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From
MAD to madder in Genoa
By JONATHAN
POWER
July 18, 2001
LONDON - Time moves on so rapidly that policy makers
may forget that acronyms that were the common currency of
a decade or two ago are now nothing to younger people
today. Stop people in the street or even on the
university campus and ask what MAD means and you'll get a
glassy stare.
The leaders of the seven major Western countries
themselves, meeting this weekend in Genoa, are not that
well informed either. Most of them at the time of the
Cold War were immersed more in the domestic nitty gritty
of their countries; political advancement rarely came
from knowing the nuts and bolts of foreign and defence
policy.
Thus it is the civilian experts - the Donald Rumsfelds
of the world - who set the pace on these things and who
win their political prowess by playing unashamedly on the
deepest fears of an uninformed but easily worried
public.
MAD in its heyday was a useful concept. It said
something sophisticated to the political decision makers
and it rang bells with the public at large. It is the
acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction- that if you,
the enemy, set out to destroy my country with a nuclear
bombardment you will be destroyed too. It was codified by
Presidents Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, both Cold
War warriors, but shrewd enough to know when enough was
enough. Thus between them they created the Anti-
Ballistic Missile Treaty in an attempt to stabilise a
nuclear warhead competition that had got way out of
control.
The requirements of MAD had become relative, not
absolute. If one side seemed to be gaining a quantitative
or qualitative advantage in nuclear forces, the other had
to respond and arsenals went through the ceiling. The ABM
treaty put a stop to that. By foregoing national missile
defences the two countries made themselves openly
vulnerable to the other side. Deterrence- the threat of
total retaliation- was left as the dose of ice-cold water
that compelled both sides to abjure the use of nuclear
weapons.
Now Rumsfeld and his acolyte President George Bush
seem determined to put all this on one side. Strangely,
they argue that deterrence is no longer enough. What was
good for the goose of the Soviet Union is apparently not
good enough for the gander of North Korea or even China.
These states would not be rational like the old USSR,
they appear to argue. They would not fear total
retaliation. They are obviously a different breed of men
who have no fear.
But to unilaterally break a solemn international
treaty should be no easy matter and yet, despite the
chorus of criticism from nearly every American ally, Bush
and Rumsfeld have not only held steady to their plan for
missile defences they have now declared they are
accelerating it and the treaty will be breached in a
matter of months. Moreover, there is little sign of the
great cuts in nuclear armaments that Bush has averred are
the policy's corollary.
Bush and Rumsfeld are conceivably right to dismiss the
arguments of those who will say this will start a new
Cold War. Russia is now so reduced in stature it has a
national budget the same size as Belgium's. Its nuclear
forces are becoming nearly obsolete. And President
Vladimir Putin has wisely set his political sights on
becoming an accepted part of Europe. Yet this is only
part of it.
The other part is what happens to the chemistry of the
rest of the world when the one superpower unilitaterally
breaks one of the post war world's most solemn
international treaties, and does it for reasons that
everyone else judges are less than grave, if not trivial.
What does it do to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
that American presidents since Kennedy have struggled to
create and then to sustain? It is a treaty that has had a
profound effect, avoiding the proliferation of nuclear
weapons to most of the 30 or so countries that Kennedy
foresaw would have them by the end of the last
century.
If the ABM is torpedoed we should reasonably expect to
see the rapid spread of nuclear weapons' states- immature
ones with poor command and control and weak supervision
of nuclear materials that can be easily trafficked to
terrorist groups. Thus, the launch of a program of U.S.
national missile defences will create the very problem
that it sets out to head off. Even now there is a
honourable way out. It is to concentrate less on a
national missile defence for continental America, which
is a vast and unbelievably costly undertaking, and
concentrate instead on theatre missile defences i.e.
where U.S. troops overseas are threatened or where
friendly but small allies are threatened in the course of
a war by missiles, as was Israel during the Gulf War and
Taiwan could be during a conflict with China. There are
some inside the Pentagon who have argued for this.
More important, President Putin has argued a form of
this- concentrating on destroying missiles shortly after
the point of take-off. This is both easier to do and it
speaks more to current issues- short-range missiles that
pose far greater threats to U.S. allies and American
forces abroad than missiles able to reach U.S. soil.
Neither do theatre defences give the Russians and the
Chinese the impression that the U.S. is trying to
neutralize the potential effectiveness of their
intercontinental nuclear forces, which in turn would make
it less necessary for India (and then Pakistan) to build
itself an ever larger nuclear armoury.
Cooperation with Russia is everything- not to avoid
all out nuclear war between enemies- that is long past-
but to avoid an accidental launch of an antiquated
unreliable Russian nuclear missile kept on a hair trigger
alert. And to continue the under-reported Cooperative
Threat Reduction Programmes with Russia.
By the end of 2000 this joint American-Russian effort
had secured the deactivation of 5,014 Russian nuclear
warheads, destroyed 407 intercontinental missiles and 366
missile silos, eliminated 68 strategic bombers and 256
launchers from ballistic missile-carrying submarines, and
destroyed 17 ballistic missile submarines and 204
long-range cruise missiles.
Bush and Rumsfeld, despite all they say, are leading
us all into a dangerous new world of unlimited MAD. What
does it take to stop them? This surely is the big
question for this weekend's summit. The leaders of the
Seven have to find an answer - or allow us to be driven
madder.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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