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Accelerating the Race Towards Destruction

It is not only with regard to Central America that the Reagan administration has been compelled to deal with a recalcitrant public. National security policy provides another example of this pervasive problem.

Elite circles in the United States are united in their commitment to the Pentagon system, which serves as an essential device to ensure a public subsidy to high technology industry and provides a nuclear umbrella for U.S. intervention worldwide, deterring any response.1 Accordingly, there was little reaction here to Gorbachev’s proposals in early 1986 for the U.S. to join the unilateral Soviet test ban, for removal of the U.S. and Soviet fleets from the Mediterranean, for steps towards dismantling NATO and the Warsaw Pact, for outlawing of sea-launched cruise missiles, and similar measures.2 But matters could get out of hand. Small wonder, then, that Secretary of State George Shultz called on Gorbachev to “end public diplomacy,” which was beginning to cause acute embarrassment in Washington3; Shultz was much praised for this statesmanlike reaction. Similarly, the U.S. alone boycotted a UN disarmament conference in New York called “to examine how money saved under future disarmament agreements could be used to stimulate economic development, particularly in the third world.” The reason, according to U.S. officials, is that the conference “would enable Moscow to discredit President Reagan’s space-defense program and his opposition to a nuclear test ban in third-world eyes by presenting them as obstacles to disarmament and thus to the developing world’s advancement,” quite accurately. The conference was originally proposed by France, which backed down after U.S. objections, though France along with all U.S. NATO allies and all members of the Warsaw Pact attended. The State Department denied a visa to a leader of the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission, preventing him from attending the UN conference to which he was a delegate. Neither this, nor a protest by the Commission in San Salvador, were reported, and the UN conference also disappeared from view.4

The Gorbachev proposals that were successfully evaded in 1986 would have been beneficial to U.S. security and the proclaimed ends of policy. A comprehensive test ban would over time reduce confidence in offensive weapons, hence the likelihood of a first strike, while preserving the deterrent, which does not require a high level of confidence. Removal of fleets from the Mediterranean would reduce the possibility of superpower confrontation there, a threat that has repeatedly come all too close to realization in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that continues to pose a serious—perhaps the most serious—threat of nuclear war. The same would have been true with regard to the Soviet proposal to reduce the superpower military presence in the Gulf in mid-1987, when the Reagan administration, seeking to counter the effect of the Iran-contra hearings,5 decided to gamble on a confrontation with Iran, risking consequences that might prove disastrous. For obvious historical and strategic reasons, moves towards dismantling the pact system would be a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for relaxing the Soviet grip over Eastern Europe, and should reduce tensions in the area generally. Sea-launched cruise missiles, as strategic analysts have observed, would render any ballistic missile defense largely irrelevant and would pose a severe threat to the U.S. with its long coastlines.

Whether these options are realistic, we do not know, since the U.S. either ignored or rejected the Gorbachev initiatives, with no noticeable comment here in elite circles. New problems arose in subsequent months, as Gorbachev unexpectedly accepted U.S. proposals on reduction of missiles in Europe; these had been offered on the assumption that they would be rejected, as part of the procedure for evading serious impediments to the arms race while pacifying public opinion. Efforts to evade Gorbachev’s annoying moves by continually raising the ante6 were accompanied by steps to increase tension and hostility, for example, naval maneuvers led by the battleship New Jersey in the Sea of Okhotsk north of Japan, bordered on three sides by Soviet territory and considered by the USSR as “their play pond” according to a source quoted. These operations were undertaken in “response to a recent large-scale Soviet exercise in the area” in summer 1986, practicing how the USSR would “defend the Sea of Okhotsk and later, how a battle group would break from the sea through the Kuril Islands into the Pacific.” Naturally we must “respond” with a display of force, just as we would expect them to respond in a similar manner to U.S. maneuvers off the coast of Texas. This U.S. response merited no mention in the national press.7

These developments provide confirming evidence for a conclusion supported by the entire history of the postwar arms race: security is only a marginal concern of security planners.8 It will be no small matter to move towards arms agreements that threaten the major functions of the Pentagon system just mentioned: its utility for state economic management (organizing public subsidies for the costly phase of research and development before the state subsidized “private corporations” can take over for profit, maintaining a substantial state-protected market for high technology industry, etc.); and its role in “deterrence,” that is, providing an umbrella for global intervention. Systems that are only marginally useful for these purposes can be sacrificed, but to reach an agreement that interferes with these essential functions is a different matter.

After the 1986 Reykjavik summit, widely portrayed in the United States as a great triumph for Reagan, the U.S. Information Agency commissioned a classified opinion poll to assess the reaction among NATO allies. The results showed that Reagan was generally blamed for the summit failure, in Britain by 4 to 1, in Germany by 7 to 1; only in France were both sides blamed equally. The results were leaked and published in Europe, but I found no mention here.9