President Obama is successfully taking the
rhetorical high ground on the key issue of arms
control and disarmament, but it is time for
actions to supplement his words. President Eisenhower’s
warnings about the military-industrial complex
in 1961 and the importance of the nonproliferation
regime established in 1969 have never been more
pertinent. The Nonproliferation Treaty required
the major nuclear powers to reduce their strategic
weapons, but recently the United States has
paid only lip service to this requirement.
U.S. criticism of Sunday’s North Korean
missile launch would have been more credible
and perhaps effective if the Obama administration
would address the major errors of the Clinton
and Bush administrations over the past sixteen
years on arms control policy.
These errors include abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty; the deployment of a national
missile defense in California and Alaska; a
cancellation of plans to deploy a missile defense
system in Poland and the Czech Republic; the
failure to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty; the step back from serious verification
and monitoring safeguards in the reduction of
strategic weapons as well as the conventions
for chemical and biological weapons; and inadequate
support for the Nonproliferation Treaty.
Obama is still playing with the option of placing
missiles and radars in Poland and the Czech
Republic, respectively. It is simply ludicrous
to buy into the notion that a defensive missile
system is needed anywhere in Eastern Europe
as a safeguard against a possible Iranian missile
launch.
Only a science fiction writer, and not a war
games planner, could justify a defense against
an Iranian attack on Europe of all places. And
since the current technology does not work,
it is time for the Obama administration to unilaterally
declare an end to any possibility of creating
missile defense in Eastern Europe. There would
be no better way to convince the Kremlin that
the United States is serious about disarmament.
At the same time, Obama must begin the reexamination
of the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty,
which served for three decades as an obstacle
to a greater strategic arms race. The ABM Treaty
ended strategic defense, offered the opportunity
to all nuclear states to put fewer resources
into its strategic arsenals, and persuaded China
to maintain its strategic deterrent at fewer
than 20 strategic nuclear warheads. The European
allies looked at the ABM Treaty as an international
guaranty of political and strategic stability,
and Third World nations saw the treaty as evidence
of the role of international diplomacy to limit
the strategic arsenals of the world’s
superpowers.
Various steps could be taken to demonstrate
that Obama is earnest about arms control and
disarmament. He could press the Congress to
ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which
the Clinton and Bush administrations failed
to do. The necessary two-thirds majority for
ratification is not guaranteed in the Senate,
but it is past time for pressuring recalcitrant
senators to move in the direction of arms control.
Obama must also develop a multilateral arrangement
on nuclear arms reductions as well as a fissile
material cut-off treay, and conclude an agreement
to extend or replace START I, which is scheduled
to expire at the end of this year. A wider dialogue
is need with Russia to find common ground on
tactical weapons as well as a dialogue with
China to create more transparency and confidence-building
measures on strategic weapons. Iran and others
possibly could be dissuaded from acquiring uranium
enrichment and reprocessing capabilities, if
they observed that the United States and others
were genuinely serious about reducing their
nuclear arsenals.
Finally, Obama should initiate steps to prevent
collisions between nuclear missile submarines,
such as the recent collision between British
and French submarines that were armed with more
than 100 nuclear warheads. The damage to the
submarines was minor, and the warheads were
not compromised, but a stronger impact could
have dispersed plutonium into surrounding waters.
If strategic aircraft can submit flight plans
to prevent midair collisions, then nuclear submarines
can report cruising depths to prevent collisions.
Actual locations could remain secret, but depths
could be assigned by agreement.
Obama demonstrated that he was serious about
arms control and disarmament when he named Rose
Gottemoeller to be assistant secretary of state
for arms control. Gottemoeller was previously
deputy undersecretary for nonproliferation at
the Department of Energy, and played a major
role in the denuclearization of Ukraine, Belarus,
and Kazakhstan after the breakup of the Soviet
Union. Obama must also revive the moribund arms
control community and make sure that the Policy
Planning Department of the State Department
takes a more active role in long-term plans
for disarmament.
Currently, there is nothing comparable in the
policy or intelligence communities to the Pentagon’s
Office of Net Assessment, which directs long-term
research and prepares strategic studies to justify
force modernization. Fortunately, there is a
bipartisan group of elder statesmen, including
William Perry, Sam Nunn, George Shultz, and
Henry Kissinger, who are prepared to offer support
to a serious disarmament agenda and to provide
cover against the neoconservatives who believe
that disarmament measures are no more than gestures
of appeasement.
Melvin A. Goodman,a regular contributor
to The Public Record, is senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.
He spent more than 42 years in the U.S. Army,
the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department
of Defense. His most recent book is “Failure
of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the
CIA.”
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
