The Cold War is Dead - Long Live the Cold War!

Not once has Britain been directly threatened by a hostile nuclear power.  Earlier this year, when North Korea readied its warheads for launch, the targets were South Korea, Japan and, of course, the USA.  The Cuban Missile Crisis, widely acknowledged to be the moment the world came closest to nuclear destruction, was a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States.

From the end of World War II onwards, Britain’s global influence has steadily declined. The war left us with a severely damaged economy to rebuild, and the inclusion of Britain in the Yalta and Potsdam conferences was a tokenistic gesture in recognition of Britain’s wartime contribution.  But Churchill, and then Attlee, represented a nation with its glory days fading fast.  As the Empire slowly disintegrated over the next quarter century and the US and Soviet Union grew more powerful than Britain had ever been, even at the height of its influence, the UK was shunted into the wings of the global stage.

Far from being something to lament, as many nostalgic for an era when Britannia ruled the waves believe, it is something to be grateful for.  The number one nemesis of today's rogue nuclear states is the USA.  These states, either known to possess or suspected of possessing nuclear weaponry – Russia, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel and Iran – have little to no interest in Britain as a strategic target.  Though our politicians would have us believe otherwise, Britain is globally insignificant.  We are one of a number of European nations, a little fish in a big pond, and our ‘special’ relationship with the USA is best described as one of those somewhat awkward love affairs, where it is painfully obvious to observers that one party is just a little bit more into the whole thing than the other.  Whether we like it or not, this is how the rest of the world views us.  So maybe it is time embrace this realisation.

That Britain is a declining world power is just one of a long list of reasons why it makes sense, economically, politically and morally, to eliminate the UK’s nuclear capability.  Top of that list is indisputably that nuclear weapons are an ineffective and inappropriate response to the threats we face in a post-Cold War world.

Britain tested its first nuclear weapons in 1952

The Cold War officially ended with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, but it had been drawing to a close throughout the 1980s.  President Ronald Reagan announced in his inaugural address in 1985 that his administration sought “the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth,” marking a definitive departure from the pro-nuclear policies that had prevailed in previous decades.  Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s twin policies of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ (economic restructuring and openness) signalled a shift in the Russian position, as well as conceding the crippling effect that the nuclear arms race had had on the Soviet economy.  The thawing of the Cold War was confirmed by the INF Treaty, signed in 1987, and cemented by START I, signed 22 years ago this week by Gorbachev and President George Bush Snr.

When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it was predicted that any future war would result in nuclear holocaust.  This turned out to be erroneous.  The 20th century did not see a reduction in the number of wars being fought with conventional weaponry.  Indicators suggest the 21st century won’t either.  And alongside the conflicts erupting across the globe, in which many more combatants and civilians have been killed than lost their lives during both World Wars, we are facing new enemies against which nuclear weapons will be next to useless.  Terrorists who are prepared to martyr themselves for their cause will not be deterred by the threat of annihilation.  The possession of nuclear weapons by the major powers has not brought peace, nor has it made the world a safer place.

Yet their proliferation increases the risk that nuclear weapons will be used by accident.  There were many near misses during the Cold War.  During the Cuban Missile crisis, having lost communication with Moscow, the commander of a Soviet submarine, not knowing whether or not war had broken out, put it to a vote amongst his senior officers as to whether or not to launch his nuclear torpedo at a US ship blockading Cuban waters: the vote was 2:1 against firing.  There were numerous other incidents of confusion, misidentified flying objects and technical hitches which could have led to World War III.  It is perhaps only luck that prevented this.

Thousands in the UK marched in 1958 against nuclear weapons,
and the protests continued throughout the 1960s.

According to Gareth Evans, Co-Chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), there are “at least 22,000 nuclear warheads still in existence, with a combined destructive capability of around 150,000 Hiroshima or Nagasaki sized bombs.” Why – morally and rationally – do we need this capability on the planet?  Experts believe that even a limited nuclear conflict – say, between India and Pakistan – would result in a nuclear winter, produced by ash from urban firestorms blocking out the sun and “causing devastating changes in weather patterns and rainfall.”

As for the role of Trident as a deterrent, the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (commonly known as MAD) no longer stands up to scrutiny.  In 1967, US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, recognising that there could be no such thing as a winnable nuclear war, famously gave a speech in which he advocated the policy of acquiring so many nuclear weapons that it would, quite literally, be madness to start a nuclear war.  However, it is now recognised that MAD is no longer a viable in an unstable world with increasing numbers of nuclear adversaries.  In an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2007, three former US Secretaries of State, including Henry Kissinger, and a former chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee argued that "it is far from certain that we can successfully replicate the old Soviet-American ‘mutually assured destruction’ with an increasing number of potential nuclear enemies world-wide without dramatically increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used.”

If the moral and strategic arguments against replacing Trident aren’t convincing, then the economic ones surely must be.  £3 billion has already been spent on exploring new designs for the submarines.  It is estimated that the final cost could be up to £34 billion.  Maintenance of the fleet will cost around £100 billion over the next 30 years.  For that money, we could build the 100 best schools in the world.  Or, as John Prescott argued yesterday, plug the predicted £25 billion black hole in NHS funding by 2020.  In a time of austerity, we can ill afford to maintain a weapons system which exists only to act as a status symbol of a former glory.

Almost from the moment nuclear weapons were first tested politicians of all guises have committed themselves to disarmament, and yet we remain a nuclear world.  And, like children in the playground, if some countries have them, others will want them too.  Britain could set an example in becoming the first nation to fully disarm.  Unilateral disarmament could be the opportunity pro-nuclear fantasists dream of for the UK to become a world-leader again.

Dear Sarajevo, I’ll never forget the first time we met…

The first time I saw Sarajevo was from the window of a train, having spent a sweat-soaked three days travelling across Europe in the late-June heat.  Our compartment was air-conditioned by way of a spare bootlace tying the window open.  We had left Zagreb at 9 that morning and it was now approaching 6pm as the hills fell away to reveal the outskirts of the city.  We disembarked the packed train and the crowds dissipated into the city, leaving us standing bewildered in virtually disserted plaza outside the station.

I was finally there, in the city I had spent four years studying and many more obsessing over.

It was all a little surreal.  Here were the landmarks I’d seen on archive TV news footage burning and shattering into dust, whilst shells and sniper fire echoed around.  In the peaceful evening sunshine, it was hard conflate the two images.  The tram we took to our hostel passed under the Holiday Inn, still towering in garish ochre over the expanse of Sniper Alley.  That day, cars, trams and pedestrians made their way untroubled along the wide road out to Ilidža.  I looked up at the surrounding hills, clambering down into the town at this point, orientating myself in this strange new reality.

My friends and I stayed six days before heading south to Mostar. I could have stayed for six weeks.  You can devour everything there is to read about somewhere, but until you visit, you cannot appreciate the taste, the touch and the sound of a place.  The random juxtaposition of Euro-pop and the call to prayer; the bitterness of your first Bosnian coffee, drunk in a tiny front room up a spiral staircase; walking barefoot home from a mountain-top restaurant in a summer storm.

I was just eight years old when the war ended in 1995, so my vague memories are limited to the coverage on Newsround.  My curiosity about Bosnia was piqued at a much later age and my visit served only to cement the country's place in my heart.  I am not arrogant enough to presume that because I have visited Sarajevo I can even begin to imagine how they suffered during the siege.  I do not pretend to know the city like a local.  Far from it.  There is so much more to learn, to experience and discover in this fascinating European capital.  I highly recommend a visit.

Sadly, all too often, Sarajevo is associated with war.  The Latin Bridge spanning the River Miljacka, on which Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is a stark reminder that this is the city in which the war to end all wars began.  And if they are unaware of that connection, many people automatically connect Sarajevo with the horrific images of the 1990s.

But despite spending three-and-a-half years under almost constant fire from encircling forces in the mountains around the city, Sarajevo survived.  In the summer months, the BSA turned off the water; in the winter, they cut off fuel supplies.  They arbitrarily sniped at pedestrians as they sprinted across road junctions and landed shells at random.  Against this backdrop, Sarajevans held a film festival and classical music concerts.  They dug a tunnel under the airport to bring supplies in from beyond the frontline.  And when the war was over, they quietly picked up the pieces of their lives and rebuilt their multicultural city, where East meets West.

Being the only student of the war in the group, I didn’t inflict too much history on my fellow travellers.  We visited what remains of the airport tunnel and the siege exhibition in the historical museum.  But, to the informed eye, the signs of the conflict which was raging just twenty years ago are everywhere.  Pavements and buildings are pock-marked with bullet holes and shell craters.  I watched in a dumbstruck trance as my friends shopped in the Markale marketplace.  The only sign of the shell that fell there in February 1994 is a memorial along the back wall bearing the names of the 68 who died there; you’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it.  A market trader accidentally knocked his sack trolley into it the glass casing around the shell crater.  And there were the railings over which I had seen the image of a mutilated body slumped.

Yet it felt necessary not to be seen noticing these things.  Whether it was due to my own awkwardness, being intimately acquainted with the pusillanimous efforts of the British government to end the war, or a sense of intrusion, it seemed somehow inappropriate, or at the very least impolite, to mention the war.

Aside from one moment of tension on arrival, when, confused and tired from travelling across seven countries and dealing with four different currencies in one weekend, we attempted to pay for our room with Croatian Kuna and were curtly informed that Bosnia was a different country, it was not apparent from the Bosnians we spoke to that a war had taken place.  We were accepted on face value as tourists and the people we met were eager to show us the delights of their beautiful country.

There was a sense almost as if the people were holding their breath.  The government buildings were set apart from the rest of the vibrant city, shrouded in a fearsome quiet.  Sarajevans were reclaiming their lives through hospitality, culture and congeniality, not through politics, which, since Dayton, have become toxic in the capital which suffered so much during the siege.  Declarations of political intent could tear apart a city which has restored itself to peace so successfully.

Over the last month, however, Sarajevo has awoken.  Sparked by the political stalemate over legislation governing the allocation of ID numbers, which has left babies born since February without numbers and therefore without access to insurance and passports, protesters have come out in force onto the streets of Sarajevo. The demonstrations have been further fuelled by the story of baby Berina, whose life-saving medical treatment in Serbia was delayed because she could not be issued a passport.  An emergency 180 day law was passed on 5 June allowing ID numbers to be allotted, but it was too late for Berina, who passed away on 13 June.

The sticking point is that politicians from the Republika Srpksa, the Bosnian Serb entity within Bosnia-Herzegovina, want the ID numbers to contain a signifier identifying the bearer’s region.  Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim politicians want the numbers to be allocated randomly.  As a result, Parliament is at an impasse.  The protesters set a deadline of 30 June for the government to break the deadlock, but that date has passed and the vote on the new draft law has been postponed until next week.

The public’s prior reluctance to protest is perhaps understandable.  The last mass protest in Sarajevo was a peace rally in April 1992.  Snipers shot into the crowd and killed two civilians.  Three-and-a-half years of war followed.  The Dayton Accords, signed in November 1995, left Bosnia-Herzegovina in a state of limbo, governed in an uneasy peace by the Federal government in Sarajevo and the Republika Srpska, with its de facto capital in Banja Luka.  The Bosnian Serbs want independence, whilst the Federal government wants unification and so the political system remains balanced on a knife edge.

Bosnians are now beginning to come out of political hibernation and exercise their democratic rights.  There has been plenty to inflame tensions in the last few weeks – the returning of 405 recently-identified bodies to Srebrenica on the 18th anniversary of the massacre, the reversal of Radovan Karadžic’s acquittal on charges of genocide in The Hague and the posturing of Bosnian Serb politicians boycotting Parliament and claiming that Sarajevo is not a safe place for Serbs.  But in Sarajevo the people have not reacted with violence but with a resounding demonstration that they will not allow the political elite to drag them back into conflict with one another.  Ethnicity has not played a part in the protesters’ message.

The recent of accession of Croatia to the EU has further highlighted the petty infighting amongst Bosnia’s politicians.  They had five years to prepare for it, but the Bosnian government still managed to miss the 1 July deadline for reforming legislation in order to allow its farmers to continue exporting food to neighbouring Croatia once it joined the EU.  Bosnia has now lost its largest export market worth 22 million euros annually.  Even if the legislation can be passed, it will take EU inspectors up to six months to give the exports the seal of approval, whilst Bosnian farmers search desperately for markets elsewhere.  Dissatisfaction with bickering politicians who appear more concerned with furthering their own personal interests than those of the Bosnian people is mounting.

It is true that the root of Bosnia’s current problems lie in the poor construction of the Dayton Accords, which left the country over-reliant on the international community and nationalist political parties.  But part of the blame lies with the people who have buried their heads in the sand and elected these politicians back into power time and time again.  With Croatia joining the European Union, perhaps the Bosnians now have a realistic goal to strive towards.  Croatia was also devastated by war twenty years ago, though admittedly not to the same extent as Bosnia, and has now recovered to a point where it can be accepted into political union with the rest of Europe.  Bosnia has a long way to go – it is predicted that they won’t be joining the EU until 2015 at the very earliest – and a lot of changes to make, but a resurgent political consciousness amongst Sarajevans may just be a start.