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U.S. is once again threatening world security.
Last time we
checked, the U.S. was doing this by threatening to withdraw from
the ABM treaty, thereby risking a new Cold War, an arms race with
China, the upset of the nuclear "balance of terror," and
other consequences too awful (and vague) to spell out in any detail.
Well, that
was six months ago, and the world has moved on. No one even seems
to remember the poor ABM treaty any more (it's so "August 2001").
Instead, the
threat to world security has taken an entirely different character
— now it's not a withdrawal from the ABM treaty, but a withdrawal
from the "negative security assurance."
This act, according
to a very heavy-breathing editorial in the New York Times
this morning, would make America a "nuclear rogue," and
be "menacing to the security of future American generations."
How, you ask,
can so much depend on something you've never heard of, never wanted
to hear of, and wouldn't want to take the time to understand even
if you had heard of it?
You obviously
haven't re-upped your membership in the Federation of American scientists
recently.
The negative-security
assurance has a pedigree going back to that Metternich of the '70s,
Cyrus Vance, who first enunciated it.
It says, very
roughly, that the U.S. will not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear
state, unless that non-nuclear state attacks us in alliance with
a nuclear state.
This assurance
is supposed to be an added benefit of joining the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty (NPT), making signing the treaty irresistible for countries
around the world (abiding by it is, of course, another question
entirely).
It was reiterated
by that Metternich of the '90s, Warren Christopher, in 1995.
Just to give
you an idea of arms-control speak at work, I'll quote Christopher
in full:
The United
States reaffirms that it will not use nuclear weapons against
non-nuclear-weapons States Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons except in case of invasion or any other attack
on the United States, its territories, its armed forces or other
troops, its allies, or on a State towards which it has a security
commitment, carried out or sustained by such a non-nuclear-weapons
state in association or alliance with the nuclear-weapon State
[weird syntax and caps in original].
Got it?
As it happens,
Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea, have all signed the NPT.
The updating
of the U.S. arsenal to include low-yield bunker-busting nukes will
be done exactly with these states in mind — we want
to be able to destroy their deeply buried weapons sites in a crisis.
So, the New
York Times and others are aflutter: The U.S. seems to be ready
to abandon the security assurance, thus supposedly kicking out one
of the legs of the current arms-control regime.
Never mind
that most of those rogue states are, or have been, attempting to
violate the very NPT that is so sacrosanct (Iraq used its signature
on the treaty to help it get nukes).
The arms-controllers'
position seems to be that once these states actually violate the
NPT by attaining nuclear weapons, then we could contemplate
attacking them with our new nukes. But not before — we have
to wait until they actually get nukes.
In the meantime,
chemical and biological weapons sites that are too deeply buried
to be vulnerable to conventional weapons will just have to be considered
invulnerable and off limits to U.S. arms in a crisis. Oh, well.
So, the arms
controllers are oddly pro proliferation.
The dirty secret,
as I write in the current NR, is that the thrust of the arms-controllers
always seems to come down to limiting U.S. power.
Consider: Arms-controllers
oppose American missile defenses because it is supposedly destabilizing
for the U.S. to have sites that can be protected from rogue-state
(or Russian or Chinese) attack. On the other hand, arms-controllers
apparently don't mind rogue states' having deeply buried sites that
can be protected from U.S. attack.
There is no
effort to create an international treaty keeping rogues from digging
deep bunkers. And arms-controllers oppose a new U.S. weapon that
would be capable of holding these sites at risk.
Assured destruction
apparently looks much better when it applies only to the U.S.
The Bush administration,
by ignoring or reworking the security assurance, would just be acting
in accord with common sense. Nukes are for protecting us —
through deterrence, and if that fails through preemption or retaliation
— from other countries' weapons of mass destruction.
Time is not
on our side, President Bush famously declared. Neither is arms-control
flotsam that is meant, indirectly at least, to tie the hands of
the U.S. at a time of grave national peril.
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