A case against nuclear weapons

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN

The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now by Jonathan Schell; Penguin Books (India), 1998; pages 240, Rs. 250.

IN December 1997, reports appearing in sections of the press in the United States indicated a drastic change in the principles that would guide the application of nuclear weapons in warfare. To end the media speculation that ensued, one of the U.S. President's top advisers on nuclear strategic affairs issued a series of clarifications. The new presidential guidance, said Robert Bell, Principal Strategic Affairs Adviser in the National Security Council, decisively set its face against any notion that a war fought with nuclear weapons could be won. It preserved an element of continuity with earlier policy in sanctioning an "overwhelming and devastating" response to any attack on U.S. territory. And all the changes apart, nuclear weapons, concluded Bell, could remain the "cornerstone" of U.S. national security planning for the foreseeable future.

It also emerged from further articulations that the new presidential guidance rendered even more conditional the scope of the security assurances that the U.S. held out to nations that had firmly renounced the nuclear option. Sanction was now available for the use of nuclear weapons to preempt or respond to the threat of chemical or biological attack. Nations with "prospective access" to nuclear weapons were now considered fair targets - reducing to triviality another part of the guidance, which committed the U.S. to refraining from launching a nuclear attack till it had verified that it was under attack, with detonations taking place on its soil.

To expect any kind of consistency in the principles that constitute the latest presidential guidance may be futile. Nuclear weapons doctrine, premised upon fear, uncertainty and the visceral fear of the unknown, has never been distinguished by the virtue of logical coherence. There is indeed an arrogance underlying the pronouncements of the nuclear weapon states that is completely divorced from basic notions of equity and fairness and never fails to grate on the sensitivities of those who have followed a policy of restraint. In recent times India experienced this facet of the nuclear weapon states' seeming freedom from all accountability, though without quite finding a justification in their duplicity for its own nuclear misadventure of May 1998.

IN contributions spread over two decades, Jonathan Schell has consistently highlighted certain ethical dimensions of the debate on nuclear disarmament. The end of the Cold War unleashed a tidal wave of nuclear apostasy, with several of the individuals who had manned the weapons establishments in the adversarial states and provided the justification for their sustenance, expressing scepticism about their political and military utility. This has encouraged Schell to believe that there is a strong chance now that his enduring ethical concerns will win greater purchase.

India's nuclear tests and the Pakistani response occurred just when the American edition of this book was being readied for publication. Invested with a new element of topicality, it was soon brought out in a special Indian edition. This offering is essential reading for all those who are serious about grappling with the moral and political issues that nuclear weapons pose, especially given the heightened Indian awareness of the attendant hazards.

Aside from its desirability, is nuclear abolition at all a feasible goal? The bipolar confrontation of the Cold War created the circumstances for the burgeoning of nuclear arsenals. Now that the Cold War itself has been declared closed, do the circumstances exist for a rapid reversal of weaponisation and indeed for the ultimate abolition of nuclear arms? Intuitively, it may seem obvious that with the underpinning of bipolar hostility having vanished, the grotesque superstructure of the nuclear arsenals in the U.S. and Russia could be dismantled without undue risk on either side.

Nuclear doctrine, however, is a terrain where intuition has no place and basic ethical postulates founder. The hostility of the Soviet Union was once the overt rationale for pumping up nuclear force levels to unimaginable heights. The environment of insecurity today created by the proliferation of social knowledge is the substitute rationale. American right-wing ideologue Richard Perle puts the case against abolition well. In its encapsulation of all the paranoia, irrationality and contempt for reason that underlies the case for nuclear weapons, Perle's opinion is indispensable.

Proliferation of knowledge being a reality, Perle suggests that the senior military personnel who have suggested that abolition is a feasible option carry their stars in their eyes rather than on their uniforms. What has been invented cannot be disinvented. Abolition in the nuclear weapon states would do little but provide an incentive for rampant proliferation in the states that had practised restraint whether by compulsion or by choice, he adds.

The justification, in other words, has shifted from the specific to the general, from the identifiable hazard of the Soviet nuclear arsenal to the abstract dangers inherent in proliferating human knowledge. Any state - engagingly called a "rogue state" in American strategic discourse - could in a world free of nuclear weapons, provoke a "breakout", that is, acquire the nuclear capability and capacity to hold a defenceless world to ransom. This made the maintenance of adequate nuclear force levels a compelling necessity, so that every prospective threat is pre-emptively neutralised and every state that aspires to achieve strategic pre-eminence through nuclear arms is persuaded of the futility of seeking to match U.S. force levels.

SCHELL deals with the arguments against nuclear abolition through a number of interviews. Among those who have presented persuasive cases from the U.S. side are former Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, retired Air Force generals Charles Horner and Lee Butler, former missile launch officer Bruce Blair, and former Senator Alan Cranston. Their emphases vary, as do the practical methods they suggest. In sum, their cases add up to a powerful advocacy for nuclear abolition, though not quite to a vision of an equal and secure world for all.

Blair, for instance, sees great merit in the "horizontal path" of abolition - a phased dismantling of nuclear arsenals that retains an element of reversibility till it is well advanced. The knowledge that the process can be reversed, in other words, would act as a powerful retardant to prospective "breakout". Any state seeking to break the rules of global abolition would run the risk of seeing a swift reconstitution of nuclear arsenals by the erstwhile weapon states, which would neutralise the strategic advantage it may have sought.

The horizontal path would commence with removing launch systems from their state of alert in a progressive fashion. In the next stage, the warhead would be decoupled from the delivery vehicle. Still further on the road to abolition, the fissile inventory would be taken out of the warhead and stored under tight international monitoring at a secure location. The policing options available under the horizontal path to abolition could embrace a wide range - from the limited reconstitution of nuclear arsenals targeted specifically at the threatening location, to massive deployments of conventional force, to the prospect of international ostracism of the offending state.

McNamara, for one, retains a degree of scepticism over the horizontal path. In his estimation, gradualism is not a special merit and the maintenance of "virtual arsenals" through the duration of the abolition process is an unnecessary hedge. Having been one of the principal authors of the doctrine of deterrence, he is convinced today of its futility and he is uneasy with the notion of a reprise in the era of nuclear abolition.

Joseph Rotblat was the only physicist to quit the Manhattan Project when it became evident that Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime was not likely to acquire a nuclear device that could influence the outcome of the Second World War. He later founded the Pugwash Conference on disarmament and received the Nobel Prize for Peace on behalf of his organisation in 1995. Abolition for Rotblat is a series of ethical steps, from a universal "no first use" commitment which would block all "pathways of escalation from conventional to nuclear warfare." Like Horner, he believes that with its massive superiority in conventional weaponry, the U.S. would still retain strategic pre-eminence in a world free of nuclear weapons.

This is a motif that is often overtly stated in the U.S. case for abolition. Expectedly, other parties in the abolition debate do not take a particularly favourable view of this aspect. For McNamara, Horner and Butler, who spent their working lives seeking to secure dominance of the world by the U.S. through nuclear weapons, the instrument has been blunted by years of non-use and a growing aversion to the inherent risks in its maintenance. Conventional weaponry in the U.S., they are convinced, can today produce the deterrent effects that were sought for half a century through nuclear arms.

A quick detour to the Russian Republic would highlight the pitfalls of this particular kind of abolitionist attitude. Early expectations that the end of the Cold War would bring about an epoch of partnership between East and West have been in vain. U.S. geostrategic manoeuvring in West Asia, Central Asia and the Balkans, and perhaps most decisively, the U.S.' determination to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation right to the doorsteps of Russia, have caused a rapid erosion of the hope.

For these reasons, Alexei Arbatov, a liberal member of the Russian Parliament, is insistent that the objective of abolition is not to make the world safe for conventional warfare. His abolitionist position is hedged around by the awareness that a few nuclear arms would be needed for an indefinite period as a safeguard against growing conventional inferiority. It reflects the insecurity that prompted Russia in 1993 to reverse the Soviet Union's long-standing "no first use" position.

Arbatov's perception is that abolition should proceed coterminously with progress towards a "world government" - which perhaps catapults the debate to an utopian realm. But his underlying concerns are evident. The nuclear era has produced many ironic role reversals. In its early years, the Soviet Union's conventional superiority was supposed to justify the U.S. resolve to maintain huge nuclear force levels in Europe and adopt a doctrine of "massive retaliation". Today, the principal successor state to the Soviet Union purports to see similar merit in the maintenance of a limited nuclear arsenal, just when the U.S. ideologues of the Cold War seek to transform conventional military superiority into a case for nuclear abolition.

In laying bare these complexities, Schell serves a vital purpose, though his optimism is undiminished and the luminosity of his ethical concerns undimmed. The reader who catches the many undercurrents of the discourse on abolition may not share Schell's belief that the generations today alive will shoulder the greatest of the responsibilities before them. But he would certainly have been awakened to the many dimensions of the task of abolition.

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