The Folly of Arms Control
Article Summary and Author Biography
Ten years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear danger is rising. Despite the end of the struggle in whose name the great nuclear arsenals were built, Washington now seeks to stop proliferation while holding on to its own arsenal indefinitely. But as nuclear restrictions falter -- battered by India's and Pakistan's tests, Iraq's defiance, North Korea's missiles, and the U.S. missile-defense plan -- the absence of a middle ground becomes stark. Holding on to nuclear arms is not a deterrent but a "proliferant" that goads others to join the club. Arms control has become a way of avoiding a fateful choice: a world of uncontrolled proliferation or a world with no nuclear weapons at all.
Jonathan Schell is the author of The Fate of the Earth, The Abolition, and The Gift of Time. He is a former staff writer for The New Yorker.
Response
Jonathan Schell's long-term predictions about nuclear proliferation overlook the imminent risks inherent in U.S. strategic policy. Reforming this policy requires active presidential leadership. And nuclear weapons have not yet brought the apocalypse of mutual destruction. They may actually help maintain peace.
WHY THERE IS NO NUCLEAR MIDDLE GROUND
History often places before the world a problem whose solution lies outside the bounds of contemporary political acceptability. Such was the case, for example, in the 1930s, when the rise of Hitler posed a threat to the European democracies that they lacked the resolve to face. To check Nazi aggression, most historians now agree, the democracies would have had to oppose it early and resolutely, as Winston Churchill advocated. But Churchill's prescriptions were beyond the pale of mainstream political thinking at the time, and he was forced "into the wilderness," as he famously put it. Not until the late 1930s did his ideas win political acceptance, and by then the price of stopping Hitler was World War II.
Vietnam offers another example. In retrospect, among the many outcomes under discussion at the time, only two were really possible. One was war without end -- the open, unlimited occupation of Vietnam by American forces. The other was withdrawal and defeat. But the political costs of either -- on the one hand, of frankly imposing American rule on that country for an indefinite period; on the other, of "losing" Vietnam -- were considered prohibitive. Deception and self-deception abounded on all sides. Those who opposed the war counseled withdrawal, but usually without admitting that this meant defeat. Those who supported the war pretended that victory was near -- that light was dawning at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Only temporizing, middling policies -- first, surreptitious escalation, then "Vietnamization" -- that postponed the hard choice were within political bounds. The price was paid by the people of Vietnam and the United States.
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