A PATH TO DISARMAMENT
Delson, Robert
The bilateral and multilateral negotiations to reduce the arsenals of death do not give much ground for hope. Reykjavik and its aftermath are a slender thread on which to hang the framework of...
...Unilateral initiatives would be' the next logical step after the Freeze and should have an even broader appeal since they represent a far more significant step toward arms reduction...
...4 The Unilateral Rationale THERE ARE MANY REASONS why such an initiative could prove more effective than bilateral negotiations...
...This possibility is clouded, however, by a series of conditions the U.S...
...The leader of neither superpower has yet reached a state of mind in which his dominant thoughts would be, in the words of Admiral Noel Gayler...
...To get into this frame of mind requires long-term attitude building...
...They would have to be demonized, stripped of their human attributes...
...Charles Osgood sets forth the details of his approach in three sets of rules, two of which are of particular interest: Rule 1: Unilateral initiatives must not reduce one's capacity to inflict unacceptable nuclear retaliation should one be attacked at that level...
...it was publicly announced and widely publicized...
...The best that can be anticipated even if the tentative strategic weapons agreement is consummated, is ft 25-percent reduction in the strategic forces in the first five-year period of the "ten-year millennium"—if, that is, the superpowers can agree on a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) formula...
...The key to achieving deep cuts is through the reduction of superpower tensions...
...has put forward, including the right to match the 130 short-range missiles now deployed by the Soviet Union, a strict medium-range verification package, and the elimination of the one hundred missiles each was to retain outside Europe...
...If they did not do so, public pressure could prod them to make more rapid progress toward a bilateral agreement, based on their apprehension that otherwise, massive public agitation would push them further...
...This would be true even if the effects were limited to the adversary and its people, since the leaders of both powers remain human beings, whatever their political creeds or crimes...
...One of the many doubts about the effectiveness of deterrence based on nuclear weapons is its lack of credibility in deterring a first strike, since retaliation would serve no purpose other than the irrational one of a pure act of revenge...
...2New York: United Nations, 1985...
...I believe that none of the other writers who have made proposals similar to mine has explicitly spelled out the terms as I have in a longer paper on the subject...
...a document almost completely neglected by the press...
...It is time to move beyond the Freeze, into the more positive role of actual reductions in nuclear weapons by a bold unilateral initiative...
...This will still require the parties to surmount their obsession with achieving parity in reductions, with respect not only to the major categories of strategic weapons, but also the numerous sublimity within each category...
...George W. Rathjens, "Unilateral Initiatives for Limiting and Reducing Arms," page 173 in New Directions in Disarmament, edited by Epstein and Feld...
...Both powers would be asked to continuously and unilaterally reciprocate each other's reductions, based on an original initiative by one of them...
...Bilateral agreements also increase the scale of verification which the two sides believe they must require, and reluctance to permit such verification substantially limits what can be achieved through formal negotiated agreements...
...Neither nuclear retaliation nor the natural aversion to taking responsibility for a first strike that could destroy all humanity, is likely to be effective in the long run unless measures have been taken to reduce tensions and to create the atmosphere for constructive relationships between the superpowers ("constructive engagement...
...Unilateral measures, no matter how small, and how well within the reasonable limits of the security of the initiating power, are the best way to reduce tensions and create an atmosphere in which more substantial initiatives can be pursued...
...They would also be restrained by the measureless opprobrium they would bear, and the monstrous nature of the world they would inherit...
...As Jonathan Schell has observed, the destruction of nuclear arms would therefore bring the incalculable advantage that we might avoid the nuclear holocaust because only the peril of extinction by the recreation of nuclear weapons would be available as a deterrent, and not the arms themselves...
...Charles Osgood, "GRIT: A Strategy for Survival in Mankind's Nuclear Age," p. 165 in New Directions in Disarmament, edited by Epstein and Feld (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1981...
...Rule 3: Unilateral initiatives must be graduated in risk according to the degree of reciprocation obtained from an opponent.' 2. Avoiding Many Difficulties of Bilateral Negotiations...
...In fact, the more fundamental restraint against the first use of nuclear arms is the shared knowledge of the incalculable consequences to both aggressor and victim, including the danger of nuclear winter...
...9Secretary General's Report, p. 8. 283...
...Unilateral reciprocated initiatives would start a long process of such reductions and should be launched even before mutual hostility has been diminished, rather than waiting for reductions of tension...
...Unilateral measures and bilateral negotiations could be pursued simultaneously, and unilateral initiatives could stimulate the pace of negotiations by the force of example...
...P. Abrecht & Ninan Koshy, 1983...
...Even if the nuclear arsenals were substantially reduced without full parity, deterrence would not be threatened since nuclear weapons are far less significant in maintaining deterrence than is generally assumed...
...Admiral Noel Gayler, The Way Out—A General Nuclear Settlement, American Committee on EastWest Accord, Washington, D.C., January 1984...
...6 Rathjens indicates a number of areas in which negotiated agreements present difficulties...
...it was so designed and conveyed to the other side as to emphasize a sincere intent to reduce tensions and invite reciprocation...
...1. Reduction of Tensions...
...We do so at our peril...
...Blundering Into Disaster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986...
...Deterrence requires only a minimum deterrent level capable of surviving a first strike, and sufficient for retaliation but not for a first strike (which would serve only to launch the aggression both sides have renounced...
...Reykjavik and its aftermath are a slender thread on which to hang the framework of peace...
...We are engaged, we and the Soviets, in building such attitudes right now...
...Consequently, little effective arms control and much less disarmament is likely to result from negotiated efforts...
...Harold Feiveson for his suggestions during the drafting of this paper...
...Unilateral Initiatives Needed I PROPOSE A PUBLIC CAMPAIGN to demand that the superpowers undertake annual unilateral reciprocal reductions over a ten-year period, until a minimum deterrent level is reached...
...to regard the people he was about to incinerate as somehow less than human...
...Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), p. 233...
...This goal will at least seek to lock the superpowers in a relationship so mutually beneficial that they will have no incentive to abandon it for mutual suicide...
...and it did not demand prior commitment to reciprocation by the other side as a condition for the execution of the unilateral initiative.' Unfortunately, the latest illustration of a unilateral initiative, the Soviet Union's moratorium on nuclear testing, did not evoke a reciprocal response by the U.S...
...But even those who believe that the nuclear component of deterrence is indispensable must 282 ultimately concede that its effectiveness is not dependent on maintaining the present level of weapons, nor even on the continued existence of any nuclear weapons...
...Thus, the threat of a revival of nuclear arms would be as fearful a deterrent as their actual presence...
...There is a considerable body of support for Osgood's GRIT (Graduated Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension Reduction) approach to deep reduction among a number of outstanding thinkers including George W. Rathjens (work cited in footnote 6), Richard Garwin, "Political/Military Imperatives," speech at the Symposium on Military and Political Aspects of Nuclear Arms, October 17, 1984 (37th Public Relations Society of America, National Conference), Eric Fromm, "The Case for Unilateral Disarmament," in Daedalus, Fall 1960, Special Issue: Arms Control, p. 1017, Ambassador Rikhi Jaipal, personal communication summarized in my longer paper mentioned above, Sydney D. Bailey, "Unilateral Disarmament Initiatives: Risks Worth Taking," p. 310, in Before It's Too Late...
...Notes 'Charles Osgood, An Alternative to War or Surrender (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1962...
...8 The actual practice of both superpowers, as evidenced in their interpretation of their professed "goal of strategic stability," is not one that opponents of nuclear war can accept, even if there is some progress toward disarmament...
...In the search by governments for bargaining chips in negotiations that take place over a period of years, new and unnecessary military programs are created, which become politically impossible to abandon...
...The 25-percent estimate, rather than the commonly accepted one of 50 percent, is put forward in a careful analysis by Jack Mendelsohn in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, December 1986...
...George W. Rathjens, professor of political science at MIT, and a former deputy director of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency, has views that closely parallel the Osgood approach...
...Instead of seeking "the goal of strategic stability," based on an equilibrium of strategic weapons, we must try to achieve massive cuts and, ultimately, to abolish nuclear weapons and substitute for them the quest for constructive engagement...
...The superpowers have already taken impressive unilateral measures that evoked reciprocal responses...
...The Challenge of Nuclear Disarmament, ed...
...3 My proposal is premised on the widely held opinion that the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers contain far more weapons than necessary for deterrence...
...q The author expresses thanks to Dr...
...The fundamental fallacy of both sides, and the world's tragedy, lies in their delusion that reliance on nuclear weapons is, and will continue to be, the principal component of preserving the peace...
...Thus, whether the arsenals of the potential victim were adequate for retaliation would not be the sole or dominant reason for restraint, so that even deep reductions in the arsenals would not substantially diminish the restraints on the initiation of nuclear war...
...Secretary General on Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament Measures...
...it was such as to be perceived by the other side as reducing an external threat...
...Support of such an initiative presents a challenge to all who understand that overkill in the arsenals serves no purpose except to permit a first strike, and that it is a growing danger whose elimination can create no danger but only a hope for peace...
...This position has been espoused by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara...
...This obsession persists, despite the judgment of former Ambassador George Kennan and other serious thinkers that parity is an unattainable and unnecessary goal...
...A further step to the conclusion of the Partial Test Ban Treaty was the United States initiative of 10 June 1963 to halt nuclear tests in the atmosphere...
...The only hopeful note is the Soviet acceptance of the proposal initially made by the United States for the removal from Europe of intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF), subject to each retaining a hundred missiles outside of Europe...
...Unilateral reciprocated initiatives, a concept most explicitly advanced by Charles Osgood,' has recently been revived in The Report of the U.N...
...The Secretary General's Report states: The tripartite moratorium on nuclear-weapon tests of 1958-1961 is a well-known case...
...In purely military terms, the nuclear test moratorium may have been disadvantageous to the United States, but in no way impaired its military capacity...
...A deterrent level would consist of perhaps a few hundred strategic weapons, or at the most, 10 percent of the cur281 rent level...
...Robert Delson, "Unilateral Graduated Reciprocated Nuclear Disarmament by the Superpowers to the Minimum Deterrent Level," available from the author at 605 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10158...
...I assume here that deterrence may be effective in the short run, although I have doubts about this, see below...
...Concessions may have to be made to the military establishment to secure their support for a treaty, because agreements based on symmetry in posture and obligations are easier to negotiate and defend than those that permit advantages to either side...
...This follows from one of the principal arguments urged by those who oppose abolition of nuclear weapons—namely, that the knowledge of how to recreate them will not be lost with their destruction...
...We must both reverse this process...
...The suspension of nuclear weapon testing late in 1958 by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States was triggered by the unilateral decision of the Soviet Union on 31 March 1958 to stop nuclear testing...
...Thus, before Secretary of State George Shultz departed for Moscow on April 12, President Reagan refused to accept the secretary's suggestion that the U.S...
...drop its insistence that the Russians eliminate longrange mobile missiles in which they have an advantage...
...The fact that the reductions could start on a small scale, which no one could reasonably suppose to jeopardize national security, means that they are likely to be politically acceptable to large sectors of the population...
...Both sides share an almost irreversible aversion to assuming the responsibility for initiating such horrors...
Vol. 34 • July 1987 • No. 3
