The North Coast times-eagle., August 01, 2003, Page 10, Image 10

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SALT’S SAVOR LOST
RALPH STEADMAN, 'DISARMAMENT TALKS’
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
"It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of
the human race proved to be nothing more than the
story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a
petrol dump."
-DAVID ORMSBY GORE
Wars are humanity’s most compelling and dramatic
business, and as a result arouse and disturb generations far
into the future. Late summer marks the beginnings of three
20th century wars that continue to severely oscillate the
United States. The first started 89 years ago in August 1914
when the armies of Europe clashed in an explosion that quickly
stalemated into a four-year butchery known now as World War
1, but was then hoped to be the war to end all wars because of
its unprecedented horror. Sixty-four years ago, on September
1,1939, the mechanized army and air force of Nazi Germany
started World War 2 with a blitzkrieg of Poland, Germany’s
second attempt in a quarter century to seize dominance of
Europe — Europe's second Thirty Years War, in which millions
died and great cities were bombed to rubble; the war spread
around the world and involved every nation, “the largest event
in the history of humankind," John Keegan has written. Perhaps
less world shaking than the World Wars but more adverse to the
personal matrix of American society, a few questionable attacks
on U.S. destroyers by North Vietnamese patrol boats in early
August 1964 led to the Tonkin Resolution, a fabrication blown up
to Pearl Harbor proportions by the U.S. government to legitimize
its escalating military role in Vietnam.
These wars (and a few others) combined to tear apart
civilization and their aftershock schisms wrack its repair at the
beginning of the 21st century, which is already two years into
what might very well be a protracted and ultimately futile
worldwide war against terrorism conducted primarily between
the United States and what are euphemistically called “low
intensity" forces. The great conflict at the heart of the 20th
century produced the means to obliterate civilization entirely.
Then, at the origin of the nuclear age, could have been
the opportunity — if there ever has been one — to put an end
to warfare as a rational response to the real probability of human
suicide. Instead rivalry between the victors of World War 2
produced a half-century supranational conflict by two competing
superpowers and led to a nuclear arms race that more than once
blundered the world to the margin of obliteration.
Even now, more than a decade after the end of the 50-
year Cold War, at least half of all Americans expect a new war
will end in nuclear devastation (not helped by the current desire
of the Bush administration to amp up nuclear weapons develop­
ment in the USA) Many Americans, especially since 9/11 fear
something like the Holocaust of World War 2 could recur —
millions gassed, starved or shot in concentration camps.
The mutual distrust and worldwide militant aspirations
and competition that characterized the surging growth of the
nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet
Union spoiled virtually every opportunity for disarmament but
caused a certain orderliness based on a hypothesis of assured
mutual destruction. The scale and breadth of the nuclear arms
race and magnitude of the nuclear arsenals that grew out of it
can only be grasped by examining the prolonged, intense,
perplexing and often mendacious process of hammering out
treaties to prevent nuclear war while simultaneously expanding
the quantity and lethality of nuclear weapons.
billions of dollars to the Pentagon: the highest defense bill in
U.S. history was levied against the nation, $1.5 trillion.
Previously discredited concepts of “winnable" limited
nuclear wars gained popularity with civilian and military
strategists who claimed the United States could absorb 20
million casualties and continue as a civilization. A scaled-down
MX missile system was approved, which critics charged could
serve no other purpose than for a first strike against the Soviet
Union. During this period a high-tech antiballistic defense was
proposed — called the Strategic Defense Initiative, it is usually
known (derisively) as “Star Wars.”
Sidney Lens wrote in The Progressive in 1982 that
American and Soviet diplomats had met at least 6,000 times
since the end of World War 2 to discuss nuclear disarmament
but not a single weapon had been eliminated. On the contrary,
he wrote, the nuclear arms race had escalated relentlessly with
the superpowers in possession of firepower in excess of two
million times all the bombs, grenades and bullets used in World
War 2. By the time of that article the world had entered what
was called the Second Nuclear Age, the age of plutonium and
proliferation in which about 40 nations had the capacity to
produce nuclear weapons — which essentially meant that the
generally watered-down and self-serving agreements of
the superpowers to limit nuclear weapons were a charade of
titans who once had all the power and acted as though they
still did, as if their decisions were the only ones that mattered.
The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 foreshadowed
the real possibility of devastating nuclear confrontation and led
to the process of arms negotiations. It was the closest to nuclear
war the superpowers came, and although it is now supposed
humanity was not as close to obliteration as the participants
thought, they were certain at the time they had lost control of
their head-to-head encounter and all that was left to do was
mutually push the doomsday button.
Beginning with Harry Truman, every Cold War U.S.
President spoke of the need to achieve what Jimmy Carter and
his successor Ronald Reagan called “zero nuclear weapons."
Yet under each administration the numbers of nuclear weapons
increased until the arms race with the Soviet Union became
virtually self-propelling and might have been irreversible but for
the sudden collapse of Russia’s communist regime.
After the Cuban missile crisis attempts were made to
at least slow the arms race down. In 1967 President Lyndon
Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin were to begin
discussions that would start a process of arms talks, but they
broke off when the Soviets intervened in Czechoslovakia the
following year. Eleven years later the U.S. refused to ratify a
culmination of the restored negotiations, the second Strategic
Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT) because of the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan in December 1979. The presidential election year
that followed gave the USSR no quarter: not even American
liberals were in favor of restoring negotiations, and the victorious
right wing campaigned on a ticket of nuclear superiority.
For most of its first year in office the administration of
Ronald Reagan was disposed toward escalating the arms race,
paying for it by scrapping most social programs and transferring
The Reaganites also planned to deploy more than 200
Pershing missiles in NATO countries, but hundreds of thousands
of Europeans held demonstrations against the missiles as well
as in rebuttal to remarks by Reagan and other administration
members that indicated a willingness to wage nuclear war in
Western Europe. Reagan felt compelled to make a nationwide
speech in October 1981 calling for renewed arms negotiations
with the Soviet Union, but used the imposition of martial law in
Poland that December as a pretext to suspend them.
The first round of the renewed SALT talks began that
year in Geneva in November. The American delegation was led
Paul H. Nitze, a hard-line nuclear superiority advocate and
opponent of arms talks. The Soviets were represented by Yuri
A. Kvitsinsky.
Efforts to slow the nuclear arms race by freezing levels
of intercontinental missiles and prohibiting defenses against
them were keystones of the SALT talks. Both superpowers had
first strike capabilities that would essentially devastate each
other, and each was capable of equal retaliation. To restrain
from mutual suicide, each superpower was to be prohibited from
building an effective missile defense system to curb first-strike
aspirations, which worked from 1972 until George W. Bush
rescinded the treaty in 2002 in order to revive Star Wars.
The opening U.S. proposal called for the Soviet Union
to dismantle its missiles aimed at Western Europe in exchange
for canceling the NATO deployment. The Soviets rejected it.
Other differences were conflicting assessments about the
number of nuclear weapons systems in Europe. The Soviets
claimed an approximate parity (the first concrete goal of all
negotiations) but the U.S. insisted the Kremlin possessed a
6 to 1 superiority, the infamous “arms gap” the U.S. claimed
throughout the Cold War.
Overall weapons discussions were suspended that
December because of martial law in Poland for which the U.S.
blamed the Russians: that talks continued at all afterward was
probably due to conditions made by NATO nations which would
only accept Pershing missiles in Europe if arms negotiations
were resumed.
Suspensions, sanctions, thunderous denouncements
and intense renewals of nuclear arms competition were not
unique in the history of negotiations between the two super­
powers during the Cold War. If anything, it was that sort of
bellicose conduct that originated the SALT talks in 1969.
At the same time the U.S. publicly sought arms negotiations
with the Soviets in 1967 it was already embroiled in the Vietnam
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