Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  The North Korean negotiating style certainly leaves a good deal to be de sired. They make dramatic announcements (“We have nuclear weapons!”), flounce out of treaties they have signed (like the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in 2002), and try to change the meaning of deals they have signed before the ink is dry on the paper (like last week). It is the behaviour of people who have no experience of negotiations between equals—and, indeed, people raised in the authoritarian, almost Orwellian system that prevails in North Korea are very unlikely to have had that experience. But these are also shrewd negotiating tactics for people who are so weak that they have practically no cards in their hand. If you have no way to make other parties pay attention to your concerns, threatening to be unreasonable and cause a lot of damage is a good way to get them to listen. Even teenagers know that.

  North Korea has no real cards in its hand. With half as many people as South Korea, it has an economy around one-tenth the size, and much of that goes to maintaining a military establishment that is more or less capable of matching the South Korean and American forces that confront it on the Korean Peninsula. Its people live on the brink of starvation (although Kim Jong Il clearly eats very well), and its ability to threaten the United States directly is precisely zero.

  When the Bush administration designated North Korea as part of the “axis of evil,” perhaps next for the treatment after Iraq, Pyongyang panicked. It had long been working on nuclear weapons secretly (and cheating on an earlier agreement to stop doing so), because it believed that they would deter an American attack, even if they could only reach nearby targets. Suddenly it pulled out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and announced that it actually had operational nukes—though it may well have been bluffing.

  That unleashed the so-called crisis of the past few years, but all North Korea was really looking for was a guarantee that it would not be attacked, and for some foreign aid. That was essentially what it got in the deal of November 19—North Korea agreed to abandon its nuclear-weapons program in exchange for economic aid, security assurances and improved ties with the United States—so the “crisis” should be over now.

  It wasn’t, unfortunately, because the U.S. Treasury Department suddenly imposed financial sanctions on North Korea on the (unproven) grounds that Pyongyang was counterfeiting U.S. dollars. It’s still not clear whether this was a deliberate spoiling move by hard-liners within the Bush administration or just poor policy coordination, but the 2005 deal fell apart. A year later, North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon.

  By 2007, inevitably, there was a new deal along much the same lines as the old one: North Korea promised to shut down the nuclear reactor that produced its fissile material, and was guaranteed a million tons of oil in return. By then, however, Pyongyang had at least two nuclear weapons (though nobody knows how well they work), and it looks like it gets to keep them.

  The lesson? If you bribe somebody to be good, and that’s your only leverage over them, then you should pay up.

  February 18, 2009

  A COLLISION AT SEA

  A ship I once served in had a small brass plate on the bridge with a quotation from Thucydides, the Greek statesman, historian and seaman of the fourth century BC: “A collision at sea can ruin your whole day.” It is still true.

  It is harder to collide at sea than on land, since there are no blind curves and nothing moves much faster than a bicycle, so my normal reaction to a collision at sea is to think “How can they have been so stupid?” But here is a collision that beggars the imagination.

  In the Atlantic Ocean, on the night of February 3–4, at an undisclosed depth, the British nuclear submarine Vanguard and the French nuclear submarine Le Triomphant ran into each other. Both boats were “boomers,” missile-firing submarines carrying sixteen ballistic missiles, each of which can deliver several nuclear warheads at intercontinental range.

  The Atlantic is the second biggest ocean in the world. The submarines are considerably smaller: around 145 metres long. So there they are, puttering along at six knots or less, with an entire ocean to play in, and freedom in three dimensions (they can go very deep if they want)—and they run into each other. The damage was slight, but it ruined the day for two whole navies. How could they have been so stupid?

  All right, it’s not quite that simple. The boomers—not just British and French missile-firing submarines but American and Russian ones, too—congregate in specific parts of the Atlantic that are called “nesting grounds.” They need deep water that is relatively quiet, and they need to stay in range of their targets. In practice, then, they have only a quarter of the Atlantic to play with.

  That still ought to be enough, but they are also deliberately running blind. If they operated their “active” sonar (the thing that goes “ping” in the war movies), they would detect everything on and below the surface for many kilometres around them—but everything they heard would also hear them.

  They mustn’t allow this to happen. Their job is to hide out in the depths of the ocean as a last-ditch nuclear deterrent that cannot be found and destroyed in a surprise attack. So they only run the “passive” sonar, which listens to all the noises in the water but does not give away their own position.

  Unfortunately, passive sonar cannot hear vessels that are not making any noise—and modern submarines are designed to be ultra-quiet. In this case, they actually closed to touching distance without detecting each other’s presence.

  The subs were obviously on courses that converged slowly because the damage was minor and only in the bows. If one had gone straight into the side of the other, however, then both could have been destroyed. Down to the bottom go their nuclear reactors, plus anything up to a hundred or so nuclear warheads on their missiles.

  Both crews would have been lost—more than two hundred men—but that would have been the end of it. None of the nukes would have exploded, and it really doesn’t matter if there are a couple of tons of highly radioactive material scattered on the deep ocean floor hundreds of kilometres from the nearest land. Nevertheless, the incident reminds us that although the Cold War ended twenty years ago, the boomers of all the great powers are still out there on patrol, nuclear weapons at the ready, as if this were 1975. There is not a single good reason for them all to be doing this, but nobody has told them to stop. Why not?

  Because we don’t know what the future might bring? Perhaps, and as such I didn’t say scrap the subs tomorrow, but tie them up in port and stop this nonsense. If we all end up in a new Cold War one day, then okay, you can have them back, but why are they cruising around out there now?

  You have to keep the crews trained? Well, train them in other nuclear submarines—or if they really must train in these particular boats, then take the missiles out. It is not sane to keep deploying these instruments of mass death when no major power fears an attack by any other.

  And, by the way, if you could all agree to stop these ridiculous patrols, it would be a useful step towards the more sweeping measures of nuclear disarmament that all the great powers say they want, and that President Barack Obama has adopted as a serious goal.

  Obama is the first occupant of the White House since Ronald Reagan with the vision to imagine a future free of nuclear weapons, and unlike Reagan he’s smart enough not to let the guardians of nuclear orthodoxy talk him out of it. He has a lot on his plate right now, but here’s a step in the right direction that costs nothing: announce that the U.S. Navy will no longer run “combat patrols” with its nuclear-missile-firing submarines, and invite the world’s other nuclear-weapons powers to follow suit.

  After this little demonstration of folly, they’d all come along pretty promptly.

  I suspect that Obama doesn’t read my articles because he did not act on that perfectly sensible suggestion. On the other hand, he did cancel the preposterous Bush commitment to install Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) radars and launchers in Eastern Europe, ostensibly to stop Iranian missiles with nuclear warheads from reaching the United States.<
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  Ballistic missile defences sound less noxious than nuclear-tipped missiles, but in fact they are the other side of the same equation. If the BMD actually works, then deterrence doesn’t work: the side with the BMD can nuke the other side and not worry about retaliation. This didn’t matter much in the case of the Iranians, who had no nuclear weapons, but the prospect of American BMD in Eastern Europe drove the Russians crazy.

  September 19, 2009

  DEAD WALRUSES

  “Some experts have doubts about the missile-shield concept,” as the more cautious reporters put it. (That example comes from the BBC website.) A franker journalist would say that the ballistic-missile defence system that the Bush administration planned for Poland and the Czech Republic, and that President Barack Obama has just cancelled, has never worked and shows few signs of ever doing so.

  Obama has done the right thing. It saves money that would have been wasted, and it repairs relations with Russia, which was paranoid about the system being so close to its borders. And the cancellation also signals a significant decline in the paranoia in Washington about Iran.

  “Paranoia” is the right word in both cases. Iran doesn’t have any missiles that could even come within range of the BMD system that was slated for Poland and the Czech Republic, let alone nuclear warheads to put on them. According to U.S. intelligence assessments, Iran is not working on nuclear weapons, nor on missiles that could reach Europe, let alone the United States. Washington’s decision to deploy the system anyway was so irrational that it made the Russians paranoid as well.

  Their intelligence services told them the same thing that the U.S. intelligence community told the Bush administration: that Iran had no nuclear weapons or long-range ballistic missiles, nor any possibility of getting them for five to ten years. So what was the U.S. really doing in setting up the system so close to Russia’s borders?

  The intelligence people in Moscow also told Russian leaders that the U.S. system was useless junk that had never managed to intercept an incoming missile in an honest operational test. (All the tests were shamelessly rigged to make it easy for the intercepting missiles to strike their targets, and still they failed most of the time.) Besides, although the planned BMD base in Poland was close to Russia, it was in the wrong place to intercept Russian missiles.

  So why did the Russians get paranoid about it? Because although they knew how the American military-industrial complex worked—they have similar problems with their own domestic version—they simply could not believe that the United States would spend so much money on something so stupid and pointless. Surely there was something they were missing; some secret American strategy that would put them at a disadvantage.

  No, there wasn’t, and almost everybody (except some Poles and Czechs who want U.S. troops on their soil as a guarantee against Russian misbehaviour, and some people on the American right) was pleased by Obama’s decision to pull the plug on the project. But why did the Bush administration choose to deploy this non-functioning weapons system in Eastern Europe in the first place?

  The answer lies in another weapons project that began in 1946: the nuclear-powered airplane. It could stay airborne for months and fly around the world without refuelling, its boosters promised, and that would give America a huge strategic advantage. There was only one problem. The nuclear reactor needed a lot of shielding, as the aircrew would be only feet away. The shields had to be made of lead. And lead-filled airplanes cannot fly.

  Fifteen years and about ten billion dollars later (in today’s money), there was still no viable design for a nuclear-powered bomber, let alone a flyable prototype. Ballistic missiles were taking over the job of delivering nuclear warheads anyway, and so, when Robert McNamara became defence secretary in the Kennedy administration in 1961, he was astonished to discover that the nuclear-powered aircraft was still in the defence budget. It was, he said, “as if I came down to breakfast in the morning and found a dead walrus on the dining-room table.” It took McNamara two years to kill the program, against fierce opposition from the air force and defence industry, and the fact that the nuclear-powered aircraft did not and could not work was irrelevant.

  Former general Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency is perhaps best remembered for his warning against what he called the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell speech in 1960, but he actually gave two warnings. The other was that “public policy could become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” These were the lobbies that kept the nuclear airplane going for seventeen years, and they have kept the BMD system going for more than a quarter-century.

  President Obama has killed the most pointlessly provocative of the Ballistic Missile Defence deployments, but he still cannot take the political risk of admitting that the system doesn’t work (though he twice explained in his speech that the United States needed missile defence systems that were “proven and cost-effective”). It is the grandchild of Star Wars, a sacred relic blessed by Saint Ronald Reagan himself, and it will keep appearing at dining-room tables for years to come.

  18.

  OF TIME AND HUMAN NATURE

  November 28, 2004

  HUMAN MONSTERS

  “He could be very entertaining,” Stalin’s niece Kira Alliluyeva told biographer Robert Service in 1998. The dictator had her jailed in his last round of purges, after the Second World War, but she still remembered how kind he had been to her when she was a little girl, how he took her on his knee and sang songs to her—and that he had a fine singing voice. Not only that, he wrote limpid poetry in Georgian as a youth, read Dostoevsky and his subordinates saw him as a considerate boss.

  He also had millions of people killed, which is why, until Service’s recent book, Stalin: A Biography, people were reluctant to write about his human side. Yet a moment’s thought will tell you that the “great” dictators could never have achieved such power over other people if there were not something attractive about their personalities.

  Maybe it’s the fact that most of their victims are no longer with us that now makes it possible to see the mass murderers of the mid-twentieth century as complex human beings rather than mere one-dimensional monsters. It will be quite a while before some brave Cambodian makes the first film that shows the human side of Pol Pot, and in China they haven’t gotten around yet to admitting officially that Mao Zedong was a monster. But in Europe, where the horrors are a bit more distant in time, it’s all the rage.

  The current wave of books and films about human monsters began with a couple of ground-breaking Italian biographies that showed the human side of Benito Mussolini, but he wasn’t really on the first team of mass murderers. Service’s biography of Stalin is different—and so is Bernd Eichinger’s groundbreaking film on the last days of Hitler, Der Untergang (Downfall).

  Released in Germany to generally positive reviews in September, Downfall is the first German film to tackle Hitler directly—fifty-nine years after the man’s death. Set in the last twelve days of Hitler’s life, as the Soviet army fought its way towards his deep, multi-storey bunker in central Berlin in April 1945, it documents his rages and his self-pity, and depicts him as an ordinary human being.

  Hitler says “please” and “thank you.” He eats pasta. He is kind to the terrified women who continue to carry out their secretarial duties as the apocalypse rages overhead. When he finally marries his mistress Eva Braun (which he always refrained from doing because, he said, he was wedded to the German people), he is implicitly accepting that his life is over, and that they will have to die in a little while—but he kisses her gently on the lips.

  It’s all true, based on the accounts of people who were in the bunker and survived, but the film stirred up a storm in Germany. Most of the criticisms echoed the words of Golo Mann, one of Hitler’s first biographers, who warned thirty years ago that the more biographers explored Hitler’s origins and psychology, the more inclined people would be to understand him. From there, Mann said, “it is only a small step towards forgiving and
then admiring.” But that is not true.

  Admitting that Hitler and the other great murderers were human is painful, but to deny it is to absolve ourselves of any moral connection to what happened. Whatever the risks involved in acknowledging our common humanity, they are outweighed by the need to understand that it is human beings, not instantly recognizable as moral monsters, who commit great atrocities.

  Consider Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the revolutionary hero whose iconic image, taken from a 1960 photo, once graced millions of students’ walls. There is no doubt that injustice inspired genuine rage in him. Since he never got to rule anywhere, however, his image is unsullied by any knowledge of what he would have done if he actually had power.

  There has been a film out about Che, too. Called The Motorcycle Diaries, it follows the epic trip he and a friend made up the length of Latin America on an old Norton 500 in 1952. It documents how these young Argentine sons of privilege had their eyes opened to the realities of poverty and exploitation in Latin America—and leaves them just before Che joined Fidel Castro in his Mexican exile and began his own meteoric revolutionary career.

  Che comes across as an attractive human being, and his dedication to the poor is clearly genuine. But the ideology he espoused in order to change the human sorrow he saw was Marxism, and he did not water it down. He used to prostrate himself before portraits of Stalin, and advocated “relentless hatred of the enemy that … [transforms] us into effective, violent, selective and cold killing machines.” If Che Guevara had led a successful revolution in Bolivia, instead of dying in the attempt in 1967, there would certainly have been mass killing.

  Mass murder in the name of a principle is as human as apple pie, borsht and steamed rice. Treating the perpetrators as space aliens simply disguises the nature of the problem. The potential mass killers live among us, as they always have. They often have perfectly good manners; some even have high ideals. And the only way the rest of us have to keep them from power is to remember always that the end does not justify the means.