U.S.
policy of nuclear weapons
go into the mire
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
February 6, 2005
LONDON - The
sixtieth anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of
Auschwitz is barely over when we are reminded of Russia's
determination to make the 60th anniversary of the Soviet
conquest of German-occupied Eastern Europe into another
world event. Hard on its heels during the summer will be
one other important 60th anniversary - the first and only
use of nuclear weapons on the cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
And this year will mark the
fortieth anniversary of the opening of the negotiations
on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the twentieth
anniversary of the ice-breaking summit in Geneva of
presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that laid
the ground for their subsequent summit in Reykjavik when
the two of them drove their advisors to the brink of
despair with their intimate discussions on how they might
get rid of all nuclear weapons.
In May there will be a review
meeting of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a treaty
that for all its flaws has been instrumental in keeping
the number of nuclear-armed powers in single digits, much
less than the 20-30 foreseen by President John F.
Kennedy. Last November, a group appointed by the UN's
Secretary General, including Brent Scowcroft, the former
National Security Advisor to President George Bush
senior, warned against a coming "cascade of
proliferation" and argued that the nuclear-have powers
need to honor the central bargain of the NPT treaty and
engage in nuclear disarmament in return for the rest of
the world abjuring the pursuit of nuclear
weapons.
Alarmingly, the usually reliable
Kyodo news agency of Japan, recently reported that, "The
U.S. plans to suggest that the [NPT review
conference] should invalidate a document adopted at
the 2000 meeting in which the five [major]
nuclear weapons' powers committed themselves to an
"unequivocal undertaking" to a nuclear-free world,
according to U.S. government and congressional
sources."
If this is so it comes as no
surprise.
The Bush administration after its
initial effort to lower the U.S. and Russian arsenals by
putting hundreds of warheads in storage has not followed
it up by either more disarmament, an effort to take the
remaining nuclear missiles off hair trigger alert, nor an
adequate joint effort to neutralize and secure Soviet-era
plutonium and enriched uranium that both sides are
supposed to be working on together. It appears that
Washington now plans to be honest about its intentions -
it wants to re-write its public and often re-stated
pledge to nuclear disarm.
It has a certain crude logic. Why
should the U.S. keep its side of the bargain when North
Korea, Libya, Iran, and maybe Saudi Arabia and Syria, all
signatories (or in North Korea's case ex-signatory) of
the NPT have taken steps to develop nuclear
weapons?
The danger is that instead of being
left with a more honest NPT we might be left at the end
of the day with no NPT at all. For long enough the
original nuclear-have powers were able to keep the
restive rest of the world in line by pointing to the
steady if slow progress made by the SALT and START
negotiations of the superpowers, together with the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the progress towards
the writing of the Comprehensive Test
Since a Republican Congress
rebuffed the attempt of the Clinton Administration to
ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty the momentum has
been reversed. The Bush administration has withdrawn from
the politically stabilizing Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty, has spent a fortune on starting to construct an
apparently irrelevant anti-missile defense (there is no
defense against a suitcase bomb) and is pouring money
into developing new types of nuclear weapons.
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Moreover, U.S. nuclear policy is
rapidly becoming not just self-defeating but incoherent.
When it first became clear in 1994 that North Korea had
perhaps developed a nuclear weapon or two Republicans
went ballistic with the likes of Henry Kissinger and
Robert Gates demanding that President Bill Clinton use
force to disarm North Korea. Now, after four years of
huffing and puffing by a Republican Administration,
Washington seems to have become if not passive, at least
resigned to the status quo. At the same time, it is
ratcheting up its military threats against Iran, even
though Iran is a hundred times more open a society than
North Korea and the one thing that gives its hard-liners
popular support is this kind of American bluster. With
neither does it understand that carrots must be on the
menu.
Hindsight should give us some
foresight. For the fight to continue so that there will
never be another Hiroshima we need to make sure that the
NPT with its central and crucial promise is kept intact,
indeed strengthened.
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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