In her Christmas message, the Queen quoted Churchill
There are a few people still active in this
country to whom the 1960s experience and examination of Anti-Ballistic
Missile Defences remains clear. We saw then that Anti-Ballistic
Missile Defences were destabilising because of their role in an
offensive posture: without Anti-Ballistic Missiles a "First
Strike Counterforce" is not thinkable, with them it becomes
plausible. Therefore for the sake of stability, and to prevent
more useless and unwinnable arms races, ABMD were banned as an
essential element in the Strategic Arms Limitation Agreements.
This analysis remains valid.
It was Robin Cook who described the ABMT as
a "cornerstone in maintaining global strategic stability",
along with the other P5 foreign ministers (including Mrs Allbright),
in September last at the UN. Strange therefore that, unlike France,
the UK abstained rather than support the ABM Treaty in the vote
in the UNGA on 1 December. Cornerstone it is.
Some think it is not so that our nuclear deterrent
is dependent upon the ABMT. Two points: (i) when she was Prime
Minister, Mrs Thatcher thought it was so and therefore secured
the now defunct Camp David commitments from Reagan. And (ii) it
is not only the bilateral US/Russian SALT and START agreements
that are jeopardised by a US denunciation of the ABMT, but also
(and therefore) the Non-Proliferation Treaty whose Article 6,
these Agreements begin to implement. And also in jeopardy, as
the Russians have pointed out, is the Agreement on Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Weapons in Europe which rid us both of the threat from
Soviet I and MRBMs and of those highly unpopular US nuclear missile
bases in Britain, over which the British Government had such uncertain
control.
The idea that the Russians cannot afford to
revive their nuclear forces is naif: what project could reunite
and galvanise Russia quicker than a renewed "US nuclear threat"?
They are already conducting nuclear-capable exercises again. And
moreover has not massive US defence expenditure been a great Keynesian
boon to the US economy? Are there not vast Russian money resources
hidden in Western laundry banks which patriotism could call home?
A new Russian regime would have plenty of arguments.
Europe, and all international relations, stand
to be re-nuclearised if the ABMT is lost.
Whitehall seems not for a long time (if ever)
to have made a systematic study of our formal relations with the
US. For instance, in answer to the Written Question, whether UK/US
Cold War bilateral treaties had been reviewed since the Cold War
ended, Baroness Scotland of the FCO promised to answer "after
enquiring of the United States" which of them were still
in operation. And indeed in December, an FCO official sent along
a list provided by the US State Department. Do we presume the
Foreign Office doesn't have one?
Rather surprisingly, this State Department list
includes the 1943 Quebec Agreement on Tube Alloys—ie atomic
weapons—which Churchill got Roosevelt to sign in order to
regularise Anglo-American relations within the Manhattan Project.
Although the first practical idea of how to develop a weapon using
atomic energy had come from German Jewish refugee scientists working
in Britain, and had been conveyed to Roosevelt by Churchill, throughout
the Manhattan Project US officials tended always to exclude Brits
as far as possible from information and policy. Hence the two
Roosevelt-Churchill agreements—Quebec 1943 and Hyde Park
1944, on post-war military cooperation. (Churchill was content
that the US alone, after their massive financial investment in
the Manhattan project, should have the civil applications.)
In 1945 Truman simply dropped both agreements
as not binding on him. This was when Attlee decided to start up
the British atomic energy programme at Harwell:
The Agreements problem goes further. The Foreign
Office regularly repeats that the US is in full legality (and
acceptability), including in Space (despite the unambiguous language
of Article 1 of the Space Treaty). It might be inquired into,
for instance, whether the Airborne Laser Weapon (ALW), and its
intended Space-based successor, are compatible with Article 1
of the Space Treaty. (Article 4, dealing with not placing nuclear
weapons on the moon, etc, is often quoted by the FCO, but it is
irrelevant: "the moon" is not Space as generally understood.)
This US ALW project should not be acceptable
to the British Government for four reasons: it is potentially
a weapon of mass destruction, it will breach the ABM Treaty by
being capable of destroying "strategic" missiles in
flight, it has an anti-satellite capability which both Americans
and Russians by tacit agreement renounced at the time the ABMT
was signed, and it is the precursor to a Space-based Laser Weapon.
Mrs Thatcher agreed the US should use British
airfields for the attack on Libya for a variety of reasons. Obviously
our dependence on US systems now as then, reduces any Prime Minister's
options. If as well as depending on the US for the platforms for
our nuclear weapons (Tomahawk) we now are to depend to any degree
on Lockheed Martin at Aldermaston for the effectiveness and safety
of our warheads[17],
we are reducing those options even further. Will the US not claim
under existing bilateral agreements the right to use airfields
in Britain for the converted 747s that will first carry the Airborne
Laser Weapon?
Last August two issues of Aviation Week showed
where US officials (and Defence contractors) and their attendant
theorists are hoping to go: a ghost opponent, technologically
equal, is always present as the justification for vast new programmes.
(Other countries' probable reactions to these programmes are not
considered. If the programmes were ever completed, what would
be left for the rest of us to do or to be? Body bags, perhaps.)
Note, however, (page 58) that
We would be in good company in also dismissing
the more outlandish threats.[18]
EUROPEAN DEFENCE
Note too the story of the very wonderful Apache
Helicopters that were taken to Albania from Germany at a cost
of half a billion dollars, and then were deemed too valuable to
risk in action. The pilots were also not trained for Balkan terrain.
So the helicopters weren't used. [International Herald Tribune,
30 December 1999.]
The Apache story is emblematic and the lesson
from both US military procurement and US deployments is that the
architecture of the new European Defence system should in no way
be modelled on what the US has got or is in the process of trying
to get.
What is going on in the US is unsustainable
for many reasons and the problems of the "technological disconnect"
between US Forces and the other NATO Allies' Forces cannot be
solved by trying to "upgrade" our forces in the direction
of recent US military slogans System of Systems, Revolution in
Military Affairs, Full Spectrum Dominance, etc.
INFORMATION WARFARE
One of the counts under which the US system
is unsustainable is Information Warfare, where a conspiracy of
silence seems to be in place in this country: perhaps it would
not be polite to draw attention to American vulnerabilities? Nevertheless,
innumerable US military and other research teams have been examining
the vulnerability of computerised systems to hackers and crackers:
not only defence systems but increasing swathes of government
and industry. The US Commander-in-Chief-Space is responsible for
conducting Information Warfare offensively: but IW is also well
understood to represent a massive threat to the whole American
system, civil as well as military: banks, transport, telecommunications,
health care, etc, etc. (A classified Pentagon exercise, Eligible
Receiver, revealed just how comprehensive the threat might be.)
Clinton issued two Presidential Decision Directives
on this "infrastructure vulnerability" to IW in 1998.
The topic is hot, the US Government is fully aware, and the unclassified
Strategic Studies bibliography is already long: the US Defence
University's 1998 volume, Can the United States be Defeated? And
RAND's 1999 volume on Information Warfare are both illuminating
and well referenced. The Chinese Army has just issued a book,
"Introduction to Information Warfare"—see BBC
SWB FE/3731 G/8.
The topic merited a very modest paragraph in
the Strategic Defence Review. MoD seems not to consider itself
responsible for the security of any "information system"
but its own, which officials implausibly claim is hacker-proof.
MoD is only responsible for the protection of the country (and
of other Government Departments) against armed attack, and hacking
does not count as armed attack. So the other departments are responsible
for the security of their own systems. (Is the National Infrastructure
Forum working on this? Perhaps they should, difficult though it
is to get commercial firms to discuss their vulnerabilities in
each other's company.)
The main UK-based thinktanks (IISS, RIIA, RUSI,
etc) are looking away; none seem to be addressing the short, let
alone long term implications of Information Warfare. Indeed, their
experts appear to be in denial.)
But this is a development that (like the Dreadnought
battleships) may make a lot of previous equipment, and therefore
doctrine, and therefore alliance arrangements, suddenly out of
date. This time not only weaponry and war-fighting are affected.
Wayland Kennet and Elizabeth Young
18
The Scud parts arriving at Gatwick from a Taiwan knitwear firm,
complete with documentation proving earlier deliveries, will no
doubt be examined with the beadiest of eyes: it may have some
sticky finger-marks on it, as did the otherwise weirdly precise
cruise missile attacks on the intelligence areas of the Chinese
embassy in Belgrade. This is the kind of "evidence"
we shall be regularly presented with by the partisans of Ballistic
Missile Defences. One problem may be the over-enthusiasm of various
of our own people for collaboration with their traditional colleagues. Back