By: Tucker Green
General Eugene E. Habiger graduated from the University of Georgia in 1963 before going on to serve in the United States Air Force, serving as a command pilot with over 5,000 flying hours and logging 150 combat missions in the Vietnam War. General Habiger has over 35 years of experience in national security and nuclear operations. From 1996-1998, he was Commander in Chief of United States Strategic Command, making him responsible for all U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy strategic nuclear forces. After retiring from the military in 1998, General Habiger was the President and CEO of the San Antonio Water System and worked as the Department of Energy’s Director of Security and Emergency Operations. Now, he is a Distinguished Fellow and Policy Adviser at the University of Georgia’s Center for International Trade and Security, where he works with the Center’s programs for preventing weapons proliferation and reducing the threat of nuclear weapons. General Habiger was gracious enough to sit down and talk with The Georgia Political Review’s Tucker Green about his time at the University of Georgia, national security, and the role of nuclear weapons in today’s society.
I have to start with this question as a University of Georgia student. Tell me a little about your time at the University of Georgia. What did you major in? Did you know you wanted to start a military career?
Sure. I started out at the University of California, and was not doing terribly well. So I had an epiphany one night that said, “You better go do something to get your act together.” So I went down to the local recruiting office in Oakland, California and volunteered for the United States Army. Sure enough, after 3 months of very extensive training in California, the Army in their infinite wisdom sent me to Fort Benning, Georgia as a private in the infantry. While I was there, before an Auburn-Georgia football game, I met on a blind date this young lady, Barbara Veal, from Macon, Georgia. And it was a great evening; we dated several times before I left the army in January. I went back to the University of California. It’s amazing what kind of good grades you can get after you spend two years in the Army, and that’s exactly what happened to me. Then I decided to come back to the University of Georgia. I was a pre-med student at Cal, and I really didn’t think I wanted to do that, so I became a psych major here. At that time, at the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, they gave a B.S. degree in psychology, and that’s what I got. And, anyway, I got the degree, Barbara and I got married during my senior year, and then I decided in my senior year that I wanted to go in the Air Force and fly, and that’s exactly what I did. I got my degree, went in the Air Force, and became a pilot, and spent over 35 years in the United States Air Force.
What do you think is the biggest threat to the United States today?
I think the biggest threat to the United States today is the threat of someone using a weapon of mass disruption. Not weapon of mass destruction; weapons of mass destruction generally connote chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. But there are so many other things out there, like cyber-attacks, that can disrupt as much if not more lethally than weapons of mass destruction. We’ve become so dependent on the internet and what the internet does in terms of our financial news capability, communications, that in my view, we’re extremely vulnerable. And we’re now starting to get serious about protection against that. The other concern is a follow up to what happened after 9/11. 9/11 was the tipping point, but there were many indicators that 9/11 was coming, going back to the first attack on the World Trade Center, the attack on our embassies in Eastern Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. So things were beginning to heat up in terms of a nuclear weapons attack.
So we are talking about asymmetrical warfare?
Absolutely. It’s so viable and such an attractive option for a transnational state, whether you’re talking about al-Qaeda or another Islamic extremist organization. I don’t want to be accused of being anti-Muslim. There are about 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. And the vast majority are good people. They have good values, they are rational, they are kind. But some percentage of those 1.3 billion people wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and say to themselves, “I want to bring down Western society as I know it.” And let’s say 10% wake up every morning like that, now that’s 130 million. Well, maybe 10% is too high. Well, what if the number is 1%? That’s 13 million people waking up every morning saying “I want to do something bad against Western society.” And then if you say, well, that’s still a little too high, well let’s talk about 1/10th of 1%. That’s 1.3 million people. That’s equivalent of the size of the city of San Antonio, population wise. That’s a lot of people waking up every morning saying they want to do something bad against the United States. And that is a very real problem, because I don’t know what the answer is. There are people out there working very hard to gain a better understanding, get a better dialogue, but the problem I see facing us, Tucker, is a generational problem, not a problem I can see us solving in 10 or 15 or 20 years.
So, [speaking about] these weapons of mass disruption, obviously nuclear weapons for so long have been the bogeyman, the face of danger. Are you suggesting that maybe the nuclear threat isn’t the most viable threat?
The nuclear threat is not the most viable threat as we have known it in most media events. I’m talking about articles and books and that sort of thing. During the Cold War, we were concerned about accidental launch, a rogue general out there launching missiles. That no longer concerns me. On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being very concerned, less than a .5. What concerns me, though, is a terrorist group getting their hands on fissile material. It doesn’t have to be much, in the case of maybe 10-15 kilograms of this stuff to build a device, not a weapon. You don’t need a weapon, you need a device. Lots of ways to get that stuff in the United States. There’s a mind-boggling amount of things that come into this country every day that can wreak havoc. The ultimate scenario is lower Manhattan. There are only 5 or 6 major ports of entry in the United States. I guarantee you if you had a nuclear device go off in the harbor at Long Beach, you’d disrupt our economy to a very, very significant point, because so much of our commerce comes in through these containers at these wealthy, tight choke points. So there’s a great deal of risk there. Again, once you get your hands on the fissile material, to build the device is not going to be very tough.
The economic crisis and the deficit are clearly drawing significant drains on the DOD. Do budgetary constraints impact our overall defense posture, and if so, how?
It’s cyclic. We’ve seen this sine wave go up and down. After Vietnam, you had a significant reduction of defense budgets. They leveled off, and then went down again under Carter, and then when Reagan came in they went up dramatically. And then at the end of the Cold War, you had the peace dividend—everyone wanted to cut defense budgets. And then defense budgets have gone up significantly since the early 90s, primarily because of 9/11. We’ve spent nearly $3 trillion to counter this terrorist threat. And I have to be careful how I say this, because there are a lot of folks inside and outside the Pentagon, they’re saying “Woe is me, the sky is falling.” Well, it’s going to be painful, but we’ll work our way through it. I mean, the war in Afghanistan and war in Iraq are not even a part of the military’s top line. They’re basic budget lines, they’re a separate line item in the budget. So they don’t have to worry about paying for those wars. So, will it be painful? Yes. Will it cause some revisions of our national security strategy? Probably. But the basic purpose of a government as we know it is to provide for the national security and protection of the United States of America. Period. That’s why we have government. All the other stuff they do is important, but the number one objective is to preserve and protect the United States of America, period. Now, how much of our basic national security strategy involves being the world’s policeman? I don’t know, but there are areas where we can back off that, in my view, would not impact the basic premise of our defense establishment, which is to provide for the security of the United States of America.
Well, do we need a traditional nuclear deterrence now, with the transition from the Russian threat to the threat of non-state actors and weapons of mass “disruption”, as you say? How feasible is a traditional, as we know it, nuclear deterrence today?
We’re on a very clear glide path to get down to lower and lower levels of nuclear weapons. One of my frustrations is, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years, and we still have a significantly large number of nuclear weapons out there. Do we need that many? Probably not. But when the Cold War ended, the loser didn’t really lose. In most other wars, you told the loser “You’re done, cut up your battleships, your planes, your tanks,” and that was the end of it. When the Cold War ended, we looked at each other like very seasoned, professional boxers eyeball-to-eyeball, we didn’t blink, we agreed the Cold War was over and we’d bring down our force levels, but the loser didn’t really lose. Now, we’re on this glide path to get to lower and lower levels. In my view, 20 years after the Cold War, we could be at much lower levels. We’ve made good progress, but there’s much progress left to be made. The reason why, in my view, we have nuclear weapons today is to deter other nuclear weapons. That’s the primary reason they have nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons will never go away, unfortunately. But that’s not to say we shouldn’t set a goal for getting zero nuclear weapons. What number will we get down to? 8 years ago, a reporter asked me that question, I said 600. 600 nuclear weapons in our arsenal should be enough to do what we need to do to deter nuclear weapons. Now, will we get down to that level? I would like to think so.
Speaking of the glide path, one issue that people always bring up is: how do we protect the discarded [nuclear/fissile] materials from disarmament and keep them from falling into the wrong hands, and how does the cost of that factor in?
The cost is miniscule compared to the consequences. And we’re going to great lengths to dismantle nuclear weapons. The Russians are going to great lengths to dismantle nuclear weapons. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the story, but 20% of the electrical energy produced in the US today is produced by nuclear energy. 20%, plus or minus a percentage point. Until very recently, 50% of all the rods used in nuclear reactors in the United States were from Soviet nuclear weapons. That’s mind-boggling. So if you looked at a ceiling with 100 light bulbs, 20 of them are being powered, theoretically, by nuclear power, and 10 of those by former Soviet plutonium and highly-enriched uranium. We’re continuing to support the Russians in dismantling their weapons. There are about 700-800 metric tons of fissile material out there in the world. Protecting that stuff is very, very critical. When I was at the Department of Energy, we were spending—and this was 10 years ago—about $1 billion a year to protect those fissile material assets. It’s a lot more now because of 9/11, but it’s just the price of admission. As a nuclear power, you have to protect that stuff. And the Russians understand the importance of that.
What do you think about the Obama administration’s foreign policy toward Iran and North Korea, specifically?
I’d rather not go there. Only because, I have gone to great lengths in the course of my professional career not to bash an administration. It’s just part of my professional ethic as a professional military guy not to throw grenades at people in office.
You have said people in Washington are saying that Pakistani weapons are safe and secure, and you expressed some misgivings about this…
Some skepticism.
Skepticism. What is the extent of the rift—is there a rift—between what the military, Washington and the media know about capabilities of nuclear powers in the world, and is the average American today getting what he needs to know?
Well, that’s an interesting point and I’d like to pursue that. During the mid-90s, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post made a big deal about loose nukes in Russia. I mean, a big, big deal. And it was not in the front page every day, but it was a recurring story. That’s one of the reasons I made my pitch to my Russian counterparts: “Let me go see what you’ve got. Let me go see what Nunn-Lugar has bought for you to secure your nuclear weapons and nuclear stockpile.” They finally got it. They let me in. They let me see. And if you Google me and you look at an interview I gave in the Pentagon around 1998, you’ll see I debunked this mystic rumor mill that there were loose nukes in Russia. Ain’t so. Now, I saw their accountability control mechanisms, I saw their facilities, I saw their troops that guard the materials, and there was a little bit of skepticism about the American media saying, “Habiger went out and saw Potemkin village and he didn’t really see the whole thing.” But when I came back and said I had been to this, this, this, and this facility, and this is what I saw, that kind of went away. But with the potential of a radical Islamic nuclear bomb in the hands of Pakistan, and virtually no exposure to how the Pakistanis are guarding those weapons except for very grandiose statements by the former president of Pakistan saying they have 10,000 troops guarding them and don’t worry about it, the media has remained blatantly silent on the issue. And if you compare Pakistan guarding nuclear weapons today and Russia guarding nuclear weapons in the mid-90s, the media has really screwed this one up, in my opinion.
Are there any emerging nuclear threats that perhaps we aren’t paying enough attention to? Or perhaps threats you could foresee emerging in 10-15 years that you would look back and say, “We probably should have paid more attention there?”
Predictions about emerging nuclear powers have been marginal at best. The scenario that scares me more than any anything else—and having gone to Israel, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and talking to senior leaders there about Iran getting a nuclear weapon—the biggest concern I heard was: if the Iranians get a nuclear weapon, and this was before the Arab Spring, Egypt and Turkey would probably start nuclear weapons programs, and the Saudis would go out and buy nuclear weapons. Now, you want to look at something very interesting, go to Google and look up “Saudi intermediate range missiles purchased from China.” That happened 20 years ago, and no one ever writes about it. The Saudis have these missiles that can cover the entire Middle East, they bought them from China, they’ve been sitting there, and what for? In my view, that gives credence to this notion that if the Iranians get a nuclear weapon, then the Saudis may go out and buy one or two or three or five, because they can afford to do that.
Obviously, no job in the military is light at all, but Commander in Chief of US Strategic Command seems like an especially stressful job. Talk a little about what kind of personality it takes to have that job and if there is a “day in the life” of that job or if that kind of regularity is a fantasy in that position?
You have to have a steady hand on the tiller, number one. Number two, you have to be extremely knowledgeable about what’s going on with your forces. You have to understand what’s going on in the international arena, in terms of what’s happening in North Korea and some of these transnational groups. In terms of being a stressful job, not really. In terms of worrying about the phone going off at 3 in the morning, that’s always a possibility, but it’s not something I lost any sleep over. The thing that concerned me more than anything else? I had a PowerPoint presentation that I showed visiting groups as they came to STRATCOM [US Strategic Command], and one of those slides listed “My Concerns as a Warfighter.” I still have a copy of it. And the number one concern was a suitcase nuclear device. That was my concern. And this was back in 1996. Not that I had any clairvoyance, but that was the thing that I saw as the greatest threat to the United States at that particular time, and I still consider that to be the greatest threat to the United States today.
