Wishful Thinking Overload - 22 October 1999

Have you ever heard of the Boston Massacre?

Every schoolchild in the United States knows - or considering the appalling record of today's American high schools in English, maths and history, perhaps I should say - every American schoolchild used to know that the Boston Massacre was the trigger that set aflame the colonies and started what is known here as the American Revolution and elsewhere as the War of Independence.

I thought at once of that gory scene - the Boston Massacre - the other day when I picked up my morning paper and saw the universal lament of the European and Asian press over the Senate's rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

The groans and curses over the blindness, the meanness, the undying Monica obsession of the vengeance-seeking Republicans.

Those are not words of mine but ones I've copied out from the reports and editorials in Europe and elsewhere.

So, as Shakespeare would have said, the concernancy please with the Boston Massacre?

Well that ghastly event was the killing by British soldiers of three citizens of Boston. One of them, by the way, was black - a fate which has left him secure in the American memory as the first black hero of the Revolution.

It was a bleak day in March 1770 - and few climates are as bleak as Boston's in March - snow and ice on the ground.

A single British sentry guarded the customs house which marked the port of entry for British goods.

The presence of that soldier, shouldering a musket, is the only fact that is agreed to by everybody who passed by or looked on or said he was looking on or later came by.

The only positive statement we can be sure about is that there was no massacre. At some point the sentry's musket went off - and there are a score of versions of why and how.

The establishment or official British version is that a bunch of toughs started joking with the soldier, then baiting him, then threw stones and slivers of ice at him, that he shouted for help and as more soldiers came running to his aid he slipped on the ice and his musket went off.

Maybe. What is not in dispute is that the crowd - small or large by this time - charged the soldiers and that one or more of them panicked and fired.

By evening, when three civilians lay dead and two wounded had been carried away, lawyers appeared - they appeared in great numbers next day and took down depositions from self-confessed onlookers, who described, while lawyers inscribed, over a hundred different authentic accounts of what really happened "Right before my very eyes sir."

And if anybody doubted the horror of that March day's bloodshed, anybody dared question whether or not it was a massacre all they had to do was to get hot off the press their favourite silversmith's print entitled The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street.

Look at it - eight British soldiers standing abreast, rifles raised and ablaze, in obedience to an officer with raised sword calling the shots. An immense cloud of gun smoke and below the pitiable sight of dying and failing and helpless civilians.

This universally popular version of the bloody massacre at Boston stirred 13 colonies and what really happened ceased to matter - as so often in history, as last week with the worldwide revulsion at the rejection of the nuclear treaty - not what happened but what people convince themselves must have happened is what counts.

A good treaty defeated by a few selfish, partisan, short-sighted men.

It seems to me that the whole conflict and the public debate over this treaty arises from the confusion between how the treaty demands that nations shall behave and how far reasonable men and women can expect them to behave.

The main points are quite plain and straightforward.

The treaty bans all nuclear testing in the atmosphere, above ground, underground and against the strong possibility that some of the 154 countries, who've agreed to obey, some might deceive us, there will be 321 detection stations planted in 90 countries.

First note that what the treaty says shall be done is something we hope 90 countries will let us do.

The other big provision of the treaty is for on-site inspection. Apparently technological detection, like seismographs spotting and locating earthquakes, may not be enough, so teams - presumably recruited by the United Nations - teams of experts would be prepared to go off to any place on Earth where a nation was violating the treaty and search and probe and inspect the ground and the underground - the caves, the secret hiding places - for nuclear material that could be used for testing.

This sounds thorough and, what's more, eminently feasible - if we had not seen a team of United Nations experts spend years giving their all to discover Saddam Hussein's violations of the treaty he signed after he'd lost, remember, the Gulf War nine years ago.

No nuclear nonsense, no preparations for chemical, biological war. No? Well the teams failed. Saddam actually threw them out.

The UN was about as successful in punishing him as the League of Nations was in punishing Japan for invading Manchuria or Mussolini for swooping down on helpless Ethiopia.

All right, stay with the main provision - demand - no nuclear testing above or below. Over 300 detector stations, 154 nations have signed on - which means nothing.

The treaty doesn't begin to come into effect until 44 have ratified it - so far only 21 have ratified - a point not made by the media that bemoans the single failure of the United States Senate.

That's understandable since there's a universal belief that since the US is the only superpower, if it fails to do something everybody thinks is admirable, helps the cause of peace, then lesser nations will say 'No need for us to comply'.

And that, I do believe, is the most powerful reason to bemoan the Senate's action, though it does not take account of the fact that with 133 other nations having done nothing yet to ratify the treaty it is not going to happen anyway.

The mourners also believe, with no evidence except the wish to believe, that the approval of the United States would have made the other 132 fall into obedience.

I mentioned last time that the treaty was supported by the military here - the chairman of the chiefs of staff and four of his predecessors, by most of the Democrats, and opposed by most of the Republicans.

What I did not mention, because I had not then read their public testimony, was that against the treaty stood six former secretaries of state from both Republican and Democratic administrations, four former secretaries of defence, several Nobel Prize winners in relevant sciences, four previous heads of the CIA and most impressively the three men who are the directors of the three American nuclear laboratories - the keepers of the American nuclear stockpile.

They gave, two weeks ago, exhaustive public testimony which changed the mind, among others, of Senator Warner - the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee - the usually stalwart backer of the president's foreign policy.

Their testimony amounted to a public confession that without continuous nuclear testing they would be powerless to go on with their jobs. They said that the present stockpile is safe and reliable but there are several factors which fail to guarantee its safety even next year let alone far into the future.

For one thing there's a disturbing shortage of trained nuclear experts. Weapons, particularly warheads, age and have constantly to be re-tested or replaced.

Dr Paul Robinson, who heads the National Nuclear Laboratory in New Mexico, thought that the crux of the whole dilemma is whether, on balance, a test ban to retard proliferation and further development of nuclear weapons is worth a similar penalty on the United States. He did not think so.

The three don't believe that the crux is soluble by this treaty but rather that the US would be bound not to test or modernise its weapons while states like North Korea and Iran could go ahead and conduct low-level tests on the way to production of their own bombs.

You know, since 1992 the United States has itself suspended underground testing and relied on weapons labs and computer models and non-nuclear explosive tests.

But these three stressed lab testing, however sophisticated, is not enough to certify the readiness of the stockpile in the near future.

Dr Robinson, clinching the trio's convictions, ended - "If the United States scrupulously restricts itself to zero yield, while other nations conduct experiments up to the threshold of international detectability we will be put at an intolerable disadvantage." That is the technical crux. It seems to me the political crux is the fact that this treaty, like the Treaty of Versailles - like the Paul Revere engraving - is loaded, overloaded, with wishful feeling.

It states what we would love to happen, or how we wish things had happened.

Woodrow Wilson's covenant of the League of Nations simply declared - didn't tell you how it was to be done, simply declared - that all ethnic groups - nationalities as we used to say - inside another nation's borders will, from now on, have the right, by an election, to determine their own political future.

Nobody at the time said - 'Are you kidding?'

It still hasn't happened today. Trying to do it has sparked many appalling wars.

So the weight of expert evidence added to our own political experience suggest that this treaty, like the Treaty of Versailles, is a classic case of begging the question. That is of assuming, as an achieved fact, the very thing you hope to prove.

A majority of the Senate today, including most Republicans, believe the treaty should have been withdrawn and brought up again when a new administration has thought hard and long, tried to write a new and workable treaty.

Mr Clinton is partly to blame here. He signed this treaty two years ago and in the interim has done nothing to shed its essential air of wishing the impossible or what is extremely unlikely to happen.

I believe it will be done. The exposure of the overload of wishful thinking in this treaty, I believe will, and before long, be seen to have done nothing but good.

In the meantime the proven superiority of the United States in these matters remains. That is to say, the nuclear umbrella is still in place.

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