North Korean nuclear development - 30 September 1994

The word went out over every New York City television and radio station: if you intend to drive into New York tomorrow or around New York, don't do it, stay home.

Forty years ago that sort of message would have been an air raid alert, 40 years ago in the '50s? Yes, everywhere we went in those days, we could see bright yellow stickers on the walls of office buildings, subway stations, street corners; they said simply air raid shelter and carried an arrow, usually pointing down. That's when we did not think a Russian air raid was an impossibility, when we lived in what was called a balance of terror.

That condition is so long-gone as to sound now like the delusion of a lunatic, but last Monday's alert signified something quite different, it meant, it means and it happens several times a year that the president of the United States is coming to town and the town had better be left free for him. I suppose there was a time when a president travelled with only a couple of secret servicemen. Woodrow Wilson used to pop up here for an evening at the opera and nobody except a clapping audience at the Met knew anything about it till the next day. Come to think of it, much much later Harry Truman took a regular walk, a brisk mile or so on the streets of Washington every morning, he did the same thing for a time when he came to New York till people learned about it and crowded him off the sidewalk.

Well, there haven't been more presidential assassinations in the last 60 years than there were in the previous 60, though there have been four scary attempts, the closest to a president's sudden death being I suppose the time down in Miami in the winter of 1932-3, I think February 33, three weeks before Franklin Roosevelt was even inaugurated when in a split second a woman nudged the elbow of a man with a pistol so that the bullet killed not Mr Roosevelt but the mayor of Chicago who was standing next to him.

However, I think the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas and then of his brother in Los Angeles set for ever a new pattern of protection. Today, a week or two before the president goes anywhere, the secret service and the local police scanned, case, probe every street he'll go along, every rooftop, every shop and department store, church entrance, every manhole cover. There's a university town I can't remember which, where the police would have to search under what the university insists must be called from now on "person hole cover".

Well, that done, the evening before the president flies into New York, the city police put LaGuardia airport on what they used to call red alert, no Russian reference intended. The next day, half an hour before the president's plane arrives, all outgoing and incoming plane arrivals are delayed, the route about 12, 13 miles to his Midtown hotel and all the United Nations headquarters is patrolled by several score radio cars and here's where the ordinary citizen comes in or rather is begged not to come in, three or four street blocks around the hotel and the highways and blocks leading to the United Nations and any other street the president might go along all closed off. Pretty much the whole of Midtown on the East side barred and banned to you and me, the resulting traffic freeze everywhere can be imagined.

However, if you manage to get into the General Assembly auditorium you looked down on a glittering assemblage of 184 ambassadors and delegates, any meeting of public men is glittery these days because of the television lights. A first-time spectator must have felt last Monday that the United Nations was more impressive, more powerful than ever. Impressive in plenary session, yes. Powerful, it's doubtful if it's ever been less powerful in critical international situations because of a fatal challenge to its authority first tried out I believe in Somalia but bracingly practised as a military routine in Bosnia.

Throughout the long and honourable history of United Nations peacekeeping, the warriors have always apart from accidents held their fire when they saw the men in the blue caps. UN forces were always looked on as a cushion of neutral policemen and latterly in Rwanda and Somalia and Bosnia as humanitarian peacekeepers, but the Serbs, perhaps they were not the first but they are the boldest innovators of a new policy, the policy being to look on the United Nations forces as combatants to be fired on.

The first time they did that was a sad day in the history of the United Nations, which was never meant to be a separate fighting force. What's more, if a majority of 184 nations decided it ought to be, it can't be it has no money and its forces, which according to the 1945 charter ought by now to be overwhelming, exist only as a collection of companies voluntarily offered by different countries. The theory, the promise of the charter we all applauded way back there in the summer of 1945 was Article 43. Today it's a wonderful thing to behold quote, "all members of the United Nations undertake to make available to the Security Council on its call armed forces assistance and facilities including rights of passage, such agreement or agreements shall govern the number and types of forces their degree of readiness and general location and the nature of the facilities and assistance to be provided", signed at San Francisco, 26 June 1945.

Did we really believe then that this would be done? I can't remember but the fact is that in 49 years it has not been done, no nation has told the United Nations it can call at anytime on its armed forces. And certainly if all members had obeyed the charter, the UN today would have a vast insuperable array of military forces.

General Sir Michael Rose, by the way, has objected to the constant use of the word "forces" because it suggests a function they are not allowed to perform. Some people have learned this sad fact of life very slowly and so when there's a threat to the peace that they fear might involve their own nations they say, "oh no, we shouldn't go in, let's have the United Nations vote the sanctions instead". That gives us a very comfortable feeling of having faced a nasty situation without in life facing it at all.

We always hear that sanctions will ruin the country their imposed on and they never do, namely because of the Achilles heel of sanctions transshipment. Saddam Hussein did very well during the desert war by receiving through Jordan and other countries goods and weapons never on the manifest assigned to him. So every time the UN appears to be unable to cope in wars with which it was never meant to cope, we have reluctantly to admit that the United Nations has not, as one of its early and the secretaries wrote 40 years ago, helped man's capacity to shed the habits of the jungle.

And it seems to me that the presence of the United Nations as an alternative answer to any threat to the peace has had a wholly lamentable effect on the big powers on the Western nations anyway, not the fault of the UN. But when things get tough and nasty – the Balkans, the supreme and devastating example – the reflex of a troubled leader is to say, "well, if we go in hundreds perhaps thousands of our boys might die, so would it not be more civilised, more humane, more enlightened to put it up to the United Nations?"

So when the defence of Bosnia fell solidly on the shoulders of France, Britain, Germany and the United States, Russia too in theory but never a chance of there deserting their Serbian allies, we all jibbed. The NATO members ceased to be the policing powers they were meant to be. The United States yet again showing their terror of committing its soldiers to the possibility of death or as United States Senator say "putting them in harm's way" refused to put in ground troops. All parties rewarded the Serbs for their conquest by ethnic cleansing by putting in peacekeeping forces into a situation where there was no peace. Well it's too late now to save Bosnia just as at Munich it was too late to save Austria and Czechoslovakia.

You may have noticed this new reflex of making a bargain with a tyrant under the guise of writing a peace treaty is being practised in this country almost as a profession by former President Jimmy Carter. He did it in North Korea, where President Clinton had said "we cannot allow you to make nuclear weapons it must stop" whereupon North Korea just went on about its nuclear business. Enter Mr Carter, he gets promises out of them, they don't keep them, they're back to business as usual. Haiti, Mr Carter like a man of God refuses to judge the character of any tyrant he talks to, he finds General Cédras an honourable man with a lovely wife. He makes an agreement at the last minute before the United States Calvary goes in.

Well, we shall see maybe it's too early to say whether Mr Carter's hair's breadth intervention was a desperate wise move or a super Munich surrender, either way there's one certain loser poor President Clinton whose being called "Jimmy Clinton" and the "assistant president" and many other demeaning names. The first ripple effect on his party's chances in the November congressional elections is from the evidence of the primaries devastating. If Haiti works, it will be Saint Jimmy Carter; if it fails Mr Carter can go into retreat, it's Mr Clinton who will have the ashes on his head.

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