Le Monde diplomatique
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July 2002
THREATS TO DISARMAMENT AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
The new world disorder
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United States threats to withdraw from peacekeeping in
Bosnia if denied exemption from prosecution in the new
International Criminal Court shows how far international
security has been dismantled. The US now realises what it
means to be a superpower and its strategists are formulating
a doctrine to match, undermining all the agreements that
governed world security and underpinned disarmament in the
1990s.
by PIERRE CONESA and OLIVIER LEPICK *
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The major nuclear weapons treaties were drawn up on the
basis of a balance of forces and mutually assured
destruction. Having agreed on arms limitation, the United
States and former Soviet Union moved towards cutting
their arsenals. First there were the Salt (Strategic Arms
Limitation Talks) agreements, then the Start (Strategic
Arms Reduction Talks) agreements and the ABM
(anti-ballistic missile) Treaty ensuring "nuclear peace";
missile defence systems were limited to certain
predetermined targets (see box).
Those agreements have gradually been made meaningless.
President George W Bush expressly denounced the ABM
Treaty in spring this year. In May the number of warheads
allowed to each side under the Start agreements was
drastically revised. The missile defence programme,
designed for a smaller number of vectors across the
globe, will be more operational as a result; and since it
will probably involve Russia, it will maintain that
country's status as a strategic partner of Washington.
Congress has still not ratified the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty (CTBT) signed in 1995. The US government wants
to keep all its options for developing new weapons open
and reserves the right to conduct real tests, even though
it has the ability to simulate them. Secondary treaties
are also being weakened. The "cut off" talks on
controlling exports of fissile material have been buried
by US intransigence.
Even the oldest of the international nuclear limitation
agreements, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), becomes
difficult to read in the light of Bush's State of the
Union address, delivered on 29 January this year, in
which he accused the "axis of evil", Iraq, Iran and North
Korea, of developing nuclear weapons and other weapons of
mass destruction. Although the first two signed the NPT,
they are considered "bad proliferators"; North Korea,
which has withdrawn from the treaty, is seen as downright
demonic. Pakistan, which has signed the NPT, does not
come in for US criticism. It has recently become an ally
and must be regarded as a "good proliferator" like India
and Israel, which had the sense not to sign the treaty.
In its war on terrorism Washington is being very
selective in its definition of nuclear proliferation,
depending on whether or not the countries in question are
its allies. President Bush's dictum, "either you are with
us or you are with the terrorists", means the NPT can be
disregarded.
The picture is no more encouraging when we look at the
international agreements banning other weapons of mass
destruction (biological or chemical). The US is one of
the countries to have filed the legal instruments of the
Biological Weapons Convention signed in 1972 - the first
international treaty banning weapons of this kind. It has
no system of verification, but five-yearly revision
conferences have brought progress in that direction. At
the 1991 meeting in Geneva, for example, groups of
experts were set up to propose improvements; this was an
initiative by France and a number of other western
countries
Their 10 years of work came to nothing when, on 25 July
2000, the US Assistant Secretary of State for
proliferation rejected all the new proposals on the
grounds that they were contrary to US commercial and
security interests (he meant the US programme for defence
against biological weapons) and said they did not
guarantee any slowing in the proliferation of such
weapons. The arguments range from needing to protect
national industry to such unlikely legal principles as
fear of malicious prosecution of American citizens
(fourth and fifth amendments to the constitution) (1).
The US has accused Libya, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Iraq
and now Cuba of breaking the agreement. The anthrax scare
following the 11 September attacks suggests that the
Americans have pursued a biological weapons programme far
beyond what defence against such threats requires (2).
At least the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), signed in
1993, does have a system of verification. But the US did
not ratify it until April 1997. And Congress introduced
new provisions watering down what US negotiators had
themselves insisted on (3). During the 1996 presidential
campaign, the Republican candidate, Robert Dole, warned
against "illusory" arms control deals and President
Clinton postponed ratification until after the election.
Finally, Congress introduced into the debate three
provisions that greatly reduced the convention's scope:
the president of the US could prevent any inspection
deemed a threat to national security; samples collected
in the US could not leave national territory; and the
number industrial sites having to be declared to the
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW), which verifies compliance, was considerably
reduced by comparison with the spirit of the convention.
Although in May 2000 the US deposited the declaration all
signatory countries were required to make, the first
inspections in the US went badly. The OPCW inspectors saw
many of their requests frustrated by red tape (4). The
US, which had demanded transparency from proliferators
acted like any suspect administration. So it is hardly
surprising that Iraq, South Korea, Russia and Iran
adopted, almost verbatim, US reservations about the CWC.
Gentleman's agreement
This year the US forced the resignation of the Brazilian
director-general of the OPCW, José Bustani, whom
Washington considered incompetent (see article by Any
Bourrier); the several weeks' crisis leading up to that
undermined the OPCW even more. And the Missile Technology
Control Regime (MTCR) remains a gentleman's agreement;
Washington experts say 28 nations now have such
technology. Moreover, since the US' grand national
missile defence (NMD) programme met with opposition from
many of its allies, the White House decided to extend the
umbrella to its main partners, including Russia. That
will probably be impossible without the transfer of
sensitive technologies in violation of the MTCR.
Finally, the former Coordinating Committee for
Multilateral Export Controls (Cocom), which was supposed
to prevent technology exports to the USSR, has lost the
teeth it once had. Now known as the Wassenaar
Arrangement, it has been steadily extended to 33
countries, many of them outside of Nato. US negotiators
often use it to prevent sales of non-sensitive
technologies to "rogue states".
Conventional weapons are equally worrying. For a variety
of reasons, the US has not agreed to the International
Convention on anti-personnel mines, which was signed in
Ottawa in 1997 and came into force on 1 March 1999. These
reasons include the protection of its forces along the
demilitarised zone between the two Koreas and the desire
to continue exporting combined anti-tank and
anti-personnel mines. Here Washington is on the same side
as China, which also exports mines.
The Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and
Light Weapons (5) has still not produced any results, It
took place in New York in July last year under pressure
from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to stop the
"slaughter of the poor". It is up against powerful US gun
lobbies; they invoke constitutional guarantees (fourth
amendment on the right of US citizens to be secure in
their persons). The US continues to reject any binding
legal rule and any ban on transfers to non-state players
so it can continue supporting pro-American guerrillas
The White House and much of American public opinion have
traditionally been suspicious of the United Nations
Organisation. In 10 years the world has moved from the
Gulf war to the war in Afghanistan. In the Gulf western
forces were seen as upholding law and order, represented
by the UN Security Council. But Washington started the
war in Afghanistan, against a regime suspected of backing
terrorist acts, without declaring war and without
consulting the UN. President Bush's State of the Union
address this January did not even mention the UN in
connection with action against the "axis of evil".
The UN will have to concentrate on conflicts that are of
no interest to Washington like the Congo or Western
Sahara. When it comes to international security, all we
can now expect from it are texts with little binding
force. Before 11 September the General Assembly had
adopted more than 11 conventions against terrorism.
Little by little, the international edifice built in an
age of two superpowers, balanced forces and mutually
assured destruction is crumbling. As the US says, the
existing mechanisms for controlling proliferation have
all been partly broken. The Pentagon believes that 12
states now have nuclear weapons, 16 have chemical
weapons, 13 have biological weapons and 28 the missiles
to deliver them. That is true; what we dispute is what
can be done about it. Washington accuses Iran, which has
ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, of conducting a
forbidden programme, but is delaying when it comes to
seeking the inspections the convention allows (6).
This dismantling did not begin with the present
Republican administration. The difference between Bush
and his predecessor lies more in the way he treats his
main allies. They have in common the primacy of US
interests. President Bush's national security adviser,
Condoleezza Rice, often says in her official speeches
that the country's security must not depend on any
external constraint.
There was a similar period after the first world war,
when the League of Nations was set up, advocated by
President Woodrow Wilson but rejected by Congress. Then,
US withdrawal from international security systems was
justified by the dominant isolationism. Now, the chief
player in the international order is clearly stating that
it no longer wants to be bound by mandatory international
instruments, a sentiment reinforced by 11 September.
We are entering a period of great uncertainty.
International security now depends on the unilateral
stance of a superpower that has progressively shown a
desire not to be bound by any international treaties or
by international criminal law. This is evident from US
refusal to recognise the International Criminal Court and
from its creation of special courts to try the members of
the al-Qaida network.
President Bush is playing international policeman,
choosing his next targets, not from among the countries
linked to terrorism, which would have been the logical
progression from the Afghanistan offensive, but from
among the proliferating countries. They pose a different
threat. Despite the Russian-US accord of 26 May on the
number of nuclear warheads, we are seeing not the end of
disarmament (7) but a new world disorder.
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* Respectively senior servant and editor of the special
edition of Revue international et stratégique on illicit
international relations, Paris, September 2001; and
research associate at the Fondation pour la recherche
stratégique, author of Les armes biologiques, Que
sais-je?, Paris, 2001
See Treaties and agreements: a check list.
(1) See Michael Moodie, "The BWC protocol: a critique",
report of The Chemical and Biological Arms Control
Institute (CBACI), Washington, June 2001: see
(2) Olivier Lepick, "Armes biologiques, le jeu trouble
des Etats Unis", Libération, 7 February 2002; Susan
Wright, "US: the bacteria option", Le Monde diplomatique,
English edition, November 2001.
(3) See speech by George Bush senior at the opening
session of the Geneva conference, 13 April 1984.
(4) Amy E Smithson, "US Implementation of the CWC" in
Jonathan B Tucker, ed.: The Chemical Weapons Convention,
Implementation, Challenges and Solutions, Monterey
Institute of International Studies, 2001.
(5) See Steve Wright, "A legal trade in death" and
Philippe Rivière, "The problem of proliferation", Le
Monde diplomatique English edition, January 2001.
(6) Countries are supposed to get rid of their stocks of
chemical weapons after 2007. But some, like Russia, lack
the financial means to do so.
(7) Pascal Boniface, "Vers la fin du désarmement",
Libération, 22 April 2002.
Translated by Malcolm Greenwood
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