U.S. shows hypocricy over issue of nuclear weapons

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Back in June, after India and Pakistan had shaken the world by testing nuclear weapons, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned them that they were making a dreadful mistake. "Don't rush to embrace what the rest of the world is racing to leave behind," she said. "Don't assume that you're the only countries on earth that are immune to miscalculation. There is no point worth making, no interest worth securing, that can possibly justify the risk."

How odd, then, that on Nov. 13 the United States voted against a resolution in the UN disarmament committee calling on the existing nuclear powers to "demonstrate an unequivocal commitment" to getting rid of their weapons by fast-tracking negotiations for nuclear disarmament. Washington certainly isn't racing to leave its nuclear weapons behind.

It's run-of-the-mill hypocrisy, scarcely worthy of comment -- except that of America's fifteen NATO allies, twelve abstained in the UN vote. Only Britain, and France, which are fellow nuclear powers equally determined to hang onto their status symbols, and Turkey, which is currying U.S. diplomatic support on other issues, joined Washington in voting against the resolution.

This was an unprecedented breach of NATO unity, but there is more to come. The two ringleaders in the revolt against U.S. determination to hang onto its nukes forever, Germany and Canada, are also moving towards an open campaign to drop NATO's policy of "nuclear first use", a policy as old as the Cold War itself.

The U.S. and NATO have always reserved the right of "first use": to be the first to launch a nuclear strike in a crisis. They simply say that this would be done in response to a non- nuclear attack by somebody else (traditionally, the Soviet Union), but they deliberately keep the language vague to maximize uncertainty about what they would actually do if attacked.

This had a certain crude logic when NATO's conventional forces were smaller than those of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact in Europe. NATO's nuclear first-use policy saved its members the greater cost and voter resistance that would have been involved in matching the Soviet Union soldier for soldier (though at the cost of making nuclear war more likely in any confrontation in Europe).

But the Soviet Union is gone now, and Russia's conventional forces are so shrunken and demoralized that they could not even conquer Chechnya. It would seem an ideal time for NATO to scrap this bizarre threat to start using nuclear weapons in the heart of densely populated Europe -- or anywhere else, for that matter.

Where NATO actually expected to use most of its "tactical" nuclear weapons, for forty years, was in among the towns and villages of Germany. This always made the prospective blast and radiation victims in those towns and villages a bit uneasy, so it's no great surprise that the government of reunited Germany has been the first NATO member to break ranks openly on this issue.

Once Helmut Kohl's long-ruling conservative government lost power in the October elections, the change came at once. Last month's 50-page coalition pact between the Social Democrats and the Greens included a promise that the new government "will campaign to lower the alert status of nuclear weapons and for a renunciation of the first use of nuclear weapons."

This left Washington foaming with indignation: "We believe the Germans are using flawed logic and phoney arguments," said a senior State Department official. The German foreign office snapped right back: "The security and military situation has changed so radically in recent years that the time is right for (a policy of "no first use"). It belongs in the NATO review (of nuclear weapons policy) and we want to push it at the April summit."

By the time of NATO's 50th anniversary summit in Washington, the pressures for "no first use" may have grown even greater. Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy asked the House of Commons foreign affairs committee to review nuclear policy two full years ago, and the report, due in early December, will further undermine the status quo.

Leaked reports in Ottawa suggest that it will seek an end to NATO's first-use policy, call for the removal of American nuclear weapons from Europe, and advocate the de-arming of all nuclear weapons (that is, separating the warheads from the delivery systems).

But this is hardly radical stuff ten years after the end of the Cold War. Why does it upset official Washington so much? The official answer, couched in language of theological density, is that "deterrence rests on uncertainty". (Translation: if you really get us annoyed, we might go crazy and start using nuclear weapons).

Nobody really believes that NATO will go crazy like that, of course, so there is a fall-back, unofficial answer: that NATO needs its nuclear weapons, and its "first-use" policy, to deal with the threat of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in the hands of genuinely "crazy states". Only nobody really believes that either.

No U.S. leader is ever going start dropping atomic bombs on some small Third World country, ending 53 years during which nobody has used nuclear weapons in warfare, no matter what it has hidden in its labs. Air strikes, maybe; nukes, no.

In practice, there is already a "no-first-use" policy -- so why in heaven's name doesn't Washington want NATO to say so? Why won't it say so itself? It would help a great deal in persuading other countries (and there is a queue stretching half-way round the block) not to go nuclear too.

A modest hypothesis. The U.S. has spent $5.5 trillion dollars on nuclear weapons since 1945, which is enough to create a very powerful interest group both in defense industry and in parts of the armed forces. All these people's jobs depend on nuclear weapons -- and if you admit that they are practically unusable, the demand for them is likely to drop. So you must never, ever say that.