Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (22 page)

IN OUR GUNS, MISSILES, BOMBS, GASES, AND GERMS WE TRUST

S
mall arms are another category of weapon whose use the United States hesitates to curb. While the developed countries pay much attention to chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, small arms are the poor man’s weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations estimates there are presently about 500 million such weapons in circulation around the world. Out of forty-nine significant armed conflicts in the past twelve years, small arms have been the weapons of choice in forty-six.
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They are easy to obtain, legally or illegally, easy to conceal, simple to use, and difficult to control to the point where the black-market price of an AK-47 has become a leading indicator of conflict. Normally the price is $230-$400. Anything under $100 indicates an outbreak of peace after a period of intense violence. Conversely, prices above $ 1000 are a strong warning of coming trouble.
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Because we are numbed by repetition, we watch the consequences every night on TV without seeing them. But in the killing fields of Sierra Leone, the jungles of East Timor, the deserts of Somalia and elsewhere, 4 million people have been killed by small arms in the past decade, 90 percent of them civilians and 80 percent women and children.
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In an attempt to curb this mayhem, the UN General Assembly created a special panel in 1995 to consider the problem of small arms. Over several years the panel’s work eventually led to the convocation of the United Nations Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, held in New York in late July 2001. Merely holding the conference was itself a major accomplishment in the face of resistance from several major arms-exporting countries, including the United States. At the same time, the focus on ‘illicit trade’ revealed the compromises that were necessary to get the meeting off the ground. Most participants believed the problem goes far beyond mere illicit trade, but all knew that any effort to address anything else would founder on the unyielding rock of U.S. opposition. Even dealing with illicit trade would turn out to be extremely difficult. The conference’s objective was stated broadly as being to deal with ‘all relevant factors leading to the excessive and destabilizing accumulation of small arms and light weapons in the context of the illegal arms trade.’
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The main immediate goal was to formulate political – not legally binding – accords that would limit production and trade of these weapons solely to registered manufacturers and brokers, and that would provide for marking the weapons, tracing and verifying supply lines, collecting and destroying weapons in ‘hot spots,’ and disarming, demobilizing, and reintegrating former combatants. Particularly important to many countries like South Africa and Norway were possible measures to limit civilian possession of such weapons and to prevent their sale to non-governmental entities.

U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton lost no time in giving the conference delegates a dose of reality. Speaking early in the conference, he noted that ‘the abstract goals and objectives of this Conference are laudable.’ But he went on to emphasize that he was talking only about military arms, not hunting rifles or pistols, and only about illicit trade: ‘We…do not begin with the presumption that all small arms and light weapons are the same or that they are all problematic.’ In response to the South Africans, Norwegians and others uneasy about a gun in every closet, Bolton emphasized that ‘just as the First and Fourth Amendments [to the U.S. Constitution] secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.’ So much for limiting arms sales to government-recognized entities. Just in case anyone mistook his meaning, Bolton added: ‘We do not support measures that would constrain legal trade and legal manufacturing of small arms and light weapons. We do not support the promotion of international advocacy activity by NGOs. We do not support measures that prohibit civilian possession of small arms. We do not support measures limiting trade in small arms solely to governments, and the United States also will not support a mandatory Review Conference.’
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Other than that, he thought there might be some good in the proposals.

The conference ended by declaring victory with the publication of a watered-down ‘set of norms to guide the actions of states in addressing this problem.’
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These contained no mention of restricting civilian gun ownership. But only the Americans were happy. ‘The United States should be ashamed of themselves,’ said South African delegate Jean Du Preez. Mexico’s delegate, Luis Alfonso de Alba, called the U.S. position ‘regrettable,’ while the conference chairman, Camillo Reyes of Colombia, vented his frustration by saying, ‘I must express my disappointment over the conference’s inability to agree due to the concerns of one state.’
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Many left believing that the sacred right of every American to own an AK-47 would probably lead to several million more deaths in the next decade. But the Americans figured they’d be okay.

Landmines and small arms were arms limitation agreements the United States chose to avoid. But on December 13, 2001, President Bush gave notice to Russia that the United States would actually abrogate a treaty – the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty then in force between the two countries – six months hence in June of 2002.
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First proposed by the United States in June of 1967, this treaty mutually to restrict deployment of antimissile defenses was concluded in May of 1972. It was thought to provide security by assuring that neither country could feel so invulnerable to missile attack that it would be tempted to try a first strike in the belief that it could escape devastating retaliation. Because the treaty had seemed to provide precisely the nuclear stalemate it was designed to produce, the possibility – first mooted in the early days of the Bush administration – of its nullification caused an international firestorm, in conjunction with the administration’s plans to push ahead with a National Missile Defense (NMD) that would be incompatible with the provisions of the treaty. Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev spoke for virtually all the leaders of Europe, China, Japan, and South Korea when he said that ‘this will destroy the entire system of international treaties aimed at ensuring strategic stability.’
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But three developments muted this reaction. The Russians knew, first, that for financial reasons they would have great difficulty maintaining their full inventory of nuclear warheads. So, they were open to mutual warhead reduction proposals. They also knew that any NMD system the United States was likely to build would not be a threat to them, because they would always retain more than enough warheads to overwhelm it. And they wanted closer relations with the West to help their economic development. So they came to an agreement with the United States under which both sides would cut their nuclear arsenals by two-thirds to 1700-2200 warheads,
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while the United States undertook to bring Russia into closer cooperation with NATO and to facilitate that nation’s economic development. In return, the Russians agreed that they would swallow the U.S. abrogation of the ABM treaty.

The second event was the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, which provided justification for the U.S. argument for deployment of the NMD – namely that it was necessary as a defense against attack by ‘rogue nations.’ Finally, the Chinese, who – because of their relatively small nuclear arsenal and their designation as a ‘strategic competitor’ by the administration – could justifiably see themselves as the real target of the NMD, decided to go along with deployment, at least for the time being, because in the wake of September 11 relations with the United States had become much more cooperative and much less adversarial, and the Chinese preferred to keep it that way. Thus, when the nullification eventually became official on June 13, 2002, criticism was restrained. The Russians and Europeans repeated that nullification was unwise, but said they could live with it. The Chinese just said quietly that it was unwise.

The reaction was quite different, however, when Undersecretary Bolton told a Geneva press conference on January 24, 2002, that the United States is opposed to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The effort to ban nuclear testing is, of course, nearly as old as nuclear testing. The recent history of the effort and of the CTBT began with an announcement by Soviet President Gorbachev on October 5, 1991, that the Soviet Union would observe a one-year moratorium on its nuclear testing and that it was inviting the United States to refrain from testing as well. Shortly afterward, the United Nations began preparations for eventual negotiation of a CTBT. The following year France announced a unilateral testing moratorium and the U.S. Congress passed the Hatfield-Exxon Amendment calling for a nine-month testing moratorium, test ban negotiations, and a prohibition on all U.S. testing after September 1996 unless another nation conducted a test. President George H.W. Bush reluctantly signed the legislation. In 1993 the new Clinton administration pledged to observe the moratorium and to pursue completion of a CTBT by the end of 1996. Congress followed this with a resolution in support passed by an overwhelming majority. The French announcement, in mid-1995, of new tests and Indian reservations about the CTBT, threatened to halt momentum, but then China dropped its insistence on so-called ‘peaceful explosions’; and by the end of September 1996, the CTBT was completed and opened for signature at the UN in New York. The United States was among the first signers, along with seventy other countries, including Russia and China, and the treaty was quickly passed to the U.S. Senate for what promised to be easy ratification.

But supporters reckoned without the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, the extreme American exceptionalist Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina. Helms bottled the treaty up in committee for two years and it did not come up for consideration until the fall of 1999. By this time, more than 150 countries had signed it.
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The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry Shelton, and four former chairmen, including General Colin Powell, all endorsed it, as did a large number of other active and retired military, diplomatic, and scientific leaders. Paul Nitze, the Reagan administration arms control negotiator, even called for U.S. unilateral nuclear disarmament on the grounds that our superiority in conventional weapons actually made nuclear weapons a danger to our own forces.
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The public supported the treaty by an overwhelming 82 percent.
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Still, there were arguments against the deal. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott argued that it would be unverifiable and thus open to cheating. He also noted that simulation alternatives to testing are unproven and therefore risky for maintaining the efficiency and reliability of U.S. weapons. A final argument was that the treaty was just a first step on the ‘slippery slope’ toward nuclear disarmament. Former National Security Advisers Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft called for delaying the vote on the grounds that the treaty was not sufficiently enforceable and failed to include countries like Iraq and Iran.
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But partisan politics was also at work. The Republican leaders in the Senate had been reluctant to bring the treaty up for consideration. Despite a letter from sixty-two senators requesting more time for debate, only one day was allotted for discussion.
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When the treaty finally came to a vote on October 13, 1999, it was defeated on a party line tally of 51-48. Most countries expressed great disappointment. Some hoped that a new Bush administration would try again and have more luck with the Republican Senate. But as Bolton made clear in Geneva, there was never a chance.

The administration’s focus on deployment of the NMD (whose viability many scientists doubt) stems from both its strategy of pre-emption and hegemonic dominance and its desire to escape the vulnerability inherent in the concept of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. NMD is an attempt to free the United States to intervene militarily almost anywhere in the world. This is coupled with the desire to develop more flexible forces and particularly to recast nuclear weapons for use against hardened underground bunkers and in retaliation for biological and chemical attacks. Achieving this may require new weapons, and testing to develop them.

The mention of chemical and biological weapons brings us to a final treaty the United States has rejected. Attempts to control these weapons date to the Geneva Protocol of 1925, adopted as a reaction to large-scale use of poison gas in World War I. In 1962 the United States and the Soviet Union both made proposals to the UN for elimination of all chemical and biological weapons. As international talks dragged into the fall of 1969, President Nixon declared a U.S. policy of unilateral renunciation of biological warfare and a no-first-strike policy for chemical weapons.
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By the mid-1980
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the United States had decided that possession of chemical weapons was not in its national interest, and in November 1985, Congress mandated the destruction of the U.S. stockpile of unitary chemical weapons.
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In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War in May 1991, President Bush declared that the United States would forswear using chemical weapons for any reason, including retaliation, once the on-going UN talks had concluded in a Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).
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These negotiations did conclude in January 1993 with a very straightforward and tough treaty that called for destruction of chemical weapon stockpiles, a ban on further manufacture, and creation of an inspection and verification body.
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The United States signed immediately, but doubts about cheating by other nations and concerns in Congress about giving up a weapons option delayed U.S. ratification until April 1997. The U.S. chemical industry played a key role in lobbying for U.S. ratification because it feared losing business if the treaty came into force without U.S. membership.