Arms races past haunt Asia's
present By Ronan Thomas
Diplomats have been muttering about the
prospect of a nuclear-armed North Korea for almost
20 years. With this week's reported nuclear test
at Gilju, Kim Jong-il has pushed past the doorman
at the world's nuclear club. The membership
committee appears powerless to act.
The
Gilju test, if true, is surely no surprise, given
Kim's long-proclaimed desire to inoculate his
regime from external attack. North Korea is now
the world's ninth nuclear-armed power. The
seismograph of regional
Asian diplomatic and strategic
calculations has jumped its
track.
As with India's and Pakistan's
entry into the club in 1998, shock waves are being
felt in world capitals. Cold War doctrines and the
language of arms races are being dusted off. From
Washington to Tokyo, Beijing to Seoul,
policymakers are reaching for the theory
textbooks. The concepts of deterrence,
appeasement, containment, domino theory, rational
actor strategy and the nature of nuclear
brinkmanship all jostle for their attention.
The prospect of a new North Asian arms
race is now emerging rapidly. The main actors will
be the United States, Japan, South Korea, China,
Russia and Taiwan, all outraged at the Pyongyang's
behavior. The locus of attention: the Korean
Peninsula. It will be a long and dangerous
enterprise.
But arms races are easier to
turn on than turn off. A glance at the historical
record of arms races past is sobering and salutary
for the present. Today's international
policymakers would do well to consider their
perilous track record.
Navies to nukes
From the 1870s to the present day, arms
races have exacted a heavy price from individual
powers. States on the rise have entered them
enthusiastically; powers on the slide have been
obliged to follow suit. Arms races predate the
formation of standing armies - witness Rome and
Carthage - but the 20th century saw some of the
most costly and destructive.
In the late
19th and early 20th centuries, arms races were
predominantly European and naval.
As early
as the mid-1870s, naval rivalry became acute
between a newly unified Italy and France over
contested North African possessions. In the 1880s,
Italy's faltering membership of the so-called
Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany
resulted in growing naval competition with Vienna
over naval command of the Adriatic. The first
naval arms race of the modern age emerged as Italy
and Austria-Hungary vied for battleship supremacy.
Italy lost: the Hapsburg navy dominated the
Adriatic with better ships and by 1914 Italy was
deterred from direct naval engagement
In
the North Sea the most dangerous arms race yet
seen began in 1904 after Britain reorganized its
navy and later unveiled the nuclear deterrent of
its day, HMS Dreadnought. The Dreadnought, an
armored battleship launched in 1906 whose
revolutionary design, firepower and speed
outclassed every competitor overnight, rewrote
naval history. It lit the fuse on an intense
multimillion-pound naval race lasting until the
outbreak of World War I (1914-18). The pace was
unrelenting: between 1906 and 1914, Britain built
38 dreadnoughts and other battle cruisers versus
Germany's 24.
Sir John "Jackie" Fisher and
his German counterpart, Admiral Alfred von
Tirpitz, jockeyed constantly to close the naval
gap, backed by two industrial colossi and
presaging the later intercontinental ballistic
missile (ICBM) race of the Cold War between the
United States and the Soviet Union. Deterrence
overrode all other naval considerations.
Britain was obsessed with maintaining its
"two-power standard": naval supremacy equivalent
to any two competitors. Prussian Germany wanted
naval supremacy of its own: boosted by Kaiser
Wilhelm's deep-rooted envy of the Royal Navy. But
as new alliance structures emerged - Britain/Japan
(1902), Britain/France (1904), Britain/Russia
(1907) versus Austria-Hungary/Germany - the costly
naval deterrence strategy failed. Germany's fear
of encirclement prompted the guns of August 1914
to open fire.
On land, the bloody conflict
on western and eastern fronts and in the
collapsing Ottoman Empire proved that arms races
and deterrence were no guarantee of security in
Europe. At sea, the only major naval engagement at
Jutland in 1916 ended in stalemate.
After
World War I the United States and Japan also
decided on new naval building programs of their
own. Along with weakened Britain, they sought to
regulate competition and expenditure. The naval
conference of 1921 aimed to take the heat out of
arms rivalry.
Yet even as one arms race
cooled, another was fast emerging. The rearmament
of Germany and rise of Imperial Japan in the 1930s
were not matched by Western powers. The age of
appeasement had arrived and there was the flawed
belief that both the Nazi and Japanese political
leaders were rational actors. Britain in
particular did not appreciate the full nature and
extent of the Axis Powers' rearmament until as
late as 1937. It failed to modernize both its army
and the Singapore naval base, with disastrous
consequences. Memories of the Great War were long,
appeasement seemed easier and rearmament was
politically problematic. So Britain's deterrent
value to Berlin and Tokyo failed. Britain by 1939
- along with the US in 1941 - had failed to
appreciate that a "first strike" strategy by an
enemy could reap spectacular rewards, at least in
the short term.
Enter nuclear
weapons In the ashes of 1945, with the
Cold War deepening, the United States' and the
Soviet Union's nuclear-arms race until 1991 cost
the US and its allies at least US$8 trillion.
Russian historians still debate Soviet expenditure
but it was clearly enough to bankrupt the country.
The world avoided a nuclear exchange over Cuba in
1962 by a whisker. Nevertheless, 1945-91 was a
clear example of an arms race with positive
outcomes. The US and its allies deterred and
finished off the evils of communism in Europe,
outbuilding, outsmarting and outspending a
totalitarian opponent. But arms races remain
addictive.
India and Pakistan entered the
nuclear arena in 1998. Both powers'
kiloton-strength tests in that year threw the
regional military balance into confusion and,
today, stalemate. As with the US-Soviet face-off,
the realities of Indo-Pakistani mutually assured
destruction (MAD) and rational-actor theory
continue.
Which brings us to this week's
Gilju test. With the North Korean test, the
history of arms races has been given a nudge. As
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is so fond of
saying, "The kaleidoscope has been shaken." A new
arms race in North Asia is almost inevitable.
The next few months will be critical. At
the United Nations, trade sanctions against North
Korea under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter are in
prospect. The jury is out as to as to whether they
will be effective. Like India and Pakistan, North
Korea now has a nuclear-tipped guarantee against
external molestation.
At the same time,
Seoul remains the easiest of targets; threats by
the North against it can be used as blackmail.
Other measures, including UN interception of North
Korean vessels at sea - Mr Kim has tried to send
Scud missiles to Yemen before - are under
consideration. North Korea's relations with its
communist ally China and rival South Korea will be
tested as never before. Chinese diplomacy will be
critical.
Then there is the lurid prospect
of Japan and South Korea announcing
nuclear-weapons acquisitions of their own. New
Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe may find that his
flight schedule includes Beijing and Seoul far
more than he imagined. Japan's pacifist
constitution may have to be revised in light of
new Northeast Asian realities. Even Taiwan may be
frightened or emboldened enough to consider its
own nuclear insurance policy. Add to this the
great unknown of Iran (likened by some to Germany
rearming in the 1930s) and policymakers,
strategists and journalists are assured plenty of
sleepless nights, column inches and studio time in
the months ahead. Iran will be watching closely to
see how the UN handles Mr Kim and will draw
appropriate conclusions.
Meanwhile, the
historical lessons learned from arms races and
nuclear-weapons acquisition still pertain.
Possession of a nuclear "big stick" gives a
country more confidence, not less, especially in
times of crisis. Arms races have unpredictable
outcomes, are always expensive and often
explosive. The product of nations on the way up or
down, they can succeed spectacularly, as in
1945-91, or disastrously as in 1906-14 and in the
1930s. Appeasement of an aggressor is a high-risk
strategy, to say the least.
The
international community now can either appease or
deter a defiant, nuclear-armed North Korea.
Deterring Mr Kim and the generals in Pyongyang may
take decades. But if the latest intelligence
assessments are correct, North Korea now has four
to six warheads. If these can be delivered, then
deterrence, for all its risks, is the only option.
Ronan Thomas is a British
correspondent.
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