Nukes

Thank goodness for nuclear proliferation

It is only the spread of nuclear arms to smaller, more insecure nations, that has stopped highly destabilizing US aggression, and Canada ought to welcome proliferation

by kevin potvin

The nuclear issue has once again, after a 15-year hiatus following the end of the Cold War, re-emerged as the deciding factor in international tensions. Regional border disputes, economic globalization, national post-colonial fractures and insecurities, and non-state terrorism ruled the imaginations of foreign policy ministers around the world for nearly a generation in the interim. But the big nuclear bogeyman that dominated international relations for 40 years after World War II is back in force.

As it was a generation ago, proliferation of nuclear knowledge and crucial components is the main issue. How, every nuclear power has asked, do we keep this out of the hands of everyone else? When the Americans alone possessed the knowledge, it was a crisis of overwhelming public terror for Americans and Europeans alike to discover the knowledge had proliferated to Russia. The US, in response to what they perceived as a Russian nuclear threat to Europe, armed Britain.

That’s when France, traditional rival to Britain, acquired the knowledge, probably from Russia. And China, sometime ally to Russia, especially during French and American wars on China’s periphery in Southeast Asia, acquired the knowledge from Russia to counter real US threats of nuclear bombardment. Since then, Israel, South Africa, India, and Pakistan have acquired nuclear arms—Israel acquiring the knowledge from the US, and South Africa from Israel, while India probably acquired it from Russia, and Pakistan from China. In the latest round, North Korea and Iran have probably acquired the knowledge from Pakistan. Meanwhile, Iraq, before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, had an advanced research program to acquire nuclear arms, as did Libya, and serious rumours suggest both Brazil and Argentina have clandestine research programs.

While being a major distributor of the knowledge as well as the key components necessary for nuclear proliferation, the US has also provided much of the recent motivation for countries around the world to seek nuclear defence. By invading, destroying, and occupying Iraq, the US as much as openly encouraged North Korea and Iran, named as members of an “axis of evil” in Bush’s bizarre 2002 State of the Union speech, to quickly acquire nuclear arms.

Their defensive measures to acquire nuclear arms seems so far to have worked: North Korea looked as lined up for US attack as did Iraq, yet nothing has happened to North Korea, and the nation has passed from international attention unscathed. Why? One cannot ignore the effectiveness of a real nuclear defence such as North Korea seems now to have.

Given that US moves to attack Iraq and Afghanistan and to threaten many others have brought the greatest degree of international instability in a century, and given that its actions are illegal, immoral, and represent a threat to world peace like no other actor today, we can only be thankful that North Korea and Iran so far have had the means to dissuade further US attacks that would have brought so much more insecurity to us all.

Indeed, as Keir A Lieber and Daryl G Press write in Foreign Affairs in their article “The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy,” there seems a definite US policy to take advantage of current conditions around the world to finally win back what the nation enjoyed in the late 1940s: a dominating nuclear primacy, by which is meant, an ability to use nuclear weapons in a first-strike attack on any and all nuclear-armed enemies in a manner that allows no substantive counter-attack. It is worth noting that the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war was by the US when it last enjoyed nuclear primacy.

The article details how the US armed services are tinkering with detonation fuses on submarine-launched ICBMs so they explode at the surface instead of in the air over a city, the better to disable highly reinforced silos containing defensive nuclear missiles in China and Russia; how stealth bombers’ navigation aids are being upgraded to allow them to fly very low to the ground at high speeds in order to evade radar detection in a surprise first-strike attack; and how cruise missile technology has been vastly improved from wide use in two Iraq wars such that, when fitted with nuclear tips, a flock of such cruise missiles could alone overwhelm any other nations’ command and control centres before they even know an attack is on. “Since the Cold War’s end [in 1990], the US nuclear arsenal has significantly improved,” Lieber and Press write. “Although the air force finished dismantling its highly lethal MX missiles in 2005 to comply with arms control agreements, it is significantly improving its remaining ICBMs by installing the MX’s high-yield warheads and advanced reentry vehicles on Minuteman ICBMs, and it has upgraded the Minuteman’s guidance systems to match the MX’s accuracy.”

This astonishing article, appearing as it does in such an establishment journal, underlines the dangers to the world in America’s use of nuclear arms. The goal of global nuclear primacy for purely offensive, first-strike purposes, also explains the rationale behind the missile shield, which is otherwise difficult to understand from a defensive point of view. The missile shield and other similar space-based systems “the United States might plausibly deploy,” the article says, “would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not as a standalone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal—if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defence system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes, because the devastated enemy would have so few warheads and decoys left.”

Given the highly destabilizing, clearly aggressive, and offensive nuclear stance the US is now adopting, how can we as Canadians ignore the good that has come from nuclear proliferation to North Korea and Iran? With a logic no more twisted than the one we celebrated over previous generations—wherein our foreign policy openly acknowledged that a balance of nuclear terror between the Soviet Union and the United States produced an era of unprecedented peace—we can also take some solace in the notion that proliferation of nuclear arms to these smaller, insecure nations has, admittedly ironically, produced something like a stable peace in those places where war was looking assured.

A covert Canadian policy to encourage nuclear arms proliferation to any other nations, including our own, that might some day fall under covetous US eyes, may well be a good and smart policy. If proliferation in the past backed the US off its path of nuclear aggression and first strike capabilities, it will work again today—to everyone’s benefit. Canada should therefore help arm Iran.