LONDON– Not much in the dark arts of international relations is purposely kept more opaque than the Missile Technology Control Regime. Although a western creation, founded by the U.S., Canada, France, Britain and Germany in 1987, one might conclude from its byzantine penchant for secrecy it was designed by Russia which signed up only in 1995 or even by Turkey which signed last year. Its purpose is to limit the diffusion of the know-how for building rockets that can deliver nuclear weapons. Anyone these days can build a nuclear weapon, but delivering it by long-range missile remains an art mastered by a restricted inner circle.
Thanks to a small group of American and Russian scholars working under the auspices of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, but sheltering under the dispensation granted by the comradeship of the Russian-American space cooperation effort, we have been given a dispassionate, but quite frightening, account of how the Missile Control Regime DOESN’T work. In short, Russia, by sheer dogged persistence, has steered a coach and horses right through it. At the same time it has been rewarded for compromises that were not worth the paper they were written on by the space deal and permission to access the lucrative market for western civilian telecommunication satellites looking for cheap launch facilities.
In enormous detail the four authors show how both in the Gorbachev era and now in Yeltsin’s time any top Russian official who favoured an honest deal with the U.S. was brow beaten, bypassed or overridden, such is the influence of the Russian rocket/space establishment.
The story begins in 1980 when India successfully launched its first satellite. Correctly, Washington perceived that the day would not be long in coming when India would have the ability to hurtle nuclear weapons half way across the world. Spurred by this threat, and also by similar programmes in Israel and South Africa, the Administration decided the time had come to get a lid on such developments. For this to be assured western export controls on the technology of ballistic and cruise missiles had to be both rigorous and widely observed. In the beginning there was some success- France cancelled a contract to sell liquid-fuel rocket engine manufacturing technology to Brazil.
Yet despite a degree of Russian self-interest in joining the Missile Control Regime- it was worried about Israel’s rapid progress on the Jericho missile that could reach parts of Russia- on balance Moscow preferred to stay outside what it saw as being an instrument for ensuring western hegemony in technology exchange and also because Washington failed to address what Moscow rightly considered just as dangerous, the sales of advanced, nuclear bomb- capable, aircraft to Israel and Pakistan.
The inevitable clash of interests came to a head with the first Soviet, incipient-capitalist, attempt to commercialise its foreign sales of rocket engine technology with an agreement to sell cryogenic engines to India in 1991. These give a spectacular high performance for engines of such modest weight. They would enable India to lop 15 or so years off its programme to develop inter-continental ballistic missiles. Washington hit the roof, saying that the deal violated the very essence of the Missile Control Regime. The U.S. imposed sanctions on Glavkosmos, the marketing organisation of the Soviet space and missile industry.
Then followed, first under President George Bush, then under Bill Clinton a labyrinth of secret negociations between Washington and Moscow, each one more layered and obfuscatory than the one before. Each time the outcome was the same, a promise by Moscow to dismantle the deal in return for Washington bringing Moscow into the western space and rocket fraternity.
The amazing tale of how Moscow managed to get away with breaking undertaking after promise for so long, all for the sake of a deal with India that at the most was worth $350 million, simply boggles an outsider’s imagination.
By sheer dint of bloody-mindedness the Russian rocket export establishment managed to outmaneuver its political masters, waiting for the ever-changing cast of characters in Moscow to move on and allow one more chance to make their case and push the politicians and diplomats to go into the ring for yet another round of negociations with Washington.
In the end a weary Clinton Administration settled, against all the White House’s early demands, for 7 engines to be sold. Only the technical advice that would allow India to build further engines itself was withheld. India got what it wanted, rather more than less, and is today effectively on the verge of becoming an inter-continental ballistic missile power, even though the actual nuclear warheads are undeclared, “in the closet”.
Maybe if Washington had been a bit more generous with financial aid in the crucial late years of the Gorbachev era Moscow would never have felt so pressed to scrimp and save so that every $350 million deal was worth so much. We’ll never know. What we do know is that with this deal mankind took one more dangerous step towards the nuclear abyss- and 99.99% of the public is totally unaware of it.
