Britain, 2005. Saddam Hussein, still the ruler of Iraq and possessor of a long-range nuclear missile, seeks revenge on the west. Warned by intelligence reports of Saddam’s plan, the United States deploys a space-based missile shield, which will catch the Iraqi rocket before it gets to Washington. The key installation is based in Yorkshire – although the shield does not protect Britain. Saddam tells the head of his nuclear warfare programme to set the controls of the missile for London . . .
This nightmare scenario is not as improbable as you’d like to think. If the US goes ahead with its stated intention to deploy a National Missile Defence system (NMD) – a form of Star Wars – then it will need to upgrade the early warning system at Fylingdales in Yorkshire. The station is under the command of the Royal Air Force, and an explicit British government decision would be required for the upgrade.
Once Fylingdales was upgraded and NMD worked, the US would be protected against missile attacks – but Britain would not (as this is national, not Nato, defence). An adversary would naturally wish to strike at the unprotected part of the system. It would thus strike at Fylingdales, or London, or other British cities.
American analysts see this point. Michael O’Hanlon, a senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, says: “If the US had a reliable missile defence, then it would be less vulnerable to nuclear blackmail [from “rogue” nuclear-armed states]. But, in that case, a leader such as Saddam Hussein might then threaten to blow up a city such as London or Paris, if the US were considering an invasion of his country. One can see why even trusting and loyal allies would be nervous about this.”
Fylingdales is itself an index of how loyal and trusting an ally Britain has been. Built in 1964 following an agreement between the US and the UK in 1960, it has been a crucial part of the ballistic missile early warning system. However, if NMD went ahead, it would become still more crucial: its role would be transformed from detection to one of tracking missiles and identifying their type – passing that information on to radars in the US. “Without Fylingdales,” says Daniel Plesch of the British American Security Information Council, which campaigns against NMD, “the system could not work. It is absolutely essential for early warning.”
We in Britain thus have a more direct, in-my-backyard stake in the deployment decision than in any other European state except Denmark – the only other base outside the US that would require upgrading is Thule, in Greenland, which is a Danish territory. But NMD affects all other European states – indeed, it affects all states, especially the “official” five nuclear club members of the US, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus the “unofficial” nuclear or would-be states such as India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Iraq and North Korea. “National” missile defence is one of the grosser misnomers of our time: this is a world matter.
A decision on deployment has been promised for this autumn, before Bill Clinton leaves office. The Democrats’ version of NMD is more minimalist than that of the Republicans; it is advertised as strictly a matter of protection against a missile or two from a “rogue” state (now called “a state of concern”). Both parties, however, agree on the need to deploy.
The genesis of NMD lies in the need for security, which increases as societies get richer, more comfortable and have time to work on decreasing the risks to individual lives. It was first put forth in a speech that Ronald Reagan made on 23 March 1983, as he launched the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). The then president went on television to ask: “What if free people could live, secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest on the threat of instant retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our soil, or that of our allies?” He called on US scientists to “turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete”.
It was a bombshell of a speech – most of all for his own administration, which had spent some time pooh-poohing the technological feasibility of that which Reagan had just commended. Five months earlier, Reagan’s defence secretary, Caspar Weinberger, had responded to an advocate of the system that “we are unwilling to commit this nation to a course which calls for growing into a capability that does not currently exist”. But Reagan held his administration, the military and the scientific community to his vision, cementing it into the American psyche with phrases such as “a shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles as a roof protects a family from rain”.
The speech was overtaken by events – events that Reagan himself helped set in motion, with his recognition that Mikhail Gorbachev was serious about reform and that huge nuclear cuts were thus possible. George Bush the Elder quietly let the SDI programme slip into obscurity – but it was not halted.
It has been revived by a new terror, that of the rogue states with their growing nuclear, chemical and biological warfare capacity. North Korea has tested a ballistic missile – the Taepo Dong – and is developing the next stage. Iran has the technical ability and resources to develop a long-range ballistic missile programme, and has acquired most of the components to do so from Russia. Iraq’s capabilities have been curtailed by the UN, but it maintains a short-range missile capacity and could develop a long-range programme if sanctions were lifted. All of these states see the US, first, and the west, second, as enemies.
Largely unstated is the fear that Russia, with still the second-largest nuclear arsenal, could again become a “state of concern”. The US administration goes to great lengths to assure both Russia and China that it does not think it has to protect itself against them – to the point where, early this year, the Russian foreign minister, Ivan Ivanov, was conducted into the most secure space in the Pentagon and solemnly assured that Russia would still be able to destroy large parts of the US, even after the deployment of NMD. However, the 1998 Congressional commission report on the system by Donald Rumsfeld, which provides much of the intellectual backbone for the current developments, noted that the new rogue threats were “in addition to those still posed by the existing ballistic missile arsenals of Russia and China, nations . . . which remain in uncertain transitions”.
As America becomes richer and more easeful, its horror at any loss of life, except by natural death at a great age, has grown. The dearth of casualties in the Kosovan intervention was the most dramatic case in point; and Bush Jr is building on this national recoiling from deadly combat by promising that he will stop all interventions by US forces in the world’s trouble spots.
Frances Fitzgerald – whose book Way Out There in the Blue is the defining account of Reagan and Star Wars – views this desire for absolute security as a theme long played on by the US right, and popular across the spectrum, that America is a special place, brought together around a myth of “rugged individualism, manifest destiny and, most importantly, American exceptionalism. The doctrine of American exceptionalism proposed that the country would be, or already was, a beacon of hope that would bring light into a benighted world.”
A country with a manifest destiny will always be right, and many in the US are upset at the reaction of Europeans and others to their plans for national defence. Yet, unusually, that reaction has been more or less united: all of the major states of Europe have voiced disquiet. The French have led this disquiet, but they are not alone.
All of the US allies, including Britain, believe that the deployment of NMD would destroy what has become the cornerstone of the nuclear world – the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972, which kept a rough balance of mutually assured destruction. Once that is gone, the world becomes much more dangerous. Russia and China will feel impelled to increase their nuclear capabilities (China has been planning to do so anyway, but now has a rationale). France and Britain, which have made deep unilateral cuts in their nuclear forces, would feel constrained to react to a new threat from Russia and China. Earlier this month, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee published a report strongly recommending that the government press the Americans to desist: in leaks immediately afterwards, it seemed that both Tony Blair and Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, were inclined to agree.
They do so because the US seems ready to turn its back on what has been its goal, as well as that of the western alliance – the patient negotiation of incremental improvements multilaterally.
We are thus at a dangerous point. There is nothing to be gained from railing against the US, whether led by Democrats or Republicans. There are, in essence, two sensible choices open to Britain. One is to come round to agreeing with the Americans – as we usually do – but to use Britain’s mid-Atlantic position to convince them that a national system should be made to cover the alliance, too, and then to convince the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese that the Americans mean it.
The other is to oppose NMD – but to so structure a European Defence Initiative as to complement the US, and to use it to bridge the growing gulf between the US and the rest of the world. It would mean using proactive European diplomacy to convince the US leadership, and the American people, that an alliance was still desired and possible – but on a more co-operative and equal basis. This is a tall order, given that Europe does not have one voice with which to speak. But if not, it will face continued subservience – and Britain risks paying the highest price for this.
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