INDEPTH: BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENCE
Ending the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty
CBC News Online | December 6, 2004
The facts are eerily familiar. A plane flies out in the morning to cause terrible destruction and by evening, with the cost in lives and devastation around Ground Zero still months, years, away from being counted, a whole new idea has entered the human imagination. Like the AIDS of international conflict: what's this? A whole new scourge we've never even heard of before? So new it needs a name. We'll call it the "atomic bomb," the A-bomb for short. Or, after you've lived with the idea for a while, just The Bomb.
Hiroshima |
The Enola Gay was a specially fitted B-29 Superfortress. It dropped a single uranium bomb that exploded 2,000 feet in the air, in an attempt to make it as destructive as possible. About 70,000 people died in the explosion in Hiroshima, twice that by the end of the year. Three days later another. Nagasaki. A quarter of the 270,000 inhabitants dead by the end of the year. In both cases, the destruction mythic in its dimensions. It was August 1945, the end of the War.
The mushroom cloud, symbol of the most terrible destructive power ever witnessed, was the backdrop to the world for decades after the Second World War. Arguments persist about whether The Bomb should have been dropped at all but, unarguably, it was out in the world now. We were stuck with it.
The Russians soon had one – spying, like The Bomb, filled the popular imagination – and as relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union grew worse and worse through the 1950s and ’60s, The Bomb, as an idea, was everywhere.
Sputnik |
In the ’50s, Americans twice elected a general and war hero as president. In 1957, when the Soviet Union launched The Space Age with the satellite Sputnik, folks in the West weren’t applauding Soviet ingenuity or talking about leaps for mankind. Instead they were having nightmares about nukes in space. The Space Race, like everything else, seemed one with The Arms Race.
Books, movies and popular music were awash with war and secret agents and imaginings of the post-apocalyptic world, never pretty. We talked about megatons, and Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (we all called them ICBMs), and “survivability.” The comedy movie Dr. Strangelove (1964) and the not-so-funny novel Fail-Safe (1962) both considered the consequences of dropping The Bomb in error, considered by many at the time to be a distinct possibility.
When, in the summer of 1961, the Berlin Wall went up, the universal question was, “Will the nukes come out?” A year later, when U.S. spy planes discovered the Russians setting up missile bases in Cuba, it became almost impossible to not watch the sky, and cities were testing their air-raid sirens. Families were spending thousands of dollars on fallout shelters (more complex than mere bomb shelters), and the question of who you’d let into yours ranged from a party game to a university seminar.
The 1963 Canadian federal election between John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives and Lester Pearson’s Liberals turned on the issue of whether missiles based on Canadian soil should have nuclear warheads. The Liberals were in favour and won.
But there was hope in The Bomb situation, though it was considered tenuous by many. It was called “mutual deterrence.” As long as each side knew that the other would hit back with devastating consequences, the theory went, neither side would dare drop The Bomb on the other, whatever the provocation. There was no advantage to being first. There was still the Dr. Strangelove possibility, but no system’s perfect.
It may have seemed a tenuous safety catch for a weapon that size but by the end of the ’60s we were all still unnuked, though international tempers had flared more than once and research on both sides continued at an explosive rate.
And then the ABM, the Anti-Ballistic Missile, upset the balance. A defensive weapon that could destroy incoming missiles was the strongest offensive weapon of the bunch. If you had those you could actually send your missiles to bomb the other guys and when they tried to hit back you could stop their missiles from getting through.
Now you could be the first and get away with it. Unless, of course, the other guy plowed billions into more and trickier missiles for which you would need an ever-growing shield. The possibilities turned, again, toward the more terrible.
SALT I, the first of two Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, addressed the issue and on May 26, 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, signed the Treaty on Anti-Ballistic Systems. The treaty restricted ABM deployment so severely that it effectively reduced their defensive power to a small part of the country. Mutual deterrence was intact.
And so things have largely stayed, long after the world of two-superpowers-head-to-head has changed dramatically. These days, it’s arguable we need protection more from individuals and small groups than from nations, more from insiders than from outsiders, more from insidious packages than from incoming flights of hardware. But U.S. President Bush warns that just because we’ve come to fear a new kind of threat, that doesn’t mean we can let our guard down on an old one, especially with the memory of Hiroshima in mind.
The Red Menace is gone and, just as during the Second World War, a common enemy has made Russia and the U.S. (tentative) allies again. But the world is certainly not at peace. And, Bush reminds us, “rogue states” with nuclear capability are just as menacing as any Reds. Many worry that an end to the ABM Treaty could froth up another arms race. It’s a risk George Bush is obviously willing to take. On December 13, 2001, he announced the U.S. intention to unilaterally end the ABM treaty in six months, the amount of lead-time that he was required to give Russia. Russia’s President Putin called the move “a mistake.” He pointed, as have many others including Americans, to almost three decades of nuclear peace that the treaty has helped ensure. He added he did not think Washington’s decision would affect Russian security.
Supporters of that decision said it was necessary so the U.S. could develop and test a system to defend itself from missiles fired by rogue states. Opponents argued it would be a fatal blow to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and would lead to the spread of nuclear weapons to smaller countries or groups like al-Qaeda.
On June 13, 2002, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty expired. It was the first time in decades that the U.S had withdrawn from a major treaty.
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