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Text File | 1994-05-02 | 13KB | 254 lines

<text> <title> Quick March to Disarmament </title> <article> <hdr> Foreign Service Journal, March 1992 Quick March to Disarmament: Unfettered trade in weapons has no place in today's world </hdr> <body> By Paul C. Warnke. Mr. Warnke was director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and chief U.S. arms control negotiator from 1977 to 1978. This article stemmed from a talk Mr. Warnke gave at AFSA on November 5, 1991. If the term "New World Order" means anything, the United States must reconsider its security priorities. Above all, the demise of the Cold War requires us to reorient our attitude toward the production, export, and international control of arms, especially nuclear arms. Let's face it: the tactical battlefield nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union, rather than being military muscle, are now an embarrassment to the new Russian leaders. The objective of eliminating all tactical nuclear weapons is no longer unrealistic. The nuclear artillery shells and short-range missiles based in Western Europe were intended to offset the presumed conventional superiority of the Warsaw Pact. That pact no longer exists, and its leader, the Soviet Union, has disintegrated. The tactical nuclear weapons on our naval vessels were designed to fight a nuclear war at sea against the Soviet fleet. No plausible scenario for their use was ever presented. Today the only struggle involving the Soviet fleet is between Russian Ukraine over control of the ships in the Black Sea. We can now adopt a double-barrelled approach to arms control: we don't have to do it all through formal treaties that require years and years of negotiation to agree on page after page of detailed implementation. Instead, both sides can now take major unilateral steps without insanely prolonged quibbling over verification procedures, for example. In the past, it would have taken a decade to get rid of battlefield tactical nuclear weapons. Those kinds of weapons no longer serve any coherent purpose, and we can simply jettison them. There is strong support for the new unilateral approach. U.S. military leaders responded enthusiastically to President Bush's initiative. General Gavin, commander of the NATO forces, observed that just training our artillery forces to handle tactical nuclear weapons interfered with our actual artillery capability. The commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean welcomed the idea of getting rid of tactical naval nuclear weapons, on the ground that just taking care of them unduly drained U.S. resources. So by adjusting to the new world order, the United States can get rid of some of the encumbrances on U.S. military forces that evolved during the Cold War. Disasters waiting to happen In 1967, when I served as assistant secretary for International Security Affairs at the Pentagon, NATO adopted the so-called "flexible response" policy, meaning that the early response to any conventional attack on Western Europe would involve only conventional weapons. Before that, an initial skirmish might quickly escalate into the use of battlefield nuclear weapons, and thus link in the U.S. strategic force. I thought changing that policy made sense at that time, when I thought there was no chance the policy would ever be invoked, and now, the entire idea of maintaining short-range nuclear artillery shells obviously makes no sense whatsoever. It is very important for the international community to gain control over tactical nuclear weapons, because the dissolution of the Soviet Union increases the risk of unauthorized use. Those weapons do not have the range to be launched against the United States or Western Europe by any nation, but they are susceptible to being stolen, and their use in a terrorist attack is a real possibility. It would not be easy to steal an ICBM, and it would be very difficult to hide one once it was stolen; but that is not true of tactical nuclear weapons. That being so, the United States ought to see to it that they are totally destroyed at the earliest possible moment. Foregoing testing We now know the proliferation of nuclear weapons is a greater risk than we realized, before we recently discovered the advanced status of nuclear technology in Iraq. We must find a way of shoring up the non-proliferation regime; and with that in mind, I have been encouraged that the Bush Administration has taken a more flexible attitude toward a comprehensive test ban than the Reagan Administration did. In a sense, Gorbachev's announced moratorium on testing was meaningless, since there was no site under his control where testing was politically tolerable. On the other hand, Gorbachev's position as adopted by his successors in the republics contributes to a political climate favoring further steps toward a comprehensive ban, as did the conference convened at the United Nations in January 1991 by the non-nuclear weapon states. Some of the smaller countries at that conference asked the nuclear states to amend the Limited Test Ban Treaty to make it a comprehensive test ban; in refusing, the United States displayed an arrogance that caused a good deal of resentment among other participants. This matter will come to a head in 1995, when a conference mandated by the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will be convened. If the United States continues to insist at that conference that it must test to develop more modern, more effective, or even "safer" nuclear weapons, it will face formidable political obstacles. If we should stop testing, that would not stop a Saddam Hussein from trying to acquire a nuclear capability. But in the NPT, we undertook to stop testing, in response to the requests of the non-nuclear weapon states. Article 6 of that treaty obligates us to take prompt steps to end the arms race and move toward disarmament. As long as we continue to test, we forfeit an important instrument that can be used to prevent proliferation. If we discontinue testing, we'll at least be in a better position to organize world pressure against any country that wants to develop a nuclear capability. But as long as we, already possessing thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons, continue to insist on our right to develop more modern ones, we seriously compromise our ability to marshal world opinion against nuclear proliferation. Hot waste The question of a cutoff in the production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium is receiving more attention than at any time since President Eisenhower proposed such a cutoff in the 1950s. Press accounts have cited Brent Scowcroft, the president's national security adviser, as favoring a cutoff, while the Defense Department appears to be dragging its feet. It would cost us nothing to advocate a cutoff: after all, the United States hasn't produced highly enriched uranium since the mid-1960s, and, with the pending destruction of a large number of nuclear missiles, we're soon going to be up to our haunches in fissionable materials. The question of how to get rid of the radioactive material we already possess has become much more pressing than the question of producing more of it. In the past, we thought the material could be adulterated and burned in nuclear reactors, but there are fewer and fewer reactors, so this may not be a viable option. Nobody wants the radioactive material generated by nuclear power plants in his own back yard, and nobody wants it in his cellar. I don't know what you can do with it, but let's not keep on adding to the problem. A comprehensive test ban coupled with a cessation of the production of fissionable materials might provide a basis for converting the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from the reluctant dragon it has been into a fire-breathing dragon, because that would give it an important role to play. When we and the other nuclear states st