Dialogue and recalcitrance

Threatened by new U.S. recalcitrance, the global disarmament campaign may well have to resort to new techniques of civil disobedience to achieve a hearing.

AFTER three postponements on account of bad weather, the United States conducted a national missile test on the morning of December 3. Enacting a variant of the scenario of a high-speed bullet hitting another at a combined velocity of over 20,000 km an hour, a 'kill vehicle' was used to intercept and destroy a simulated warhead launched from another location.

Early on December 3, a missile was launched across the Pacific Ocean from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. On attaining its orbital path, the missile released a warhead and a decoy. In the nuclear war scenarios that have been repeatedly played out in strategic circles, a decoy has the unpleasant consequence of diverting the attention of defence systems while lethally tipped nuclear warheads are allowed through. But the December 3 test did not fail. The 'kill vehicle' launched atop a missile from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific after an interval of 20 minutes, disregarded the decoy, sought out the warhead and destroyed it. The debris from the test was left to float around in near-earth orbit for an indefinite period of time.

With global attention being transfixed by the ongoing U.S. "war for civilisation", reactions tended to be subdued. The Russian government was particularly muted, in marked contrast to early expressions of forthright opposition to the U.S. proposal for a national missile defence (NMD) system. This has lent credence to the expectations that have been freely aired since October, that Russia and the U.S. are working towards an agreement that will provide the U.S. the leeway to proceed with its NMD tests, even while preserving an appearance of compliance with the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

The U.S. has clung to the pretence that the tests as conceived do not constitute a violation of the ABM Treaty. Russia has never made a secret of its belief to the contrary. But faced with U.S. insistence that it will unilaterally walk out of ABM Treaty if it fails in conjunction with Russia to "update" it, the Russian government of President Vladimir Putin may be inclined to make a virtue of necessity and acquiesce in the ongoing testing programme.

China, however, was forthright in its criticism. "Our position on missile defence is very clear and consistent: we are opposed to the U.S. building a missile defence system," said a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. China instead believed, she continued, that "the relevant sides should, through sincere and serious dialogue, seek a solution that does not compromise any side's security interests, nor harm international efforts at arms control and disarmament."

Lay opinion, when not beguiled by the technological pretensions of a high-speed projectile striking another in orbital space, remained sceptical. Some wondered about the utility of a system that was postponed successively in the test phase on account of weather conditions. Was this a "fair weather missile defence" system, they asked.

Expert opinion came up with a more robust critique. The Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out that the test design inherently tilted the probabilities towards success by using only one decoy, whereas in a real-life situation, a multitude of decoys should be expected. Further, it said, the simulated warhead used in the test carried a transponder that sent out data and enabled the launch of the kill vehicle to be precisely timed and targeted.

Officials of the U.S. Defence Department justify the use of this transponder on the grounds that the ABM Treaty prohibits the use of a radar of the necessary specifications in the area of the test. But they have somehow been unable to rid expert opinion of the impression that the NMD tests have been doctored to justify enormous financial outlays on an ambitious and ultimately unworkable system.

THE NMD test came as an ironic climax to a month of hectic activity in the global disarmament dialogue. The Committee on Disarmament and Security of the United Nations - otherwise known as the First Committee of the U.N. General Assembly - concluded its deliberations early in November and forwarded a set of resolutions for ratification by the General Assembly. Voting in the First Committee showed a sharp polarisation between the perceptions of the U.S. and the rest of the membership.

A carefully drafted Japanese resolution calling for progress towards total nuclear disarmament in terms of the 13 steps listed in the 2000 review conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was approved with two votes in opposition. India voted no because the resolution was based on the NPT which it opposed. The U.S., though party to the consensus in 2000, also voted no.

A resolution calling for the preservation of the ABM Treaty and full compliance with its provisions attracted much attention because of U.S. plans for an NMD test. But despite strong efforts by the U.S. to rally numbers to its cause, it was joined by only Israel and Micronesia in voting no.

Most alarming was the voting pattern on a simple procedural resolution calling for the retention of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) on the agenda of the U.N. General Assembly next year. The U.S., which has signed the CTBT, voted against the resolution. This dramatic disavowal of a treaty it had actively sponsored was sharply highlighted by India and Pakistan, which are yet to sign the CTBT but saw little problem with its retention on the agenda.

A U.S. representative explained that his country "did not support the CTBT", a global compact that President Eisenhower had urged as far back as the 1950s and President Clinton as recently as 1996, had described as the "hardest fought and longest sought" objective of international arms control.

The new spirit of recalcitrance was underlined shortly afterwards when a conference on the entry-into-force (EIF) of the CTBT took place on the peripheries of the U.N. General Assembly session. In a calculated diplomatic snub, the U.S. insisted, while staying away, that the name-plate reserved for its delegation should be removed from the conference hall. The organisers, who had no information about the intended boycott till shortly before the conference began, pointedly refused. And even if in keeping with normal diplomatic practice there were few adverse references to the U.S. by name, most participants made little secret of their feelings.

The CTBT was ignominously defeated at its first consideration by a cabal of right-wing Republican senators in October 1999. Disregarding moderate counsel that consideration of the treaty be postponed till a more propitious time, the Republican duo of Jesse Helms and Trent Lott - close associates of President George Bush - insisted on bringing it before the Senate for a vote. The CTBT not merely failed to gain the two-thirds majority required for ratification, it was denied even the modest dignity of a simple majority.

At the recent EIF conference Russia warned in exceptionally strong words of "dangerous trends towards disrupting" the global compact on banning explosive nuclear tests. President Putin's written statement, placed before the conference, said that the CTBT was a "most important instrument" in preserving strategic stability. A senior Russian participant in the conference said that the failure of the U.S. to ratify the treaty could "result in a crisis in the NPT regime" and perhaps fuel "an uncontained spread of nuclear weapons".

Mid-November, President Bush met President Putin in Washington before transferring their summit-level confabulations to the convivial ambience of his Texas ranch. And though the two leaders announced plans to cut steeply their levels of strategic missile deployments within 10 years, they reached no agreement on the ABM Treaty. Putin was definitive in insisting that the Russian position remained unchanged.

THE U.S. is, without great subtlety, signalling that its arms control commitments from now onwards will be unilateral and not bound by treaty. Yet, few are convinced of the prudence of leaving the vital goal of nuclear disarmament to the good faith of the two main nuclear powers. The second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-II) is yet to take effect because of conflicting interpretations about its anchorage within the wider context of arms control treaties. The U.S., for instance, believes that it stands alone, while the Russians believe that the entire sequence of negotiated agreements beginning with the ABM Treaty of 1972 constitute a seamless web. No one component can be removed without jeopardising the entire edifice.

Clearly, the processes followed by existing disarmament forums are proving inadequate to deal with the new spirit of recalcitrance that the U.S. has been displaying. This is a context in which the techniques of civil disobedience that have recently been adopted by various activist groups could achieve greater prominence. A number of such incidents have been reported in recent times, by groups such as Greenpeace International and Trident Ploughshares.

In July this year, 15 members of Greenpeace breached the high security perimeter at the Vandenberg Air Force Base, from where the U.S. was scheduled to launch an ultimately unsuccessful missile defence test. Using patented Greenpeace techniques, part of the group set off in boats, holding banners aloft, while some members swam across the water body that constitutes the natural boundary of the air force station. All 15 activists, along with two freelance journalists, managed to enter the exclusion zone that had been cleared in preparation for the test. Their stated intent was to prevent the test, and in the confusion that they managed to engender, it is likely that the test firing of a missile kill system was fractionally delayed. Unable to clear the exclusion zone in time to exploit his launch window, the base commander ordered the firing of the missile while the group of activists remained under its flight path.

All 15 activists, along with two journalists who accompanied them, were arrested and charged under U.S. security laws dealing with terrorist violence. At the first hearing, U.S. federal prosecutors demanded that all 17 defendants be detained in prison for the duration of their trial. Bail was subsequently granted, but all nine foreign nationals who had been associated with the demonstration were required to stay within the Central District of Los Angeles where the trial was being held. Their passports were confiscated to ensure compliance. One of the defendants is Samir Nazareth, a native of Nagpur and a recent graduate in development economics from the University of Pondicherry.

The Star Wars 17 - as the defendants were soon collectively named - took the plea that their demonstration was perfectly legitimate, since it was intended to prevent the U.S. government from committing an illegal act. As a signatory to the ABM Treaty, the U.S. was obliged not to introduce any system that could be construed as a defence against ballistic missiles. Rather than increasing security, missile defence in the U.S. would only render the world more unsafe, by impelling rival nuclear powers to multiply their offensive capabilities. In protesting the test, the Greenpeace activists argued, they were only seeking to hold the U.S. government accountable for its treaty commitments.

Following an international campaign coordinated by nuclear disarmament groups, all the foreign nationals involved in the demonstration were allowed to leave the U.S. Their trial will resume in January in a climate rendered more hostile by the ongoing "war against terrorism". The judicial precedents that they can call to their defence are rather thin, but interesting. A ruling by a Scottish court in a case involving the Trident Ploughshares group could be something to rely upon. Although it was subsequently reversed in an unprecedented appeal by the British government, the Trident Ploughshares precedent has invaluable lessons for the global disarmament campaign.

In July 1999, three women from the Ploughshares group boarded a barge moored in a Scottish loch and threw some equipment overboard. The barge was a floating laboratory which housed some of the instruments to monitor the movement of British nuclear armed submarines, the Trident fleet. Arraigned before a Scottish court, the Ploughshares activists argued that they were acting out of "absolute necessity", since they were engaged in "crime prevention through the disarmament of illegal and criminal weapons of mass destruction". As a defence prop, they invoked the 1996 finding of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which held that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons would in normal circumstances be illegal.

The Scottish court, in a ruling that was justifiably termed historic, held that the defence of the Ploughshares trio was sustainable in terms of international legal convention.

Faced with the prospect of snowballing demonstrations by anti-nuclear activists, the British government sought recourse to rarely invoked judicial process, called the Lord Advocates Reference. Of the four questions posed before the Scottish High Court, the key one was whether customary international law should at all have a bearing on a criminal matter pursued under Scottish law.

The High Court determined all the questions before it to the disadvantage of the Ploughshares protestors. But the movement has acquired a momentum of its own, best symbolised by the award to it last October of the Alternative Nobel Prize or the Right Livelihood Award. Determined action by citizens' groups clearly retains the serious potential to forcefully intrude into the closed world of international arms negotiations. With innovative legal arguments and methods of mobilisation, these movements are emerging as a growing reproach to the indifference of official disarmament dialogue to public concerns.