Europe, Headlines, Human Rights, Nuclear Energy - Nuclear Weapons, Peace

Eastern Europe Resists Disarmament

Pavol Stracansky

PRAGUE, May 21 2010 (IPS) - Despite the U.S. and Russia signing what was widely hailed as a landmark deal on nuclear arms reduction in Eastern Europe last month, the region remains hesitant to back full disarmament.

Leaders who met U.S. President Barack Obama just hours after he inked the agreement with his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev have all backed the planned reductions. But in contrast to the stance of many in Western Europe, they will not give their support to a “global zero” abolition of all nuclear weapons any time soon, security experts say.

Jiri Schneider of the Prague Security Studies Institute in Prague told IPS: “In Eastern Europe there is a hesitancy towards complete abolition and especially the removal of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons from Europe. The region has concerns about Russia.”

President Obama first laid out his nuclear disarmament plans in Prague a year ago in a speech in which he said he hoped that one day the world would be rid of nuclear weapons. He then chose the Czech capital as the location to seal a deal last month with Russia to limit Russian and U.S. strategic nuclear weapons stocks to 1,550 warheads each.

The venue, in one of the most prominent capitals in the former Eastern bloc where nuclear weapons had been deployed in the Cold War, was seen by many as a signal to Washington’s Eastern European allies that their support both politically and materially — in some case sending troops to Afghanistan — was not being cast aside as closer ties were forged with Washington.

But foreign political analysts say that concerns about Russia and its influence are at the heart of a reluctance among Eastern European political leaders to wholeheartedly commit to any programme to rid the world entirely of nuclear weapons.

Schneider said: “There are no firm positions on disarmament in the region simply because there are no nuclear weapons here and no country in this region has them. There is no reason for anyone not to give their support to the disarmament levels agreed to in this treaty. But there is a general scepticism towards global zero among Eastern European regimes, unlike in Western Europe where that ideal is more likely to be wholeheartedly embraced.

“The reason for this is worries over Russia. If the U.S. removed tactical nuclear weapons, what would happen to the Russian nuclear weapons within (Russian) Europe? You would need to get rid of them and that is not even on the cards.”

Tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were not mentioned in the agreement signed in Prague.

Enmity towards Russia and its possible influence still runs deep in former Eastern bloc countries where memories of Soviet-led invasions and the privations of Moscow-dominated communist rule still linger.

Many of the former Eastern bloc states have now joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and had until recently been largely secure in their belief that membership had made their countries safer.

But in July last year prominent Eastern European intellectuals and former leaders including former Czech president and dissident Vaclav Havel and ex- Polish president and Solidarity movement leader Lech Walesa published an open letter to President Obama citing their fears that the United States was abandoning Russia, that NATO was growing weaker and that Russian influence in the region was surging. They also openly questioned whether NATO would come to the region’s defence if a country was attacked.

Fears that Washington was appeasing Moscow to the detriment of the region also grew just months later when President Obama dropped plans to deploy parts of a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic first proposed by the Bush administration in 2006. It had been sternly rejected by Russia.

The plans would have seen interceptor missiles housed in Poland and a radar base in the Czech Republic. Since then, Romania has announced a deal with Washington to host a missile defence system, and neighbouring Bulgaria has offered to house an accompanying radar base.

Experts say that Eastern European leaders will be only too happy to have a U.S. defence system in the region.

Robert Ondrejcsak, head of the Centre for European and North-Atlantic Affairs NGO in Bratislava, Slovakia, told IPS: “Eastern European leaders generally want a stronger U.S. presence in the region and will welcome any new U.S. engagement in European defence, and that includes Bulgaria and Romania.

“Romanian politicians are very much in support of these plans across the political spectrum, and in Bulgaria also there is a great deal of political support.”

The plan has been backed by all the major parties in the Romanian parliament, and Washington and Bucharest are to begin talks on the issue soon.

The missile defence plans for Poland and the Czech Republic were controversial and fiercely opposed at local level in both states. Surveys ahead of the Obama decision showed that in the Czech Republic two-thirds of the population was against the radar base while in Poland almost half did not want the missiles.

But the strength of public opposition in response to the original missile shield plans compares starkly to what experts say is an almost complete lack of any nuclear disarmament campaigning at the societal level.

Experts say that the reason for the public apathy is both down to history and a lack of structured debate on nuclear weapons for the last two decades.

Schneider said: “At societal level no one really cares. There are no weapons deployed here so there is not much to debate and when there were weapons deployed here during the cold war there was no debate about their deployment, for obvious reasons. It is down to history. Generally, there has never been any real defence or strategic debate in the region at societal level.”