More
imagination needed
if we are to control the
spread of nuclear weapons
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
December 8, 2004
LONDON - Imagine for a moment that
the U.S. gave up all its nuclear weapons, a totally
farfetched idea but one supported by such luminaries as
former secretary for defense, Robert McNamara, the late
Paul Nitze, Ronald Reagan's hard-line negotiator on
nuclear arms and General George Lee Butler, the former
chief of U.S. strategic (i.e. nuclear) forces. As his
successor, General Eugene Habiger, has said, "We have
reached the point where the senior military generals
responsible for nuclear forces are advocating more
vocally, more vehemently, than our politicians, to get
down to lower and lower weapons".
But imagine if it did happen what
effect this would have on Russia. It would then move
immediately to close down its decaying early warning
system and its hair-trigger nuclear posture, which former
senator Sam Nunn sees as a likely cause of accidental
nuclear war. Imagine what effect it would have on Iran,
Syria, Saudi Arabia and Japan that are all in one way or
another laying the groundwork for going rapidly nuclear,
if their leaders give a clear decision. Imagine what it
would do to Pakistan and India who if they could mend
their fences on Kashmir might then find nuclear
disarmament a logical next step. Imagine what China would
do, a country that although nuclear, has never developed
its arsenal to its full potential. That would leave North
Korea, Israel, Britain and France. Lo and behold these
four might then feel the wind of world opinion and disarm
too.
All this is day dreaming. If it
were so easy to happen it would have happened when
Gorbachev and Reagan were in power. Indeed they tried at
their summit in Reykjavik but were pounced upon by their
advisers who warned them they might be impeached. As
George Perkovich has observed in Foreign Affairs, even
presidents find it hard to change the status quo given
"their reluctance to challenge Washington's odd couple of
Pentagon bureaucrats and myopic and doctrinaire
senators".
Bill Clinton gave up the ghost on
this battle at an early stage in his presidency but
George W. Bush is an interesting and more complicated
case. His father was a bit of a nuclear disarmer,
unilaterally taking off alert all bombers, 450 Minuteman
missiles and ten submarines. In 2002 he tried to persuade
President Vladimir Putin to agree to a major reduction of
nuclear arms on a handshake. In the end the deal was done
with one sheet of paper and, calming the Senate hawks, by
only putting the weapons in storage
All but unreported upon, Bush has
been using the power of the UN Security Council, a body
that he is supposed to detest and distrust, to introduce
what Chaim Braun and Christopher Chyba in the current
issue of Harvard University's "International Security"
have described as "a remarkable new approach to global
enforcement of non-proliferation
requirements".
In April this year the Security
Council imposed an expansion of export controls on all
the countries of the world, compelling nations to make
proliferation a criminal offence. This short cut the need
for a new time consuming treaty and if it had been put in
place before would not have allowed President Pervez
Musharraf to pardon his rogue chief weapons' scientist
who turned his country's nuclear program into a personal
money making machine.
Yet three months after that UN vote
the Bush administration paradoxically announced a major
shift in policy toward the important negotiations on a
Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. It decided it would
oppose the treaty's verification provisions, a move which
while protecting America's serets would protect everyone
else's. The treaty has been in discussion since 1993 and
its central idea is a simple one: by capping the
production of fissile material for nuclear weapons it
would prohibit the further manufacture of nuclear
weapons.
This would make irreversible the
reductions already made by the big powers; it would cap
the arsenals of China, France and Britain; and
effectively rein in the programs of India, Israel and
Pakistan, even though these three haven't signed the
Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Not least, it might
have some appeal to Iran, North Korea, Japan, Syria and
Saudi Arabia- although it would render illegal their
attempts to produce weapons-useable fissile material they
would earn the satisfaction of knowing that they would
not be overtaken by what a UN report recently warned
might be a "cascade" of new nuclear weapons'
states.
The Administration's somersault on
verification make it difficult to conclude a satisfactory
treaty. Likewise its opposition to a Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty and its desire to build new weapons that can
penetrate underground bunkers are working against its own
non-proliferation urges.
If the U.S. is to gain the world's
credibility and its support in his dealings with the
likes of Iran and North Korea, Bush has to pull some more
of his surprises out of the hat.
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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