Remember the old mantra? “Nuclear weapons keep the peace”. At least during the Cold War it was an arguable proposition, although the probability was that the USSR had had enough of war and had no designs on the territorial occupation of Western Europe. The US, for its part, was not, and never had been, interested in dominating Russia.
But the nuclear boffins today don’t even attempt to argue that nuclear weapons keep the peace. Despite growing tension with Russia no one, not even neoconservatives, argues that Russia is an enemy that needs military might to keep it at bay. As for China, President George W. Bush has made Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson the lead official in America’s dealings with Beijing, which says it all. Peace between the old antagonists apparently rules OK without nuclear deterrence.
So where else might nuclear weapons be “keeping the peace”? Both Bush and his father dropped heavy hints that they could be used against Iraq if Saddam Hussein used his supposed arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and word has been allowed to get out that Iran could be targeted with nuclear headed “earth diggers” to prize out Iran’s underground nuclear research facilities. But the White House doesn’t have the military at its beck and call on that contingency. There are well-substantiated rumors that high-level military officers have threatened to resign if the Iran option were considered. And the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, recounted in his biography how he backed down Defense Secretary Dick Cheney when he pressed Powell to investigate how nuclear weapons might be used during the first Gulf War.
In truth nuclear weapons are unusable anachronisms. Breaking the taboo on the use of torture is one thing; breaking it on devastating millions of innocents is quite another. So why is Britain renewing its nuclear deterrent and why is the Bush administration trying to achieve nuclear primacy?
This may seem the wrong question to pose when the US has 66 percent fewer strategic bombers, 50 percent fewer intercontinental nuclear missiles and 50 percent fewer ballistic missile submarines than it possessed during the Cold War. But numbers are not the main point — quality, destructive power and accuracy are. During the last years of the Cold War a US submarine-launched missile had a 12 percent chance of destroying a hardened Russian rocket silo; today the chance is over 90 percent. The strategic balance between Russia and the US is becoming less stable. Yet back in 1974 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was questioning the idea of nuclear superiority: “What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it, politically, militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?”
Well, if you are a George Bush type you strut, you push out your chest and you feel good. Is that the answer? It is maybe part of it. But it is also bureaucratic inertia. In 1993 President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defence Les Aspin made it clear he intended to sharply cut the US arsenal. But midlevel officials failed to provide Aspin with a road map on how to do this. Supported by influential members of Congress they simply stalled. The industrial-congressional-academic-journalistic complex that dominates the nuclear weapons debate makes it almost impossible for even a president — as Ronald Reagan discovered in his summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik — to put the US nuclear machine into real reverse.
Common sense suggests that a US president would either have to have nerves of steel or brains of lead to consider a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Russia. Nevertheless, the fact that it is US policy to not only remain top nuclear dog but to achieve the power to make such a pre-emptive strike is very frightening. Who can read the future? — After another decade of deteriorating relations with an increasingly assertive Russia, a panicky president with an electorate wild with anger after a suitcase nuclear weapon goes off in Grand Central Station, with scientists reporting to him that it looks as if the enriched uranium originated in a Russian facility, might try and push the button.
But if you think this is ludicrous scaremongering then why, when the peace is kept, do we hold on to our nuclear weapons?
