DEFENCE
VERSUS OFFENCE IN THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE
One thing has quickly led
to another in what former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has termed
“the action-reaction phenomenon in the technology of weapons.” The development
of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in the early 1950s led shortly
to the development of a defence system against missiles (known as the
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system) in the mid- and late 1950s, and the ABM
though in its infancy in turn led to the development of the MIRV to put
multiple warheads on individual missiles in the mid-1960s.
During the presidency of
Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69), the Sentinel defence system was proposed in 1967
in an election year to close another so-called “missile gap” (a leaf taken from
Kennedy’s campaign in 1960). Sentinel was expressly conceived and designed to counter
a non-existing Chinese missile threat.
Sentinel was to present a
thin shield to thwart an imaginary Chinese missile attack in the 1970s. The
Chinese were later to deploy their first ICBM (the DF-5) in late 1981 when they
had more than 300 nuclear weapons as compared with over 23,000 nukes in the
American arsenal.
Robert McNamara, Secretary of
Defense (1961-68), said Sentinel had a threefold mission: (1) to provide a thin
“area defense” of the entire United States against a missile attack by China,
(2) to protect against an accidental launch of a Soviet missile, and (3) to
provide “as a concurrent benefit,” a limited defence of US land-based Minuteman
ICBMs against a Soviet strike.
Scientists opposed to the
urban-based Sentinel system brought the issue to the American public. The
leading lights among them included the distinguished pair of Hans Bethe, a
Nobel laureate and wartime director of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos,
and Richard Garwin, another theoretical physicist and protégé of Enrico Fermi,
who like Bethe had done work on the thermonuclear bomb.
Citizen protests began promptly
in Chicago where a few scientists from the Argonne National Laboratory
spearheaded the public campaign against the ABM.
On 14 March 1969 Richard Nixon,
newly sworn in as the US president (1969-74), announced that the ABM sites and
radars would be removed from the cities to more remote locations. Renamed
“Safeguard”, its primary purpose was to defend the Minutemen ICBMs (the first
of which were deployed in 1963) against a preemptive Soviet strike.
Herbert York, former
director of the Livermore Laboratory (a major centre for designing and
developing nuclear weaponry), wrote in August 1969 that “Safeguard will
safeguard nothing” in the field of US national security.
York pinpointed “the
futility of searching for technical solutions to what is essentially a
political problem, namely, the problem of national security…”
In condemning the
Sentinel and justifying the rechristened Safeguard, the new Defense Secretary
Melvin Laird stated in March 1969 that “the original Sentinel was potentially
provocative. As such, it appeared to us (in the Nixon Administration) to be a
step toward, rather than away from, an escalation of the arms race…”
According to the statistics
compiled by Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American
Scientists, the Soviets nearly doubled their nuclear warheads from over 8,000
in 1967 to over 14,000 in 1972 when the two superpowers signed the ABM Treaty.
Bethe and Garwin had foreseen that Sentinel “would inevitably stimulate a large
increase in the Russian strategic offensive forces…” The US, however, had nearly twice as many nuclear weapons as
the Soviet Union in 1972.
Following Chairman
Khrushchev’s abject humiliation in the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis which
exposed the vulnerability of Moscow and other Soviet key targets to a
devastating nuclear assault, and also in response to Sentinel’s predecessor
Nike X (1962-67) which was never deployed, the Soviets developed and deployed
the Galosh defence system around Moscow. And although the Soviet ABM was known
to be rather rudimentary with fewer than 100 interceptors, the US responded by
developing the MIRV to arm their new ICBMs with multiple warheads.
The introduction of MIRV
technology starting with the initial deployment in 1970 of the Minuteman III
with three independently targetable warheads brought “the single most
destabilizing element in the history of the nuclear arms competition.”
In 1985 Henry Kissinger (US
Secretary of State, 1973-77) told Micheal Charlton of BBC London in an
interview: “Secretary McNamara did not want to build an anti-ballistic missile
defence. He therefore developed the idea of a MIRV, arguing that with MIRV we
could saturate any Soviet defence and that therefore there would be no
strategic inequality if the Soviets had a defensive system and we did not…”
The Soviets also developed their
own MIRV and started deploying their super-monster Hydras with the SS-18 ICBM
with 10 warheads in 1974 and the SS-19 with 6 warheads in 1975.
“MIRV and its fratricidal
counterpart ABM, the anti-ballistic missile, were respectively offence and
defence, sword and shield,” Charlton has written. “Superficially they had
transported this classical antithesis into the nuclear era. But given the
enormous power of even a single nuclear weapon, the ancient discord of sword and
shield were adjudged unconvincing by
Robert McNamara. It fell to Henry Kissinger to search for some common
understanding of the proposition that, in the nuclear age, the adversary
becomes in a sense partner in the avoidance of nuclear war as a political and
moral necessity…”
Before the signing of
the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, the Americans had to persuade
the Soviet side that ABM development had destabilizing consequences. Both
rivals then agreed that nation-wide deployment of the ABM system was futile,
destabilizing, and costly.
As explained in Arms Control Today, July/August 1984: “Futile: because in a competition
between defense system and offensive missiles with nuclear warheads, the offense
would win, especially against populations and urban areas.
“Destabilising: because the arms race would be accelerated as both
sides developed and deployed not only competing ABM systems, but also
offsetting systems to overpower, evade, or attack and disable the opposing ABM
system. Furthermore, each side would fear the purpose or the capability of the
other’s ABMs (especially against a weakened retaliatory strike), and in a
crisis these fears could bring mounting pressures for striking first. What
strategic theorists refer to as arms race instability and crisis instability
could both result.
“Costly: because both ABM development and deployment, and the
buildup, modernization and diversification of offsetting offensive forces, must
be purchased…”
On 23 March 1983, a decade
after the signing of the ABM treaty, President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) called
on American scientists to develop his so-called SDI (Strategic Defense
Initiative) to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” McNamara called
the envisioned leak-proof defence system to replace offensive weapons by
defensive weapons as “Star Wars I” which, he said, would not be technically
feasible within the next several decades.
The combination of a partial
defence system with offensive systems, he called “Star Wars II” which would
appear to be aggressive to the Soviets and, he stressed, “that is a very great
danger.”
Reagan’s SDI has since
morphed into regular BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense) during the presidency of
his avatar George W. Bush (2001-2009). Influenced much by neoconservative hawks
in Washington, Bush scuppered the ABM treaty in 2002 to further develop the
BMD.
Early June 2009, Lt-Gen
Patrick O’Reilly, head of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, proudly told a
missile defence conference in Washington that the US has fine-tuned its
capability to shoot down long-range missiles launched by North Korea which had
about a week earlier conducted its second nuclear test on May 25 after its
debut in October 2006 (and its nuclear test on February 2013). That recalls
what the old Sentinel had been supposedly tasked to do against a hypothetical
attack by primitive Chinese missiles in the 1970s.
The far-seeing physicist
Herbert York tried vainly to drive home the point four decades ago that the
solution of security is not technological, but essentially political.
What Presidents Gorbachev and
Reagan also vainly tried to achieve in the mid-and late-1980s, the answer is to
be found in the political decision for total nuclear disarmament, without any
defence system whether the SDI in Reagan’s time or currently the BMD inherited
from Bush.
“What is SDI for?” Gorbachev asked
Reagan at their meeting in Moscow on 29 May 1988.
“What missiles is it supposed to
bring down if we eliminate all nuclear weapons?”
Since the 1983 “Star Wars”
speech of Reagan, the Pentagon has spent more than $200 billion in developing
missile defense over the first two decades and about another $100 billion in
the third decade to 2013. Just as the US military will most probably keep their
nuclear weapons until the end of history, they will also keep on developing their
missile defense to its ultimate realization – whatever it means.
For an update, we take the
liberty of quoting from the brief introduction in U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense co-authored by Jonathan Masters and
Greg Bruno, and published on 1 May 2013:
“U.S. missile defense systems are designed to protect the U.S. homeland,
deployed military forces, and allies from limited ballistic missile attacks.
The Pentagon originally sought development of ballistic missile defense (BMD)
technology to counter the Soviet nuclear threat during the Cold War, but focus
in the twenty-first century has shifted to defending and deterring potential
strikes from regional actors, particularly Iran and North Korea.
“In March 2013, the Pentagon announced it would shore up missile
defenses on the U.S. west coast to guard against a growing North Korean threat,
while effectively cancelling the final phase of plans to deploy missile
interceptors in Europe over the next decade.
“Proponents of BMD stress its role (essentially defense) in the
projection of U.S. power abroad and its value as a deterrent (the prime
attribute and virtue of nuclear weapons), while critics highlight BMD’s largely
unproven technology and high costs.”
16-17.7.2009 0333 11.01.2014 19:12 12.01.2014 00:02 16.08.2014 03:57
21.08.2014 08:10
Whatever Reagan had said about making SDI to make nukes “impotent and
obsolete”, the reality from the moment of its conception in his mind is
apparently much more sinister and hostile to the fate of humankind.
The presently-developing BMD is regarded as one of the essentials of the
American military’s Vision 2020 for attaining the Holy Grail – total and
overwhelming military superiority,
labeled as Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD).
As envisioned, the nuclear spear is to provide a first-strike
counterforce war-fighting capability while the nuclear shield will empower the
Pentagon to strike any adversary with impunity, without any fear of retaliation
from the other side.
According to the US Space Command, the “emerging synergy of space
superiority with land, sea and air superiority” will lead to Full Spectrum
Dominance – to control, dominate and prevail “across the full range of military
operations”, including nuclear war-fighting.
With the National Missile Defense (NMD) using space systems for both
defense and offense/precision strike, global surveillance/information
dominance/superiority will be harnessed and synchronized to deliver a
spaced-based global precision strike (GPS) capability. An American Dream, it’s
quintessentially Reagan’s of 1983!
Not everyone is convinced, however. American primacy or supremacy is not
acceptable to either Russia or China. Nor is it relevant to the world of the 21st
century.
Putin has said that Russia will continue to build up its military
(having restored its nuclear parity with the US) – “not to threaten anyone” but
“to feel safe…”
Xi of China has said that a Sino-American war will be disastrous for the
whole world. The message is clear enough.
6 pages 28.01.2015
10:45
NUCLEAR
PROLIFERATION: QUO VADIS?
While the breakup of the
Soviet Union at the end of 1991 marked the closure of the Cold War, the sudden
dissolution of this vast Communist empire brought the greatest nuclear
proliferation threat in the nuclear era. In 1991 when the SU had 37,000 nuclear
warheads (twice the number of American nukes), they were mostly deployed in
four of the 15 republics – Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine.
Overnight, the Union’s
disintegration critically impinged on the control and command of thousands of
strategic nuclear arms. Eventually it was agreed that Russia should take over
and take sole charge of all the former-Soviet nuclear arsenals, and
subsequently all the nuclear missiles and warheads were withdrawn from service and
brought back for dismantling on Russian soil.
In Ukraine, for example,
where the Soviets had deployed 46 SS-24 missiles (known as the Scalpels, each
one of them armed with ten 550 KT warheads), these solid-fueled ICBMs (first
deployed in mid-1984) were removed from service by mid-1998, and their last
silo was destroyed in 2001.
Vladimir Orlov, director of
Center for Policy Studies, has written and posted 29 December 2011 online
Russia in Global Affairs:
“…The main problem
after the collapse of the Soviet Union was the presence of strategic nuclear
weapons, alongside those in Russia, in three other newly established countries
(formerly republics in the Soviet Union): Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
“Kazakhstan’s nuclear
arsenal was equivalent to the nuclear forces of Britain, France and China
combined on the day the Soviet Union collapsed…”
It took nearly half a decade
for all the nuclear weapons in the three former Soviet republics to be totally
withdrawn and safely transferred back to Russia, that is, by the end of
1996.
25.01.2014 03:37
With the Russian monopoly and
sole control of the world’s largest nuclear stockpile, the threat of a massive
nuclear dispossession, dispersion and proliferation was effectively contained.
In 1979 Nigel Calder, a
widely traveled and highly regarded science writer, recalled in writing his
last meeting way back in 1966 with the distinguished Indian physicist Homi
Bhabha shortly before his death at the age of 31 in a plane crash. Calder
wrote: “He was a close friend of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru,
and in a poverty-stricken country he won public funds and precious foreign
exchange for the nuclear palaces that symbolized India’s hopes for the future.
“At that last meeting he paid
careful lip service to Nehru’s doctrine of the peaceful atom but, following
China’s nuclear weapons tests (the first one on October 1964), he had the
military option clearly in mind.
“Jerking his head with a
characteristic tic, Bhabha told me that he could make a bomb within eighteen
months, when the government of India gave him the go-ahead. He did not live to
do the job himself, but his manner taught me the inevitability of nuclear
proliferation…”
On May 1974 India exploded a
nuclear device, using material from a reactor provided by Canadians. The
underground explosion had a yield of 10-15 KT (Hiroshima bomb).
“The Indians created a
general awareness that nuclear abstinence could not be taken for granted,”
Lawrence Freedman, a research fellow at the Royal Institute of International
Affairs, Chatham House, wrote in 1978. “As France and China had argued before
them, the Indians wrote of the dangers of being beholden to the superpowers for
military protection and of the national independence that could come from a nuclear
programme…”
Alva Myrdal, Sweden’s former
Minister of Disarmament, wrote in 1976: “With its underground test in May 1974
India demonstrated possession of a device which is per se an atomic bomb,
whether or not it is so used or intended…”
“More nations will follow
India’s example, perhaps aiming straight forwardly at the weaponizing of
nuclear explosives…”
Calder wrote in 1979: “Three
countries, India, Israel, and South Africa, have acquired nuclear weapons in
the 1970s, and at least one more, Pakistan, is working hard to secure them in
the early 1980s…”
And, he added: “Israel’s bomb
will probably set off a chain reaction of bomb making throughout the Middle
East…” In 1974 the CIA reported that Israel had operational nuclear weapons.
Israel’s military nuclearization had been an open secret since the late 1960s.
The world should remember,
however, that on February 1990 South Africa’s President Frederick Willem de
Klerk issued written instructions to dismantle the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
His successor Nelson Mandella often implored the nuclear powers to follow South
Africa’s exemplary lead in relinquishing nuclear weapons. Addressing the UN
General Assembly in 1998, he described the nukes as “these terrible and
terrifying weapons of mass destruction” and he asked (not rhetorically, but
indeed with profound significance) “why do they (the nuclear powers) need them
anyway?” 13.03.2014 08:24
Shortly after India’s
resumption of nuclear tests in 1998, Pakistan initiated a short series of
nuclear tests of its own. North Korea surprised the world by conducting its
maiden nuclear test on October 2006, and a second explosion on 25 May 2009.
According to the
Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a public education and lobbying
organization, India had 100 nuclear weapons and Pakistan 30-50 in 2009. Israel
was said to have 100-200.
The new kid on the
nuclear block, North Korea has an estimated 8 bombs. And, of all people,
President Barack Obama has declared North Korea a “grave threat” to the world.
Perhaps so, to go by the North Korea’s wild rhetoric threatening the American
superpower and its followers with “a one hundred- or one thousand-fold
retaliation with merciless military strike.” Whatever it’s meant.
Expressing grave
concern over North Korea’s nuclear test on 25 May 2009, Malaysia reiterated its
anti-nuclear stand: “Malaysia strongly believes the continued existence of
nuclear weapons presents a grave threat to humanity, particularly by increasing
the risk of proliferation…”
An Myong Hun, a North
Korean diplomat, told the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that
moves to acquire a nuclear arsenal were for self-defence.
The North Korean diplomat
then restated his country’s policy to achieve nuclear disarmament.
Following the UN
resolution on 12 June 2009 to impose tougher sanctions, North Korea defiantly
declared that “a proud nuclear power will not flinch from them.”
North Korea said it had
turned to nuclear weapons, forced by US hostility.
“It has become an
absolutely impossible option for the DPRK (North Korea) to even think about
giving up its nuclear weapons,” North Korea stated. And defiantly added that
“all plutonium to be extracted (reprocessed from the Yongbyon reactor) will be
weaponised...”
After its third nuclear
test on February 2013 which triggered new United Nations sanctions in March,
North Korea’s National Defence Commission issued a statement on 18th
April demanding an end to UN sanctions, following which the North’s top
military body stated that the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula would
begin – but first with the removal of the US nuclear weapons deployed in the
region.
“The denuclearization of
the Korean peninsula can begin with the removal of the nuclear war tools
dragged in by the US and it can lead to global nuclear disarmament,” the
Defence Commission boldly stated.
17.01.2014 18:23
On November 1987, Nigerian
Foreign Minister Bolaji Akinyemi was reported to have said: “Nigeria has a
sacred responsibility to challenge the racial monopoly of nuclear weapons.”
Ali Mazrui wrote in 1986,
suggesting that only when African nations, with “their underdevelopment and
instability,” seem about to acquire the nukes would the major powers understand
the need to abolish nuclear weapons.
Article VI of the Treaty on
the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (signed in 1968 and ratified to come
into force in 1970) commits the US, the Soviet Union, and Britain (the first
three nuclear powers) “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective
measures relating to cessation of the arms race at an early date and to nuclear
disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict
and effective international control..”
Alva Myrdal observed in
1976: “First and foremost, the superpowers must cease the nuclear arms race as
they solemnly pledged to do in NPT, Article VI. In addition, the Treaty obligations
must be balanced. There are several prices that must be exacted in the form of
improvements in NPT rules in order to make them more equitable and more
effective…”
Myrdal added: “The
superpowers must be brought to realize that they are losing prestige and
credibility, that they can have no leverage against further proliferation if
they do not immediately proceed seriously to agree on restraints…”
According to Norris and
Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, the Soviets increased
their nuclear warheads from more than 12,600 in 1970 to over 30,000 in 1980.
The Soviet arsenal peaked in 1986 with 45,000 nuclear weapons (the most the US
had was over 32,000 in 1966).The US managed to reduce its nuclear stockpile,
while improving its quality, from over 26,000 in 1970 to more than 24,000 in
1980.
At the second review
conference on the NPT in 1980, the final document called for multilateral
negotiations on nuclear disarmament. And negotiations were to be conducted in
the stated context of “A comprehensive, phased programme with agreed
time-frames, whenever feasible, for progressive and balanced deduction of
stockpiles of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery, leading to their ultimate
and complete elimination at the earliest possible time.”
Frank Blackaby, director of
SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) wrote in March 1985:
“In signing the NPT the parties agreed that the treaty was only a step in the
larger process of disarmament, in which the self-imposed denial of non-nuclear
weapon states was to be matched, ultimately, by corresponding acts of the
nuclear weapon powers. The non-fulfilment by the latter of their disarmament
obligations contributes to sapping the legitimacy of the non-proliferation
regime, particularly in Third World countries, where the regime may begin to be
seen as an imposition by the great powers…”
To quote Lawrence Freedman: “Furthermore,
as drunkards (the nukoholics) insisting on the abstinence of others (that is,
do as they say, not as what they do), the superpowers have been warning others
to stay clear of nuclear weapons while building up and improving their
capabilities at an intensive rate.
“If they take these weapons
to be so essential to national security or as a symbol of national virility,
why should not others?”
Why not? And if the two
nuclear superpowers can have thousands of nuclear weapons, why can’t the
have-nots have only one or even a handful of the nukes? Mao Tse-tung once said
that a handful was enough for a nation.
“One single nuclear weapon is
enough to level the larger part of almost any major city in the world,” stated
Anders Thunborg, Sweden’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and
chairman of the group of experts for the 1980 UN study on nuclear weapons.
“A small number of nuclear
weapons aimed at important targets could cause tremendous destruction…”
A Swedish foreign minister
told the UN General Assembly: “Nuclear weapons continue to be the greatest
threat to mankind. The appalling spectre of their possible use haunts the minds
of people everywhere. The nuclear weapons of a few States affect the security
of all States…”
Gareth Evans, former
Australian foreign minister and presently chancellor of the Australian National
University, has recently written (as published in the New Straits Times, Kuala
Lumpur, April 30, 2013):
“With Russia and the US
holding 18,000 of the world’s current stockpile of 19,000 nuclear weapons, it
is proving impossible to persuade any of the other nuclear-armed states to
reduce their own (much smaller) arsenals…
“None of the nuclear-armed
States, inside or outside the NPT, pay anything more than lip service to the
ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons.
“The continued seductive power
of the Cold War logic and language of nuclear deterrence is the primary reason,
though for some states it is clear that the testosterone factor – perceived
status and prestige – also plays a role…”
One of the leading figures in
the global nuclear disarmament campaign, Evans has persuasively and strongly
addressed the need for the world’s leaders to reconsider and resolve the problem of nuclear weapons, more
than two decades after the end of the Cold War. To quote him, as he has put it
so cogently and succinctly:
“Progress toward achieving a
safer and saner world requires all of the nuclear-armed states to break out of
their Cold War mindset, rethink the strategic utility of nuclear deterrence in
current conditions, and recalibrate the huge risks implied by retaining their
arsenals. In today’s world nuclear weapons are the problem, not the
solution.”
Therefore, the only answer to
the apocalyptic threat of a nuclear war as well as the solution to the
persistent and protracted problem of nuclear proliferation, is to be found in
total nuclear disarmament.
“The arsenals of nuclear
weapons states set a bad example for the world, encouraging proliferation. And
they could kill us all,” Distinguished Professor Alan Robock of Rutgers
University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Professor Owen Brian Toon of
Colorado University in Boulder jointly posted in the Strategic Security Blog of
the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) on 3 February 2014.
After reviewing the 1962 Cuban
missile crisis and other incidents which had close to a nuclear conflict,
Robock and Toon concluded: “The only way to be sure we do not annihilate the
human population is to destroy the (nuclear) weapons…”
While the overwhelming majority
of nations (184 of them) do not have nuclear weapons, nine nations have these
“doomsday” weapons, with the two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the US in
blatant and immoral possession of more than 90% of the world’s present total
stock of over 17,000 nuclear warheads. 14.03.2014 06:10
To quote from the February 2010
report by Global Zero Commission:
“…The world is nearing a
“proliferation tipping point” when nuclear weapons spread beyond the capacity
of any effort to rein them in and the danger increases that they will be used
by a country in conflict or by accident, or by a terrorist group.
“The only way to eliminate the
nuclear threat is to achieve the phased, verified, multilateral elimination of
all nuclear weapons – global zero
(by 2030)…” 13.03.2014 09:13
Yes; get rid of all the nuclear
weapons. And the earlier, the better, for the peace, security and wellbeing of
humankind.
