[Peace-discuss] The deadly fruit of Bush's policies

[ppatton at uiuc.edu]

The Iraq war, and Bush's policies in general, have a
significance that extends far beyond the tens of thousands of
deaths they have already caused.  They represent one step down
a path which leads to the extinction of the human species. 
While opposing specific wars and specific policies, the peace
movement needs to keep this broader perspective in mind.
-Paul P.

Nuclear Renaissance
by Jonathan Schell
 
The review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
(NPT), a five-yearly event, opened in New York on May 2
without benefit of an agenda. The conference had no agenda
because the world has no agenda with respect to nuclear arms.
Broadly speaking, two groups of nations are setting the pace
of events. One -- the possessors of nuclear arms under the
terms of the treaty, comprising the United States, Russia,
Britain, France and China -- wants to hold on to its nuclear
arsenals indefinitely. The other group -- call them the
proliferators -- has only recently acquired the weapons or
would like to do so. Notable among them are North Korea, which
by its own account has built a small arsenal, and Iran, which
appears to be using its domestic nuclear-power program to
create a nuclear-weapon capacity.

As the conference began, Iran announced that it would soon end
a moratorium on the production of fissile materials and
Pyongyang declared that it had become a full-fledged nuclear
power -- a declaration buttressed by testimony in the Senate
from the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice
Adm. Lowell Jacoby, that North Korea now has rockets capable
of landing nuclear warheads on the United States. If the two
countries establish themselves as nuclear powers, a long list
of other countries in the Middle East and North Asia may seek
to follow suit. In that case, the NPT will be a dead letter,
and the gates of unlimited proliferation will swing open.

The two groups of nations are in collision. The possessors
want to stop the proliferators, and the proliferators want to
defy them as well as ask them to get rid of their own
mountainous nuclear arsenals. One of the liveliest debates at
the conference concerns the nuclear fuel cycle, whereby fuel
for both nuclear power and nuclear bomb materials is made. In
the possessor countries, proposals abound to restrict this
capacity to themselves, thus digging a moat around not only
their arsenals but their nuclear productive capacities as
well. The proliferators respond that the world's nuclear
double-standard should not be fortified but eliminated: In the
long run, either everyone should have the right to the fuel
cycle -- and for that matter to the bombs -- or no one should.
(This was the view of Pakistan and India until, in May 1998,
they remedied the inequity in their own cases by testing
nuclear weapons and declaring themselves nuclear powers.)

Far more contentious is the new American military doctrine of
pre-emptive war, aimed at stopping proliferation by force, as
the United States said it sought to do by overthrowing the
government of Iraq. Inasmuch as the Bush administration has
suggested that even nuclear force might be used, the new
policy represents the ultimate extreme of the double standard:
The United States will use nuclear weapons to stop other
countries from getting those same weapons. The proliferators
accordingly fear a world whose commanding heights will be
guarded by the nuclear cannons of a few nations, while the
rest of the world cowers in the planet's lowlands and back
alleys. Nuclear disarmament, once the domain of the
peace-loving, would become a prime engine of war in an
imposed, militarized global order.

The debate between the nuclear haves and have-nots is probably
unresolvable anytime soon. Certainly it will not be settled at
the review conference. And yet, as is true of so many
adversaries, the two groups of nations have more in common
with each other than with other nations: They both want
nuclear weapons. And if one looks at what is happening on the
ground, a remarkable uniformity appears. All the parties in
this quarrel are expanding their nuclear capacities and
missions. In a sense the two groups, even as they threaten
each other with annihilation, are cooperating in nuclearizing
the globe.

The end of the cold war was supposed to be the beginning of a
farewell to nuclear danger, but now, fifteen years later, it's
clear that a nuclear renaissance is under way. China, India,
Pakistan, North Korea and Britain are all increasing their
arsenals and/or their delivery systems. (In an amazingly
undernoticed development, the shadow of danger from Chinese
nuclear weapons is falling over larger and larger areas of the
United States.) The United States, even as it reduces the
number of its alert nuclear weapons -- though not the total
number of nuclear weapons, alert or otherwise -- is rotating
its nuclear guns away from their traditional Cold War targets
and toward Third World sites. (The United States and Russia
built up such an excess of nuclear bombs during the Cold War
that they can string out their dismantlement almost
indefinitely without carving into their joint capacity to
finish off most of human civilization.) Britain likewise is
redirecting its targeting. Its Defense Secretary has stated
that even the modest step of declaring no-first-use of nuclear
weapons "would be incompatible with our and NATO's doctrine of
deterrence, nor would it further nuclear disarmament
objectives." In other words, Britain may find it necessary to
initiate a nuclear war to achieve nuclear disarmament.
Finally, individuals and terrorist groups are reaching for the
bomb and other weapons of mass destruction. Osama bin Laden,
for instance, has declared that obtaining such is the
"religious duty" of Muslims, and September 11 gave us an
example of how he might use them.

All but unheard in the snarling din are the true voices of
peace -- voices calling on the one group of nations to resist
the demonic allure of nuclear arms and on the other group to
rid themselves of the ones they have, leaving the world with a
single standard: no nuclear weapons. Of the countries
represented at the conference, fully 183 have found it
entirely possible to live without atomic arsenals, and few --
barring a breakdown of the treaty -- show any sign of changing
their minds. In the UN General Assembly the vast majority of
them have voted regularly for nuclear abolition. Behind those
votes stand the people of the world, who, when asked, agree.
Even the people of the United States are in the consensus.
Presented by AP pollsters in March with the statement, "No
country should be allowed to have nuclear weapons," 66%
agreed. In other countries, the percentage of supporters is
higher. On the day their voices are heard and their will made
active, the end of the nuclear age will be in sight.

Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the
Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan
Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books.

This article will appear in the May 23rd issue of The Nation
Magazine. 
__________________________________________________________________
Dr. Paul Patton
spring semster 2005
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Biology, Williams College
Williamstown, MA
phone: (413)-597-3518

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)-344-5812
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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