A World Without Nuclear Weapons

In the surrealistic atmosphere within the haunted Hovde House at Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, Presidents Ronald Reagan of the US and Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union had come incredibly close on the late Sunday afternoon of 11 October 1986 to an epic agreement, to  destroy all their thousands of nuclear weapons within a decade. This recap gives the background on the boldest and most momentous move to denuclearize the global military at the height of the Cold War.

        President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) has been described as “an extraordinarily complex character” by Henry Kissinger. This could mean that no one was quite able to read his mind. Nevertheless, he was like another other American, who wanted his country to be the best and the strongest in the world. That was exactly he did during his two eventful terms at the White House.

        After President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) had raised the ceiling on military spending to its highest level in peacetime militarization, Reagan came in to double the defense budget from US$140.7 billion in 1980 to $281.4 billion in 1986.

        Reagan brought back the strategic B-1 bomber (dropped by Carter), started deploying the long-range cruise missiles in 1982, and planned to start deploying the highly controversial MX (America’s most accurate and powerful ICBM with up to ten 310 KT warheads) in 1986, the advanced cruise missiles in 1988, and the Trident II (the most advanced submarine-launched missiles) in1989. However, both the MX and the Trident II had started their development under Carter.

        Paradoxically enough, Reagan was known to abhor nuclear war all his conscious life and he was even described as a dyed-in-the wool nuclear abolitionist. A staunch believer in the biblical prophecy of Armageddon, he also feared an apocalyptical nuclear conflict.

        At the high point of the ‘nuclear freeze’ movement in the US, Reagan spoke of “dismantling the nuclear menace” (while he was building up his nuclear arsenal) when he delivered his commencement address at Eureka College (his alma mater) in Illinois on 9 May 1982. Under pressure by public clamor for nuclear restraint/disarmament, he also called for substantial and verifiable reductions of nuclear arms (in his so-called ‘build-down’ modernization strategy) to enhance security and reduce the risks of war.

        In 1983 he made known his wish to see the Soviet leader Yury Andropov, Chairman and General Secretary (1982-84), to propose eliminating all nuclear weapons.

        When he announced on 16 May 1983 his planned deployment of the MX  missiles to counter the Soviet SS-18s (with ten 550 KT warheads) and SS-19s (with six 550 KT warheads), he expressed the hope that the nuclear arms race would be reversed, and that all nuclear weapons would be eliminated.

         He said: “I can’t believe that this world can go on beyond our generation and on down to succeeding generations with this kind of weapon on both sides poised (to strike) at each other without someday some fool or some maniac or some accident triggering the kind of war that is the end of the line for all of us…”

         Earlier on 23 March1983, Reagan had called on American scientists to build a new defense system against ballistic missiles (in his ‘dream’ project known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, the SDI) to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete”.

         He did not say (though the thought of military superiority could be subliminally present in his mind) that if such a technically perfect or near-perfect defense system could be developed and deployed, American would regain its original nuclear predominance which it had had for three golden decades from the beginning of the nuclear era in 1945 to 1975 when the Soviet military achieved nuclear parity following its unprecedented nuclear expansion in the wake of utter humiliation from the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

        “If Reagan’s claim of a 100 percent effective defense came even close to reality,” Kissinger wrote, “American strategic superiority would become (once again) a reality…” What American presidents have always in mind – the ‘Holy Grail’ in the military field.

        

        Gorbachev described SDI development as “the creation of a shield which would allow a first strike (with nuclear weapons) without fear of retaliation.” It was also his fear that the SDI would extend the arms race into space, an untoward venture that could bust the treasury in Moscow.

         On 15 January1986, Gorbachev proposed abolishing all nuclear weapons. Then in late February, delegates at the 27^th Party Congress in Moscow called for making progress towards a nuclear-free world.

          At their two summit meetings in Geneva (November 1985) and Reykjavik (October 1986), Reagan and Gorbachev discussed and negotiated what the US side called going to zero – the zero option, the total elimination of all nuclear weapons, total nuclear disarmament.

          According to Donald Regan, Chief of Staff in the White House who was present at both summits, Reagan and Gorbachev spent a total of nine hours and forty-eight minutes over two days of face-to-face discussions on October 10-11, 1986. On the final session in the late Sunday afternoon from 5.32 p.m. to 6.30 p.m., Regan has written in his memoirs:

          “What, Reagan asked Gorbachev, had he meant by the reference in his letter (to Reagan) to “the eliminating of all nuclear forces”?

           “I meant I would favor eliminating all nuclear weapons,” Gorbachev replied.

           “All nuclear weapons?” Reagan said. “Well, Mikhail, that’s exactly what I’ve been talking about all along. That’s what we have long wanted to do – get rid of all nuclear weapons. That’s always been my goal.”

            “Then why don’t we agree on it?” Gorbachev asked.

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            “We should,” Reagan said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

            “It was a historic moment. The two leaders had brought the world to one of its great turning points. Both understood this very clearly.

            “Then came the impasse: Mikhail Gorbachev said, “I agree. But this (referring to their agreement on total nuclear disarmament over a 10-year period, 1986-1996) must be done in conjunction with a ten-year extension of the ABM treaty and a ban on the development and testing of SDI outside the laboratory.”

             “Outside the laboratory. Those words negated (for the US) all that had  been agreed upon. As soon as they were uttered, Reagan and Gorbachev were down from the mountaintop and right back where they had started.

            “Reagan, astonished by this sudden reversal, said, “Absolutely not. I am willing to discuss all details, including the timing of a plan to eliminate all nuclear weapons in conjunction with a plan to reduce conventional forces to a state of balance. But I will not discuss anything that gives you the upper hand by eliminating SDI.”

            “Gorbachev did not reply. After a long silence, Reagan assumed that the Soviet leader had nothing more to say. Thereupon he closed his briefing book and stood up. Gorbachev seemed startled by the President’s action and remained in his chair for a moment in puzzlement. Then he rose to his feet also. The summit at Reykjavik was over…”

            Kissinger has written:”Years later when I asked a senior Gorbachev

adviser who had been present at Reykjavik why the Soviets had not settled for what the United States had already accepted, he replied: “We had thought of everything except that Reagan might leave the room.”

           “Shortly afterward, George Shultz (Secretary of State) gave a thoughtful speech describing why Reagan’s vision of eliminating nuclear weapons was actually to the West’s advantage. But the language of his speech, artfully phrased in support of a “less nuclear world” showed that the State Department – painfully conscious of allied concerns – had not yet signed onto Reagan’s vision of the total abolition of nuclear weapons…”

           When Michael Charlton of BBC London interviewed Edward Heath in 1985, the former British prime minister suggested that the two superpowers and America’s allies in Europe had agreed “about the non-establishment of SDI forces…” In Charlton’s interview with Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor sounded much more in favour of military integration in Europe than in  “all this bloody nonsense about ‘Star Wars’ (the more popular label for Reagan’s dream SDI)…”

           Through one man’s obsession and another ’s dread, the highly delusive SDI had very strangely zapped their last-minute breakthrough to a world without nuclear weapons.

WHITE DOVE OR BLACK SWAN: NUCLEAR DETERRENCE, OR GLOBAL DEVASTATION?

     “If some extraterrestrial species were compiling a history of Homo sapiens, they might well break their calendar into two eras: BNW (before nuclear weapons) and NWE (the nuclear weapons era). The latter era, of course, opened on August 6, 1945 (atomic bombing of Hiroshima), the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but – so the evidence suggests – not the moral and intellectual capacity to control the worst instincts,” world-renowned American linguist and philosopher, social critic and political activist, Noam Chomsky posted on the eve of Hiroshima Day 2014.

     “As we now enter its 70^th year, we should be contemplating with wonder that we have survived. We can only guess how many more years remain…”

    Chomsky then quoted General Lee Butler, the last commander in chief of the US Strategic Air Command (in charge of nuclear weapons and strategy) before its disestablishment on June 1992.

     “Twenty years ago, he (Lee Butler) wrote that we had so far survived the NWE “by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportions.”

     “Reflecting on his long career in developing nuclear weapons strategies and organizing the forces to implement them efficiently, he described himself ruefully as having been “among the most avid of these keepers of the faith in nuclear weapons. But, he continued, he had come to realize that it was now his “burden to declare with all of the conviction I can muster that in my judgment they served us extremely ill.”

     “And he asked, “By what authority do succeeding generations of leaders in the nuclear-weapons states usurp the power to dictate the odds of continued life on our planet? Most urgently, why does such breathtaking audacity persist at a moment when we should stand trembling in the face of our folly and united in our commitment to abolish its most deadly manifestations?””

     Concluding his timely piece with the same penetrative insight as the good general’s, Chomsky gladly quoted the military authority again:

     “As General Butler observed, it is a near miracle that we have escaped destruction so far, and the longer we tempt fate, the less likely it is that we can hope for divine intervention to perpetuate the miracle.”

     On 5 December 1996, an unprecedented statement calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons was released by 61 former Generals and Admirals from 17 countries, including 18 Russians and 17 from the US. They described nuclear weapons as constituting “a peril to global peace and security and to the safety and survival of the people we are dedicated to protect.”

     Introducing on 2 February 1998 the landmark statement by 120 civilian leaders calling for abolition of nuclear weapons, General Lee Butler took the opportunity to explain why he had “made the long and arduous journey from staunch advocate of nuclear deterrence to public proponent of nuclear abolition.” And he warned that nuclear deterrence could lead to Mutual Assured Destruction (the two sides of the coin of nuclear force). Butler noted that nuclear deterrence was “a Western design, a self-delusion” that a nuclear war could be deterred.

     Former national leaders including Jimmy Carter (US), Lord Callaghan (UK), Helmut Schmidt (Germany), and Pierre Trudeau (Canada) concluded their historic statement:

     “The world is not condemned to live forever with threats of nuclear conflict, or the anxious, fragile peace imposed by nuclear deterrence. Such threats are intolerable and such a peace unworthy. The sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons invokes a moral imperative for their elimination. That is our mandate. Let us begin.”

     (Ironically, that’s a restatement of the very first resolution of the United Nations, adopted way back in 1946. Speaking at the UN in September 2015, Pope Francis called for banning all nuclear weapons, describing the nuclear threat of destruction as “an affront to the entire framework” of the United Nations.

          “…Nuclear war is the black swan (which is said to be impossible, but does exist) we can never see, except in that brief moment when it is killing us (in massive numbers). We delay eliminating the risk at our own peril,” Seth Baum of Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI) wrote in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 21, 2014.

          “Now is the time to address the threat, because we are still alive…”

          According to Alan Robock, American climatologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and co-author of a 2014 study on the impact on Earth’s climate

following detonation of 50 “Hiroshima-size” (13-15 kiloton) nuclear weapons in a war between India and Pakistan, the ensuing fires would loft 5 million tons of soot to heat up the stratosphere around while surface temperatures plunge, inducing a noxious nuclear winter. With atmospheric ozone consequently depleted and UV radiation enhanced, the destruction of crops would lead to global famine and death of about 2 billion people (slightly over a quarter of the world’s population).

          On the climatic and overall impact of a global nuclear conflict, Brian Gallagher posted on nauti.us 27 June 2015:

           “It’s almost impossible to fathom the awesome amount of charred remains that would be floating around the planet after nuclear annihilation.

          “Robock estimates that 150 million tons of smoke would envelope Earth, plummeting temperatures to those of the last ice age 18,000 years ago. It would be around 30 years for smoke-filled air to clear. It would take decades for the planet to warm up to pre-war levels.

           “But global warming would be over,” says Robock. “Why? Because CO2 (carbon dioxide) production would stop with the destruction of civilization…””

           To further quote William Perry, former defense secretary and author of “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink” (1995):

         “My special experience has kept me acutely aware of nuclear dangers and contemplating the almost unthinkable consequences of a nuclear war. A lifetime in which I had firsthand experiences and special access to top-secret knowledge of strategic nuclear options has given me a unique, and chilling, vantage point from which to conclude that nuclear weapons no longer provide for our security – they now endanger it…”                                                

NUCLEAR MODERNIZATION, DISARMAMENT’S DILEMMA

In an insightful article published in Foreign Affairs March/April 2006, two American political science professors, Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press have written matter-of-factly:

“Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy. It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China (or both) with a first strike.

“This dramatic shift in the balance of power stems from a series of improvements in the United States’ nuclear systems (in early 1990s shortly after the end of the Cold War), the precipitous decline of Russia’s arsenal (during the Yeltsin era of 1991-1999 with its total neglect of the Russian nuclear forces amidst rampant corruption, economic collapse, and political crisis), and the glacial pace of modernization of China’s nuclear forces.

“Unless Washington’s policies (for maintaining total military superiority and world dominance) change or Moscow and Beijing take steps to increase the size and readiness of their forces, Russia and China – and the rest of the world – will live in the shadows of U.S. nuclear primacy for many years to come…”

It may be recalled that the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the US in 1975, slightly over a decade after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Although the US had overwhelming nuclear superiority in 1962, the hugely outnumbered Soviet missiles had enough nuclear explosives to destroy the US in a free-for-all.

While the US had regained its first-strike capability/nuclear primacy(the Holy Grail)  by the time that the piece by Lieber and Press had gone to press early 2006, Moscow had woke up to the great American nuclear threat following Yeltsin’s resignation in favour of his hand-picked successor Vladimir Putin at the end of 1999. Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev (1997-2001) had turned his mind to the Strategic Rocket Forces and provided adequate funding for Russia’s nuclear arms from the late 1990s.

 With the recent deployment of the new Yars RS-24 ICBMs each with three nuclear warheads and the commissioning of two new Borei-class nuclear submarines (SSBNs) each carrying 16 Bulava missiles, each of which armed with six warheads, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has reclaimed its nuclear parity with the US in early autumn of 2014.

The Chinese “tortoise” has since also confirmed its confident arrival at the level of second-strike/deterrent capability against the US with the successful launching in late 2013 of the JL-2 SLBM with at least a dozen missiles with three warheads each, for the Type 094 Class submarines (SSBNs) developed in 2010.

“Our JL-2 SLBMs have become the fourth type of Chinese nuclear missiles that threaten the continental US, after our DF-31A, DF-5A and DF-5B ICBMs,” Global Times proudly reported in an article on the Chinese underwater nuclear deterrent (New Straits Times November 4, 2013).

According to Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), China has had a nuclear deterrence and second-strike capability since 1981 when the silo-based DF-5 ICBM became operational. The road-mobile DF-31A ICBM entered service in 2008. Even before the entry of the JL-2, China already had about 40 ICBMs to target the continental US.

“A conflict between China and United States will definitely be a disaster for the two countries and the world,” President Xi Jinping said in Beijing on 9 July 2014, as reported by Bloomberg News.

Nevertheless, the US Department of Defense remains fully committed to its “Joint Vision 2020” for full-spectrum dominance, its blueprint for global and total military superiority (publicly released 30 May 2000). 

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“After President Barack Obama took office with a strong commitment of the United States to reducing its numbers and role of nuclear weapons, and to taking concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons (for which he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize), the Obama administration  may eventually be remembered for its commitment to modernizing the US nuclear arsenal.

 “Partly building on programs from the Bush administration (2001-2009), the Obama administration  has drawn up plans for modernizing all aspects of the entire nuclear enterprise, including development of new nuclear delivery systems, and life extension and modernization of all its enduring nuclear warhead types and nuclear weapons production facilities,” Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) posted online 20 June 2014, and published in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July/August 2014.

“Moreover, rather than constraining the role of nuclear weapons, the Obama administration’s 2013 nuclear weapons employment strategy reaffirmed the existing posture of a nuclear triad of forces (ICBMs, SSBNs and strategic bombers) on high alert…”

On Russia’s nuclear modernization, the two distinguished nuclear statisticians/historians have briefly reported:

 “Within the next decade, all Soviet-era nuclear weapons systems will be phased out and replaced with new ones – albeit at a lower level. On land, development of three missiles is under way, the SS-27 ICBM, the R8-24 (possibly another SS-27 modification), and the “heavy” ICBM known as the Samat. At sea, construction of eight Borei class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) is scheduled and equipped with the SS-N-32 (Bulava) SLBM…” (With 10 warheads like its much-dreaded predecessor the SS-18 (Satan) ICBM, the Samat is expected to enter service shortly after 2020.)

 In nuclear weapons we trust, is the American way of maintaining and securing its supreme national defense and security interests. This abiding faith in nuclear might is also espoused by the other eight nuclear-armed

States, particularly and passionately so Russia.

“We’re now at the precipice, maybe I should say the brink, of a new nuclear arms race,” William Perry, 19^th US Secretary of Defense (1994-1997), said in Washington, DC, on 3 December 2015.

Kristensen and Norris have stressed that “the nuclear nations have undertaken ambitious nuclear weapons programs that threaten to prolong the nuclear era indefinitely…”