Crawling from the Wreckage (28 page)

So the Dutch troops came home safely. In 1999, the
UN
admitted that it had failed to protect the Muslims of Srebrenica from mass murder, but said that none of its officials could be held responsible and invoked its legal immunity. In 2002, an official Dutch report blamed the Dutch government and senior military officials for the massacre, and Prime Minister Wim Kok’s entire cabinet (which had been in power in 1995) resigned.

Then, in 2006, the Dutch government awarded those who had served in Srebrenica a special insignia “in recognition for their behaviour in difficult circumstances.” They still didn’t get it. Even if all the higher authorities had failed them, the soldiers’ duty was clear, and they didn’t do it.

I have talked to Canadian soldiers who served in Srebrenica before the Dutch, and they wonder if they would have behaved any better when the Serbs attacked. At least they know that they should have. Real soldiers are old-fashioned people who still believe in honour, and that is the most attractive thing about them.

Nuclear weapons have not actually gone away. However, they have become politically invisible, except of course for the ones that don’t yet exist: for example, the ones that Iran might build one day. Even North Korea’s few nuclear weapons actually fell off the international agenda after Pyongyang actually tested one or two. That is because the only conceivable use for an Iranian or North Korean nuclear weapon, assuming that the local government is sane, is as a deterrent: a guarantee that there will be terrible retaliation if somebody attacks either country with nuclear weapons. Only great powers ever threaten to use their nuclear weapons first—and even they’d have to be insane to actually do it
.

If you want to understand why North Koreans are so worried you have to imagine the Doomsday scenario that haunts them.

Kim Jong Il wakes up early, because it’s “The Day,” but it takes him ages to get ready. His hairdresser fusses for half an hour to get his hair to stand up, then his corset is tightened to contain his bulging stomach, and finally he himself decides which shade of light tan Mao jacket he’ll wear. Eventually he slips into his platform shoes and clops downstairs to meet his assembled generals.

“Are our nuclear missiles ready to fly?” he asks General Number One. “Yes, Dear Leader, they are both ready. One will strike Seoul, and the other will strike a large American base in Japan,” the general replies. Then, mustering up all his courage, the general adds: “But are you sure this is a good idea? The Americans will know where they came from, and their retaliation will be terrible. By lunchtime our country will be destroyed and we will all be dead.”

A single shot rings out and the impudent general falls to the floor. “Thus to all cowards and weaklings,” cries Kim Jong Il, and then continues, in a more conversational tone: “We must destroy the nests of the capitalist imperialist vipers. It is our destiny, and we will dwell with Marx forever. Launch the missiles!” General Number Two salutes and says “Yes, sir! At once, sir!”

Having a little trouble with this scenario? Doesn’t quite ring true? Good, because I have trouble with it, too. But this is roughly the scenario that panic-mongers have been asking us to believe in, and if it isn’t true then there never was a crisis.

There wasn’t. Last week was especially silly, with the members of the six-party talks on getting Pyongyang back within the nuclear non-proliferation regime (China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Russia and the United States) declaring a dramatic success on Monday, September 19, and North Korea apparently reneging on the deal on Tuesday. But there are reasons for this.

The North Korean negotiating style certainly leaves a good deal to be de sired. They make dramatic announcements (“We have nuclear weapons!”), flounce out of treaties they have signed (like the Non-Proliferation
Treaty, in 2002), and try to change the meaning of deals they have signed before the ink is dry on the paper (like last week). It is the behaviour of people who have no experience of negotiations between equals—and, indeed, people raised in the authoritarian, almost Orwellian system that prevails in North Korea are very unlikely to have had that experience. But these are also shrewd negotiating tactics for people who are so weak that they have practically no cards in their hand. If you have no way to make other parties pay attention to your concerns, threatening to be unreasonable and cause a lot of damage is a good way to get them to listen. Even teenagers know that.

North Korea has no real cards in its hand. With half as many people as South Korea, it has an economy around one-tenth the size, and much of that goes to maintaining a military establishment that is more or less capable of matching the South Korean and American forces that confront it on the Korean Peninsula. Its people live on the brink of starvation (although Kim Jong Il clearly eats very well), and its ability to threaten the United States directly is precisely zero.

When the Bush administration designated North Korea as part of the “axis of evil,” perhaps next for the treatment after Iraq, Pyongyang panicked. It had long been working on nuclear weapons secretly (and cheating on an earlier agreement to stop doing so), because it believed that they would deter an American attack, even if they could only reach nearby targets. Suddenly it pulled out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and announced that it actually had operational nukes—though it may well have been bluffing.

That unleashed the so-called crisis of the past few years, but all North Korea was really looking for was a guarantee that it would not be attacked, and for some foreign aid. That was essentially what it got in the deal of November 19—North Korea agreed to abandon its nuclear-weapons program in exchange for economic aid, security assurances and improved ties with the United States—so the “crisis” should be over now.

It wasn’t, unfortunately, because the U.S. Treasury Department suddenly imposed financial sanctions on North Korea on the (unproven) grounds that Pyongyang was counterfeiting U.S. dollars. It’s still not clear whether this was a deliberate spoiling move by hard-liners within the Bush
administration or just poor policy coordination, but the 2005 deal fell apart. A year later, North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon
.

By 2007, inevitably, there was a new deal along much the same lines as the old one: North Korea promised to shut down the nuclear reactor that produced its fissile material, and was guaranteed a million tons of oil in return. By then, however, Pyongyang had at least two nuclear weapons (though nobody knows how well they work), and it looks like it gets to keep them
.

The lesson? If you bribe somebody to be good, and that’s your only leverage over them, then you should pay up
.

A ship I once served in had a small brass plate on the bridge with a quotation from Thucydides, the Greek statesman, historian and seaman of the fourth century
BC
: “A collision at sea can ruin your whole day.” It is still true.

It is harder to collide at sea than on land, since there are no blind curves and nothing moves much faster than a bicycle, so my normal reaction to a collision at sea is to think “How can they have been so stupid?” But here is a collision that beggars the imagination.

In the Atlantic Ocean, on the night of February 3–4, at an undisclosed depth, the British nuclear submarine
Vanguard
and the French nuclear submarine
Le Triomphant
ran into each other. Both boats were “boomers,” missile-firing submarines carrying sixteen ballistic missiles, each of which can deliver several nuclear warheads at intercontinental range.

The Atlantic is the second biggest ocean in the world. The submarines are considerably smaller: around 145 metres long. So there they are, puttering along at six knots or less, with an entire ocean to play in, and freedom in three dimensions (they can go very deep if they want)—and they run into each other. The damage was slight, but it ruined the day for two whole navies. How could they have been so stupid?

All right, it’s not quite that simple. The boomers—not just British and French missile-firing submarines but American and Russian ones, too—congregate in specific parts of the Atlantic that are called “nesting
grounds.” They need deep water that is relatively quiet, and they need to stay in range of their targets. In practice, then, they have only a quarter of the Atlantic to play with.

That still ought to be enough, but they are also deliberately running blind. If they operated their “active” sonar (the thing that goes “ping” in the war movies), they would detect everything on and below the surface for many kilometres around them—but everything they heard would also hear them.

They mustn’t allow this to happen. Their job is to hide out in the depths of the ocean as a last-ditch nuclear deterrent that cannot be found and destroyed in a surprise attack. So they only run the “passive” sonar, which listens to all the noises in the water but does not give away their own position.

Unfortunately, passive sonar cannot hear vessels that are not making any noise—and modern submarines are designed to be ultra-quiet. In this case, they actually closed to touching distance without detecting each other’s presence.

The subs were obviously on courses that converged slowly because the damage was minor and only in the bows. If one had gone straight into the side of the other, however, then both could have been destroyed. Down to the bottom go their nuclear reactors, plus anything up to a hundred or so nuclear warheads on their missiles.

Both crews would have been lost—more than two hundred men—but that would have been the end of it. None of the nukes would have exploded, and it really doesn’t matter if there are a couple of tons of highly radioactive material scattered on the deep ocean floor hundreds of kilometres from the nearest land. Nevertheless, the incident reminds us that although the Cold War ended twenty years ago, the boomers of all the great powers are still out there on patrol, nuclear weapons at the ready, as if this were 1975. There is not a single good reason for them all to be doing this, but nobody has told them to stop. Why not?

Because we don’t know what the future might bring? Perhaps, and as such I didn’t say scrap the subs tomorrow, but tie them up in port and stop this nonsense. If we all end up in a new Cold War one day, then okay, you can have them back, but why are they cruising around out there now?

You have to keep the crews trained? Well, train them in other nuclear submarines—or if they really must train in these particular boats, then
take the missiles out
. It is not sane to keep deploying these instruments of mass death when no major power fears an attack by any other.

And, by the way, if you could all agree to stop these ridiculous patrols, it would be a useful step towards the more sweeping measures of nuclear disarmament that all the great powers say they want, and that President Barack Obama has adopted as a serious goal.

Obama is the first occupant of the White House since Ronald Reagan with the vision to imagine a future free of nuclear weapons, and unlike Reagan he’s smart enough not to let the guardians of nuclear orthodoxy talk him out of it. He has a lot on his plate right now, but here’s a step in the right direction that costs nothing: announce that the U.S. Navy will no longer run “combat patrols” with its nuclear-missile-firing submarines, and invite the world’s other nuclear-weapons powers to follow suit.

After this little demonstration of folly, they’d all come along pretty promptly.

I suspect that Obama doesn’t read my articles because he did not act on that perfectly sensible suggestion. On the other hand, he did cancel the preposterous Bush commitment to install Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) radars and launchers in Eastern Europe, ostensibly to stop Iranian missiles with nuclear warheads from reaching the United States
.

Ballistic missile defences sound less noxious than nuclear-tipped missiles, but in fact they are the other side of the same equation. If the BMD actually works, then deterrence doesn’t work: the side with the BMD can nuke the other side and not worry about retaliation. This didn’t matter much in the case of the Iranians, who had no nuclear weapons, but the prospect of American BMD in Eastern Europe drove the Russians crazy
.

“Some experts have doubts about the missile-shield concept,” as the more cautious reporters put it. (That example comes from the
BBC
website.) A franker journalist would say that the ballistic-missile defence system that the Bush administration planned for Poland and the Czech Republic,
and that President Barack Obama has just cancelled, has never worked and shows few signs of ever doing so.

Obama has done the right thing. It saves money that would have been wasted, and it repairs relations with Russia, which was paranoid about the system being so close to its borders. And the cancellation also signals a significant decline in the paranoia in Washington about Iran.

“Paranoia” is the right word in both cases. Iran doesn’t have any missiles that could even come within range of the
BMD
system that was slated for Poland and the Czech Republic, let alone nuclear warheads to put on them. According to U.S. intelligence assessments, Iran is not working on nuclear weapons, nor on missiles that could reach Europe, let alone the United States. Washington’s decision to deploy the system anyway was so irrational that it made the Russians paranoid as well.

Their intelligence services told them the same thing that the U.S. intelligence community told the Bush administration: that Iran had no nuclear weapons or long-range ballistic missiles, nor any possibility of getting them for five to ten years. So what was the U.S. really doing in setting up the system so close to Russia’s borders?

The intelligence people in Moscow also told Russian leaders that the U.S. system was useless junk that had never managed to intercept an incoming missile in an honest operational test. (All the tests were shamelessly rigged to make it easy for the intercepting missiles to strike their targets, and still they failed most of the time.) Besides, although the planned
BMD
base in Poland was close to Russia, it was in the wrong place to intercept Russian missiles.