[ RadSafe ] Commentary: Nuclear Weapons reality -- Acceptance?

Wed Jun 1 00:02:37 CEST 2005

>From BusinessWeek On-line at
http://businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_22/b3935148.htm

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MAY 30, 2005 

GOVERNMENT 

Commentary: Back To The Cold War?  
Facing up to the awful reality of rogue nations with
nukes 

Iran may soon acquire the ability to enrich uranium,
paving the way for a nuclear arsenal. North Korea
claims it already has the bomb -- and is reprocessing
spent fuel to make more. Could sanctions make the
nuclear upstarts stop in their tracks? Probably not.
China and South Korea are balking: They don't want
sanctions to drive North Korea over the brink. As for
Iran, the U.S. and Europe can't see eye to eye on when
or whether to apply sanctions at all.

What should Washington do? Well, here's a radical
approach: Accept the reality of a nuclear North Korea
and Iran, and let them join the nuclear club.

That sounds like anathema to U.S. policymakers. The
Bush Administration, after all, has gone out of its
way to depict North Korea and Iran as the most roguish
of rogue states. Acknowledging their new role as
nuclear powers would seem to mark a capitulation and
set a dangerous precedent.

But years of threats by the U.S. have done nothing to
curb these states' nuclear ambitions, and may even
have strengthened them. There has to be a better way
to deal with North Korea and Iran, and perhaps it can
be found in the U.S. experience of the Cold War. That
40-year standoff was a scary time, but nuclear war
never broke out. One reason was the U.S. pledge to
retaliate massively against any nuclear attack by
Russia or China. This approach, which evolved into the
policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), made it
clear how the U.S. would act if the missiles started
flying.

Another U.S. strategy during the Cold War did not
involve missiles. It tacitly acknowledged that the
other side had a right to exist. Yes, the U.S.
propaganda machine regularly lambasted Russia and
China for decades, but no Administration made a
serious effort to bring either regime down. Although
the U.S. never officially renounced the option of
striking first in a nuclear exchange, everyone knew a
first strike was far down on the list of
possibilities. It was also understood that if certain
rules were observed by all sides, a nuclear launch
would never occur. Later, with the advent of détente
in the Nixon Administration, dialogue and engagement
were even possible.

Contrast this history with the behavior of the Bush
Administration, and you see what it can learn from the
Cold War. The Administration already has its version
of MAD down pat. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
makes it clear that Washington will strike back hard
against attackers and will topple hostile regimes.

Get-Tough Strategy
Yet the White House has also violated Cold War tenets
by explicitly adopting the prospect of striking first,
with conventional or other forces, as part of its
get-tough strategy with rogue states. And the Bush
team regularly calls for regime change for the
remaining members of the Axis of Evil. Such rhetoric
has put both North Korea and Iran in a corner and
given them a perfect pretext for keeping their nuclear
options open. "You have to admit they have a point,"
says Joseph Cirincione, an arms-control expert at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

A quiet retreat from the idea of regime change could
do what all the saber-rattling of the past two years
has failed to achieve: arrive at a new nuclear
equilibrium. Leaving nukes in the hands of erratic
leaders in Tehran and Pyongyang certainly doesn't look
like a great idea. But the conventional wisdom about
these regimes may be wrong. The mullahs "are not
suicidal," notes Robert J. Einhorn of the Center for
Strategic & International Studies. Adds Shai Feldman,
a Mideast expert at Brandeis University: "Iran is not
Iraq. The Iranian regime is not prone to adventures or
miscalculation."

North Korea may be more inclined that way than Iran,
but it's not suicidal, either. While Dear Leader Kim
Jong Il uses brinksmanship in negotiations, regime
preservation is its central motive. Attacking U.S.
troops or U.S. allies runs counter to that goal.
Kenneth N. Waltz, a Columbia University nuclear-arms
expert, says leaders such as Kim "have proved very
good at figuring out where the line is that, if
crossed, will cause great damage to their country."
Recently translated documents from the Warsaw Pact
governments make it clear that North Korea's leaders
have long wanted the bomb for security reasons, not
for blackmail.

Besides, there's already evidence that when the U.S.
abandons demands for regime change, a substantial
payoff can result. Libya turned over its weapons
program last year after "a tacit assurance of regime
survival," notes Robert Litwak, a nonproliferation
expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars.

What could go wrong with such a policy shift? For
starters, taking the pressure off North Korea and Iran
would obviously conflict with the Bush team's laudable
push to establish democracies worldwide. It would also
seem to abandon the Iranian and North Korean people to
despotic regimes. But the reality on the ground is
more complex. In Iran, the nuclear program is
genuinely popular, even among the many Iranians
well-disposed toward the U.S. So an American policy of
active opposition to Iran's nuclear program, coupled
with calls for regime change, strengthens the hand of
the most reactionary members of the mullahs' regime.

North Korea is a trickier case. But the Bush policy to
date has not delivered any improvement in human rights
in that country. Achieving some sort of thaw with
Pyongyang might at least create the opportunity to
open that country to the world -- and increase the
chances for meaningful dialogue.

The biggest danger of a tacit acceptance of a nuclear
Iran and North Korea is that it would kick off a
global arms race. Accepting Iranian and North Korean
bombs could encourage others to follow suit,
especially Japan and possibly Saudi Arabia, which
would feel the most threatened from their neighbors'
truculence. But even as policymakers contemplate this
dilemma today, the Cold War experience of the U.S.
offers some guidance. As the tension between Moscow
and the U.S. deepened, high-profile strategic
alliances brought friendly countries under the
American nuclear umbrella. That arrangement made it
unnecessary for frontline states such as West Germany
to develop nuclear weapons on their own. Similar
guarantees for countries like Japan could have the
same effect today, and could keep another arms race
from starting.

New global arms accords would help, too. The Bush team
trashes these accords because some nations have
cheated on those Cold War-era treaties meant to curb
the spread of nuclear weapons. But scores of other
countries did comply. That compliance kept the nuclear
club from expanding to 25 by the mid-1970s, as an
alarmed President Kennedy predicted it would a decade
earlier.

Changing policy toward North Korea and Iran won't
remove the threat from these regimes overnight. Then
again, the Cold War wasn't won immediately either. But
the right combination of containment and diplomacy may
yet win this new contest for the U.S.

By Stan Crock

+++++++++++++++++++
"Embarrassed, obscure and feeble sentences are generally, if not always, the result of embarrassed, obscure and feeble thought."
Hugh Blair, 1783

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com

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