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