At 08:52 PM 6/16/2002 +0200, Karsten Johansen wrote:
>For få uker siden flommet den gnoreske offentligheten av gledesbudskaper
om en
>ny nedrustningens globale tidsalder (har det noengang vært en slik?). Det
var
>selvsagt ledd i en Bush II/Putin-reklamekampagne, og kun den gnoreske
>journaliststanden slukte som vanlig det hele rått. Her er dokumentasjon for
>den faktiske utviklingen mot fler atomvåpen.
>
>Karsten Johansen
Takk til Karsten for aa sende denne Observer-artikkelen videre.
>Secret plan for N-bomb factory
>
>Berkshire plant will build weapons for use on terrorists, say experts
>
>Mark Townsend
>Sunday June 16, 2002
>The Observer
[...]
>Experts point to a series of statements from Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon in
>which he insists Britain has a right to use nuclear devices -
pre-emptively if
>necessary - against states that are not nuclear powers.
Jeg legger ved en artikkel som gir noe mer bakgrunn om dette.
Det burde jo vaere ganske oppsiktsvekkende, at UK naa erklaerer at de
vil forbeholde seg retten til aa atombombe hvemsomhelst, uten engang aa
ha blitt angrepet. Men i en verden hvor USA erklaerer sin intensjon om
aa invadere Nederland (dette har skapt et visst oppstyr her den siste
uka) skal en vel ikke vaere overrasket.
Artikkelen er foroevrig ogsaa noe oppsiktsvekkende fordi Hugo Young
vanligvis er den mest spyttslikkende blairisten i The Guardian -- naar
han kritiserer regjeringen, er det vanligvis fordi de ikke er tilstrekkelig
EU-fanatiske.
Hoon's talk of pre-emptive strikes could be catastrophic
The defence secretary's defiance makes nuclear war more likely
Hugo Young
Wednesday June 05 2002
The Guardian
Before Jack Straw went to the subcontinent to lecture India and Pakistan on
the consequences of nuclear war, he irritably brushed aside a pertinent
question. Asked by John Humphrys why they should pay attention to a country
that had itself never renounced first use of nuclear weapons, he said
everyone knew the prospect of Britain (and the US and France) using nuclear
weapons was "so distant as not to be worth discussing". It sounded like a
reassuring platitude. In fact it was about as misleading an answer as can
be found in the entire record of Britain's conduct as a nuclear power.
Normally, British ministers are reticent about their nuclear weapons. The
standard formula is to say, if asked, that we don't rule anything out if
anyone attacks us. All this has now changed. The first person who says
nuclear use is worth discussing happens to be Straw's colleague, Geoff
Hoon, the defence secretary. In March, Hoon said, in the context of Iraq:
"I am absolutely confident, in the right conditions, we would be willing to
use our nuclear weapons."
Those who heard him say this, including some expert advisers, were
startled. Such explicitness broke a norm that even Washington has usually
observed. But they thought it was an accidental one-off occurring, as it
did, at the end of a select committee session and without obvious
premeditation. However, a few days later Hoon gave more particulars to
Jonathan Dimbleby, insisting that the nuclear option would be taken
pre-emptively, if we thought British forces were about to be attacked by
Iraqi chemical or biological weapons. My colleague Richard Norton-Taylor
reported and commented on this at the time, but there was little political
fall-out.
Then, to make sure we understood, Hoon said it for a third time, telling
the full House of Commons: "A British government must be able to express
their view that, ultimately and in conditions of extreme self-defence,
nuclear weapons would have to be used." This triple whammy, insisting on
Britain's right to use nukes, pre-emptively if necessary, against states of
concern that aren't themselves nuclear powers, has made the quietest of
impacts. Yet it has no precedent in the policy of any government, Labour or
Conservative.
It's not merely the words that are new. Some officials close to high policy
making tried to pretend to me that Hoon was merely saying what any informed
interpreter of British nuclear policy could have known all along. This is
nonsense. Dr Stephen Pullinger, author of an instructive recent Isis paper
on military options against Iraq, shows clearly how much has changed.
In cold war days Britain, like Nato as a whole, opposed a policy of
no-first-use because we feared superior Warsaw pact conventional forces
might make the nuclear option imperative to save Europe. The scenario Hoon
envisages is quite different. Instead of deploying nukes in a conflict
initiated by the other side, we claim the right to start nuclear war before
any attack is made; and we contemplate doing so, for the first time,
against a state that is neither nuclear itself nor allied with a nuclear
power.
The best case for this language is that it's intended to be deterrent.
Leaders unversed in the calculations that sustained nuclear inertia in the
cold war need to be reminded in plainest detail of the terrible risks they
might be running. That certainly seems to be true of Pakistan. But if
further evidence were needed of how much has changed in the case of Iraq,
it's supplied by what happened under the Major government, at which time
Saddam Hussein was deterred from using chemical and biological (CB)
weapons, which he had in plenty, by less apocalyptic means. John Major was
asked about that at the start of the Gulf war. He said Britain had a range
of weapons and resources to deal with CB attacks on her troops. "We [do]
not envisage the use of nuclear weapons," he added. "We would not use them."
It's still possible to argue that his successors are engaged in
sabre-rattling against a reckless enemy, though Saddam didn't show that
kind of recklessness in 1991. There's not much doubt, either, that Iraq is
trying to become nuclear-equipped. Maybe intelligence sources think they're
closer to getting there than the public can be allowed to know, and far
sooner than outside experts have contemplated. In which case a break with
the old nuclear grammar might start to be defensible.
What's more obviously happening is a change in the rules of the game being
written in Washington. Hoon's readiness to import first-strike thinking
into his public discourse, which has shocked old nuclear hands, is
consistent with many hours spent in the company of the visitor whom Tony
Blair and he received in Downing Street yesterday, the US defence
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. The Pentagon's nuclear posture review, leaked
in March, scatters nuclear threats around the globe, listing Libya, Syria,
Iraq, Iran and North Korea, as well as any Chinese threat to Taiwan, as
potentially necessary first-strike targets. It also spells out a plan for
the US to develop new nuclear weapons, allegedly low-yield, "smart", mini
not mega, perhaps bunker-busting bombs eventually applicable against
al-Qaida's caves and Saddam's labs alike.
Britain has no such weaponry. Our usable nukes are almost entirely on top
of Trident ICBMs. Is this what Hoon means we might use against Baghdad?
What exactly would be our targets? How hard have we thought about Iraqi
civilian casualties? Or about what we say when Saddam turns out to have
survived our nuclear strike? These are questions of detail, which the
defence secretary should surely answer. But more general issues arise
from the strategic turmoil that's replacing the nuclear discipline of the
cold war.
First, what's supposed to happen to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty,
the bulwark on which so much depends? A crucial element of the treaty was
the 1978 pledge by the US, Britain and the Soviet Union never to use
nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, except when they started a war
in alliance with a nuclear state. In 1995, China and France joined in
reiterating this. More than 180 non-nuclear states accepted the deal. If
the US or Britain takes Iraq as a pretext to break the promise, what's to
stop many countries rushing to acquire the only weaponry they think might
keep them safe?
Second, and more acutely, we're witnessing the banal-isation of nuclear
weapons. Suddenly they seem to have lost their unique horror. Pakistan and
India needed teaching about the truth, and may yet not have learned it even
with a potential 12 million deaths held out for their inspection. The
British case is much worse. The defence secretary's strutting defiance
makes the nuclear option sound like merely a stepped-up version of a
regular battlefield weapon. Every time he flourishes it, his insouciance
renders it more normal, instead of the most terrible calamity that could be
visited on the earth. Any use of it, by any power, at any time, would fit
such a description. What is it about our times that allows a Labour
minister - a Labour minister - to forget that?
-- We are guilty of the grossest, and most narrow partiality, and make ourselves the model of the universe ... What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole Universe. - David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
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