Posted on 8-4-2003
Disarmament
In Tatters
James Sterngold , San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday 6 April 2003
The Bush administration's war to disarm Iraq and its increasingly
unilateral approach to international disputes, say arms control
experts, are helping to paralyze one of the most hopeful products
of the post-World War II era: the global arms control and disarmament
movement.
They argue that the elaborately constructed system of disarmament
treaties and organizations, which over the years had controlled
the spread of everything from chemical and biological weapons
to nuclear materials, has been dangerously imperiled. Any new
agreements are at best a distant dream. "It is all very
much dead in the water at the moment," said William Potter,
a U.N. adviser and director of the Center for Nonproliferation
Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
In fact, arms control advocates note, there is a particular
irony to the war in Iraq: While U.S. forces pound Saddam Hussein
in one of the most radical -- and expensive -- unilateral acts
of disarming another country, the leading international forum
for negotiating multilateral arms control agreements, the United
Nations-affiliated Conference on Disarmament, is so frozen by
disputes that it is unable even to agree on an agenda. Negotiations
of crucial issues relating to nuclear materials, weapons in
space and biological weapons are completely deadlocked. "There
is a lot of despair," said Jayantha Dhanapala, undersecretary-
general for disarmament affairs at the United Nations, who worked
to extend the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995. "There
is a general feeling that the disarmament machinery is just
not working."
Although there is general agreement that the old system is broken,
it is not clear what will replace it -- or how newly emerging
proliferation threats should be addressed. Even a quick success
in Iraq, for instance, will leave the Bush administration facing
a potentially much graver challenge in North Korea, which is
believed to have secretly built two nuclear weapons and is now
openly revving up a production program. North Korea was the
first country to abandon an arms agreement when it announced
three months ago that it was withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation
Treaty. That withdrawal takes effect this Thursday.
The Bush administration has argued it was forced to act in Iraq
precisely because arms control agreements had failed to hold
back rogue states like Iraq that were determined to acquire
and keep weapons of mass destruction. But, critics claim, the
administration contributed to their failure by walking away
from a number of agreements. It has, for instance, abrogated
the 1972 Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty and it has made clear
it has no intention of seeking ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty, which President Clinton signed but the Senate
rejected once before. At the same time, the administration has
proposed developing a new generation of nuclear weapons and
possibly using them pre-emptively against hostile nations suspected
of developing prohibited weapons. Many experts believe this
strategy will only provoke some other nations to develop their
own weapons of mass destruction -- thus making the work of arms
control advocates that much harder. "I can't recall any
point in time when there have been so many challenges to the
traditional way of approaching arms control," Potter said.
"I really question whether the system can bear the strains.'
Robert Einhorn, a senior disarmament official in the Clinton
administration, said that, even without the Bush administration's
aggressive policies, the traditional arms control approach was
already being undermined by other nations who chose to ignore
the treaties, overtly or covertly. "We've realized that
good rules can't make bad guys good," he said. "Those
mechanisms could only hold off the really determined cheaters
so long."
John Bolton, the Bush administration's undersecretary of state
for arms control and international security, put the case bluntly
when he addressed the Conference on Disarmament last year. Given
the deadlock in the conference, he described its debates as
an exercise in futility, and insisted that the United States
was prepared to act on its own. "Our policy is, quite simply,
pro-American, as you would expect," he said. In November
2001, Bolton warned that six countries other than Iraq -- North
Korea, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan and Cuba -- must dismantle
their programs developing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
But no international organization has moved to address the issue.
"The problem is not just that the governments are not in
agreement today," said Daryl Kimball, the executive director
of the Arms Control Association. "The structure may not
be adequate given how many are breaking the rules."
The turnaround in the fortunes of the arms control movement
has been remarkably swift. The collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991 led to a string of breakthroughs, including missile
reductions, the elimination of nuclear weapons from many of
the former Soviet states, an agreement with North Korea to mothball
its nuclear program and the conclusion of a chemical weapons
treaty. But in 1998, India and Pakistan both exploded nuclear
test devices, Iraq halted the U.N. weapons inspection program,
and Iran and North Korea tested missiles. Shortly afterward,
the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty. Potter said the failure of the international community
to impose significant sanctions against India and Pakistan contributed
to the breakdown of the prohibitions and encouraged a flood
of new violations.
Last February, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Select Commission on Intelligence
that "some 25 countries possess or are actively pursuing
WMD or missile programs." He added that some Third World
countries had also begun exporting their newly acquired technology
for producing weapons of mass destruction, accelerating the
alarming trend.
Meanwhile:
- -- The United States has rejected an inspection and verification
program for the biological weapons treaty, saying it is not stringent
enough.
- -- Talks on a treaty to prohibit weapons in outer space and to ban
the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons are stalled.
- -- The United States is resisting the space treaty, in part because
it wants to consider deploying lasers on satellites as part of a missile
defense, while China argues that without progress on that issue it will
resist movement on the treaty to prohibit the development of fissile
materials.
- -- Efforts to ban the use of land mines are deadlocked, in part
because of U.S. opposition.
- -- While the United States and Russia have agreed to a nuclear
missile reduction treaty -- which Russian President Vladimir Putin asked
the State Duma to ratify on Saturday -- arms control specialists say it
is fatally flawed because the decommissioned weapons are to be put in
storage rather than destroyed, which means they could be redeployed at
any time.
Still, some arms control advocates still believe the system can be
saved. "It is a crisis, but we are not yet at Armageddon," said
Dhanapala of the United Nations. "We have the tools to fix this, and
if we don't, then we have to make some new tools. The key will be coming
up with some fresh approaches." He was asked what those approaches
might be. "We have not yet seen any new ideas," replied
Dhanapala
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