AS I WAS SAYING
The old bombers who are now for banning the bomb
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
Incredibly enough, the policy of nuclear deterrence (i.e., a Mutual Assured Destruc- tion, MAD) still remains the official defence policy of the United States, the only differ- ence being that nowadays, with the Cold War over, the target areas are in Russia rather than in the Soviet Union, and the number of American strategic warheads doing the tar- geting is 8,000 instead of the old tens of thou- sands. Even with these changes, however, the USA is still committed to a defence policy which, if implemented, might destroy the human race, in spite of the fact that the moral justification for such a terminal degree of global destruction — that the fate of the human race under communism would be even more horrible — no longer applies and has not done so for nearly a decade.
Having written an article in The Spectator last year retrospectively questioning even the Cold War moral justification for such a uniquely destructive defence policy, how can I refrain from pointing out that this policy is even more indefensible in the present cir- cumstances when the communist threat no longer exists? Conventional wisdom, of course, has it that since nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented, there is no safe alter- native. In any case, it argues, America's rela- tively bloodless victory in the Cold War proves that deterrence works, and if it man- aged to keep the peace in the bad old days of the Cold War, how much more so can it be relied upon to do so in the good new days of American-Russian friendship. In short, three cheers for thermonuclear deterrence, and long may it continue.
No longer is it seen as a temporary evil most reluctantly accepted as the only defence against the even worse evil of com- munism, but rather as a permanent and almost benign feature of American public policy, to be accepted as a matter of course for the foreseeable future. Not so much MAD as eminently sane; not so much terrify- ing as reassuring; not so much malign as benign; not so much unthinkable as taken for granted. In other words, the Americans have come to love the H-bomb, to regard it as almost as much part of their way of life as apple pie, destined in due course, no doubt, to join the Statue of Liberty as another noble symbol of American determination to defend the free world at any cost.
There are now 35,000 nuclear warheads in the world. Ask anyone whether it is more likely that one will go off somewhere in the future or that all of them will eventually be banned, and I bet he will put his money on the first eventuality rather than the second, not with a shudder of horror but with a shrug of resignation. One nuclear weapon going off is at least an imaginable night- mare, whereas nuclear disarmament in gen- eral is no longer even the stuff of dreams.
Why is this? Partly, I think, out of habit. The stigma of pro-communism which, during the Cold War, attached to the campaign for nuclear disarmament lives on, in spite of the death of communism itself. Partly out of inertia. So much effort by the military went into perfecting nuclear deterrence strategies that they are reluctant to make, or even inca- pable of making, the fresh effort to plan for a defence that does not rely on nuclear weapons. In relation to the communist Sovi- et Union, nuclear disarmament was indeed wholly impractical. Being a closed and secret totalitarian society, committed to imposing communism on the rest of the world, it was reasonable to conclude that persuading the Soviet Union to open up its borders to the necessary degree of inspection was quite sim- ply out of the question. But Russia is no longer an implacably aggressive superpower or a closed society, and even China is also becoming less so with every passing year. In other words, if only for a brief period, there is a window of opportunity for nuclear disar- mament, if only the existing powers did not set such a bad example by insisting on ignor- ing it. Indeed, the message they send out, far from encouraging nuclear disarmament, pos- itively discourages it.
For in effect the message says that because nuclear deterrence had such a happy ending in the Cold War — i.e., the victory of democ- racy and freedom — it is to be recommended as the best way to settle differences between other hostile groups. But the logical infer- ence must be that if it worked for Russia and America, why should it not work for India and Pakistan, for Greece and Turkey, for Israel and the Arab world, and so on? The US can have no satisfactory answer to this question. For by seeming to have concluded that nuclear deterrence is a source of good rather than evil, on the side of the angels rather than the devils, America has made a mockery of its support for non-proliferation, encouraging the Third World to conclude that the more nuclear weapons are scattered around, the safer the world will grow.
Normalisation of nuclear deterrence which is the logical result of current US poli- cies — can only lead to the universalisation of nuclear deterrence. This is the last thing the US or any of the existing nuclear powers want, but it is what they will get if they con- tinue in their present ways. Of course, their present ways are understandable. So relieved were Russia and America that the Cold War ended without universal thermonuclear holo- caust that the temptation to downplay the nuclear terrors was temporarily excusable. But the danger now is that what began as a temporary indulgence will soon become a permanent habit, and if that does happen the long-term legacy of the Cold War will be a world overshadowed by the mushroom cloud for ever and ever. Must the price paid for ridding the world of communism be eternal fear of global incineration?
Certainly not, according to the former US senator Alan Cranston of California, whom I met last week when he was passing through London on his way back to the States from a meeting in Moscow with the former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Without much publicity the venerable senator has been assembling a group of former Cold War war- riors from the heart of the American, Rus- sian and European establishments, including Paul Nitze, America's first and foremost nuclear strategic thinker, all of whom firmly believe that nuclear disarmament on a world scale is still not only desirable but, unlike before, also practicable. Of course nuclear weapons can't be disinvented, any more than anthrax can be disinvented, but just as the lat- ter has been judged by the international com- munity to be the mark of Cain, fit only for pariah states to possess, so can the former.
Space does not permit me to go into the details — how inspection could be made to work etc. — which are shortly to be outlined in a new book by Jonathan Scheer, author of the famous Fate of the Earth. What can be said, however, is that this highly prestigious, international, civil and military group is determined to end the current complacency about nuclear deterrence, and defeatism about nuclear disarmament. Nuclear deter- rence theories were spun so as to entangle and destroy the communist fly. With that goal accomplished, they should be brushed aside as no more worth preserving than dirty old cobwebs in need of a spring-cleaning.
The slogan 'Ban the Bomb' was once hijacked and discredited by fellow-trav- ellers. But so was the word 'peace', and just as that word has slowly but surely recov- ered a clean bill of moral health, so now, in the nick of time, must the slogan.
Previous page
