COMMENT US lacks smart
nuclear policy By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
A smart, soft power approach to
US nuclear policy is missing. In the current
emerging discussions on a "US "smart power"
approach to global affairs, conspicuously absent
is any reference to the need to substantially
revise the present US nuclear posture. [1]
This is a seriously neglected issue in the
marathon US presidential debates as well. The
candidates for the Republican
Party, such as Mitt Romney,
Rudi Guiliani and John McCain, are sufficiently
hawkish to be averse to any major rethinking of
the US nuclear posture and doctrine as articulated
by the George W Bush administration. The
Democratic candidates on the other hand have
almost without exception focused on other issues,
eg, narrow attention to proliferation threats,
without due consideration of how those threats are
partially generated in response to the nuclear
policies of the US and other nuclear weapons
states.
But, if there is any witches'
brew, to borrow the title of a recent article by
David Albright and Jacqueline Shire on Iran [2],
it certainly heats up on multiple dimensions,
including disarmament or, better said, the lack of
it, as well as proliferation-provocative postures
that rely on "smart" tactical warheads fitted for
conventional warfare.
Interestingly, US
officials in charge of arms control continue to
behave as if they are in an unreflexive cocoon of
unilateralism in which the superpower's actions
serve the collective good. Case in point, last
week, Robert Joseph, a former top US arms control
negotiator, told an audience at Harvard University
that the "primary threat" to the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is posed by Iran
and North Korea.
This is a self-serving
response that conveniently ignores the myriad
reasons for a growing perception of a US nuclear
threat on the part of many nations. These reasons
include:
Absence of meaningful disarmament: true, since
the end of the Cold War, the US has made deep cuts
in its nuclear arsenal, but it still retains
several thousand warheads, sufficient to blow the
planet apart several times over. It has also
simultaneously modernized its nuclear arsenal by
pursuing a new generation of "smart" nukes for its
air, sea and land triad. These weapons blur the
distinction between the nuclear and conventional
theaters and lower the the nuclear threshold.
Unilateral withdrawal from arms control
treaties such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
following (phantom of Star Wars) ballistic
defense.
The Bush administration's opposition to the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, despite the
treaty's indisputable value as an a
counter-proliferation instrument.
The US's aggressive new nuclear posture,
articulated in a 2001 review, which reverses the
post-Cold War diminishing reliance on nukes for US
security and allows for pre-emptive strikes at
adversaries armed with weapons of mass
destruction.
The US's new North Atlantic Treaty
Organization strategy, or eastward expansion and
simultaneous reliance on nuclear weapons, which
extends the nuclear theater to, among others, some
areas covered by various nuclear-weapons free
zones.
The US's nuclear sharing, for instance with
India, that is in direct conflict with the US's
own nuclear export policies. No matter how White
House officials cut it, this is tantamount to
selectively disavowing legally binding obligations
and subordinating non-proliferation obligations to
economic and geopolitical considerations, such as
by failing to exert pressure on the NPT's
"outlying states", such as Israel, to join the
NPT.
The US's declared policies of rejecting the
"no first use" pledge maintained by China and
refusing to give "negative security assurance" to
would-be proliferators who, now or in the future,
may want a nuclear shield against the perceived US
military and security threat.
Given the
above, it is hardly surprising that the US has
effectively lost the leadership role at the NPT
review conferences, RevCon). Since the 1995
RevCon, when the US agreed to the practical "13
steps" toward disarmament, what we have witnessed
is a one-step forward, two-step backward US
approach that stubbornly refuses to implement
those steps or even accept their relevance.
Unless there is a change of course by the
next US president, at the next RevCon in 2010 we
may well witness a repetition of the lackluster US
performance at the past couple of conferences,
when the US showed the absence of any will to lead
the rest of the world community on this most
important issue of peace and survival.
To
avoid this scenario, the US would need to assume a
proactive role now, at the preparatory meetings of
RevCon, setting the stage for a successful
conference that could, conceivably, tackle the two
issues of non-proliferation and disarmament in
tandem, given the tight interplay between the two.
Sustainable non-proliferation requires a
lot more than the panoply of counter-proliferation
measures such as the Proliferation Security
Initiative (PSI), tightening export controls, or
strengthening the role of the UN Security Council
(as called for by some nuclear experts); rather,
it also requires sustained disarmament and its
ideological corollary that would arrest the
development of threat perceptions caused by the
aggressive postures of weapons states.
Nothing will change though as long as the
US lacks a new, smarter nuclear policy, led by a
smart US president who has the necessary nuclear
acumen to avoid narrowly focusing on
non-proliferation at the expense of disarmament.
Both issues are unachievable goals as long as the
nuclear weapons states do not take into adequate
consideration the threat perceptions of the
non-nuclear weapons states.
Both sides
need to develop and strengthen confidence in the
NPT, that is, it takes two to tango.
Unfortunately, the weapons states' relative
obliviousness to their NPT obligations with
respect to disarmament only means that they look
for a solo dance by the non-nuclear weapons
states. And that is an illusion, a self-deluding
expectation that is at variance with global
security outlooks and calculations.
The
premise of a smart power approach by the US thus
remains unrealized as long as this approach is not
extended to a critical examination of the current
nuclear policies and postures that directly or
indirectly contribute to the diminishing global
standing of the US. Only then can we really begin
to address the question of whether or not the US
can become a smart power again.
Kaveh
L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World
Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with
Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's
nuclear potential latent", Harvard International
Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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