America the Rogue?
Liberals have a new hyperbolic complaint about the Bush administration.

March 12, 2002 12:05 p.m.

he 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.