Banning war
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed warns that weapons of mass destruction are threatening the human race with extinction and believes the time has come to ban wars altogether
Weapons of mass destruction, with their terrifying potential to not only defeat the enemy but to virtually annihilate it, introduced a fundamental change to warfare in our age. It was an awareness of this potential which, in the context of the bipolar world order, kept the confrontation between the two superpowers at the level of a "cold" war. Their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction created a sort of balance of death between them and prevented their animosity from flaring up into a hot war. True, they did not enjoy parity in their overkill capabilities, but as people only die once, the discrepancy did not affect the equation of mutual deterrence that kept the spectre of an all-out confrontation at bay for over half a century.
This equation disappeared with the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a unipolar world order over which the United States reigns supreme as the sole remaining superpower with nothing and nobody to challenge its overwhelming military, technological and economic superiority. In other words, there is nothing to deter the remaining superpower from going to war against any country it considers hostile or, indeed, from eliminating whoever it regards as an enemy. This makes it imperative to replace the countervailing force once represented by the Soviet Union in the balance of power that held during the bipolar world order with a mechanism that would prohibit war altogether.
For a start, a total ban must be placed on the use of weapons of mass destruction. It is conceivable that states not already in possession of such weapons can be prevented from acquiring them. But what about states which already possess them? Can they be persuaded to relinquish them? Is there a way out of the dilemma?
In recent years the dilemma has become, if anything, more refractory. There are two reasons for this. The first is that a certain category of states not in possession of weapons of mass destruction believe they can acquire them either by purchasing them on the open market, smuggling them out of countries which do possess them or developing their own programmes to develop these weapons. Thanks to progress in science and technology and to the information revolution, this option is well within the reach of any country determined to join the nuclear club. In any case, it is impossible to prevent the spread of the secrets of producing such weapons indefinitely.
The second reason is that states which do actually possess weapons of mass destruction and which might eventually be willing to reduce their stockpiles are not ready to eliminate them altogether, on the grounds that
maintaining them is necessary to face the threat of terrorism, a threat compounded by the fact that terrorist networks do not belong to any specific state, operate in secret and enjoy relative independence from all state structures. We thus find ourselves in a vicious circle, with states in possession of weapons of mass destruction unwilling to give them up completely, and states aspiring to possess them unwilling to abandon their attempts to acquire them whenever possible.
Then there are states which possess undeclared arsenals of weapons of mass destruction or which are accused by Washington of secretly developing such weapons. It is in this latter category that Iraq has been placed. Indeed, it heads the list of countries belonging to what the Bush administration calls the "axis of evil". The war on terror launched in the wake of 11 September has inexplicably turned into a war on Iraq, which America justifies on the basis of two unproven allegations: one, that Baghdad is secretly harbouring weapons of mass destruction and, two, that it is in contact with terrorist networks, including Al- Qa'eda, which it could provide with such weapons. With its war on Iraq, the US has set a dangerous precedent, launching a massive military assault on a sovereign state in violation of the rules governing the existing world order, outside the auspices of the United Nations, without regard to the veto prerogatives of the permanent members of the Security Council and in open defiance of international legitimacy.
The same scenario now playing out in Iraq could well be repeated in respect of other countries on Washington's list of rogue states, a list that includes Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and North Korea. Conspicuously absent from the list is Israel, despite the fact that it possesses no fewer than 200 (undeclared) nuclear warheads. In a recent interview with Al-Ahram's editor-in-chief, US Vice-President Dick Cheney declared that the US has no plans to target other Arab and Islamic countries after Iraq. But such assurances are for tactical considerations that Washington cannot ignore while it conducts an unpopular and controversial war in a volatile and unstable region of the world, and there is no guarantee that it will consider itself bound by these assurances after the end of its war on Iraq. The central question put forward by the war is whether a war was necessary to destroy Iraq's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or whether we need to acknowledge that such weapons are a new and inevitable stage in the development of weaponry worldwide and devise new mechanisms to face this challenge.
A top Russian expert on earthquakes recently warned that concentrated missile strikes in regions containing huge layers of underground petroleum could damage the earth's crust. If conventional weapons can wreak such havoc, the damage that can be caused by a nuclear strike does not bear thinking about. Weapons of mass destruction are capable not only of exterminating wide segments of the human population but also of exposing the environment to irreversible threats. Wars in the past did not reach that critical stage and were unable to harm the human species beyond a certain threshold, which is no longer the case. The destructive capability of weapons of mass destruction is such that they can change the course of history and actually bring to an end life on our planet. With the very survival of the human race at stake, it has become imperative to seriously consider ways and means of outlawing wars together.
In the past, wars were divided into just and unjust wars. Unjust wars were those waged for such ignoble ends as occupation, exploitation, repression and the realisation of imperialist objectives. Just wars were those waged to achieve liberation, emancipation, independence, self- determination, development and progress. Today, even just wars can bring about more harm than good. In other words, it would seem that the contradiction between Man and Nature could overshadow the contradiction between Man and Man. Violence and struggle should be made to accommodate these new givens.
This highlights the wisdom of the slogan that all conflicts can -- and must -- be resolved by peaceful means, that is, that violence and war must be avoided at all cost. It is a slogan the United States has wantonly rejected in its conduct with respect to Iraq; indeed, that it has discarded altogether since the 11 September events, which deeply affected the American psyche in general and the Bush administration in particular. The real question now is how to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction by means which are not themselves weapons of mass destruction. In other words, how to put an end to weapons of mass destruction and not make the need to eliminate them a reason for their proliferation and development into yet more sophisticated weapons that are even more difficult to suppress. Technology has so far not produced an instrument capable of eliminating weapons of mass destruction without itself being such a weapon. This is a challenge that must be met if we hope to guarantee the survival of humankind on Earth.
