Can
either Bush or Gore
bring about nuclear disarmament?
By JONATHAN
POWER
September 13, 2000
LONDON - "It was a famous victory" of large
proportions - of that there can be no doubt. President
Bill Clinton's announcement that he was not going to be
rushed into implementing a national anti-ballistic
missile defence drew not only plaudits from Russia and
China which were threatened by it, but from India,
Britain and Germany, among many others, all of whom
thought from their differing perspectives that it would
upset the balance of power in pursuit of a purpose that
was at best unproved, at worst ill-thought out and which
had all the ingredients of a nasty back-fire when there
were other ways of reaching the same end.
One last word should be added before the issue leaves
the front pages and awaits resurrection, hopefully in new
form, under a new president- there is nothing wrong with
anti-missile defence, if nuclear disarmament is moving
apace. If nuclear weapons were reduced to very low levels
missile defences could act as a hedge against cheating
and a surprise attack.
The overriding issue- nuclear disarmament- can now
return to centre stage. For most of the Clinton
presidency it has remained a bit player caught between
Senator Jesse Helms' unpleasant combination of
ideological bigotry and lack of political foresight and
Mr Clinton's insouciance created out of the political
imperative for a draft- dodger president to be speaking
terms with the military-industrial complex. The next
president has to ask himself: who are our enemies and by
whom are we seriously threatened? If communism is dead in
Russia then not only the Cold War is dead, which everyone
accepts, then its corollary, nuclear deterrence, should
also be dead. There is just no plausible reason why the
country that is almost the poorest in Europe, so
impoverished that it cannot pay its soldiers or keep its
submarines, planes or rockets in working order should be
artificially resuscitated by out-of-work Cold War
warriors into being a current mortal threat.
If Russia and the U.S. got serious about nuclear
disarmament then China, Britain, France, and even India
and Pakistan would find the pressure to follow suit next
to irresistible. But it all depends on the incumbent of
the White House. President Vladimir Putin cannot wait to
begin serious cuts as the recent, in the end public,
argument inside the hierarchy of the Russian military
made clear.
The chances seem mixed, depending on which way you
hold the U.S. presidential candidates up to the light.
George W. Bush is another Vietnam-avoider who compensates
by being hawkier-than-thou. He surrounds himself with old
school hard-liners such as ex-Defence Secretary Richard
Cheney who the then chairman of the joint chiefs of
staff, Colin Powell, once had to take to task for raising
the matter of the possible use of nuclear arms against
Iraq. The joker in Bush's pack is indeed none other than
General Powell who is tipped to be Secretary of State in
a Bush Administration. Although tight-lipped during this
campaign he has long been an ardent nuclear disarmer.
Al Gore as vice-president has been regarded as a
friend of the Pentagon. Yet he is capable, on occasion,
of being his father's son - who at the time of Vietnam
argued that might did not grow out of the barrel of the
gun and who allied himself with his fellow southern
senator from Arkansas, William Fulbright who preached
about America's "arrogance of power". Indeed there are
enough people who have held high office both in the
military and the State Department that a president Gore
could appoint plausibly to the most senior positions who
are convinced that U.S. nuclear force levels could come
down from thousands to dozens, if not to zero.
We are already paying a heavy price for Clinton's
inaction. It has undoubtedly slowed the forces of
progress in Russia, handing Russia's own anti-disarmament
lobby cards they never deserved to have. It has slowed,
too, the nevertheless quite remarkable progress that has
been made in a joint U.S.-Russian effort to dismantl
Russian and Ukranian nuclear weapons, to remove stocks of
plutonium and to re-deploy Soviet-era military research
scientists in new directions. Without question it helped
provoke India and Pakistan to make the move to be open
nuclear weapons powers. It broke a solemn agreement by
Russia, the U.S., France and Britain, made in 1995, to
initiate a timed programme for eliminating nuclear
weapons, which besides setting a bad example to the likes
of Iraq and Iran has undermined the huge effort of the
International Atomic Energy Agency to bring into force an
enhanced nuclear safeguards regime around the world. It
has certainly pushed China to increase its nuclear
capability, which is another pressure on India to develop
its.
Not least , by passing up the great once in a lifetime
chance, with the fall of European communism, to bring a
sense of peace and stability to the world, it has
undermined the harmony that prevailed on the UN Security
Council in the time of the last two years of Mikhail
Gorbachev and the first year or so of Boris Yeltsin,
during the presidency of George Bush. If Clinton had
devoted himself to single-mindedly building on that,
today's world would be unrecognizably different from the
volatile, uncertain, often dangerous place it now is. It
is fair to surmise there would never have been the
division of opinion that has stymied the Security Council
on such issues as disarming Iraq or the civil wars of
ex-Yugoslavia. UN peace-keeping, especially in Africa,
would have been both more coherent and more vigorous.
The U.S. presidential campaign isn't going to much
address these questions. Alas, foreign policy is low on
the electorate's agenda. But the issues hang in the air.
And if I were allowed on word of advice to the candidates
it would be to say "it's never too late". Russia has a
new young and highly intelligent president. On foreign
policy he has shown a great deal of flexibility, as in
his useful intervention in North Korea and with the joint
U.S.- Russian statement this week on the future of the
UN. This, after the interlude of the late Yeltsin years,
is a man that Washington "can do business with". Under
Clinton and Yeltsin the world watched its chances for
peace and security whittled and dribbled away. Bush or
Gore both have at their fingertips the knowledge and the
power of appointment to remedy this situation. For them
and for us, it is this subject, more than any other, that
will decide whether our planet is a reasonably safe place
to dwell in.
I can be reached by phone +44
385 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By
JONATHAN POWER
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