The Price of Benignity

Looks as if the Senate might ratify START.  Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, the pivotal Republican Senate Whip, called the treaty “benign” in his Wall Street Journal op ed article on Friday.

This unexpected blessing was followed, of course, by the Republican blackmail list.  Kyl acknowledged that part of the price for ratification has been paid - continuation of the triad, U.S./Russian agreement to negotiate further reductions, recitations about the importance of deterrence, and pledges to spend over $100 billion to maintain and modernize nuclear delivery systems and $80 billion to modernize warheads and infrastructure.

Not enough, says Kyl.  Add a next-generation bomber, ballistic missile, and air-launched cruise missile, replace two facilities that produce plutonium and uranium, approve the weapons items in the FY 2011 budget, and provide evidence that the FY 2012 budget will include “adequate” nuclear weapons funding.

Kyl is disturbed, as well, by some of President Obama’s ideas, like the “utopian” goal of zero nuclear weapons, restrictions that he thinks the Nuclear Posture Review places on the freedom of military and scientific experts to dream up new weapons designs, and the pledge to pursue another new U.S.-Russian treaty, that would achieve further nuclear weapons reductions.

Kyl contradicts the last of these objections when he complains that START does not address tactical weapons, which is exactly what would be addressed in a further treaty.

My OED offers five meanings when “benign” is applied to “things”:  favorable, kind, fortunate, salutary, and propitious.  Sorry I can’t say the same about Kyl’s doomsday list.  There ought to be a law (international) that every country’s annual military budget be accompanied by a proposal to improve the population’s security during that budget year, through graduated steps toward a world of enforced law.  If the United States initiated such an effort our country would prove itself worthy of some of the “peace loving” accolades that Super patriots love to toss.

Impossible, though, at the Presidential or Congressional level of politics. The question for threatened populations is, how to make it politically feasible for national governments to entertain such thoughts in the face of utopianism charges like Congressman Kyl’s.    

Two Things At Once

The politics of ratification and the military’s strategic judgement will exact a price for such comfort as we can draw from the Nuclear Posture Review, the Nuclear Security Summit, and hopefully, the Non Proliferation Treaty Five Year Review in May. Part of the cost is to spend huge amounts that, according to many experts, is unnecessary, to “extend” the life of the nuclear arsenal that is not scheduled for discard. Another is to continue huge conventional arms budgets so as to make credible the promise of non-nuclear retaliation in the event of attack with chemical or biological weapons on the U.S. or its “nuclear umbrella” protectees. A third is to join enthusiastically in the current world-wide missile race, both defensive and attack missiles.

To arm while disarming is to perform two contrary tasks at once. Doing two things at once is hard - for people and for countries. Do I concentrate on two sets of facts and goals or attack them one at a time? There is my emotional commitment - hard to split, or spread. There is my credibility - how to communicate security and conviction about more than one subject at a time? There are resources - from hours in the day to money to manpower. With countries, there is political opportunism - if one goal is slighted, the opposition will champion it, and claim that the other goal must not be pursued simultaneously. There are unshakeable devotees, emotionally, irretrievably committed to, or advantaged by, one goal and opposed to the other, even if the two are in fact compatible.

A nation that must be prepared for war while trying to keep peace is faced with all this and more. War usually wins, because to prepare for peace seems inconsistent. To remove causes of war and enforce peace would weaken the nation. War always is there first, commanding money and emotion, enlisting war veterans, the business establishment, the misinformed and uninformed, arousing excitement, dreams of glory, and entertaining the populace.

You hear about peace mostly after peace has been lost. Peace necessitates law creation, adjudication, enforcement, and the politics that will deliver the power to create them. It is easier to build missiles, planes and tanks. They cost more but create profits and jobs and provide spectacle.

This argues for mounting peace efforts through some other vehicle than nations. Yes, peace must be between nations, more or less by definition. But let us stop expecting nations to carry the peace burden. Let us design peace and enlist the citizens of the nations to demand peace, through the cities and towns of the world, which, after all are the targeted, terminal victims of the next war, whether started with missiles or suitcase terrorist devices.

It would be relatively simple for a few cities and towns in a handful of countries to hold a security conference every year. They could legitimize the effort by putting a slot on their municipal ballots to elect representatives to the conference.