Cooking the books on nuclear weapons: The less the better

Dan Plesch, Senior Research Fellow, Royal United Services Institute, United Kingdom, Guardian News Service, London

Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin are expected to conclude a deal next week on nuclear arms and Star Wars. Bush administration officials indicate that it will be a deal from the last century, despite Bush's protestations that the cold war is over. There will be concessions to anti-nuclear opinion; fake statistics; continued planning to fight and win nuclear war, a neatly laid out course for a new arms race and, regrettably, no plan to implement the "unequivocal" commitments to eliminate the bomb made at the UN last year.

Public opinion and most nations are profoundly against nuclear weapons. A few may be needed, people feel, but generally less is better. For half a century superpower leaders had to come up with some concessions to that view. This time there will be an agreement to reduce nuclear arms to about 1,800 each for the U.S. and Russia from present totals of around 7,000. Such a massive reduction will make us safer.

There may also be steps to put a safety catch on some that are left, but America's Trident will remain able to burn any pinpoint on the planet at a moment's notice.

What are thousands of nuclear weapons for? Even if one wanted to Hiroshima the Taliban, surely a few dozen would suffice? Bush apparently thought something similar and wanted "just" a thousand for a rainy day. But the high priests of nuclear theology, notably the National Security Council's Franklin Miller, insisted that potential targets should determine the number. And, as ever, the prime targets are Russian and Chinese weapons before they can be fired.

In the immortal words of Stanley Kubrick's general, such an attack would not mean that "we would not get our hair mussed, but 30 to 40 million dead -- tops". Bush has completed his review of nuclear strategy and the ability to launch a strike at Russia's forces: The major attack option one of the single integrated operating plan for nuclear use remains in place. So much for getting beyond the cold war.

Washington and Russia collude in cooking the nuclear accounting. Thousands more "reserve" and "tactical" weapons are left out of the headline number on each side. In a concession to U.S. power, Putin, with his own bombers rusting, has apparently conceded that planes such as the 94 B-52s be counted as one weapon when in fact they each carry 20 nuclear cruise missiles with a 1,500-mile (2,500km) range. This one line of small print doubles the U.S. total.

President Bush's prime security concern before Sept. 11 was to shoot missiles down with other missiles. If anything the terrorist attacks have reaffirmed the view that the U.S. should be protected against all kinds of threats. Should Russia and China wish to keep their ability to destroy America -- their deterrent -- and get into another arms race, well so be it -- the U.S. won the last one, argued Ambassador Evan Galbraith, a senior adviser to President Bush and long-time chairman of the influential National Review, in a speech in London last month.

The connection of the missile shield to a nuclear surprise attack is rarely made explicit by Washington. A leaked memo in the summer of 2000 from the Clinton administration was one bizarre example. With the self-confidence of the truly hair- brained, the Clintonites explained to the Russians that provided Russia kept its rockets on a hair trigger they would still be able to destroy America if the U.S. launched a surprise attack, even after the Pentagon had built a few score anti-missile systems to fend off rogue states. Don't blame me -- I did not invent this stuff. You can read it for yourself on the web site of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (www.thebulletin.org).

Putin is expected to concede that the U.S. can continue to test missile defenses and will not cite this as a breach of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty which limits U.S. and Russian anti- missile missiles. In turn, out of respect for its ally in the war against terrorism, Washington will not declare the treaty null and void as many Bush supporters have demanded. As all the history of the military industrial complex shows, once weapons start putting taxpayers' dollars in the pockets of shareholders and employees they become unstoppable. In this instance there are an exotic array that would fill the pages of a Christmas catalog of war toys, from space-based lasers to kinetic kill vehicles.

Everyone wants to be defended but a verified and enforceable nuclear-free world is a cheaper and more technically feasible solution than anti-missile missiles. According to NATO, the worst missile now in the hands of "rogue" states is the Scud, which uses an engine designed by Werner von Braun for the Nazi V-2. Sixty years later this is the worst the "bad guys" have got, mainly because Russia and China have not given them anything better. Even China has only managed to build rockets of a standard the superpowers surpassed in the 1960s.

The challenge now is to put more energy into enforceable international law banning nuclear, and for that matter, biological and chemical weapons. The "coalition against terrorism" is, we are told, to last for years. Can we expect to be better or worse off if we are trying to scrap and check up on as much dangerous junk as we possibly can? And what are we to make of a coalition leader if it continues to want to police the world by force alone and without recourse to international law?

Britain has said that it would join multilateral talks on eliminating nuclear arms when the time was right. As prime minister Tony Blair has said in Ireland and the Middle East, there is a choice between starting a dialogue or not. This is also true of implementing the rhetoric on a world free from weapons of mass destruction.