military threat to the United States.

GROSS: My guest is Joseph Cirincione. He's director of the Non-Proliferation
Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of the
co-authors of its new report, "Iraq: What Next?"

So we have Hans Blix saying that Iraq seems to not have come to genuine
acceptance of the disarmament which was demanded of it, and we also have the
head of the nuclear inspections saying, `But there's no evidence that Iraq has
resumed its nuclear program.' So have the findings of Hans Blix and Mohamed
ElBaradei changed any of your opinions about whether the United States should
attack Iraq or whether the UN weapons inspectors should continue the process
of inspections?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: The inspectors gave us, I think, an honest, forthright
appraisal of the situation, its pluses and minuses. And it is a mixed
message, and that's what makes this decision so difficult. There are some in
the administration, the president's inner circle, which long ago decided that
they wanted to go to war with Iraq, and it's not clear how much that has to do
with Saddam's possession of chemical or biological weapons. But for the
majority of the country, and for the majority of the world, they've been
concerned about Iraq because of its possession of these weapons. That's what
turns Saddam from a regional bully into a global threat.

And the president has been remarkably successful in convincing the United
Nations to impose the most onerous inspection regime it ever has. This is an
extremely coercive regime. There are no restrictions on the inspectors. They
can go anywhere, anytime, inspect anything. And they've accomplished two very
important goals. One, with the presence of tens of thousands of troops
outside Iraq's borders, we have contained the danger. Saddam may be a
monster, but right now he's a monster in a cage. Second, with hundreds of
inspectors just beginning to travel around Iraq, they can assure--and
ElBaradei points this out--that there's no ongoing large-scale production or
development of chemical or biological or nuclear weapons or their missile
systems.

So we've frozen Saddam in place; the threat is contained. And this is what
makes it so difficult now for the president to push his case, because he's
still focusing on this compliance issue: `He's not complying, he's not
embraced it. Therefore, we have no choice. We have to go to war.' But the
rest of the Security Council and the majority of the American people don't see
the threat, so they don't want to send hundreds of thousands of young
Americans into battle if there isn't a real good reason to do it now.

GROSS: There are people in the Bush administration who basically say
inspections is a farce. I mean, they're never going to uncover everything,
Saddam Hussein is never going to fully comply. So it's going to be this
cat-and-mouse game, and it's going to drag on and on without ever achieving
fully satisfying results. What do you think about that and how does one go
about...

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Yeah.

GROSS: ...evaluating the effectiveness of the inspections process?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Yeah. Well, it's absolutely true that there's no regime that
can find a group of scientists whipping up a batch of anthrax in a one-room
laboratory. Even if we were to militarily occupy the country, you couldn't
find that. You couldn't stop that. There are some things that are just very,
very difficult. The question is: Can you impose a regime that can stop
militarily significant production and development? `Can you stop them from
developing a nuclear weapon?' for example. And the answer to that is clearly,
`Yes, you can.' This is the kind of thing that inspections can't accomplish,
really, without the kind of Iraqi compliance that we want him to give. We may
never have answers to the questions of what happened to the 15,000 rockets
that we know he built that could be filled with chemical weapons that we don't
have records that he destroyed. Where are they? We may never find that out
unless Iraq coughs up the documents.

But we can put in place an ongoing monitoring and verification regime that can
make sure that he's not engaged in large-scale production. The only threat
that you really have to worry about in this point is that if he has some
chemical or biological weapons, is he doing something with them to get them
outside the country? `Is there really a nexus that goes on with the al-Qaeda
terrorist network?' for example. Is he sending these to a group of terrorists
that used them to attack the United States? And most experts think that that
is just very unlikely. A man like Saddam would not give away what he
considers his crown jewels to a group that he has no control over. And the
president has said that there's this connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda,
but there's been very little, if any, evidence to prove that there's been
cooperation between this Islamic fundamentalist religious fanatic group and
this secular Arab regime that Saddam has had for the past 20 years.

GROSS: My guest is Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation
Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We'll be back
after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest, Joseph Cirincione, directs the Non-Proliferation Project of
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He co-wrote the Carnegie's
new report, "Iraq: What Next?"

The Bush administration has hinted that it has more information about a link
between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that it will soon reveal.

Mr. CIRINCIONE: The president's in a very difficult position. And because
officials have been quoted repeatedly that we don't have hard evidence, many
of us expected that the administration or the United Kingdom or Israel or
other countries would come forth after December 7th when Iraq released its
12,000-page declaration. It was clearly an inadequate declaration, clearly
just regurgitating past information. And we thought the administration would
say, `Aha, here we have--he has not admitted this. We have proof of it. Here
are the facilities at A, B and C.'

And we thought that because the intelligence assessments before that point
were so definitive. The president had gone to the United Nations and said
that Saddam was importing thousands of aluminum tubes that he would use to
restart his nuclear program. These are aluminum tubes, he said, that were
used for uranium enrichment. We declared that Saddam had begun, once again,
the large-scale production of chemical and biological weapons; very clear,
very definitive. But they didn't come forth with the evidence, and many of us
have begun to question how much evidence there really is. We make the
assumption that most people make: that Saddam has these weapons. But the
truth is we just don't know.

And what the president is likely to be able to release next week is going to
be a circumstantial case, things that indicate that there may be weapons here.
There was suspicious activity at this site. There was a scurrying around of
activity at a particular facility right before the inspectors come.
Suspicious, yes; convincing, no. Particularly because the particular cases
the president has cited--the aluminum tubes, for example--turn out to be
wrong, that they were trying to import the aluminum tubes for rockets. These
tubes are not suited for uranium enrichment, as the inspectors reported
yesterday, that there is no large-scale production of chemical or biological
weapons going on, at least that we've been able to observe so far.

So the president's got a very tough case to make. I expect him to make it
with great skill and terrific soaring rhetoric. It's after that dies down,
however, I honestly don't think that we're going to have a case that will
convince most people that the threat is urgent enough to go to war now.

GROSS: What would it take to convince you that we should attack Iraq?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: If there was evidence that Saddam had, in fact, a nuclear
program under way. It's that threat that's the most urgent. If there were
evidence that Saddam had actually succeeded in getting, or was in the process
of trying to get, highly enriched uranium or plutonium from Pakistan, from the
stockpiles in the former Soviet Union, that would be a clear and present
danger. That would justify the most urgent action, including a military
invasion of Iraq.

GROSS: Now are you confident that if Iraq had enriched uranium or plutonium
that weapons inspectors could actually find it?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Small amounts, no. He could probably still hide that. The
weapons design? No, he could probably still hide that. It would be the
production of uranium, the production of plutonium that he couldn't hide, very
large observable activities, difficult for him to avoid detection of those.

GROSS: So if he wasn't manufacturing it, but if he just imported small
amounts, would that be sufficient for him to create a nuclear weapon?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: It could be. But see, this is the uncertainty. There's a
whole range of uncertainties that you have here. The question is: Do you
have enough proof to justify going to war? And the point isn't, `Wouldn't we
all be better off if Saddam was removed?' Of course, we would. He doesn't
have any friends in the area. His own people have been suffering under his
brutal dictatorship for years. The question is weighing the costs and
benefits, the risks of a war. And this is one issue that we have just not had
enough debate on.

We are talking about the military invasion and long-term military occupation
of a major Arab country. This is an extreme measure. This is something that
we have never done. Now Western countries have done it--Britain, France,
Germany, Russia--with disastrous short-term and long-term results. The US is
now saying, `Now we're going to do that.' What I fear the most is that in
that invasion, even if a large percentage of the Iraqi population supports it,
there's going to be a sizable group that is not. There's going to be inflamed
passions around the Arab world. We are going to unleash a new wave of
terrorism against the United States, and the US homeland is simply not
prepared for that kind of danger.

So I don't want to undertake those risks. I don't want to have hundreds of
thousands of US troops occupying Iraq for a decade or more unless there's a
darned good reason to go do it. And that's got to be more than just
circumstantial evidence, it's got to be more than worst-case assessments. You
got to have an urgent threat to justify that kind of extreme measure.

GROSS: If Iraq does have small amounts of enriched uranium or of plutonium,
how much of a concern is that? I mean, what might they do with that?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: You only need about 50 kilograms of enriched uranium to make
a bomb. The is the program that Saddam was embarked on. The design is
well-known; it's a simple device. You basically slam two chunks of highly
enriched uranium together, you get a critical reaction, the bomb detonates.
If Saddam has a bomb, it is a major worry, a major concern, not because he's
going to put it on a missile, but because he might put it on a truck, he might
put it on a ship and bring it someplace. And this brings us into the sort of
nightmare movie scenarios where on the eve of an invasion, Saddam says, `I
have sent a tanker to your port of Baltimore, or maybe it was Los Angeles or
San Diego. If you invade, I will detonate that ship.' That's the kind of
danger you never want to have to confront. The problem is we just don't know,
and we'll never know.

And it's not just Iraq; there are other countries that might try to acquire
that material. That's why you have to have a multipronged approach to this.
It's not just concentrating on one guy. It's not just smashing the
international terrorist networks. You have to go drain the nuclear swamp.
You have to go dry up the source of that material. He can't produce this by
himself. Al-Qaeda can't produce enriched uranium or plutonium. They have to
get it from somebody who's already done it. There's 40,000 tons of--enough
for 40,000 weapons in Russia right now, almost 1,000 tons of this stuff.
You've got to secure and eliminate that material as quickly as possible. You
have to do something about the Pakistani program and worry that whatever we do
in Iraq not disrupt Pakistan and let some of their material go, let some of
their scientists or some of what we think is approximately 30 weapons go. You
have to do all these things at once, and the single-minded focus on Iraq, I
think, is distracting us from the many other tasks we have to do to keep
America secure from any nuclear terrorist threat.

GROSS: But you know, if Saddam Hussein could say, `If you invade us, we're
sending that truck with a car bomb or the ship with a car bomb to Baltimore,'
can he make that kind of threat even if we don't threaten to invade, and might
that be a reason for a regime change? If Saddam Hussein is crazy enough and
armed enough to threaten one of our ports, that's a pretty big threat.

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Sure. Saddam could bluff. He's doing a little bit of
bluffing already, talking about how he's arming the population and preparing
for a siege of Baghdad. Who knows if the population will actually support him
in an invasion? This man is a danger. He is a lying snake, there's no
question about it. The world would be better off without him. The question
is one of risks and benefits. What's the best way to get rid of this guy? Is
it really mounting a large-scale invasion of an Arab country? Do we really
want to once again get in a land war in Asia over this threat at this time?

GROSS: Do you think that the US show of strength and the mobilization of
military forces has actually helped the inspection process by really backing
up the inspection with a lot of, you know, muscle flexing and a real threat of
the use of force?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Absolutely. The only way Saddam Hussein is ever going to
disarm is if he is convinced that he has no other choice; that he disarms or
dies. That's why it's extremely important to have those troops, tens of
thousands of troops, on his border and to maintain that pressure while the
inspection process is under way. This is an essential ingredient in getting
the success of the inspections.

GROSS: Joseph Cirincione directs the Non-Proliferation Project of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, the push for regime change in Iraq. We continue our
discussion with Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace. President Bush has said that critics of his economic plan are waging
class warfare. Our linguist, Geoff Nunberg, considers how we talk about
class.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Joseph Cirincione, one
of the authors of the new report "Iraq: What Next?" which was issued
yesterday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He's the
director of the Carnegie's Non-Proliferation Project. We're talking about his
report and the one given yesterday to the UN Security Council by the chief
weapons inspectors.

The UN weapons inspectors would like the United States to share some of its
intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs. The Bush administration has been
reluctant to do that for fear that it will compromise sources, it'll make it
harder to get more intelligence and, also, those are some of the targets that
the US would bomb if it does attack Iraq. What are some of your thoughts
about how much intelligence the US should share and at what point it starts
compromising its own ability to have intelligence?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Well, I had a top-secret code word clearance for nine years.
I'm familiar with intelligence. I'm familiar with some of the concerns the
administration is expressing. But a lot of those concerns come into play when
you're talking about a particular memo being released that was circulated only
to a few individuals or a conversation that only a few individuals would know
about. But it really shouldn't come into play when you're talking about
evidence that production is going on at a facility, or that there are weapons
stored at place X, Y and Z. There could be multiple sources for that
information, and you should be able to protect your human intelligence.

I think the United States has got to share what it knows now that gives it the
best indication that Saddam actually has these weapons. But I suspect that we
know a lot less than we're saying, that some of the reasons that you're
hearing the administration express are, in part, excuses for not disclosing
that our evidence is actually a lot more circumstantial than it is. I may be
wrong, and I hope the administration comes up next week with a convincing case
and is able to give that case to the inspectors even before they publicly
release it so that they can use this. This is our chance. If we think Saddam
has got a program, has got a weapon and that we think we have good evidence of
where it is, why not give it to the inspectors? Let them go find it.

GROSS: What do you think is needed for the next phase of inspections to
proceed effectively?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: The United States has to keep the international resolve high.
It has to keep the unity. This is really an unprecedented inspection regime.
We've never had this kind of support for an inspection regime. We've never
had this kind of cart blanche for the inspectors. If the US holds the,
especially the permanent members of the Security Council, firm on this, we can
press this for a good two months more and have a pretty good idea after that
on the prospects for success or failure of the inspections.

I suspect think that this may be part of the administration's game plan,
because while the focus has been on the inspectors' report and the January
27th deadline, the truth is that we don't actually have the military forces in
place to launch an invasion. If the president were to decide tomorrow to go,
we couldn't go. The troops that were ordered deployed three weeks ago are
still packing. The tanks, the armored personnel vehicles, the helicopters
have not yet been shipped over. It takes two or three weeks by ship to get
this equipment over to the Gulf. The 101st Airborne, which many people
believe would be the spear point of an invasion force, has not yet been
ordered deployed. So there are still what most figure is five to six weeks of
deployment necessary before the president were to actually be in a position to
go to war.

He may be gaming this out, and I just had conversations with people in
Washington recently about this, saying, `OK, I'll compromise. I'll give the
inspections four more weeks, five more weeks. We'll give a little more time,'
because he's got that time to give. There's nothing he can do now anyway, so
we may see that kind of negotiating policy play out over the month of
February.

GROSS: If, in fact, the Bush administration needs more time before it's ready
to go to war, so it just kind of gives the UN weapons inspection team another
month to carry out inspections, unless the weapons inspectors find a smoking
gun, do you expect that you would the same questions at the end of February
that you have now at the end of January?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Yes, I do. And I expect that many in the administration
would have exactly the same position that they have now. There's a group in
the administration that has the ear of the president, has apparently won the
debate inside the administration, that wants to go to war. They say this as
being about much more than simply weapons of mass destruction, and, in fact,
much more than just revenge on Saddam Hussein or concern about oil supplies.
For some, this is part of a plan to democratize the Middle East, to shake
up the regimes that were put in place during the Cold War supported by one
side or the other that are now, what they think of, as strangling the
prospects for a Middle East peace solution.

They want to go into Iraq, establish Iraq as a democratic beacon, and in that
process, they will encourage people in Syria, in Iran and other countries to
rise up and overthrow their regimes. That will in turn help bring about a
democratic Palestinian Liberation Organization that will give Israel a true
reliable partner to negotiate with, and thus you can bring about peace in the
Middle East. So in their view, the road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad.

And we have the ability to do this. It's almost our duty, our mission to do
this. This is part of a grand view in the eyes of some in the administration
that will unleash `a democratic tsunami,' they say, in the Middle East and
bring about the fundamental reordering of not just the Middle East, but global
politics. That's a very seductive view, a very powerful view of what you
think the US can accomplish and the historic mission that you are now in a
position to fulfill. That is in great part what is motivating the drive to go
into Iraq.

GROSS: My guest is Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation
Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We'll be back
after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Joseph Cirincione. He directs the Non-Proliferation
Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He co-wrote the
Carnegie's new report "Iraq: What Next?"

Let's go back to what you described as a very seductive scenario, which is
that the US accomplishes regime change in Iraq, paving the way for democracy
in Iraq, the Gulf and the Middle East. You said it was a very seductive
scenario. Do you buy that scenario?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: There is a group in the administration, including Deputy
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, head of the Defense Policy Board
and John Bolton, Douglas Feith, who are really on the extreme edge of foreign
policy theory, and I'm not sure that people appreciate just how radical a
group this is. We really haven't ever seen anything like this. And they have
a real messianic vision. They feel that their historic moment is here. They
compare the current situation to 1949 when a small group of people in the
National Security Council around Harry Truman basically created the world as
we know it; created the institutions of NATO, the United Nations, the new
national security strategy for the United States. Bretton Woods structured
the Cold War world.

They think that they are in a position to do the same for the post-Cold War
world, that we have wasted eight years in the Clinton administration. They
were on the verge of doing this when they were in the Reagan administration.
They were robbed of their opportunity by the loss in 1992. They're back.
They don't want to miss this opportunity. They have a missionary zeal. The
question is whether America's going to be dragged along with this missionary
zeal.

I think this vision is extremely dangerous, that they are seducing America
into embarking on a long-term military occupation of a foreign land. We have
never done anything like this. This is not liberating Kuwait. This is not
sending a few Green Berets into Saigon. This is not taking out Noriega in
Panama. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of young men and women
being brought into battle. Maybe it'll go well; maybe it'll be house-to-house
fighting in Baghdad. Maybe half the country will welcome us; maybe half the
country will now make those troops the subject of terrorist sniping and
bombing.

This--the risks are so high at this point, I cannot see the logic behind gong
to war now. We have this man exactly where we want him. We have put him in
an iron box; tens of thousands of troops outside his borders, inspectors
inside his borders. There's no reason why we can't sustain that for a good
year. We have contained the danger. The president has achieved a remarkable
and remarkably popular victory. He should claim credit for this...

GROSS: Let...

Mr. CIRINCIONE: ...and give it some time to work.

GROSS: I want to read you an excerpt of a Washington Post editorial from this
past Sunday's paper.

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Yeah.

GROSS: And you've probably read this, but I'll read it out loud. (Reading)
`The posturing of the French and Germans combined with the waffling of Hans
Blix has made war more rather than less likely. Saddam Hussein can draw only
one message from the current debate: That the Security Council no more has
the will to force disarmament on him now than it did in the 1990s. Mr. Blix's
report and the European reactions will encourage him to cooperate not more but
less. He might be contained for awhile, but in the post-9/11 world, another
failure by the world's powers to enforce Iraqi disarmament would be a
disaster, even worse than war. It would touch off a rush by rogue states for
nuclear weapons.' And the editorial goes on to say that the Security Council
should admit that Saddam Hussein is in material breach, and come up with some
deadlines to deal with it. Your reaction to that editorial?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: This is part of what I think is the mass exaggeration of mass
destruction. I think The Washington Post has taken an extremely unhelpful and
jingoistic tone to its editorials.

GROSS: But...

Mr. CIRINCIONE: The world is resolved on containing Iraq. There is
unprecedented unity. What we're asking for is more time to let the inspection
process work.

GROSS: Let me ask you about a specific line in that editorial. You're a
non-proliferation expert. This Washington Post editorial says that what's
happening now in Iraq could touch off `a rush by rogue states for nuclear
weapons.' So what kind of precedent do you think that we're setting either
with war or with a prolonged inspections in process in terms of rogue states
getting nuclear weapons?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: The inspection process right now is showing that we will not
tolerate this; that the world is united that Saddam cannot have these weapons.
An invasion might send exactly the opposite message. If you're Iran, what
lesson do you learn from this, that you'd better abandon your nuclear
ambitions or you better speed them up? The Indian chief of staff of the
Indian army said that the lesson of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 was that if
you're going to go up against the United States, you better have a nuclear
weapon.

There are some countries that might draw the conclusion from this, one, that
they may be on America's hit list next and they better get a deterrent or,
two, that American leadership is so irresponsible at this point that they can
no longer rely on a close alliance with the United States to protect their
interests, and perhaps they should re-examine their nuclear options. So war
can be accomplished exactly the opposite of what some people intend. Instead
of a resolute message `Disarm or die,' it could send the message, `Get a nuke
now or face us later.'

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Joseph Cirincione. He's
director of the Non-Proliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and he is co-author of the Endowment's recent report--its
new report called "Iraq: What Next?"

What countries have actually started programs for weapons of mass destruction
and then abandoned those programs? And what lessons can we learn about what
got them to abandon those programs?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: This is one of the least-understood issues involving weapons
of mass destruction. Three out of the four countries that started nuclear
weapons programs, for example, over the last four or five decades have
abandoned those programs, never completed them. In many ways, the question
isn't `Why do so many countries have nuclear weapons?' It's `Why aren't there
more countries with nuclear weapons?'

And it's not an issue of technology. It's not that this technology is now
spreading around the world and there's nothing we can do to stop it and we're
going to live in a terrifying new century with dozens of states with nuclear
weapons, as some in the administration believe. Rather, the technology's been
out there for a long time. It's that countries have made the political
decision not to acquire these weapons. They've turned away from these when
they have found other means of resolving the political or territorial disputes
that engender the illusion that somehow acquiring a weapon of mass destruction
might improve their security.

For example, people don't remember this perhaps, but Brazil and Argentina and,
to a lesser extent, Chile in South America all had explored nuclear weapons
programs; Brazil and Argentina making a great deal of progress, Brazil going
so far as to be preparing a test site for a nuclear weapon. When those
countries returned from military juntas to civilian control, the civilians
turned away from those programs. And Brazil and Argentina and Chile
peacefully settled their territorial disputes, and they all ended their
programs and joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as have almost every single
country in the world, and declared that they would remain a non-nuclear state.

When you look at who's got weapons of mass destruction, there are vast areas
of the world--Africa--most of Africa, South America, Southeast Asia,
Indonesia, Malaysia, etc.--where there are no weapons of mass destruction,
none; no chemical, no biological, no nuclear. And the states that we're
concerned about, the 15 or so states that have something, tend to group
around--along, rather, an arc of crisis that goes through the Middle East down
to South Asia and then up to the Korean Peninsula. And these are all
countries that are involved in unresolved political or territorial disputes.

And it helps us understand that one of the ways to stop proliferation is to
resolve those underlying disputes. If you don't resolve the Kashmir issue in
South Asia, for example, it's very likely that we will see the first use of a
nuclear weapon since Hiroshima in a conflict between Pakistan and India.
You've got to resolve these issues in order for the governments to feel some
confidence that they can reject these programs, turn away from this path,
follow the example of South Africa, who built and then dismantled six nuclear
weapons, or Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, all of whom inherited thousands of
nuclear weapons after the breakup of the Soviet Union and were convinced by
officials in the Bush and then Clinton administration to peacefully dismantle
them and join the Non-Proliferation Treaty as non-nuclear members. There's a
lot of success story out there; we just got to pay attention to it and learn
lessons.

GROSS: You say that the weapons inspections are so far inconclusive and,
therefore, the inspectors need more time. Say they inspect for another year
and the results are still inconclusive. Then what?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Hmm. I think it's very unlikely that after a year of
inspections, the results would be inconclusive. We will have a very good
chance that we will know one way or the other whether he's got their programs.
At that point, if we decide that he does not have programs, we go into phase
two of the inspections, which people forget about, and that is to set up a
permanent monitoring and verification regime so that we will know if any major
activity is under way. We will never leave Iraq unmonitored as long as Saddam
is in power. That's the plan. This man may be allowed to roam around his
country, but he's going to remain under house arrest for as long as he lives.

GROSS: Joseph Cirincione, thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. CIRINCIONE: My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on your show,
Terry.

GROSS: Joseph Cirincione directs the Non-Proliferation Project of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He co-wrote the Carnegie's new
report, "Iraq: What Next?"

Coming up, class warfare. Our linguist, Geoff Nunberg, considers how we talk
about class. This is FRESH AIR.

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Commentary: How Americans of various classes and political beliefs
talk about class
TERRY GROSS, host:

One of the issues the president will address tonight in the State of the Union
address is his economic plan. He has said that his opponents who criticize
the plan for benefiting the rich are waging class warfare. Our linguist,
Geoff Nunberg, says it's a charge that touches a delicate spot in the American
social psyche. He has these thoughts about the way we talk about class.

GEOFF NUNBERG:

The phrase `class warfare' is on a roll right now. It's appeared in the press
more often since the beginning of January than it did in the whole second half
of 2002. And it's on track to blow right by its previous two peaks. Those
were in the summer of 2000, when Republicans were accusing Gore of waging
class warfare in his presidential campaign, and back in 1995, when they were
making the same charge about the Democratic opponents of Newt Gingrich's
"Contract With America." If conservatives keep coming back to the phrase,
it's because it's an effective charge. A few liberals are willing to throw
the phrase back at Bush. As New York Congressman Charles Rangel put it, `If
this is class warfare, who started it?' But to most Americans, class warfare
echoes too much of cloth caps and barricades. It's a foreign-sounding
phrase, like something out of "Les Mis," not "Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington."

What makes class warfare so alien? According to conservatives, it's because
Americans reject the politics of envy, another favorite phrase. As David
Brooks put it in a New York Times Op-Ed piece a few weeks ago, `In America,
people vote their aspirations. We've always had a sense that the great
opportunities lie just over the horizon. None of us is really poor; we're
just pre-rich.' Well, that's one theory: that working Americans will welcome
the Bush tax proposals in hopeful anticipation off the day when they'll be
living off their own stock dividends.

But I suspect that the discomfort that Americans have with the notion of class
warfare owes a lot to the way we use the word `class' itself or, more
important, to the way we don't use it. It's striking that the conservatives
who decry the politics of class warfare never go on to finish the thought.
You never hear them talk about the virtues of class cooperation. In fact, the
phrases `class warfare' and `class envy' are pretty much the only places where
the word `class' occurs at all in the American conservative lexicon. I mean,
when it's not preceded by `middle.' If you do a search of the speeches and
statements at the whitehouse.gov Web site, you'll find 50 hits for `middle
class,' but none at all for `working class.'

Needless to say, the phrase `upper class' doesn't appear at the whitehouse.gov
Web site, either. In fact, that phrase has pretty much disappeared from
American political discourse. People may still talk about upper-class
neighborhoods or the upper-class character in a movie, but you very rarely see
a phrase like `upper-class voters' or `upper-class taxpayers.'

The connection between the notion of upper class and income and power was
already getting cloudy when Jay Gatsby moved to West End, and by now it's
almost too vague to define. You could see that in the exit polls conducted by
the Voter News Service after the 2000 presidential elections. Not
surprisingly, the 29 percent of voters who describe themselves as upper middle
class went for Bush over Gore by about a 5:4 margin. But the 4 percent of
voters who describe themselves as upper class actually voted 3:2 for Gore.

Just who were those voters, anyway? They weren't just the 4 percent at the
top of the income scale. The same exit polls showed that voters with incomes
over $100,000 went decisively for Bush. Actually, those self-styled
upper-class voters were probably no different at all in income or social
status then the ones who described themselves as upper middle class. They
were simply the ones who were willing to say that an income of $100,000 a year
put them in a privileged group, and that's something that Democrats are more
likely to own up to than Republicans are.

Conservatives like to say that class is an illusion in American life. As
David Brooks puts it, `Americans do not see society as a layer cake with the
rich on top, the middle class beneath them and the working class and
underclass at the bottom.' But it's significant that Brooks started that list
with the rich rather than the upper class. Americans actually have no qualms
at all about acknowledging a distinction between the middle class and a
working class. If not, where would that leave Roseanne or Bruce Springsteen?

And we recognize the existence of an underclass, too, even if we usually
describe it in racial or ethnic terms. But as those exit polls showed, most
Americans don't see the wealthy as a separate class. Say `upper class' to
most people and what comes to mind is Thurston Howell III, not Jack Welch. In
fact, my guess is that if you ask him, Welch would be quick to describe
himself as upper middle class, pointing out that he still prefers beer to
wine.

That's what tricky about the phrase `class warfare.' Middle-income Americans
may be painfully aware of the gulf that separates them from the wealthy, but
they don't think of those differences in terms of class lines. To a
high-school principal making $80,000 a year, the only class difference is
between herself and the school janitor, not between herself and a
dividend-clipping investor. `Class' is a word that sets Americans to looking
over their shoulders. I think of what my friend Bob said many years ago as we
were nervously chaining up our bicycles outside a restaurant on Broadway in
New York. It's when you buy a 10-speed that the class war comes home to you.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is currently a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.
He's the author of the book "The Way We Talk Now."

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GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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