AS I WAS SAYING
My guess as to what the West will do about Third World nuclear weapons
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
• obody will recall, since nobody took the slightest notice, that this column recent- ly — before the India and Pakistan tests — raised its croaking voice in favour of a new Ban the Bomb campaign. Most columnists get a response, either with brickbats or bouquets, from about ten readers. In this instance there was not a single letter. Not even Monsignor Bruce Kent wrote in to give my plea his imprirnatur. Just imagine if someone of my reactionary ilk had come out in support of a ban on fox-hunting — that, in our little circle, would certainly have been news. But an ex-supporter of thermonuclear deterrence coming out for CND went quite unnoticed.
Not that I was surprised. For the truth is that in the interval between the end of the Cold War and last month's India and Pak- istan nuclear tests, the West had grown amazingly complacent, even quite fond of the Bomb. For had it not, by introducing the balance of terror, brought the Cold War to a triumphant conclusion without the need for anybody to fire a single shot? Indeed it had, as even the CND was forced to admit. Far from having proved a source of unprecedented evil, nuclear weapons had in fact kept the peace with unparalleled effectiveness and, because of their astro- nomical cost, been a major factor in bankrupting the evil empire.
With the end of the Cold War, in short, the Western mood changed from nuclear self-laceration to nuclear self-congratula- tion. Instead of the mushroom cloud being seen as a dreadful shadow endangering the future of mankind, it began to be seen rather as a reassuring shield protecting the future of mankind. In theory, of course, Western governments continued to urge non-nuclear countries to desist from devel- oping their own nuclear arsenals. But the fact that the same weapons were credited by the West with having kept the peace in Europe for half a century could not fail to weaken at least the moral force of such urgings. If the balance of terror had worked in Europe, why should it not do so in the other troubled regions of the world?
The obvious, if unspoken, answer, of course, was that whereas the United States, France and Great Britain, and even the Soviet Union, were in the hands of sane and responsible statesmen, deter- mined not lightly to press the nuclear but- ton, the same, unfortunately, could not be said about the nations of the Third World. Plainly, however, this was not an argu- ment likely to carry much weight among the potential nuclear powers. In fact it was quite certain to provoke rather than to deter proliferation, as could easily have been predicted if anybody had bothered to remember how Germany reacted when, at the beginning of the century, Britain and France, having acquired colonies all over the world, produced similar argu- ments to prevent the Kaiser from doing the same.
If Britain and France had been prepared to give up their own places in the sun, it might have been another matter. But short of making that sacrifice, which they were unwilling to do, their hypocritical claims that colonies were more trouble than they were worth, or that Germany, unlike them, had no need of them, succeeded only in hotting up, rather than damping down, Germany's colonial ambitions, just as today's determination by the West to hang on to sizable nuclear armouries, while at the same time urging others not to acquire any at all, has also proved counter-produc- tive, as it was bound to do.
Entirely overlooked, as much by com- mentators as by governments, was the Western case for non-proliferation having always depended on the continuation of the Cold War. That case could not fail to unravel once the Cold War had been won. During the Cold War the West could indeed claim a special dispensation to pos- sess, and therefore to threaten to use these appallingly destructive weapons because of the supreme importance of the task which fate had burdened them with: namely, the defeat of Soviet communism. So great was this responsibility that those charged with it had a duty to go to any lengths, including, if need be, the incineration of the human race, rather than risk failing to fulfil it. For if they did fail to fulfil it, and totalitarian communism conquered the world, freedom would be obliterated from the face of the earth, not just for a time, but for ever.
In other words, the struggle against Sovi- et communism was a special case, tran- scending all the customary limitations placed on the use of hideously destructive weapons; transcending even the Church's age-old conditions for a 'just war'. Tradi- tional raisons d'etat alone could not justify the use of nuclear weapons. But the Cold War, being about the survival of freedom itself, was different; so different that rather than risk losing it, the Western allies had a duty, with a clear conscience, to threaten to bring history to an end.
Of course not everybody, even in the West, believed these claims. Hence the popularity of CND with its dissenting slo- gan 'Better Red than Dead'. But Western governments did believe them — or rather pretended to believe them so as to make credible the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). As to what would happen to the case for non-proliferation when the Cold War was won, the allies would cross that bridge when they came w it, which seemed at the time well beyond any foreseeable future. In the event, of course, they came to the bridge much soon- er than anyone expected, and were, and Still are, quite unable to cross it — are quite unable, that is, to find a post-Cold War case for hanging on to their own nuclear armouries, while forbidding other coun- tries, many of whom in the post-Cold War world face incomparably greater and more urgent national security problems — tO have any at all. My guess, therefore, is that slowly but surely the United States and her allies and former enemies will agree to abandon all their nuclear arsenals — so as to make non-proliferation once again a realistic goal — while at the same time secretly exploiting their own uniquely rich scientific resources to develop a post-nuclear range of weapons of an even more effectively destructive order. Indeed the likelihood must be that such research is already well under way. Precisely what these weapons will be I have no idea, but I think that it can be safely taken for granted that theY will be of such a sophistication as to make nuclear weapons seem pitifully out of date, to the same degree as dynamite super- seded the bow and arrow. No doubt Third World countries are well aware of this, and are trying to make the best of their nuclear capabilities before they are rendered redundant. Who can blame them? In corn- parable circumstances we would be doing the same. Let me conclude with a confident predic: tion. Early in the next millennium the worl" will have cause to look back on the nuclear half-century with nostalgia. They will wine to seem like the good old days.
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