An Opening at
Long Last for Nuclear Disarmament
By JONATHAN
POWER
December 16, 1998
LONDON--One of the greatest ironies of our fin de
siecle age is that arms control in the post Cold War
dispensation has been much more frozen than it was during
the superpower permafrost itself.
Then there was SALT and START, the acronyms of nuclear
arms limits and cuts and, arguably most important of all,
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But since START 2 was
signed in 1993 the only positive element working towards
pushing forward the frontiers of arms control has been H20*
and O2*-- in common parlance rust. Russian missiles are
literally rusting in their silos with the unforeseen result
that even the Pentagon's top brass are becoming uneasy that
this gives the U.S. such superiority in the (workable)
missile count that to spend even more money on renewing and
modernising the U.S. arsenal to maintain the numbers allowed
under START 2 is to throw money away.
Rust has achieved what intellectual argument failed to
do. This last couple of months it has become clear that the
log jam in the Russian Duma, that has held up ratification
of START 2 for six years, is now going to break.
Ratification could well be voted on before the end of the
year. And Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State,
has announced that Washington is now ready for START 3 and a
further sharp reduction in nuclear missiles. Thus the
missiles on each side would come down in two quick stages
from around 6,000 to around 3,000 to around 2,000, still
more than enough, if used, to effectively destroy both
sides. Meanwhile, both Washington and Moscow keep their
rockets on a hair trigger.
One can look back over these six years of wasted
opportunity and pinpoint certain political reasons for
stalemate--Senator Jesse Helms holding up ratification of
START 2 in the U.S. Senate and thus giving room for
manoeuvre to like-minded Neanderthals in the Duma. President
Boris Yeltsin's original intention had been to put
ratification on a "fast track" in the summer of 1993. But
that was sabotaged by his enemy at the time the (later
deposed) Supreme Soviet chairman, Rusian Khasbulatov, who
made ratification conditional on firing the pro-western
foreign minister, Andre Kozyrev. Since then a combination of
communists and nationalists have easily been able to block
Yeltsin's modest efforts to start the ball rolling
again.
Yet this political history does not adequately explain
the lack of momentum for two countries who are no longer
supposed to be antagonists. It is nearer the truth to
observe that the establishments on both sides are loath to
renounce what distinguishes them from the rest of the
world's nations (though with some strong dissension at least
on the American side, for example from General George Lee
Butler, the former head of the U.S.'s nuclear forces). This,
of course, is equally true of Britain, France and China, the
other long established nuclear armed countries. Nuclear
missiles are simply the currency of contemporary power.
When president Jimmy Carter's national security advisor,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, told me in an interview that in an
all-out nuclear war only "about 10% of humanity would be
killed--descriptively and analytically its not the end of
humanity" he was widely attacked. Soviet president Leonid
Brezhnev took him to task for breaking the implicit
understanding between Moscow and Washington that nuclear war
was too terrible to contemplate. Yet the truth is that that
remark reflected the concensus that existed and still exists
in the military heirarchy on both sides.
When a debate erupted just before the Gulf War began on
whether or not America was prepared to use tactical nuclear
weapons if Iraq was able to bog the allies down in a land
offensive at the same time it was intimidating Israeli
cities with chemical and biological weapons only President
Francois Mitterand of France said unambigously, "I say no to
that".
Nuclear weapons ARE considered usable. This is why the
moral and thus political leverage against newcomer nuclear
powers, India and Pakistan, is non-existent. No one in the
West has a satisfactory answer to why the sauce that is good
for the goose is not good for the gander.
This is why, even if SALT 3 goes ahead, the superpowers
are still a long way from being able to make any impact on
what they say is their greatest worry, the danger of further
nuclear proliferation--today the Indian subcontinent,
tomorrow Iran and North Korea and who knows after that?
Japan and Saudi Arabia?
Thus it was time overdue for a major figure in a major
western government to raise the question never before posed
by a NATO government--is not the best way of tackling the
threat of rogue states armed with weapons of mass
destruction to "create a climate of disarmament"? This was
Joschka Fischer at the recent meeting of NATO foreign
ministers. He also argued for NATO to forgo its
long-standing doctrine of the first use of nuclear weapons--
that is, using them before the other side does. Although
such views have been argued for the best part of two decades
by such figures as former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert
McNamara, the new German government was savaged by
Washington. The present Secretary of Defense, William Cohen,
practically took over a press conference with his German
counterpart, Rudolf Scharping, to publically force feed him
the "correct" position.
First use? Who is deceiving who? Four thousand
nukes--what for? Mr Fischer's dissent needs to be built on.
We can no longer be party to what historian E.P. Thompson
described as allowing "The unthinkable to become thinkable
without thinking".
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and
e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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