More than twenty years ago, working on a book that was later titled Origins of the Fourth World War, I inserted a quote from the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America, which states: "That nuclear weapons, whose terrible effects are suffered, indiscriminately and inexorably, by military forces and civilian population alike, constitute, through the persistence of the radioactivity they release, an attack on the integrity of the human species and ultimately may even render the whole earth uninhabitable." The treaty further states: "That general and complete disarmament under effective international control is a vital matter which all the peoples of the world equally demand."
About the above, I predicted, "It is, in essence, the language of the final treaty; of the treaty that is coming...." There is an inevitability to certain ideas, for better or worse, and this can be discerned far in advance. Today the "final treaty" will be signed on April 8th, marking the first step in President Barack Obama's march toward a world free of nuclear weapons. Currently the U.S. deploys 2,100 strategic warheads while Russia deploys 2,600 warheads. According to the president of the Partnership for Global Security, Kenneth Luongo, the larger meaning of the present treaty is the way it delegitimizes nuclear weapons.
There is an eloquent summation of all this in James Burnham's book, Suicide of the West, where he wrote: "It is a mark of the ascendancy of liberal ideology ... in the advanced Western nations, most particularly the United States and Great Britain, that for the first time in history disarmament proposals and pacifist-tending ideas are being pressed not by the nations with inferior arms in order to weaken the stronger, but by the stronger in order to weaken themselves: to sacrifice their relative advantage, and thereby to lessen their ability to defend their interests and ideals." As Burnham correctly noted, "what is ending in our age is not empire but merely the empires of the West."
To further make his point, Burnham quoted Louis Veuillot, who wrote: "When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle." Here is what Burnham calls "the dialectic of liberalism." It is also the dialectic of the arms control process between Russia and the United States. The treaty that President Obama is going to sign will not disarm Moscow in the same way it disarms the United States. "When the cost to technical intelligence collection systems is taken into account," wrote former intelligence official Bill Lee in 1997, "the U.S. spent billions trying to verify the 'arms control' agreements with the FSU [Former Soviet Union]. It was largely, if not entirely, a waste." As Lee further explained, the KGB and its successor organizations have waged "a disinformation campaign on arms control" that has effectively turned the Western political elite into a pack of useful idiots. "Given the relatively small number of U.S. missile and bomber warheads likely to survive a Russian preemptive strike under START II," wrote Lee, "if Russia can maintain its Triad of strategic offensive and defensive forces, it will become the preeminent nuclear superpower. The Russian military and senior political officials understand this very well even if the U.S. does not." (See The ABM Treaty Charade: A Study in Elite Illusion and Delusion, by William T. Lee, pp. 141-42.)
In 1990, CIA analyst Peter Vincent Pry wrote: "The balance of U.S.-Soviet strategic lethality and survivability, whether lethality is measured in equivalent yield, countermilitary potential, equivalent weapons, or single-shot kill probability, heavily favors the USSR." (See The Strategic Nuclear Balance and Why it Matters, Peter Pry.) Sadly, the reduction of the U.S. nuclear arsenal since 1990 has more than compensated for any reductions on the Russian side, due to the lack of hardening of U.S. strategic sites (as lamented by Pry). The nuclear balance, since the supposed "fall of the Soviet Union," has consistently and steadily increased Moscow's effective superiority, and the Russians have played an excellent waiting game as they anticipate the accumulation of further advantages.
In 1988 Joseph D. Douglass, Jr. put together a book titled Why the Soviets Violate Arms Control Treaties. It is a compilation of expert opinion and testimony on Soviet motivation during the Cold War. It is as accurate and vital today as it was at the time of publication. The appendix of the book contains an essay by the high-level defector Jan Sejna, titled "Arms Control and Soviet Strategy." The chief motivation behind everything done in Russia, said Sejna, is Marxism-Leninism. "There is a tendency among many Western commentators on Soviet affairs to talk about Marxism-Leninist ideology as if it were dead. They expect to see modifications in Soviet policy, especially when the top level strategic leadership of the Soviet Union changes. Changes there are, although these are most often tactical innovations, not substantive changes. Occasionally there are even variations in strategy. However ... there have been no significant changes in the strategic goals to establish a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' in every country worldwide, each controlled according to the principle of proletarian internationalism."
If we look carefully at Moscow's policy, we find a country that remains allied with the Communist enemies of the United States (in North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam and China, etc.). It is a serious failing on the American side that enmity of the Communist nations is not recognized, neither do we recognize that Russia remains under effective KGB control, and that the KGB remains the "sword and shield" of the Communist Party Soviet Union (presently underground). Deception has always been a Soviet mainstay. On September 27th, 1905 the founder of the Soviet state, Vladimir Lenin, said: "Promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken...." In his Reply to Debate on War and Peace (1919) Lenin wrote, "It is ridiculous not to know the history of war, not to know that a treaty is a means of gaining strength."
According to Sejna, "by 1963 the Soviets began to believe that at some time in the distant future, nuclear weapons might be prohibited." The leadership in Moscow, with great strategic foresight, realized that the elimination of nuclear weapons would deprive them of their most important advantage. Therefore the Russians put great effort into the development of advanced chemical and biological weapons. "Superiority in CBW [chemical-biological weapons] ... would enable the Soviets actually to increase their strength in a future era where nuclear weapons would be banned. However, this did not mean that the Soviet Union would discard its nuclear weapons; on the contrary, the Soviets would retain a substantial hidden reserve, because they could not trust the Western 'imperialists' to destroy their nuclear stockpiles."
Exactly such a hidden reserve was testified to by intelligence expert Bill Lee, toward the end of his book (quoted above), where he wrote about Russia's extensive national ABM system and hidden stockpile of re-fire missiles and warheads. According to Lee, "While the treaties did not prohibit production of re-fire missiles and warheads, the FSU [Former Soviet Union] produced far more strategic missiles than were declared under START I and the INF Treaty. The U.S. does not know how many re-fire missiles were produced, nor where these stocks are located. Similarly, the FSU produced and stocked (at least) 50 to 100 percent more nuclear weapons than the U.S. estimated, and the U.S. does not know where those warheads are stored. CIA and DIA covered up all discrepancies in the Soviet declarations of weapons stocks under the START, INF and CFE Treaties." (Lee, p. 141.)
Nothing can stop the disarmament process over time. It will advance, and will signify the weakening of the West as it signifies the strengthening of Russia and China. The final, predictable, and tragic result of all this was foreseen by James Burnham more than four decades ago. With all that happened during and after World War II, it seems that nothing has been learned about the essential nature of free society and the essential nature of societies that are decidedly not free.
