The Guardian
Tuesday
May 12, 1998
Dicing with death
With such terrible instruments of
mass destruction, can we imagine humanity surviving the next millennium?
Dan Plesch
The fateful decision announced yesterday by the new Indian government requires immediate British action. Nuclear proliferation is not a spectator sport. Britain must now decide to enter formal negotiations in the UN for the elimination of nuclear arms.
The Government should also initiate a technical study of how this can be achieved as part of a strategy of reducing the risks to Britain. The Cabinet should task the Foreign and Defence Secretaries to support to those sections of the Clinton administration seeking to move the disarmament agenda forward. The urgency comes both from India’s tests and also from an objective assessment that the risk of accidental nuclear war with Russia remains far too high for comfort.
Last week attempts to get nuclear disarmament moving as part of the Non-Proliferation talks in Geneva were still being stonewalled. Appeals for action from states as diverse as South Africa and Switzerland fell on deaf ears at the US State Department in Foggy Bottom, and in the Kremlin, Whitehall and the Elysee.
When Sheriff Clinton set off for the Gulf to tackle Saddam Hussein, Britain was happy to his Deputy. Problem was there weren’t no posse. One reason the posse stayed home was that they saw Britain and the US as hypocritical. We have a legal commitment under the NPT to negotiate away our nuclear weapons. If we want our bomb for ever why should not others?
The Pope has emphasised the grave danger if leaders of governments do not have the wisdom or the will to put brakes on the production of such terrible instruments of death. Can we imagine humanity surviving the next millennium with nuclear weapons?
Peregrine Worsthorne recently wrote a call to Ban the Bomb, saying that nuclear deterrence theories should be brushed aside as no more worth preserving than dirty old cobwebs.
General George Lee Butler was, until 1994, the US Commander in Chief of Strategic Command. He was the man who in the nuclear war movies sits in a big chair with lots of phones from which he can talk to the President and launch the big birds. General Butler now fervently rejects nuclear deterrence as an irrational and inappropriate policy. (see, www.worldforum.org)
A strategy of reducing the risks to Britain should build upon the Tories’ unilateral nuclear disarmament steps. John Major abandoned nuclear artillery and battlefield rockets, the Tactical Air to Surface Missile, the nuclear role of RAF Tornados, the navy’s nuclear depth charges and even limited the warheads on Trident.
We need to get Russian nuclear weapons off hair trigger alert, but this means being prepared to act ourselves. Even when off alert, nuclear weapons present a grave risk no longer justifiable by any threat. We need verified destruction to prevent them being stolen.
The Start talks have stopped. The Americans are waiting for the Duma to agree START II before beginning START III. Now many cold warriors see the need for rapid action to reduce the nuclear risk, most of the technical work has been done by the boffins. But the Clinton Administration is hamstrung by fundamentalists in the Senate who hate international agreements of all kinds, especially those on defence, and also by the results of his own sleazy behaviour.
Paralysis in Washington is matched by catatonia in Moscow. Yeltsin presides over a decaying Russian nuclear infrastructure that becomes ever more deadly as it decays.
Tony Blair sees the relationship with the US in general and Clinton in particular, as central to his foreign policy. But Washington is made up of competing interests. Throughout the Cold War Europeans acted as a counterweight to the worst bomb-happy Americans. Tony Blair should now rally the Europeans to assist those sections of the US government trying to reduce the nuclear threat.
Dan Plesch heads BASIC, the London- and Washington-based arms control organization.