Читать книгу Statecraft - Margaret Thatcher - Страница 18

The lessening of superpower rivalry in the final stage of the Cold War also resulted in a loosening of superpower disciplines. On the one hand, Soviet political satellites were released to seek their own irregular and eccentric orbits. On the other, as the Soviet Union itself crumbled, its weapons stockpiles were dispersed and plundered, new clients were found for weapons production, and existing experts with knowledge of advanced military technologies abandoned a state that could no longer pay its bills.

Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait in 1990 occurred a little too early for him. He had not quite been able to acquire the weaponry he needed to strike back at the West – his plans to develop the nuclear weapon having been seriously set back by Israel’s pre-emptive attack in June 1981. But if Saddam had been in a position credibly to threaten America or any of its allies – or the coalition’s forces – with attack by missiles with nuclear warheads, would we have gone to the Gulf at all? Just posing that question highlights how fundamentally the reality of proliferation can affect the West’s ability to exert power beyond our shores.

Subsequent experience in dealing with Saddam Hussein should also bring home to us the difficulty of trying to maintain a united front against proliferators – even against a rogue whom everyone in public characterises as a pariah. The recent book by Richard Butler, former head of UNSCOM, the body commissioned to inspect and eliminate Saddam’s weapons capability, provides new insights into how China, and in particular France and Russia, have played fast and loose with their international obligations. The Russians clearly still view Iraq as their gateway to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, while the French have huge commercial interests in the Iraqi oil industry. All three powers have been driven by what Mr Butler calls ‘a deep resentment of American power in the so-called unipolar post-Cold War world’.* If this is a precedent for international cooperation in such matters it would be better to pursue other channels.

The more general, and even more important, lesson from experience in dealing with Saddam is that it is extremely difficult to prevent states that are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from doing so. If it is so hard to monitor and control the activities of a country like Iraq, which has been defeated in war and subjected to repeated threats, sanctions and punishment, what chances are there of preventing the proliferation of WMD among states that are much less subject to scrutiny?

In fact, proliferation has proceeded, often assisted by the failure of the West to check the outflow of technologies. Nor have international arms control agreements helped much in this respect. The Biological Weapons Convention has been unsuccessful in preventing the development of this particularly horrible weapon, because its provisions are for all practical purposes unverifiable. The same is true of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

These agreements, though, are at least more or less neutral in their effects. The same cannot be said, however, of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the United States Senate rightly refused to ratify. The fundamental truth here is that the nuclear weapon cannot be disinvented. A world without nuclear weapons is thus quite simply a fantasy world. The realistic question, therefore, is whether the West and America wish to stay ahead of potential nuclear competitors or not. If we do not, we hand power over regions where our interests are at stake to the Saddams and Gadaffis and Kim Jong Ils.

Faced with that prospect it is easy to see why America’s nuclear deterrent must be completely credible, which means that it has to be tested and modernised as necessary. We should have learned by now that no weapons technology ever stands still. For every idealistic peacemaker willing to renounce his self-defence in favour of a weapons-free world, there is at least one warmaker anxious to exploit the other’s good intentions. All those who shelter beneath the American nuclear umbrella should have been praising Senator Helms and his colleagues who defeated the CTBT – not having tantrums.*

Moreover, in the end nuclear weapons will probably be used. That is a terrible thought for everyone. It is also a novel thought for many who argued, as I did, during the 1970s and 1980s for an up-to-date deterrent as a means of keeping the peace.

During the Cold War’s ‘balance of terror’ it was always possible to argue that because both sides had powerful nuclear arsenals this provided an important stabilising factor, preventing not just nuclear but conventional war, at least in Europe. In truth, there was never any cast-iron guarantee against a nuclear exchange. We knew that we would never initiate a war of any kind against the Warsaw Pact. And we had good reason to believe that the Soviets would be too cautious to launch a nuclear war against the West. But we could never altogether rule out the possibility of miscalculation or technical error precipitating an exchange.

Since the end of the Cold War, it has been possible to cut back nuclear arsenals substantially, and it may be possible for America and Russia to cut back still further. But we should not forget that the START II and the proposed START III treaties, like earlier arms control (and, as in these cases, arms reduction) agreements, do not in themselves actually make us more secure. What they do is reduce the cost of our security, by lowering expenditure on surplus weaponry, and they arguably help ease tensions and mistrust. The last point is about all that can be said for agreements about the targeting of missiles – which can always be re-targeted.

With the end of the Cold War we entered what one leading expert has provocatively termed ‘the second nuclear age’. Among the fallacies which Professor Colin S. Gray lists as afflicting Western strategic policy planners today are that ‘a post-nuclear era has dawned’, ‘nuclear abolition is feasible and desirable’, and ‘deterrence is reliable’. He has also warned that ‘the less strategically attractive nuclear weapons appear to the United States, the greater the attraction of those weapons and other WMD to possible foes and other “rogues’”.* And he is right.

The most important threat of this sort today does indeed come from the so-called ‘rogue states’. This category usually refers to medium-sized (or even quite small) powers in the grip of an ideology (or of an individual) that shuns the existing international order, and is bent on aggression. The usual candidates are Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and North Korea, all of which should certainly be included, as in the light of recent events should Afghanistan.* But we should not disregard either the chilling remark of a senior Chinese official made in 1995 at the height of confrontation between China and Taiwan. The official noted sarcastically that Beijing could take military action against Taipei if it wished, without worrying about US interference, because America’s leaders ‘care more about Los Angeles than they do about Taiwan’. Perhaps the Chinese too remember Pearl Harbor.

We also have to guard against the idea that the desire of non-nuclear powers to become nuclear is somehow irrational. Inconvenient and even dangerous it may be, but irrational it is not. After all, was Colonel Gadaffi unreasonable to draw conclusions from Libya’s inability to react to the punitive action that America took against him in 1986 when he said: ‘If [the Americans] know that you have a deterrent force capable of hitting the United States, they would not be able to hit you. Consequently, we should build this force so that they and others will no longer think about an attack’?†

By his own lights Gadaffi was talking sense – the folly is ours in letting him think he could get away with threatening us in this way.

But it is not just fanatics and revolutionaries who make this calculation. Every state that retains nuclear weapons makes it too. This is something that the utopian New Left internationalists simply refuse to grasp. Let me start close to home. Without Britain’s nuclear deterrent we would not be powerful enough to have acquired our status as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council. And I have no hesitation in affirming that it is a matter of vital national interest that we retain both the weapon and the international standing it secures. If the present British government doesn’t understand that, they should – it is the main reason why the rest of the world takes notice of us.

Similarly, I fully understand India’s – and, in response, Pakistan’s – desire to demonstrate to the world that they too are nuclear powers. India has China on her doorstep and Pakistan has India. President Clinton was quite simply wasting his time when he advised India in the wake of its nuclear tests in 1998 to define her ‘greatness’ in ‘twenty-first-century terms, not in terms that everybody else has already decided to reject’.* But we haven’t left nuclear weapons behind, and if we did others wouldn’t.

The arms control treaty that undoubtedly does most harm and makes least sense – and was accordingly regarded by the Clinton administration as ‘the cornerstone of strategic stability’ – is the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. The ABM Treaty had some rationale when it was signed in 1972, though in retrospect not much. It prevented either the United States or the Soviet Union from deploying a strategic missile defence system capable of defending the entire national territory. It also prohibited the development, testing or deployment of anything other than a limited, fixed land-based system. The original treaty allowed for the deployment of two sites for such a system, though a protocol reduced this to one each in 1974.

The philosophy behind the treaty was that contained in the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (otherwise and rightly known as MAD). Essentially, the belief was that as long as each superpower was totally vulnerable to nuclear attack it would not be tempted to start a nuclear war. Practice never entirely followed this theory. The Soviets cheated by secretly building an early-warning station at Krasnoyarsk. NATO, through its doctrine of ‘flexible response’ – that is a graduated conventional and nuclear response rather than total nuclear war – also inched away from MAD. Not even the Cold War froze strategy entirely.

But there was, in any case, a deeper and more pervasive logic at work. The history of warfare, viewed from a technical perspective, is that of an unrelenting competition between offensive and defensive weapons and strategies, with progress in the development of one being countered by corresponding improvements in the other. Thus swords were countered by armour, gunpowder generated new techniques of fortification, tanks were opposed by anti-tank weapons and the bomber – known at the time as ‘the ultimate weapon’ – led to the development of radar systems capable of tracking its flight and the use of anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes to shoot it down. It was, therefore, written into the essential nature of warfare that exclusive reliance on that other ‘ultimate weapon’, the nuclear deterrent, could not last indefinitely: at some point the technology of defensive weapons would catch up. The ABM Treaty could not ultimately prevent that.

The treaty was also, of course, meant to contribute to arms control, because assured vulnerability should, the theory went, make it less necessary to build ever-increasing numbers of long-range missiles. On this point too it failed. The only time the Soviets slowed down the arms race was once they knew they had lost it.

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is a Cold War relic. It is, therefore, rather surprising that today’s liberals show such misplaced affection for it. In fact, the best international lawyers tell us that the treaty has in any case lapsed, because one party to it, the Soviet Union, has ceased to exist. (Even if one takes a contrary view of the present legal position, it is clear from the treaty itself – Article XV, paragraph 2. – that either side is able to withdraw from it, giving six months’ notice.) Whatever purpose the ABM Treaty had has certainly ended, now that an increasing number of unpredictable powers can threaten us with weapons of mass destruction.

This consideration also bears upon the frequently heard assertion that discarding the constraints of the ABM Treaty and building missile defence would precipitate a new arms race. I argued in a speech to a conference of experts on missile defence in Washington in December 1998 that such fears were groundless. On the contrary, a failure to deploy a ballistic missile defence system (BMD) would provide an incentive for the leaders of rogue states to acquire missiles and develop weapons of mass destruction. Conversely, the deployment of a global BMD would dampen the desire of the rogues to stock up their arsenals – because the likelihood of their missiles getting through would have greatly diminished. I concluded that seen in this light such a system actually had a ‘stabilising potential’.*

Two broader objections, though, can and doubtless will be raised against my advocacy of missile defence.

The first is that I am exaggerating the threats. But I am not. I base my arguments on the work of acknowledged experts. And all the experience of recent attempts to assess these threats is that the experts have consistently been inclined to underrate them. For example, the US administration’s 1995 National Intelligence Estimate, while taking current developments in missile proliferation seriously, concluded that the US would be free of threat for at least another fifteen years. Other evidence was, however, already by then emerging that caused me and my advisers to doubt whether this (relatively) comfortable judgement was soundly based.

Accordingly, in 1996 I warned in a speech at Fulton, Missouri – the site of Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech fifty years earlier – that there was a ‘risk that thousands of people may be killed in [a ballistic missile] attack which forethought and wise preparation might have prevented’. The seriousness of the danger was highlighted when in April the following year the Japanese Foreign Minister spoke of reports that North Korea had deployed the Rodong-i missile, with a range of 625 miles, and was therefore able to strike any target in Japan. Other reports highlighted the fact that proliferating rogue states were cooperating with each other – that Rodong missile was believed to have been financed by Libya and Iran. The Iranians were reported to have tested components of a missile capable of striking Israel, and Russia had been selling them nuclear reactors.

These ominous signs could still be discounted by those who chose to do so. But 1998 was the year in which much harder evidence emerged.

The authoritative report of the Rumsfeld Commission, appointed by Congress to assess the threat posed by ballistic missiles to the US, woke even the sleepiest doves from their dreams. Donald (now US Defense Secretary) Rumsfeld noted that, apart from Russia and China, countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq ‘would be able to inflict major destruction on the US within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability, ten years in the case of Iraq’, adding that for much of that time the United States might not know that such a decision had been taken. He concluded that the threat was ‘broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly’ than reported by the intelligence services, whose ability to provide such warnings was in any case ‘eroding’.

Simultaneously, events were lending further gravity to the report’s conclusions. Although neither country poses any threat to the West, India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May 1998 took American intelligence by surprise, showing just how little we can expect to know about the new nuclear powers’ capabilities and intentions. Still more seriously, in July Iran test-fired a nine-hundred-mile-range missile and was discovered to be developing a still longer-range missile, apparently based on Russian technology. This constituted a threat to Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. Most serious of all, in August North Korea took the world by surprise by launching a three-stage rocket over Japan. This represented a direct threat to America’s most important ally in the Pacific, to American forces stationed there, and indeed by implication to the American homeland. One of Thatcher’s laws is that the unexpected happens: but I doubt whether we can really still consider a missile attack as unexpected.

The second objection to my argument is quite the opposite of the first: it is that nothing we do will make any difference. This is turn comes in several variants. That most often heard today, especially since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and the later fears of biological terrorism, is the suggestion that an aggressor does not need to acquire missiles in order to attack us. He can rely on other means closer to hand – whether passenger aircraft loaded with fuel, or anthrax, or a smuggled-in so-called ‘backpack’ nuclear weapon. In these circumstances, it is argued, missile defence is a waste of time and money.

But this argument is flawed at several levels. The first is at the level of basic logic. It does not follow that because we have been shown to be vulnerable to one threat we should simply accept vulnerability to another. Second, no one argues that BMD offers a substitute for other measures. We need a layered defence so that we are able to guard against a range of threats. Of these the danger posed by an incoming missile is only one. But, third, it is by no means the least of the dangers we face; indeed, the likelihood that it will be employed against us must have increased as a result of the events of 11 September. Although we must avoid complacency, it is surely much less likely that hijacked aircraft will again be used as a means of mass terrorism against the West. In response to all that has happened, security has already been increased; a range of further measures will doubtless be adopted; air crews will be more alert; passengers will be less compliant; suicidal terrorists will find fewer collaborators to dupe; in short, the chances of a successful hijack will diminish. The attraction to terrorists or to a rogue state of an attack by the alternative means of a long-range missile has accordingly grown.

Moreover, that attraction was always considerable, for reasons that are often overlooked. We can never be sure that some fanatic may not seek to detonate a small nuclear weapon in a Western capital. We can, though, take some comfort from the fact that such acts of terrorism are not much favoured by the leaders of rogue states who want to use their weapons to maximum political effect. Ballistic missiles are attractive to them because they are designed to ensure that the weapon remains, from the moment of its launching until its impact, within the sole control of the power that fired it.

But in answer to the broader objection, I would simply say that no system is guaranteed perfect. I was never as optimistic as President Reagan seemed to be that even a fully-fledged Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) would render nuclear weapons obsolete. But in the post-Cold War age we are, after all, most unlikely to be faced with a full-scale nuclear exchange with a major power. Far more probable is that a rogue state may fire one or more missiles with nuclear or chemical warheads at one of our major cities. Another ever-present possibility is that an unauthorised launch could occur. In such cases, missile defence offers the only protection we have – though I certainly would not rule out preemptive strikes to destroy a rogue state’s capabilities.

The truth is that the global system of ballistic missile defence, which I am proposing, is by far the best chance we have of preventing missiles and their warheads reaching our cities. This is because unlike other less comprehensive systems a global ballistic missile defence system has the ability to target and destroy missiles in each of their three phases of flight – the boost phase, mid-course, and the terminal phase. The first phase, directly after launch, is naturally the best from the point of view of the intended victim – and the worst from that of the aggressor, on whom the warhead’s destructive elements fall.

I believe that the best way to achieve such a global system is probably along the lines suggested by the excellent and authoritative report of the Heritage Foundation’s Commission on Missile Defense. This would be based upon a combination of a sea-based missile defence system and a space-based sensor system. By contrast, it seems highly unlikely that a single land-based system, or indeed any system which accepts the constraints of the ABM Treaty, could provide America with an effective defence.*

I also believe that the British Missile Proliferation Study Report was right to underline the effect that restricting America’s missile defence in that way, as proposed by the Clinton administration, would have on the rest of the Alliance. Britain, as America’s closest ally and most effective military collaborator, would be particularly vulnerable to missile attack from a rogue state if we were not within the defensive shield.* The British and other European governments should be pledging their full support to those in America who wish to create an effective global ballistic missile defence. America’s NATO allies should also be prepared to bear a fair share of the burden of the expense: so far there is little sign of this happening.

Though you would not guess it from President Putin’s well-publicised objections, Russia too has a strong interest in America’s building such a system. Its cities are closer to the potential threats than are most of the West’s. For its part, America by offering to protect Russia has the potential to achieve the visionary goal of President Reagan who saw SDI as a benefit to share.

I was delighted that George W. Bush, in the course of his US presidential campaign, made his position on this matter so clear, saying:

It is time to leave the Cold War behind, and defend against the new threats of the twenty-first century. America must build effective missile defences, based on the best available options, at the earliest possible date. Our missile defence must be able to protect all fifty states – and our friends and allies and deployed forces overseas – from missile attacks by rogue nations, or accidental launches … A missile defence system should not only defend our country, it should defend our allies, with whom I will consult as we develop our plans.†

As President, Mr Bush energetically set about honouring this pledge. I hope that Congress will see fit to support his endeavours. I also trust that America’s allies, above all Britain, will take full advantage of the President’s proposal to protect our populations too. And no one should pretend that the events of 11 September made effective missile defence any less important, or its acquisition any less urgent.

So I conclude that:

 We must recognise that the threat from ballistic missiles carrying nuclear or other WMD warheads is real, growing and still unanswered

 We should acknowledge that diplomatic and other means aimed at curbing proliferation will have little effect

 Politicians should stop talking as if a world without nuclear weapons were a possibility and begin to accept that nuclear weapons need to be tested and modernised if the nuclear shield is to be maintained

 They should recognise that though political conditions make proliferation and the threat of missile launches more likely, the advance of science has made coping with them more possible

 The only way to do this is to build a system of global ballistic missile defence.