Page 3 of 3 THE NEXT WAR,
AND THE NEXT, Part 1 The futuristic
battlefield By Jack A Smith
retaliatory blow from the few possible
nuclear weapons that were not destroyed in the
initial US attack.
During the Cold War the
US and USSR avoided a nuclear war through the
policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD). The
nuclear equivalency of the time meant that a first
strike would not be able to destroy all the other
side's retaliatory strike force, assuring that any
attack would be met with a counterattack, killing
hundreds of millions on both sides - so there was no
nuclear war. Now, with the US
moving swiftly toward first-strike supremacy and
an anti-ballistic-missile system under
construction, a catastrophic nuclear exchange in
the decades ahead cannot be ruled out.
As
an indication of the present world danger, the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in January moved
the hands of its Doomsday Clock two minutes ahead
to 11:55pm - five minutes to annihilation
midnight.
Much to Russia's and the world's
disappointment, the Bush administration withdrew
from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in
2002 to develop an ABM system to eliminate the
chance that a nuclear-wounded "enemy" might be
able to launch its few remaining nuclear warheads
toward the United States. In addition, despite
pleas to do so from Moscow, Washington has no
intention of renewing - or even discussing
renewing - the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction
Treaty (START) when it expires in 2009.
According to an article about the end of
START in the January Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists (online) by Pavel Podvig of the Center
for International Security and Cooperation, the US
"plans to keep the capability to maintain an
arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads for
decades to come".
There is not much hope
that the current political climate will produce
proposals that could change the substance of
nuclear-policy discussions. Instead, we see the
growing acceptance of the idea that nuclear forces
should be preserved (more or less) in their
current form, even if no one can clearly formulate
missions for these forces.
At the very
least, the START process has kept some pressure on
the United States and Russia (and indirectly on
other countries) to think about nuclear-arms
reductions and has provided the framework for
implementing these reductions. Now that this
process is ending, there is nothing to replace it.
Not only Russia but other countries will
strengthen or create their own atomic strike force
as a result of America's quest for nuclear
domination. For instance, the fear of a US nuclear
attack was certainly a motive for North Korea to
develop a rudimentary nuclear weapon. In this
connection, Russia long ago agreed to a
no-first-strike pledge, but the US still refuses
to follow suit, maintaining that such a pledge
would reduce its options. Washington even
maintains it has the right to use nuclear weapons
preemptively against non-nuclear states.
Both Russia and China are acutely aware
that they are potential targets of a US attack,
not least because of their strenuous objections to
the concept of a unipolar world with Washington at
its epicenter. This was one of the reasons Russian
President Vladimir Putin delivered an
exceptionally strong critique of US
foreign-military policy on February 10 during the
Munich Conference on Security Policy. Obviously
exercising Russia's new sense of having restored
itself to great-power status in recent years, the
Russian leader declared:
Unilateral and frequently
illegitimate actions have not resolved any
problems. Moreover, they have caused new human
tragedies and created new centers of tension.
Judge for yourselves: wars as well as local and
regional conflicts have not diminished. Today we
are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper-use
of force - military force - in international
relations, force that is plunging the world into
an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result, we
do not have sufficient strength to find a
comprehensive solution to any one of these
conflicts. Finding a political settlement also
becomes impossible.
We are seeing a
greater and greater disdain for the basic
principles of international law. And independent
legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming
increasingly closer to one state's legal system.
One state, the United States, has overstepped
its national borders in every way. This is
visible in the economic, political, cultural and
educational policies it imposes on other
nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy
about this? And of course this is extremely
dangerous. It results in the fact that no one
feels safe. I want to emphasize this - no one
feels safe!
Note 1.
Jim Lobe reviews The New American
Militarism along with Anatol Lieven's
America Right or Wrong in The specter of two
'isms', Asia Times Online, July 9,
2005.
Part 2: The militarization
of outer space
Jack A Smith is
former editor of the (US) Guardian Newsweekly and
editor of the Hudson Valley (New York) Activist
Newsletter.
(Copyright 2007 Jack A
Smith.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia
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