Nuclear drunks

ADDRESSING the United Nations General Assembly on June 9, 1988, Rajiv Gandhi appealed: Nuclear war will not mean the death of a hundred million people. Or even a thousand million. It will mean the extinction of four thousand million; the end of life as we know it on our planet earth. We come to the United Nations to seek your support. We seek your support to put a stop to this madness. A decade later, India became a nuclear weapon state. Not that he was against that. But he made a last-minute plea for sanity. Richard Rhodes is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The present work is one of the most important works on the subject that has appeared in the last few years. It shows up the nuclear hawks for what they are nuclear drunks who worship nuclear weapons and become their prisoner. The book is based on primary source material and is a model of rigorous analysis.

In the last decade or so, a crop of Indian realists has grown up, innocent of the debates their counterparts in the West had conducted with greater learning than they are capable of. Meanwhile, the quality of American writings on Indias political and strategic policies has declined steeply. Many an Indian realist has a soulmate in some of the American scholars of today.

The United States did not become any the safer for the Bomb. Nor has India. Rhodes book exposes its folly. Campbell Craig, a British academic, and Sergey Radchenko, a Russian academic at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), establish how it triggered and accentuated the Cold War. History will never forgive President Harry Truman for his crime in ordering the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. He would not have done so on any target in Europe. Mankind owes an immense debt to President John F. Kennedy for keeping his head during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Rhodes records: I asked Mr. [Robert] McNamara, who has come to believe that nuclear weapons should be abolished, why the United States built so many more than it realistically needed during the Cold War. Each individual decision along the way seemed rational at the time, he told me. But the result was insane. However, confronted by a crucial test, the U.S. opted for sanity.

Contrary to Kennedys public statements, there was never any public question on the U.S. side of initiating a nuclear attack. McNamara reveals: Despite an advantage of seventeen to one in our favour, President Kennedy and I were deterred from even considering a nuclear attack on the USSR by the knowledge that, though such a strike would destroy the Soviet Union, tens of their weapons would survive to be launched against the United States. These would kill millions of Americans. No responsible political leader would expose his nation to such a catastrophe. Kennedys sanity was confirmed years later, after the end of the Cold War, and much to McNamaras surprise and shock. When Russian participants in the Cuban crisis revealed that no fewer than 162 nuclear weapons (warheads, submarine-launched missiles, and bombs) had already been deployed to the Caribbean and to Cuba before the crisis began.

The missile warheads, McNamara learned, were moved from their storage sites to positions closer to their delivery vehicles in anticipation of a U.S. invasion at the height of the crisis on Friday, 26 October 1962. [Nikita] Khrushchev personally approved the move, which increased the risk, writes McNamara, that in the event of a U.S. invasion the Soviet forces in Cuba would have decided to use their nuclear weapons rather than lose them. We need not speculate about what would have happened in that event. We can predict the results with certainty.

Those who talked of surgical strikes on Pakistan after 26/11 betrayed their lack of sense and their professional incompetence. None of the P5 of the U.N. Security Council would have supported us. The Government of India acted sensibly in ruling out such a riposte. We can predict the results with certainty in this case as well.

In a moment of candour, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1956: We are piling up these armaments because we do not know what else to do to provide for our security. In the last two years, pleas for nuclear disarmament have been made by certified hardliners of old. The series was opened by an article written by two former U.S. Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Defence Secretary William J. Perry and former Chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee Sam Nunn. Entitled A World Fear of Nuclear Weapons, it was published in The Wall Street Journal of January 4, 2007. They quoted Rajiv Gandhis speech approvingly as also Kennedys remark: The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.

They rightly linked the arms race to the Cold War. The end of the Cold War made the doctrine of mutual Soviet-American deterrence obsolete. Deterrence continues to be a relevant consideration for many states with regard to threats from other states. But reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.

The goal was clearly defined. We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal, beginning with the measures outlined above. One must not dismiss this with Benjamin Disraelis cynical remark: Old men give advice when they can no longer set bad examples.

The writers suggested a few immediate steps, meanwhile. Changing the Cold War posture of deployed nuclear weapons to increase warning time and thereby reduce the danger of an accidental or unauthorised use of a nuclear weapon. Continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them. Eliminating short-range nuclear weapons designed to be forward-deployed. Ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and halting the production of fissile materials for weapons globally were other suggestions.

The U.S. and Russia have, between them, 90 per cent of the 27,000 nuclear warheads in the world. The 1991 START Treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) expires at the end of 2009. It bound both powers to halve their nuclear stockpiles from the previous total of 10,000 warheads to 5,000 warheads each. In May 2002, they signed the Moscow Treaty, which committed them to further reducing the number of operationally deployed nuclear warheads on each side to no more than 1,700-2,200 warheads by 2012. The provision for operationally deployed warheads inserted in the text by U.S. negotiators, despite Russian objections, allowed the sides to stockpile dismantled warheads instead of destroying them, from START.

In 2002, George W. Bush abrogated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with the Soviet Union. It banned deploying national missile defence systems and guaranteed that neither side would be tempted to launch a nuclear attack against the other under the cover of a missile shield. The U.S. withdrawal from the treaty opened the way for it to build a global anti-missile system. Russia says that to agree to radical cuts in its nuclear arsenals while the U.S. still pursues its missile shield would amount to unilateral disarmament.

Vladimir Radyuhin reported that the [Barack] Obama administration has leaked plans to push for an 80 per cent cut in nuclear arsenals compared with the START level. Washington is yet to send formal proposals to Moscow, but the former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, is reported to have visited Russia in December on a secret mission to try and win President Dmitry Medvedevs support for Mr. Obamas proposal for the U.S. and Russia to cut their nuclear arsenals to 1,000 warheads on each side (The Hindu, February 9, 2009). The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) Review Conference will be held next year.

In this context the views expressed by four eminent German statesmen deserve note. They are former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt; former President Richard Von Weizsacker; a Minister who was the architect of Ostpolitik, Egon Bahr; and former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. Their article was entitled Toward a nuclear-free world: A German view and was published in The International Herald Tribune of January 10, 2009. They endorsed the views of the four American leaders and noted with alarm that existing nuclear weapon states are developing new nuclear arms. They called upon them to keep their promise under the NPT to reduce their nuclear arsenals, opposed the U.S. plans to station missiles and a radar system on bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, demanded the restoration of the ABM Treaty, and most significantly of all, demanded that all remaining U.S. nuclear warheads should be withdrawn from German territory (emphasis added, throughout). One wonders when British statesmen will show similar independence from the U.S.

Kissinger returned to the theme nearly a month later (Containing the fire of the gods, International Herald Tribune, February 7, 2009). It was short on substance, long on advice.

By far the most eloquent and constructive contribution came from the highly respected Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, in an article in the same daily on February 17, 2009, entitled A recipe for survival. He called for the ratification of the CTBT, negotiations on a verifiable Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, a successor to the START Treaty with cuts to 1,000 or even 500 warheads on each side. Unless the NPT Powers keep their word, they have no right to preach to India or any other country.

He boldly asserted The Middle East [West Asia], home to the worlds most perilous conflict, will never be at peace until the Palestinian question is resolved. What compounds the problem is that the nuclear non-proliferation regime has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of Arab public opinion because of the perceived double standards concerning Israel, the only state in the region outside the NPT and known to possess nuclear weapons.

Double standards and the urge to dominate have marked the U.S. policies since the Second World War ended. There was a deliberate, consistent attempt over the years for what Richard Rhodes calls threat inflation, an attitude very pronounced in what passes for Indias strategic community. He recalls that from the beginning, and throughout all the years of the Cold War, the United States led the Soviet Union in total numbers of strategic nuclear bombs and warheads. The bitter U.S. political debates of the 1970s and early 1980s about nuclear strategy, nuclear force levels, supposed Soviet first strike capabilities, and strategic defence hinged on arguments as divorced from reality as the debates of medieval scholars about the characteristics of seraphim and cherubim. One of the foremost in the U.S. strategic community, Paul Nitze, lied to the people.

The Soviet leader Yuri Andropov thought that Ronald Reagan was preparing for a surprise nuclear strike. The Soviets themselves were short-sighted and played into the hands of Americas Cold Warriors by inducting SS-20s into Europe. The British spy Donald Maclean, now Moscows expert on the West, was more objective than his masters in the Kremlin and warned, The next result will be, unless the Soviet Union changes its policy a rise in the level of nuclear confrontation in Europe with no compensating advantage to itself, indeed quite the reverse.

Not that the U.S. needed such help. Threat inflation was crucial to maintaining the defence budgets of the Cold War. The practice was carried to its extreme by Ronald Reagan, who, with neoconservative coaching, actually claimed that the U.S. nuclear arsenal was dangerously inferior to the Soviet arsenal, vulnerable to the first strike which, Dobrynin reports, was never a part of Soviet planning and inflated his defence budgets accordingly. In words published in 1985 that describe the post-2000 George W. Bush years as well as the years of the Cold War.

As has been pointed out, It is one of historys great ironies that at the very moment when the United States has a monopoly of nuclear weapons, possessed most of the worlds gold, produced half the worlds goods on its own territory, and laid down the rules for allies and adversaries alike, it was afraid. Fear was part of the programme, the psychological response to threat inflation that delivered reliable votes.

It was so futile as the political scientist Jacek Kugler demonstrated in careful case studies of post-War crises. In a large majority of cases nuclear weapons failed to deter.

Investment banker and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Marriner Eccles argued as long ago as the 1960s that over-kill spending of the military was responsible for our financial inability to adequately meet the problem of our cities (poverty, crime, riots, pollution) and our rapidly expanding educational requirements. The Columbia University economist Seymour Melman noted in 1974 that the extent of economic deterioration in the cities of the U.S. would be a mystery forever if we had no way of explaining the unique consequences of non-productive (military) economic activity. After all, the decay of Americas cities occurred during a period of economic growth in the United States . (But) the additional taxes generated by the new income were being pre-empted for the military. Melman dismisses the triumphalist right-wing claim that the U.S. with its superior economy could afford to spend the Soviet Union into bankruptcy one argument offered for the huge defence budgets of the Reagan years. The purveyors of this shrewd idea, he writes, never allowed themselves to admit the possibility that the American war economy could also devour the civilian economy of the United States.

Rhodes remarks: Far from victory in the Cold War, the superpower nuclear-arms race and corresponding militarisation of the American economy gave us ramshackle cities, broken bridges, failing schools, entrenched poverty, impeded life expectancy, and a menacing and secretive national-security state that held the entire human world hostage.

Ironically, the hawk Reagan was honestly, passionately committed to the abolition of nuclear weapons. In 1983, in a letter responding to one from Andropov that Reagan drafted by hand in mid-July, he wrote, If we can agree on mutual, verifiable reductions in the number of nuclear weapons we both hold, could this not be a first step toward the elimination of all such weapons? What a blessing this would be for the people we both represent. You and I have the ability to bring this about through our negotiations in the arms reduction talks that would lead to the total elimination of all such weapons [sic]. Impatiently, on the advice of his second national security adviser, William Clark, the President agreed to delete the paragraph, including the line [that would lead to the total elimination of all such weapons] he had struck through himself, from the rewritten copy he sent to Andropov.

At their Reykjavik summit in October 1986, Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came within inches of an accord on abolition of nuclear weapons. Sadly, they failed at the very last minute. Students of diplomacy should study carefully Rhodes detailed account of the proceedings based on authoritative sources. They will be reminded of the India-Pakistan summit at Agra in July 2001. In both cases, an underling contributed to the break. The sticking point was Reagans Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Gorbachev relented to concede research in laboratories, but no more.

The U.S. final draft read: The USSR and the United States undertake for ten years not to exercise their existing rights of withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, which is of unlimited duration, and during that period strictly to observe all its provisions while continuing research, development and testing, which are permitted by the ABM Treaty. Within the first five years of the ten-year period (and thus through 1991), the strategic offensive weapons of the two sides shall be reduced by 50 per cent. During the following five years of that period, all remaining offensive ballistic missiles of the two sides shall be reduced. Thus by the end of 1996, all offensive ballistic missiles of the USSR and the United States will have been totally eliminated. At the end of the ten-year period, either side could deploy defences if it so chose unless the parties agreed otherwise.

Gorbachev pointed out: In the first part of this formula you speak of reducing the strategic offensive weapons of the parties by 50 per cent in the first five years.

But in the second part, where you speak of the second five years, you mention offensive ballistic missiles. Whats what about? Why such a difference in approach?

Read this account of the historic proceedings. Reagan: Let me ask, do we mean that by the end of the two five-year periods all nuclear explosive devices will be eliminated, including bombs, battle-field weapons, cruise missiles, sub-launched, everything? It would be fine with me if we got rid of them all.

Gorbachev: We can do that. We can eliminate them all.

Shultz: Lets do it?

Reagan: If we agree that by the end of the ten-year period all nuclear weapons will be eliminated, we can send that agreement to Geneva. Our teams can put together a treaty and you can sign it when you come to Washington.

Gorbachev, seemingly startled, agreed. Then he raised the issue of confining SDI to the laboratory.

Reagan reacted angrily. Weve come a long way, he said. ABM Treaty sets the limits, and what the hell difference does it make anyway? He was just trying to protect the United States, to make a sort of gas mask against the danger of nuclear maniacs.

Yes, Gorbachev said with contempt, hed already heard about the gas mask and the maniacs, about ten times. But Reagan still hadnt convinced him, he said.

More debate: A matter of principle. But youre burning all my bridges.

Gorbachev: Is that your final position? If so, then I think we can end our meeting on that.

Reagan: Yes, Its final. You must understand that experiments and research cannot always remain within laboratory walls sometimes its necessary to go outside.

Gorbachev: And you understand me too. The question of the laboratory for us isnt a matter of being stubborn or hard-headed. Its not casuistry. Were agreeing in deep reductions and in the final analysis to the destruction of nuclear arms. But at the very same time, the American side is pushing us to agree to allow them the right to create space weapons. Thats unacceptable to us. If you agree to restrict your research to the laboratory, without going into space, then in two minutes Ill be ready to sign the treaty.

Gorbachev gave it one more try: Mr. President, allow me to speak in confidence and with frankness. If we sign a package containing huge concessions on the part of the Soviet Union on the cardinal problems, then you will become, without exaggeration, a great president. Youre literally two steps away from there. If not, then we may as well go home and forget about Reykjavik. But there wont be another chance, even now, if were able to attain the destruction of nuclear arms, then none of your critics will be able to say a word, because the vast majority of people in the world would welcome our success. If were unable to agree, however then obviously this will become a matter for another generation of leaders. You and I no longer have any time left. The American side has not made any substantive concessions at all, not a single large step to meet us even partway. Its hard to conduct business on this basis.

Reagan: If I give you what youre asking, it will cause me great damage at home. Are you really, for the sake of one word, going to reject the historic possibility of an accord?

Gorbachev: Its not just a question of a word, but a question of principle. If I return to Moscow and say that I agreed to allow you to test in the atmosphere and in space, they would call me a fool and not a leader.

Reagan: I ask you for a personal favour, one that would have enormous impact on our future relations, and you refuse me.

Gorbachev: There are different kinds of favours. What youre asking of the USSR would never be acceptable to the United States.

Reagan: One word. I ask you again to change your mind as a favour to me, so that we can go to the people as peacemakers.

Gorbachev: Its unacceptable. Agree to a ban on tests in space and in two minutes well sign the document. We cant agree on anything else. What we could agree to, we already have. We cant be reproached for anything. I have a clear conscience before my people and before you. I did all that I could.

Reagan: Its a pity. We were so close to agreement. I think, after all, that you didnt want to reach an agreement. Im sorry.

Gorbachev: Im also sorry this happened. I did want an agreement, and I did everything I could for it, if not more.

Reagan: I dont know when well have another chance like this, or if well be able to meet soon.

Gorbachev: I dont know either.

It was learnt later that Reagan had consulted the neo-con Richard Perle. His biographer recorded: The President first looked at Perle. Can we carry out research under the restraints the Soviets are proposing? Perles mouth was dry; he felt short of breath. Reagan was asking him for a reason. If he said yes, it gave Reagan cover with the conservatives to confine SDI to the laboratory (Richard Perle assures me ). If he said no, he would be arguing against Shultz. But his view was an unequivocal no. Mr. President, we cannot conduct the research under the terms hes proposing. It will effectively kill SDI.

The President paused and weighed this, and then turned to Nitze and Shultz. They both counselled him to accept the language proposed by Gorbachev, and suggested that they would worry about whether research could be conducted in the laboratory later. Perle stared hard at Reagan. What was he going to do?

There was however, much more to it. Perle was against any accord, whatever. Speaking in Munich in late January 1987, not long before he resigned as Assistant Secretary of Defence, Perle ridiculed the idea of a nuclear-free world as foolishness that was in no way mitigated by the conditions that Western statesmen routinely attach to its achievement in order to avoid dismissing the idea as the empty propaganda that it is. Perle disguised his ex-cathedra censure of nuclear abolition as a deconstruction of Gorbachevs surprising proposals at Reykjavik, but his reference to Western statesmen makes it clear that he also meant to condemn Reagans dream. It is the advice of such a small man that wrecked Reykjavik.

These proceedings demonstrate that given the will, the idea of a nuclear weapons-free world is realisable.

After the end of the Cold War, Russia opened its archives. The last decade has seen excellent studies on the Cold War by Russian scholars in collaboration with American scholars. The book by Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko is a good illustration of that collaboration and the openness of Russian and American archives, in contrast to Indias cult of secrecy. Their thesis is thoroughly documented. That the Bomb played a starring role during the Cold War (1945-1991) is well known. Less understood is its role in triggering off the Cold War. When we think of the diplomatic history of that era, the bomb features as a blunt, fearsome tool; a brutal means of ending the Second World War, and then of deterring war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was an object of statecraft, a grim means of pursuing national ends.

It was that, but we mean to suggest here that it also played a more active role. As the United States and the Soviet Union began to regard each other as potential rivals during the latter part of the Second World War and then the tense months afterward, the bomb or, to put it more accurately, the implications of a war fought with it had a kind of independent effect upon the attitudes of American and Russian leaders. It led American leaders such as Roosevelt and Truman to reconsider the notion that the United States would naturally lead the post-War world into an era of permanent peace. It led the Soviet leader Stalin to develop an acute fear for Russias post-War welfare, not so much because of what the Americans had done, or what they intended, but because of what they had. The miserable prospect of an atomic war, made vivid by witnesses to the destruction wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, led many to demand that the nations of the world band together and form the international government necessary to prevent another world war that would surely doom civilisation. Yet the shadow of the bomb pushed both the United States and the Soviet Union in the opposite direction.

Truth to tell, the Cold War existed in embryo during the Second World War. Winston Churchill deliberately delayed the opening of the Second Front in Europe by a whole year from 1943 to 1944 to Roosevelts dismay. Stalins anger and suspicions were justified. He knew of the Manhattan Project by 1942. By early 1943 Roosevelt knew that Stalin also knew of it. Stalin had a formidable network of spies.

For a few minutes on August 6, 1945, and then again on August 9, the United States inflicted upon the residents of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the most brutal acts of war in recorded history. Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand as the worst atrocities ever committed in the history of warfare. Hitlers and Stalins genocides killed far more, but they were not military operations. The worst of the conventional bombing attacks earlier in the War Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo took far longer to achieve their grim toll, as did the awful scorched earth campaigns of Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe or Japan on the coast of China. Even the suicidal trench battles of the First World War in places like Verdun, Paschendale and the Somme occurred over greater expanses of time than the atomic bombings, and the victims of these catastrophes were armed soldiers who had at least some volition over their fate.

Why did Truman commit this outrage? Because Truman wanted not only a Japanese surrender, he, together with his new secretary of state James Byrnes, wanted a quick Japanese surrender. By dropping a second bomb immediately, he did no damage to the first objective a Japanese surrender before November was just as foreseeable with a bomb dropped on the ninth as with one dropped on, say, the fourteenth but substantially enhanced the chances of the second... we can regard Hiroshima in the final American strike of the Second World War, and Nagasaki, as its first strike in the Cold War.

The Bomb took centre stage in the history of the origins of the Cold War. Three consequences followed. Stalins decision to build the bomb; the U.S. discovery of Soviet espionage; and new intractable problems for achieving a just international order. The Bomb could ensure peace only if it was put under international control. The chances of the United States, not to mention the Soviet Union, accepting such an arrangement were zero. In the atomic age, there is no middle ground: the choice is either sovereignty or international government. The Soviet Union and the United States chose the former. The Cold War was on.

There is, however, another alternative abolish nuclear weapons all over the world.