U.S. policy on nuclear weapons in the mire

Jonathan Power, London

The sixtieth anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of Auschwitz is barely over when we are reminded of Russia's determination to make the 60th anniversary of the Soviet conquest of German-occupied Eastern Europe into another world event. Hard on its heels during the summer will be one other important 60th anniversary- the first and only use of nuclear weapons on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And this year will mark the fortieth anniversary of the opening of the negotiations on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the twentieth anniversary of the ice-breaking summit in Geneva of presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that laid the ground for their subsequent summit in Reykjavik when the two of them drove their advisors to the brink of despair with their intimate discussions on how they might get rid of all nuclear weapons.

In May there will be a review meeting of the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, a treaty that for all its flaws has been instrumental in keeping the number of nuclear-armed powers in single digits, much less than the 20-30 foreseen by President John F. Kennedy.

Last November, a group appointed by the UN's Secretary General, including Brent Scowcroft, the former National Security Advisor to President George Bush senior, warned against a coming "cascade of proliferation" and argued that the nuclear-have powers need to honor the central bargain of the NPT treaty and engage in nuclear disarmament in return for the rest of the world abjuring the pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Alarmingly, the usually reliable Kyodo news agency of Japan, recently reported that, "The U.S. plans to suggest that the [NPT review conference] should invalidate a document adopted at the 2000 meeting in which the five [major] nuclear weapons' powers committed themselves to an "unequivocal undertaking" to a nuclear-free world, according to U.S. government and congressional sources."

If this is so it comes as no surprise. The Bush administration after its initial effort to lower the U.S. and Russian arsenals by putting hundreds of warheads in storage has not followed it up by either more disarmament, an effort to take the remaining nuclear missiles off hair trigger alert, nor an adequate joint effort to neutralize and secure Soviet-era plutonium and enriched uranium that both sides are supposed to be working on together. It appears that Washington now plans to be honest about its intentions- it wants to re-write its public and often re-stated pledge to nuclear disarm.

It has a certain crude logic. Why should the U.S. keep its side of the bargain when North Korea, Libya, Iran, and maybe Saudi Arabia and Syria, all signatories (or in North Korea's case ex-signatory) of the NPT have taken steps to develop nuclear weapons?

The danger is that instead of being left with a more honest NPT we might be left at the end of the day with no NPT at all. For long enough the original nuclear- have powers were able to keep the restive rest of the world in line by pointing to the steady if slow progress made by the SALT and START negotiations of the superpowers, together with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the progress towards the writing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It may have only made a modest difference but at least the pace was forward. Since a Republican Congress rebuffed the attempt of the Clinton Administration to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty the momentum has been reversed. The Bush administration has withdrawn from the politically stabilizing Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, has spent a fortune on starting to construct an apparently irrelevant anti-missile defense (there is no defense against a suitcase bomb) and is pouring money into developing new types of nuclear weapons.

Moreover, U.S. nuclear policy is rapidly becoming not just self-defeating but incoherent. When it first became clear in 1994 that North Korea had perhaps developed a nuclear weapon or two Republicans went ballistic with the likes of Henry Kissinger and Robert Gates demanding that President Bill Clinton use force to disarm North Korea.

Now, after four years of huffing and puffing by a Republican Administration, Washington seems to have become if not passive, at least resigned to the status quo. At the same time, it is ratcheting up its military threats against Iran, even though Iran is a hundred times more open a society than North Korea and the one thing that gives its hard-liners popular support is this kind of American bluster. With neither does it understand that carrots must be on the menu.

Hindsight should give us some foresight. For the fight to continue so that there will never be another Hiroshima we need to make sure that the NPT with its central and crucial promise is kept intact, indeed strengthened.

Power is a London-based free-lance journalist.