ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 8, 1996 TAG: 9612100172
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
THREE DOZEN military leaders last week called for more serious progress toward nuclear disarmament. The world, and Americans in particular, would do well to listen.
Hear this, for instance:
"Despite all the evidence, we have yet to fully grasp the monstrous effects of these weapons, that the consequences of their use defy reason, transcending time and space, poisoning the earth and deforming its inhabitants. . . . The case for their elimination is a thousandfold stronger and more urgent than that for deadly chemicals and viruses already widely declared immoral, illegitimate."
So says retired Gen. Lee Butler, former commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command and, until recently, director for strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Butler warns that, without disarmament, "hostility and alienation will almost certainly over time lead to a nuclear crisis" - that "nuclear war is a raging, insatiable beast whose instincts and appetites we pretend to understand but cannot possibly control."
Or listen to retired Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster, who was deputy commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam and commander of NATO:
"The Cold War is over and unlikely to return, hard as it may be to comprehend this historic fact in all its dimensions and to seize the opportunities that are now available to reorient our policies accordingly."
Today, the risk of massive nuclear exchange between superpowers has receded. In its place are the growing threat of nuclear proliferation, and the possibility that weapons materials, especially from the former Soviet arsenal, might fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue states.
Butler asks, reasonably: "Of what use is our nuclear arsenal in light of these threats?" The retention of a huge arsenal only feeds foreign suspicions that, for America, anti-proliferation controls are the means to maintain a perpetual nuclear advantage.
As for terrorists, retaliation for an isolated nuclear attack could be carried out with "smart" conventional weapons and forces. Says Butler: "The irony is, of all nations, the United States is best served by the elimination of nuclear weapons because we are the pre-eminent conventional power."
In this observation, he joins Paul Nitze, the Reagan administration's chief arms control negotiator and a longtime Cold War strategist. In 1994, Nitze wrote that the United States should "pursue the conversion of our strategic deterrent from nuclear to conventional weapons. It is no stretch to assert that we can and should now begin to decide not whether, but in what manner, this conversion will take place."
Because nuclear knowledge won't be uninvented, nor evil in human nature exorcised, the need for some sort of nuclear deterrence remains. But the deterrence need not rely on nuclear weapons. Indeed, it should not.
With congressional support, the Clinton administration should take the international lead in efforts to prevent an accidental outbreak of nuclear war, to remove nuclear-use doctrines from military planning, to negotiate further arms reductions with the former Soviets, to help control the spread of nuclear materials and nuclear weapons, and to seek collective security arrangements that would forestall future demand for nuclear arsenals.
America also should lead the phased reduction of nuclear arsenals, with the eventual goal of eliminating them. But don't take our word for it. Listen to what some of our most experienced military strategists are saying.
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