[Peace-discuss] Hiroshima day

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Some mental preparation on the eve of the anniversary.  --CGE]

   Revisiting Hiroshima
   By Noam Chomsky 

THIS month’s anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki prompts only the most sombre reflection and most
fervent hope that the horror may never be repeated.

In the subsequent 60 years, those bombings have haunted the
world’s imagination but not so much as to curb the development
and spread of infinitely more lethal weapons of mass destruction. 

A related concern, discussed in technical literature well
before 9-11, is that nuclear weapons may sooner or later fall
into the hands of terrorist groups.

The recent explosions and casualties in London are yet another
reminder of how the cycle of attack and response could
escalate, unpredictably, even to a point horrifically worse
than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. 

The world’s reigning power accords itself the right to wage
war at will, under a doctrine of "anticipatory self-defence"
that covers any contingency it chooses. The means of
destruction are to be unlimited. 

US military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the
world combined, while arms sales by 38 North American
companies (one in Canada) account for over 60 per cent of the
world total (which rose 25 per cent since 2002).

There have been efforts to strengthen the thin thread on which
survival hangs. The most important is the nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty, which came into force in 1970. The
regular five-year review conference of the NPT took place at
the United Nations in May. 

The NPT has been facing collapse, primarily because of the
failure of the nuclear states to live up their obligation
under Article VI to pursue "good faith" efforts to eliminate
nuclear weapons. The United States has led the way in refusal
to abide by the Article VI obligations. Mohamed El-Baradei,
head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasizes
that "reluctance by one party to fulfil its obligations breeds
reluctance in others."

President Jimmy Carter blasted the United States as "the major
culprit in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be
protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq,
Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have
abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted
plans to test and develop new weapons, including antiballistic
missiles, the earth-penetrating ‘bunker buster’ and perhaps
some new ‘small’ bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges
and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against
non-nuclear states." 

The thread has almost snapped in the years since Hiroshima,
repeatedly. The best known case was the Cuban missile crisis
of October 1962, "the most dangerous moment in human history,"
as Arthur Schlesinger, historian and former adviser to
President John F. Kennedy, observed in October 2002 at a
retrospective conference in Havana.

The world "came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear disaster,"
recalls Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defence secretary, who also
attended the retrospective. In the May-June issue of Foreign
Policy, he accompanies this reminder with a renewed warning of
"apocalypse soon." 

McNamara regards "current US nuclear weapons policy as
immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully
dangerous," creating "unacceptable risks to other nations and
to our own," both the risk of "accidental or inadvertent
nuclear launch," which is "unacceptably high," and of nuclear
attack by terrorists. McNamara endorses the judgment of
William Perry, President Bill Clinton’s defence secretary,
that "there is a greater than 50 per cent probability of a
nuclear strike on US targets within a decade."

Similar judgments are commonly expressed by prominent
strategic analysts. In his book Nuclear Terrorism, Harvard
international relations specialist Graham Allison reports the
"consensus in the national security community" (of which he
has been a part) that a "dirty bomb" attack is "inevitable,"
and an attack with a nuclear weapon highly likely, if
fissionable materials — the essential ingredient — are not
retrieved and secured.

Allison reviews the partial success of efforts to do so since
the early 1990s, under the initiatives of Sen. Sam Nunn and
Sen. Richard Lugar, and the setback to these programmes from
the first days of the Bush administration, paralysed by what
Sen. Joseph Biden called "ideological idiocy."

The Washington leadership has put aside nonproliferation
programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving
the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to
manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq. The threat and use
of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with
jihadi terrorism.

A high-level review of the "war on terror" two years after the
invasion "focused on how to deal with the rise of a new
generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past
couple years," Susan B. Glasser reports in The Washington
Post. "Top government officials are increasingly turning their
attention to anticipate what one called ‘the bleed out’ of
hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their
home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe.
‘It’s a new piece of a new equation,’ a former senior Bush
administration official said. ‘If you don’t know who they are
in Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?"’

US terrorism specialist Peter Bergen says in The Boston Globe
that "the president is right that Iraq is a main front in the
war on terrorism, but this is a front we created."

Shortly after the London bombing, Chatham House, Britain’s
premier foreign affairs institution, released a study drawing
the obvious conclusion — denied with outrage by the government
— that "the UK is at particular risk because it is the closest
ally of the United States, has deployed armed forces in the
military campaigns to topple the Taleban regime in Afghanistan
and in Iraq ... (and is) a pillion passenger" of American
policy, sitting behind the driver of the motorcycle. The
probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically
estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to
contemplate with equanimity. While speculation is pointless,
reaction to the threat of another Hiroshima is definitely not.

On the contrary, it is urgent, particularly in the United
States, because of Washington’s primary role in accelerating
the race to destruction by extending its historically unique
military dominance.