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World Peace Accountability: A Proposal for Broadening East-West Dialogue
| Article
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12529 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
4,697 Words |
| Author
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John Norton Moore
John Norton Moore is Walter L. Brown Professor of Law at
the University of Virginia. Formerly he served as counselor
on international law to the Department of State, as a U.S.
ambassador, as a member of the U.S. delegation to the
Athens round of the Helsinki process, and as chairman of
the American Bar Association Standing Committee on
Law and National Security. |
For a quarter-century the focus of East-West dialogue has been arms control, primarily control of strategic nuclear arms. This has produced such achievements as the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty and the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which at least slowed down the rate of the spread of nuclear arms. The potential of a nuclear Armageddon means that nuclear arms control will and should remain an important focus of East-West dialogue.
A powerful case can be made, however, that this near-total focus--indeed preoccupation--with strategic nuclear arms has failed to prevent a deterioration in world order and even lessened chances of agreement on nuclear arms. We end the quarter-century of SALT/START/Geneva talks with four times more deliverable nuclear warheads targeted on America than when we began. The conventional military balance in Europe is as unstable as it was when these arms talks began. The massive Soviet deployment of triple-warhead SS-20 intermediate-range and newer shorter-range nuclear missiles has added a new destabilizing element. Despite recurrent episodes of détente, tension between the United States and the Soviet Union seems almost as high in 1987 as in 1962.
Most ominously, the quarter-century has produced a dramatic increase in terrorism, guerilla warfare, and "low-intensity" or "secret" warfare. It is also a period that produced the Vietnam War, the fourth most serious in American history in terms of casualties. The Vietnam War was initially a secret war, but it became a classic invasion following the 1973 Paris Accords, when North Vietnam openly invaded South Vietnam with twenty-two armored divisions. The Afghanistan and Central American conflicts further illustrate the decline in world order. Sadly, this
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