Tall Tales and Deceptive Discourses

Weapons systems, treaties, and strategies come to seem right (or wrong) in the context of the stories we tell ourselves about them. Social scientists and historians call these stories discourses. Sometimes new discourses (like our discourse on civil rights) originate from below and eventually gain enough credibility that they are co-opted by the government. Other discourses (like the discourse on deterrence during the Cold War) originate within the government, and within the tight circle of think tanks that speaks to the government, and are then propagated outward through society by waves of speech-making and media dissemination.

From time to time there are sharp historical breaks as new stories and propositions become accepted with startling suddenness. Senior officials in the Bush administration are now trying to create this kind of radical shift in our discourse about nuclear weapons.

The Cold War saw the rise of an official discourse on nuclear weapons that is now looking more than a little tattered. Its chief assumptions were: that the genie having escaped the bottle in a dangerous world, nuclear weapons could not be abolished, and anyone who thought otherwise was näive or worse; that even though the two superpowers were inevitable rivals racing to improve their arsenals, they were rational enough to manage their competition in ways that would not cause a nuclear war; that the arms race could be channeled and disciplined, though not prevented, by arms control treaties; and that certain avenues of competition were destabilizing and should therefore be foreclosed by mutual agreement. These included a race to build defensive anti-missile systems and a race to put nuclear, anti-satellite, or anti-ballistic weapons in space.

After the Cold War, this way of looking at the world began to look increasingly outmoded. The Clinton administration attempted to strike up some new discursive themes, but its attempts were undercut by their own half-heartedness. For example, the administration made some vague remarks about moving toward a world without nuclear weapons, but it failed to negotiate any new arms reductions and it proclaimed through its Nuclear Posture Review that the United States would rely on nuclear weapons for its security for the indefinite future. Similarly, Clinton administration officials said that they supported the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty only to sponsor research and development programs that pointed in the direction of its erosion or demise. And President Clinton spoke of a new global order founded on strong international treaties and institutions only to wage war in Kosovo without U.N. approval and to walk away from an international convention on landmines.

The Bush administration, on the other hand, has attempted to use the debate about ballistic missile defense to transform the official discourse on nuclear weapons and arms control. It has sought to dramatically redefine the U.S.-Russian relationship, the morality and effectiveness of deterrence, and the significance of arms control. If some of the statements made by administration officials had been uttered by President Clinton, they would have met with Republican derision. The Bush administration has also appropriated some of the anti-nuclear movement's rhetoric, only to use it in support of a further round of militarization.

IF SOME STATEMENTS MADE BY ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS HAD BEEN UTTERED BY PRESIDENT CLINTON, THEY WOULD HAVE MET WITH REPUBLICAN DERISION.

The new discourse, like its predecessor, starts with the assumption that the world is a very dangerous place, although the source of danger is no longer Soviet-style militant communism, but the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to “rogue states.” As Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recently testified to Congress: “The short-range missile threat to our friends, allies, and deployed forces arrived a decade ago; the intermediate missile threat is now here; and the longrange threat to American cities is just over the horizon–a matter of years, not decades, away–and our people and territory are defenseless.” 1

Within the old discourse, military threats from abroad were used to justify nuclear deterrence. No longer. Remarkably, it is now becoming axiomatic that leaders of “rogue states,” unlike the old Soviet leaders, cannot be deterred by nuclear weapons. This axiom is being used to justify not only the development of missile defenses but also a new, earth-penetrating “mini-nuke” that would supposedly hold the leaders of “rogue states” personally at risk in their underground bunkers. Although there is no evidence to support it, and the argument seems plausible only within the context of racist assumptions about Third World leaders' lack of rationality, the proposition that nuclear deterrence does not work on “rogue states” is now treated as self-evident by government officials.

Just as an earlier generation of government officials would have said “nuclear weapons keep the peace” as if merely articulating the obvious, so our current officials simply claim as fact that leaders of countries like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea cannot be deterred by nuclear weapons. Thus, Richard Perle said of Saddam Hussein, “I really don't want to count on the rational judgment of a man who used poison gas against his own peo-ple.” 2 And Paul Wolfowitz asked rhetorically, “If Saddam Hussein had the ability to strike a Western capital with a nuclear weapon, would he really be deterred by the prospect of a U.S. nuclear strike that would kill millions of Iraqis?” 3

Those who thought the answer to Wolfowitz's question would be “Yes, of course he would be deterred,” would find themselves in disagreement with the editors of the New York Times, whose reaction has typified the extraordinary credu-lousness with which the media have received such claims. A May 2 New York Times editorial, repeating the new common sense, said: “By their nature, rogue nations, sometimes ruled by irrational dictators, cannot be assumed to respond to the Cold War deterrence of ‘mutually assured destruction.’”

The next day, Times columnist William Safire drove the point home, asking, “Why should we make it possible for some tinpot dictator, unconcerned about retaliation, to hold an American city hostage?” 4 What we see happening here–aided and abetted by a striking lack of skepticism in the media–is the creation of a new axiom for what Jonathan Schell has called the “second nuclear age.”

The flip side of the emphasis on new threats from rogue states is an insistence that the old threat, Russia, is no longer an enemy. For example, Wolfowitz told the Senate that “we are engaged in discussions with Russia on a new security framework that reflects the fact that the Cold War is over and that the U.S. and Russia are not enemies.” 5 And George Bush, taking aim at the ABM Treaty, said that “Russia is not an enemy of the United States and yet we still go to a treaty that assumes Russia is the enemy, a treaty that says the whole concept of peace is based on us blowing each other up. I don't think that makes sense any more.” 6

THE PROPOSITION THAT NUCLEAR DETERRENCE DOES NOT WORK ON “ROGUE STATES” IS NOW TREATED AS SELF-EVIDENT.

The truth is, of course, that Russia may no longer be the enemy it once was, but it is not exactly a friend either. Friends do not keep thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert targeted against one another. Nor do they expel one another's diplomats 40 at a time. The new discourse overstates the transformation of U.S.-Russian relations so as to delegitimize the ABM Treaty the two countries signed in 1972 as a relic of the past, opening the way for construction of George Bush's cherished missile defense system. Bush administration officials have even suggested that treaties in general have become useless fetishes, revered out of habit, and that the fast-moving world of today requires a more flexible approach than treaties allow. Condoleezza Rice, George Bush's national security adviser, has said, for example, “There's a good reason not to get into 15-year negotiations, which is what it has taken to create arms control treaties.” 7 She also made the following remarkable statement:

HTE NEW DISCOURSE OVERSTATES THE TRANSFORMATION IN U.S.-RUSSIAN RELATIONS TO DELEGITIMIZE THE ABM TREATY, OPENING THE WAY FOR A MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM.

“I was one of the High Priestesses of Arms Control–a true believer. Like so many others, I eagerly anticipated those breathtaking moments of summitry where the centerpiece was always the signing of the latest arms control treaty; the toast; the handshake; and with Brezhnev, the bear hug. For those precious few moments the world found comfort in seeing the superpowers affirm their peaceful intent. And the scientists would set the clock back a few minutes further away from midnight. Deep down we knew that arms control was a poor substitute for a real agenda based on common aspirations…. But along the way to the next summit something happened. History happened. 1989. So, while many of us were debating the implications of MIRVs [multiple independent reentry vehicles] on SS-18s and Peacekeepers like so many angels dancing on a warhead, the forces of history were making the old paradigm obsolete…. We cannot cling to the old order–like medieval scholars clinging to a Ptolemaic system even after the Coper-nican revolution. We must recognize that the strategic world we grew up in has been turned upside down.” 8

This futuristic rhetoric is one of the most striking features of the new nuclear discourse, and it signifies a bold theft of the disarmament movement's rhetorical fire by the ideologues of the Pentagon. Cold War nuclear discourse was full of appeals for “caution,” “realism,” and “stability,” making a virtue of its distrust for radical measures, where the new nuclear discourse is all about futuristic weapons and bold measures. One might have expected to hear of the need for visionary thinking, the hopeful possibilities if only we can break with the assumptions of yesterday, from partisans of disarmament. Instead, we hear this discourse from Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz–veteran Cold Warriors all–who use it as a battering ram against the ABM Treaty.

“The ABM Treaty is a relic of the past,” said George Bush recently. “The days of the Cold War have ended, and so must the Cold War mentality as far as I'm concerned.” 9

Paul Wolfowitz used similar language: “A 30-year-old treaty designed to preserve the balance of terror during the Cold War must not be allowed to prevent us from taking steps to protect our people, our forces, and our allies.” 10

Virginia's John Warner, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, concurred: “The ABM Treaty has outlived its justification and foundations.” 11 Likewise, his colleague, North Carolina's Sen. Jesse Helms, said, “Russia must come to grips with the fact that the Cold War is over. It is time to scrap the ABM Treaty.” 12

This new rhetoric is more indebted to the logic of advertising than of strategic thinking. Advertisers use rhetoric glibly to create perceptions rather than to argue for truths, and they have learned that one of the easiest ways to discredit rival products, whatever their manifest virtues, is to make them seem old and outdated compared to one's own. While it is arguably the thinking of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz that is old and outdated, these creators of the new nuclear discourse have learned that by simply likening the ABM Treaty to mom and dad's Oldsmobile they do not need to get their hands dirty with arguments about the precise relationship between the ABM Treaty and strategic stability.

Perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of these purveyors of the new nuclear discourse is to have appropriated anti-nuclear critiques of nuclear deterrence in the service of a new generation of weaponry. Officials who only a decade ago would have derided the naïveté of disarmament advocates who criticized nuclear deterrence now sound like their erstwhile opponents. Paul Wolfowitz, for example, striking a sentimental note, began his recent testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee by saying that, in Israel during the Gulf War, “We saw children walking to school carrying gas masks in gaily decorated boxes–no doubt to try to distract them from the possibility of facing mass destruction. They were awfully young to have to think about the unthink-able.” 13

Jesse Helms, a staunch defender of deterrence throughout the Cold War, told the Senate two months earlier that it was time to “dispense with the illogical and immoral concept of mutually assured destruction.” 14 And Condoleezza Rice, recycling an argument often made by the anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s, said that “we need to recognize that just as peace is not the absence of war, stability is not a balance of terror.” 15

The new nuclear discourse holds out the hope that the United States and Russia can be friends and that, although rising military powers in the Third World may not be rational, we can be safe from their weapons of mass destruction, and indeed from the entire depressing logic of mutually assured destruction, if only we can let go of the ABM Treaty and build a new generation of defensive weapons that are almost within our technical grasp. Such weapons, being purely defensive, “threaten no one,” in the words of Donald Rumsfeld. “They bother no one, except a country … that thinks they want [to] have ballistic missiles to impose their will on their neighbors.” 16

“Once people begin to realize that this is not something that is a matter of gaining advantage over anyone but is a matter of reducing vulnerability for everybody, then I think they begin to look at it differently,” Wolfowitz told a press conference in Paris. 17

THE MOVEMENT IS LEFT TO DEFEND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE OR ARGUE FOR NUCLEAR ABOLITION–A GOAL THAT STRIKES MUCH OF THE PUBLIC AS NO LESS IDEALISTIC THAN THE PENTAGON'S BUCK ROGERS MISSILE DEFENSE SCHEME.

All discourses, especially government discourses, have something to hide, and this one is no exception. Although the Bush administration speaks of missile defense as a purely defensive technology designed to protect the United States from “rogue states” and not to change the balance of power with established nuclear powers, I have it on good authority from sources in the Clinton White House that, in their conversations out of public view, Pentagon planners are very interested in ways in which missile defense might be able to neutralize the 20 single-warhead missiles in China capable of hitting the United States, thus effectively disarming China.

Although Bush administration officials like to tell the public that missile defense is not “a matter of gaining advantage over anyone,” they tell the Senate something different. Thus Wolfowitz recently testified that “the countries pursuing these [ballistic missile] capabilities are doing so because … they believe that if they can hold the American people at risk, they can … deter us from defending our interests around the world…. They may secure, in their estimation, the capability to prevent us from forming international coalitions to challenge their acts of aggression and force us into a truly isolationist posture. And they would not even have to use the weapons in their possession to affect our behavior and achieve their ends.” 18 In other words, ballistic missile defense is a new means to the old dream of the Cold Warriors: achieving nuclear superiority. Insofar as it is about doing away with deterrence, it is only about abolishing the ability of other countries to deter the United States. As British anti-nuclear activist Helen Johns put it, “Ballistic missile defense is the armed wing of globalization. It is a euphemism for plans to ensure U.S. military and economic domination of the planet.” 19

The new nuclear discourse puts the disarmament movement in an awkward position. Its traditional rhetoric about the possibility of reconciliation with Russia and the existential darkness of deterrence have been hijacked by today's superannuated Cold Warriors as a way of justifying the abrogation of old arms control treaties, the construction of new weapons, and the militarization of space. Thus the movement is left either defending nuclear deterrence or arguing for nuclear abolition–a goal that strikes much of the public as no less idealistic than the Pentagon's Buck Rogers scheme for missile defense. But unless the disarmament movement learns to tell a compelling new story soon, very soon, the tall stories being told by the Bush administration will become the stories for our age.