Contents

FUNCTIONAL AREAS OF COOPERATION 55

III. Nuclear controls and reductions 55

A multilateral nuclear force 55

COCOM 57

Arms sales and technology exchange 57

Intelligence cooperation 59

IV. Nuclear and environmental clean-up 60

V. Economid aid 62

FUNCTIONAL AREAS OF COOPERATION

III. Nuclear controls and reductions

“Eventually, joint programming could replace mutual deterrence. Likewise, conversion could be organized on an intercontinental scale, along with technological trade and integration of military-industrial bases. This would provide a silver lining for the reductions faced by military producers.”

– Igor Khripunov, in Defense News, June 15-21, 1992

Entrance of the Easterners into NATO would facilitate a much greater Western role in financing ex-Soviet nuclear scientists and research institutes, preventing export of nuclear weapons and expertise, dismantling nuclear arsenals, and cleaning up nuclear facilities of all kinds. Once the two sides have formally become allies, or have agreed on a timetable to become allies, it would no longer seem so much like a hostile foreign intrusion for Western scientific and military people to come in en masse for these purposes.

As allies, it would be natural to discuss and eventually plan nuclear targeting together. Mutual deterrence would cease to be the active role of the nuclear forces of America and Russia; it would only survive as an implicit, potential role. Mutual adversary postures would be ended, not toned down. Nuclear reductions could be greatly speeded. Entente would subsume the business of détente and finally bring it to completion.

A multilateral nuclear force (MLF)

NATO’s old goal of a multilateral nuclear force (MLF) could finally be achieved. This goal never got anywhere in the past because of the imbalance between America and its nuclear allies in Europe, and the limits of confidence in extended deterrence. The nuclear forces of the former Soviet Union would provide the necessary balance to motivate the formation of the MLF.

The MLF could conceivably get underway very quickly, by Ukraine ceding its nuclear weapons to NATO to be destroyed or multilateralized. Ukraine is loathe to turn them over to Russia until it gets a security guarantee from NATO, and has made clear that it would feel safer turning them over to NATO. However, only if Russia was already a full member of NATO could it agree to NATO’s retaining of any of these weapons.

The core of an MLF should be the Russian and American portions. Russia could put some of its strategic nuclear forces under a dual key with NATO, with a quid pro quo in terms of America putting some of its own strategic forces in NATO under a dual key at the same time. Then joint decisions could be made on their upkeep, financing, or destruction.

Once these MLF arrangements were set up, both Russia and America might find it to their advantage to transfer more and more of their nuclear forces to the MLF. Denuclearization could proceed much more rapidly in this way, without the old processes of negotiations over opposing deterrent forces and all of the concomitant mutual doubts and suspicions.

Britain and France might be drawn in next, both by the prestige of participating in the MLF and by the fading away of the residual fears of nuclear attack or coercion by Russia. The new MLF would carry prestige for them, unlike the one proposed in the 1960s, because it would be set up on a balanced political basis and would be a grand nuclear force for the entire “North” of the world. The old feeling of need for separate national deterrence against Russia would meanwhile dissipate – insofar as it has not already disappeared – with the experience of Russia behaving as an ally and with the incorporation of more and more of Russia’s own nuclear forces in the MLF.

However, neither Britain nor France – nor for that matter America or Russia – would be anxious to surrender their entire nuclear forces. They would want to keep a small, readily-usable deterrent against new and volatile nuclear countries, such as might emerge in the Middle East. To induce a full merger of nuclear forces despite this consideration, the MLF would have to become itself a convincing, efficient deterrent force to protect the territories of its member countries against nuclear attack. This probably would not happen in the early stages of the MLF. However, the MLF would tend to make for growing mutual confidence among its members, which would in turn encourage them to invest more functions and more efficient powers in collective organs like the MLF. As long as the initial structuring of the MLF is such as to facilitate such future accretions of powers rather than obstruct them, it would be reasonable to expect that an eventual full merger of nuclear forces would take place.

Thus, for the first time since the collapse of the Baruch Plan in the late 1940s, it would no longer be utopian to think of a single nuclear force for the entire industrialized “North” of the world. Nuclear proliferation could actually be reversed. A single force would be the natural ultimate goal of the MLF; the administrators of the MLF would pursue that goal as a professional responsibility, buttressed by the force of ambition as well as by humanistic sentiment and ideology. As long as the MLF was set up intelligently – so that it would give its members some tangible rewards, inspire some confidence in itself, and foster convergent negotiating processes on its issues – the result would be to impart a sort of inevitability to the eventual realization of the goal of a full merger of nuclear forces.

COCOM

Entrance into NATO would likely be contingent on signing protocols to join the equivalent of COCOM at the same time. A NATO agency might be formed to monitor COCOM compliance.

In the ex-Communist countries, there has been an interest in joining COCOM as a way of overcoming in one fell swoop the barriers to technological exchange which still inhibit their economic recovery. However, to avoid erecting barriers against trade with one another at the same time as barriers with the West come down, they would need to join in groups rather than one by one. If only some of the CIS countries joined NATO and COCOM, those that did join might have to institute strict border controls on technological flows to the others. Alternatively, exemptions would have to be made; e.g., if Russia joined without Ukraine also joining (or vice versa), then Russia would need exemptions in order to continue production processes which it can carry out only together with Ukrainian factories and supplies. It would be simpler for COCOM to work out a comprehensive agreement that brings them both in at the same time than to pursue piecemeal development of links with each of them separately.

Since 1989 the West, in the name of accommodating the economic needs of the former East bloc countries, has been gradually whittling down the COCOM barriers. Discussion proceeded on whether to dismantle COCOM altogether. At the same time, Western officials argued that much was being lost in control of dangerous weapons and technologies by the weakening of COCOM, since none of the other supplier regimes is as well-developed or well-organized as COCOM. Yet the logical solution – an extension in COCOM membership to the East, rather than a whittling down of COCOM for the much more limited benefit of the East – was largely outside of the range of Western imagination. The piecemeal, incremental approach, inherited from the days of détente and adversary relations, led to sloppy thinking and self-defeating behavior by the West.

Under the Clinton Administration, somewhat greater inventiveness has been shown. The trend of thinking has been to discard COCOM altogether, but also to replace it with a new overarching export control structure in which the Easterners might be included from the start and into which the various export control regimes might be wrapped together. One can only hope that this new structure will be a step up, or at least an adequate replacement for its predecessor. Unfortunately a step downward may be more likely: there is far less sense today of an urgent threat than in the days when COCOM was developed, and there is a widespread new belief in the desirability of competing more aggressively for international markets.

Arms Sales and Technology Exchange

Membership of the former Soviet bloc in NATO and COCOM would create an opening for a Euro-Russo-American arms-and-technology market. For decades, NATO has needed a Euro-American arms market, and the consequent integration of defense industrial bases; this idea was most fully developed in the writings of Thomas A. Callaghan, Jr., who urged a commitment to phased increases in inter-allied arms trade and a “NATO GATT” to oversee its fulfillment. In an Extended NATO, a 3-cornered game might be more promising than in the old Euro-American game.

Organized arms trade within the North would produce a more adequate-sized market for these extremely expensive products, reducing the economic pressure for dangerous arms exports to the South. The trade-regulating tasks of a “NATO GATT” could be coupled with control of re-export and with more positive tasks like promotion of conversion to dual or civilian use.

The West is already involved in promoting conversion in CIS, i.e. diversification and transfer to civilian or dual use production. Conversion is being considered also in the U.S. At the same time, there are severe doubts whether conversion is economically worthwhile compared to abandonment. The opening of technological trade among all these countries and regulation of it within a “NATO GATT” would allow these decisions to be made on the best and widest possible basis – the basis of the widest market forces coupled with the widest-ranging agency for examining industrial conversion projects and allocating conversion funds.

Intelligence Cooperation

NATO is already a regime of limited sharing of technological and intelligence information. Its members share with one another, but also differentiate between one another as to what and how much they share. No one need fear that expansion of NATO means immediate opening of all secrets to everyone. What it does mean is opening the door to much more widespread sharing of information, on a basis of pragmatic judgments. Further, it opens the door for better organized cooperation in developing information, and for enhanced capabilities for joint use of shared information.

NATO already has some slight joint intelligence capability, in addition to building on national intelligence sources and on cooperation among its members’ intelligence services. The present and future need is to upgrade the common capability and give it a stronger common institutional base. The imbalance between America and its allies has made this difficult in the past. The addition of Eastern intelligence services, particularly the KGB, could, paradoxically, ultimately benefit the cohesion of NATO’s intelligence system, because it would provide some of the balance and incentive needed to impel NATO toward developing stronger common institutions in this sphere.

Already a beginning has been made on linking the KGB’s global assets with those of the West in the fight against terrorism, drugs, nuclear and chemical proliferation, etc. However, this cooperation is highly reversible. It is inherently limited by lack of institutionalization and uncertainty over its future. As long as Russia remains outside of NATO, it will remain in a diplomatic nether-world in which it is unclear which side it is on and whether assistance to the West is not in some sense assistance to the enemy. The links could be greatly deepened in a formal alliance that is organized for permanence, i.e. by membership in NATO.

A NATO sub-agency might be the best venue for organizing closer links among the intelligence services of member countries. Eventually this might grow into a common intelligence structure. Such a structure would make sense in any case, as a foundation for common assessments of strategic problems and common planning of response. Arguably NATO has needed more of this for decades, in order to provide it with assessment-and-response capabilities without so much of a feeling of bowing to “American leadership;” the critics always viewed this as “American dictation” when it came to NATO’s estimation of adversary capabilities, of the Soviet threat, and of Western needs and responses. Today, with strategic dangers in infinitely greater flux, the need for common strategic assessment capabilities is even greater if the alliance is to hold together. The need for making the best use of the intelligence resources of the East may finally provide the motive force for forming the stronger common intelligence capabilities that NATO needs anyway.

IV. Environmental and Nuclear Clean-Up

Here the need is enormous. The environmental legacy of Soviet Communism and of its military machine is a nightmare, as Prof. Murray Feshbach, a former NATO researcher, has documented in painful detail.

The problem is so vast as to create a sense of hopelessness. To be precise, it seems hopeless, as long as the East is taken as a realm separate from the West which has to manage the problem on its own. But it should not be taken as a separate realm, if only because basic environmental management in the East is very much a necessity for the West as well. A closer intertwining of Eastern and Western efforts does not promise an easy solution to the problems of the Eastern environment, but it is a prerequisite for an adequate solution.

The cost to West Germany of cleaning up East Germany is enormous. But in the long run it is far less than the cost of an Eastern Germany that was not cleaned up and that continued to produce massive daily pollutants – or that daily ran high risks of large-scale nuclear and chemical catastrophes.

The danger to Western Europe from unsafe nuclear reactors in Eastern Europe is enormous. The insurance cost of this risk is far greater than the cost would be for financing a shutdown and replacement by oil imports.

The clean-up of nuclear waste in the former Soviet Union has a cost that is mind-boggling – tens, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars. It can be brought into perspective only if it is compared against the costs of continued nuclear dumping and of risks of catastrophes at nuclear plants and diversion of nuclear warheads.

Once one sets one’s mind to it, areas of potential collaboration in the environment leap out from the page:

• aid-for-environment swaps; i.e. money for emissions reductions or shut-down of industries with transnational environmental impact

• retooling of industries for lower emissions

• conversion of military industries

• exchange of technical means of clean-up and denuclearization

• supervision of clean-up in matters of transnational or treaty importance

• use of the military for nuclear and environmental clean-up efforts

Already some joint work is being done in these areas. To take one example: the West succeeded in early 1994 in persuading Ukraine to shut down its remaining reactors at Chernobyl. This success was due to a new U.S. policy of increased engagement in providing both security and economic aid. It shows what a vital stake the West has in such policies. If one considers the long-range cost of one more Chernobyl disaster, it can be seen that the new policy pays for itself many times over.

However, the deal with Ukraine came after years of continued operation after the first disaster. Most of the accident-prone nuclear reactors in the former Soviet bloc remain open. Much more needs to be done.

The Ukrainian cabinet minister in charge of conversion under the reformist Kuchma government had hoped for $1 billion; instead he was promised a total of $70 million from the West. He expressed his country’s frustration in the following terms:

One source for investing in conversion could be the assistance of the capitalist countries. I believe we have the right to count on this. Was it not the United States which for long years called on us to disarm and lower the level of military confrontation? Now we have taken this path. I think that the cessation of the arms race on the former territory of the USSR freed up billions of dollars in the United States alone and a portion of this amount could be shared with the CIS.

The end of cheap energy supplies from Russia has left almost all of the Eastern countries in an acute energy crisis. At the same time, the entry onto the world market has left them in an acute cash crunch. Unless the West wants to pay the exorbitant cost of seeing them go the way of more use of nuclear power and of more sales of arms and technologies, it will have to get up the will to pay to make it possible for these countries to survive financially in ways that are less dangerous to the West and the world at large. This would be a reasonable premium for its strategic victory.

Much more not only could but would be done in these areas, if the East and West were full-fledged, institutionally-joined allies. This is because there would be a major change in attitudes and efforts on both sides, for the three fundamental reasons that keep coming up in this study:

(1 It would be done with a sentiment of mutual support as allies and of investment in an area that is an organic part of our own future.

(2) It would be done without nearly as much of the residual suspicion on our side that we might be funding an enemy, or on their side that they are knuckling under to the strategic designs of a hostile West.

(3) It would have a well-organized institutional base, with substantial personnel and resources – namely, NATO itself – for joint functional efforts.

V. Economic Aid

Assistance for economic reform would presumably not be a part of the bargain for NATO membership.

However, for the reasons (1) - (3) just enumerated, members of NATO could expect economic aid to flow more generously. Aid would become an expression of the spirit of mutual support among allies, and would be seen less as charity than as an investment in a territory that is part of our own future (our point (1) above). There would be less of the excesses of suspicion and conditionality that have dogged the aid program thus far (point 2). And there would be a stronger base in the Atlanticist system of institutions for organizing the aid (3), although probably the Atlanticist institution that would deal directly with the aid would be OECD not NATO.

The fear that aid would go to potential enemies, i.e., to untrustworthy countries whose commitment to the West was indeterminate, was the underpinning of the polemic of the Bush Administration against the idea of massive aid or a “new Marshall Plan.” In turn, the failure to organize a strategic entente with the emerging democracies ensured that they would remain less than determinate or trustworthy in the eyes of the West. This outcome was further ensured by the almost exclusive concentration instead on the progress of their economic reform programs, a progress that could not help but be slow, painful and halting in most cases. Critics ridiculed the “economics first” approach as an inverted form of Marxism, but the ultimate irony was that this very emphasis on economics was one of the main causes of the inadequacy of Western support on the economic level.

The original Marshall Plan did not exist in such a vacuum. It was preceded by the Truman Doctrine and followed by NATO. It was not completed until after NATO was well in place. It was a part of a multi-phase, full-service effort at integration. Let us recall only some of the phases of this effort:

1) Truman Doctrine (1946)

2) Marshall Plan (announced 1947, completed in early 1950s)

3) OEEC (Organization for European Economic Cooperation; the institutional form of the Marshall Plan) (1948)

4) Hague Conference / European Movement (1948)

5) Council of Europe (1949)

6) NATO (1949)

7) ECSC (the initial institutional form of the EC/EU) (1950)

8) EEC (1958)

9) OECD (restructured OEEC, with U.S. as full member) (1961)

In 1945-6, before this integration project began, only piecemeal efforts had been made at aid to postwar economic recovery and reconstruction. These efforts were not necessarily inexpensive, but were lacking in vision. It was not the quantity of money but the effort of integration that enabled the aid to have a transformative effect.

A similar multi-pronged integrative effort is needed today. Economic aid alone cannot be carried out on an adequate, meaningful scale. It will be given on an adequate scale only when it is intertwined with a program of strategic alliance.

The Marshall Plan could not have even been carried politically in the U.S. all on its own. In order to pass Congress, it had to be embedded in a context of a conception of the recipient countries as partners in our progress and allies in facing our dangers. The alliance began with the Truman Doctrine, and with a background in the two world wars, and was codified in 1949 in NATO.

The meaning of a “Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe and Russia” is not merely an increase in the amount of money given, although that is certainly needed. Nor is it a new-fangled program, or an effort to imitate an experience carried out under totally different circumstances. Rather, it means, simply, completing the portion of the original Marshall Plan that was already offered to the Easterners in 1947. This requires full use of the means of the Marshall Plan – its scale of funds, its integrative vision, and its institutions – as well as adaptation of it to the changed circumstances.

The idea that the Marshall Plan is irrelevant to today’s circumstances is one that was fashionable in the Bush Administration, but it does not withstand inspection. The integrative vision is just as relevant to the economic needs of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union today as it was to Western Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Aid is just as much needed now as then as an incentive for the economic and political integration that most of the countries want but which they lack the consistency or commonality of will to achieve on their own. The dual integration of the recipient countries with one another and with the donor countries is fitting, now as then, to the vital interests of the countries on both sides of the donor/recipient fence.

Even the institutional form of the original Marshall Plan, the OEEC/OECD, is the right venue for organizing the program today, with suitable updating: in place of the U.S.-Canada wing aiding the devastated Western European wing as in the original OEEC, today it would be the West European-American-Japanese wing of the post-1961 OECD aiding a new East European-Russian wing. This is a much more appropriate venue than the IMF, which was handed the lead in the aid program after 1989 primarily as a way of keeping the scale small and ducking the need for American leadership.

The result of the reliance on the IMF has been, ironically, a damagingly mechanical application of structural adjustment programs to the very different situation of reform of state socialist economies; whereas the Marshall Plan is precisely the plan that is built around the actual unique situation, and the OEEC/OECD is precisely the institution that fits its plans to the actual situation. The Bush Administration’s polemic against the Marshall Plan – that it was a misguided analogy, a mechanical application of the wrong plan under different circumstances – was wrong about the Marshall Plan, but it was all too true of that Administration’s own plan, or lack of plan.

The lack of plan continues to this day. If anything, attitudes in the U.S. Government have hardened against giving any adequate level of aid. The Clinton Administration has been beholden to a myth of economic decline resulting from international spending and generosity to allies, and as such has been constrained from acting on its better intentions. What can be improved at this late date is the organization and targeting of the aid, the political context of an alliance, and an overall plan of integration. NATO would not administer the program, but would be vital for its spirit, by providing the context of a living alliance between the donors and the recipients. After the plan and the alliance are in place, the Western spirit may yet rise closer to the level of its own enlightened interest and begin to provide a more adequate level of aid.