Unwise move

IF THE END of the Cold War between Washington and Moscow soon after the collapse of communism in, and the break-up of, the Soviet Union had raised hopes that the next logical step for the two superpowers would be to get down to the task of scrapping their deadly stockpile, it soon became clear that they were illusory. The U.S. shooting of a ``hit-to-kill'' weapon fired from Vanderberg Air Force base in California - which failed to achieve an intercept of the missile launched from a Pacific atoll - has been rightly seen as a provocation by Russia and China. Their response would naturally be to regard this as a challenge and devote their endeavours to match whatever superiority the U.S. might have gained in the technology of missile launching and interception.

The only explanation for the latest U.S. launching of an interceptor of its Minuteman intercontinental missile could be its resolve to retain its supremacy in the technology both for making destructive weapons and its own inviolability from missile attacks. The failure of the intercept due to a glitch will not leave the U.S. in peace until it further perfects the interception technology to ensure that its successful deployment becomes just a matter of routine. The effort which this requires is bound to concentrate the attention of U.S. scientists and technologists on the achievement of an objective - the building of a missile and anti-missile armoury - which both Washington and Moscow should have given up after the end of the Cold War. It will be recalled that the nuclear and missile arsenals of the U.S. and Russia will still remain sizable by 2010 even after their committing themselves to bring them down and eventually destroy them. The latest missile and the intercept launches only strengthen suspicions that the U.S. had no intentions of honouring whatever obligations it might have accepted for bringing down its missile stockpile - and one could be sure that it will not carry out such reductions in its nuclear armoury either.

It will be naive to believe that the launching of the interceptor is just a one-shot effort by the U.S. especially after it had failed to hit and pulverise its target. A perfection of the technology for achieving a hundred per cent fail-proof destruction of its target will be followed by the building up of an arsenal. The utter stupidity - and even madness - of resorting to such a programme at a cost of several billion dollars is appalling at a time when none of the superpowers faces any threat to security and it is beyond even the wildest imagination to visualise a situation which could rush them to an annihilating missile war. This being the present global scenario, the latest U.S. move could only be attributed to the Pentagon's susceptibility to pressures from its missile industry bent upon remaining indefinitely in business with a continuous upgradation of its technology at a huge cost which is sheer squandering.

The close relationships the U.S. has built up not only with Russia but also with China should have completely set at rest all fears about there being another conflagration of the kind the world had seen in the two world wars of the last century. If in spite of this, the U.S. feels that it has to remain very much ahead with a continuous sophistication of its missile technology, it could only be a manifestation of a craze to remain invulnerable against wholly non-existent hazards. The U.S. obviously believes that the world can be kept in peace only if its superior weaponry deters other nations from resorting to adventurist behaviour. Such a perception could recall the pronouncement about ``the strong man becoming strongest only when he is alone'' made by Adolf Hitler, in his Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a maniac whom the U.S. had fought along with its allies half a century ago.

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