The Pecking Order

[muse]

The nuclear pecking order
Shahzad Chaudhry


Perhaps, the sense of suggesting a nuclear pecking order and its placement along an ascending incline is best reflected in a recent study, “America’s Strategic Posture”, by William Perry and James Schlesinger, who propose that disarmament, looked at today, seems like a mountain peak from the bottom, which is just not visible.

Instead, they propose a base-camp approach, where America is seen to lead the world up the incline of disarmament, through a series of base-camp stops, which ultimately nears them to their objective. The base-camps are, of course, measures of incremental reduction towards elimination of nuclear weapons.

Using the same analogy, of a peak and camps, but modifying it to reflect the surety of what exists and has an influence, as against enabling a mix of ‘lead and hedge’ — the US’ nuclear strategy of recent times which is both contradictory in intent and shorn of credibility from a disarmament perspective — it is possible to place the current nuclear powers of the world in a hierarchical classification.

On the top of the peak sit the United States, China and Russia — the Exclusive Three (E-3). This in itself may be provocative to some since it divorces itself from the usual P-5, but is easily reflective of the influence that the three are likely to continue to exercise on the global political order. It also points to a need to shed the anachronistic epitaph of P-5. With strong elements of national power that each possesses, robust political systems suitable to their own socio-political environment and evolved over years to pursue respective national objectives, very strong economic bases and great potential to dominate the world scene, the E-3 stand alone in terms of the pecking order.

There can be identified minor variations and glitches impacting their inter-state relations, but through the détente that has evolved because of the great interplay of politico-economic forces in the last two decades, they have not only retained a sense of strategic stability within themselves, but have also helped sustain a stable global order. Forays into Iraq, Afghanistan and Georgia have essentially been well contained without destabilising the regions around, and Hong Kong and Macau have been absorbed into China without geo-political upheavals.

Their combined military and nuclear arsenals provide them essential deterrence, forcing them to respect each other, avoiding blatant challenge; one does not see the three going into an armed confrontation in the foreseeable future. The accrued détente has been a major contribution to sustaining the existing order, and is likely to continue to offer that necessary stability overhang under which nations of the globe can continue to seek avenues of improvement in areas of development and progress. We must not mistake such an umbrella ensuring elimination of conflict — which will continue to subsist in various forms — just that global stability through the beneficial détente of the E-3 will mitigate huge global disorder.

The remaining two of the original P-5 are proposed to be called the Superfluous Two (S-2) — Britain and France. No, not for any lack of importance in their very worthwhile role in the global political economy, but simply through redefinition of their respective roles in a more Europeanised environment ably subsisted through the pervasive presence of NATO as an integrated and cooperative security cover. Their respective positions at the end of WWII as allied victors granted them the right to a prime place among the P-5 and hence the accrued access to the most powerful weapon of effect in the immediate aftermath, although both had to be augmented from outside to recover from precarious individual positions in the war.

France’s nationalistic posture and an impressive individualistic stance over the years has evolved into a more committed European outlook, while Britain, despite some crucial political role-playing in global matters, has pragmatically understood the limitations of a waning military capacity; both therefore stand aside respectfully to the dominating presence of the E-3.

More to the point, both have gradually reduced their nuclear weapons holding. France’s reliance is now more on naval platforms, while Britain, as a unilateral measure, eliminated tactical nuclear weapons with the end of the Cold War. The United States’ nuclear deployments in Europe provide its European allies the safety of a nuclear umbrella. The absence of any direct militarised threat to Europe and its consequential pacification as a society has diminished the need and the role of nuclear weapons in their security calculus. The two hold onto some strategic nuclear prowess only as a matter of prestige, and less as a need.

In the ‘lead and hedge’ strategy of the United States, it would be crucial to not only retain the START format with Russia, and reduce their stock holdings in an equitable fashion, but also to integrate China into a similar arrangement. A good measure to determine the requisite numbers for sustainable credibility of deterrence should be the number of warheads presently held by China.

An E-3 initiative in this direction will leave a greater sense of credibility with the rest to follow suit. An even more poignant indicator of the western resolve towards disarmament and non-proliferation would be for both Britain and France to give up their nuclear arsenals completely since there is no plausible politico-military logic for each to hedge with their existing holdings.

This is the first article in a two-part series. The concluding piece will appear next Monday, September 14. The writer is a retired air vice marshal and a former envoy. Contact shahzad.a.chaudhry***********

 

[SinoIndusFriendship]

Huh?! Lots of mumbo jumbo!

 

[muse]

Pakistan, it's very survival threatened by a relentless adversay ten times larger than Pakistan, confronted Pakistan with an existential choice, nuclear power or slavery under the yoke of the adversary -- but now Pakistan has emerged much more confident and science and technology have been utilized and seen by the public to have been utilized for the survival of the nation.

Nuclear weapons represent a most awful power, what kind of a role will the Pakistani nation seek to create for this power, will the nation of destiny find that the relentless adversary will continue to threaten the existence of Pakistan and therefore leave Pakistan with no choice but a pact of death with the adversary, so that the adversary may not be able to harm others? Or can the nation devise an alternate vision, one in which the relentless adversary is made transformed into a more benign entity and help the nation transform it's nuclear arsenal??




Fighting Godzilla
Odaira Namihei



“Is Japan prepared for the arrival of extraterrestrials?” asked the Japan’s opposition MP Ryuji Yamane in December 2007. The government’s response caused quite a stir: “There are no grounds for us to deny there are unidentified flying objects and some life-form that controls them,” Japan’s defence minister, Ishiba Shigeru, told a shocked media. He thought Japan needed to prepare for such an eventuality by defining a legal framework for possible military action. This may have sounded foolish, but Shigeru had put his finger on the complexity of the military question in Japan.

Japan was defeated in the Second World War after a failed attempt to become the dominant regional power. It paid a heavy price for its ambition: the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and the US-imposed constitution of 1946-7, which forced Japan to renounce war and replace its armed forces with “self-defence forces” (FAD). Since then, Japan has been militarily dependent on the United States, the big winner of the war in the Pacific.

That explains why three themes — nuclear weapons, the role of the army and the importance of science — are recurrent in Japanese literature, cinema and science-fiction cartoons. They provide a vehicle for the Japanese to explore how they feel about their nation, which only regained independence in April 1952 with the end of US occupation.

Godzilla (1954) by Ishiro Honda was the first in a long series of films about a monster which emerges from the deep and destroys everything in its path. Godzilla’s awakening is linked to US nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean: a few months before filming, the United States carried out a test at Bikini Atoll, contaminating the crew of a Japanese trawler. Less than 10 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese were once again victims of an atomic bomb “made in the USA”.

Honda used this event to remind his compatriots that their country remained vulnerable. But at the same time he wanted to say that Japan, newly liberated from the US, was at a turning point, ready to take its destiny into its own hands: the weapon that destroys Godzilla is developed by a Japanese scientist, Doctor Serizawa.

Three years later, in 1957, Honda made The Mysterians. This time the threat does not come from monsters, but extraterrestrials escaping from a planet laid waste by nuclear war. They set up home at the foot of Mount Fuji (the symbol of Japan) and try to recreate a society dominated by science. Although they seem peaceful (“our aim is to end nuclear war”) they make a series of demands that Japan cannot accept: in particular, they want to marry humans in order to regenerate their race, which has been contaminated by nuclear radiation.

The Japanese military tries to drive them away, but without success. It is only with the help of the UN (which Japan joined in 1956) that the aliens are finally expelled from the planet. Satellites are launched into space to keep watch and prevent them returning. That idea was added at the last minute, after the Soviet Union sent its first Sputnik into orbit.

The extraterrestrials in this film exercise their power through a giant remote-controlled robot. The figure of the robot often features in the Japanese science fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s. It symbolises the extreme vulnerability of a country caught between the rival powers of the East and the West and unable to choose its own path.

But with Japan’s economic success came greater confidence and hope: aliens and robots were transformed into allies who helped bring peace — as in the television series Ultraman, broadcast from July 1966 on the TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System) channel. The hero, Hayata, is a member of the “Science Patrol” whose job it is to protect the planet from monsters. While on a mission, Hayata discovers the ability to transform himself into an Ultraman, a super-being who makes short work of any opponent.

The Manga cartoon Cyborg 009 tells the story of nine cyborgs (a cross between human and machine) which rebel against the powerful organisation Black Ghost, which wants to use them in its plan to take over the world. The film came out in 1964 when tensions were high between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was also the year of the Tokyo Olympics, where Japan had demonstrated its technological and cultural prowess. The message of the film is clear: the Japanese will not allow themselves to be manipulated by the big powers.

The main hero of Cyborg 009, Shimamura Jo, is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to prevent Black Ghost succeeding in its evil plan. Indeed, many characters from Japanese science fiction are ready to give their lives to save the planet, such as the captain of the space battleship Yamato in the animation series of the same name, made in 1974 by Leiji Matsumoto. The series relates the battleship’s interstellar adventures as it fights against extraterrestrial civilisations who threaten humanity. In the end the spaceship carries out a suicide mission to save the world from certain death.

In Japanese mythology, the world was created by the deities Izanami and Izanagi, and humans are insignificant compared to the gods, who can manifest their power at any moment. Another deep-rooted popular belief has it that Japan rests on the body of a giant catfish, namazu — each time the fish moves, the islands suffer an earthquake.

Sakyo Komatsu, considered the king of Japanese science fiction, imagined the worst in his novel Japan Sinks, which was published in 1973 and adapted for the cinema that same year (a remake was shot in 2006). He describes in detail the consequences of a devastating earthquake, making the point that the main threat to Japan does not come from extraterrestrials but from nature itself (incarnated in various mythological deities). The director Mamoru Oshii, who made the movies Patlabor 1 and Patlabor 2 (1989 and 1993) and Ghost in the Shell (1995), created new myths with a wider resonance for a modern, global society.

In the form of myths, machines or mutants, disruptive elements threaten chaos, but they also herald a rebirth and the construction of a new society. In Hideaki Anno’s television series Neon Genesis Evangelion, made in 1995 and considered one of the best of the last 15 years, giant robots battle mysterious creatures bent on wreaking destruction. The first episode was broadcast in the autumn of 1995, shortly after Japan had experienced two traumatic events: the Kobe earthquake of 17 January and the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo underground in March by the Aum Shinrikyo sect led by Shoko Asahara, who thought Japan was heading towards the apocalypse.

Science fiction allows Japan to imagine a future where it is master of its own destiny and where questions about preventing an alien invasion don’t seem so ridiculous. For many Japanese, the alien today is called Kim Jong-il. The threat to the region by the North Korean leader’s nuclear programme and ballistic missile tests demands a clearer response from the government than the one it gave to the question about UFOs. — LMD

The writer is a freelance journalist

 

[muse]

See part one of the this piece as the lead in the thread



Down the order
Shahzad Chaudhry



Last week, I discussed the E-3 and S-2 groupings in the nuclear pecking order. I call the next group the ‘Next Three’ (N-3); specifically, India, Pakistan and Israel, the three de-facto nuclear powers outside the ambit of the NPT. The N-3 are unique in their status since they went the nuclear route through an obsessive fear psychosis.

Israel can be simply justified through the hostile neighbourhood and perceived apprehensions of her survival. In a strange sense, the status quo within the Middle East, despite a history of war and bloodshed, holds because of Israel’s military-nuclear potential. That it uses to browbeat all others into submission on the basis of such power is absolutely repugnant to civil sense and needs to be unequivocally rejected. Since 1973 though, the region has not gone into a major war, and the residual effect of Israel’s nuclear status and her military prowess seems to provide a balance against the combined Arab capacity to challenge Israel. An uneasy truce prevails.

The case of India and Pakistan, however, is unique. Both justify acquisition of nuclear weapons because of the other, and in a perverse reversion to the hostility bind also feed from each other on almost a unified stance to various international treaties formed to regulate ownership of nuclear weapons.

But what is most critical is a sense of strategic equilibrium through effective deterrence that has held a tentative peace between the two neighbours. Some significant politico-military events such as the Kargil episode and the year-long 2001-02 stand-off between the two militaries was never allowed to degenerate further into an expanded conflict. Contemporary debates within politico-military circles of both countries have tended to examine the possibility of space for a limited war under a nuclear overhang and have thankfully found little as a strategic opportunity. It may be paradoxical, but in the case of these two nations too, nuclear weapons have ushered in a relatively long period of peace. And as the Americans say,” If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Very simply, the N-3 need to be given an environment of peace and resolution for them to shed their insecurities. The two-nation solution to the Palestinian issue is crucial for Israel to find itself at peace; similarly, her Arab neighbours will need a more accommodative declaratory stance to ease Israel’s apprehensions.

Two separate issues, however, will continue to ride this process of resolving regional problems, necessitating the N-3 to seek assured security through their nuclear arsenal. Israel eyes Iran’s quest for strategic nuclear capability, and may therefore push justification for its retention of the capability; while India, increasingly now with regional and global aspirations, seeks to equate itself with China, finding support from the western lobbies, who in turn have their own geo-political interests.

There is thus a mutation of threat perception that both Israel and India proffer as the logic justifying ownership of these dastardly weapons. Similarly, till Pakistan’s issues with India are not resolved equitably, Pakistan will find reason to retain her own arsenal to ensure peace in a dangerous neighbourhood.

The next group is the M-2 — the Emerging Two — which includes North Korea and Iran. This will tend to be a combustible expansion of the nuclear group, if allowed to happen. North Korea, despite her informal nuclear status, perhaps a bit short of the by-default margin, is still a work in process. It seems that her case is pretty much transactional, and given the necessary inducements, it may well be possible to dissuade North Korea to move further, as indeed encourage her to give up on the capability. A similar approach was immensely helpful with South Africa.

Let to stay, North Korea’s nuclear status is likely to set into motion a chain reaction, with South Korea and Japan going the nuclear route. Most of Northeast Asia will then be under the dreaded threat of a nuclear Armageddon. China will be the key in enabling the world to nudge North Korea out of her nuclear ambitions.

Iran’s case is equally complex and potentially dangerous. It will, if let to occur, complicate the geo-politics of the Middle East immensely; and may even set off another phase of nuclearisation in the Middle East. Given the powder-keg nature of the Middle East, any further deterioration of the politico-military environment renders itself to most destructive conflagration.

Iran’s nuclearisation will also impact South and Southwest Asia. Contiguous to the already nuclearised Indo-Pakistan landmass, and with active and competing interests in Afghanistan and the region, Iran will perhaps end up altering the existing strategic status quo. Iran’s dissuasion from the route is possible through its acceptance in the global mainstream, in the resolution of the Palestinian equation in a mutually acceptable manner, inclusive of Israel distancing itself from the policy of aggression towards her neighbours, and in enabling equitable access for growing economies to cheaper and cleaner nuclear energy.

The nuclear club’s pecking order is a useful instrument in determining the more plausible route to disarmament. It also helps highlight the accompanied initiatives that are required to appease the sense of insecurity of its constituent members. A key, perhaps the most crucial aspect of formulating a new nuclear paradigm is to accede to a universal demand for equal access to energy options, particularly under the threat of an impending environmental disaster. These can and should be based upon a stringent criterion of checks and balances under the IAEA to ensure its probity of functioning as indeed compliance with internationally formulated guarantees of the receiving nations.

An unequal and discretionary approach will only lead to rogue attempts to acquire what is now becoming increasingly possible in the form of knowledge, materials and technical capacity of owning nuclear capability.

In its current composition, the group is pretty much contained and stabilised, but any further addition is likely to upset the apple cart with disastrous consequences. The actions to be taken are clear. Do the international community and particularly the E-3 have it in them to pursue resolution of global political issues and enable equitable access to energy needs of developing nations? Or, will it be only an incremental denial to the various base-camp parkers while those on the peak when left to themselves may choose an option that the rest of the world may just not be able to witness from their much lower beats?

Disarmament is some way off. But during the journey, the nuclear paradox will continue to haunt humanity between the dreaded peace and status quo that it seems to offer and in its most destructive capacity if the world at large fails to mend what may eventually break.

This article concludes a two-part series. The first article, “The nuclear pecking order”, appeared last Monday. The writer is a retired air vice marshal and a former envoy. Contact shahzad.a.chaudhry***********

 

[nightcrawler]

Nothing in the world could eliminate the threat of a nuclear powered rogue state the emerging ones being even a size off a speck on world map like Cuba Venezuela & the Pecking order dont apply to them!!
Thy simply can't afford to buy planes ships modern hardware for them the safety measure is one big boom & thats all. So we can't be sure that even if world powers eliminate this Nuclear fallout emerging ones will not care about it
because for them LIVING is a word long forgotten & SURVIVAL is what they follow & cherish

 

[muse]

Why ? Why has ACM Chaudhry's article appeared when it has? What position is he signalling? What is the context in which the article has appeared?