Global Security and the War on Terror

Elite Power and the Illusion of Control

Paul Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415419383
• eBook ISBN: 9781134112036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

As the 'War on Terror' evolves into the 'Long War' against Islamo-fascism, it demands an enduring commitment to ensuring the security of the United States and its allies. This policy is based on the requirement to maintain control in a fractured and unpredictable global environment, while paying little attention to the underlying issues that lead to insecurity. It is an approach that is manifestly failing, as the continuing problems in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate.

Moreover, 'control' implies the maintenance of a global order that focuses on power remaining in the hands of a transnational elite community, principally focused on North America and Western Europe, but extending worldwide. This elite largely ignores socio-economic divisions and environmental constraints, and sees continuing stability as being best achieved by the maintenance of the status quo, using force when necessary.

This collection of essays by Professor Paul Rogers argues that this post-Cold War security paradigm is fundamentally misguided and unsustainable. It concludes with two new essays on the need for a new conception of global security rooted in justice and emancipation.

Global Security and the War on Terror will be essential reading for students and scholars of security studies, the Cold War, international relations and development studies.

Part I
Cold War and old war

Introduction

The Cold War came to an end in 1990 and, as a result, is not even a memory for at least 2 billion people across the world. As new generations emerge, it becomes, at best, an interesting sideline of history, even if there remains a residual awareness of the dangers of the nuclear arms race. Even so, one of the persistent themes that has long survived that era is that nuclear weapons kept the peace, with the superpower arsenals being the ultimate deterrent.

It is a theme that needs to be rejected for numerous reasons. The Cold War era was not a period of peace between the superpowers and their associates. Instead, proxy wars were fought across the world in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and elsewhere in which at least 10 million people were killed and 30 million injured. Nor was the nuclear arms race ‘safe’. Many analysts were deeply critical of the notion of stable deterrence at the time, and many of the sources of information that have become available since the end of the Cold War confirm their suspicions. During the course of the Cold War there were crises that came uncomfortably close to all-out nuclear war, there were many nuclear accidents, some involving the loss of nuclear weapons and others resulting in the release of radioactive contamination. Indeed a notable feature of the 1990s was the manner in which some of the leading figures of the Cold War era, once they had retired, became convinced supporters of radical moves towards a nuclear-free world.

Furthermore, the Cold War involved a 40-year diversion of a massive range of scientific and intellectual endeavour into an ideological and political confrontation at a time of immense human needs. At the height of the world food crisis of 1974, for example, when several tens of millions of people faced starvation and hundreds of millions were malnourished, a United Nations (UN) blueprint for a 10-year programme of radical improvements in tropical food production was costed at a level of barely 2 per cent of world spending on the military. Given that well over 80 per cent of world military spending was down to the NATO and Warsaw Pact alliances, one gets some appreciation of the diversion of resources. Not surprisingly, the UN proposals never got full funding and now, more then three decades later, the number of people malnourished is scarcely less than at that time.

The two essays in this first part approach the issue of the Cold War confrontation in different ways. The first concentrates on the era itself, with an emphasis on the development and potential consequences of the nuclear arms race. It says little about nuclear proliferation but seeks to indicate the manner in which an interconnected process of relationships between East and West resulted in the eventual deployment of around 70,000 nuclear weapons – sufficient to destroy all major centres of population many times over.

Although written in the late 1990s and covering the four decades from the late 1940s, there is a strong relevance to current developments. The excesses of the Cold War nuclear arsenals may have lessened, even if 10,000 or more nuclear weapons are still deployed, but all the major nuclear powers – the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China and Israel – see a long-term role for nuclear forces and all are modernising their systems. Furthermore, with the rise to nuclear status of India, Pakistan and now North Korea, and with nuclear ambitions developing across the Middle East, an understanding of some of the dangerous features of the Cold War may help provide a context for the years ahead.

At the same time, one of the more hopeful features of the Cold War was the development of alternative approaches to security, especially work undertaken in Europe in the 1980s on non-nuclear defence. The second essay, written in 1988 as the Cold War was just beginning to wind down, explores such approaches. There is some evidence that these ideas were taken up in the Soviet Union during the early part of the Gorbachev era and helped convince Soviet strategists that it was not necessary to match NATO at every level. Whatever the extent of this impact, what is also interesting is that some of the approaches to security that were based on ‘defensive defence’ do have a marked relevance to the post-Cold War.

1 Learning from the Cold War nuclear confrontation (1998)

Introduction

Since the ending of the Cold War in the early 1990s, two broad views of the confrontation have emerged. One contends that the Cold War ended in victory for the NATO alliance, with the Soviet bloc collapsing first into the Commonwealth of Independent States and a number of independent East European countries, and subsequently into an even looser alliance, with the Russian Federation itself under threat of decline if not disintegration. This analysis sees the nuclear confrontation as an essential part of the process, with stable nuclear deterrence providing a security context within which the much greater free market economic success of Western liberal democracies could ultimately lead to the downfall of a rigid centrally planned economic system. Central to this was the manner in which the Eastern bloc was forced into crippling defence budgets in a desperate attempt to maintain military parity with NATO.

An alternative view acknowledges the role of excessive defence commitments in hastening the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but is critical of the Cold War era as being both massively wasteful of human and material resources and also a highly dangerous period with great potential for disaster. It is pointed out that when Cold War military spending peaked in the late 1980s, it made up rather more than 80 per cent of world military expenditure of around $1,000 billion per annum (at 1998 prices). Not only is this held to be a wasteful diversion of state spending away from pressing national and international human needs, but it also required an immense commitment of scientific and technical capabilities which might otherwise have been available to civil use.

A further development of this view is that the 45 years of the Cold War produced a military/technological momentum which has given rise to numerous advanced military developments which are proliferating across the world in the post-Cold War era. These include biological and chemical weapons, ballistic and cruise missiles, and conventional weapons of mass destruction such as fuel-air explosives, cluster weapons and other areaimpact munitions.

The Cold War critique also places emphasis on the dangers of the nuclear confrontation, arguing that nuclear deterrence was far from stable, that there were nuclear accidents and near-disastrous crises and that the much-vaunted notion of stable nuclear deterrence was, to an extent, a myth.

In the 1990s, support for this view has come from some unlikely sources, in particular from a number of former senior military officers and security advisers such as one-time US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the retired head of US Strategic Command, General Lee Butler. Such people are becoming strong advocates of proposals to move rapidly towards further reductions in numbers of nuclear weapons, with some raising the possibility of a nuclear-free world. They argue that the ending of the Cold War does not in any sense rule out the risk of nuclear confrontation, an argument given weight by an event occurring not during a period of peak tension at the height of the Cold War but several years after the East–West confrontation had begun to decay.

Early on the morning of 25 January 1995, a Norwegian-US research team launched a large four-stage Black Brant XII rocket as part of a long-term programme to observe the Northern Lights. The rocket was launched from an island off the North Coast of Norway, an area which had been a very sensitive part of the Cold War, given that it could have been a launch zone for US submarine-launched ballistic missiles aimed at targets in the former Soviet Union.¹

To avoid false alarms, such experiments were notified in advance to the relevant Russian authorities, and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry had sent a letter to them reporting an impending launch of a research rocket in late January or early February depending on weather conditions. Probably as a result of the chaotic state of the Russian bureaucracy at the time, this message had not been received by Russian radar crews. Moreover, the Black Brant XII rocket was much larger than previous experiments and its four stages resembled the multiple stages of a US submarine-launched Trident missile.

The Trident D5 missile carries six substantial thermonuclear warheads and, to the radar operators, it was not possible to dismiss the idea that it might be part of a surprise attack on Russia. Within minutes, the alert had reached the highest levels in Russia and, possibly for the first time, Yeltsin’s ‘nuclear briefcase’ was activated. It would have been possible for a Trident missile launched from off the Norwegian coast to have delivered its warheads over Moscow within 20 minutes, giving President Yeltsin very little time to decide whether to launch a retaliatory strike. In the event, the early warning system was able to detect, within those 20 minutes, that the Black Brant rocket was not heading for Russian territory, and the alert status was reduced.²

Part of the explanation for this sudden and dangerous alert lay with an event in 1987 when a young German, Mathias Rust, flew a light aircraft right across Russia to Moscow and landed in Red Square. Rust’s ability to evade detection by Soviet air defences had had a profound effect on the system, making operatives highly sensitive to the need to avoid being caught out. Thus, at several levels up the ladder of command, officers decided to play safe and pass on the alert rather than check in detail before doing so.

When they first detected the Black Brant rocket, the radar operators could be blamed for causing a false alarm if they passed on details of the launch, but they were concerned that the rocket could just have been part of a missile attack and passed on responsibility to a higher level. The general on duty adopted a similar stance, not least because the ‘missile’ could have been equipped with an electromagnetic pulse warhead designed to explode high over Moscow and disrupt the Russian command and control system as a prelude to a more general attack.³

Once the warning of the rocket’s trajectory had been passed on to the Russian command and control system, Kazbek, predetermined procedures came into operation, ending with alerts in the three nuclear briefcases held by the Russia President, Defence Minister and Chief of Staff. With the command and control system now operating in combat mode, the trajectory of the rocket was monitored as Yeltsin and his colleagues conferred. Only when it was concluded that the rocket was not a threat was the alert terminated, the whole episode lasting just a few minutes.

The January 1995 incident happened after the Cold War and at a time of relatively low East–West tensions, yet it prompted an immediate high-level alert. Evidence from a number of sources now indicates that there were several false alarms during the Cold War, coupled with numerous nuclear accidents. Together, they indicate a degree of danger during many of the Cold War years which turns out to be fully supportive of the much-derided warnings of anti-nuclear campaigners, so often dismissed as scaremongering at the time.

This chapter examines some of the developing evidence of these dangers and suggests some lessons which arise from this experience. To put this in perspective, though, a brief examination of the general history of Cold War nuclear weapons developments and a more detailed discussion of their potential use is appropriate, not least because this wider context also has a relevance to the future.

Origins and development of Cold War strategic nuclear arsenals

Nuclear weapons were originally developed as a result of the collaborative Manhattan Project in the United States, with the first atomic device tested on 16 July 1945 and atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August of that year. The Manhattan Project embraced an immediate production capability as well as being a research and development project – had Japan not surrendered in August 1945, as many as ten more atom bombs could have been produced within six months.

Following the end of the war, the United States Congress passed the McMahon Energy Act in 1946, one of its provisions being the ending of involvement in the nuclear project of states such as Britain, a factor which encouraged Britain’s Attlee government to initiate its own nuclear programme. Within the United States, progress was rapid and an arsenal of some fifty free-fall atom bombs was available by 1948, these being deliverable first by Second World War vintage planes such as the B-29, but then by the first of the new intercontinental bombers, the B-36.⁴ The Soviet nuclear programme was initiated by the mid-1940s and made rapid progress, leading to the first atomic test in 1949. Both states moved rapidly into the field of fusion or thermonuclear weapons, with the United States testing a device in 1952, followed a year later by the Soviet Union. Britain tested its fission bomb in the same year, and a fusion bomb in 1957. France started a nuclear programme in the early 1950s, testing its first device in 1960, and China followed suit in 1964. Israel’s nuclear programme probably delivered useable nuclear weapons by the very early 1970s, India tested a device in 1974, and South African and Pakistani efforts came rather later.

By the mid-1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a full-scale nuclear arms race comprising very powerful nuclear weapons delivered initially by bombers. Concerns over their vulnerability to air defences resulted in intensive programmes to develop ballistic missile nuclear delivery systems, initially with medium and intermediate range missiles based in Europe (and an attempted Soviet basing in Cuba which resulted in the 1962 missile crisis).

The next stage was the development of 8,000-mile range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); the first test was conducted by the Soviet Union in 1957, and the United States was the first to deploy them three years later. These ICBMs were based on land, were liquid-fuelled and were slow to prepare for launching, making them vulnerable to surprise attack. If a missile took several hours to prepare for launching, but had a flight-time of less than 30 minutes, there was a vulnerability that led on readily to the ‘use them or lose them’ outlook.

More immediately, other solutions to this problem of missile vulnerability were sought. One was to develop ICBMs with storable solid fuels which could be kept at more or less instant readiness for launch. A second was to place them in heavily protected underground silos which could survive almost anything short of a direct nuclear strike, and the third was to develop submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), which could be fired from large nuclear-powered submarines when submerged and which were, at least in theory, impossible to detect and destroy.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union went on to develop so-called ‘triads’ of strategic nuclear forces based on ICBMs, SLBMs and heavy bombers. Overall, though, the Soviet Union placed most emphasis on ICBMs and least emphasis on bombers, whereas the United States developed a more balanced set of forces.

During the late 1950s, both superpowers developed extremely powerful weapons, with the largest of the missile warheads and free-fall bombs having destructive yields of 10–25 megatons, a megaton being equivalent to 1,000,000 tons of conventional high explosive such as TNT. Used against cities, these would be utterly devastating – a 25 megaton warhead detonated at an altitude of 100,000 feet would cause near total devastation over an area of 500 square miles and would cause serious fires up to 25 miles from the point of detonation. Many of the early devices were tested in the atmosphere at ground level and the resultant controversies over the effects of radioactive fallout were early prompts for anti-nuclear campaigning in a number of countries.

By the late 1960s, production lines for several types of strategic nuclear weapon were operating intensively in the United States and the Soviet Union, and strategic nuclear arsenals were numbered in the thousands. There was a belief in the need to have very large forces to ensure the survival of some part of a nuclear arsenal in time of war, but the extent of the forces amounted to a remarkable degree of ‘overkill’. Given that the destruction of a handful of major cities and centres of industrial production could devastate the economies of either the United States or the Soviet Union, there was already a developing air of unreality, but this was to be carried to extremes with two new strategic developments under way by the early 1970s.⁵

The first was the development of multiple warheads on each missile, a number of smaller warheads giving a wider ‘spread’ over a larger target and ensuring greater destructive capability. These multiple re-entry vehicles (MRVs) were then superseded by multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) in which each warhead could be directed at a different target. The US Poseidon SLBM was an example of a MIRVed missile – carrying ten warheads (fourteen over a reduced range), it could direct them at targets spread over an area of well over 20,000 square miles.⁶

This MIRVing of missiles coincided with the second round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) negotiations from 1972 to 1979. At the very time when these talks aimed to curb increases in numbers of missiles, the two negotiating superpowers were rapidly increasing the number of warheads on each missile, negating the very basis of the talks. Thus, over the seven years of the talks, the United States increased its strategic warhead numbers from 5,700 to 9,000 and the Soviet increase was from 2,100 to 5,000.

In parallel with this MIRVing was a remarkable increase in warhead accuracy. Early missiles were able to deliver large single warheads to within one to two miles of their target, but major improvements in guidance made it theoretically possible for warheads to be accurate enough to destroy missiles in hardened underground silos. By 1980 the United States had a missile, the Minuteman III, which had an accuracy of 600 feet CEP (circular error probable – a 50 per cent chance of a warhead landing within this distance of the target).

Highly accurate missiles carrying multiple warheads could theoretically ‘disarm’ an opponent’s land-based missiles while leaving the attacker with many missiles in reserve. Developments in anti-submarine warfare and air defences also suggested that other legs of the strategic triad might have some vulnerability, and the notion of a ‘disarming first strike’ acquired impetus, leading to the developmen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Cold War and Old War
• Part II: A Jungle Full of Snakes
• Part III: Force and Counterforce
• Part IV: After 9/11
• Part V: An Illusion of Control
• Notes