2. “Too Close for Comfort”
Nick Cohen
The Observer
September 16, 2001

IN GEORGE BUSH'S May 1 speech in which he announced plans for a National Missile Defence system, the US President referred to the need for ''a clear and clean break from the past, and especially from the adversarial legacy of the Cold War''.

However, the announcement confirms what most had feared that the US is about to lead us straight back to the Cold War, with ''new concepts of deterrence that rely on both offensive and defensive forces''.

Certainly, the old concepts of nuclear deterrence are dangerously flawed. They rely on ''mutually-assured destruction'', whose acronym well describes the theory nuclear weapons won't be used by either the USA or the (then) USSR because the effects of a retaliatory strike as well as the first strike would be too unthinkable. The theory is mad because it relies on both human and technical infallibility, a state which humanity is never likely to achieve. As the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons concluded in 1996, ''The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used accidentally or by decision defies credibility''.

Bush's new concept is that the US will render itself less vulnerable by erecting a shield (notwithstanding the enormous, perhaps insurmountable, technical difficulties which are yet to be overcome). However, far from reducing the risk of nuclear war, NMD will actually increase the risk, for several reasons.

Firstly, Russian and Chinese insecurity will increase. The Russians in particular are not buying assurances that NMD will remain a limited and purely defensive system. Their fear is that NMD could eventually neutralise a sizable portion of Russia's nuclear force, making Russia vulnerable to a US first strike. Their fears are well founded. The US Space Command's long-term proposal ''Vision for 2020'' is a plan for the US to dominate outer space for its own military and commercial purposes. The Vision jargon goes like this: ''The emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea and air superiority, will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance''. The message is clear.

China's nuclear-capable ballistic-missile force, which numbers dozens of warheads (compared to Russia's thousands), is particularly vulnerable to even a limited missile-defence system. But in the unique calculus of nuclear weaponry, where a single warhead can kill millions and injure millions more, just a little bit of offence that is, more weapons trumps defence. In short, NMD could well be the first shot fired in a new nuclear arms race.

Secondly, deployment of NMD threatens to unravel decades of painstaking efforts to achieve nuclear arms control treaties. Last year the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was renewed, with an ''unequivocal commitment'' from the five major nuclear powers, including the US, to eliminate their nuclear weapons. Who needs a shield if we're moving to zero nuclear weapons? NMD renders the US commitment meaningless and will undermine faith in the whole non-proliferation regime.

Thirdly, NMD is likely to actually increase the global problem posed by ballistic missiles by spreading missile technology. After all, the technology which launches ballistic missiles is not entirely different from the technology which tries to shoot them down. Bush has already indicated that he will share the technology with Japan, South Korea and Israel, and China and Russia are certain to seek to reduce their financial burden of rearming by selling major weapons and related technology to their respective allies (or possibly to any buyer).

As for the ''rogue states'', those nations whose missile capabilities are said to be so threatening to the US that a defence is needed, the prospects of one of them actually hitting the US with an intercontinental missile, while negligible now, are likely to benefit from such technology sharing. Top of the list of ''rogues'' is North Korea, which announced in September 1999 a (verifiable) freeze on further missile flight tests. With signals that North Korea is seeking engagement with the West (for example, diplomatic ties with Australia have been re-established), efforts to reduce tensions further through diplomacy would make far more sense than a provocative and ever-escalating search for military superiority.

Perhaps the most bitter irony of NMD, especially for the poor of America whose basic economic needs will once again be sacrificed to the military-industrial complex, is that a ballistic missile is only one way to deliver a nuclear weapon. A suitcase smuggled over the border, or concealed in a merchant ship, are others. NMD or no NMD, people everywhere will remain profoundly vulnerable as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world.

Despite the grave implications for global security of NMD, the Australian Government appears to have already given a very encouraging response to the US regarding the use of Pine Gap. But there are other options open to us apart from simply bowing to pressure. We could, for example, just say no.

The Medical Association for Prevention of War has called on the Australian Government to hold a public inquiry into NMD and its implications, including: the nature of the missile threat, and possible ways of responding to it; the likely impact on nuclear arms control and elimination efforts; the implications for the security of Australians; the impact on Australia's bilateral relations, especially with China; the role of Pine Gap.

The Government has replied that it has no plans to hold such an inquiry. And yet it is not providing convincing arguments that it is in the interests of Australians or the international community generally to support the US proposal for NMD.

Humanity escaped the Cold War with the horrors of incinerated cities remaining, for most of us, the stuff of nightmares, fiction or World War II history. We can't rely on being so fortunate next time. In essence this is not a debate about abstract military policies. It's about weapons which burn, mutilate and irradiate humans on a scale of suffering we can barely imagine. That it why NMD must be opposed.

On Monday [September 10], Joe Biden, the chairman of the American Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, gave Washington journalists a disconcertingly prescient speech. 'Our real security needs,' he  said, 'are much more earthbound and far less costly than National Missile Defence - the Joint Chiefs say a strategic nuclear attack is less likely than regional conflicts, or major  theatre wars, or terrorist attacks at home and abroad. We will have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat while the real threats come into this country in the hold of a ship or the belly of a plane or are smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack.'

The next day, mid-twentieth-century jet flight and seventh-century ecstatic martyrdom combined to produce mass  murder. Biden didn't exactly predict the method which would devastate the Pentagon and downtown New York. But he was far closer to the mark than the extravagantly funded secret policemen in the intelligence services and bluff analysers of clear-and-present danger in the West's terrorism and foreign policy institutes.

'Blowback' is the jargon word for his well-founded fears. 'We have nothing, you have everything,' the hijackers said in effect to the financial and military élites of the world's hyperpower. 'We can still take your technology and blow it back in your faces.' Blowback weapons must necessarily be relatively low-tech and easy to obtain and deploy: sarin or VX nerve gas released in a subway; an old Soviet nuclear weapon smuggled over the border in a lorry and exploded in the capital; fuel sprayed into the skies and ignited to create an 'air bomb'. Blowback works best when, as last week, there's no claim of responsibility or obvious target for reprisal.

One might have thought that invokers of national security would be alert to the menace. But just as those who are hardest on criminals are softest on crime, so the loudest patriots make the most treacherous garrison. For years, rational debate on the proliferation of weaponry has been drowned by the howls of the American Right barking up the wrong tree. The 'threat' it chose to magnify was the most unlikely imaginable.

National Missile Defence, or the 'son of Star Wars' programme, envisages that starving Iraq or North Korea or Afghanistan would spend billions of dollars building intercontinental ballistic missile systems. These would be sitting targets long before they could be armed with warheads. Despite these handicaps, Star Wars' defenders insisted, 'rogue states' or terrorist groups would carry on    regardless and risk annihilating nuclear retaliation by launching missiles from identifiable bases against America.

Billions of dollars have been spent by the Clinton and Bush administrations to protect the United States against this fantastical nightmare. Star Wars probably won't work, but the fear that America will be able to dispense with the mutually assured destruction of deterrence theory, and fire nuclear weapons from behind the safety of an anti-ballistic shield, will push Russia, China, India, Pakistan and, possibly, Japan into a grotesque and unnecessary arms race.

If it is to have Star Wars, America must make the world a more dangerous place by tearing up the 1972 Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty. The unilateral insistence that the laws which apply to others do not apply to the United States incites the anti-Americanism righteous Americans find incomprehensible. The dizzying gulf between Washington and the rest of the planet was perfectly exemplified by Douglas J. Feith, an anti-Soviet hawk who Bush dug out of post-Cold War obscurity and plonked into the highest echelons of the Pentagon.

On Tuesday, he was in Moscow. He told the Russians there could be no compromise on Star Wars. His hosts took him to a press conference where he learned that the World Trade Centre and his very own offices in the Pentagon had been blown to pieces. Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian Prime Minister, said that all America's arguments for missile defence had been 'swept aside' by the slaughter. Journalists followed up by asking if Feith would reconsider Star Wars, given that it wouldn't have prevented one plane being hijacked or saved a life. 'I don't think it's fair to say that the system that is designed for a specific purpose is flawed because it doesn't accomplish something that it is not designed to do,' Feith sniffed. 'I guess I have difficulty with the question.'

He found it easier to contemplate the murder of his fellow citizens and the destruction of the Pentagon he served than to doubt the theology of Star Wars. He just didn't get it. But Britain didn't either.

After George W. Bush plucked up the courage to return to  Washington, he made an appeal for multilateral unity. In less terrible circumstances, it would have been as risible as Tony Blair's loyal reply that he would stand 'shoulder to shoulder' with the President. The question both begged was what was the world meant to unite around? Blair told the Commons on Friday that common purpose could be found in abhorrence of crimes against humanity. 'These attacks were not just attacks upon people and buildings, nor even merely on the USA. These were attacks on the basic democratic values in which we all believe so passionately and on the civilised world.'

In 1998 the civilised world, as represented by 140 governments, created the International Criminal Court to judge the grossest violators of life and liberty. Bill Clinton gave the court America's endorsement in the dying hours of his presidency. Bush is determined that America will not meet global standards. He has asked the lawyers, who fought so well for him in Florida, to discover if there is a way of 'unsigning' the treaty. Bush's Republican allies in Congress want to authorise the US military to free American soldiers remanded in custody by the court. The only explanation for American opposition to international law was that her generals could see themselves committing a few war crimes, as they may well do in the coming days.

After Blair had sat down, Jack Straw sensibly added: 'We also need to focus our attention on where the next threat to our collective security will come from. Efforts to prevent the proliferation of chemical, biological and other weapons must be redoubled.' In July, Bush wrecked a decade of negotiations on the enforcement of the global prohibition of biological weapons. The protocol would have given independent inspectors access to laboratories in the signatory countries. The pharmaceutical conglomerates, who bankrolled Bush's campaign as enthusiastically as the manufacturers of Star Wars, claimed industrial and military espionage would follow.

Without independent verification, the ban on biological warfare is so much waste paper. Any laboratory which wants to manufacture the ideal blowback weapons - they're cheap and can be 'smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack,' as Biden said - has little to worry about. People who ought to know in the defence bureaucracy tell me that the rogue laboratories may be American. The Star Wars fantasy is accompanied by the dream of building a biological weapon programmed to target the DNA of Saddam Hussein, for example, or Osama bin Laden, if anyone knows where he is.

Neither the Prime Minister nor Foreign Secretary had the bad taste to ask if unity is meant to be found in unconditional support for the most criminal members of the Israeli Right? Or the judicial execution of children? Should we agree, perhaps, to come together in opposition to the Kyoto protocol on global warming? Or the proposed agreement to regulate the trade in small arms? Or to the comprehensive ban on the testing of nuclear weapons? On all these matters, a unilateral America is on its own or thereabouts, although with so much anti-Islamic junk about the 'clash of civilisations' in the air at the moment, Bush can deflect accusations of racism by pointing out that Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are standing 'shoulder to shoulder' with him on a sovereign state's inalienable right to kill kiddies.

I'm sure he is grateful for their backing. Nevertheless, it seems a little late in the day to be asking the rest of the world for multilateral support.

To be fair, Tony Blair may have grasped the contradictions and be using the kamikaze attacks to persuade Bush that he must co-operate with others. Yet whatever gentle hints he's dropping in private, the Prime Minister has already failed the big test. If there is to be concerted action against terrorism in the Middle East and Central Asia it will require the support of Russia and China. Both have been infuriated by Star Wars.

Blair might have stopped the nonsense at the start by refusing to allow the American bases at Fylingdales and Menwith Hill to be used as forward stations to track missiles. I've written before that Star Wars won't defend Britain and Blair was obliging a foreign power by turning his country into an unprotected target. I have to confess I wasn't at all sure how simple it would be for America's enemies to attack Yorkshire. Last week got rid of that doubt.

The Prime Minister chose to put indulging Bush before the true interests of Britain and America. He has proved, yet again, that sycophants are the worst of friends.