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10 May 2005 |
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http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?... |
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The United States' anti-missile defence program has to be the most idiotic military decision since the Trojans allowed the Greeks to wheel a large wooden horse through the gates of Troy. The Trojans, after all, didn't know what was inside the horse - and getting it cost them no money. At a cost so far of close to $100 billion, America's anti-missile system suffers from two consequential defects: It can't knock down incoming missiles even when the co-ordinates of their flight paths are programmed into it. No nation-state dictator, no matter how paranoid, is going to condemn himself (and his people) to instant, total obliteration for the satisfaction of lobbing at the U.S. a nuclear-tipped missile that almost certainly will miss anyway. Americans have the right to waste their own money - up to a point. The rest of the world has a considerable interest at stake when the anti-missile system is considered as part of the U.S.'s overall nuclear policy. "Overkill" (an unfortunate word in this context) is the best way to describe U.S. nuclear policy. It's a larger version of the anti-missile program. Today, a decade-and-a-half after the end of the Cold War and therefore after the end of any serious nuclear threat to its territory and people, the U.S. has 5,300 "operationally deployed" nuclear weapons. To understand the scale of that armoury, Britain, France and China, all well-established nuclear powers, each have between 200 and 400 nuclear warheads. Russia does have a lot more. But most of them are rusting and antiquated. American apologists keep saying that under a deal (in 2001) with Russia, the U.S. will reduce its warheads to around 2,000. Except that the deactivated warheads won't be scrapped but will be put into a "responsive reserve," from which they can be retrieved quickly if necessary. The objective - as with the missile-defence system - isn't arms reduction or arms control or nuclear security. It's nuclear supremacy, absolute and unchallengeable. As part of this continued drive for supremacy, the U.S. has announced it will not ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and, although no decision to test has yet been made, Washington has ordered the national nuclear laboratories to start research on new atomic weapons. While all this is going on, the U.S. is trying to convince Iran and North Korea to halt their minuscule nuclear programs. If Washington was out, instead, to provoke these two nations into developing nuclear weapons, it is impossible to imagine policies and practices that would more certainly produce that result. It's all madness. But clever, cynical, Machiavellian madness. To justify its own nuclear program, from the anti-missile system to the dismissal of international controls, Washington needs a threat. Iran and North Korea, thus, are doing exactly what Washington wants them to do. And they are doing it because Washington is provoking them into doing it. As the latest example, at the huge United Nations conference on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty now going on in New York, the U.S. signalled its indifference by sending as its delegation leader an unknown, mid-rank official. Iran's representative rose to the bait by declaring in his speech that Iran would go back to developing enriched uranium. It remains madness. The U.S. is achieving its objective of maintaining nuclear supremacy all right. But it is paying itself back in nuclear insecurity. "I have never been more fearful than now," former U.S. defence secretary William Perry said recently. "There is a greater than 50 per cent probability of a nuclear strike on U.S. targets within a decade." The rest of us should be as fearful. Richard Gwyn's column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. gwynR@sympatico.ca.
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