Ridding the world of arsenals a distant dream

By Brahma Chellaney

NEW DELHI (JP): Elimination of all weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has never looked as distant a dream as it does today. The historic opportunities opened up by the end of the Cold War have been frittered away. Future generations will view these missed opportunities as the biggest blunder of the last part of the 20th century.

As if the existing 30,000 nuclear warheads are not enough, all the five nuclear powers are presently engaged in building new high-tech nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles.

Nuclear disarmament will become possible, as U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen has candidly admitted, only "when new technology has produced a powerful new non-nuclear deterrent in the indefinite future".

Just as nuclear weapons gradually eroded the military value of chemical arms for the great powers, paving the way for the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, nuclear disarmament will have to await the arrival of a new mass-annihilation technology. "Hopefully," as Cohen said recently, "in a very short period of time, technology will bring us techniques and technologies other than nuclear weapons."

Whether the new extermination weapons are space-based laser systems or other products of the revolution in military affairs (RMA), they are likely to be more powerful and dreadful than nuclear arms. Future military power will be pivoted on space- based offense and defense and information-superiority capacity.

With the RMA process presaging a more lethally armed world, the race for fourth-generation nuclear weapons has begun in earnest. While the United States has drawn international criticism for conducting underground nuclear tests at professedly subcritical level, Russia has been surreptitiously carrying out similar experiments since 1996 at the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya.

A high-ranked Russian official has disclosed that Moscow conducted two such tests in 1996 and another two this year. Russia, in other words, was the first to begin such testing. The United States, which has scheduled four more "subcritical" tests in 1998 after carrying out the first two experiments this year, is committed to sharing the test results with France and Britain.

These plutonium-based tests, indistinguishable from very-low- yield experiments, can help develop advanced micro-nuclear arms for "surgical" strikes as well as new or modified fission weapons. The claims that these tests are not reaching criticality are unverifiable under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty's unfolding monitoring regime, whose detection capabilities drop sharply for tests below one-kiloton yield and are close to zero for tests that release a few kilograms of fission energy.

The thin line separating these tests from old-style testing was exposed in August when a seismic event near Novaya Zemlya rang nuclear alarm bells in Washington and prompted an official protest to the Russian ambassador. The United States only this month dropped its charge that Russia had conducted a low-yield test there. The Chinese, meanwhile, remain engaged in unspecified activities at their Lop Nor test site.

Each of the nuclear powers has its own strategic rationale for nuclear modernization. Russia's love for nuclear weapons has grown in proportion to its national decline. It is now relying on nuclear weapons as a means to cut its ground forces in half by 2005 and move towards lighter, mobile Army units armed with battlefield nukes and high-tech weaponry. The Russians are developing new "high-safety" tactical nuclear weapons as well as new strategic ballistic missiles and warheads.

China's ongoing nuclear and missile modernization is part of its great-power pretensions and desire to be militarily invulnerable. For Britain and France, nuclear weapons are critical to their continued status as important powers. The two are now integrating their nuclear strategies, as they induct new nuclear weaponry in their armories.

The most ominous aspect of the current armament process is the development of new nuclear weapons by the world's sole superpower.

The United States, with its unchallenged conventional military power, faces no imminent or short-term threat to its security. Nor in the foreseeable future will any country or coalition be able to openly take on the United States. Yet, it is quietly developing an array of new nuclear-weapon systems, one of which (the air-launched, earth-penetrating B-61 Mod-11) it has already deployed.

The other advanced weapons currently under development, according to published U.S. disclosures, include a nuclear warhead for theater-defense missiles, a replacement for the Trident submarine-launched warhead, upgrades to MX warheads and strategic bombs, and nuclear glide bombs to overcome the shortcomings of the B-2 stealth bomber. In addition, U.S. weapon labs are working on a more modern Trident missile and a high- powered radio-frequency warhead to knock out adversarial electronic systems.

Recent developments are reminding the world that even modest, reversible steps by the nuclear powers remain distant. Such steps could include the removal of nuclear weapons from hair-trigger alert, separation of warheads from delivery vehicles and agreement not to use nuclear weapons first.

This month the United States and its NATO allies demanded that the proposed International Criminal Court (ICC) exclude the use of nuclear weapons as a war crime.

They also joined hands with Russia to vote against a UN First Committee resolution seeking to implement a ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which held that the nuclear powers are legally obliged to negotiate in good faith and "achieve a precise result -- nuclear disarmament in all its aspects". Yet, 16 months after the landmark ruling, even the first part of that two-fold obligation has not been honored, with negotiations nowhere in sight.

According to the NATO proposal, the ICC -- scheduled to be set up at a meeting in Rome next June -- should include in its statute as war crimes the use of chemical and biological weapons but not nuclear arms. The submission, seeking to change the current draft statute language classifying all WMD use as a crime, is aimed at shielding nuclear weapons as legitimate instruments of terror for some nations.

While the ICJ deals with disputes between states, the ICC is to try individuals charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

Against this background, the recent United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) approval of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's proposal to establish a separate UN department on disarmament affairs will make little difference. The UNGA's very first resolution -- "the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons" -- remains unfulfilled almost 52 years later.

In fact, Annan's proposal to elevate disarmament affairs to a full department was received with deep suspicion by some non- aligned nations, which saw it as an effort to weaken the current focus on nuclear disarmament by emphasizing nonproliferation and conventional-arms issues. It was this concern that forced a name change -- from Department for Disarmament and Arms Regulation, as proposed by Annan, to Department of Disarmament Affairs.

Armament and disarmament are essentially two sides of the same coin. Arms buildup spawns an exigency for elimination of outdated or redundant weapons. History shows that major arms buildups are inevitably followed by "disarmament", or elimination of weapon surpluses. But such "disarmament" is designed to bolster, not undermine, the vital interests of the great powers.

For example, the INF, START I and START II treaties -- products of Cold-War surpluses -- were designed to safeguard deterrence by eliminating the most vulnerable and destabilizing of the weapon systems. History also shows that only those engaged in armament have a real say in disarmament.

Current research on space-based platforms and high-power lasers, and the recent U.S. laser firing against a satellite, indicate the 21st century will bring new, awe-inspiring WMD systems.

The writer is an arms-control specialist and professor of security studies at the Center for Policy Research, an independent think-tank in New Delhi.