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| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
We hear a lot of talk about the heroic achievements of America's World War II generation. It takes nothing from the courage of those who threw themselves against the iron wall of Omaha Beach to praise that generation's equally courageous assault against the age-old logic of war nearly 30 years later. By then the youthful heroes of World War II were at the peak of power during the Cold War. Building on the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, they negotiated with the Soviet Union the myth-shattering Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 and saved the future.
The United States has recently taken unilateral steps away from that treaty, embracing the idea of a national missile defense system, which the treaty forbids. Americans are well into testing prototype weapons designed to shoot down incoming missiles. Russia has declared that the United States is already in violation of the treaty, ''with all the negative consequences which that entails,'' as a Kremlin spokesman put it earlier this fall. Now comes news of the Clinton administration's pressure on Russia to accept a change in the treaty that would permit the United States to do what it is already doing.
As last week's shocking Senate vote rejecting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty indicates, the United States has turned away from a long-established bipartisan effort to reduce the threat of a nuclear war in favor of a strategy of preparing to win it. The treaties of the Cold War era that limited nuclear weapons are widely dismissed as obsolete, and even liberal Democrats accept the idea of a national missile defense system designed to protect against rogue nations and accidental launches. This shift undoes the unprecedented insight around which our parents' generation had boldly built the approach now derided as obsolete. But is it?
What the ABM Treaty of 1972 enshrines is the still radical notion that in the nuclear age, every act of defense inevitably provokes an act of offense by the enemy. National security becomes defined as paradoxical, not dialectic. It runs counter to human history and human intuition to reject defensive measures because of their inevitably provocative character, yet eight American administrations - four Democratic and four Republican - have done just that. But under the second Clinton administration, that approach is being discredited.
Now the rejection of defensive measures - whether by outlawing ABMs or forbidding nuclear tests - is seen as naively unrealistic in a dangerous world. But the men and women who beat back Hitler and outlasted Stalin were hardly naive idealists. They learned the hard way what their glib progeny are prepared to ignore - that the unilateral pursuit of national security through new rounds of weapons development leads to less security, not more.
For example, now that the Senate has rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, claiming to protect our security by protecting our ability to test new generations of nuclear weapons, other nations will do exactly the same. Widespread weapons testing, probably beginning on the subcontinent, will likely resume. And so with the ABM. The threats that an American national missile defense would counter are indeed real, especially the risk of accidental nuclear launches by Russia or China, the only two nuclear powers capable of targeting the United States.
But when we deploy a missile defense shield, Russia and China will inevitably worry that deterrence has been diluted. That will require Russia and China to respond with some kind of heightened offensive threat, since neither can soon deploy a matching defensive system. That heightening could take the form of increased levels of nuclear alert, like a policy of launch on first warning. Such adding hair to the hair trigger, in the argot, would increase the likelihood of an accidental launch. The new defenses could bring about the very catastrophe they are intended to deflect.
It took the World War II generation several decades to do it, but they developed a simple standard when it came to decisions about nuclear weapons: Does this policy move us toward nuclear doomsday or away from it? That standard led to the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, the ABM Treaty of 1972, the original SALT agreements of the 1970s, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, and the START agreements of the late '80s and early '90s.
To their great credit, the heroes of D-Day thus institutionalized an approach to foreign policy and national security that aimed not at nuclear weapons status quo but at nuclear weapons reduction; not at winning nuclear war but at preventing it; not at dominating our rivals but of engaging them in a joint project of nuclear disarmament.
It is sentimental in the extreme to honor the World War II generation while dismantling the hard-won structure of peace that they left to us as their legacy. With a weapons industry hellbent on a new arms race; with a Congress that squanders the future to settle a score; with a callow president who fights only for himself; with presidential candidates defined by what they avoid; and with an American citizenry that cooperates in its own irrelevance, American has become a danger to the world. Even our allies say so.
With the Senate destruction of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Clinton administration's undermining of the ABM Treaty, we, the children of heroes, have ourselves become the rogue nation.