Submission from Mrs Elizabeth Young (Lady
Kennet)
I am a second generation arms control enthusiast,
my father, on retiring from the Royal Navy, having become Naval
Advisor to the Disarmament Section of the League of Nations (1929-39).
I joined the Institute of Strategic Studies shortly after its
foundation and am also a long term member of Chatham House and
of RUSI.
It was for the ISS (as it then was) that in
April 1969, I wrote an Adelphi Paper, No 56, on The Control
of Proliferation: The 1968 Treaty in Hindsight and Forecast.
Later, in 1972, I wrote a Pelican Special, A Farewell to Arms
Control?
The first pages of the Adelphi Paper,
describe the situation as it was in the late 1960s. Nothing has
very much changed since then: Governments continue to value their
own state's interests above others' and above those of the international
community. With Mr Bush's United States, it is almost as if other
states' probable reactions to their own policies need not figure
in their formulation.
In practice, then—and since—National
Interest was and has been the main motivator for proliferation.
This started with the UK in 1945. President Truman—unilaterally—backed
out of war-time agreements between Mr Churchill and President
Roosevelt (the Montreal and Hyde Park memoranda) to continue atomic
cooperation after the War. Prime Minister Attlee immediately decided
the United Kingdom, particularly as the original source of the
relevant atomic physics, should indeed continue to develop nuclear
weapons, despite the American wish to secure a nuclear weapon
monopoly. The Atomic Energy Authority was set up at Harwell in
October 1945.
Today, in a not entirely dissimilar situation,
one principal motivator of the ill-feeling between the United
States (ever eager to enhance its strategic posture) and Russia
(equally eager to protect its own) is the US Missile Defence Programme.
In 2002, President Bush withdrew, as unilaterally as Mr Truman
in 1945, from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had been
agreed in 1972, precisely to avoid a predictable arms race in
missile defences.
MISSILE DEFENCES'
ROLE IN
AN OFFENSIVE
STRATEGY
Despite the name, missile defences form part
of an offensive posture: with a pre-emptive attack—and President
Bush has announced pre-emption as an essential element in US strategy—you
can reduce the effectiveness of your opponent's retaliatory force.
When he does attempt to retaliate, you can hope to destroy the
remains of a much attenuated force. Missile defences, in short,
damage the doctrine of mutual deterrence which has in fact served
us well since 1945.
If the proposed American "missile shield"
is indeed set up in Eastern Europe, TIT will certainly be followed
by TAT. Strangely, in the West, this seems not to have been properly
analysed. For instance, in the long interview in the October 2008 issue
of the RUSI Journal with Lieutenant General Henry Obering
III, Director of the US Missile Defense Agency, he shows no awareness
that Missile Defences can indeed be seen as forming part of an
offensive posture, and that this is how the Russians have always
seen them, and that it is such that they are reacting to them
now.
And all American efforts to persuade the Russians
that a Global Missile Defense System, including Russia, and able
to defend against anything that Iran, North Korea, or any other
irresponsible rogue might wish to deploy, could be a good idea,
have failed: it would necessarily be under American control.
A Russian—hardly serious—counter
proposal for a system, making use of an existing Russian radar
base, was rejected by the Americans.
And the Czech and the Poles have, not surprisingly,
rejected another Russian "compromise" proposal, which
would have Russian personnel permanently stationed at the US bases.
There cannot ever in fact be a satisfactory
solution to the problems of the requisite Integrated Command and
Control. All decisions to engage a presumed attack would have
to be under exclusive US control, and then under some kind of
virtually automatic control: there would be no time for consultation,
even with superiors, let alone with "allies", with an
"attack" on the way.
To the Russians, and to many others, all this
is the US seeking, not global peace or stability, but global hegemony:
that Full Spectrum Military Dominance—Land, Sea, Air,
Space, and Cyber Space, that United States officials so often
mention in other contexts.
In 1972, Nixon had signed the ABM Treaty with
Brezhnev to
"clos[e] off the possibility of a spiralling,
potentially dangerous competition in anti-ballistic missile systems",
[as it is put in the Kissinger Transcripts,
p. 15.]
Then in 1983, President Reagan attempted to
have everyone accept his own great anti-missile idea: the Strategic
Defense Initiative—"STAR WARS"…
According to Helmut Schmidt, German Chancellor,
"there was no allied consultation whatever
before Mr Reagan publicly declared, on March 23rd 1983, that SDI
was meant to "change the course of history"…and
even make nuclear weapons obsolete" [A Grand Strategy
for the West: the Anachronism of National Strategies in an Interdependent
World, 1985, p61]
Of that project, Yuri Andropov, Soviet Premier,
said,
"It is time they [Washington] stopped…
search[ing] for the best ways of unleashing nuclear war…
Engaging in this is not just irresponsible. It is insane".
[Pravda, 27 March 1983].
Precisely to remove all restraints placed on
US policy President Bush, unilaterally, withdrew from the ABM
Treaty in 2002. Ever since, he has given enthusiastic support
to his Missile Defense Agency, and to the relevant parts of the
Military Industrial Complex, against whose blandishments President
Eisenhower had warned. Less enthusiasm from the Congress has followed,
but enough funding to keep things going. (And cooperation with
Israel has also been enthusiastic and continuous.)
Secret negotiations with the Czech Republic
and with Poland followed, for bases in those countries, radar
and missiles respectively. Strangely, other NATO countries were
not consulted, although they were obviously legitimately concerned.
(At some point, the United Kingdom must have been consulted, because
the US radar base at Fylingdales was enhanced to become part of
the US Missile Defense System. This, Des Browne announced just
before the 2007 summer recess.)
President Bush's Missile Defense plans for Eastern
Europe Did soon become public knowledge and the Czech and Polish
governments have each actually reached agreement with the US.
The texts have not yet been ratified by the respective Parliaments
and with some 70% of the people in each country reported in polls
to be opposed, they may not be. As one Czech newspaper has put
it,
"Public opinion and political elites in
the Czech Republic and Poland are ambivalent about the US radar
and missile defence bases. This is understandable—we had
an army of one superpower in this region for 40 years, so
why should those from the other side of the world be here now,
after all?"
The Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, on the
other hand, having secured promises of US assistance in updating
the Polish military in return for agreeing to a base for US Missiles,
was reportedly annoyed by M. Sarkozy's 14 November remark
that the US missile defence plans were misguided: missile defence,
said Mr Tusk, was a matter strictly between the United States
and Poland and did not involve France or any other "third
parties". (Did he mean Russia?) It has now been reported
that "Patriot" missiles—short-range anti-missile
missiles will arrive in Poland in 2009—part of the military
assistance the US has agreed.
The Russian view has remained consistent.
The President of the Russian World Foundation,
Vyacheslav Nikonov, has recently pointed out:
"The conflict field between Russia and the
USA is quite big but the problems that have significance for the
Kremlin can be counted on the fingers of one hand:.. NATO enlargement,
the acceptance of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, and the anti-missile
defence system".
And on 4 November, just as Barak Obama
was being elected, President Medyedev announced that if the US,
under the new President, continued with President Bush's plans
to deploy elements of his Missile Defense system in Poland and
the Czech Republic, Russia would deploy certain missiles in Kaliningrad,
capable of taking them—and much else—out. TIT following
TAT…
None of which is in the least surprising, and
can hardly be news to the State Department, or even the Pentagon,
if they have done the appropriate thinking.
Slightly new proposals are said to be now emerging
from Washington, but in these last days of the Bush Presidency,
the Russians are not willing to enter into any agreement at all
on missile defences. The only purpose they see behind the new
proposals is to rule out future discussion—ie with President
Obama.
What they see is the Bush administration
"intent on putting the new U.S. president
in a hopeless situation, so that he should take responsibility
for what they concocted without him,…something that had been
designed without his involvement."
Or, of course, ours.
PROLIFERATORY RESPONSES
TO MISSILE
DEFENCES
Responses to Missile Defences can take a great
many forms, of which a new deployment of short-range missiles
in Kaliningrad is only one. Others—all "proliferatory"—include:
more warheads on existing missiles; improved warheads on existing
missiles; multiple war-heads; bigger, less vulnerable warheads;
disguised warheads; the earlier deployment of announced missiles
or warheads; failure to adhere to existing arms control agreements
regarding missile number reductions; and so on, ad infinitum.
Nevertheless, General Obering is hoping to persuade
President-elect Obama to continue with the programme:
"Our testing has shown not only can we hit
a bullet with a bullet, we can hit a spot on a bullet with a bullet,"
he recently told reporters.
"Hitting a bullet with a bullet" is
hardly the point when the problem remains how to identify the
"bullet"; how to determine if, indeed, it is a "bullet",
and if so, of what kind, and what the results of releasing its
unknown contents might be.
The "militarization of space" is bound
to follow the US deployment of missile defences. Space systems
already provide most of the information about missile-launchings,
etc., and, next, sending up weaponised satellites will look quite
reasonable. The US reaction to the Chinese destruction of one
of their own worn-out weather satellites showed the kind of alarm
to which the US—is prone, faced with even unsurprising reality.
Just what the consequences of US-Japanese cooperation in missile
defences may be is of course another matter to keep sight of.
How will China respond?
And, given the extent to which missile defences
are dependent on their cyber-connexions, and the vulnerability
of these to hackers of all kinds, these systems are not those
on which it would be sensible to rest the security of one's country.
Here, in the UK, we were (rather) surreptitiously
inserted into the US Missile Defense System, when Desmond Browne
announced, in July 2007, that the US Radar base at Fylingdales
was being brought up to Missile Defence standards. At the time
he promised full-scale national debate, but that has not happened.
None of the three major think-tanks—RIIA (Chatham House);
Royal United Service Institution; the IISS (International Institute
for Strategic Studies)—have had open meetings to discuss
the matter. A few PQs have been asked, and Lord Wallace had a
debate in the House of Lords, but there has been no general excitement
about what should be a major public issue.
"…and the FCO's policy goal on countering
weapons proliferation
There could be a lot to be said for "countering
weapons proliferation", but there is a very strong urge among
governments to see the arms industry and the arms trade as useful
tools of economic policy. Clearly, as President Eisenhower foresaw,
the "unwarranted influence" of both the "military
industrial complex" and of the "scientific-technological"
elite, has been there, in Washington, powerful and dangerous as
never before, with a militarily and scientifically illiterate
American President.
And we ourselves need to think about our arms
industry, our arms trade, differently from how we think about
other exports: the globalising world requires us to engage in
"peacekeeping", but the uncontrolled export of arms
is—usually—peace-destroying. And in the UK such "control"
as there is, is quite inadequate in a Government Department that
is intended vigorously to promote "trade": trade that
includes the arms trade. Which in turn promotes Proliferation.
US President-elect Barack Obama
We now have in the United States a President-Elect,
of whom Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov has said
that Russia
"regards statements made by the headquarters
of newly elected US President Barack Obama as a favourable background
for Russian-American relations."
And Obama's staff are quoted as saying that
he
"will seek real and verifiable reductions
in all US and Russian nuclear weapons, and work with other nuclear
powers towards significant reductions in nuclear arsenals by the
end of his presidency"
Which is good. And Obama himself stated in July
that he would welcome a "world free of nuclear weapons".
But he also said that as long as others had nuclear weapons, he
would always see to it that the United States had sufficient deterrent
forces.
The point here is that whatever agreements are
reached with who-ever it may be, there will never be certainty
that ALL nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons technology have been
abolished. A report just published by a Harvard unit urges
"a global campaign to lock down every nuclear
weapon and every significant stock of potential nuclear bomb material
worldwide as rapidly as that can possibly be done."
And while that is sensible, it is very different
from "a world free of nuclear weapons".
Would the US ever totally disarm? Would France,
or Britain, or Israel or Russia or India? Why should Iran commit
itself, when it is actively threatened by Israel, and even by
some elements in the United States?
We managed during the Cold War—eventually—to
recognize that the other party's interests were as real as our
own, and settled for Mutually Assured Deterrence—MAD.
And—its unacceptability to the Russians—is
why there is no point whatever in the missile defence system that
President Bush is bequeathing to his successor—and to the
rest of us: every response to it is proliferatory.
The causes of Proliferation are obvious: TIT
for any suspected TAT. It is a response to the military activities
or acquisitions of others that could amount to a threat to one's
own country or its interests.
"Worst case analysis" is central,
and no hypocrisy will remain unsuspect. Thus there is no way any
United States President can persuade Russia—or indeed anyone
else—that the proposed "missile shield" is a harmless
plan aimed at protecting us all from the weapons that Israel's,
or the United States own, nuclear weapons have probably inspired.
If we wish our views on Proliferation to be
taken seriously we have to explain to ourselves, and to the world
at large, how it is that we have for so long tolerated Israel's
nuclear weapons—Israel's not unreasonable nuclear deterrent—and
India's, and Pakistan's—and then announce that any of Iran's
would be no less than "unacceptable". Iran is already
surrounded by states with nuclear weapons; Israel threatens her;
the United States refuses, in negotiations, to take the "military
option" off the table. Would Iranian nuclear weapons necessarily
start up any new arms races?
Most desirable, would be a nuclear-weapon-free
Middle East. Should we not make that our anti-proliferation policy
for the region, rather than concentrate on what Iran is doing,
which has not yet exceeded what is allowed by Article 4 of
the Non- Proliferation Treaty?
November 24th 2008
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