Paper Defense

By George F. Will
The Washington Post, 07 June 1998

In the meadow of the president’s mind, in the untended portion where foreign policy thoughts
sprout randomly, this flower recently bloomed concerning the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests:
“I cannot believe that we are about to start the 21st century by having the Indian subcontinent
repeat the worst mistakes of the 20th century.”

What mistakes did he mean? Having nuclear weapons? Were it not for them, scores of
thousands
of Americans would have died in 1945 ending the fighting in the Pacific. And nuclear weapons
were indispensable ingredients of the containment of the Soviet Union and its enormous
conventional forces.

Perhaps the president meant that arms competitions were the “mistakes.” But that thought
does
not rise to the level of adult commentary on the real historical contingencies and choices of
nations.

This president’s utterances on foreign policy often are audible chaff, and not even his
glandular
activities are as embarrassing as his sub-sophomoric pronouncement to India and Pakistan that
“two wrongs don’t make a right.” That bromide was offered to nations weighing what they
consider questions of national life and death.

U.S. policy regarding such tests has been put on automatic pilot by Congress’s itch to
micromanage and to mandate cathartic gestures, so the United States will now evenhandedly
punish with economic sanctions India for its provocation and Pakistan for responding to it.
Because India is stronger economically, the sanctions will be disproportionately injurious to
Pakistan.

India has an enormous advantage over Pakistan in conventional military forces. (It has the
world’s
fourth largest military establishment, although China’s army is three times larger than India’s.)
That is one reason Pakistan believes it needs nuclear weapons. Economic sanctions will further
weaken Pakistan’s ability to rely on non-nuclear means of defense.

This should be a moment for Republicans to reassert their interest in national security issues,
one
of the few areas in which the public still regards them as more reassuring than Democrats. But the
Republican who could be particularly exemplary, isn’t. Arizona Sen. John McCain says the first
thing to do is impose “sanctions which hurt” and the second is “to get agreements that they will
not test again.”

So, automatic sanctions having failed to deter either nation, Washington’s attention turns,
robotically, to an even more futile ritual — the superstition of arms control, specifically the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the United States signed in 1996, but which the Senate
has prudently not ratified. The designation “superstition” fits because the faith of believers in arms
control is more than impervious to evidence; their faith is strengthened even by evidence that
actually refutes it.

Far from demonstrating the urgency of ratification, India’s and Pakistan’s tests demonstrate
the
CTBT’s irrelevance. India had not tested since 1974. Pakistan evidently had never tested. Yet
both had sufficient stockpiles to perform multiple tests. So the tests did not create new sabers,
they were the rattling of sabers known to have existed for years. Indeed, in 1990, when fighting in
the disputed territory of Kashmir coincided with Indian military exercises, the Bush administration
assumed that both Pakistan and India had built weapons with their nuclear technologies and
worried about a possible nuclear exchange.

The nonproliferation treaty authorizes international inspections only at sites declared to be
nuclear
facilities. Nations have been known to fib. The CTBT sets such a low-yield standard of what
constitutes a test of a nuclear device, that verification is impossible.

Various of the president’s policies, whether shaped by corruption, incompetence or naivete,
have
enabled China to increase the lethality of its ICBMs. The president and his party are committed to
keeping America vulnerable to such weapons: 41 senators, all Democrats, have filibustered
legislation sponsored by Sens. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) declaring it
U.S. policy “to deploy effective anti-missile defenses of the territory of the United States as soon
as technologically possible.”

Instead, the administration would defend the nation with parchment — gestures like the
CTBT,
which is a distillation of liberalism’s foreign policy of let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that if we forever
forswear tests, other nations’ admiration will move them to emulation. Diagnostic tests are
indispensable for maintaining the safety and reliability of the aging U.S. deterrent inventory. So
the CTBT is a recipe for slow-motion denuclearization. But let’s pretend that if we become
weaker, other nations will not want to become stronger.

Seeking a safer world by means of a weaker America, and seeking to make America safe
behind
the parchment walls of arms control agreements, is to start the 21st century by repeating the
worst fallacies of the 20th century.