Disarmament Diplomacy

Editorial

It's about Security, Stupid!

"What's your definition of Security?

I read yesterday, I think there were something like six-hundred and sixty-six murders in Chicago last year... In a city, not a country. Is that Security?"

This was Donald Rumsfeld, musing during a Department of Defense News Briefing, December 17, 2002. The US Defense Secretary answered his own question: "Yes," and added: "I lived in Chicago and I think it's a great city."

Chicago is undoubtedly a great city, one of the finest cities in the richest country in the world. But being blasé about 666 murders a year shows a poor notion of security. Not a concept that I would expect the murder victims - or rather, their families - to share. For them, security would mean dealing with the poverty, education deficits, drugs and guns that underlie such terrible murder statistics.

The United States has the largest, most expensive and sophisticated military in the world, equipped with all the latest high tech weapons and machinery, and its military budget continues to increase. During the cold war, 'communism' - used as threat or accusation - was often enough to clinch an election or get millions added to the budget for pet weapons projects; now 'terrorism' plays that role, the button to push to prove patriotism and get money.

But if security is the objective, the priorities don't make sense. In the US last year, over $80 billion went on counterproliferation and the war on terror, destabilising alliance relationships and causing many more deaths than before. Half that for homeland security, though people in cities like Chicago might not be quite sure what that gives them. Only a fraction - around 2 billion - was allocated to nonproliferation, cooperative threat reduction, arms control and verification. Taking a different, but equally illustrative example from Britain, Llew Smith MP noted that ten times more MoD staff are engaged in selling arms abroad than in oversight and regulation of the licensing of military equipment and weapons for export. What price security?

I thought of these things as I sat through weeks of First Committee (Disarmament and Security) discussions and votes this autumn. Watched as the US again voted against the test ban treaty, vowing never to become a party to this important curb on nuclear weapons proliferation and development. Watched 'Myanmar' posturing as a leading disarmament advocate, while shallow supporters closed their eyes to its egregious suppression of the human rights of the Burmese people and incarceration of their chosen leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. Watched India and Pakistan play to the non-aligned gallery and promote resolutions full of high minded rhetoric that bore little relation to the actual defence policies and practices of these two nuclear rivals.

Watched how, in one vote after another, the US opposed arms control measures that the rest of the world wanted, sometimes garnering a fig leaf of support from Israel and two tiny Pacific island groups under US control, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, or sometimes ganging up with a couple of other nuclear states, like Britain and France. Even on the issue of a working group to negotiate an international agreement to identify and trace small arms and light weapons, the US cast the sole vote against. The reason? Its additional cost (around $1.9 million), they said. Such fiscal responsibility would be more convincing if the Bush administration were not at the same time pushing to develop new nuclear weapons (average cost of a nuclear test before they were banned in 1996, $12-21 million). The stand might also have been more convincing if the US gun lobby hadn't been so active in undermining stronger measures to curb gun acquisition and possession at home and abroad.

Traditionally, defence meant the military, and this was assumed necessary to protect national security. But beefing up the military has never been much of a guarantee of security. Three years after that much-decorated soldier, Ariel Sharon, was elected to bring peace through force, more Israelis, from Intelligence chiefs to airforce pilots, are questioning the efficacy of Sharon's policies. As so many more Israelis are killed and maimed in cafés and buses, a further generation of young Palestinians are being brutalised, seeing friends die in hails of bullets, houses crushed by tanks, denied education, jobs, and the dignity of unmolested movement from town to town. Two kinds of ways of inducing terror and hatred, neither bringing security.

Defence and security cannot be kept in separate boxes. Nor can security be enhanced by eroding civil liberties and human rights. The frontline of security comes from citizens taking responsibility, asking questions and challenging government abuses of power. Citizens' monitoring of military activities is more essential to security than military obedience, deterring both terrorists and governmental wrongdoing. It comes as no surprise that the IAEA was first tipped off about Iran's clandestine uranium enrichment and plutonium programmes by Iranian dissidents. Meanwhile, back in democratic England, the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act is increasingly used by armed police to stop, search and harass peaceful protesters. Under this law, no reason needs to be given by the police. As with the detentions in Guantanamo, such practices may be intended for defence purposes, but they do not enhance security.

Rebecca Johnson

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© 2003 The Acronym Institute.