[Peace-discuss] preventing another Hiroshima

[ppatton at uiuc.edu]

We Must Act Now to Prevent Another Hiroshima - or Worse
The explosions in London are a reminder of how the cycle of
attack and response could escalate
by Noam Chomsky
 

This month's anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki prompts only the most somber 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 11 September 2001, 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-defense"
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 more than 60 per cent of
the world total (which has risen 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 (NPT), 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 to 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 ElBaradei,
head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasizes
that "reluctance by one party to fulfill 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
Anti-Ballistic 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 defense secretary, who also
attended the retrospective. In the May-June issue of the
magazine 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 defense 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, the 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 Senator Sam Nunn and
Senator Richard Lugar, and the setback to these programs from
the first days of the Bush administration, paralyzed by what
Senator Joseph Biden called "ideological idiocy".

The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation
programs 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 of years", Susan B Glasser reported 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?'"

Peter Bergen, a US terrorism specialist, 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 Taliban 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, and in the UK, which goes along with it as
its closest ally.

The author is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and the author, most recently, of
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance 
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Dr. Paul Patton
Research Scientist
Beckman Institute  Rm 3027  405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  Urbana, Illinois 61801
work phone: (217)-265-0795   fax: (217)-244-5180
home phone: (217)-239-2015 x112
homepage: http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ppatton/www/index.html

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
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