Non-strategic nuclear weapons are neither the reason, nor the solution, to Europe’s security issues and a lack of transparency and Eastern European political leadership has allowed bureaucrats to give these weapons a legitimacy they don’t, and shouldn’t, possess, according to a white paper released yesterday.
In the white paper, Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons, Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project with the Federation of American Scientists, said an old-fashioned and misguided preoccupation with a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) threat has delayed completion of the 1991-92 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, prevented new arms control initiatives and preserved a bloated non-strategic nuclear weapons arsenal to compensate for inferior conventional forces and maintained a sense of national prestige.
Kristensen said in the white paper Russia has retained wide use of non-strategic nuclear weapons, ranging from long-range cruise missiles to nuclear torpedoes, while the United States has eliminated all but two of its non-strategic nuclear weapons, has retired one of them and appears to be on a path toward phasing out designated non-strategic nuclear warheads all together.
But Kristensen said within NATO, a reluctance to complete the withdraw of such weapons from Europe due to opposition from nuclear bureaucrats and over-sensitivity to generic security concerns in Eastern European nations has helped tie down U.S. non-strategic nuclear weapons in Europe.
Kristensen said non-strategic nuclear weapons are neither the problem, nor the solution, because the Eastern European nations would probably have “exactly” the same security concerns if Russia did not have any non-strategic nuclear weapons. He said, mainly, non-strategic nuclear weapons have become a crutch for inaction by local Eastern European bureaucrats.
“Absent an important military mission, (non-strategic nuclear weapons) have become leftovers from the Cold War that linger on because some see them as providing reassurance in the absence of addressing the underlying security issues,” Kristensen said.
Kristensen said NATO needs to have “serious and sustained” discussions with its eastern European member countries about what their security concerns are about and provide primarily non-nuclear means to reassure them. He said the Deterrence and Defense Posture Review (DDPR), which he expects to be approved by NATO at the Chicago Summit May 20-21, will be an important opportunity to define the nuclear policy.
Kristensen concludes by saying honest transparency will make the biggest difference to non-proliferation in Europe.
“It is important that Russia and the U.S. take steps to drastically increase transparency,” he said. “This can be done on a unilateral basis and should include overall numbers, locations and delivery systems. It should also include verification measures to confirm data that is provided. Increasing transparency is essential because uncertainty creates mistrust, rumors and worst-case planning.”
According to Kristensen, there is no universal definition of what a non-strategic nuclear weapon is. During the Cold War, a nuclear weapon was generally considered to be non-strategic (or tactical) if it had a much shorter range than strategic weapons and was intended for battlefield use in a theater of operation. Some consider a nuclear weapon non-strategic if it is not covered by strategic arms control treaties. Others consider all nuclear weapons strategic; the French government, for example, defines its air-delivered cruise missile as strategic even though the aircraft do not have inter-continental range.
The white paper can be viewed at: http://is.gd/jxu1dp