LONDON- Couldn’t the contestants in the U.S. presidential primaries toss us in the rest of the world just one crumb? For example, in this foreign policy starved contest, a serious discussion about whether they are planning, if elected, to make a unilateral abrogation of one of most important international treaties in existence, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. It was negotiated and signed on behalf of the U.S. and the Soviet Union by presidents Nixon and Brezhnev and described ever since by presidents on both sides as “the cornerstone of the strategic relationship”.
One would perhaps think that the electors of the world’s single superpower might press the candidates on this point, not just because a good part of the rest of the world is hanging on an answer, but because it will profoundly affect their own country’s relationship not just with Russia but with China and Europe. Indeed, one could add with India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Israel – all the other nuclear or would-be nuclear powers. At the moment it looks as if the American electors are hell bent on allowing their country to shoot itself in the foot with nuclear weapons.
But the fact is the issue is barely mentioned. Neither has there been much talk about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty shot down in flames last year by the Senate, despite Vice-President Al Gore’s promise that he would immediately pick up the ball and run with it. Moreover, this was supposed to be a solid promise made to Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, who’d personally campaigned for it.
We all know there is a peculiar insouciance about Bill Clinton’s attitude to nuclear disarmament. Long gone is the fervour that was brought to the subject by presidents as disparate as Carter and Reagan. Clinton has spent little energy either on engaging the Russians or on educating American opinion on the need to rid the world of weapons developed for a purpose that no longer exists, the need to deter communist aggrandizement. Without the leadership of the Cold War’s victor, the rest of the world, from Britain to Iran, from Israel to Pakistan, has blithely continued on its long-laid tracks of justifying its own nuclear ambitions, without regard to either the consequences, the morality or its own real needs.
Such carelessness must not be allowed by the next U.S. administration to become provocation. And it would quite simply be provocation of the most short-sighted and counterproductive kind to break up a treaty that the Russian people have been bottle fed by successive U.S. and Soviet/Russian administrations to believe it was the one thing that made a nuclear holocaust unlikely.
The ABM treaty says in effect: “We both agree not to protect our cities against nuclear attack. Therefore we know a nuclear exchange would be a calamity. Therefore it won’t happen.” Once that treaty is abrogated, as the U.S. starts to try (it cannot, but that is another matter) to protect its cities with a so-called missile shield, the Russians, already reeling from defeat in the Cold War, followed by the expansion of Nato almost up to their doorstep, will be easily convinced, since they cannot afford a similar shield, that the U.S., even if doesn’t try to bump Russia off, will use this to its political advantage.
And for what? What do American policymakers from Bill Clinton to George Bush junior think they will get out of this? What is it that makes them think they are right, when even Washington’s closest allies in Europe think they are wrong? It is trumpeted as a defence not against Russia or China, the traditional enemies who are no longer supposed to be enemies, but as a protection from North Korea, Iran and Iraq who, it is said, within a few years will have the ability to lob a missile at least to Alaska, and perhaps one day to Chicago or Seattle.
This begs a whole lot of questions. Question one: are these countries so suicidal they have no fear of revenge? Question two: if they are fearless, then what are they waiting for? Why do they bother with developing, if they can, a long range missile? Wouldn’t a bomb in suitcase smuggled ashore on one of the many boats running drugs into America suffice?
Question three: Why is the U.S. so sure that these countries have such evil intent? Its diplomatic efforts with North Korea have progressed so amazingly well that the U.S. is now considering taking the country off its list of terroristic countries. Iran is just about to elect a liberal-minded parliament in a free vote and should be far easier to woo than North Korea. After all, its moment of confrontation with the U.S. over the hostages is now a generation old. As for Iraq, deterrence and sanctions take a heavy toll, and will continue to, inspections or no inspections.
The truth is there are two and only two likely nuclear flash points in the world we inhabit – and that is likely to remain so for the forseeable future. One, and the most likely, is Pakistan and India. The pity is one can say with more or less absolute certainty that if the U.S. had made nuclear disarmament its priority at the Cold War’s end neither of these two countries would have gone openly nuclear. The second flash point is the U.S. and Russia. The overriding danger, however, is not an intentional nuclear war, as it was in the old days, it is an accidental one. So many experts, from former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to the general formerly in charge of all U.S. nuclear weapons, George Lee Butler, have warned of the grave seriousness of this danger, one that worsens as the missiles and their control systems physically deteriorate in Russia.
If Ronald Reagan had got his way with his subordinates at his summit in Reykjavik with Mikhail Gorbachev, massive, large-scale, nuclear disarmament would have even begun in the Cold War era. One could imagine, if he were well, how scandalized he would be by the present drift of U.S. opinion. Tragically, none of the smaller men who have succeeded him or are likely to, (although George Bush senior did have one spell of sensible unilateral nuclear disarmament when he pulled America’s short range missiles out of Europe), have the stature within their own society to take such a courageous step. And now, by seemingly being prepared to torpedo one of the great breakwaters of the old era, they appear intent on opening the dykes to a new nuclear age, one perhaps even more dangerous than the last. All without an honest and open debate.
