GS(NP) 90: Letter to the Chairman of the Committee from Lady Elizabeth Kennet

 

I was pleased - and relieved - to read on page 2 of the June 12th Press Release for the Report, Global Security: Non-Proliferation of your doubts about "ballistic missile defence". As you say, there should indeed be a full Parliamentary debate on the UK's participation in the US programme - including the existing roles of Fylingdales and Menwith Hill. I hope your Committee may have found my contribution useful-it pointed to the essentially offensive character of missile defences. I also see on the internet that the UK is thought to have shown interest in the Israeli Arrow ABM-??? I also recommend the two papers on ABM commissioned by the CNNPD by Arbatov and Dvorkin.

 

Perhaps the most interesting thing to emerge from the discussions between the Americans and the Russians in Moscow last month was that the Americans did give the appearance of recognising what Mikhail Gorbachev, writing in the IHT (18/9-7-09) called the "interrelationship between [strategic offensive arms] and missile defence". This recognition, he wrote, was "a notable achievement"; "by accepting it, the Obama administration sent an important message". Indeed every Russian, official or commentator, emphasised at the time that this was a central element in what they would agree to in the new START.

 

I hope the Americans have really recognised this. BUT, Gary Samore, Obama's Arms Control coordinator, speaking at the IISS immediately after returning from Moscow, made no mention of it in his talk. So I specifically asked him and he answered that

 

"it was just in public that the Russians were saying they minded so much about this",

 

implying, I thought, that the Administration did not need to accept the interrelationship, and probably wouldn't. Dangerous!

 

You were suggesting that some joint ABM structure might be a good plan. (And the IISS Conference in September is discussing "cooperative ballistic missile defence".) I believe it would be better-if possible-to return to the ABM Treaty that President Bush withdrew from, and carry on engaging in arms control and disarmament negotiations, without engaging in missile defences at all.

 

I think "cooperative ballistic missile defence" would be a bad plan for the following reasons:

 

1. There can never be 100% certainty that an ABM system will work: arranged tests against one's own missiles cannot count as conclusive.

 

2. 100% success, in actual practice, would-absolutely-be necessary; less than 100%, allowing one or more nuclear tipped missiles to get through, is not acceptable.

 

3. Nor can there be any certainty about your opponents' various responses - technical or other; and you don't have just one opponent.

4. Moreover, and perhaps above all, missile defences promote proliferation - new kinds or numbers of offensive weapons are already being devised by the Russians to get around US missile defences and Iranian to get round Israeli missile defences. (The new "Russian S-500 system is capable of defeating all manner of ballistic missiles and supersonic air devices", says the relevant Russian General, 11-8-09.)

 

5. So, new arms races follow - just what the ABM Treaty was designed to prevent - and the paranoid "worst case analyses" arms races promote.

 

6. There will follow the active militarization of space.

 

7. The costs of globally deployed ABM would be phenomenal. There is already some talk in the US of big ABM being a remedy for current economic distress; but all Keynesian expenditures should in themselves be useful. Expenditures on weapons are not.

 

8. There is also the ever-increasing use of Private Military Companies-not to call them mercenaries-which is distorting the nature of warfare, and of military analysis;

 

9. and the role of the Military-Industrial Complex in supporting the US Missile Defense Agency's Program - they fund the massive conferences that have been held at RUSI, to two of which, out the ten of them, I have been...

 

And then

 

10. there is the ever-increasing growth of cyber-activity which will make missile defences, as well as all other forms of sophisticated weaponry, increasingly unreliable..

 

In an incendiary article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, (QV) Dr. Andrew F. Krepinevich points out that

 

"It may be that a defensive strategy [against cyber attacks] cannot be successfully pursued and that the US will be forced to develop its own cyberweapons and rely on deterring the worst sort of cyberattacks. In short, the potential for a surprise of the worst sort in this realm remains a real possibility".

 

Precisely: and the US is already developing its own offensive cyberweapons.

 

But at the same time "cyber" is providing us with something quite new. To mis-quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Speech of 1972, then, something

 

"that threaten[ed] us with destruction, [was] the fact that our physically compressed, constrained world [was] not allowed to unite in spirit, that the molecules of knowledge and sympathy [were] not permitted to dart from one half of the world into the other".

 

All that has changed. Now, "the molecules of knowledge and sympathy" do indeed "dart", not only "from one half of the world into the other", but increasingly, and globally, and ever more speedily, they intermingle.

Is this, still developing, new world one in which War may safely, or sensibly, be waged? Global Security and Non-Proliferation still need thinking about as we come to terms with our new situation, but-as Krepinevich reminds us-things are suddenly very, very different.

 

Other changes: the increasing use of Unmanned Vehicles, for both surveillance and for attack. Note the research into "Robots" that can work in "fleets", designed for "urban warfare";

 

As well, another change is the extent to which the US is-and we are-outsourcing traditionally military activities: where will this lead? (And both the Georgians and the Russians are, I read, employing Western public relations firms to keep their points of view before us, if you please...)

 

 

 

18 August 2009