DISARMAMENT?
. . . NO TANKS
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on
the dangers that Soviet forces stillpose for Europe
Washington AFTER four months in office, George Bush has at last done something about the world. Doing things can be hazardous. By this stage in the Kennedy administration much had already been done with dis- astrous effects. The new president had sent a brigade of Cuban exiles without air support into the Bay of Pigs, where they were annihilated by Fidel Castro. By June, Kennedy was in Vienna negotiating face to face with Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet leader took the measure of the callow young man, so full of airy ideas, so driven by image, and promptly tried to gobble up Berlin. A year later Khrushchev made a drastic bid to change the balance of nuclear power by installing missiles in Cuba.
Difficult times, to be sure. But the harsh fact is that the management of foreign affairs by Jack Kennedy and his Harvard coterie put the United States in a position where it had to contemplate nuclear war, not once but twice, and all within a year and a half of taking office. So it was maddening to read an article in the Wall
Its our baby-sitter! She wants bailing ow.'
Street Journal by Arthur Schlesinger, one of the guilty, carping at the 'bunch of foreign policy hacks' in the Bush adminis- tration for their crabbed caution in dealing with Gorbachev. 'We stand at a great turning point in history,' he wrote . . 'Think what Kennedy would have done with this opportunity.' Think, indeed.
Schlesinger speaks for much of the opinion elite in the United States, especial- ly the media which keeps scolding Bush for losing the public-relations war. There is an insidious process at work here. A public relations ploy only succeeds as long as the media lends itself to manipulation, so the critics are the very agents of the effect. It is a sorry state of affairs when star-struck journalists are more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the dictator of a hostile empire than to their own elected president. But that is effectively what is happening. The death of 20 demonstrators in Soviet Georgia in April, gassed with toxic chemicals and hacked to death with shovels, passed with scarcely any com- ment. There was a muted reaction when Gorbachev tried to blackmail Nato by threatening to abrogate the INF Treaty. Some editorials spoke of Gorbachev's 'understandable concerns', other allowed that he might have made a 'mistake'. There was outrage, of course, when the White House responded to this gangsterism by calling him a 'drugstore cowboy'.
The barrage of criticism has worn down President Bush, who likes to be liked. At the Nato conference this week he joined the propaganda war, calling for the with- drawal of 20 per cent of American combat forces from Europe. In itself the proposal is sensible enough. It is conditional on a massive demobilisation of Soviet forces by 1992 and would, if enacted by both sides, end the military threat to Western Europe. We shall see whether the stampede to- wards disarmament (and towards isolation- ism in the United States) can now be kept under control. We may end up with some- thing closer to Gorbachev's terms which would stretch out mutual reductions until 1996-1997, and which might allow the Russians to redeploy tank and artillery units within the Soviet Union, instead of demobilising them entirely, unless there is a watertight verification procedure. The danger of this is obvious. The Soviet Union can send the units back at any time. The Americans cannot, and the politics of Washington make it doubtful that they would respond to a stealthy but cumula- tively decisive Soviet redeployment.
The other danger of such a slow timet- able is that Nato might give in to political pressures to scrap battlefield nuclear weapons before the conventional reduc- tions begin to bite. These SFN weapons not only have a battlefield purpose, they are also the first rung in the ladder of escalation that leads (in theory) to an American nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. This so-called extended deterrent is already an improbable notion, premised as it is on the willingness of the United States to commit suicide on behalf of allies. Any more erosion and the deterrent will cease to deter altogether.
We are even less able to forgo that deterrent today than we were when Gor- bachev came to power. Over the last four years the American defence budget has fallen by 11.4 per cent in real terms. The latest CIA report estimates that Soviet military spending has increased by over 12 per cent during the same period and
Gorbachev has now admitted that the defence budget is four times the previous official claim. There was no slowdown in 1988. Spending grew fastest on ground-to- air missiles, submarines, and ships. Con- struction has just begun on a giant aircraft carrier. Overall spending is about 16 per cent of CNP, excluding civil defence milit- ary pensions, the space programme, and KGB troops. The American defence budget in the fiscal year 1990 will be 5.5 per cent of GNP. The biggest danger to Nato is massed tank attack in Northern Europe. 'We can only hold out for ten days, even in the most optimum conditions,' says General Ber- nard Rogers, former supreme commander of Nato. The Soviet Union has developed a ceramic armour on its new T-64B, T-72, and T-80 tanks. It has also adopted the Israeli idea of fixing explosive boxes on the outside of the tanks, known as reactive armour. 'Essentially, it nullifies a decade of Nato investment in infantry anti-tank capability,' says Phillip Karber, an adviser to the Pentagon and a world authority on tank warfare. New weapons are being developed, but they are not going to fill the breach until the mid-1990s, if then.
For the time being Nato has to rely heavily on its own tanks to hit Soviet tanks. Nato only has about 6,500 in Central Europe. The Warsaw Pact has 17,000 in the zone, and another 10,000 in Western Russia. Over half of the forward deployed tanks are late models and are the ones that really matter. 'Tanks that don't have corn; posite armour aren't much use any more, says General Donn Starry, former chief of the army Training and Doctrine Corn- mand. So there is less than meets the eye in the Soviet withdrawal of obsolete T-55 tanks from Hungary, conducted with much fanfare in April. If they are eventually replaced by modern tanks the threat will grow. We must assume this could happen. Soviet factories continue to turn out 3,400 new tanks a year, even as Gorbachev promises to demobilise a total of 10,000 old tanks over the next two years.
In his article Schlesinger wrote: 'Anyone who thinks that an invasion of Western Europe is high on the list of Mr Gor- bachev's priorities should have his head examined.' No quarrel with that. The more relevant question is what kind of suzerainty the Soviet Union could establish without having to invade, if it ever acquired unchal- lenged military power. And Gorbachev is no foundation for our future. Clearly, the Bolshevik Party cannot revert to messianic communist imperialism. The faith is dead. But nor can it find legitimacy in the hodge-podge of incoherent half measures known as perestroika. The Party may muddle through or it may give way to a sort of Great Russian military fascism. Nobody can say with confidence what the country will look like in six years. All we know is that turbulent, declining empires with large armies are exceedingly dangerous.
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