The Perils of Sole Superpower Status.

The United States is the world's self-proclaimed sole superpower, and both President Clinton and Congress are determined to maintain that superiority despite the cost in trillions of dollars and millions of lives. What makes it a superpower?

The first way the United States maintains its superpower status is by way of four major spheres of influence. Utilizing the Monroe Doctrine, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and various other agreements, it exercises its influence within the first sphere: the continents of North and South America. Since World War II, that influence has expanded to the second sphere: throughout the Pacific. U.S. military bases now extend from Australia to Japan, from South Korea to Hawaii and Alaska.

Through NATO and numerous investments and bases, the United States enjoys a third sphere of influence in Western Europe and, with the expansion of NATO upon U.S. insistence, in Eastern Europe to the borders of Russia. The United States further enjoys a fourth sphere encompassing the Middle East, where it has troops or military alliances stretching from Bosnia, Turkey, and Greece to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and some of the Gulf emirates--with Israel the pivotal ally. In addition, the United States exercises overwhelming financial influence abroad through American investments and in international policy-setting agencies, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

The second way the United States maintains its number one status is domestically, through the vast military program of the Pentagon. There can hardly be a more arrogant proclamation of power than in the Pentagon's draft Defense Planning Guide for 1994-1999, which states:

   America must prevent other states from challenging our leadership or
   seeking to overturn the established political and economic order .... We
   must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even
   aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

To sustain this power, the United States maintains nearly one hundred major bases in sixteen countries and has stationed troops in seventy-five countries.

One of the ways the Pentagon influences the militaries of other countries is by training foreign officers at U.S. "war colleges." Another is by conducting training exercises with foreign armies. According to the August 1, 1998, New York Times, the Pentagon acknowledged that the purpose of these exercises, known as Joint Combined Exchange and Training, is "to train and engage and interact and gain influence with successive generations" of those nations' officers. According to Pentagon records, the U.S. military conducted training exercises with 102 foreign armies in 1997. In nations where the military is not completely controlled by civilian governments, this means the Pentagon has more influence than the State Department.

Another way the Pentagon influences other countries is through its arms sales staff of 6,400 employees. The Pentagon's foreign military finance program, with a budget of $3.5 billion, gives money to approved nations to buy arms. In fiscal year 1995-1996, the top U.S. armsmakers gave key members of Congress $10.8 million through political action committees and contributions, and Congress increased subsidies for arms exports from $7 billion to $7.6 billion. Since arms companies did a $15 billion export business in 1995, over half the cost for planes, tanks, and missiles came from U.S. taxpayers--not from other countries. Congress also passed a $15 billion loan guarantee program for domestic armsmakers if other countries default on their payments, and it gave armsmakers a tax break of $200 million a year by freeing them from their obligation to give the government 5 to 25 percent of their arms sales.

The U.S. government is not only the biggest supplier of weapons to other countries, it is helping to build arms industries in such countries as Israel, Turkey, Egypt, South Korea, and Taiwan. When it licenses these allies to develop U.S. weapons of mass destruction, it also exports the military technology to do so.

The third major facet of the United States' status as the world's leading superpower is its uncontested control of outer space through the U.S. Space Command and the two largest intelligence agencies: the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Security Agency (NSA). The United States is now the sole proprietor of a twenty-four-hour global reconnaissance network, with headquarters in Colorado: at the Aerospace Data Facility at Buckley Field in Aurora, at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, and at Falcon Air Force Base near Colorado Springs. Subsidiary bases exist in England, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. Other known bases are in San Antonio, Texas, and Fort Gordon, Georgia.

Lockhead Martin, whose Titan IV plant is also in Colorado, launches highly secret technology into outer space aboard giant spy satellites that cost more than $1 billion each. Using this space network, the United States not only gathers an enormous amount of "intelligence" but commercial information of value to U.S. companies. In early 1995, France expelled all U.S. intelligence agencies, charging the NSA with giving information to Raytheon, a defense electronics powerhouse.

According to the January 5, 1998, Newsweek, "Business is viewing the heavens as the final profitmaking frontier." This is reflected in the U.S. Space Command's Vision for 2020, which proclaims the agency the "stewards for military space" and states its aim as "dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investments" and "integrating Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict." Unfortunately, this violates the Outer Space Treaty ratified by the United States in 1967, which states that "the exploration and use of outer space ... shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind."

The fourth and last evidence to be cited here about the United States as a superpower is its insistence on being the major stockpiler of nuclear weapons--between 12,000 and 15,000. In December 1977, it reaffirmed that nuclear weapons would remain the cornerstone of its defense policy, with nuclear weapons on alert and retaining the option of first use and massive retaliation against threats of chemical and biochemical weapons. This, however, contradicts the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, to which the United States is a party, requiring that nuclear powers "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control."

Instead of disarmament negotiations, the United States and its allies pursued negotiations for a comprehensive test ban treaty to prevent other nations from developing nuclear weapons. Neither India nor Pakistan signed that test ban treaty, citing the refusal of the nuclear powers to begin negotiations for nuclear and general disarmament.

At a meeting in May 1998 in Geneva, Switzerland, of the Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee, the United States blocked a proposal to discuss nuclear disarmament. Immediately following that action, India decided to test nuclear weapons. The day it began testing, India asked for a "speedy process of nuclear disarmament leading to a total and global elimination of nuclear weapons" and announced that it would continue to support "the goal of a truly comprehensive international agreement which would prohibit underground nuclear testing of all weapons as well as related experiments described as `subcritical' or hydronuclear." It was an announcement referring to a U.S. subcritical nuclear test conducted in July 1997 as part of a series of three or more in which plutonium was blown up with chemical explosives one thousand feet below the Nevada desert without causing a chain reaction.

The United States, acting like the arrogant superpower it is, attempts to deny other nations nuclear weapons while continuing various tests as part of a "stockpile stewardship" program to design new nuclear weapons over a period of years. Congress, which has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, appropriated in 1998 $4.5 billion to pay for this program. William Arkin, in the November/December 1997 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, asserts that "a wide variety of new nuclear weapons are under development in the United States ... in secret mode."

There are various dangerous consequences of this entire nuclear superpower stance. One is that it leads to other so-called terrorist weapons by smaller powers or bands of individuals who can more cheaply make chemical or biological weapons or various explosives. American nuclear or other weapons cannot prevent such warfare. Another danger is expressed in the December 1996 Defense Monitor:

   In practical terms these expensive weapons and their delivery systems are
   militarily useless because they would destroy everything we might believe
   justified their use to defend.

Jonathan Schell, in the February 2/9, 1998, Nation, states it even more profoundly:

   Rudimentary moral principle taught that we must never, even in
   "retaliation," threaten to kill millions of innocent people, but nuclear
   strategy required us to do so. Common sense rebelled against offering up
   every person in our country as a hostage to a hostile power and seizing
   every person on the territory of that power as a counter-hostage, meanwhile
   placing the whole arrangement on a hairtrigger.

Yet U.S. policy rejects the commonsense view of security.

It is time to reaffirm the human need for real security. Is it not better to prevent war and terrorism by working immediately for nuclear and general disarmament than to risk numerous terrorist attacks or widespread nuclear destruction? Living in a superpower requires such thought and consequent action.

John M. Swomley is professor emeritus of social ethics at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri.