Tuesday, March 28, 2000
“Oh gosh, I forgot, we do have 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads of our own at a high state of alert, 15 minutes away from blowing up any city in the world. But our nuclear bombs are carried by ‘Peacekeeper’ missiles and are not intended as weapons of mass destruction.”
Could that have been President Clinton last week when the leaders of India and Pakistan both turned down his call to abandon their hot and heavy nuclear arms race? Obviously not, but it does underscore U.S. hypocrisy on this issue.
Clinton was right to be concerned that a half-century of animosity on the subcontinent is accelerating into the very real possibility that those two bitter enemies will use the nuclear weapons they have been testing, with devastating consequences for them and the rest of the world.
In both countries, there is a fevered pitch of excitement about the prospect of developing powerful nuclear forces that can be used to settle historical territorial, ethnic and religious disagreements. There, as in other parts of the world, the nuclear club is expanding, and a giddiness even in progressive circles in democratic India about the usefulness of those weapons defies rational explanation. The sad truth is that the world has learned to live with, if not love, the bomb, and until some major city disappears in a nuclear conflagration, nuclear arms control is a tough sell. Nuclear weapons are a cheap route to national power.
But it is also painfully obvious that the U.S. has zero credibility in urging other nations to abstain from reliance on a weapon that remains the cornerstone of our own defense policy–an unspeakable weapon that we have been the only ones to use, which we are now in the process of modernizing as an even more destructive implement of war. Despite the end of the Cold War, we are the rogue nation that nuked huge populations of innocent civilians and, to this day, we have never disavowed the right to the “first use” against a presumed enemy. Our national policy remains the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction,” which threatens to end all life on the planet and, as its acronym suggests, made no sense even when the Soviet Union was a viable enemy.
Indeed, shorn of a credible enemy, we no longer seem capable of focusing on the need to rid the world of nuclear weapons and have dramatically regressed in the pursuit of arms control. We bemoan the spread of bomb-making technology to unstable regimes from North Korea to Iraq. But this administration has failed miserably to advance the cause of nuclear nonproliferation or to build on the success of previous Republican administrations in pursuing a regime of arms control with those who inherited the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal, an arsenal more threatening than ever because of the steady disintegration of Russian command and control.
Clinton is in the absurd position of urging India and Pakistan to sign the nuclear test-ban treaty when only last fall the U.S. Senate refused to ratify that very treaty. The test-ban treaty was the cornerstone of U.S. efforts under six previous presidents to secure an effective worldwide nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which is now in a shambles.
Nor has this administration made any progress in getting the Russians to ratify the START II treaty. The U.S. is now poised to violate that treaty’s basic commitment to cut each side’s strategic nuclear arsenal in half. Instead of cutting back to the 3,000 strategic warheads permitted by the START II treaty that the Senate has ratified, the administration has embarked on a program to modernize 6,000 of those warheads. The administration also has hastened development of a ballistic missile defense system that would make hash of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.
But no amount of investment in such a Star Wars-based missile defense would leave the American people secure from an enemy that possesses nuclear weapons and is determined to use them. Nuclear weapons can be smuggled into this country the same way that truckloads of marijuana and cocaine daily cross our borders undetected.
Get serious. As dozens of nations now energetically pursue membership in the nuclear club, and as it becomes that much more difficult to keep the sick genie possessed of nuclear weapons material and knowledge in the bottle, there is only one path to the security of our nation and others: abolishing nuclear weapons. That means a concerted effort by existing members of the nuclear club to end the testing, development and deployment of nuclear weapons and to define them, as we have with biological weapons, indelibly, as non-weapons totally unfit for the pursuit of any human purpose.
Robert Scheer is a Contributing Editor to The Times