[Peace-discuss] Bush prepares to violate international and US law again

[patton paul]

 The Absolute Weapon
by James Carroll


LAST WEEK the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to allow the
development of low-yield nuclear weapons -- a reversal of a ban that had
been in effect since 1993. According to press reports, the committee also
approved funding to study bunker-busting nuclear weapons as well as
funding to speed up preparations for underground nuclear testing. These
decisions, taken in response to Bush administration requests, come as no
surprise in the light of the Nuclear Posture Review that was released in
January 2002, but they amount to first steps in the implementation of the
administration's radical new nuclear policy. As The New York Times
reported, the Senate Committee proposals are slated to be considered by
the House Armed Services Committee today and by the full Senate next week.
In each of these forums, Democrats should vigorously oppose the Bush
administration's dangerous attempts to reshape America's relationship to
nuclear weapons. Here is why:

The proposals relativize ''the absolute weapon.'' In 1946, only a few
months after Hiroshima, the political theorist Bernard Brodie published a
book with that phrase as its title -- a first statement of the fact that
nuclear weapons are unique, have changed warfare forever, and must always
be considered apart. That became the consensus of international
statecraft, a key to the fact that nuclear weapons were never used during
the Cold War. Any blurring of the distinction between nuclear weapons and
conventional weapons was understood to move the world across the nuclear
threshold again -- to disaster. It is that consensus that the Bush
administration is overturning by lumping conventional and nuclear weapons
together as ''offensive strike weapons'' and by proposing to develop
''usable'' low-yield nukes as part of the standard arsenal.

These proposals, if enacted, will exacerbate ''the security dilemma,'' a
phrase referring to the built-in paradox that was laid bare by the Cold
War. ''An increase in one state's security,'' as political scientist
Robert Jervis put it, ''will automatically and inadvertently decrease that
of others.'' The dynamic is inevitable: When one state enhances its
military capacity, other states take steps to match it. Compared with the
hugely expensive and unchallenged conventional force that the United
States now possesses, nuclear capacity (like chemical and biological
capacity) is cheap and relatively easily achieved. The security dilemma
squared.

These proposals, if enacted, would violate Clause 6 of the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty, which commits the United States (like other
nuclear powers) to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons, not
toward their normalization. The Bush administration's effective
abandonment of the nonproliferation regime may be its single gravest folly
-- and in violating the Nonproliferation Treaty, the administration would
be violating the law of the United States.

In Bush's defense, one Republican senator said last week, ''Experience has
shown that nonproliferation treaties really don't have any effect on
countries like North Korea, India, and Pakistan.'' But what about
countries like Brazil, South Africa, or Sweden? Do we really want a world
in which every nation is given urgent new cause to nuclearize its arsenal?
The United States meets the challenge of so-called nuclear rogues by
behaving like one.

All of this makes the United States less secure, not more. Indeed, the
very idea of ''national security'' has become mythical. The only meaning
''national security'' can have now assumes an international mutuality, a
system of acknowledged -- and treaty-enforced -- interdependence among
states that will check the armed nihilism of nonstate actors, which is the
real threat in the world today. The Bush administration's nuclear policy
moves in exactly the opposite direction, keeping in place an outmoded
system of nationalist rivalry that has nearly destroyed the globe twice.
Those who think of America's new dominance as empire are stuck in the 19th
century; our vast power will not protect us in a world where, because of
new technologies and information systems, methods of mass disruption and
violence are cheap and unstoppable.

These proposals represent a complete failure to imagine what such moves
look like to other nations, both our friends and adversaries. As the war
in Iraq shows, the United States is the one country in the world for which
further nuclear capacity is entirely superfluous. Others must ask then,
Why is the United States preparing to take such steps? Washington's motive
may be the moral good of an orderly world, but its self-anointed
militarism can only look to others, friends included, like arrogant
swagger. Is this really what the United States has become?

As the presidential election season gets underway, the differences between
Democrats and Republicans are muted, as if Democrats are reluctant to draw
attention to their inbred opposition to Bush's various revolutions. But
his radical overthrow of nuclear caution is by far the gravest issue
facing this nation. We know what Republicans will do about it. Beginning
today, the urgent question is, What about the Democrats?

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.