The lighter side of weighty security issues

American Defence Secretary Robert Gates was in China this week to meet top Chinese leaders. The Sino-US strategic relationship is pivotal in the Asia-Pacific but the Chinese do not seem to be keen to institutionalise high-level strategic dialogues with the Yankees.

So, defence talk fests like the annual mid-year Shangri-La Dialogue held in Singapore will continue to provide the venue for Sino-US bilateral discussions on the sidelines.

For sure, the end of the Cold War has not really ushered in the wished for "peace dividend". The US and Russia have recently been making progress on their strategic relationship, symbolised in their New Start accord. But the Sino-US nexus has of late become more tense.

But there is always a lighter side to weighty security issues. I wrote an article along this theme for The Straits Times last year, reproduced below:

Now that the three-day Shangri-La Dialogue annual meeting [May 29-31, 2010], a
serious affair tackling major regional security challenges, is over, it is
time to take a light-hearted break.

You cannot say these chaps in the security community -- be they officials,
military brass or academics -- do not have a wicked sense of humour.
Otherwise, how can you explain the fact that the London-based International
Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), organiser of the Shangri-La
Dialogue series, abbreviated to SLD (and named after the venue, the
Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore), impishly gave, as the high-level talks'
formal name, the Asian Security Summit.

My survey of the media's coverage  found that most of them stuck with SLD
when they chose to abbreviate the sessions, or used variations like the
Dialogue, the forum. the summit, the event, and so forth. Some did point
out that the other name of the event -- first inaugurated in 2002 -- was
the Asian Security Summit. None, as far as I know, tried to abbreviate
that.

Moving on, the heyday of the Cold War is sorely missed, not for the
nuclear-tipped "balance of terror" tensions, but for its lighter moments.
Arms reduction talks were in vogue then. The United States and the Soviet
Union, the two superpowers with "overkill" arsenals, decided to hunker down
to reducing their vast strategic arms, stuff like strategic bombers,
nuclear bombs and long-range nuclear-armed missiles.

Hence, the two Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (Salt I and Salt II) were born. They were
succeeded by the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (or Start). So far so good.

But I was told the following account, perhaps fictional, perhaps not, that
one official (from which superpower side, I was not told) was frustrated
with the slow pace of the bargaining over how many of the thousands of
nuclear weapons each side was prepared to turn into ploughshares. He wanted
faster movement, and proposed a new name, Faster Arms Reduction Talks.
Fortunately, while everyone else agreed that things should get going a lot
faster, no one else took up his suggested name change.

Still on Cold War-era nuclear issues, there was an idea to have "peaceful
nuclear explosions". These are when controlled nuclear explosions are
carried out, such as in creating a civil engineering work like a large dam.
I believe none ever materialised. But those wicked boffins, or maybe it was
the fun-starved bureaucrats, did create an abbreviation for the term --
PNE.

Moreover, they insisted PNE had to be pronounced as "pee-nee", and the
plural form (PNEs) would be...

Abbreviations are (and were) not the only coinage of the arcane realm of
the security community. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) was
at one time worried that Turkey, a Nato member, was vulnerable to a
preemptive Soviet attack. Greece, another Nato member but one with a
history of conflict with next-door Turkey, was critical to the Western
alliance's military response if an attack were to occur behind Nato's
lines.

The anecdote I once heard was this supposed poser on the matter, made by an
American general during closed-door Nato discussions: "If the Soviets were
to attack Turkey from the rear, would Greece help".

There are lots more strange Dr Strangelovian humour from the folks who
ensure global security -- like this long-range missile called the
"Peacemaker" -- but perhaps another time.