New arms race: its implications
By Shameem Akhtar
IT would be rather a hasty generalisation to say that the honeymoon between the neocons and authoritarian Putin regime has weared off in the face of the formers pursuit of strategic ascendancy over the Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China. For, in spite of Putins barbed broadside against George Bush for riding his high hobby horse, BMD, the belligerent Russian leader still called him partner.
Their meeting at Heiligendamm, a German seaport on the Baltic coast, on March 7, was far from stormy as Vladimir Putin took his partner-adversary unawares by offering him to share the use of Gabalin, a Russian base in Azerbaijan, rented by Moscow. The Russian leader went on to explain that the Azerbaijan base would be a far better site than the Czech republic for detecting any long-range missile test by Iran and, at the same time cover the whole of Europe rather than a part of it and the missile debris will fall into the sea and not on the soil of Europe.
Over and above all, the arrangement will allay any Russian misgivings about US ballistic missile defence plan. Vladimir Putin had come prepared at the G-8 meeting to counter the controversial BMD plan of George Bush since the former had obtained the consent of Ilham Alieve, the Azerbaijan President.
The Putin plan defused the tension for the time being which was engendered by his Cold War rhetoric backed by successful testfiring of a 10-warhead RS-24 missile from the Plestesk cosmodrome on May 29 that could overcome any missile shield developed so far amid widespread panic in Europe, especially in Poland and Czech republic. It sounded as a return to the bad old days of the Cold War when the two titans, the US and the Soviet Union, were flexing their missiles and accelerating the arms race.
This was Moscows counterblast to Washingtons plan to deploy ten interceptor missiles in Poland supplemented by a radar system installed in Czech republic on the flimsy pretext of protecting Europe against the on-coming long-range attack form Iran and North Korea.
Clearly, this was seen as a sinister imperialist plan to target Moscow after casting what the Bush administration naively believed to be a fool-proof impregnable shield over the US territory and certain of its bases in Europe.Now Bush finds himself in a quandary.
If it is the threat of Iranian or Korean missile that the US wants to ward off, then it must at once seize on Putins offer of Azerbaijan base, but the fact that Washington is mulling it shows that the rogue state argument was used as a ploy to distract Moscows attention from the American design to increase Russias vulnerability.
The Cold War had established a strategic balance mainly by Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972. According to it, the US and the USSR were to construct two missile shields one to cover their capitals, and the other, to cover parts of their inter-continental ballistic missile sites. The two systems were to be separated by 1,300 kilometres with each having a radius of 150 kilometres and equipped with 10 launchers. These were static and contained a single warhead.
This system left large tracts of territories of both the US and the USSR vulnerable to a missile attack by each other. The mutual fear of exposure to a nuclear attack served as a deterrent to nuclear war. If any power tries to make itself completely invulnerable to an attack by the other, while the other does not expand its defence shield, it will find itself at the mercy of the other power. This is precisely what would happen to Russia since George Bush threw away Americas allegiance to ABM treaty in 2001.Both the Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China had expressed their alarm at this development, but it was overshadowed by the September 11 episode which brought them together in a war against terror. The 1996 Shanghai Agreement that was concluded primarily to promote intra-regional co-operation in trade and economy was reoriented to combat separatism in Xinjiang and Chechnya espoused by religious extremism. To invade the Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, the US, with Moscows blessings, obtained military air bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
The US spread tentacles over the central-eastern Europe in the form of a string of bases in Poland, Czech republic and the Baltic coast. At the same time, it financed the anti-Russian forces in Georgia and Ukraine to oust the pro-Moscow regimes there while backing the tiny republic of Estonia to remove the memorial of Russias war dead from the capitals central part to some unknown remote place.
Russias reprisals against the US infiltration into what traditionally had been part of the former Soviet territory has been the same as in the days of the Cold War.
Moscow suspended the supply of crude oil to Lithuanias Mazeikiu refinery by blocking the Druzhbe pipeline and earlier, in 2006, it temporarily cut off the gas supplies to Ukraine over a price dispute and banned the import of meat from Poland. This is how the Berlin crisis brewed in 1948 when the Soviet authorities imposed blockade around the US-occupied west Berlin, cutting off food and fuel to the besieged population.
Then General Lucius Clay of the US mounted a massive airlift of food and fuel to west Berlin which continued for nine months. It seemed as if the two were about to go to war. Though the present situation has not reached that point, if this power struggle continues some dangerous conflict may erupt.
The former Warsaw Pact allies of Moscow have become Americas allies, some of whom have joined Nato which has been expanding in both members and its role. Russia wanted to join the Atlantic Alliance but was denied admission. It was a good opportunity for partnership for peace in Europe as the US and the Russian Federation could have worked as partners to assist the United Nations in its peace-keeping operations.
In fact, Nato, whose scope of operations was initially limited to the defence of western Europe against any communist attack, extended its operation to the Gulf and beyond since its forces are assisting the American occupying troops not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan as well. It must be worrying the Russians that Americans have established military bases in Iraq, a former ally of the Soviet Union, and in neutralist Afghanistan, thus encircling both Russia and China if one were to point to US bases in Diego Garcia, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.
The Gulf is being patrolled by two US aircraft carriers which held military-naval exercises in the proximity to the Straits of Hormuz in a naked display of gunboat diplomacy to bring Iran to its knees. While the Americans are on the rampage on land and at sea, the littoral states in the region, especially those which do not kowtow to the US hegemonic designs, feel threatened.
In order to tip the strategic balance against Russia and China, the Bush administration went the whole hog to wean India away from Russia by striking a nuclear deal with it last July, which, though not finalised yet, exempts 35 per cent of Indias nuclear plants from the IAEA safeguard, thus colluding with that country in proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Consequently, the deal will enable India to manufacture fifty nuclear bombs annually. Americas another protégé, the expansionist state of Israel, possesses, according to a CIA estimate, four hundred nuclear bombs, more than the number possessed by Britain or France. The UN Security Council and the IAEA are after North Korea which may be having just a few crude bombs and Iran which has none. Furthermore, Britain launched an attack on a nuclear submarine called Astitute.
Under urgings from the US, Germany and Japan have decided to embark on an ambitious armament plan, raising alarm in Europe and East Asia. No wonder, the Chinese now engaged in doing business were alarmed over these developments, and successfully experimented with their anti-satellite missile and launched JIN-class submarine which can deliver ballistic missiles oover a range of 8000 kilometres; in addition they are preparing a mobile land-based intercontinental ballistic missile which can reach targets in the US from coast to coast.
The Pentagon and US Vice-President Dick Cheney have questioned Chinas armaments programme. This amounts to saying that the US has the divine right to build BMD, ICBMS and SLBMS but Russia and China have no right to arm themselves. Britain can launch an attack on a nuclear-powered submarine but China cannot. Israel can make nuclear bombs, but Iran and North Korea cannot; India can possess nuclear arsenal and keep nuclear weapons manufacturing plants but Pakistan should be dispossessed of its bombs and its nuclear plants dismantled.
This logic does not make any sense. What is needed is general and complete disarmament by all nations, large and small. That makes sense.
The writer is professor-Dean, Faculty of Management and Social Sciences, Balochistan University of Information Technology and Management Sciences, Quetta.
http://www.dawn.com/2007/06/24/ed.htm#4
