Disarmament is for wimps. Go get your nukes if you can

S A Aiyer in The Times of India

All my life I have opposed nuclear bombs. I have argued that such bombs are basically unusable; that, instead of ensuring security, they risk escalation of small conflicts into disasters; and that they lead to undesirable macho foreign policies. Most Indians exulted after India’s nuclear tests of 1998, claiming India was now a great power on par with the US. I cautioned that India was merely on par with Pakistan and North Korea. However, after seeing Ukraine bullied by Russia, I have to revise my views. Nukes are not useless, and may be essential deterrents. 

Ukraine was one of a dozen new states created when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. It emerged independent with a massive 1,190 nuclear warheads, more than the arsenals of Britain, France and China combined. 

But it mistakenly thought that the Soviet collapse heralded the end of Moscow’s domination. So, it agreed to give up all its nukes and send them to Russia for destruction. In return, the US, Russia, and Britain signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, pledging to safeguard Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. This was greeted with universal applause. 

Today, Ukraine knows it made a terrible mistake: it can no longer deter its powerful neighbour. Last month, Russia sent troops to annex Ukraine’s Crimea province. Now Russia threatens to split the rest of Ukraine, converting Eastern Ukraine (where a quarter of the population is ethnic Russian) into a puppet state, just as it earlier used armed muscle to convert the Russian-ethnic regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia into puppet states. Armed Russian infiltrators have teamed up with local ethnic Russians to seize major cities in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian troops and police are too fearful of Russian firepower to offer much resistance. How they regret giving up nukes! 

Last week’s Geneva talks proposed peace, but with no teeth at all. Neither the US nor the UK, both Budapest Memorandum guarantors, is willing to stop Russia militarily. They are reluctant to even impose stiff economic sanctions, since Putin could retaliate by slashing gas supplies to Europe and nationalizing Western investments in oil and gas. 

Western security guarantees to Ukraine have proved as empty as those given to Czechoslovakia before World War II. When Hitler demanded the right to expand into Czechoslovakia to “protect” ethnic Germans there — the same excuse used by Putin to move into Eastern Ukraine — the Western powers gave in. 

Putin’s words in a TV interview were straight out of Hitler’s book. “We definitely knowthat we should do everything to help these people (ethnic Russians) defend their rights and define their destiny . We will fight for this. The Federation Council (of Russia) gave the president the right to use military force in Ukraine. I hope very much that I don’t have to use this right.” 

Most Indians are uninterested in a far-away country like Ukraine. Anti-US Indians are happy to see Putin bash the West. Yet the Putin principle is monstrous. How would readers react to Pakistan wanting to take over Muslim-inhabited areas in India to protect Muslims there? Or to Bangladesh taking over Assam to protect Bangladeshi migrants there? 

India is militarily strong and so can resist any such threats. Ukraine, Georgia and most states cannot. The USSR once posed an existentialist threat to the West, which therefore took security guarantees seriously. But no more. The West will honour military commitments only when this is costless, or affects its core interests. Ukraine has taught the world not to depend on the promises of the mighty. 

One consequence will be more nuclear proliferation. Japan and Korea have long avoided nukes, and depended on a US security umbrella. After Ukraine, they will think again. I predict both will go nuclear in a decade. 

Saudi Arabia, fearful of Iran and Iraq, has long depended on US security guarantees, including steps to prevent Iran from getting an N-bomb . After the Ukraine fiasco, Saudi Arabia knows how hollow US assurances are, and will embark quietly on a nuclear plan. The US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and bombed Libya. Would it have done so if those countries had nuclear bombs? For an answer, look at North Korea. This country has violated the UN charter repeatedly, attacked South Korean ships, and poses a security threat to East Asia. But the US does not intervene because North Korea has nukes. 

Lesson for non-nuclear states: don’t depend for security on the big powers who will dump you when convenient. Disarmament is for wimps. Go get your own nukes if you can. More nuclearization will deter some invasions, but also increases chances of a nuclear clash or accident. It is not a panacea. But it is now inevitable.

Obama's rogue state tramples over every law it demands others uphold

For 67 years the US has pursued its own interests at the expense of global justice – no wonder people are sceptical now

BETA

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 9 September 2013 20.30 BST

US troops fire a white phosphorous mortar towards a Taliban position on 3 April 2009 in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Photograph: John Moore/Getty

You could almost pity these people. For 67 years successive US governments have resisted calls to reform the UN security council. They've defended a system which grants five nations a veto over world affairs, reducing all others to impotent spectators. They have abused the powers and trust with which they have been vested. They have collaborated with the other four permanent members (the UK, Russia, China and France) in a colonial carve-up, through which these nations can pursue their own corrupt interests at the expense of peace and global justice.

Eighty-three times the US has exercised its veto. On 42 of these occasions it has done so to prevent Israel's treatment of the Palestinians being censured. On the last occasion, 130 nations supported the resolution but Barack Obama spiked it. Though veto powers have been used less often since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the US has exercised them 14 times in the interim (in 13 cases to shield Israel), while Russia has used them nine times. Increasingly the permanent members have used the threat of a veto to prevent a resolution being discussed. They have bullied the rest of the world into silence.

Through this tyrannical dispensation – created at a time when other nations were either broken or voiceless – the great warmongers of the past 60 years remain responsible for global peace. The biggest weapons traders are tasked with global disarmament. Those who trample international law control the administration of justice.

But now, as the veto powers of two permanent members (Russia and China) obstruct its attempt to pour petrol on another Middle Eastern fire, the US suddenly decides that the system is illegitimate. Obama says: "If we end up using the UN security council not as a means of enforcing international norms and international law, but rather as a barrier … then I think people rightly are going to be pretty skeptical about the system." Well, yes.

Never have Obama or his predecessors attempted a serious reform of this system. Never have they sought to replace a corrupt global oligarchy with a democratic body. Never do they lament this injustice – until they object to the outcome. The same goes for every aspect of global governance.

Obama warned last week that Syria's use of poisoned gas "threatens to unravel the international norm against chemical weapons embraced by 189 nations". Unravelling the international norm is the US president's job.

In 1997 the US agreed to decommission the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other agents it possessed within 10 years. In 2007 it requested the maximum extension of the deadline permitted by the Chemical Weapons Convention – five years. Again it failed to keep its promise, and in 2012 it claimed they would be gone by 2021. Russia yesterday urged Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control. Perhaps it should press the US to do the same.

In 1998 the Clinton administration pushed a law through Congress which forbade international weapons inspectors from taking samples of chemicals in the US and allowed the president to refuse unannounced inspections. In 2002 the Bush government forced the sacking of José Maurício Bustani, the director general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He had committed two unforgiveable crimes: seeking a rigorous inspection of US facilities; and pressing Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, to help prevent the war George Bush was itching to wage.

The US used millions of gallons of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It also used them during its destruction of Falluja in 2004, then lied about it. The Reagan government helped Saddam Hussein to wage war with Iran in the 1980s while aware that he was using nerve and mustard gas. (The Bush administration then cited this deployment as an excuse to attack Iraq, 15 years later).

Smallpox has been eliminated from the human population, but two nations – the US and Russia – insist on keeping the pathogen in cold storage. They claim their purpose is to develop defences against possible biological weapons attack, but most experts in the field consider this to be nonsense. While raising concerns about each other's possession of the disease, they have worked together to bludgeon the other members of the World Health Organisation, which have pressed them to destroy their stocks.

In 2001 the New York Times reported that, without either Congressional oversight or a declaration to the Biological Weapons Convention, "the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities". The Pentagon claimed the purpose was defensive but, developed in contravention of international law, it didn't look good. The Bush government also sought to destroy the Biological Weapons Convention as an effective instrument by scuttling negotiations over the verification protocol required to make it work.

Looming over all this is the great unmentionable: the cover the US provides for Israel's weapons of mass destruction. It's not just that Israel – which refuses to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention – has used white phosphorus as a weapon in Gaza (when deployed against people, phosphorus meets the convention's definition of "any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm").

It's also that, as the Washington Post points out: "Syria's chemical weapons stockpile results from a never-acknowledged gentleman's agreement in the Middle East that as long as Israel had nuclear weapons, Syria's pursuit of chemical weapons would not attract much public acknowledgement or criticism." Israel has developed its nuclear arsenal in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty, and the US supports it in defiance of its own law, which forbids the disbursement of aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.

As for the norms of international law, let's remind ourselves where the US stands. It remains outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, after declaring its citizens immune from prosecution. The crime of aggression it committed in Iraq – defined by the Nuremberg tribunal as "the supreme international crime" – goes not just unpunished but also unmentioned by anyone in government. The same applies to most of the subsidiary war crimes US troops committed during the invasion and occupation. Guantánamo Bay raises a finger to any notions of justice between nations.

None of this is to exonerate Bashar al-Assad's government – or its opponents – of a long series of hideous crimes, including the use of chemical weapons. Nor is it to suggest that there is an easy answer to the horrors in Syria.

But Obama's failure to be honest about his nation's record of destroying international norms and undermining international law, his myth-making about the role of the US in world affairs, and his one-sided interventions in the Middle East, all render the crisis in Syria even harder to resolve. Until there is some candour about past crimes and current injustices, until there is an effort to address the inequalities over which the US presides, everything it attempts – even if it doesn't involve guns and bombs – will stoke the cynicism and anger the president says he wants to quench.

During his first inauguration speech Barack Obama promised to "set aside childish things". We all knew what he meant. He hasn't done it.