From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner@interpac.net>
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 22:36:49 -0000
-----Original Message-----
From: DavidMcR@aol.com [mailto:DavidMcR@aol.com]
Sent: Friday, February 02, 2001 6:17 PM
[from Progressive Response [irc@irc-online.org]
By William D. Hartung, World Policy Institute
(Editor's Note: A major focus of FPIF's new initiative, called The
Republican Rule, will be to track--and to help stop--the entrenchment of
the military-industrial complex. As William Hartung, a member of FPIF's
advisory committee, notes, the modernization of this complex of weapons
profiteering is increasingly driven by plans for an ambitious national
missile defense system that has frightening domestic and international
implications. We include below Hartung's analysis of the
corporate-driven missile defense system. Further analysis by Hartung and
others on the military budget is found on the FPIF's Republican Rule
webpage:
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/republicanrule/commentary_body.html)
Foreign policy issues were mostly an afterthought during the 2000
presidential campaign, and they continue to take a back seat in
President George W. Bushs discussions of the priorities of his
administration. But one critical foreign policy issue--U.S. nuclear
weapons policy--demands immediate attention and debate. The Bush foreign
policy team is quietly contemplating radical changes in U.S. strategy
that could set off a global nuclear arms race that will make the
U.S.-Soviet competition of the cold war period look tame by comparison.
In his only significant public pronouncement on the subject, delivered
last spring, Bush put forward a schizophrenic view of the nuclear
conundrum. On the positive side, he spoke of making unilateral cuts in
U.S. nuclear forces and taking those forces off of hair-trigger alert.
He even implied that the cold war doctrine of Mutually Assured
Destruction (MAD--the doctrine that spurred the U.S. and the Soviet
Union to build thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons as a way of
ensuring that neither side would dare attack the other for fear of being
annihilated in return) was a dead relic of a bygone era. On the
negative side of the ledger, Bush endorsed the deployment of a massive
missile defense program on the scale of Ronald Reagans Star Wars
plan, complete with interceptor missiles based on land, at sea, in the
air, and in outer space.
The seeming contradiction in the Bush view--taking reassuring steps by
reducing the size of the U.S. arsenal and taking forces off of alert on
the one hand, while provoking other nuclear powers with a massive Star
Wars program on the other--disappears if you look at the common thread
uniting these proposals: nuclear unilateralism.
Spurred on by the ideological rantings of conservative think tanks like
the Heritage Foundation and Frank Gaffneys Center for Security Policy,
a powerful bloc within the Republican Party has increasingly come to
treat negotiated arms control arrangements--like the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty of 1972, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I
and II), and the proposed Comprehensive Test Ban treaty--as obstacles to
U.S. supremacy rather than guarantors of a fragile but critical level of
stability in the nuclear age. The right-wing rallying cry is peace
through strength, not peace through paper. If that means shredding two
decades of international arms control agreements (most of which were
negotiated by Republican presidents), so be it.
This unilateralist approach to nuclear strategy is a disaster waiting to
happen. Bush advisers like Stephen Hadley have suggested that the U.S.
can significantly reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons in its current
arsenal of 8,000 to 10,000 strategic warheads. Simultaneously, the U.S.
would need to modernize the force by developing low-yield nuclear
weapons that could be used for missions like destroying hardened
underground command centers or hidden weapons facilities.
The barely concealed premise of this emerging nuclear doctrine is a
desire to make U.S. nuclear weapons more usable. This dubious
proposition is grounded in the notion that a low-yield weapon could more
readily be used as a threat, or actually dropped on a target, without
sparking nuclear retaliation by another nuclear power. Some conservative
analysts have even suggested that low-yield nukes are a humanitarian
weapon, claiming that they can be used to take out underground
biological warfare laboratories, for example, with less loss of life
than would result from other approaches to destroying such facilities!
Of course, in the unfortunate event of a nuclear exchange prompted by a
U.S. threat to use mini-nukes, the Bush doctrine would trust in our
spiffy new Star Wars system to protect us. The fact that such a system
is far from reality and may never successfully be built does not seem to
cool the passions of the new generation of nuclear use theorists (or
NUTs, as some critics have called them).
Perhaps the scariest aspect of this new doctrine of making nuclear
weapons more usable is that the Bush administration is going to try to
sell it to the American public as a forward-looking, responsible
approach to nuclear arms control. Because it will entail reductions in
the numbers of U.S. nuclear weapons, it will be presented as a step
forward from the nuclear gridlock of the Clinton/Gore administration, a
fallow period during which not a single significant nuclear arms
reduction agreement was negotiated. The fact that it might provoke
nuclear buildups in Russia and China, ratchet up the nascent nuclear
arms race between India and Pakistan, terrify our European allies, and
reduce the stigma attached to the use of nuclear weapons will be waved
aside by the Bush spin control team as old thinking on the part of
arms control ideologues who are mired in the past.
At least one sector of American society will benefit from this dangerous
new doctrine. Weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin (which runs the
Sandia nuclear weapons engineering laboratory in New Mexico and builds
Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles) will profit handsomely
from Bushs Orwellian approach to reducing the numbers of old nuclear
weapons in the field, while investing heavily in the development and
deployment of new nukes. The big four weapons contractors--Lockheed
Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and TRW--will reap billions in taxpayer funds
to build the Bush version of Star Wars, which could cost as much as $240
billion over a ten- to fifteen-year period.
As for the rest of us, we need to raise our voices now to demand real
nuclear disarmament, not the bait-and-switch approach offered by the
Bush administration. Its not like we havent been through this before.
Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 with guns blazing, pushing for a
new generation of nuclear weapons and a Star Wars system. By the end of
his second term, however, he had put Star Wars on the shelf and signed
on to two major nuclear arms reduction treaties, the Intermediate
Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty
(START). Reagans historic reversal came as a direct result of pressure
brought to bear by the nuclear freeze campaign, the European Nuclear
Disarmament movement (END), and pressures from European allies and our
erstwhile adversaries in Moscow, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, who wouldnt
take no for an answer. It will take a similar international outcry to
stop Bushs reckless nuclear doctrine. The sooner we get started, the
safer well be.
(William D. Hartung <hartung@newschool.edu> is the presidents fellow at
the World Policy Institute at New School University and a military
affairs adviser to Foreign Policy in Focus.)