The Lessons of Disarmament

by John Thompson

02/17/03

With the latest report by Hans Blix to the UN, it becomes apparent that Iraq remains coy about its weapons of mass destruction. What the UN weapons inspections teams are really uncovering is more evidence of the fact that the disarmament of the unwilling simply doesn’t work. But then, anybody with common sense and practical experience (qualities in desperate short supply in the UN HQ) would know this.

History is full of attempts to force people and nations to disarm. The results are inevitable.

Individual weapons are very easy to hide, just ask the Canadian Firearms Centre and the flunkies of our Federal Solicitor General -- assuming that they would be telling the truth for once. However, it has proven as difficult and unsuccessful for them to get every Canadian firearms owner to register their weapons, as it has been for Members of Parliament and the Federal Auditor General to get the full picture on how much gun control is really costing us.

The English, plagued by the Highland Scots on many occasions in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries, attempted to round up all of their small arms and swords. The searches in 1689 didn’t turn up the weapons that were used in the rising of 1715; and the searches after that revolt didn’t turn up the weapons used in 1745. The total occupation of the Highlands with determined and brutal searches in the aftermath of Culloden had little effect. Predictably, when the British latter started recruiting Highlanders for their army, swarms of eager recruits often turned up with their own swords, daggers and bagpipes (banned by the British as a weapon in 1745).

If disarming a people won’t work, is it possible to disarm a whole nation? After all, you can’t thrust a fighter plane into the thatch of a cottage, or bury a warship in the back garden. After the Versailles Treaty of 1919, Germany was ordered completely disarmed of all heavy weaponry — no submarines, no aircraft, no tanks, no heavy artillery, no poison gas, etc. Unfortunately, the Allies settled for few inspectors and little resolve in imposing their will. Fokker moved his fighter plane factories to the Netherlands, while the German general staff conducted their experiments with new weaponry inside Soviet Russia.

When Hitler repudiated the Versailles Treaty and openly armed Germany once more; the light fast ‘passenger aircraft’ Lufthansa had been using made a remarkable overnight transition into a large bomber force. German designers were ready with excellent new designs for artillery and tanks, and pressed them into service immediately, and the coastal torpedo craft that the German navy had been allowed turned out to have been excellent training ships for the coming generation of U-Boat commanders.

We have the whole sorry experience of dealing with Soviet Union during the latter years of the Cold War. While generally honest about their strategic nuclear forces, they were fond of motherhood statements of grand principle and phony disarmament ploys. Remember the ‘Whiskey on the Rocks’ incident, when a conventional Soviet submarine (with a pair of nuclear warheads in its torpedo room) was stranded outside an important Swedish naval base? This was when they were pressing the Scandinavian countries to become a "Nuclear Weapons Free Zone". There was also Brezhnev’s grand offer in 1979 to pull thousands of T-62 tanks from Germany and Czechoslovakia as a reassuring gesture to the West. What actually happened was that all of these tanks went to Central Asia to be used in the invasion of Afghanistan, while unheralded shipments of new T-64 tanks came in to replace the obsolescent T-62s.

In the early 1970s, the US unilaterally halted production of new chemical weapons and experiments into offensive biological warfare. The Soviets, resisting any attempt for mutual inspection, swore they would do likewise. They didn’t — as their occasional use of chemical weapons in Afghanistan and the 1979 Anthrax incident in Sverdlosk indicates. There were also talks to reduce conventional arms in Europe, but after the USSR collapsed, it transpired that their real holdings of tanks and artillery had been significantly under-reported.

Disarmament does work if agreements are open, contain stringent verification measures, and the disarming countries show they have nothing to hide. Current arms control agreements between the US and post-Soviet Russia include all these features, and both nations (plus NATO and the UN) are perfectly satisfied that both countries are doing exactly as advertised. South Africa was also open and candid when letting the world it had abandoned its weapons programs.

What about Iraq? Totally non-cooperative, they’ve had a year to hide things before this latest round of inspections. They won’t disarm, won’t let the inspectors find anything, and will re-open their programs as soon as they can. The only way to make them abandon their biological, chemical and nuclear programs is to change their government. If the UN can’t do it, somebody else will have to do it the hard way.

On behalf of the untold millions of people whose lives will be spared if Saddam’s programs come to an end; there is only this to say to Washington. Go for it. History will vindicate you.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca