Missed opportunities
on abolishing nuclear weapons
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF
Associate since 1991
Comments directly to
JonatPower@aol.com
November 22, 2007
LONDON - Over coffee this morning I was telling a friend that I was going to write about nuclear weapons. As I explained a couple of my thoughts to her she said I went white. I countered that’s why we prefer not to think about the unthinkable or, if we do, we do we try to do it without thinking. Probably I do blanche but I am not alone. Richard Rhodes, the Pullitzer prize winning author, in his book published last month, “Arsenals of Folly”, recounts how President Ronald Reagan, who preferred information that he imbibed visually, viewed one morning the film “The Day After”, about a nuclear attack on Lawrence, Kansas, a quiet university town in the hilly eastern part of the state. Reagan wrote that the film “left me greatly depressed”, the only time in his diary he confessed to that emotion.
Soon after, Reagan was given a briefing on the consequence of a nuclear war. Officials at the same meeting reported that the president became withdrawn. Caspar Weinberger, the defence secretary, attested that the president had found it a terribly disturbing experience.
So it was that at the summit in Reykjavik with the reforming Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, the two of them came as close as two antagonistic leaders have ever done to agreeing to abolish all nuclear weapons.
For the first time, thanks to Rhodes’ diligent research, we have a near verbatim record of the conversations of the two leaders plus an immense amount of the background negotiations by high powered advisors from both sides, most of whom were coolly “professional” enough not to think of consequences and preferred to think of numbers, balance and advantages. The most morally self-contained of all was Richard Perle, the assistant secretary of defence, who was the hawk among hawks and who used the credibility earned by his formidable intelligence to persuade Reagan at the last minute to pull back from closing the deal. It remains a mystery why Reagan, despite his impulse to close the deal, allowed Perle to bend his ear- perhaps he knew that if Perle was not convinced the Senate or the mass of voters never would be either. And it remains a mystery why Gorbachev was so insistent that a total ban must include limiting research on Reagan’s pet baby, the Strategic Defence Initiative, only to the laboratory As Andre Sakharov, the Soviet physicist, informed Gorbachev, SDI would be a “Maginot line in space- expensive and ineffective.”
After both presidents had retired, Reagan and Nancy invited Gorbachev and Raisa to stay on their ranch in California. That was a conversation without records, but certainly worth imagining and thinking about- the reminiscing of two men who at one time felt the other represented an aggressive “evil empire”, out to pull off the coup de grace of a pre-emptive nuclear war, who gradually became convinced through their meetings that the other was sincere about total and quick nuclear disarmament. As the only remaining survivor of the foursome, Gorbachev should be encouraged to write about it, before the memory is extinct.
If Reykjavik did not produce the goods it did change the climate between the two superpowers. It produced soon after the agreement to abolish intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe, the first treaty ever to eliminate a whole class of nuclear weapons, and it encouraged President George Bush Sr to unilaterally get rid of all American tactical nuclear weapons. Gorbachev immediately responded with far-reaching initiatives of his own.
But once Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush senior were off the scene momentum on nuclear disarmament was dissipated. Clinton and to a lesser extent Yeltsin didn’t give it time or priority. President George W. Bush made an initial gesture by proposing a treaty-less major cut in strategic nuclear weapons, but weakened the result by placing the weapons in storage rather than destroying them.
Meanwhile, the remaining Russian missiles literally rust and rot in the silos, poorly serviced and maintained, a form of unwilling disarmament. Nevertheless, Georgi Arbatov, a close Gorbachev foreign advisor, who persuaded Gorbachev to drop the old Soviet policy of confrontation and instead adopt Olof Palme’s notion of “Common Security”, wants Russia to engage in willing unilateral disarmament. “We have so many weapons we could decrease the numbers unilaterally and show an example”, he told me recently, “ We could dismantle our rockets and take others off alert and the Americans would be obliged to follow us.”
If Iran is ever to be persuaded that it should forgo nuclear weapons the promise made by the nuclear powers in the negotiations renewing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to make a substantial reduction in their numbers of nuclear missiles has to be realized. If Iran goes nuclear the genie will be truly out of the bag, especially in the volatile Middle East. Then even Richard Perle, if he is able to think properly about it, might blanche.
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan
Power
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Jonathan Power can be
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Jonathan
Power
2007 Book
Conundrums
of Humanity
The Quest for Global Justice
“Conundrums
of Humanity” poses eleven questions for our future progress, ranging
from “Can we diminish War?” to “How far and fast can
we push forward the frontiers of Human Rights?” to “Will
China dominate the century?”
The answers to these questions, the author believes, growing out of
his long experience as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the
International Herald Tribune, are largely positive ones, despite the
hurdles yet to be overcome. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, London, 2007.
William Pfaff, September 17, 2007
Jonathan Power's book "Conundrums" - A Review
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