Old Thinking and New Weapons

The month of August marks the 44th birthday of the nuclear age. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. August 6 also marks the fourth birthday of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's nuclear disarmament offensive. It was on that day in 1985 that the Soviet Union began its unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapons testing. That moratorium lasted for a year and a half while the Soviets waited in vain for a reciprocal response from the United States.

Four years ago, official American opinion held the test moratorium to be a clever piece of "Red" trickery. But time has proven that it was only the first shot in Gorbachev's ongoing campaign to create a breathing space for his domestic reforms by demilitarizing and defusing the East-West conflict. In the months and years that followed, Gorbachev made a series of ground-breaking proposals aimed at dismantling many of the nuclear and conventional military barricades of the Cold War. One of Gorbachev's proposals, his unconditional acceptance of the "zero option" on intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, proved irresistible even to the Reagan administration.

Since the completion of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement, Gorbachev's peace offensive has continued unabated. The Soviets are out of Afghanistan and are cooperating in the resolution of "regional conflicts" in southern Africa and Indochina. They are also currently implementing a unilateral reduction of their European troop strength and observing a unilateral moratorium on the production of weapons-grade plutonium. But responses from the Bush administration have not been forthcoming.

Shortly after his election, George Bush announced that his administration would, in its first months, undertake a thoroughgoing multiagency review of U.S. strategic policy in light of recent changes in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. On the face of it, this seemed to be an appropriate course of action. America's official geopolitical cosmology is still essentially the one set forth in the late 1940s, at the dawn of the Cold War. The world has now clearly changed, and, to borrow a Gorbachevian catch phrase, some "new thinking" is clearly in order.

As this is written, the Bush administration has had almost five months of thinking time. The results of this process can be assessed. And they are not encouraging. The times offer historic opportunities to shape a new, post-nuclear international order rooted in cooperation and democratic values. But America's new leadership seems to offer only a fear of change and a timid clinging to the status quo.

Bush recognizes the need to appease pro-Gorbachev public opinion in Europe and America. But he refuses to entertain thoughts of a non-nuclear world and is surrounded by voices, such as that of his Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, that insist that a return to the bad old days is inevitable. Between the tugging of past and future, the president seems paralyzed.

THE FIRST EVIDENCE OF THIS paralysis in the face of history has come on the question of short-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Gorbachev has effectively declared an end to the Cold War and offered to retool the Soviets' European military presence into purely defensive formations. In that changed political environment, the logic that has littered Central Europe with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads (on short-range missiles, aircraft, mines, and artillery shells) would seem to be on its last legs. Those weapons supposedly exist to offset Soviet advantages in the always-unlikely event of a land invasion from the East.

In the new, improved East-West climate, European public opinion, echoed by the government of West Germany (where the bulk of the Euronukes are berthed), has clamored for the realization of the dream of a nuclear-free Europe. Gorbachev has indicated his readiness to enter negotiations toward that end.

President Bush, faced with this genuinely new and revolutionary prospect, tried instead to cling to a regimen of old thinking and new weapons. Instead of a nuclear-free Europe, he called for a modernization of short-range missiles that amounted to the introduction of a whole new short-range nuclear system. In the brave, new world of 1989, the United States could offer only the solutions of 1946. Uncle Sam started looking more and more like Rip Van Winkle.

American pigheadedness also threatened to split the NATO alliance, where only the "Iron Lady" of Britain came to our side. As a result, Bush was forced into the very confrontation with new international realities that he seemed so desperate to avoid. With the NATO summit looming, Bush went outside of his sleepwalking circle of advisers and quickly developed his proposal for a year-long process of U.S.-Soviet negotiations toward conventional force reductions, to be followed by negotiations on a partial reduction of short-range nuclear arsenals.

For the present, this sign of some political life in the Bush administration was enough to appease the Right-Center government in West Germany and deflect immediate movement toward a nuclear-free Europe. But, in the long run, it only postpones the hour of reckoning. Eventually the Bush administration will have to decide whether it stands with the future or the past.

Big decisions on that score are also ahead as the START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) re-convene in Geneva. These talks were on hold while the Bush administration did its rethinking. But, at this writing, the United States appears to be going to Geneva empty-handed, if not empty-headed. The Bush arms control team is still mostly made up of Reaganaut anti-arms control holdovers. The Star Wars program, though shrinking in budget share, remains as official doctrine. While heading into negotiations supposedly aimed at reducing land-based strategic missiles, the Bush administration has committed itself to a whole new line of those weapons (the Midgetman) and proposed yet another mobile-basing mode for the MX.

While the administration remains frozen by its allegiance to old verities (and friendly defense contractors), the Democrats are, for the most part, similarly immobilized. For the Democrats, the main freezing agent is their political fear of appearing "soft on defense." At this point, it seems that only a dose of shock treatment from the voting (and marching) public will cause America's leaders to stir from their stupor and face the new world.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.