New York City Dusko Doder’s assertion, in “Balkans Breakdown” [April 30], that Greece was against the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s (FYROM) existence is erroneous and unfounded, especially in light of Greece’s continuous support for FYROM during the Balkan crisis. Besides condemning the terrorist attacks against FYROM’s northwestern regions, Greece from the beginning firmly reiterated its support for its Balkan neighbor. In his message to FYROM Prime Minister Georgievski, Greek Prime Minister Simitis stressed that “Greece considers the sovereignty and territorial integrity of FYROM within its internationally recognized borders essential for the stability in our region and unequivocally condemns all violent acts aiming at its destabilization.”
Simitis assured Georgievski that Greece, in close cooperation with its partners in NATO and the EU on the situation, called on the international community to take appropriate measures to avoid further escalation in that sensitive region. Greek Foreign Affairs Minister George Papandreou, who was among the first to visit Skopje and offer support, said that Greece was prepared to participate in a multinational force aiming at protecting FYROM.
Regarding Greece’s position on the use by FYROM of the name “Macedonia,” Simitis reiterated that in his recent talks with Georgievski they agreed that this matter must be resolved as quickly as possible.
DIMITRIS GEMELOS
Vienna, Va.
As an information official, Dr. Gemelos is paid to have a selective memory. A few facts: In 1992, both Greece and Serbia were engaged in relentless harassment of the new Macedonian state. The Greeks banned the tiny country’s access to the port of Thessaloniki, while the Serbs banned export of food to Macedonia. The Serb and Greek leaders, Slobodan Milosevic and Konstantin Mitsotakis, actively considered Macedonia’s partition. In April 1992, after Milosevic returned from Athens, he publicly proposed a Greek-Serb confederation. Prime Minister Mitsotakis backed away from this idea when some key people in the ruling New Democracy Party publicly broke away. The grand old man of conservative politics, George Rallis (the former prime minister, whose father and grandfather were also prime ministers) resigned his parliamentary seat protesting Mitsotakis’s policy toward Macedonia, which he said was endangering Greece’s ties to Europe.
Dr. Gemelos quotes George Papandreou, whose father was elected prime minister in 1993 on a platform denouncing the incumbent Mitsotakis for taking part in UN-sponsored talks to resolve the Macedonian crisis. “Greece cannot and should not accept a nation with the name Macedonia on its borders,” Papandreou insisted. In November 1993 he terminated UN-sponsored talks on resolving the Macedonian-Greek conflict. In February 1994, he imposed a total embargo on Macedonia. The Greek government’s slogan, which could be seen everywhere, was: “Macedonia has been a part of Greece for 3,200 years.”
It is perhaps most telling that Dr. Gemelos does not refer to Macedonia as Macedonia but as FYROM–nine years after that unhappy territory became a fully fledged member of the United Nations.
DUSKO DODER
Washington, D.C.
Bill Hartung, in “Bush’s Nuclear Revival” [March 12], asserts a view widely held by the peace community that the Bush Administration’s nuclear posture review, and the push for a National Missile Defense (NMD), will rekindle a nuclear arms race. If only it were that simple. In all likelihood, the Bush review has intensified the internal conflict within the military establishment between burgeoning conventional- weapons spending and the enormous costs of supporting excessively large nuclear targeting requirements. There’s a good chance that nuclear weapons will be cut further. DOE weapons labs are already looking for a new “niche market” by pushing for new, low-yield precision nuclear “bunker busters.” In addition to enormous operations and maintenance costs of deployment, nuclear weapons states are being forced to internalize additional large costs of nuclear material legacies, and to shore up deteriorating and dangerous nuclear weapons facilities. These factors add greatly to the cost of maintaining the roughly 7,500 existing nuclear weapons. Even after significant reductions over the past ten years, the real costs of the DOE’s nuclear weapons program have nearly tripled. In effect, the “balloon mortgage” of the nuclear arms race is just coming due.
If past is prologue, George W. Bush will have to contend with the legacy of his father, who after a similar nuclear weapons posture review in 1990 imposed a moratorium on nuclear testing, eliminated battlefield nukes and removed other tactical nukes from deployment, ceased production of fissile materials, initiated a major downsizing of the weapons production complex, entered into an agreement to purchase 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium from Russian nuclear weapons, teed up the ratification of START I and initiated START II negotiations. George W.’s campaign rhetoric was very clear about his promises to take unilateral nuclear disarmament steps.
Specifically for Russia, deployment of NMD could mean serious harm to existing arms agreements, which is bad enough. However, the enormous expense of nuclear weapons is leading Russia to unilaterally slash its nuclear arsenal to pay for more urgent conventional-force requirements. To compensate for the loss of revenues from the Defense Ministry, the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry is actively trying to obtain hard currency by offering Russian sites as nuclear waste dumps for the commercial nuclear industry. A more imminent threat to the world than NMD comes from the spread of excess fissile materials in the former Soviet Union.
The nuclear arms buildup scenario by China is less certain, given China’s minimal nuclear deterrent capability. However, the days of huge nuclear buildups based on the concept of “how many times the rubble will bounce” are over. China and other nations merely have to look at the enormous and tragic debacle created by the United States and Russia over the past half-century. Provocative acts not connected to NMD, like pushing for “usable” nuclear weapons, can unleash efforts by China and other countries to do the same.
The NMD program is meant to open the door for a major weaponization of space using an array of next-generation nonnuclear weapons. NMD is just the first step in achieving the Pentagon’s long-range objective of US military domination of space, where weapons are envisioned to do things like cripple the electrical infrastructures of entire nations.
The consequences of NMD testing and deployment by other nations are likely to be mixed. They will probably take the form of economic and military acts that will alienate the United States from its historical friends and former enemies at a time of growing global political instability. But these problems should not be confused with a steep new cold war-era buildup of nuclear weapons. That nuclear arms race cannot be restarted.
ROBERT ALVAREZ
New York City
I thank Robert Alvarez for his thoughtful response to my editorial. He has a long and distinguished record of dealing with nuclear issues, both as a nongovernmental expert and at the Energy Department, and I respect his judgment.
My concern about the Bush nuclear posture–at least the variant supported by advisers like Stephen Hadley and Robert Joseph, both of whom participated in the National Institute for Public Policy’s hair-raising study on this issue–is not necessarily that it will lead to huge numerical increases in global nuclear weapons stockpiles. My concern is that by pushing a technical solution to nuclear dangers (missile defense) while pressing for a new generation of allegedly more “usable” low-yield nuclear weapons, the Bush Administration will re-legitimize nuclear weapons as an “acceptable” instrument of coercive diplomacy and outright warfare. This in turn could push China to build hundreds or perhaps as many as a thousand or more nuclear-armed missiles to augment its current force of eighteen. Russia would be more inclined to keep its nuclear forces on alert, increasing the possibility of an accidental launch in some future crisis. And all bets would be off in terms of capping the nuclear programs of India and Pakistan or the nuclear ambitions of states like Iran and Iraq. The danger would not be increasing numbers of weapons, but an increased risk that one of them might be used in a regional conflict.
I do not dismiss Alvarez’s extremely important arguments. The economic and environmental costs of sustaining cold war-style nuclear arsenals are coming home to roost. There are obvious incentives for Washington, Moscow and Beijing to reduce these forces, if for no other reason than that they will gobble up resources that could be used for other military purposes. And given the daunting technical obstacles standing in the way of fielding even a modest missile defense system, Bush’s dream of a multitiered missile shield is by no means inevitable. Funding priorities that may compete with ballistic missile defense in the Pentagon budget include weaponizing space, building a new generation of lighter, “smarter” weapons and increasing the mobility of US forces–not to mention building all those big-ticket weapons platforms left over from the drawing boards of the cold war. Even if the Pentagon decides not to pursue a major nuclear buildup, the Bush Administration’s highly militarized approach to foreign policy is worth opposing in its own right, even if it is accompanied by some reductions in the numbers of nuclear weapons, but that’s a longer discussion.
Despite the excellent points made by Alvarez, my fear is that if Bush doesn’t hear strong, clear opposition to the more destructive elements of his emerging nuclear doctrine–from the media, the public, Capitol Hill and cooler heads in his own party–he may resist the strong logic favoring denuclearization in pursuit of a deluded and dangerous ideology of nuclear superiority that should have long since been tossed into the dustbin of history. Given his Administration’s behavior in its first few months, I’m not inclined to trust the good intentions or common sense of the Bush foreign policy team on a matter as sensitive and dangerous as nuclear weapons policy.
WILLIAM D. HARTUNG
GREECE [heart] MACEDONIA
Greek Press and Information Office
DODER REPLIES
Popular
"swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe →
TAKE THE TOYS AWAY FROM THE BOYS
HARTUNG REPLIES
