Capri June 28th 2002

Published in the International Herald Tribune 23 June 1992

Anacapri, Italy, - We cannot uninvent a technology once invented. The question of how to handle atomic weapons will not go away. Concerns about the nuclear capabilities of countries like Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and about the intentions of some former Soviet republics will stay with us.

Since the days of Hiroshima, the United States has sought to prevent its atomic secrets from falling into Soviet hands. To that end it helped set up the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, or Cocom, which has been based in Paris since 1950.

For years its existence was kept secret. Several NATO governments still prefer not to talk too openly about Cocom, which some considered a form of economic warfare.

Cocom's essential work was to draw up lists of the goods that should not be exported to Communist nations. Most Western nations implemented these decisions, which were legally nonbinding.

But embargoes are generally not very efficient, as has been shown by Professor Gary Hufbauer, among others. This is especially true when they are directed against a fundamental policy of the target nation.

The major weaknesses of embargoes are three: Rarely is it possible to achieve unanimous political support for an embargo among the states surrounding the targeted country. Embargoes create high profit possibilities, so smugglers always appear. And even if political unanimity is achieved and smuggling controlled, few governments will allow outside pressure to prevent them from realizing a fundamental policy goal; they simply marshal domestic resources and take the time they need.

Stalin and his followers knew this. They exploited any political disunity among the Cocom members (Japan, Australia and all NATO states except Iceland), pressured the "neutrals" and other small nations, bribed businessmen, and set up elaborate foreign spying operations and domestic nuclear research organizations.

The Soviets thus were able to explode their first atomic bomb as early as 1949, and, it is believed, their first hydrogen bomb only a few months after the detonation by the United States of its own bomb in 1952.

W.B. Gallie, a Cambridge emeritus professor of war studies, has suggested that the best solution to today's atomic conundrum would be an American-Russian "nuclear diarchy".

Hopefully with the consent of the smaller atomic powers, he writes, the two big ones should seek to monopolize atomic weapons. If some nation deviously tried to obtain them, disobeying warnings, it should be dealt with as Iraq was in the Gulf War.

Essentially, this is a proposal for a new, global embargo policy, focused on atomic weapons.

To suggest forming a "global police force" seems negative. Why not instead see this as a "global fire brigade", trying to contain blazes before they spread out of control.

The potential importance of such a fire brigade must be stressed. Marshal Yevgeni Shaposhnikov, commander in chief of the armed forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States, is reported to have warned Turkey recently that if it invaded Armenia, "we would be on the brink of a Third World War."

But if Mr. Gallie's ideas are to have teeth, they must be efficiently implemented. With the Cold War over, there has been talk of closing Cocom. That would be a mistake.

Cocom could become a useful instrument for realizing a nuclear diarchy. If the Paris organization, which knows about implementing an embargo, combined forces with the anti-Cocom experts of the former Soviet Union, who know how to circumvent one, a truly efficient organization might be achieved - taking us a step closer to Mr. Gallie's wise proposal. (Important movement in this direction was made early this month, when Cocom members agreed in Paris to invite the former countries of the Soviet empire to join a global effort to control the spread of the weapons and technologies of mass killing.)

Some will say that the United Nations should be doing this. But Realpolitk dictates that this must be primarily a U.S.- Russian affair.

In the long run, atomic weapons will not be uninvented, and no embargo policy will ensure eternal peace. But an American-Russian nuclear diarchy, combined with a Cocom-Russian nuclear embargo, might give us a breathing spell for a few decades. It might provide a chance to look for better and more just solutions to the enduring atomic dilemma.

Gunnar Adler-Karlsson