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  • Empire and Nuclear Weapons

    Over the past six decades, the United States has used its nuclear arsenal in five often inter-related ways. The first was, obviously, battlefield use, with the “battlefield” writ large to include the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The long -held consensus among scholars has been that these first atomic bombings were not necessary to end the war against Japan, and that they were designed to serve a second function of the U.S. nuclear arsenal: dictating the parameters of the global (dis)order by implicitly terrorizing U.S. enemies and allies (”vassal states” in the words of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.) The third function, first practiced by Harry Truman during the 1946 crisis over Azerbaijan in northern Iran and relied on repeatedly in U.S. wars in Asia and the Middle East, as well as during crises over Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis, has been to threaten opponents with first strike nuclear attacks in order to terrorize them into negotiating on terms acceptable to the United States or, as in the Bush wars against Iraq, to ensure that desperate governments do not defend themselves with chemical or biological weapons. Once the Soviet Union joined the nuclear club, the U.S. arsenal began to play a fourth role, making U.S. conventional forces, in the words of former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, “meaningful instruments of military and political power.” As Noam Chomsky explains, Brown was saying that implicit and explicit U.S. nuclear threats were repeatedly used to intimidate those who might consider intervening militarily to assist those we are determined to attack.

    The final role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is deterrence, which came into play only when the Soviet Union began to achieve parity with the United States in the last years of the Vietnam War. This is popularly understood to mean preventing a surprise first strike attack against the United States by guaranteeing “mutual assured destruction.” In other words, any nation foolish enough to attack the United States with nuclear weapons will be annihilated. However, Pentagon leaders have testified that deterrence has never been U.S. policy, and they have defined deterrence as preventing other nations from taking “courses of action” that are inimical to U.S. interests. This could include decisions related to allocation of scarce resources like oil and water, defending access to markets, or preventing non-nuclear attacks against U.S. allies and clients, i.e. role #2, using genocidal nuclear weapons to define and enforce the parameters and rules of the U.S. dominated global (dis)order.

    My argument is not that U.S. use and threatened use of nuclear weapons have always succeeded. Instead, successive U.S. presidents, their most senior advisers, and many in the Pentagon have believed that U.S. use of nuclear weapons has achieved U.S. goals in the past. Furthermore, these presidents have repeatedly replicated this ostensibly successful model. In fact, even the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki achieved only one of their two purposes. These first bombs of the Cold War did communicate a terrorizing message to Stalin and the Soviet elite about the capabilities of these new weapons and about the U.S. will to use them. But, within weeks of the A-bombings, Washington was sharing influence in Korea with Moscow. Four years later northern China and Manchuria, which U.S. leaders thought they had won with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, fell into what was seen as the Soviet sphere. In 1954 France declined the offer of two U.S. A-bombs to break the Vietnamese siege at Dienbienphu, and in 1969 North Vietnam refused to be intimidated by Nixon’s “November ultimatum.”

    The U.S. commitment to nuclear dominance and its practice of threatening nuclear attacks have, in fact, been counterproductive, increasing the dangers of nuclear war in yet another way: spurring nuclear weapons proliferation. No nation will long tolerate what it experiences as an unjust imbalance of power. It was primarily for this reason that the Soviet Union (now Russia) and China, North Korea, and quite probably Iran opted for nuclear weapons.

    The Romance of Ruthlessness The Bush administration has again put nuclear weapons – and their various uses – at the center of U.S. military and foreign policy. The message of the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) in December 2001 was unmistakable. As The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists editorialized, “Not since the resurgence of the Cold War in Ronald Reagan’s first term has U.S. defense strategy placed such an emphasis on nuclear weapons.” The NPR reiterated the U.S. commitment to first-strike nuclear war fighting. For the first time, seven nations were specifically named as primary nuclear targets: Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea. Consistent with calls by senior administration figures who spoke of their “bias in favor of things that might be usable,” the NPR urged funding for development of new and more usable nuclear weapons. This included a new “bunker buster.” Seventy times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb, the bunker buster was designed to destroy enemy command bunkers and WMD (weapons of mass destruction) installations buried hundreds of feet beneath the surface.

    To ensure that the “bunker buster” and other new nuclear weapons could inflict their holocausts, the NPR called for accelerating preparations for the resumption of nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site. It also pressed for the nuclear weapons laboratories to continue modernizing the nuclear arsenal and to train a new generation of nuclear weapons scientists. Among their first projects would be the design of a “Reliable Replacement Warhead” to serve as the military’s primary strategic weapon for the first half of the 21st century. With a massive infusion of new funds to consolidate and revitalize nuclear research, development and production facilities, National Nuclear Security Administration Deputy Administrator Tom D’Agostino testified it would “restore us to a level of capability comparable to what we had during the Cold War.”

    Later, the Rumsfeld Pentagon published and then ostensibly “rescinded” a non-classified version of its Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations. The Doctrine was revealing and profoundly disturbing. In the tradition of the Clinton administration’s Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, the Doctrine communicated that the United States could all too easily “become irrational and vindictive.”

    Most striking was the Doctrine’s extended discussion of deterrence. Rather than define deterrence as the prevention of nuclear attacks by other nuclear powers, the Doctrine stated that “The focus of US deterrence efforts is… to influence potential adversaries to withhold actions intended to harm US’ national interests…based on the adversary’s perception of the…likelihood and magnitude of the costs or consequences corresponding to these courses of actions.” Diplomatically, the Doctrine continued, “the central focus of deterrence is for one nation to exert such influence over a potential adversary’s decision process that the potential adversary makes a deliberate choice to refrain from a COA [course of action.]” In addition to putting Chinese diplomatic efforts to marginalize U.S. power in Asia on notice or deterring unlikely Russian or French nuclear attacks, the central role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal was global dominance. China, Russia, France and Germany were reminded of their proper places, and Iran and Venezuela received ample warning not to adopt oil and energy policies that might constitute- courses of action that would “harm U.S. national interests.”

    Placing the world on further notice, the Doctrine threatened that “The US does not make positive statements defining the circumstances under which it would use nuclear weapons.” Maintaining ambiguity about when the United States would use nuclear weapons helped to “create doubt in the minds of potential adversaries.” The Doctrine also refused to rule out nuclear attacks against non-nuclear weapons states.

    The Doctrine also baldly instructed the U.S. military that “no customary or conventional international law prohibits nations from employing nuclear weapons in armed conflict,” thus subordinating international law to U.S. military strategy. It also argued that nuclear wars could be won. The Doctrine gave increased authority to field commanders to propose targets for nuclear attacks and described the circumstances when field commanders could request approval to launch first-strike nuclear attacks. “Training,” it further stated, “can help prepare friendly forces to survive the effects of nuclear weapons and improve the effectiveness of surviving forces.” The Doctrine went on to reconfirm the bankruptcy of the nuclear reduction negotiations between the United States and Russia. The Doctrine was clear that U.S. nuclear forces would not actually be reduced because “US strategic nuclear weapons remain in storage and serve as an augmentation capability should US strategic nuclear force requirements rise above the levels of the Moscow Treaty.”

    Toward Abolition Since the end of the Cold War, the media and national political discourse in the United States have focused on the dangers of “horizontal proliferation.” These dangers include “rogue” states with nuclear weapons, the possibility of nations with nuclear power plants becoming nuclear weapons states, and leakage from nuclear stockpiles finding its way to “rogue” states or to non-state terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. One nightmare scenario has envisioned the overthrow of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of radical Islamists.

    It doesn’t take a genius to understand the importance of under-funded initiatives like the congressional Nunn-Lugar Nuclear Threat Initiative, which was designed to secure the world’s nuclear weapons, fissile materials, and nuclear wastes. However, these efforts can be no more than stop-gap measures as long as the United States threatens other nations with nuclear attacks and insists on maintaining the terrorizing imbalance of power.

    Since the 1995 Nuclear Nonproliferation Review Conference, popular, elite, and governmental demands have been growing for the United States and other nuclear powers to fulfill their Article VI treaty commitment to negotiate the complete elimination of their nuclear arsenals. In 1996, in the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on the use and threatened use of nuclear weapons ruled that both are violations of international law, and the Court directed the nuclear powers to implement their Article VI commitments. While NGOs and popular movements from across the world came together to form Abolition 2000, at the elite level former head of the U.S. Strategic Command Gen. Lee Butler – supported by many of the world’s generals and admirals – called for abolition. And, in January 2007, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz joined former secretary of defense William Perry and former senator Sam Nunn in saying that U.S. double standards were driving nuclear weapons proliferation, and that the time had come for the United States to meet its NPT obligations.

    Since then, pressed by voters and community based activists, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson have each stated that if elected, they will be the president who negotiates the complete elimination of the world’s nuclear weapons. They need to be held to these commitments, and other presidential and congressional candidates need to be pressed to join their commitment. (Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel have made similar commitments.)

    The political and technical steps needed to eliminate nuclear weapons have long been known. First, the United States must renounce its “first strike” nuclear wear fighting doctrines. Next it must refuse to fund the development and deployment of new nuclear weapons. The other essential steps include verified and irreversible dismantling of nuclear weapons and their installations; halting production of weapons-grade fissile material and securely containing existing stockpiles; verification, including societal verification, and intrusive inspection systems; and investing power in a supranational authority, probably the UN Security Council, to isolate, contain, or remove threats to the nuclear-free order.

    Like cannibalism and slavery, nuclear weapons can be abolished. The question is whether we humans have the will and courage to choose life.

    Like cannibalism and slavery, nuclear weapons can be abolished. The question is whether we humans have the will and courage to choose life.

    Table 1: Partial Listing of Incidents of Nuclear Blackmail

    (From Empire and the Bomb: How the United States Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World by Joseph Gerson)

     
    1946 Truman threatens Soviets regarding Northern Iran.
    1946 Truman sends SAC bombers to intimidate Yugoslavia following the downing of U.S. aircraft over Yugoslavia.
    1948 Truman threatens Soviets in response to Berlin blockade.
    1950 Truman threatens Chinese when U.S. Marines were surrounded at Chosin Reservoir in Korea.
    1951 Truman approves military request to attack Manchuria with nuclear weapons if significant numbers of new Chinese forces join the war.
    1953 Eisenhower threatens China to force an end to Korean War on terms acceptable to the United States.
    1954 Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Dulles offers French three tactical nuclear weapons to break the siege at Dienbienphu, Vietnam. Supported by Nixon’s public trial balloons.
    1954 Eisenhower used nuclear armed SAC bombers to reinforce CIA-backed coup in Guatemala.
    1956 Bulganin threatens London and Paris with nuclear attacks, demanding withdrawal following their invasion of Egypt.
    1956 Eisenhower counters by threatening the U.S.S.R. while also demanding British and French retreat from Egypt.
    1958 Eisenhower orders Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare to use nuclear weapons against Iraq, if necessary to prevent extension of revolution into Kuwait.
    1958 Eisenhower orders Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare to use nuclear weapons against China if they invade the island of Quemoy.
    1961 Kennedy threatens Soviets during Berlin Crisis.
    1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
    1967 Johnson threatens Soviets during Middle East War.
    1967 Johnson’s public threats against Vietnam are linked to possible use of nuclear weapons to break siege at Khe Shan.
    1969 Brezhnev threatens China during border war.
    1969 Nixon’s “November Ultimatum” against Vietnam.
    1970 Nixon signals U.S. preparations to fight nuclear war during Black September War in Jordan.
    1973 Israeli Government threatens use of nuclear weapons during the “October War.”
    1973 Kissinger threatens Soviet Union during the last hours of the “October War” in the Middle East.
    1973 Nixon pledges to South Vietnamese President Thieu that he will respond with nuclear attacks or the bombing of North Vietnam’s dikes if it violated the provisions of the Paris Peace Accords.
    1975 Sec. of Defense Schlesinger threatens North Korea with nuclear retaliation should it attack South Korea in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.
    1980 Carter Doctrine announced.
    1981 Reagan reaffirms the Carter Doctrine.
    1982 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher threatens to eliminate Buenos Aires during the Falklands War.
    1990 Pakistan threatens India during confrontation over Kashmir.
    1990-91 Bush threatens Iraq during the “Gulf War.”
    1993 Clinton threatens North Korea.
    1994 Clinton’s confrontation with North Korea.
    1996 China threatens “Los Angeles” during confrontation over Taiwan. Clinton responds by sending two nuclear-capable aircraft carrier fleets through the Taiwan Straight.
    1996 Clinton threatens Libya with nuclear attack to prevent completion of underground chemical weapons production complex.
    1998 Clinton threatens Iraq with nuclear attack.
    1999 India and Pakistan threaten and prepare nuclear threats during the Kargil War.
    2001 U.S. forces placed on a DEFCON alert in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
    2001 Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refuses to rule out using tactical nuclear weapons against Afghan caves possibly sheltering Osama Bin Laden.
    2002 Bush communicates an implied threat to counter any Iraqi use of chemical weapons to defend Iraqi troops with chemical or biological weapons with a U.S. nuclear attack.
    2006 French Prime Minister Chirac threatens first strike nuclear attacks against nations that practice terrorism against France.
    2006 & 07 “All options are on the table”: U.S. threats to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure made by President Bush and presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton.

    This article is adapted from Joseph Gerson, Empire and the Bomb (University of Michigan Press, 2007).

    Joseph Gerson is the director of programs of the American Friends Service Committee in New England and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. His previous books include The Sun Never Sets and With Hiroshima Eyes.

  • An Explanation of Nuclear Weapons Terminology

    Discussions of nuclear weapons and the policies which guide them often utilize terminology which lacks standardized definition. Much of the nuclear jargon consists of words or phrases which are essentially descriptive terms whose meaning is generally agreed upon, but in fact do not have precise technical definitions in any military or civilian dictionaries. Such imprecision in language has created confusion among those trying to comprehend nuclear issues and has even hindered the process of negotiation among nations.

    This problem of imprecision exists for a variety of reasons. Some terms may not be listed in the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) online Dictionary of Military Terms (see http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/) because they refer to policies, such as “launch-on-warning”, which the U.S. government does not wish to acknowledge or discuss. Other terms, such as “high-alert status”, “hair-trigger alert” and “de-alerting”, may be regarded as useless by military officers who would wish to regard their forces as always “alert”.

    Although civilians and the military may approach the use of such terminology from different perspectives, it is important that they at least be able to understand each other when conversing. A lack of precise terminology will continue to plague discussions of nuclear policy until adequate definitions are finally agreed upon by all parties.

    The U.S. recently employed imprecision in terminology as a tactic during the 2007 General Conference on Disarmament at the United Nations, when it announced, “The fact is that U.S. nuclear weapons are not and have never been on “hair-trigger alert”. By repeatedly using the term “hair-trigger” (which lacks technical meaning but is commonly used to describe fire-arms and bad tempers), the U.S. deliberately muddied the semantic waters in an attempt to avoid serious discussion about the true status of its nuclear arsenal[1].

    The U.S. apparently chose this strategy because the governments of New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Nigeria and Chile had put forward a Resolution to the General Assembly which called for the removal of all nuclear weapons from “high-alert status”[2]. This left many of the delegates at the U.N. scrambling for a means to decipher exactly what was being debated.

    Because I had been asked to speak in support of the New Zealand Resolution[3], I decided to present the delegates with definitions for commonly used nuclear terms. I found, however, that very few published definitions are available for such terms, and so I instead developed a list of what I believe are valid explanations for commonly used nuclear jargon (copied below). It is my hope that eventually all these words and phrases can be assigned standardized definitions usable by both civilians and military authorities.

    “Operational”, “Active” and “Deployed” nuclear weapons

    • Fully functional nuclear weapons which are either mated to delivery systems or available for immediate combat use.
    • There are about 11,800 operational/active/deployed nuclear weapons in the global nuclear arsenal (mostly U.S. and Russian).

    Note: The DOD has a rather confusing definition for “Deployed Nuclear Weapons” available at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/data/d/01632.html “Reserve” or “Inactive/Responsive” nuclear weapons

    • Nuclear weapons not immediately available for combat. They are kept in long-term storage as spares, as a source of parts for remanufacture or the manufacture of other weapons, or held in reserve as a responsive force that may augment deployed forces. These weapons can lack some component which renders them inoperable unless that component is replaced.
    • There are 13,500 reserve nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. Should they choose to do so, the U.S. and Russia could use these reserves to essentially double the number of operational nuclear weapons in their arsenals within a relatively short period of time.

    Note: The great irony of “arms control” negotiations is that the reductions which have occurred through the SALT, START and SORT treaties have focused only upon the destruction of missile silos and submarine launch tubes – not on eliminating nuclear warheads or even missiles, but only upon reducing the total number of operational delivery systems. Consequently, as the delivery systems were eliminated, many of the warheads were taken out of active service and placed in the “reserve” arsenals of the U.S. and Russia.

    “Low-yield” nuclear weapons

    • Generally refers to simple fission weapons, first described as “atomic bombs”, which have a nominal explosive power of about 15 kilotons, roughly the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are the type of weapons which would be made by emerging nuclear weapon states such as India and Pakistan or by terrorists (using Highly Enriched Uranium).

    “Tactical” nuclear weapons

    • This is an older term which is no longer useful in describing the explosive size of nuclear weapons (many modern versions of these weapons can have large yields). “Tactical” now infers that the weapon is used for limited, or “theater” military operations, but not long-range intercontinental missions. Thus, the term “non-strategic weapon” is more appropriate.

    “Strategic” nuclear weapons

    • Often referred to as “high-yield” or “thermonuclear” nuclear weapons. The first generations of these weapons were called “hydrogen bombs” because they used (and still use) atomic bombs as triggers to generate enough heat to cause the nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms (fusion is the same process which powers the Sun). Most modern thermonuclear weapons are 20 to 50 times more powerful than the Hiroshima-size bombs, although weapons more than 1000 times as powerful still exist in the global nuclear arsenal.
    • Strategic nuclear weapons generally have an explosive power of at least 100 kilotons yield, i.e. 100,000 tons of TNT.
    • There are 7200 strategic nuclear weapons in the global nuclear arsenal.
    • For a detailed explanation of nuclear weapon design, look it up at Wikipedia, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design

    Note: The DOD actually has a definition for thermonuclear weapons, see http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/data/t/05511.html

    ”High-alert status” or “Launch-ready alert”

    • Commonly refers to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) or submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) armed with strategic nuclear warheads, able to be launched in a matter of 15 minutes or less. Can include any missile or weapon system capable of delivering a nuclear warhead in this time frame.
    • Maximum flight time of 30 minutes or less for U.S. and Russian ICBMs and SLBMs to reach their targets.
    • Total time required to launch high-alert ballistic missiles and have their nuclear warheads reach their targets = 45 minutes or less. With high-alert nuclear forces a nuclear war can be ordered, launched and completed in less than one hour.

    Note: A definition of high-alert requires no specific explosive power of the weapon on the missile, but in general, most high-alert missiles are armed with strategic nuclear weapons with yields equal to or greater than 100 kilotons. The U.S. and Russia have for decades possessed solid fuel ICBMs and SLBMs capable of being launched in 2 or 3 minutes. The U.S. “Minuteman” ICBM earned its name for its quick-launch capability.

    Nuclear forces now at “High-alert status”

    A large fraction of the following forces, including at least 2600 to 3500 strategic nuclear warheads:

    • U.S. land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles = 1050 strategic nuclear warheads
    • 4 U.S. Trident submarines kept at “hard alert”, carrying a total of 600 high-yield warheads
    • Russian land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles = 1843 strategic nuclear warheads
    • Russian nuclear subs in port (virtually all year) carrying a total of 624 high-yield warheads

    Note: for published references on 2007 U.S. and Russian nuclear forces see the NRDC Nuclear Notebook at the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The URL for the U.S. arsenal is http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/91n36687821608un/fulltext.pdf; for Russia see http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/d41x498467712117/fulltext.pdf. And also stay tuned for my new website, www.globalnucleararsenal.com .

    “De-alerting” nuclear weapons

    • De-alerting prevents the rapid use of nuclear weapons by introducing physical changes to nuclear weapon systems which lengthen the time required to use the nuclear weapons in combat. Such changes are made in order to allow more time for rational decision-making processes to occur and hopefully avoid nuclear conflict.
    • De-alerting is a reversible process which can be used to rapidly implement existing arms control agreements ahead of schedule. In other words, arms control agreements create a timetable to introduce irreversible reductions of weapon systems, but these changes generally occur incrementally over the course of a number of years. De-alerting can be utilized to rapidly implement the entire range of negotiated reductions in a reversible fashion (which over time are then made irreversible), thereby bringing the benefits of the negotiated reductions into being much more rapidly.
    • Examples of de-alerting: (1) Placing large, visible barriers on top of missile silo lids which would be difficult to rapidly remove, (2) Removing or altering firing switches of missiles to prevent rapid launch, (3) Removing warheads from missiles and storing them in a separate, monitored location.
    • De-alerting may require negotiations and verification procedures in order to accomplish symmetrical force reductions on both sides. However, de-alerting can occur rapidly if sufficient political will exists, e.g., the 1991 Bush and Gorbachev Presidential Nuclear Initiatives.
    • De-alerting nuclear forces would prevent a false warning from triggering a retaliatory nuclear strike (accidental nuclear war) via launch-on-warning policy (see next definition).

    Note: It would be worthwhile to define separate stages of de-alerting which would refer to specific increments of time required to return a weapon system to high-alert status. For example, Stage 1 de-alerting would require 24 hours to bring the weapon system back to high-alert status; Stage 2 de-alerting would require a week; Stage 3 de-alerting would require a month or more to reconstitute the weapon system.

    Launch-on-Warning (LoW) policy

    • The Cold War policy of launching a retaliatory nuclear strike to a perceived nuclear attack only on the basis of electronic Early Warning System data before the reality of the perceived attack is confirmed by nuclear detonations from the incoming warheads.
    • Under LoW policy, a false warning misinterpreted as a true attack could trigger a retaliatory nuclear strike, and thus cause an accidental nuclear war.
    • Under LoW policy, the 30 minute (or less) flight time of ballistic missiles dictates that only a few minutes are available to evaluate Early Warning System data and act upon it before the arrival of incoming nuclear warheads. If the attack warning is accepted as accurate, top U.S. or Russian military commanders would contact their President to advise him, and the president would then be allowed only a few minutes to decide whether or not to launch a nuclear retaliatory strike – before the perceived attack arrives.
    • Launch-on-Warning capability can be eliminated by introducing physical changes to nuclear weapon systems which prevent their rapid use (de-alerting). In other words, Launch-on-Warning requires high-alert forces that can be launched in 15 minutes or less. If you remove nuclear forces from high-alert, you CANNOT Launch-on-Warning.
    • Launch-on-Warning policy can be ended overnight by Presidential decree.
    • By replacing LoW policy with a policy of Retaliatory Launch Only After Detonation (RLOAD), a false warning misinterpreted as a true attack could no longer cause an accidental nuclear war.

    For a more detailed analysis on LoW and its alternatives, see “Replace Launch on Warning Policy” by Phillips and Starr at www.RLOAD.org

    Note: The U.S. presently maintains that it does not operate under the policy of Launch-on-Warning (LoW). Although the U.S. DOD Dictionary of Military Terms lacks a definition for LoW, it does define Launch Under Attack (LUA, see http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/data/l/03079.html) – with a definition exactly the equivalent to the commonly used definition of LoW! Perhaps we should ask the U.S. if it operates under LUA? Furthermore, Russian military experts (writing in English) use LUA to mean something significantly different than the U.S. DOD definition. Russian usage of LUA refers to the delivery of a retaliatory nuclear strike “in response to an actually delivered strike”, i.e. after nuclear detonations have been confirmed (see Valery Yarynich, C3: Nuclear Command, Control, Cooperation, Washington, D.C.: Center for Defense Information, 2003, pp. 28 -30.)

    Launch-on-Warning (LoW) capability

    • Early Warning Systems (EWS), high-alert nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, and nuclear command and control systems, all working together, provide the U.S. and Russia the capability to Launch-on-Warning.

    Launch-on-Warning (LoW) status

    • The combination of Launch-on-Warning capability with Launch-on-Warning policy has created what is commonly referred to as Launch-on-Warning status.
    • LoW capability + LoW policy = LoW status

    Note: This is my own opinion and definition. I felt obligated to come up with the explanation for “LoW status” because the term has often been used by non-governmental observers to describe the strategic nuclear forces of the U.S. and Russia.

    “Hair-trigger alert”

    • “Hair-trigger alert” is a figurative term sometimes used to describe strategic nuclear weapons at Launch-on-Warning status and in particular the condition of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals, see “A Rebuttal of the U.S. Statement on the Alert Status of U.S. Nuclear Forces” by Bruce Blair at http://www.lcnp.org/disarmament/opstatus-blair.htm
    • “Hair-trigger alert” has been used to confuse the debate about the status of nuclear arsenals. For purposes of diplomacy, it may be wise to use non-figurative and more technical terms to describe nuclear policy and nuclear weapon systems.

    Footnotes

    [1] The text of the Oct. 9, 2007, U.S. statement at the U.N. can be viewed at http://reachingcriticalwill.org/political/1com/1com07/statements/9octusa.pdf Two authoritative rebuttals to the U.S. Statement are posted on the internet at the website of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, see: http://www.lcnp.org/ These include, “A Rebuttal of the U.S. Statement on Nuclear Weapons Alert, Dismantlements and Reductions”, by Dr. Hans M. Kristensen, the Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, see http://www.lcnp.org/disarmament/kristensen-rebuttal_oct07.pdf and, “A Rebuttal of the U.S. Statement on the Alert Status of U.S. Nuclear Forces”, by Dr. Bruce Blair, President of the World Security Institute, see http://www.lcnp.org/disarmament/opstatus-blair.htm
    [2] The Resolution passed by the vote of 124 to 3, with only the U.S., the U.K. and France voting against it. The U.S. voted against the Resolution because it said the Resolution was “meaningless” (see http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/political/1com/FCM07/week4.html#opstatus ) 

    [3] Our Oct. 16th panel, which discussed the Operational Status of Nuclear Weapons, also included speeches by the Ambassadors of New Zealand and Sweden, and a presentation by John Hallam of Australia, with Ms. Rhianna Tyson of the Global Security Institute as moderator.

    Steven Starr is an independent writer who has been published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies. He recently retired from the medical profession to work as an educator and consultant on nuclear weapons issues.

  • The High Price of Arrogance and the Bitter Harvest of Hypocrisy

    The Twin Horsemen of the New Apocalypse:

    Slowly, the nuclear genie escapes from the carefully constructed bottle of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, threatening the world with annihilation.

    Inexorably, global warming advances across the decades as temperatures climb, fires rage, glaciers melt, droughts escalate, hurricanes intensify, habitats shrink, species disappear.

    These, then are the twin horsemen of the new apocalypse: the prospect of nuclear war and the reality of global warming.

    No biblical prophesy this. The pale riders mounted upon these steeds are men, and they wait eagerly at the gate, their time come at last. Arrogance is their vehicle; hypocrisy their fuel.

    We are Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds

    Imagine a world in which more than twenty-five countries possessed nuclear weapons, instead of the nine that do now. Imagine that number relentlessly growing, decade by decade until a hundred or more nations – all but the very poorest – were capable of detonating a nuclear device and initiating a nuclear holocaust. In such a world, the unthinkable would become the inevitable.

    The only reason we’re not living in that world today is that in 1968, the international community seized a rare moment of sanity and produced the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, stuffing the nuclear genie back in its bottle.

    Led by Ireland and Finland, 189 states signed the treaty.

    The NNPT was supposed to work as follows: Nations who had not yet developed nuclear weapons agreed not to pursue a nuclear arsenal. In return, nations possessing nuclear weapons agreed “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

    In short, the treaty was a quid-pro-quo. Nuclear have-nots agreed not to obtain nuclear weapons in exchange for nuclear haves agreeing to take real, verifiable steps to get rid of theirs.

    Now imagine a nation that broke this grand bargain, and risked bringing forth death and destruction of biblical proportion. That nation exists. It is US.

    Listen.

    At the time of the treaty, South Africa, Egypt, Argentina, Brazil, and several other countries who were actively developing nuclear weapons suspended their programs. Five nations – the US, Russia, Britain, China, and France agreed to suspend active programs and begin negotiations to dismantle their stockpile. Countries capable of constructing nuclear weapons, including Australia, Norway, Japan, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Finland, South Korea, and host of others then had no incentive to initiate programs, and the world was moved a little further from the brink of a nuclear insanity. There have been leaks. Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all developed nuclear weapons.

    But for years, the dream of a nuclear free world was a powerful card the world could play in constraining the spread of this deadly ambition.

    No longer.

    The nuclear haves – led by the US – have steadfastly ignored their responsibilities under this treaty. Indeed, under Bush, the US has scrapped the ABM treaty, sought funding for a new generation of nuclear weapons, and proposed to resume testing of nuclear devices, even as we’ve insisted that others abandon efforts to produce them. Thus, we approach the world as an arrogant hypocrite, and seem surprised that it is not working.

    Climate: the slow-motion nuclear war

    Forget wars, famine, pestilence and death. They are merely the stepchildren of global warming.

    Hyperbole?

    Consider this. The cumulative energy embedded in all fossil fuels is on the same order of magnitude as the energy that would be released from detonating all of the world’s nuclear devices. So if we burn all of those reserves, in terms of energy, it is the equivalent of an all out nuclear war. But wait, you say, even if we were to burn all those reserves, it would take place over three centuries, hardly the same as a nuclear conflagration.

    Fair enough, but try this little thought experiment, and in the words of Aldo Leopold, think like a mountain. In terms of geologic time, three centuries is virtually indistinguishable from an instant.

    Over the four and a half billion years the earth has existed, the systems that sustain us have been sculpted carefully from the ether. Life appeared some 3.8 billion years ago – simple procaryotes living off of methane and sulfur. Oxygenators became dominant about a billion years later, and slowly, the orange sky turned blue. Painstakingly, the world we know evolved until a scant million years ago hominids something like ourselves appeared. Homo Sapiens – man the wise – evolved about fifty thousand years ago, and in the last ten thousand years, blessed with a relatively benign climate, we began our march towards civilization.

    Now we look through the lens of our own life span and declare three centuries to be a long time. But to that mountain, the blinding death-flash of a nuclear holocaust, and the three hundred year combustion of fossil fuels are less distinguishable, and the consequences may be too. In a very real sense, climate change could play out like a slow-motion nuclear war, sans radioactive fallout.

    Just as with the nuclear threat, the US is the biggest impediment to progress, and the biggest cause of the problem. In 2005, the US released 7.1 billion tons of GHGs. To put that in context, the US – with about five percent of the world’s population – emitted about twenty five percent of the world’s greenhouse gasses. Cumulatively, the US contribution to global warming dwarfs any other country’s, and it will do so long after China supplants us as the largest annual emitter.

    The Origins of Arrogance

    Given the fact that we sit astride this heinous record of disregarding all elements of a sane world, on what basis do we now object to Iran or any country seeking to develop a nuclear capability? Certainly not moral grounds.

    How do we, the worlds biggest energy pig, justify our failure to ratify the Kyoto climate accords, and our failure to honor our obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which we did sign and ratify?

    Do we simply assert that we are different? Special in some way?

    A sizable number of neocons take precisely that point of view, referring to the US as the “Exceptional Nation.” Indeed, it is this notion which has animated our foreign policy to one degree or another since the fall of the Soviet Union. Under Bush, it has become an almost religious conviction.

    Presumably, this exceptionalism gives us the right to retain our nuclear weapons, expand our arsenal, and prevent anyone else – even those we threaten – from developing them. It could even be used to justify the fact that we continue to spew out GHG at more than six times the global per capita average.

    It’s worth examining the roots of this notion of the US as the exceptional nation. It was coined by De Tocqueville in the 1830’s, and predicated on his observation that the US was unique in that it had no feudal tradition, was more centered on rights, merit, religious beliefs, and was more egalitarian. This, according to De Tocqueville, set us apart from the more state-centered societies of Europe, and allowed democracy to flourish here, more than anywhere else.

    But it’s a big leap to go from there, to where the neocons would take us – the US as exempt from the civilizing treaties of the global community, by virtue of this exceptionalism.

    Of course, the problem with this arrogant stance is that it only works if other countries accept the neocons’ self-designated version of the US as “exceptional.”

    If they don’t – and why should they?- then our wholesale rejection of civilizing agreements such as the Land Mine Treaty, the Tobacco Treaty, the World Court, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Kyoto Climate Protocol looks less like De Tocqueville’s exceptionalism and more like ignorant and arrogant jingoism.

    Add to this list of ignominy that the US supports trade agreements that exploit labor and harm the environment and that, under Bush, we have consistently bad-mouthed the UN, essentially ignored the Geneva Conventions, preemptively invaded a sovereign nation, scuttled the chemical and biological weapons treaties, ignored our obligations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (to which we are a signatory) and publicly defended torture (water boarding is defined as torture in our own laws and in international laws) and “rendition,” as well as acted to limit the freedom and rights of our own citizens by subverting both the First and Fourth Amendments, and the necon case for exceptionalism becomes little more than a weak justification for a destructive form of jingoism that does more to limit freedom than champion it.

    The Harvest of Hypocrisy

    With a record of hypocrisy like this is it any wonder that a foreign policy based on arrogance is a complete failure? Might it not be at least a partial answer to the question, why do they hate us and, more to the point, why do they hate us even more now than they did in 2001? Certainly, arrogance without portfolio is the weakest platform from which to negotiate and lead.

    We the People of the United States have a choice about our country’s and the world’s destiny, and we will make that choice in the 2008 elections. On the one hand, we can choose to elect leaders who will continue to act as if we are not subject to the civilizing rules of the international community, while insisting others are. Down this path lies permanent confrontation, continuous wars and occupations, inevitable nuclear proliferation and nuclear brinksmanship, destruction of the climate that has sustained us since we appeared on the planet, a US that is increasingly isolated in the international community, and a world that is hurtling towards nuclear devastation and environmental destruction.

    On the other hand, we can choose to be truly exceptional, not simply by honoring our international obligations, but by actively leading the world community toward peace, prosperity and sustainability. This is not only ethically correct, it is strategically smart, and it would make the US a leader in all the ways mere military might cannot.

    Imagine a world in the process of destroying its nuclear weapons instead of its climate. Imagine the stature and influence that would accrue to the country leading that effort.

    It would have a moral authority that would be unambiguous and undeniable.

    Ghandi defeated Great Britain with the that kind of moral authority. Imagine, now, a nation with the military and economic power the US possesses, but blessed with Ghandi’s ethical leverage, too.

    Such a nation could walk across the world stage a colossus, and others would be forced to follow. It would be capable of building coalitions, blessed with allies, and capable of being a force for good that would be virtually unprecedented in human history. It would indeed be an exceptional nation.

    There is, in fact, only one country capable of becoming that nation. Us. If we were to choose this path, we would truly deserve to be known as the exceptional nation, and it would be others who designated us so, not an arrogant and belligerent claim we made on our own behalf.

    That’s the real opportunity cost of the Bush administration and the Republican doctrine; that’s the prize that will be lost if we allow the Democratic Party to be led by men and women of little vision and less courage, more interested in following polls than leading nations.

    There is no other country that can deliver us from this apocalypse; there is no other time we can choose to lead. It happens now, or it can’t happen. If we fail to call our nation to meet its destiny, the twin horses of the new apocalypse will ride, and we will sit astride them.

    Our votes and our voices will determine which it will be.

    This is either the blessing or the tragedy of our time.

    John Atcheson’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several work journals.

  • No Nukes, No Proliferation

    The rising anxieties about nuclear weapons are rooted in two major and parallel developments: a renaissance of nuclear power and a resurgence of old-fashioned national security threats that supposedly had ebbed with the end of the Cold War.

    After the well publicized accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979 and Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, opposition to nuclear power was so strong that many reactor plants were shut down, plans for new ones were canceled and virtually no new reactor was built over the past decade. With the spiraling price of oil caused by a spike in demand and disruptions to supply, the economics of nuclear power has changed. With the accelerating threat of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the balance of environmental risk has shifted. Adding technological developments, the politics of constructing and operating nuclear power reactors has also altered.

    The net result is plans for building several reactors to add to the 435 reactors in 30 countries that provide 15 percent of the world’s electricity today. Asia will account for 18 of the 31 planned new reactors. The spurt in Chinese and Indian demand is a function of booming economic growth and population. In Japan and South Korea interest in nuclear power arises from lack of indigenous oil and gas resources and the desire for energy security and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

    This throws up three clusters of concern:

    • How do we ensure that the plants are operated with complete safety?
    • How do we secure the plants against theft, leakage and attacks of weapons-sensitive material, skills and knowledge?
    • How do we build firewalls between civilian and weapons-related use of nuclear power?

    These concerns extend also to the international trade in nuclear material, skills and equipment. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, observed in 2004 that “Nuclear components designed in one country could be manufactured in another, shipped through a third, and assembled in a fourth for use in a fifth.”

    The challenge on the national security front is fourfold. First, the five Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty-licit nuclear powers–Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States–have ignored their NPT obligation to disarm. Instead they are busy enlarging, modernizing and upgrading their nuclear arsenals and refining nuclear doctrines to indicate retention and expanded use of these weapons for several decades yet. The lesson to others? Nuclear weapons are indispensable in today’s world and becoming more useful for dealing with tomorrow’s threats.

    Second, three states outside the NPT–India, Israel and Pakistan–have been accepted, more or less, as de facto nuclear weapons powers.

    Third, as an intergovernmental agreement, the NPT doesn’t cover nonstate groups, including terrorists, who might be pursuing nuclear weapons. The turmoil in Pakistan, with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf playing the “loose nukes” card to retain U.S. backing, highlights the related danger of links between rogue elements of security forces and extremists.

    Fourth, some countries may be cheating on their NPT obligations and seeking nuclear weapons by stealth. The drumbeats of war being sounded in Washington on Iran bring back memories of 2002-03. This is a story we’ve heard before. We didn’t like the ending the first time and are unlikely to like it any better the next time round.

    The disquieting trend of a widening circle of NPT-illicit and extra-NPT nuclear weapons powers in turn has a self-generating effect in drawing other countries into the game of nuclear brinksmanship. The renaissance of nuclear power cannot be explained solely by the interest in nuclear energy for civilian uses.

    What might be the solution? Of the 27,000 nuclear weapons in existence today, 12,000 are deployed and ready for use, with 3,500 on hair-trigger alert. To begin with, some practical and concrete measures are long overdue: Bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force; negotiating a verifiable fissile materials treaty; retrenching from launch-on-warning postures, standing down nuclear forces. That is, reviving, implementing and building on agreements for reducing the role, readiness and numbers of nuclear weapons in defense doctrines and preparations.

    But these amount to tinkering, not a bold and comprehensive vision of the final destination. What we need are rules-based regimes on the principles of reciprocity of obligations, participatory decision-making and independent verification procedures and compliance mechanisms.

    U.S. presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., declared, “America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons.” In January, three former U.S. secretaries of defense and state–George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger–and Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, called on Washington to take the lead in the abolition of nuclear weapons. The national security benefits of nuclear weapons, they argued, are outweighed by the threats posed to U.S. security by uncontrolled proliferation.

    The symbiotic link between nonproliferation and disarmament is integral to the NPT, the most brilliant half-successful arms control agreement in history. The number of countries to sign it–188–embraces virtually the entire family of nations. But the nuclear arsenals of the five NPT nuclear powers expanded enormously. With almost four decades having elapsed since 1968, the five NPT nuclear powers are in violation of their solemn obligation to disarm, reinforced by the advisory opinion of the World Court in 1996 that the NPT’s Article 6 requires them to engage in and bring to a conclusion negotiations for nuclear abolition.

    Despite this history and background, a surprising number of arms control experts focus solely on the nonproliferation side to demand denial of technology and materiel to all who refuse to sign and abide by the NPT, and punishment of any who cross the threshold. The term “nonproliferation ayatollahs” is applied pejoratively to them. The latest episode in this long-running and tired serial is the United States, Britain and France threatening Iran with war to stop it from acquiring–not using, merely acquiring–nuclear weapons. From where do the leaders of nuclear-armed Britain and France derive the moral authority to declare that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable?

    Nuclear weapons could not proliferate if they did not exist. Because they do, they will. The policy implication of this logic is that the best guarantee of nuclear nonproliferation is nuclear disarmament through a nuclear weapons convention that bans the possession, acquisition, testing and use of nuclear weapons, by everyone. This would solve the problem of nonproliferation as well as disarmament. The focus on nonproliferation to the neglect of disarmament ensures that we get neither. If we want nonproliferation, therefore, we must prepare for disarmament.

    Too many, including the government of Japan, have paid lip service to this slogan, but not pursued a serious program of action to make it a reality. The elegant theorems, cogent logic and fluent reasoning of many authoritative international commissions, including the Tokyo Forum, have made no discernible dent on the old, new and aspiring nuclear powers. A coalition between nuclear-armed and nonnuclear countries, led perhaps by India–which has crossed the threshold from a disarmament leader to a hypocritical nuclear power–and Japan, the only country to have suffered an atomic attack, might break the stalemate and dispel the looming nuclear clouds.

    Time is running out for the hypocrisy and accumulated anomalies of global nuclear apartheid. Either we will achieve nuclear abolition or we will have to live with nuclear proliferation followed by nuclear war. Better the soft glow of satisfaction from the noble goal realized of nuclear weapons banned, than the harsh glare of the morning after of these weapons used.

    Ramesh Thakur, distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and professor of political science at the University of Waterloo in Canada, is the author of The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  • A Response to Brown and Deutch

    A Response to Brown and Deutch

    On November 19, 2007, Harold Brown, a former Secretary of Defense in the Carter administration, and John Deutch, a former CIA Director in the Clinton administration, published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. The title of their piece was “The Nuclear Disarmament Fantasy.” Their article began by pointing out that the end of the Cold War has led “several former senior foreign policy officials who wrote on this page [that is, the Wall Street Journal opinion page]…to make the complete elimination of nuclear weapons a principal U.S. foreign policy goal….”

    Brown and Deutch were referring to an article published in the Wall Street Journal on January 4, 2007, co-authored by Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn. The article was entitled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” and the authors made the case for US leadership for a nuclear weapons-free world. They argued, “Nuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also an historic opportunity. US leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage – to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.”

    Disturbingly, Brown and Deutch were dismissive of even the aspirational goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. They quoted Article VI of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which obligates parties to good faith negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons, but dismissed it, stating “hope is not a policy.”

    According to Brown and Deutch, “Nuclear weapons are not empty symbols; they play an important deterrent role, and cannot be eliminated.” But if these weapons are not “empty symbols,” what is it that they symbolize? A power beyond our ability to control? Human folly? A pinnacle of destructive achievement? They based their arguments on “the important deterrent role” of nuclear weapons, but never bother to mention who exactly is being deterred by the current US arsenal of 10,000 nuclear weapons.

    Rather than looking for a new direction for US nuclear policy more than 15 years after the Cold War, Brown and Deutch seem convinced that nuclear weapons are here to stay, and with their approach they will make this outcome inevitable. Without US leadership, there will be no possibility of achieving a world free of nuclear weapons. With US leadership, it is a possibility.

    No country would benefit more from a world free of nuclear weapons than the United States. These are the only weapons that could destroy this country, and perhaps will if we continue to rely upon them for phantom deterrence. Nuclear weapons are really weapons of the weak, giving great asymmetrical advantage to smaller, less powerful nations or to extremists. If the US continues to rely upon these weapons, they will eventually proliferate to extremists who cannot be deterred, and they will be used against us.

    Brown and Deutch’s vision looks directly into a rearview mirror toward the 20th century. Their vision will sustain a future of nuclear threat and make nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war more likely. We desperately need a new vision in our country – a vision that we can lead the world in a more positive direction based upon human security and encompasses ending the nuclear weapons threat to humanity.

    To view the Brown/Deutch article and see other responses to it, click here.

    David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • Are You With Us…Or Against Us

    Originally published at www.tomdispatch.com

    The journey to the martial law just imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed president, the dictator Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington on September 11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan’s intelligence chief, Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to meet with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps the earliest preview of the global Bush doctrine then in its formative stages, telling him, “You are either one hundred percent with us or one hundred percent against us.”

    The next day, the administration, dictating to the dictator, presented seven demands that a Pakistan that wished to be “with us” must meet. These concentrated on gaining its cooperation in assailing Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which had long been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence services in Afghanistan and had, of course, harbored Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps. Conspicuously missing was any requirement to rein in the activities of Mr. A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, who, with the knowledge of Washington, had been clandestinely hawking the country’s nuclear-bomb technology around the Middle East and North Asia for some years.

    Musharraf decided to be “with us”; but, as in so many countries, being with the United States in its Global War on Terror turned out to mean not being with one’s own people. Although Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999, was already a dictator, he had now taken the politically fateful additional step of very visibly subordinating his dictatorship to the will of a foreign master. In many countries, people will endure a homegrown dictator but rebel against one who seems to be imposed from without, and Musharraf was now courting this danger.

    A public opinion poll in September ranking certain leaders according to their popularity suggests what the results have been. Osama bin Laden, at 46% approval, was more popular than Musharraf, at 38%, who in turn was far better liked than President Bush, at a bottom-scraping 7%. There is every reason to believe that, with the imposition of martial law, Musharraf’s and Bush’s popularity have sunk even further. Wars, whether on terror or anything else, don’t tend to go well when the enemy is more popular than those supposedly on one’s own side.

    Are You with Us?

    Even before the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, the immediate decision to bully Musharraf into compliance defined the shape of the policies that the President would adopt toward a far larger peril that had seemed to wane after the Cold War, but now was clearly on the rise: the gathering nuclear danger. President Bush proposed what was, in fact if not in name, an imperial solution to it. In the new dispensation, nuclear weapons were not to be considered good or bad in themselves; that judgment was to be based solely on whether the nation possessing them was itself judged good or bad (with us, that is, or against us). Iraq, obviously, was judged to be “against us” and suffered the consequences. Pakistan, soon honored by the administration with the somehow ridiculous, newly coined status of “major non-NATO ally,” was clearly classified as with us, and so, notwithstanding its nuclear arsenal and abysmal record on proliferation, given the highest rating.

    That doctrine constituted a remarkable shift. Previously, the United States had joined with almost the entire world to achieve nonproliferation solely by peaceful, diplomatic means. The great triumph of this effort had been the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, under which 183 nations, dozens quite capable of producing nuclear weapons, eventually agreed to remain without them. In this dispensation, all nuclear weapons were considered bad, and so all proliferation was bad as well. Even existing arsenals, including those of the two superpowers of the Cold War, were supposed to be liquidated over time. Conceptually, at least, one united world had faced one common danger: nuclear arms.

    In the new, quickly developing, post-9/11 dispensation, however, the world was to be divided into two camps. The first, led by the United States, consisted of good, democratic countries, many possessing the bomb; the second consisted of bad, repressive countries trying to get the bomb and, of course, their terrorist allies. Nuclear peril, once understood as a problem of supreme importance in its own right, posed by those who already possessed nuclear weapons as well as by potential proliferators, was thus subordinated to the polarizing “war on terror,” of which it became a mere sub-category, albeit the most important one. This peril could be found at “the crossroads of radicalism and technology,” otherwise called the “nexus of terror and weapons of mass destruction,” in the words of the master document of the Bush Doctrine, the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

    The good camp was assigned the job not of rolling back all nuclear weapons but simply of stopping any members of the bad camp from getting their hands on the bomb. The means would no longer be diplomacy, but “preventive war” (to be waged by the United States). The global Cold War of the late twentieth century was to be replaced by global wars against proliferation — disarmament wars — in the twenty-first. These wars, breaking out wherever in the world proliferation might threaten, would not be cold, but hot indeed, as the invasion of Iraq soon revealed — and as an attack on Iran, now under consideration in Washington, may soon further show.

    …Or Against Us?

    Vetting and sorting countries into the good and the bad, the with-us and the against-us, proved, however, a far more troublesome business than those in the Bush administration ever imagined. Iraq famously was not as “bad” as alleged, for it turned out to lack the key feature that supposedly warranted attack — weapons of mass destruction. Neither was Pakistan, muscled into the with-us camp so quickly after 9/11, as “good” as alleged. Indeed, these distinctions were entirely artificial, for by any factual and rational reckoning, Pakistan was by far the more dangerous country.

    Indeed, the Pakistan of Pervez Musharraf has, by now, become a one-country inventory of all the major forms of the nuclear danger.

    *Iraq did not have nuclear weapons; Pakistan did. In 1998, it had conducted a series of five nuclear tests in response to five tests by India, with whom it had fought three conventional wars since its independence in 1947. The danger of interstate nuclear war between the two nations is perhaps higher than anywhere else in the world.

    *Both Iraq and Pakistan were dictatorships (though the Iraqi government was incomparably more brutal).

    *Iraq did not harbor terrorists; Pakistan did, and does so even more today.

    *Iraq, lacking the bomb, could not of course be a nuclear proliferator. Pakistan was, with a vengeance. The arch-proliferator A.Q. Khan, a metallurgist, first purloined nuclear technology from Europe, where he was employed at the uranium enrichment company EURENCO. He then used the fruits of his theft to successfully establish an enrichment program for Pakistan’s bomb. After that, the thief turned salesman. Drawing on a globe-spanning network of producers and middlemen — in Turkey, Dubai, and Malaysia, among other countries — he peddled his nuclear wares to Iran, Iraq (which apparently turned down his offer of help), North Korea, Libya, and perhaps others. Seen from without, he had established a clandestine multinational corporation dedicated to nuclear proliferation for a profit.

    Seen from within Pakistan, he had managed to create a sort of independent nuclear city-state — a state within a state — in effect privatizing Pakistan’s nuclear technology. The extent of the government’s connivance in this enterprise is still unknown, but few observers believe Khan’s far-flung operations would have been possible without at least the knowledge of officials at the highest levels of that government. Yet all this activity emanating from the “major non-NATO ally” of the Bush administration was overlooked until late 2003, when American and German intelligence intercepted a shipload of nuclear materials bound for Libya, and forced Musharraf to place Khan, a national hero owing to his work on the Pakistani bomb, under house arrest. (Even today, the Pakistani government refuses to make Khan available for interviews with representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency.)

    *Iraqi apparatchiks could not, of course, peddle to terrorists, al-Qaedan or otherwise, technology they did not have, as Bush suggested they would do in seeking to justify his war. The Pakistani apparatchiks, on the other hand, could — and they did. Shortly before September 11, 2001, two leading scientists from Pakistan’s nuclear program, Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the former Director General of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and Chaudry Abdul Majeed, paid a visit to Osama bin Laden around a campfire in Afghanistan to advise him on how to make or acquire nuclear arms. They, too, are under house arrest.

    If, however, the beleaguered Pakistani state, already a balkanized enterprise (as the A.Q. Khan story shows) is overthrown, or if the country starts to fall apart, the danger of insider defections from the nuclear establishment will certainly rise. The problem is not so much that the locks on the doors of nuclear installations — Pakistan’s approximately 50 bombs are reportedly spread at sites around the country — will be broken or picked as that those with the keys to the locks will simply switch allegiances and put the materials they guard to new uses. The “nexus” of terrorism and the bomb, the catastrophe the Bush Doctrine was specifically framed to head off, might then be achieved — and in a country that was “for us.”

    What has failed in Pakistan, as in smashed Iraq, is not just a regional American policy, but the pillars and crossbeams of the entire global Bush doctrine, as announced in late 2001. In both countries, the bullying has failed; popular passions within each have gained the upper hand; and Washington has lost much of its influence. In its application to Pakistan, the doctrine was framed to stop terrorism, but in that country’s northern provinces, terrorists have, in fact, entrenched themselves to a degree unimaginable even when the Taliban protected Al-Qaeda’s camps before September 11th.

    If the Bush Doctrine laid claim to the values of democracy, its man Musharraf now has the distinction, rare even among dictators, of mounting a second military coup to maintain the results of his first one. In a crowning irony, his present crackdown is on democracy activists, not the Taliban, armed Islamic extremists, or al-Qaeda supporters who have established positions in the Swat valley only 150 miles from Islamabad.

    Most important, the collapsed doctrine has stoked the nuclear fires it was meant to quench. The dangers of nuclear terrorism, of proliferation, and even of nuclear war (with India, which is dismayed by developments in Pakistan as well as the weak Bush administration response to them) are all on the rise. The imperial solution to these perils has failed. Something new is needed, not just for Pakistan or Iraq, but for the world. Perhaps now someone should try to invent a solution based on imperialism’s opposite, democracy, which is to say respect for other countries and the wills of the people who live in them.

     

    Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute, and a visiting lecturer at Yale University

  • Nuclear is Uneconomical

    Existing technologies for more efficient end-use can save three-fourths of U.S. electricity at an average cost of around 1 cent per kilowatt-hour–cheaper than running a coal or nuclear power plant, let alone building one. Scores of utilities have demonstrated and implemented at scale, rapid, large, predictable, and extremely cheap “negawatts” (saved electricity). California’s per-capita use of electricity has been flat for 30 years while per-capita real income rose 79 percent. Firms like DuPont, Dow, and IBM are saving billions of dollars by cutting energy intensity, sometimes as fast as 6-8 percent a year.

    My household saves 90 percent of electricity and 99 percent of space and water heating energy with a 10-month payback using 1983 technology. My team’s redesign of some $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors normally finds energy savings of 30-60 percent in retrofits (paying back in about 2-3 years) and 40-90 percent in new installations (typically with lower capital cost). A detailed road map for eliminating U.S. oil use by the 2040s, led by business for profit (“Winning the Oil Endgame”), shows how to save half of U.S. oil and gas at average costs one-fifth and one-eighth of current prices. Implementation is already underway. And each of the 60-80 known obstacles to implementing energy efficiency can be turned into a business opportunity.

    On the supply side, “micropower”–small-scale generation that emits little or no carbon dioxide–provided one-sixth of the world’s electricity and one-third of its new electricity in 2005, meeting from one-sixth to more than one-half of all electrical needs in 13 industrial countries. The smaller of micropower’s components, distributed renewable sources of electricity, was a $56 billion global equipment market in 2006, while the larger, combined-heat-and-power, was probably even larger. Micropower added four times the electricity and 8-11 times the capacity that nuclear power added globally in 2005, now produces more electricity than nuclear power does, and is financed by private risk capital. Micropower plus “negawatts,” which are probably about as big, now provide more than half of the world’s new electrical services.

    Nuclear power is unnecessary and uneconomic, so we needn’t debate its safety. As retirements of aging plants overwhelm construction, global capacity and output will decline (as they did slightly in 2006). Most independent analysts doubt the private capital market will finance any new nuclear plants. Even in the United States, where new subsidies would roughly repay the next six units’ entire capital cost, Standard & Poor’s said this wouldn’t materially improve the builders’ credit ratings. I expect this experiment will be like defibrillating a corpse: It’ll jump, but it won’t revive.

    Nuclear power’s market meltdown is good for global development: Saving electricity needs around 1,000 times less capital and repays it about 10 times faster than supplying more electricity. Shifting capital to saving electricity can potentially turn the power sector (now gobbling one-fourth of global development capital) into a net funder of other development needs. Further, an efficient, diverse, dispersed, and renewable energy system can make major supply failures, whether caused by accident or malice, impossible by design rather than (as now) inevitable by design.

    The nuclear phaseout will also speed climate protection, because buying negawatts and micropower instead will save 2-10 times more carbon per dollar, and will do so more quickly. And it can belatedly stem nuclear proliferation, too, by removing from commerce a vast flow of ingredients of do-it-yourself bomb kits in civilian disguise.

    This would make bomb ingredients harder to get, more conspicuous to try to get, and far costlier politically if caught trying to get, because the motive for wanting them would be unmasked as unambiguously military. Focusing intelligence resources on needles, not haystacks, would also improve the odds of timely warning. All this wouldn’t make proliferation impossible, but it would make things far more difficult for both recipients and suppliers.

    Thus, acknowledging and accepting the market collapse of nuclear power is an important step toward a fairer, richer, cooler, and safer world.

    Amory B. Lovins is the Cofounder, Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

  • Nuclear Disarmament Remarks

    Note: Governor Schwarzenegger was scheduled to deliver this speech at the Hoover Institution on Oct. 24, 2007 but was forced to cancel due to the wildfires in Southern California. Former Secretary of State George Shultz read the remarks in his place.

    Thank you, I’m delighted to be in such distinguished company. On behalf of the people of California, I welcome you to our Golden State.

    George Shultz is one of the people I admire most in the world, someone for whom I feel great affection. So when George asked me to speak tonight, I was eager to say yes. But since my expertise is in weights, not throwweights . . . I didn’t know what I could possibly say to an audience of such experts. Knowing that I like big issues, George slyly suggested that I just give some thought to the big issue of nuclear weapons. This has caused me to realize some things. So let me start at the beginning.

    As some of you may know, I grew up in Austria. As a boy, the Red Army loomed over us from its bases in central Europe. Even as children, we all knew about the threat of nuclear war. We knew the blinding power of its flash. We knew the shape of its cloud. Like here, we had nuclear drills in our schools. When I was 18, I went into the Austrian Army for my required service. I really, really wanted to be a tank driver. This was before I had a Hummer. Although you were supposed to be 21, I talked them into letting me drive a tank. I have to say I wasn’t much of a deterrent to a Soviet attack. During lunch one day on maneuvers, I forgot to put on the brakes and my tank rolled into the river. I can’t tell you what a sinking feeling I had as I watched that tank heading backward down the bank and then splashing into the water.

    A true, amusing story . . . but the reality of the times, of course, was quite serious. In 1956, the Soviets crushed the Hungarians. Then later, the Czechoslovakians.

    We Austrians had three basic fears. One, that Soviet tanks might roll into Vienna the way they did into Budapest. Two, a Soviet invasion of Austria or nearby countries might bring a U.S./Soviet confrontation—with Austria getting caught in the nuclear crossfire. And three, we feared mistakes. Mistakes are made in every other human endeavor. Why should nuclear weapons be exempt? I still remember the tensions of those times. I think Austrians, wedged between the West and the Soviet empire, may have felt the Cold War more intensely than Americans. I think I actually felt less tension here in America.
    After I became an American citizen, the thing that stands out so clearly in my mind is the Reagan/Gorbachev summit at Rejkjavik. The leaders of the two most powerful nations on earth were actually discussing the elimination of nuclear weapons. Such a breathtaking possibility. I still remember the thrill of it. I’ll never forget the photos of a grim President Reagan as he left the summit after the negotiations broke down. Even though the negotiations failed, I think the very talks themselves reassured the world. The world saw that both nations desired to be free of the nuclear curse. Then history began moving rapidly. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union collapsed. Russia began attending G-8 meetings. We even heard talk of it joining NATO. In spite of the nuclear differences between President Putin and President Bush, few today would believe that either nation seeks to attack the other. So, over the years, the intense, glaring threat of nuclear war faded. What also faded was the public’s awareness and concern. I include myself in that public. Today . . . the nuclear threat has returned with a vengeance, the vengeance of a terrorist. The Soviets had nuclear weapons and did not use them. Today, is there any doubt whether terrorists would use them?

    Even when Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the table at the UN, I don’t believe people felt the Soviet Union—no matter how ruthless—was devoid of reason. Today, the enemy is both ruthless and seemingly without reason. I don’t know whether it is ironic or frightening . . . but have we reached the point where we look back to Nikita Khrushchev and the Cold War as the good old days? Have the current dangers made us romantics, longing for the concepts of deterrence and mutually assured destruction? During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union also had the time and inclination to develop a living arrangement with their nuclear arsenals.

    As George and others have pointed out, the new nuclear states don’t have these safeguards of the Cold War, which increases the possibility of accidents and misjudgments. Furthermore, today those who would seek them can find the makings of nuclear weapons in hundreds of building spread over 40 countries. As we meet, terrorists are jiggling the door knobs of these buildings trying to get in, trying to get their hands on these materials. In your discussions, I would be interested whether you would rather live under the massive nuclear threat of the Cold War . . . or under the varied, erratic nuclear threat we face in the post 9-11 age? Senator Nunn has very insightfully raised the question—after a nuclear device explodes on our soil, what will we wish we had done to prevent it? And Secretary Perry has raised the question, what will we do when it does happen? Few people are addressing those questions with the immediacy of this distinguished gathering. After all, the consequences of a nuclear detonation are so horrific that it’s more comforting to put them out of mind. But I have realized some things as a result of thinking about what I should say tonight.
    For example, I have advocated—and continue to advocate—action against global warming. I genuinely believe we must take steps to stop the destruction of the planet’s environment. Looking at this logically, however—although we must address global warming now—its most dangerous consequences come decades down the road. The most dangerous consequences of nuclear weapons, however, are here and now. They are of this hour and time. A nuclear disaster will not hit at the speed of a glacier melting. It will hit with a blast. It will not hit with the speed of the atmosphere warming but of a city burning. Clearly, the attention focused on nuclear weapons should be as prominent as that of global climate change. After he left office, former Vice President Gore made a movie about the dangers of global warming. I have a movie idea for Vice President Cheney after he leaves—a movie about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. If you Google “global warming,” you will find 6,690,000 entries. If you Google “Britney Spears,” you will find 2,490,000. If you Google “nuclear disarmament,” you will get 116,000 entries. And if you Google “nuclear annihilation,” you will get 17,400. Something is wrong with that picture.

    The words that this audience knows so well, the words that President Kennedy spoke during the Cold War, have regained their urgency: “The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.” Here in California we still have levees that were built a hundred years ago. These levees are an imminent threat to the well-being of this state and its people. It would be only a matter of time before disaster strikes. But we’re not waiting until such a disaster.

    We in California have taken action to protect our people and our economy from the devastation. Neither can this nation nor the world wait to act until there is a nuclear disaster. I am so thankful for the work of George, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, Max Kampelman, Sid Drell and so many of you at this conference. You have a big vision, a vision as big as humanity–to free the world of nuclear weapons.

    Ladies and gentlemen, I have come this evening to say that I want to help. Let me know how I can use my power and influence as governor to further your vision. Because my heart is with you. My support is firm. My door is open.

    On behalf of the people of California, thank you again for the work you are doing to lift the nuclear nightmare from our nation’s future.

     

    Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Governor of California.

  • You Can Help End the Thermonuclear Threat to Humanity

    You Can Help End the Thermonuclear Threat to Humanity

    Do you think the threat of nuclear weapons is a relic of the past? If so, think again.

    The nuclear threat remains very real. At any moment of the day or night, a nuclear war could be triggered by accident or design. This isn’t an exaggeration or a paranoid delusion. It’s a fact.

    Did you know that there are still 26,000 nuclear weapons in our world? Twelve thousand of these are deployed and ready to be used. Some 3,500 are on hair-trigger alert, which means that these weapons could be fired within moments of an order to do so.

    No one would give that kind of order, right? Some say it is delusional to worry – after all, the Cold War is over. But what is delusional is to believe that we can maintain such arsenals for the indefinite future without a catastrophe – either a deliberate act of fanatical madness or Murphy’s law playing out at a cataclysmic scale.

    Imagine waking up and discovering one (or many or most) of the world’s great cities – New York, Moscow, London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi, Karachi, or Tel Aviv – lies in rubble and ashes. It could be your city.

    We know this is possible. It’s not a Hollywood thriller. It’s an all too real possibility played out to the brink every day as new shifts of potential button-pushers and obedient followers take over the keys to Armageddon. Why aren’t more of us taking steps to save our cities and our common future – steps to end this game of planetary Russian roulette?

    Perhaps the reason we’re not acting is that the nuclear threat seems too remote – an artifact of bygone days. After all, we have lived for over sixty years without the use of nuclear weapons in warfare. But the weapons have been there, and they have been poised at the brink and ready to launch – just not triggered to the blinding flash.

    So we have become complacent – to our own detriment. Maybe we believe that we are just too smart to ever have a nuclear war – the fallacy in believing in never and in our own prowess. But there have been many accidents and many near misses with nuclear weapons. Just recently, six nuclear-tipped missiles were mistakenly loaded onto a US B-52 bomber and flown across the central US. Officials are still trying to figure out how that major breach in security could have happened – a mega-error that could have led to a mega-disaster. If such a breach can happen inside the US, with all our supposed controls and safeguards, it can happen anywhere.

    The current instability in Pakistan could result in their nuclear weapons falling into the hands of fanatics or terrorists. As a human community on a planet we share, we cannot afford to run such risks. The era of nuclear weapons must be brought to an end – for our own good, for the good of humanity and for the sake of life on Earth.

    By failing to be part of the solution, we are allowing our world to drift toward nuclear catastrophe. This is an even more urgent and “inconvenient truth” than that of climate change. We know full well that nuclear weapons are 100 percent human-created. While continued global warming could irrevocably change our planet, causing great dislocation and suffering, our self-created nuclear dangers are even more urgent. They could destroy civilization and end intelligent life on the planet in the virtual blink – or blinding flash – of an eye.

    Einstein concluded, “The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

    The old way of thinking leaves important decisions to leaders who surely “know better,” relies upon brute force to solve conflicts, and believes that strong nations can solve their own problems. The new way of thinking that is needed to prevent nuclear catastrophe understands that ordinary citizens must lead their political representatives, relies upon dialogue and diplomacy to solve conflicts so all sides can “win,” and recognizes that even the most powerful nations cannot solve the great global problems confronting humanity without cooperation and collaboration.

    The Nuclear Age we have created requires new modes of thinking based upon collective problem solving in which everyone has a seat at humanity’s table for one simple reason: our mutual survival depends upon it. There are many unknowns in our human future that we will have to deal with. One thing known for certain, though, is that nuclear weapons – monsters of our own making – can make our planet uninhabitable overnight. That is one looming threat we can choose to eliminate. For the sake of all that is dear to us – for the past as well as the future – that is a choice we must make.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is committed to abolishing nuclear weapons. For 25 years the Foundation has worked to change thinking in order to change the world. We need your thinking. We need your participation. We urge you to take these five steps now to help end the thermonuclear weapons threat to humanity.

    1. Change your thinking – put nuclear weapons in the unacceptable category, along with other major threats to human survival.
    2. Be vocal, strong and persistent in expressing this new thinking. Help make a world free of nuclear weapons an idea whose time has come.
    3. Lobby your Mayor to join the Mayors for Peace and support its “2020 Vision” Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons (www.mayorsforpeace.org). Lobby your Congressional or Parliamentary representatives to join the Parliamentary Network for Nuclear Disarmament (www.pnnd.org) in order to work with parliamentarians from throughout the world to eliminate nuclear weapons.
    4. Sign up to be a member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at www.wagingpeace.org. View and share the Foundation’s DVD, “Nuclear Weapons and the Human Future.” Read our free monthly e-newsletter, The Sunflower. Participate in our Turn the Tide Campaign.
    5. Provide financial support to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and other organizations that work daily for a world free of nuclear weapons. Contribute online at https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/menu/donate/index_secure.htm.

    David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • No Exceptions

    Article originally published in Haaretz on 11/5/2007

     

    How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that “Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel.” This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.
    What will Israel’s policy – or for that matter, America’s – be, if in Iran’s upcoming elections, Ahmadinejad were to give way to a more moderate leader, who were to announce that Iran recognizes Israel’s right to exist within the 1967, borders? Will Iran become one of the “moderate” Muslim states, like, say, Pakistan, which is allowed to develop nuclear weapons? There was a day when our friend the Shah ruled Iran, and then came the Ayatollahs, with whom we were happy to trade arms, until the whole affair became muddled. Regimes come and go, but nuclear weapons are forever.
    According to foreign reports, Israel recently bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor that was under construction. It was reported that the United States approved the attack on the Syrian installation and went so far as to encourage Israel’s violation of Syrian sovereignty. Syria is part of the axis of evil, mostly because of its ties with Iran, its involvement in Lebanon and its intentional failure to prevent the entry of anti-American extremists into Iraq. But it is a well-known phenomenon, in the world in general and in the Middle East in particular, that an evil leader can become a popular friend overnight. What will the Israeli and American policies be toward the Syrian nuclear program if Assad were to announce his intentions to step away from Iran, not interfere in Lebanon and seal the border with Iraq?

    A visit to Jerusalem 30 years ago transformed Anwar Sadat from enemy No. 1 into a hero for peace. President Hosni Mubarak is considered an astute, peace-loving leader, and a friend of the west. He was even democratically elected. Sort of. But what would happen if one day, when the nuclear reactor is operational in the middle of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood does to Mubarak’s heir what their Hamas brethren did to Mahmoud Abbas? Will we fly over to bomb the Egyptian nuclear reactor? And how does the free world need to deal with Pakistan, if its nuclear weapons fall under the control of Islamists? Is anyone proposing to preempt and invade Islamabad?
    Jordan’s King Abdullah said several months ago that most of the countries in the region, including his own, would begin developing nuclear energy. He was quick to stress that the Hashemite Kingdom would obviously place its nuclear installations under international supervision. He did not need to point out that this was “contrary to Israel.”
    The question is not therefore whether the Middle East is going nuclear, but when it will happen. The demand for a sanity certificate as a precondition for joining this club ensures that even the opponents of the Iranian regime will back Ahmadinejad against the entire world. Visitors who recently were in Tehran say that intellectuals, who did not hide their displeasure with their president, have expressed full support for his position on the nuclear question. They said that relinquishing the nuclear program would be interpreted as an admission that Iran belongs to the club of pariah nations and persisted in asking, “Why should it be forbidden to Iran when it is permitted to Pakistan and Israel?”
    The struggle against the Iranian and Syrian nuclear programs, and in the future perhaps the Egyptian and Jordanian programs, is meant to divert attention from the real problem in the Middle East – the war for hegemony over the region between the religious-extremist camp and the moderate-pragmatic one. The Annapolis summit is an excellent opportunity to update the formula for peace posed by the Arab League and conclude that when the conflict is resolved, the Middle East will be free of nuclear weapons. No exceptions!

     

    Akiva Eldar is the diplomatic affairs analyst for the Haaretz newspaper.