Those of us working for the reduction and elimination of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction achieved a clear victory this fall, with US President Bill Clinton’s move to delay a decision on initial deployment of a National Missile Defense (NMD) system.

Nevertheless, the nuclear debate is not being conducted on our terms, and the driving force continues to be the United States and its NMD desires. The bulk of the opposition to NMD has been based on technical grounds, which are good for spoiling tactics but provide no foundation for either making the issue go away or turning the debate in our favor. As a senior State Department official wryly asked a delegation from the US Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers last year, "So, if it’s cheap and it works, you have no objection in principle?"

Of course, the objections of US allies and other nations also are factors in the NMD debate in Washington — but relying on the Russians to hold the line on the embattled Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is a triumph of hope over experience. Moscow most often has been rolled by US arms control negotiators and is now in a very weak position. It is nevertheless essential to stress that the effect of NMD on China and Russia already has begun a new arms race. NMD is no defense — it merely restarts the action/reaction cycle.

In the United Kingdom, another weak argument is used by missile defense opponents — "We don’t want to be a target." This is weak because A) President Bush will offer to protect Britain, and B) it does not display the proper Blitz spirit.

The cost argument, however, can and should be used in Britain. William Hague, Conservative Party leader, has left a hostage to fortune by offering unconditional support for NMD — including, presumably, cash. We should set the press on the case of whether he supports buying American missiles and adding 5 pence to income tax to pay for it.

Even so, some British and American politicians find themselves at a loss when asked by missile defense supporters — "Don’t you want to be defended?"

The answer is "Of course we want to be defended, that is why WE want to eliminate the threat, not sit around waiting to shoot it down. NMD advocates have no plan to eliminate the threat. They mostly deride the idea of elimination as unrealistic. Their defeatist attitude is most un-American. We need a can-do attitude to threat elimination."

This slogan/soundbite is intended to recapture the political/psychological ground given up by the anti-nuclear movement when Reagan launched Star Wars, and which has never been recaptured. The domestic political requirement for Star Wars in 1983 was to counter-attack the peace movement’s success in making people fear that the "Balance of Terror" was too risky. Reagan agreed and went further than almost everyone in the peace movement by attacking nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction (MAD) as "Russian Roulette." He offered Star Wars as a technical solution to answer the threat of annihilation. The anti-nuclear groups — dominated by arms control groups who endorsed/accepted MAD — replied, "Don’t mess with deterrence and the ABM Treaty."

The US movement in the early 1980s had been about freezing the number of nuclear weapons at their present level; the incrementalism of the time was forced by the Cold War mentality.

To this day, the debate in the United States has been characterized in this way. As Star Wars developed new rationales, opponents continued to get rolled because they had no strategic political response.

We need to back up the key message I have laid out above with repetition and politically useful tools. These include:

• The argument made by former Reagan administration official Paul H. Nitze for complete unilateral nuclear disarmament.
• The new NATO arms control report and Nuclear Planning Group communiqué, which include a commitment to work to implement the agreements made at the 2000 Review Conference of the NPT. Any NATO policy must — in Washington terms — already be US policy. In this case, the NATO endorsement of the NPT was signed by outgoing US Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, a Republican. This is unique, and a significant success for the long-standing dialogue through which the Non-Aligned Movement and the NAG [New Agenda Group] used the NPT process to pressure European NATO nations into adopting improved positions inside NATO. BASIC and other NGOs then followed by using the NATO position to influence the United States. As a Senate staff member remarked the other day — "any NATO position has to be our position."

Over the last six years, the debate on nuclear weapons has been frozen — with a weak and defensive Russia, a US president who could care less, and a Republican Senate that enforced no action being taken.

This has changed. New President George W. Bush and his team are considering a combination of some form of de-alerting, unilateral cuts, and force modernization alongside expanded NMD. They are fully prepared to break the logjam and define the debate on their terms.

They will, however, take some months to get this together. At the same time, the pro-disarmament and arms control Democrats are now free to criticize, whereas before they would not attack an already weakened Democratic president.

The NGO community in Washington needs to work together to refocus the debate.

And a strategy based on touting the need for elimination of nuclear weapons gives the Democratic opposition a tool to use in the upcoming US debates, when otherwise they would be gnashing their teeth in frustration while watching Republicans such as Senator Jesse Helms, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, endorsing de-alerting, unilateral cuts, and the rest.

This strategy links, rather than separates, internal Washington political work with the global anti-nuclear constituency.

If successful, it also moves the debate towards cooperative threat elimination.

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