Kevin Rudd’s proposed nuclear disarmament
commission will encounter problems in Washington, writes ANDY BUTFOY
(source: APO)
NEWS that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is establishing a
Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Commission is welcome. But the
commission will have an uphill battle to make substantive progress
outside the seminar room. There is the obvious problem of getting the
usual suspects – such as Iran – into line. But a more politically
awkward challenge for Rudd will be moving Washington in the right
direction.
The fact is that our most important ally, with which
we have such a close relationship and with whom we supposedly have
privileged and influential access, has for years ignored our policy and
recommendations on some key non-proliferation goals. The most obvious
example is Washington’s dismissive attitude to the Australian-sponsored
nuclear weapons Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
But the matter goes beyond the CTBT. To develop
this point, take a
report by senior Western analysts
which earlier this year said the United States must be prepared to start
a nuclear war. Many people were shocked by this, but not experienced
analysts. After all, for decades Washington has declared a readiness to
escalate crises into nuclear conflict and has helped kill efforts to ban
first use.
This approach goes back to when American plans for
nuclear escalation were used to keep the Soviet Union from invading
Western Europe. But the first-use option didn’t die with the end of the
Cold War, it got repackaged.
The Bush administration’s approach to Iran
illustrates how this happened. Rather than simply contain Tehran,
Washington has also dabbled with the oxymoronic idea of preventive war,
and has contemplated using threats to help bring about political
transformation of the country. As part of this muscling up, Washington
refuses to rule out
nuclear strikes.
This has got the United States into a muddle.
One day
officials indicate
Iran is a potential nuclear target. On other days, as in his last State
of the Union Address,
Bush says, “Our
message to the people of Iran is clear: We have no quarrel with you.” I
doubt the message seems clear to many Iranians.
It’s not that Bush wants to press the button. But his
advisors say he ought to show a readiness to do so. This supposedly
enables Washington to leverage nuclear threats to boost its diplomacy.
But using nuclear weapons to put the frighteners on Iran raises
problems.
For example, the tactic could encourage more Iranians
to want their own deterrent. But there is more than Iranian
sensitivities at issue. US nuclear threats also contradict the spirit of
the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Most countries support the NPT on
condition they won’t be threatened with devastation by the official
members of the nuclear weapons club (the US, Russia, China, UK, France).
Many efforts have been made to spell this out. For example, there was a
2006 proposal in the UN to develop legal measures “to assure
non-nuclear-weapons states against the use or threat of use of nuclear
weapons.” Unfortunately, in the only negative vote from over 160
countries, the US said “no.”
This fits neoconservative instincts. They sometimes
enjoy sharpening points of difference with the multilateral mainstream
and believe a self evidently virtuous Washington shouldn’t be
constrained by global rules. Unsurprisingly, this has exacerbated the
difficulty of gaining consensus at NPT meetings and has accentuated
perceptions of American double standards.
Washington explains its stubbornness as being
motivated by concerns over “weapons of mass destruction.” WMD is a handy
expression because it means that if you want to justify making a nuclear
threat, but the opponent doesn’t have nuclear bombs, you can point to
their biological and chemical weapons, or the usefully vague – and
sometimes empty – idea of their “capabilities.” This is despite the fact
that many of these weapons, even when they do exist, are incapable of
causing mass destruction. Furthermore, according to the Pentagon, the
definition of WMD can be stretched even further to include, for example,
high explosives. This means any
state can be said to have WMD capabilities.
The WMD label is loaded rhetoric, not a serious
analytical term. In 2003 it was served-up to start a war; today it’s
being unrolled to justify options for nuclear escalation. The Iraq
adventure may have discredited WMD-speak among the general public, but
the term is still being wheeled-out in politicised strategic analysis.
Ludicrous suggestions that US nuclear missiles are equivalent to, say, a
rogue state’s stocks of mustard gas are being manipulated to quash
growing calls for the role of nuclear weapons to be limited to the
deterrence of nuclear war; instead, it’s said by Washington, nuclear
weapons have additional roles and uses.
Now, Washington’s nuclear weapons might be
needed to deter
aggressive nuclear-armed regimes. But this has been
confused in US thinking with justifying plans to
start nuclear
escalation. This is reckless and unwise, for two reasons. First,
Washington is most unlikely to use nuclear bombs against the likes of
Iran, not least because doing so would probably trigger a political and
moral disaster. Second, the unintended – but loud – signal sent by
Washington is that these weapons are essential, so non-proliferation is
for mugs.
The United States is doing a lot of posturing for the
sake of a policy on first-use that offers little strategic benefit and
may backfire. It also reinforces perceptions of the neocons as wreckers
– happy to talk-up the flaws in the NPT system as an excuse strut their
stuff, but unable to come up with a better alternative. These folk are
not likely to embrace the spirit in which Rudd’s commission has been
proposed.
Unfortunately, however, waiting for the demise of the
neocons with the next presidential election will not necessarily solve
the problem. They are simply the loudest advocates of an American
approach to nuclear weapons which has deep roots.
Bill Clinton’s presidency helps illuminate the point.
He was interested in exploring alternatives to the Cold War addiction to
the first-use option – but not interested enough to invest the political
capital required to make the shift. Key parts of the Pentagon
bureaucracy found it easy to dilute, circumvent and ultimately derail
suggestions that Washington should adopt a clear stance of no first use.
When Clinton tried to move on an associated front, by backing the CTBT,
it was the Senate which pulled him into line.
Today, both presumptive presidential candidates, John
McCain and Barack Obama, look like they would be better guardians of
Washington’s place in multilateral non-proliferation than George W.
Bush. Both want additional cuts to the US nuclear arsenal, and both
resist calls for a new generation of “bunker-buster” nuclear warheads
(often seen as the most suitable weapons for first-use); in addition,
McCain has said he would reconsider his 1999 opposition to the CTBT.
And, predictably, both Obama and McCain mouth platitudes and clichés
about lessening the risk of nuclear war. Obama has also said it would be
“a profound mistake” to use nuclear weapons in the war on terror
(although Hilary Clinton’s negative, hairy-chested and point-scoring
response to this sensible view showed that in America there can still be
a political risk in ruling out the nuclear option).
Only time will tell whether the next president will
push for a turnaround in US strategic thinking, which currently
institutionalises – in the form of diplomatic recalcitrance at NPT
meetings, strategic analysis, indoctrination of military personnel, and
war planning – a self-declared American right to start nuclear war. •
Andy Butfoy lectures in international
relations at Monash University. He is the author of
Disarming Proposals: Controlling Nuclear,
Biological and Chemical Weapons,
published by UNSW Press in association with APO.
