Swedish nuclear weapons and unilateral nuclear disarmament
Shortly after the end of World War II, the Swedish government
decided to
acquire a nuclear arsenal. It was one of a number of countries
to make this
decision. By 1952 the promoters of the idea had set themselves
the goal of
manufacturing ten Nagasaki-type nuclear bombs, employing plutonium
diverted
from Sweden's "peaceful" nuclear power generation program.
The project's
political sponsors were all in the ruling Swedish Social Democratic
Party.
They included the veteran Socialist leader Tage Erlander and his
protégé and
successor Olof Palme. The politicians were supported by the heads
of the
armed forces and the state's Institute of Defence Studies. Given
that
rank-and-file Social Democrats were mostly opposed to Sweden possessing
nuclear weapons, Erlander and his collaborators were obliged to
work
secretively, behind the back of parliament and in opposition to
party
resolutions. The diversion of fissile materials from Sweden's
"peaceful"
nuclear power generation program took place - of necessity - clandestinely.
But at the same time, on the level of policy recommendation, there
was a
"pro-nuclear" tendency in the Social Democrats which
operated openly. Olof
Palme headed this tendency as chairman of the Social Democrats'
Nuclear
Weapons Committee. In 1965, when the Swedish military adopted
a new
strategic conception of nuclear weapons, Palme and the other nuclear
"hawks"
were forced to come to terms with the idea that Swedish nuclear
weapons were
not to be. The nuclear weapons programme was gradually run down
and, in
1972, after a serious of simulated nuclear tests, terminated.
.
Sweden's turning away from nuclear weapons is one of the shining
examples of
voluntary unilateral nuclear disarmament, an almost unique achievement.
It
seems to have been an educational experience for Palme. However,
this
educational experience was something he was never willing fully
to share
with the public, for it impinged upon his own perceived reputation.
Palme
was not a private citizen who could indulge in the luxury of a
"confessional" approach to his past. He was a parliamentary
politician,
surrounded by potentially merciless and self-righteous competitors
and
critics in his own party and other parties, not to mention the
media. His
subsequent evolution into one of the world's best known spokesmen
for
nuclear disarmament is part of the record on the basis of which,
if he were
still alive, he would wish to be judged. I do indeed judge him
on that
basis, and not only him but also other anti-nuclear campaigners
who have
shared with him the high-profile orientation and mass-politics
approach to
nuclear disarmament. This high-profile stance stands in polar
antithesis to
the discreet anti-nuclear orientation that was successfully implemented
by
the Swedish military, taking the form of a simple unilateral decision
to
have nothing more to do with nuclear weapons. It is the Palme
approach of
international anti-nuclear conferences, public relations offensives
and
United Nations resolutions, not the Swedish military approach
of a simple
unilateral decision behind closed doors, that has become the established
mode of operation of the international anti-nuclear movement.
The result is
that nuclear weapons and the problems they cause are still as
much with us
as they ever were.
Nuclear Weapons and Mass Politics
I would like to make it clear that I am not interested in this
paper in
discussing questions of individual innocence or guilt. What concerns
me is a
certain mode of behaviour that flows from the demands of mass
politics and
the need to win elections. From this viewpoint, what most needs
explaining
about Sweden is how it succeeded in achieving nuclear disarmament
where so
many other countries with politicians at least as committed to
anti-nuclear-weapons policies as Palme later appeared to be, have
failed.
The military considerations that led Swedish military experts
to recommend
abandonment of the nuclear weapons programme later became part
of the
patrimony of the anti-nuclear weapons movement - namely that nuclear
weapons
undermine national security, turning a country into a nuclear
target, that
they breed mass insecurity and at the same time encounter the
problem of the
steadily deteriorating credibility of the threat they are said
to embody.
These are ideas that were to be put forward by specialists in
other
countries that were later to become nuclear powers: the difference
is that
in Sweden they were heeded, proving stronger than the subjective
- and in
many cases perhaps instinctive - conviction of politicians and
the general
public that in a world where nuclear weapons exist, security depends
on
possessing them.
Undoubtedly a decisive factor in the Swedish context was the
absence of an
obvious and immediate enemy. Sweden had been a neutral country
for all of
the twentieth century. Political passions on questions of national
security
did not run high. Most voters had other priorities and other interests.
Neither had the mass ideologies of Fascism/Nazism or Communism
and
anti-Communism made the deep inroads into the hearts and minds
of subjects
of the kingdom of Sweden that they had in other European countries
or in
what were to become the "two superpowers". Politicians
were therefore not
"calling the shots" as they were in Britain, the United
States and the
Soviet Union.
These three last-mentioned countries were the first to become
nuclear
weapons states. Two of them embodied the opposite ideological
poles of the
bipolar system that came to dominate international politics after
the Second
World War. The Third was a constitutional monarchy allied with
the United
States but still retaining some pre-mass-politics elements in
its political
culture. It was here, in the more thoughtful and informed sections
of the
British "establishment" that opposition to nuclear weapons
and support for
British unilateral nuclear disarmament first became entrenched.
But of
course for such policies to be implemented, given the pro-nuclear
orientation of the bulk of Britain's ruling elite, in the first
instance a
parliamentary majority for unilateral nuclear disarmament had
to be
obtained. This was a task that the anti-nuclear sections of the
establishment decided to assign to the Labour Party.
The Labour Party and CND
Labour's problem was that given the pro-nuclear-deterrence
dictates of
"common sense", unilateral nuclear disarmament was unsaleable.
When in 1957,
so as not to have to go "naked into the negotiating chamber",
Labour leader
Aneurin Bevan finally led the revolt of the parliamentary realists
against
unilateral nuclear disarmament, the response to this of the "establishment"
anti-nuclear weapons circle was to set up the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament.
CND was essentially a parliamentary lobby, using demonstrations,
marches and
public meetings to influence public opinion and thus votes and
hopefully
political party policy. It was on the last front that it was least
successful, only sporadically managing to get its resolutions
accepted, for
a short time, by Labour Party annual conferences. On the international
diplomatic front, by contrast, CND was more successful. It had
an input into
the deliberations of the United Nations and from there managed
to acquire
an element of borrowed prestige. The high point of achievement
was the
passage of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, bringing to an
end the worst
threat to public health from United States and Soviet atmospheric
nuclear
testing. But while conferring prestige on one hand, on the other
the
Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was a factor, together with the
rise of
Third World Solidarity politics, that served to marginalise CND
in the
1960s, lending credibility to the view that the established international
diplomatic channels were able to address at least the worst problems
caused
by the continuing nuclear arms race between the United States
and the Soviet
Union. CND went into a downward spiral, from which it was not
to emerge
until the end of the seventies, as a result of the North Atlantic
Treaty
Organisation's foreign and defence ministers' decision in Brussels
to
"modernise NATO's long-range Theatre Nuclear Forces",
i.e. install in Europe
a new generation of first-strike "Euromissiles".
European Nuclear Disarmament.
The revival of the anti-nuclear movement in Britain following
the Brussels
decision took a twofold form. Alongside a renewed growth of CND,
the April
1980 Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament resulted in the rise
of a
smaller but politically more sophisticated competitor, END, whose
goal was
not unilateral British nuclear disarmament (correctly held to
be impossible
owing to the effect of "enemy-image stereotyping" on
the British
electorate) but "a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal",
in other
words a form of European unilateralism depending for its success
on Warsaw
Pact co-operation, and specifically on removal from Europe of
the Soviet
SS-20 nuclear missiles that were said to necessitate the installation
in
Europe of NATO's intermediate-range "first-strike" nuclear
missiles.
END rejected the Communist-controlled peace movements of the
World Peace
Council, claiming that they were not really interested in peace
because the
states that sponsored them were participants in the nuclear arms
race. END
saw the nuclear arms race as fueled by antagonism between two
superpower
blocs, each of which needed the other as an external threat in
order to
justify the imposition of internal discipline. The antagonists
were in a
sense in collusion: The enemy images each projected of the other
functioned
reflectively as a source of legitimation for both sides. The abstract
pacifist propaganda of the WPC was merely one of a number of instruments
used to perpetuate the rule of an undemocratic Communist bureaucracy.
A
nuclear-free Europe could not be achieved through peace activists
following
the dictates of Warsaw Pact diplomacy. It must be a product of
the
self-emancipation of civil society in both East and West.
With a view to encouraging the growth of civil society in Eastern
Europe,
END proceeded to discover and encourage peace groups in Warsaw
Pact states
that were independent of - and in opposition to - the official
World Peace
Council organisations. The first of these was the Moscow Group
for Trust,
set up in June 1982 and setting a precedent soon to be followed
in Hungary,
East Germany and Poland. END's annual conventions, held every
summer from
1982 onwards, became the arena for an ongoing dispute between
the two basic
currents in the non-aligned peace movement, the first opposing
all
collaboration with or even dialogue with the WPC until the Warsaw
Pact
governments granted equal recognition to the END-supported "independent"
groups. The second current (associated with CND), while rejecting
theories
of nuclear deterrence and proposing unilateral nuclear disarmament
for
Britain, was nevertheless prepared to extend a certain degree
of recognition
to the patriotically pro-Russian and "pro-deterrence"
groups of the WPC. It
was of course this element in CND's politics that lay at the basis
of the
media-supported Tory jibe that CND "should propose unilateral
nuclear
disarmament to the Russians".
The Coming of Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev's coming to power in the Soviet Union introduced
a new
factor into the equation. In contradistinction to the previous
Soviet line,
which had rejected any idea of linkage between the Soviet SS-20s
and NATO's
new generation of first-strike theatre nuclear missiles, Gorbachev
was
conspicuously willing to accept such linkage and by extension
the
implication that Soviet nuclear weapons strategy in Europe was
aggressive,
not merely a "deterrent" to NATO's threatened first
use of nuclear weapons.
This implied one of two things: either Soviet diplomacy was
willing - in the
interests of the possible diplomatic gain of a "nuclear free
Europe" - to
forego the purported military advantage of forward stationing
of
intermediate-range and relatively accurate nuclear missiles. Or,
given that
there was no guarantee that the Europeans would stick to their
side of the
bargain and denuclearise Western Europe in response to a Soviet
dunuclearisation of Eastern Europe, possibly the Soviets were
beginning to
query the deterrent capacities of nuclear weapons in a more general
sense,
in other words to reach similar conclusions to those which had
led Sweden's
military theoreticians to insist on unilateral nuclear disarmament
of
Sweden. There is much circumstantial evidence for this view: NATO'S
two-stage nuclear-war-winning strategy in Europe was, unlike earlier
"massive retaliation" strategies, contingent on the
existence of the Soviet
nuclear arsenal. The hostage-taking of European populations by
the Pershing
2 and Cruise missiles was possible only because of Soviet embroilment
in the
nuclear arms race.
The Euromissiles
Circulating on trucks on built-up areas where the Soviets would
never dare a
pre-emptive strike against them, the Euromissiles targeted nuclear
installations in the Soviet Union. The threat was as follows:
do what we
say, because if you don't we will destroy your nuclear weapons
sites, and if
you react to that, we will send our ICBMs against your cities.
In this
scenario the Soviet nuclear arsenal played the role of missing
link in the
scenario of nuclear escalation. If it had not been built in the
first place,
creating the political prerequisites (mass hysteria) for a plausible
threat
of second-strike bombardment of Soviet cities, there would have
been no
politically credible targets for the Euromissiles.
It is unclear how far the Soviet Union was ever truly threatened
by nuclear
strikes in the forties and fifties. After the initial atrocities
of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki American presidents had always opted for
less extreme
measures than actual utilisation of nuclear bombs in war, despite
the less
than total pliability of the then Soviet leadership and despite
the fact
that for most of this period Stalin possessed no nuclear "deterrent"
worth
mentioning. If one compares the resilience of Stalin in the face
of
attempted nuclear blackmail by Truman, Byrnes, etc. in the period
before the
Soviets acquired nuclear weapons (it is said to have greatly exasperated
Secretary of State Byrnes) with the extreme vulnerability to blackmail
of a
Gorbachev sitting on top of the second largest nuclear arsenal
in the world,
the message should become sufficiently clear. Writing to Gar Alperovitz
in
1965, George Kennan said: "I never at any time attached any
importance to
our possession of the atomic bomb, as a weapon of diplomacy or
as a means of
pressure on the Russians. I tended rather to agree with Stalin's
view that
this was something you used, if you like, to frighten people with
weak
nerves." Many examples could be cited of the United States
using the nuclear
weapons threat more as a means of impressing its own domestic
public opinion
than of trying to influence the behaviour of the Soviets or other
external
enemies. Take Truman's oft-cited boast that he had forced the
Soviets into
precipitate withdrawal from Iran by threatened use of nuclear
weapons
against Russian cities. Alperovitz claims that there is no record
of such a
threat ever having been issued to the Soviets by Truman. Another
example
could be mentioned from period of the immediate aftermath of the
1991 Moscow
coup against Gorbachev and in fact I will look at it when I come
to deal
with that period.
If one introduces other facts such as the superior survival
power of
Castro's non-nuclear Communist Cuba to the nuclear-armed Soviet
Union, one
begins to find more than circumstantial evidence for the hypothesis
that the
Soviet nuclear arsenal was the key element in the in the ever-growing
political, military and economic vulnerability of the USSR, and
in its final
collapse.
The INF Treaty: Triumphalism
The INF Treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in December 1987
satisfied
some of the demands of the END Appeal - namely withdrawal and
destruction of
the land-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles of the Soviet
Union and
of NATO that had been stationed in Europe - but it did not bring
into
existence "a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal".
In political
terms its most significant effect was subordination of the anti-nuclear
policies of the Soviet-line World Peace Council groups to those
of the
victorious (in one sense) "independent" peace movement,
as personified by
groups such as END. For the WPC this meant the exchange of one
set of
delusions, their own patriotic faith in the "deterrent"
powers of Soviet
nuclear weapons, for the corresponding delusions, or hypocrisy,
of their
"independent" rivals, namely that the INF Treaty's destruction
of "an entire
category of nuclear weapons" represented the first step -
utilising the
established international mechanisms of the United Nations - on
what was to
be a steady march towards "a nuclear-weapons-free world by
the year 2000".
But no INF-Treaty enthusiasts could convincingly claim that the
Treaty would
be the first step towards "a nuclear-free Europe from Poland
to Portugal".
This demand was therefore silently abandoned by END and its allied
groups
after the signing of the INF Agreement.
After that it was not long before END began to divert most
of its energies
away from nuclear weapons into a campaign for preparing "civil
society" in
Eastern Europe for its coming showdown with the Communist bureaucracy.
The
Prague-based Helsinki Citizens' Assembly set up after the INF
Agreement by a
number of END leaders concerned itself with a whole gamut of human
rights
issues but by the time of its Third Conference in Ankara in 1993
did not
have nuclear weapons on the agenda at all.
The other party to the INF agreement, the partisans of perestroika
and
glasnost, persisted in anti-nuclear initiatives post-INF, both
at the level
of intra-state politics and at the grass-roots level, where Gorbachev
met
with any number of Green personalities of the time from Petra
Kelly to Jutta
Dittfurth, inviting the anti-nuclear movements to apply "pressure
from
below" to which he could respond from his position above.
But the climate
which generally prevailed in that period was one of an abstract
and
hysterical "Gorbymania", quite free from any trace of
the dialectic between
"civil society" and official nuclear weapons politics
that had been so much
part of END rhetoric prior to December 1987.
The August 1991 Coup
The Berlin Wall came down, the Gulf War came and went. Finally
the watershed
was reached: the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev. The last
head of the
KGB Krioutchkov later claimed that this coup was triggered by
Russian
anxieties at the impending surrender of the Soviet nuclear arsenal
to the
Americans. Whatever the truth of this, there is no doubt that
August 1991
was the golden opportunity for the Western peace movements to
press ahead
with the demand for unilateral Soviet nuclear disarmament, something
which
if achieved would have given a tremendous boost to the prospects
for
realisation of the demands of the END Appeal and ultimately perhaps
even to
the prospects for nuclear disarmament of the United States.
In British party-political terms, the logic of such a demand
was obvious.
Tories had long resorted to the jest of summoning proponents of
unilateral
British nuclear to make the same unilateralist proposal to the
Soviets. If
the British peace movement at this conjuncture had done exactly
that, the
Tories would have been in a deep fix. If, at that particular moment
of high
drama and anti-Communism, the Tories had tried to argue - as Australian
Foreign Minister Gareth Evans did successfully in the CTBT context
only five
years later - that one should respect BOTH superpowers' need for
"nuclear
deterrence", they would have made themselves into a laughing
stock.
Arguing these ideas with Edward Thompson at the time, I received
the reply
that "I think your positions are certainly worth discussion.
But my doubt is
that 'the end of the Cold War' has been so one-sided: NATO firmly
in place,
now joined by WEU and a possible Euro army, but Warsaw Pact dismantled,
etc.
a one-sided campaign to rid the Soviet Union of all nukes - if
the campaign
came from the West, from movements which can't persuade their
own
governments to stop Trident or Hadesall this raises my doubts."
Of course
by this time E.P. Thompson was at the very end of his life. He
confessed
that discussion of the idea of unilateral Soviet nuclear disarmament
was
exhausting him, and he requested that we should discontinue it.
But what I
wanted to know then, and would still like to know, is why other
leaders of
the European peace movements who were younger then and in better
health were
not pressing these demands, which seemed to me so self-evident.
Or if they
were, why we did not succeed in finding each other.
CND had also received correspondence from me, which their spokesperson
found
"very interesting". But in late 1991 they were taking
the position that
"there is now no enemy", so that Western nuclear arsenals
had lost their
last shred of justification. This position ignored the fact that
the Cold
War mindset had reflected not just an intra-ideological conflict
but also an
intrastate conflict, involving not just anti-Communism but also
geopolitical
anti-Russianism. The dissociation of these two elements in the
wake of the
August coup, as a result of which Communists lost their control
of the
Soviet nuclear arsenal, had presented certain opportunities for
the
anti-nuclear movements, but CND did not try to exploit them, or
apparently
even perceive them, however "interesting" they might
have been.
The peace movements apparently could not grasp that the conceptual
confusions of Cold War politics were two-edged weapons that could
be turned
against their originators. Whatever its subjective intentions,
CND's "there
is now no enemy" stance was only too easy to recast as an
invitation to find
a new enemy. This was exactly what END-HCA later did, systematically
demonizing Russian nationalists like the now forgotten clown Zhirinovsky,
not to mentioned Serb leaders such as Milosevic and Karadjic.
After August
Even after the August coup, in the months remaining before
Gorbachev's final
demise, there was time for the peace movements to intervene. With
powers
greatly reduced, virtually confined to presiding over the nuclear
arsenal,
Gorbachev tried to stay in the game by acting as mediator between
Russia and
the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin, at that time
unencumbered
by the need to retain credibility with the military, was even
keener than
Gorbachev in his advocacy of nuclear disarmament. On 3rd September
1991 he
announced to the Russian parliament that he favored total destruction
of the
Soviet nuclear arsenal. The French Defence Minister of the day,
Pierre Joxe,
stated publicly "France will not be the first to put on the
brakes if there
is a large world-wide movement for nuclear disarmament."
There was no need for France to put on the brakes. The anti-nuclear
movement
put them on itself, needing no help from Pierre Joxe or any other
politician.
The call for nuclear disarmament did not come from the peace
movements, so
not surprisingly the moment of opportunity soon began to recede.
President
Bush entered the debate with announcements of "unilateral
nuclear
disarmament of the United States", basically cutbacks in
land-based ICBMs
and tactical nuclear weapons.
It was a move which seemed to catch Gorbachev off-guard. Perhaps
the Soviet
President was uncertain as to who he should attempt to represent,
the
comatose Western anti-nuclear movements or his own disintegrating
country.
In his response to Bush's "unilateral" proposal, Gorbachev
agreed to
reduction in the Soviet land-based strategic arsenal, but not
to its total
abolition.
President Bush's "disarmament proposals" had been
well-prepared. Throughout
September 1991 NATO had been announcing plans for a new generation
of
air-launched nuclear missiles, the TASM. Such interest in nuclear
weapons as
existed among the public was thus artfully focused on the nuclear
weapons
not of the USSR but of NATO.
NATO's sudden bout of muscle-flexing injected fear into an
already-dazed
public consciousness, making it even less likely that Gorbachev
or Yeltsin
would find an audience that could penetrate the logic of the games
being
played at the top and persist in demands, in the first place,
for Soviet
nuclear disarmament.
This clearly constitutes another example of the phenomenon
mentioned
earlier, of deployment of nuclear weapons being used not to deter
a
military enemy but to confuse and demoralise public opinion.
Bush's spectacular public relations coup had succeeded in demonstrating
that
Gorbachev was not prepared to make corresponding offers of "unilateral
nuclear disarmament of the Soviet Union". The political sophisticates
of END
made no attempt to help Gorbachev by exploring how the Soviet
leader would
react if called upon by "civil society" to adopt such
policies.
The later 1990s
As the 90s progressed, nuclear disarmament disappeared altogether
from the
agendas of the movements and political parties that had formerly
supported
it, even if only on the level of diplomatic initiatives in the
framework of
international arms control negotiations. With the re-emergence
of the
nuclear testing issue in the light of China's and France's resumption
of
underground nuclear testing , on June 26, 1995, Greece's PASOK
Socialists,
formerly conspicuous for their big-budget international anti-nuclear-weapons
fiestas, voted against the protest statement from Western European
states
condemning the resumption of French nuclear testing. The abdication
of the
parties left the field free for Greenpeace to take up the
anti-nuclear-testing issue in the name of "civil society",
but Greenpeace
was not interested in promoting regional initiatives of unilateral
or
bilateral nuclear disarmament such as the one put forward in the
1980 END
Appeal Action was rigorously confined to high-visibility media-oriented
protests against nuclear testing, perhaps with lip service to
ideals of
generalised nuclear disarmament through the United Nations (and
so subject
to US sabotage). There was thus no serious challenge to United
States policy
of preventing nuclear testing by other nuclear weapons states
while
utilising its own technological superiority to carry out through
laboratory
simulation such testing as it deemed necessary.
Even worse, in 1996 when India refused to sign the Comprehensive
Test Ban
Treaty, supposedly in protest at this above-mentioned American
hypocrisy
(which Greenpeace itself had previously - when it was a question
of opposing
French nuclear testing - chosen not to talk about), Greenpeace,
indeed the
anti-nuclear movement in general, had then allowed the nuclear-armed
Indian
government to play the role of their anti-nuclear attorney against
the USA.
They therefore did not condemn India's refusal to sign the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty, and so pulled the rug from under Benazir Bhutto
and her
attempts to curb the expansion of the nuclear weapons program
of Pakistan.
Bhutto fell from power in October 1996, brought down by this issue
among
others. The anti-nuclear movements' indulgence of nuclear-armed
India's
anti-nuclear rhetoric against the United States stands in glaring
contrast
to their former absolute intolerance of similar double-standard
politics
from the peace committees of the Communist-controlled World Peace
Council in
the heyday of the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, when India, and then Pakistan, a year or so later
actually
started nuclear testing, as it was obviously only a matter of
time before
they would, once again there was Greenpeace exuding moral indignation
from
the television screens, this time conveniently in step with the
explicit,
and not merely the unacknowledged, priorities of United States
nuclear
weapons policy. The general picture of anti-nuclear movement activity
in
the mid- and late 1990s was thus one of comprehensive irrelevance
and
inability to follow any train of thought through to its logical
conclusion.
National Missile Defence
Now, faced with the prospect of American abrogation of the
Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty of 1972 and implementation of the National Missile
Defence
system known as Son of Star Wars, some key participants in the
END
mobilisations of the 1980s, notably Ken Coates and the Bertrand
Russell
Peace Foundation, would like to see a revival of those movements
for the
purpose of defending the threatened Treaty, a task which "cannot
be left to
diplomats". Reading Ken Coates position paper "Present
Nuclear Dangers" in
which he outlines these new proposals, one notes in the preamble
the
familiar invocations of hopes held by "most people"
in the late 1980s that
"the threat of wholesale nuclear destruction had been lifted",
followed by
the equally familiar confession that these views were "overoptimistic".
Personally, not ever having been one of those who harboured such
hopes, nor
knew anyone who did, I would like to suggest that one prerequisite
for any
revival of the anti-nuclear movements of the eighties or anything
approaching them will be an acknowledgement of the disingenuous,
misguided
or at any rate unreal character of this assertion concerning "hopes",
and
its function of disguising a certain reality: the reality that
in the wake
of the INF Treaty the Western supporters of the Appeal for European
Nuclear
Disarmament simply withdrew support from their side of the deal,
namely that
denuclearisation of Eastern Europe would be matched by parallel
denuclearisation of Western Europe. The "hopes" allegedly
existing at that
time are simply the formula clothing accommodation to the climate
of
contentless euphoria that was then so prevalent. But the euphoria
served a
purpose. It disguised the fact that there was no reciprocation
from European
governments to the Warsaw Pact's compliance with NATO's demands.
It was not
only governments that did not reciprocate. The Western peace movements
did
not reciprocate either, to the Warsaw Pact's carrying out what
was demanded
of them in the European Nuclear Disarmament Appeal of April 1980.
They did
not even protest. They simply lost their political and moral bearings
and
were integrated willy-nilly, along with their Eastern bloc counterparts,
into the virtual reality of the mass media and the political agendas
of the
winning side of the Cold War.
The withdrawal from Europe and the destruction of one category
of land-based
intermediate Soviet and American nuclear falls a long way short
of being a
"nuclear-weapon-free Europe from Poland to Portugal"
or even a first step in
that direction. What occurred was not only a moving of the goalposts
but
also an imposition of the insistence that any Eastern bloc protest
at such
moving of the goalposts (which in any case did not occur) should
be
immediately categorised as a return to "old thinking".
There is in fact only
one way of escaping the conclusion that the proponents of "old
thinking" in
the Soviet Union are and were right, and that is to conclude that
the whole
idea of building a Soviet nuclear arsenal was a mistake in the
first place.
The Return to "Old Thinking"
In "Present Nuclear Dangers" Ken Coates takes the
other option: that of
becoming a defender of the new "old thinking". The recommendation
that the
anti-nuclear movements should react with sympathetic understanding
to Mr.
Putin's repudiation of the doctrine of "No First Use"
because "their
conventional forces are already greatly enfeebled, and the sick
state of
their economy makes it difficult to recuperate military strength"
and
moreover that American deployment of National Missile Defence
"would cancel
such residual defensive capacity as the Russian state felt it
possessed"
amounts to nothing more or less than a reassertion of the old
World Peace
Council position of solidarity with Soviet/Russian nuclear "deterrence",
in
effect implying that the whole trajectory of European Nuclear
Disarmament
was nothing more than a mistake from beginning to end.
Of course there is a demand in the countries of the ex-Soviet
Union that
their governments should "do something", just as public
opinion in the West
wanted their governments to "do something" in Yugoslavia,
but this doesn't
mean that the something that is done has any point to it, or is
justifiable.
One of the truly tragic aspects of the spread of representative
democracy to
so many countries of the world is how it has served as an accelerator
and
amplifier for the proliferation of doctrines of mass ignorance
such as
nuclear deterrence. It is no longer just the British Tories who
win
elections by heaping ignorant ridicule on the heads of would-be
nuclear
disarmers. The same now happens in India and Pakistan. Even in
the countries
of the former Soviet Union, politicians can now win support through
pandering to the populist fantasy that security is to be had through
the
acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Preservation of the putative deterrent potential of either
Russian or of
European Nuclear Weapons is not the right argument to be used
to oppose the
development of the American National Missile Defence System. Nor
is the
United Nations, with its current image of being the destroyer
of national
sovereignty and international law an appropriate instrument to
try to use to
get the United States to opt for less destabilising security policies.
Nothing could be better calculated to get the nationalistic American
right
loyally supporting even such crack-brained ideas as the Son of
Star Wars.
There is not going to be any "strong movement of opinion"
to support the
diplomats in their defence of the 1972 ABM Treaty. Nor are significant
numbers of people going to be willing to "grease up the walking
boots and
refurbish the banners" of nuclear disarmament. Because just
as the idea has
caught on that it was wrong to think that if you want nuclear
disarmament
you should support the Communists, so people are now unwilling
to be taught
the lesson that if you want nuclear disarmament you should support
the
United Nations. In either case there is the suspicion that the
threat of
nuclear weapons and the prospect of nuclear disarmament have both
been
instrumentalised in order to blackmail people into supporting
institutions
and proposals they would not otherwise tolerate, much less support.
The
nuclear weapons industry and the nuclear disarmament industry
are perceived
as being in a symbiotic relationship, as being two sides of the
same coin.
Grease Up the Walking Boots
I don't think I am the only one who has had enough of street
politics, and
not only because one is getting older. Why after all, should we
go on
accepting this division of labour where we take to the streets,
presumably
in the hope of "putting pressure" on the politicians,
while the politicians
continue to look on us as a form of human capital whom they may
or may not
invest in for a while, until it suits them to sell us out. Likewise
the
media, whose interest in us is as a spectacle that may or may
not boost
their ratings. Are we supposed to go in again for all that caper
with
"die-ins" in the street, and dressing up in skeleton
costumes? Let's leave
antics of that kind to Greenpeace, who are professionals, and
can do it much
better than we can. Street politics on the one hand has been commodified
to
the extent that one feels like a fool and a sucker to get involved
in it. On
the other its very function has been rendered dubious by the breakdown
of
respect for legality that has begun to manifest itself on every
level from
the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague down. The
conventions of
parliamentary democracy are no longer upheld even by parliamentarians.
Perhaps particularly by parliamentarians. How many European politicians
protested about the way Kostunica came to power in Yugoslavia?
The rule of
law is replaced by the media glorification of "direct action".
For me that
kills it.
Which brings us back to Olof Palme, the parliamentary politician
and one of
the stars of the nuclear disarmament industry, who was launched
on his
international anti-nuclear career by certain Swedish military
professionals
having no involvement whatever either with parliamentary politics
or with
international diplomacy and arms control but simply deciding -
and being
allowed to decide - that they didn't want nuclear weapons for
their country
for the simple reason that such "weapons" would be militarily
useless and
indeed dangerous, not to the enemy but to themselves. This is
the
experience we must investigate. We must find out the secret of
their
success..
What we should do
I believe that there is a way of dealing with the threat of
America's
National Missile Defence. What we can do is to go back to the
point where
we - the European nuclear disarmament movements - lost our bearings,
in
December 1987 when we celebrated the INF Agreement and forgot
that we had
been proposing to the Russians and the Eastern Europeans: that
if they
removed the SS-20s from Europe we would deliver - or at least
try to
deliver - a nuclear-weapons-free Western Europe. But we should
not try to
continue the old kind of anti-nuclear activism with the street
politics and
the fear-mongering. People are tired of all that. We should ourselves
be
tired of it.
On 3rd November 2000 in Groningen Daniel Cohn Bendit gave a
speech where he
called upon Europeans to go ahead and complete the political structures
of
the European Union, with a European Constitution, a grand European
guiding
vision, a second chamber of the European Parliament, a European
head of
state. In terms of detail, much of his conception was overly influenced
by
what now exists in America and as such is unacceptable, for the
American
institutional status quo is no model even for Americans, much
less for
Europeans. But in the most general sense Cohn-Bendit's proposal
is worthy of
support, in fact I would say that it represents THE way forward.
The details
of how a second chamber of the European Parliament should constitute
itself
and what its functions should be are the subject for another paper,
but the
European nuclear disarmament movement should set itself the task
of
building, in fact of BEING, that European second chamber. Cohn-Bendit
spoke
of a unifying European idea but he did not speak of a policy objective
which
a second chamber might serve and which indeed might help to bring
it into
existence as a living entity. I believe that the policy objective
should be
European nuclear disarmament, to be specific the content of the
Appeal for
European Nuclear Disarmament of 28th April, 1980 which proposed
a
nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal.. That would represent
a belated
keeping of the promise to the Russians that was contained in that
appeal in
the first place and it would represent a restoration of the moral
order that
was overturned when the promise was broken.