LONDON–One of the greatest ironies of our fin de siecle age is that arms control in the post Cold War dispensation has been much more frozen than it was during the superpower permafrost itself.
Then there was SALT and START, the acronyms of nuclear arms limits and cuts and, arguably most important of all, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But since START 2 was signed in 1993 the only positive element working towards pushing forward the frontiers of arms control has been H20* and O2*– in common parlance rust. Russian missiles are literally rusting in their silos with the unforeseen result that even the Pentagon’s top brass are becoming uneasy that this gives the U.S. such superiority in the (workable) missile count that to spend even more money on renewing and modernising the U.S. arsenal to maintain the numbers allowed under START 2 is to throw money away.
Rust has achieved what intellectual argument failed to do. This last couple of months it has become clear that the log jam in the Russian Duma, that has held up ratification of START 2 for six years, is now going to break. Ratification could well be voted on before the end of the year. And Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State, has announced that Washington is now ready for START 3 and a further sharp reduction in nuclear missiles. Thus the missiles on each side would come down in two quick stages from around 6,000 to around 3,000 to around 2,000, still more than enough, if used, to effectively destroy both sides. Meanwhile, both Washington and Moscow keep their rockets on a hair trigger.
One can look back over these six years of wasted opportunity and pinpoint certain political reasons for stalemate–Senator Jesse Helms holding up ratification of START 2 in the U.S. Senate and thus giving room for manoeuvre to like-minded Neanderthals in the Duma. President Boris Yeltsin’s original intention had been to put ratification on a “fast track” in the summer of 1993. But that was sabotaged by his enemy at the time the (later deposed) Supreme Soviet chairman, Rusian Khasbulatov, who made ratification conditional on firing the pro-western foreign minister, Andre Kozyrev. Since then a combination of communists and nationalists have easily been able to block Yeltsin’s modest efforts to start the ball rolling again.
Yet this political history does not adequately explain the lack of momentum for two countries who are no longer supposed to be antagonists. It is nearer the truth to observe that the establishments on both sides are loath to renounce what distinguishes them from the rest of the world’s nations (though with some strong dissension at least on the American side, for example from General George Lee Butler, the former head of the U.S.’s nuclear forces). This, of course, is equally true of Britain, France and China, the other long established nuclear armed countries. Nuclear missiles are simply the currency of contemporary power.
When president Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, told me in an interview that in an all-out nuclear war only “about 10% of humanity would be killed–descriptively and analytically its not the end of humanity” he was widely attacked. Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev took him to task for breaking the implicit understanding between Moscow and Washington that nuclear war was too terrible to contemplate. Yet the truth is that that remark reflected the concensus that existed and still exists in the military heirarchy on both sides.
When a debate erupted just before the Gulf War began on whether or not America was prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons if Iraq was able to bog the allies down in a land offensive at the same time it was intimidating Israeli cities with chemical and biological weapons only President Francois Mitterand of France said unambigously, “I say no to that”.
Nuclear weapons ARE considered usable. This is why the moral and thus political leverage against newcomer nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, is non-existent. No one in the West has a satisfactory answer to why the sauce that is good for the goose is not good for the gander.
This is why, even if SALT 3 goes ahead, the superpowers are still a long way from being able to make any impact on what they say is their greatest worry, the danger of further nuclear proliferation–today the Indian subcontinent, tomorrow Iran and North Korea and who knows after that? Japan and Saudi Arabia?
Thus it was time overdue for a major figure in a major western government to raise the question never before posed by a NATO government–is not the best way of tackling the threat of rogue states armed with weapons of mass destruction to “create a climate of disarmament”? This was Joschka Fischer at the recent meeting of NATO foreign ministers. He also argued for NATO to forgo its long-standing doctrine of the first use of nuclear weapons– that is, using them before the other side does. Although such views have been argued for the best part of two decades by such figures as former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, the new German government was savaged by Washington. The present Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, practically took over a press conference with his German counterpart, Rudolf Scharping, to publically force feed him the “correct” position.
First use? Who is deceiving who? Four thousand nukes–what for? Mr Fischer’s dissent needs to be built on. We can no longer be party to what historian E.P. Thompson described as allowing “The unthinkable to become thinkable without thinking”.
