Nuclear
Armaments Should
Have Had Their Day
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- It's almost exactly one year
since General George Lee Butler made his confessional
statement before the National Press Club in Washington--that
as commander in chief of the U.S. Strategic Command which
controls all navy and airforce nuclear weapons he'd had
moral qualms and profound doubts about America's possession
of nuclear weapons. The speech triggered an avalanche of
supportive phone calls and letters from all over the world.
This led General Butler to conclude that he could "discern
the makings of an emerging global concensus that the risks
posed by nuclear weapons far outweigh the presumed
benefits".
Yet barely a month passed before
General Butler realized that for all this initial enthusiasm
the heavyweight critics in the political, military and
journalistic establishments were not impressed. They had, he
said later, "sniffed imperiously at the goal of elimination,
aired their stock Cold War rhetoric, hurled a personal
epithet or two and settled smugly back into their world of
exaggerated threats and bygone enemies". These were General
Butler's thoughts last Christmas.
To get them in perspective we need to
cast back our thoughts to Christmas, 1950. President Harry
Truman had just written in his diary that he feared World
War III was imminent, as North Korean and Chinese troops
threatened to plunge into South Korea. On Christmas Eve
General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander of the UN
force, sent Washington a list of targets for which he needed
34 atomic bombs.
Since then the world has come
perilously close to nuclear war a number of times and the
risk of accidental war has been drawn attention to not just
by the peaceniks but by such illustrious Cold War warriors
as senior Reagan arms advisors, Fred Ikle and Paul Nitze.
The post Cold War era is even more dangerous than the actual
one. It is increasingly evident that Russian missiles are
ill-maintained and that the command and control system is
not as secure as it was in Soviet times. Moreover, other
countries, with less expertise and experience, are rapidly
developing their nuclear arsenals. As General Butler has
asked, "Will history judge that the Cold War was a sort of
modern-day Trojan Horse, whereby nuclear weapons were
smuggled into the life of the world and made an acceptable
part of the way the world works?" We have been led, he says,
to "think about the unthinkable, justify the unjustifiable
and rationalize the irrational."
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of our
warped thinking is that nations cling to the impossible
notion that at the same time they have the ability to
threaten others with impunity they can tell the rest of the
world that proliferation must be contained.
We saw this last week in Brussels when
the American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright addressed
her colleagues to the effect that the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction is "the most overriding security
interest of our time." She went on to argue that the
struggle to keep such weapons from falling into the wrong
hands could be seen as the new "unifying threat" that binds
the alliance in the twenty-first century.
But Mrs. Albright does not ask herself
why the sauce that is good for the goose is not good for the
gander. What exactly is the U.S. doing, what exactly are its
nuclear allies, Britain and France, doing to set a plausible
example of the imperative to do away with weapons of mass
destruction? The policeman has no moral authority if he is
stealing and raping too.
President Bill Clinton loves to say at
regular intervals, "for the first time since the dawn of the
nuclear age, there is not a single Russian missile pointed
at America's children." This is an absurdly facile remark.
Within minutes both Russia and the U.S. could program their
missiles to aim at each other and could fire off 5,000
strategic missiles within half an hour. We live every day on
a hair trigger and meanwhile negociations about bringing
these numbers down are stymied by an impasse in the Russian
Duma whose parliamentarians refuse to ratify the latest
nuclear arms reduction treaty (START 2), a political freeze
that took hold when Senator Jesse Helms managed to delay
ratification in the U.S. Senate.
The best ploy is to skate round this
ice block. Clinton could start off a process of reciprocal
unilateral action with President Boris Yeltsin--first, to
take their nuclear missiles off their accident prone
launch-on-warning posture. The U.S. should take the first
step, since America's second strike power is far superior to
Russia's--the U.S. has 2,000 invulnerable warheads on
submarines at sea compared with Russia's 200 mobile
missiles.
Second, Washington should come to
terms with the fact that Moscow is already engaged in a form
of unilateral nuclear disarmament, albeit an unwilling one.
Russian missiles almost literally are beginning to rust in
their silos. Improperly maintained, their condition is
visibly deteriorating. Washington should offer to match this
de facto unilateral disarmament with its own. These two
initiatives would do much to loosen the deadlock in the Duma
and get mainstream disarmament back on the fast track.
Until the process of U.S./Russian
nuclear disarmament picks up speed it would be wiser if
Washington shelved its rhetoric about nuclear proliferation.
Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw
stones--especially at Christmas.
December 24,
1997, LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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