This html article is produced from an uncorrected text file through optical character recognition. Prior to 1940 articles all text has been corrected, but from 1940 to the present most still remain uncorrected. Artifacts of the scans are misspellings, out-of-context footnotes and sidebars, and other inconsistencies. Adjacent to each text file is a PDF of the article, which accurately and fully conveys the content as it appeared in the issue. The uncorrected text files have been included to enhance the searchability of our content, on our site and in search engines, for our membership, the research community and media organizations. We are working now to provide clean text files for the entire collection.
Navy Launches Self-Defense Test Ship
The remotely-controlled ex-USS Decatur (DD-936) will be used to upgrade current systems and develop new ones. To allow repeated tests, the ship will tow a decoy barge about 150 feet aft; attackers will fly directly at the ship until terminal engagement and then shift to the barge.
Why the Nuclear Proliferation Issue Is Like Gun Control
Nuclear proliferation, which played so important a role in igniting the Gulf War, and which has proven so delicate an issue in Korea, is back in the news.
A conference convenes this month to review and to extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, now a quarter-century old. If a majority of signatories agree, the treaty will become permanent; alternatively, it may be extended for a fixed period—permanent extension seems less and less likely. Whatever the outcome, the future of nuclear weapons depends largely on those countries outside the treaty that can produce nuclear weapons.
The conference coincides with the trial of Moslem fundamentalists who allegedly plotted to blow up a variety of New York landmarks, including the United Nations building. It is well known that Iran, the principal public supporter of fundamentalist activism, badly wants nuclear weapons, and it is not stretching things too much to think that the terrorists might have had something much more powerful than dynamite to do the job.
Staving off the spread of nuclear weapons has been a major theme of U.S. policy. The U.S. argument always has been that a world in which many countries had nuclear weapons would be incomparably less stable than one in which they were limited to a very few major (read “responsible”) powers. On the theory that safety is a universal goal, countries ought to forgo the expense of acquiring weapons. The carrot the treaty dangles before them is the hope of acquiring nuclear power technology, which might otherwise be denied to them on the theory that a nuclear power plant might be making plutonium for bombs while it is generating electricity. Congress has been particularly adamant, demanding that military aid to nations trying to manufacture bombs be stopped.
Pakistan has been the main victim.
Behind the U.S. arguments is an unstated one: a country that forswore the bomb could hope for U.S. aid if attacked. This was really a Cold War argument. So long as the only likely attacker was the Soviet Union, surely the United States would be standing ready to help.
To many Third World countries, none of this makes any sense. The United States of the Cold War would certainly have tried to deter Soviet nuclear attacks on Third World countries, but in fact it did very little to dissuade the Soviets from invading Afghanistan. The aid that helped drive the Soviets out came well after the invasion and the start of the bloodshed. In any case, the threat a Third World country faces is generally not from a great power, but more from other nearby Third
World countries that may harbor territorial ambitions. The U.S. record of dissuasion within the Third World is virtually nonexistent, though the recent defense of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait is an interesting case in point.
To a Pakistani, for example, the most important reality is that an inherently hostile India has had the capacity to make nuclear weapons for about two decades. Indian statesmen have denied that any nuclear stockpile exists, but such statements cannot be verified. It would seem difficult to explain to a Pakistani just how much safer he is because his most likely enemy has a weapon that he lacks. In this particular case, U.S. leverage— exerted in the form of denying the country conventional weaponry—would seem counterproductive. The smaller the conventional arsenal, the more urgent the call to escalate to nuclear weapons, once war breaks out. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine any U.S. leverage strong enough to convince a foreign government to forgo a program it naturally equates with its country’s survival.
Moreover, a Pakistani would argue that U.S. insistence on democracy around the world makes it difficult for the United States to put pressure on India, the world’s largest democracy. During the Cold War, Pakistan benefited from her strategic position, and the United States did tilt (albeit rather mildly) against India in 1970-71. That motive is now gone; the only saving grace for Pakistan is that now the country is clearly a democracy. Consequently, the United States may be reluctant to apply pressure against it.
The cry among many potential conference participants seems to be that the Non-Proliferation Treaty is no more than an attempt by the members of the nuclear club to maintain their position by excluding any new members. The original treaty justified exclusion by promising that the nuclear powers would work toward total nuclear disarmament, i.e., toward the elimination of the club. President Bill Clinton recently tried to encourage this view by ordering that preparations for possible future U.S. nuclear tests be canceled. Presumably, once testing becomes impossible, a nation’s nuclear stockpile cannot be maintained. Materials used in earlier weapons often are no longer available, and it is difficult to be sure that replacements will really work properly.
The reality is that possession of the bomb has been extremely useful. Nuclear weapons are infinitely less expensive than the conventional weapons that might provide anything approaching equivalent firepower—and they offer a unique degree of deterrence. Experience seems to show quite clearly that deep air strikes using conventional bombs have very limited effects, whereas the threat of dropping a very small number of nuclear weapons deep in an enemy’s territory is devastating. Indeed, it might be said that superpower status is meaningless without nuclear weapons, since even a superpower cannot easily field the sort of mass forces required to fight a major sustained war on a conventional basis.
Superpower status also demands something of a monopoly of nuclear weapons. The main role of post-Cold War U.S. military forces is probably a combination of intervention and presence, the latter generally meaning the threat of intervention. As long as all the weapons involved are conventional, no likely Third World victim of intervention can counter our advanced technology. Any Third World government with nuclear weapons, however, might hope to deter unwanted U.S. attentions.
The situation is something like the debate on gun control, carried out at an infinitely higher level. Those who advocate gun control argue that society is in great danger unless guns are limited to law enforcement agencies, i.e., to the government. Many of those who argue against any form of gun control point out that absolute control is virtually impossible; any criminal who wants a gun badly enough can get one. The police seem unable to deal with all the criminals and citizens surely have the right (not to mention the responsibility) to provide some self-protection. Owning a gun ought not, perhaps, to be taken as a sign of a desire to use it improperly. Some go so far as to say that a fully armed society is a very courteous one, since no one really wants to start a potentially deadly fight (the evidence on this point is hardly conclusive).
In this case, the would-be government is either the United Nations, which might hope ultimately to control all existing nuclear weapons; or a combination of the great powers which currently possess bombs and which, the argument goes, have shown the requisite restraint. The rub is that the major powers do not— and cannot—constitute a world government by consent. Nor are they willing to abandon sovereignty to a United Nations dominated by lesser countries. Moreover, it would probably be impossible to define any sort of world order to which most governments would cheerfully subscribe, and in support of which they would willingly spill much of their citizens’ blood!
The Gulf war made it clear that the major powers would sometimes go far to maintain their nuclear monopoly. Had Iraq possessed the bomb at the outbreak of war, it seems unlikely that the allies would have attacked (though they might well have propped up Saudi Arabia in the face of Iraqi threats). By now, most Third World governments have probably realized as much. Given their world view, the North Koreans certainly believed that the bomb would be their only means of staving off an assault that the United States and South Korea would eventually make. The price the United States has offered to pay for quite limited North Korean concessions makes the threat of proliferation a valuable Third World bargaining chip.
The desperate attempts to build bombs in Iraq and Pakistan show that anyone who really wants a bomb can eventually get one, but that the road to the bomb can be quite long and very costly. Bomb control works, but not perfectly. The potential opponents mirror the world of guns: some are interested mainly in survival, some are would-be aggressors, and many badly want a symbol of full sovereignty.
What can the United States do if many countries obtain a few bombs each? We certainly will need a secure and relatively inexpensive deterrent, since we will always hope that the threat of retaliation will keep fingers off triggers. We may want to invest more heavily in intelligence, since there must always be the fear that bombs are sent into the United States covertly. We probably want some measure of antimissile defense.
Too, we can still hope to derail many ongoing Third World programs by keeping the industrial price of the bomb very high. A Third World country, by definition, has only limited human high-technology resources. If those resources alone must be used for every important national program, then each country can afford very few, and the bomb may not be the single highest priority. We can also continue to try to limit some exports, in hopes that local substitutes will be difficult to find. The same goes for the technology of delivery systems.
Minks May Mimic Subs, Say Swedes
In an echo of the Cold War, the Swedish government recently rather sheepishly admitted that at least some of the acoustic signatures it used to identify with Soviet midget submarines were probably the work of wild minks. During the 1980s, the Swedes claimed numerous submarine incidents, but apart from the case of the “Whiskey” submarine that ran aground off Karlskrona they could produce no conclusive physical evidence (e.g., pieces of submarines or submariners). Tread-like marks on the sea bottom could have had natural causes.
At the least, the Swedish story tells a great deal about how difficult it is to be sure that something, once detected, is really a submarine. Many natural phenomena produce submarinelike signatures, particularly in shallow waters like those around Sweden. Indeed, so difficult is Baltic antisubmarine warfare that from about 1965 on, the Royal Swedish Navy virtually abandoned it in favor of antiship operations. It built numerous submarines, on the theory that if it could not find enemy boats, no enemy could find its boats.
The climate changed in the early 1980s. People thought they saw midget submarines but none was ever photographed. The navy turned once more to ASW. The “submarines” were hunted down; depth charges were exploded on the bottoms of Swedish gulfs. Were the submarines ever real? We cannot know. A mink may make submarine-like noises, but that is the same as saying that a small submarine can make mink-like noises. When the sounds were associated with submarines, they justified a substantial increase in Swedish naval spending. Now that the Cold War is over, there must be a considerable interest in Sweden in cutting spending. If the “submarines” of the 1980s were only minks, then the Royal Swedish Navy of the 1980s was clearly less than competent—and, perhaps, the Soviet Union of those days was less menacing, a view which some in the Swedish government may find comforting.
The truth remains unknown. The Soviets were certainly capable of mounting very secret special operations. A mass of recently-published Russian material on Cold War Soviet military developments shows that the West often missed major ones (as in the failure to count one-third of the Soviet nuclear stockpile). Maybe some Russian magazine eventually will publish a full account of a secret midget submarine program, with photographs of Swedish beaches taken by Soviet Spetznaz submarine drivers. Or maybe there never were any midgets, only small mammals (in Russian pay?).