Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Lawrence Wittner

  • Reflections on War and Its Consequences

    The shift of the Iraq War from what its early proponents claimed would be a cakewalk to what most current observers—including the small group of neocons who originally championed it—consider a disaster suggests that war’s consequences are not always predictable.

    Some wars, admittedly, work out fairly well—at least for the victors. In the third of the Punic Wars (149-146 B.C.), Rome’s victory against Carthage was complete, and it obliterated that rival empire from the face of the earth. For the Carthaginians, of course, the outcome was less satisfying. Rome’s victorious legions razed the city of Carthage and sowed salt in its fields, thereby ensuring that what had been a thriving metropolis would become a wasteland.

    But even the victors are not immune to some unexpected and very unpleasant consequences. World War I led to 30 million people killed or wounded and disastrous epidemics of disease, plus a multibillion dollar debt that was never repaid to U.S. creditors and, ultimately, fed into the collapse of the international financial system in 1929. The war also facilitated the rise of Communism and Fascism, two fanatical movements that added immensely to the brutality and destructiveness of the twentieth century. Certainly, World War I didn’t live up to Woodrow Wilson’s promises of a “war to end war” and a “war to make the world safe for democracy.”

    Even World War II—the “good war”—was not all it is frequently cracked up to be. Yes, it led to some very satisfying developments, most notably the destruction of the fascist governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan. But people too often forget that it had some very negative consequences. These include the killing of 50 million people, as well as the crippling, blinding, and maiming of millions more. Then, of course, there was also the genocide carried out under cover of the war, the systematic destruction of cities and civilian populations, the ruin of once-vibrant economies, the massive violations of civil liberties (e.g. the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps), the establishment of totalitarian control in Eastern Europe, the development and use of nuclear weapons, and the onset of the nuclear arms race. This grim toll leaves out the substantial number of rapes, mental breakdowns, and postwar murders unleashed by the war.

    The point here is not that World War II was “bad,” but that wars are not as clean or morally pure as they are portrayed.

    Curiously, pacifists have long been stereotyped as sentimental and naive. But haven’t the real romantics of the past century been the misty-eyed flag-wavers, convinced that the next war will build a brave new world? Particularly in a world harboring some 30,000 nuclear weapons, those who speak about war as if it consisted of two noble knights, jousting before cheering crowds, have lost all sense of reality.

    This lack of realism about the consequences of modern war is all too pervasive. During the Cuban missile crisis, it led Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to warn top U.S. national security officials against their glib proposal to bomb the Soviet missile sites. That’s not the end, he insisted. That’s just the beginning! After the crisis, President Kennedy was delighted that war with the Soviet Union had been averted—a war that he estimated would have killed 300 million people.

    How do we account for the romantic view of war that seems to overcome portions of society on a periodic basis? Certainly hawkish government officials, economic elites, and their backers in the mass media have contributed to popular feeble-mindedness when it comes to war’s consequences. And rulers of empires tend to become foolish when presented with supreme power. But it is also true that some people revel in what they assume is the romance of war as a welcome escape from their humdrum daily existence. Nor should this surprise us, for they find similar escape in romantic songs and novels, movies, spectator sports, and, sometimes, in identification with a “strong” leader.

    Of course, war might just be a bad habit—one that is difficult to break after persisting for thousands of years. Even so, people will give it up only when they confront its disastrous consequences. And this clear thinking about war might prove difficult for many of them, at least as long as they prefer romance to reality.

    Dr. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

     

    First published on the History News Network.

  • Disarmament is a Two-Way Street

    The Bush administration’s current confrontation with Iran over what it claims is that nation’s nuclear weapons development program raises the question: Can the disarmament of one country occur in isolation from the disarmament of others?

    That question seemed to be answered by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968. Signed by almost all countries of the world, including the United States, it provided that the non-nuclear nations would forgo building nuclear weapons, while the nuclear nations would divest themselves of their own nuclear weapons.

    But, upon taking office, the Bush administration quickly abandoned the U.S. commitment to the NPT. It withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, moved forward with the deployment of a national missile defense system (a revised version of the Reagan administration’s “Star Wars” program), and opposed ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (negotiated and signed by President Clinton). Furthermore, it dropped negotiations for nuclear arms control and disarmament and, instead, pressed Congress to authorize the building of new U.S. nuclear weapons—for example, the nuclear “bunker buster” and “mini-nukes.”

    Nor are the Bush administration’s more recent actions in line with the U.S. government’s alleged commitment to nuclear disarmament.

    This past March, President Bush traveled to India, where he cemented a nuclear deal with the Indian government. India, of course, recently became a nuclear weapons nation, having spurned the NPT, conducted nuclear tests in 1998, and developed its own nuclear arsenal. Yet the agreement rewards India for its defiance of international norms. By supplying U.S. nuclear fuel and technology to India, the agreement facilitates a substantial expansion of that nation’s nuclear weapons complex. At the same time, it does not require India to stop producing nuclear material for weapons or to place Indian nuclear reactors under international inspection. As this U.S.-India agreement flies in the face of U.S. legislation that bans nuclear exports to nations that have not signed the NPT, the Bush administration is now pressing Congress to revoke such legislation. The Republican-led Congress seems likely to do so.

    In addition, the Bush administration is promoting legislation in Congress that will fund the development of what is called the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), as well as a sweeping modernization of U.S. nuclear weapons labs and factories. Although the RRW is billed as an item that would merely update existing U.S. nuclear weapons and ensure their reliability, it seems more likely to serve as a means of designing new nuclear weapons. And the quest for new nuclear weapons seems likely to lead to the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing and the final breakdown of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

    Furthermore, the Bush administration has come out in opposition to a pathbreaking treaty to create a nuclear weapons-free zone in Central Asia. Signed earlier this month by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, the agreement commits the signatory countries not to produce, buy, or allow the deployment of nuclear weapons on their soil. According to Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, the U.S. government’s opposition to the Central Asia treaty is based upon its reluctance “to give up the option of deploying nuclear weapons in this region.”

    Another sign of the Bush administration’s double standard when it comes nuclear weapons is its unwillingness to consider the idea of a nuclear weapons-free zone for the Middle East. Israel, after all, has developed a substantial nuclear arsenal, but the Bush administration has studiously ignored it. The contrast with the administration’s reaction to Iraq’s possible development of nuclear weapons is quite striking.

    In a letter published in the Washington Post on September 7, Kevin Martin, executive director of Peace Action—the largest peace organization in the United States–observed that the Bush administration’s nuclear nonproliferation policies were “incoherent and contradictory.” The administration, he charged, “is rewarding India’s nuclear weapons program with a deal to share technology; doing next to nothing about Pakistan’s veritable nuclear Wal-Mart; winking at Israel’s nuclear arsenal; unilaterally dropping out of arms control treaties . . . ; and ignoring our own obligations to pursue nuclear disarmament under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”

    Certainly, the Bush administration has been quite selective about which nations should have nuclear weapons and which should not. And most nations—including Iran–know it.

    The U.S. government would be far more convincing—and perhaps more effective with respect to diplomacy for creating a nuclear-free Iran—if it recognized that nuclear disarmament is a two-way street

     

    Dr. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

    First published by the History News Network

  • Bush’s Latest Nuclear Gambit

    In 2005, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, recognizing that the Bush administration’s favorite new nuclear weapon–the “Bunker Buster”–was on the road to defeat in Congress, told its leading antagonist, U.S. Representative David Hobson (R-Ohio): “You may win this year, but we’ll be back.”

    And, now, like malaria or perhaps merely a bad cold, they are.

    The Bush administration’s latest nuclear brainchild is the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). According to an April 6, 2006 article in the Los Angeles Times (Ralph Vartabedian, “U.S. Rolls Out Nuclear Plan”), the RRW, originally depicted as an item that would update existing nuclear weapons and ensure their reliability, “now includes the potential for new bomb designs. Weapons labs currently are engaged in design competition.”

    Moreover, as the Times story reported, the RRW was part of a much larger Bush administration plan, announced the previous day, “for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation’s system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War.” The plan called for a modern U.S. nuclear complex that would design a new nuclear bomb and have it ready within four years, as well as accelerate the production of plutonium “pits,” the triggers for the explosion of H-bombs.

    Although administration officials justify the RRW by claiming that it will guarantee the reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and reduce the need for nuclear testing, arms control and disarmament advocates are quite critical of these claims. Citing studies by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers, they argue that U.S. nuclear weapons will be reliable for decades longer than U.S. officials contend. Furthermore, according to Hoover Institution fellow Sidney Drell and former U.S. Ambassador James Goodby: “It takes an extraordinary flight of imagination to postulate a modern new arsenal composed of such untested designs that would be more reliable, safe and effective than the current U.S. arsenal based on more than 1,000 tests since 1945.” Thus, if new nuclear weapons were built, they would lead inevitably to the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing and, thereby, to the collapse of the moratorium on nuclear testing by the major nuclear powers and to the final destruction of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

    Most worrisome for nuclear critics, however, is the prospect that the administration will use the RRW program to develop new kinds of nuclear weapons. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, remains convinced that the replacement process initiated by the RRW program could serve as a back door to such development. Peace Action, the nation’s largest peace and disarmament organization, maintains that “the weapons labs and the Department of Defense will be the ones to decide the real scope” of the RRW program.

    Even Representative Hobson, who seems to favor the RRW, appears worried that the administration has a dangerously expansive vision of it. “This is not an opportunity to run off and develop a whole bunch of new capabilities and new weapons,” he has declared. “This is a way to redo the weapons capability that we have and maybe make them more reliable.” Hobson added: “I don’t want any misunderstandings . . . and sometimes within the [Energy] department, people hear only what they want to hear. . . . We’re not going out and expanding a whole new world of nuclear weapons.”

    Certainly, some degree of skepticism about the scope of the program seems justified when one examines the Bush administration’s overall nuclear policy. Today, despite the U.S. government’s commitment, under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, to divest itself of nuclear weapons through negotiated nuclear disarmament, the U.S. nuclear stockpile stands at nearly 10,000 nuclear warheads, with more than half of them active or operational.

    Not only does the Bush administration steer clear of any negotiations that might entail U.S. nuclear disarmament, but it has pulled out of the ABM treaty and refused to support ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (negotiated and signed by former President Bill Clinton). According to the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review Report of February 2006, “a robust nuclear deterrent . . . remains a keystone of U.S. national power.”

    Furthermore, there are clear signs that the Bush administration is shifting away from the traditional U.S. strategy of nuclear deterrence to a strategy of nuclear use. The nuclear Bunker Buster, for example, was not designed to deter aggression, but to destroy underground military targets. Moreover, in recent years, the U.S. Strategic Command has added new missions to its war plans, including the use of U.S. nuclear weapons for pre-emptive military action. Seymour Hersh’s much-cited article in the New Yorker on preparations for a U.S. military attack upon Iran indicates that there has already been substantial discussion of employing U.S. nuclear weapons in that capacity.

    This movement by the Bush administration toward a nuclear buildup and nuclear war highlights the double standard it uses in its growing confrontation with Iran, a country whose nuclear enrichment program is in accordance with its NPT commitments. Of course, Iran might use such nuclear enrichment to develop nuclear weapons–and that would be a violation of the NPT. But Bush administration policies already violate U.S. commitments under the treaty, and this fact appears of far less concern to Washington officialdom. Logic, however, does not seem to apply to this issue–unless, of course, it is the logic of world power

    Dr. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

  • Gandhi, Bush, and the Bomb

    On February 24, at a press briefing, White House National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley announced that, when U.S. President George W. Bush travels to India, he will lay a wreath in honor of Mohandas Gandhi.

    For those familiar with the cynical gestures of government officials, it might come as no surprise that an American President would attempt to derive whatever public relations benefits he can by linking himself to one of the most revered figures in Indian and world history.

    But the level of hypocrisy is heightened when one recalls that Bush is currently one of the world’s leading warmakers and that Gandhi was one of the world’s leading advocates of nonviolence. Furthermore, the American President’s major purpose for traveling to India is to clinch a deal that will provide that nation with additional nuclear technology, thus enabling it to accelerate its development of nuclear weapons.

    Gandhi, it should be noted, was not only a keen supporter of substituting nonviolent resistance for war, but a sharp critic of the Bomb. In 1946, he remarked: “I regard the employment of the atom bomb for the wholesale destruction of men, women, and children as the most diabolical use of science.” When he first learned of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Gandhi recalled, he said to himself: “Unless now the world adopts non-violence, it will spell certain suicide.” In 1947, Gandhi argued that “he who invented the atom bomb has committed the gravest sin in the world of science,” concluding once more: “The only weapon that can save the world is non-violence.” The Bomb, he said, “will not be destroyed by counter-bombs.” Indeed, “hatred can be overcome only by love.”

    That is certainly an interesting backdrop against which to place President Bush’s plan to provide India with nuclear technology. India is one of only four countries that have refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—a treaty endorsed by 188 nations. Thumbing its nose at the world, India has conducted nuclear tests and has developed what experts believe to be 50 to 100 nuclear weapons. Under the terms of the NPT, the export of nuclear technology is banned to nations that don’t accept international inspections of their nuclear programs. In addition, U.S. law prohibits the transfer of nuclear technology to a country that rejects full international safeguards. U.S. law also bans such technology transfer to a non-NPT country that has conducted nuclear test explosions.

    Thus, if the President were to give any weight to Gandhi’s ideas, international treaty obligations, or U.S. law, he would not be working to provide India with the same nuclear-capable technology that he so vigorously condemns in Iran—a country, by the way, that has signed the NPT, has undergone inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and has not conducted any nuclear weapons tests.

    There are other reasons to oppose this deal, as well. Although India’s relations with Pakistan are relatively stable at the moment, they might well be very adversely affected by any perception that the Indian government was racing ahead with a buildup of its nuclear arsenal. Furthermore, Pakistan might demand the same nuclear assistance as India. Indeed, if India can simply ignore the NPT and, then, receive nuclear technology from the United States, why should other countries observe its provisions? The Iranians, certainly, will make this point.

    At home, the Bush administration’s double standard has not gone unnoticed. In Congress, Representatives Ed Markey (D-MA) and Fred Upton (R-MI) have introduced a bipartisan resolution—H.Con.Res. 318–expressing strong concern about the proposed U.S.-India nuclear deal. Although this resolution affirms humanitarian and scientific support for India, it contends that full civil nuclear cooperation between the two nations poses serious dangers. For example, it points to the possibility that the supply of nuclear fuel to India could free up India’s existing fissile material production, thereby enabling it to be used to expand India’s nuclear weapons arsenal. The resolution also opposes transfer of nuclear technology to any country that is not a party to the NPT and has not accepted full safeguards.

    Whatever happens to this resolution, if the Bush administration were to implement its nuclear agreement with the Indian government, it would have to convince Congress to amend U.S. law. And arms control and disarmament groups are determined to prevent that from happening.

    Thus, the Bush administration might genuflect to Gandhi in its efforts to arrange a nuclear pact with India, but it is going to have to convince a lot of very skeptical observers before it implements this agreement.

    Dr. Wittner, a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Associate, is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

    Originally published by the History News Network.

  • Review of David Schalk’s War and the Ivory Tower

    “History,” the French philosopher Julien Benda once remarked, “is made from shreds of justice that the intellectual has torn from the politician.” This contention may overestimate the power of the former and underestimate the power of the latter. But it does point to a tension between intellectuals and government officials that has existed at crucial historical junctures–for example, in late nineteenth century France (where the term “intellectual was first coined in connection with the Dreyfus affair) and in the late twentieth century Soviet Union (where intellectuals provided the major source of dissent).

    This tension is well-illustrated by David Schalk’s excellent study, War and the Ivory Tower, an examination of intellectual engagement during France’s war in Algeria (1954 to 1962) and America’s war in Vietnam (1964 to 1975). Originally published in 1991 and reissued in 2005, this book has new prefaces by Benjamin Stora (a French historian, born in Algeria) and George Herring (a U.S. diplomatic historian), as well as a new introduction by Schalk (a specialist on European intellectual history).

    Schalk defines intellectuals by what he calls “their more abstract and distantiated social role which sharply contrasts with almost all others in a modern society. Their function involves a certain kind of creativity, usually through the written word and dealing with ideas in some fashion, often applying ideas in an ethical way that may question the legitimacy of the established authorities.” Thus, “a significant percentage of the professoriate and some journalists” can be classified as intellectuals, as can “a substantial portion of the artistic community . . . who theorize in print about their creativity.” In his view, “there was, and perhaps remains, a symbiotic relationship between the intellectual and engagement,” a French term meaning “critical dissent.”

    Schalk argues convincingly that there were remarkable similarities between the Algerian and Vietnam wars. These include: the use of torture; the looming precedent of the Nuremberg trials; anti-colonial revolt; the undermining of democracy; the murky style of diplomacy; the racist views of Western troops; the unjustified optimism and arrogance of military and political leaders; the forced relocation of civilian populations; and the transformation of the two nations’ countrysides into vast “free fire zones,” in which the military sought to destroy everything that moved.

    There were also important differences, he notes, among them the relative absence of Marxism within Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN); the large French settler population in Algeria; and the presence in France of some 300,000 Algerian workers, whose monthly remittances to the FLN and its government in exile paid a significant portion of the costs of the Algerian independence struggle.

    Albert Camus has often been cited as an example of French intellectual resistance to the Algerian war. But, as Schalk reveals, Camus was conflicted about the struggle in Algeria, and at times fell silent about it. “A far more relevant model,” Schalk notes, is provided by the French Catholic intelligentsia, especially the left-leaning intellectuals gathered around the monthly Esprit. From 1954 and 1962, that journal published 211 articles on the Algerian war, 42 of them by its co-director (and later director) Jean-Marie Domenach. The responsibility of intellectuals, argued Domenach, was to show that “between the frivolous word and the recourse to arms there exists a path”–the path, he eventually concluded, of nonviolent resistance and peaceful protest. The French Left, he believed, had to be awakened from its paralyzing sense of impotence so that it would no longer “cultivate a despair that is the secret weapon of tyranny.”

    As Schalk notes, Esprit’s prominence in resistance to the war did not mean that the French Catholic intelligentsia solidly opposed French policy. Indeed, some conservative Catholic intellectuals were keen supporters of France’s war in Algeria. Denouncing conscientious objectors, Monseigneur Jean Rodhain declared in 1960, contemptuously, that if they would not fight for France, they should “go and live in another country.”

    Jean-Paul Sartre and writers connected with his journal, Les Temps modernes, also played key roles in the resistance to the Algerian war. Once the full significance of that conflict became apparent to Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and their associates, they dealt with it extensively in that journal. Schalk remarks that, as “the guiding spirit” behind Les Temps modernes, “Sartre channeled much of his amazing energy and intellectual power into the struggle to end the war.” His articles dealt “unsparingly with issues of collective guilt and thus the historical parallel with the Nazi years, torture, war crimes, and the danger of fascism.” He also published a report on the first clandestine congress of the Young Resistance, a group of draft resisters, with the mission of helping deserters and those who refused induction to leave France and locate employment elsewhere.

    In the fall of 1960, Sartre and others created a sensation by circulating what became known as the Manifesto of the 121, the “Declaration on the Right of Insubordination in the Algerian War.” Banned by the government and consequently unpublished (e.g. the pages of Les Temps modernes where it was to appear remained conspicuously blank), it sharply denounced the Algerian war, noting that “French militarism . . . has managed to restore torture and to make it once again practically an institution in Europe.” The signers declared that they “respect and deem justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people,” as well as the “conduct of Frenchmen who . . . supply aid and protection to Algerians who are oppressed in the name of the French people.” They concluded that “the cause of the Algerian people, who are contributing in a decisive manner to destroying the colonial system, is the cause of all free men.”

    The most dramatic and controversial act of resistance by French intellectuals was organized by Francis Jeansen, a philosopher and former protégé of Sartre’s. In a powerful statement published in Esprit in May 1957, he pointed to French war crimes in Algeria, observing that “this politique is ours, these horrors are imputable to us.” In Jeansen’s view, the terrible responsibility borne by the French for their disgraceful behavior in Algeria necessitated extraordinary action. Consequently, he and his students began transporting suitcases filled with money from Algerian workers in France across the border to Swiss banks. From there the money was funneled toward the purchase of weapons for the Algerian independence struggle. Although some of Jeansen’s associates were arrested and tried, he was never caught by the French secret police, despite the fact that he surfaced briefly in Paris for a clandestine press conference.

    These activities, led by prominent French intellectuals, fed into accelerating displays of public resistance. A silent protest against the war took place in Paris in June 1957. Banned by the government, it nevertheless drew some 500 to 600 people, including Sartre and Francois Mauriac; 49 of them were arrested for this “crime.” In December 1961, 50,000 people turned out for a march in Paris to protest OAS terrorism. This march also was banned by the government and was broken up by police, with more than a hundred participants hospitalized as a result of police brutality. In February 1962, when the authorities finally granted legal authorization for a peace demonstration, a crowd of half a million surged through Paris.

    As this account suggests, resistance to the war occurred against the backdrop of significant verbal and physical assault. Addressing French veterans’ groups, Robert LaCoste, France’s Resident Minister in Algeria, accused “the exhibitionists of the heart and the intellect who have mounted the campaign against torture” of being “responsible for the resurgence of terrorism. . . . I present them to you for your scorn.” Esprit’s increasingly critical stand led to arrests, fines, and seizures of issues of the journal by the government. On two occasions, the OAS bombed the headquarters of Esprit with plastic explosives. Sartre’s apartment and the offices of Les Temps modernes were also bombed with plastic explosives, and pro-war militants marched through the streets of Paris calling for his assassination.

    Despite the obstacles erected by the government and colonialist fanatics, however, by the end of the war French intellectuals were in a state of revolt, with the vast majority of them denouncing France’s role in Algeria.

    Similarly, notes Schalk, among American intellectuals–and particularly those affiliated with elite educational institutions and those who constituted the country’s most famous novelists, essayists, artists, and poets–opposition to the U.S. war effort in Vietnam became “overwhelming.” In October 1969, for example, the Harvard faculty voted 255 to 81 against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, and 391 to 16 in support of the upcoming Moratorium Day against the war. An endless stream of antiwar petitions appeared in the New York Times and elsewhere, signed by faculty at top universities and by other intellectual luminaries.

    The most influential of these petitions–inspired by the Manifesto of the 121–was the “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” which appeared in the October 12, 1967, issue of the New York Review of Books. Signed by Philip Berrigan, Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman, Denise Levertov, Dwight Macdonald, Herbert Marcuse, Linus Pauling, Susan Sontag, and others, the “Call” argued that the kinds of actions taken by U.S. troops in Vietnam–the destruction of villages, the internment of civilian populations in concentration camps, and summary executions of civilians–were those that America and its World War II allies “declared to be crimes against humanity . . . and for which Germans were sentenced at Nuremberg.” Everyone “must choose the course of resistance dictated by his conscience and circumstances,” they argued, but resistance to military service in Vietnam is “courageous and justified.” Addressing “all men of good will,” they asked them to join “in this confrontation with immoral authority. . . . Now is the time to resist.”

    The New York Review, the nation’s leading intellectual journal, devoted enormous attention to the Vietnam War, publishing 262 articles on the subject between 1964 and 1975. The most famous of them, Schalk notes, was Noam Chomsky’s “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” which appeared in February 1967. In numerous ways, it set the tone for the “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” and represented the shift of American intellectuals from educational efforts to calls for extralegal action. “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies,” Chomsky wrote. But he contrasted this obligation with the practices of establishment intellectuals, who lied and dissembled to serve power. The moral was clear: in the circumstances of the Vietnam War, the only appropriate response was resistance.

    In later writings, Chomsky admitted that he felt “uncomfortable about proposing draft refusal publicly, since it is a rather cheap proposal from someone my age.” But he did advocate tax resistance, “both because it symbolizes a refusal to make a voluntary contribution to the war machine and also because it indicates a willingness . . . to take illegal measures to oppose an indecent government.” In addition, Chomsky participated in antiwar demonstrations and was arrested during the October 1967 march on the Pentagon. Like almost all other American and French intellectuals, though, Chomsky consistently rejected violent protest. He wrote: “Continued mass actions, patient explanation, principled resistance can be boring, depressing. But those who program the B-52 attacks and the `pacification’ exercises are not bored, and as long as they continue in their work, so must we.”

    Other key U.S. intellectuals also became engagé, including Hans Morgenthau, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joseph Heller, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Muriel Rukeyser, Eric Bentley, Ann Sexton, William Styron, Anais Nin, Henry Steele Commager, and Robert Penn Warren. Draft counseling, teach-ins against the war, and antiwar commencement ceremonies preoccupied some of America’s most illustrious minds. “For many intellectuals,” observes Schalk, “the Vietnam episode lay in a special category. It stood outside the normal realm of debate.” As Martin Bernal put it, in yet another article in the New York Review, the Vietnam War could be categorized with “Nazi concentration camps.” Reflecting their bitterness, Susan Sontag wrote in 1967: “America has become a criminal, sinister country–swollen with priggishness, numbed by affluence, bemused by the monstrous conceit that she has the mandate to dispose of the destiny of the world, of life itself, in terms of her own interests and jargon.”

    The powerful, of course, were enraged by the engagement of the intellectuals. Officials in the Johnson and Nixon administrations denounced them, launched investigations of them, placed them on “enemies” lists, attempted to disrupt their activities, and prosecuted them. In 1968, Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin Jr., Mitchell Goodman, Marcus Raskin, and Michael Ferber were indicted for counseling, aiding, and abetting draft registrants to “fail, refuse, and evade” service in the U.S. armed forces; among the “overt acts” cited in the indictment was the “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority.” Father Daniel Berrigan, after indictment for the destruction of draft records, declared himself a “fugitive from injustice” and went underground, from which he somehow granted interviews and made public appearances. Other prominent intellectual critics of the war, such as Staughton Lynd, had their academic employment challenged or terminated.

    Schalk places this chronicle of escalating engagement in France and the United States within three stages: a pedagogical stage, in which intellectuals critiqued official justifications for their country’s wars; a moral stage, in which they challenged the ethical basis of their country’s behavior; and a counter-legal stage, in which they promoted civil disobedience. This model proposed by Schalk nicely fits the trend of resistance in both countries.

    Indeed, Schalk has written a masterly work, which has stood up extraordinarily well in the years from its initial publication to this new edition, which appeared in late 2005. His careful style, thorough research, and judicious conclusions make this an excellent study of intellectual engagement. Its relevance goes beyond the crises of conscience in France and the United States over their governments’ brutal wars in the Third World to the role of intellectuals in modern society.

    In this broader framework, Schalk speculates on whether intellectual engagement is a phenomenon solely of the past, and concludes that it probably is not. But “to elicit a profound moral reaction from its intellectual elites,” he maintains, “a government in power has to do something stupid and evil enough.” Furthermore, “the external historical situation . . . must not appear totally hopeless and impermeable to change.”

    George Herring, in his preface to the book, takes up this issue and applies it to American intellectuals and the current U.S. war in Iraq. “The insurgency that began in Iraq after the . . . spring 2003 U.S. invasion bears a marked resemblance to the wars in Algeria and Vietnam,” he observes. “The Abu Ghraib scandal calls forth memories of French torture in Algeria and the notorious tiger cages at Con Son in South Vietnam. Indeed, the sometimes-bewildered looks on the faces of American soldiers in Iraqi cities are reminiscent of the expressions of those who fought earlier wars in Algeria and Vietnam.” And, yet, he notes, intellectual dissent has been relatively muted. “Where is the outrage against government lies and blundering? Where is the call to resist illegitimate authority?”

    There are signs, though, that a storm has been gathering, and that the intellectuals, now restive, will once again lead the way in fearlessly exposing the lies and mendacity of the powerful, as they did so effectively during the Algerian and Vietnam wars. And if they do plunge once more into public debate and resistance, they will surely build upon the exemplary stance of their predecessors, chronicled so brilliantly in War and the Ivory Tower.

    Years ago, with his characteristic pessimism, Chomsky wondered gloomily what would happen to historical consciousness of the Vietnam War “as the custodians of history set to work.” But, as David Schalk shows us, a sensitive and forthright historian can illuminate the darkened terrain of the past and of the present.

    Lawrence S. Wittner, a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Associate, is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

    Originally published by the History News Network.

  • Bush Abandons Plan for New Nukes

    Confronted with strong opposition from disarmament groups and from Congress, the Bush administration has abandoned its plan to develop a nuclear “bunker buster.”

    This new weapon, formally known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, became the symbol of the Bush administration’s plan to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal and wage nuclear war. The administration alleged that the bunker buster was necessary to destroy deeply buried and hardened enemy targets, and that—thanks to the fact that it would explode underground—it would produce minimal collateral damage. But critics charged that, with more than 70 times the destructive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, a single bunker buster might kill millions of people. This contention was reinforced by an April 2005 report from a National Academy of Sciences panel, which claimed that such a device, exploded underground, would likely cause the same number of casualties as a weapon of comparable power exploded on the earth’s surface.

    In addition, building the weapon symbolized the Bush administration’s flouting of the U.S. government’s commitments to nuclear arms control and disarmament. Under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, the nuclear powers—including the United States—agreed to move toward elimination of their own nuclear arsenals. And, in fact, after much hesitation, this is what they began to do, through treaties and unilateral action, over the ensuing years. Therefore, it came as a shock to the arms control community when the Bush administration pulled out of the ABM Treaty, opposed ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and pressed Congress for funding to build new nuclear weapons, including “mini-nukes” and bunker busters.

    Given the symbolic, high-profile status of the bunker buster, groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Council for a Livable World, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and Peace Action worked hard to defeat it—mobilizing public opposition and lobbying fiercely against congressional funding. Last year, their efforts paid off, when Congress, despite its Republican majority, refused to support the weapon’s development. A key opponent was Representative David Hobson, the Republican chair of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Committee, who insisted that the U.S. government could hardly expect other nations to honor their NPT commitments if it ignored its own.

    With the Bush administration determined to secure the new weapon, bunker buster funding came to the fore again this year. Debate on the proposal was intense. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) insisted that building the bunker buster “sends the wrong signals to the rest of the world by reopening the nuclear door and beginning the testing and development of a new generation of nuclear weapons.” Ultimately, both the Senate and the House rejected the administration measure. The administration’s only remaining hope lay in pushing through a scaled-back version of its plan, for $4 million. Championed by U.S. Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), long an avid supporter of nuclear weapons development in his home state, the bill passed the Senate but was again blocked in the House, where Representative Hobson once more led the way. In recent months, a House-Senate conference committee grappled with the legislation, but without making a decision on it.

    Finally, on October 25, Senator Domenici pulled the plug on the funding proposal, announcing that it was being dropped at the request of the Energy Department. An administration official explained that a decision had been made to concentrate on a non-nuclear bunker buster. Naturally, the arms control and disarmament community was overjoyed. According to Stephen Young, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, “this is a true victory for a more rational nuclear policy.” Although the reason for the administration’s abandonment of its new nuclear weapon program remains unclear, it does appear that it resulted from public pressure, Democratic opposition, and a division on the issue among Republicans.

    Of course, much more has to be done before the world is safe from the nuclear menace. Some 30,000 nuclear weapons remain in existence, with about 10,000 of them in the hands of the U.S. government.

    But the story of the bunker buster’s defeat illustrates that, even in relatively unpromising circumstances, it is possible to rein in the nuclear ambitions of government officials.

    Dr. Wittner, a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Associate, is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

    Originally published by the History News Network.

  • Our Global Cinderella

    The announcement that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005 has been awarded to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and to its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, should remind us of the crucial activities performed by the United Nations.

    The IAEA, of course, is the U.N. agency that has worked, with considerable effectiveness, to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Hundreds of nuclear facilities are monitored by the IAEA in over 70 countries. Among its other activities, it led the search for what the U.S. government claimed were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and, in 2003, reported that it could not verify the U.S. contention. If the Bush administration had listened to its advice rather than to that of individuals who lied and distorted the truth about such weapons, the United States would never have rushed into a bloody, expensive, and futile war in that land.

    But this is only a small part of the U.N. record. Consider the following:

    • The U.N. has vigorously promoted economic and social development in impoverished nations. UNICEF alone is active in 157 countries, pouring $1.2 billion a year into child protection, immunization, fighting HIV/AIDS, girls’ education, and other ventures.
    • The U.N. has sponsored free and fair elections, including monitoring and advice, in numerous lands, including Cambodia, Namibia, El Salvador, Mozambique, South Africa, Kosovo, and East Timor.
    • Since the General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the U.N. has fostered the enactment of dozens of comprehensive agreements on civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights.
    • Over the years, the U.N. has dispatched 60 peacekeeping and observer missions—16 of them currently in operation–to world trouble spots, saving millions of people from mass violence and war.
    • The U.N. assisted in negotiating some 170 peace settlements ending regional conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war, civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the use of Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
    • The U.N. facilitated the decolonization of more than 80 countries, with almost a third of the world’s population.
    • Through its imposition of international measures ranging from an arms embargo to a convention against racially segregated sporting events, the U.N. played a key role in bringing an end to apartheid in South Africa and in transforming that country into a democratic nation.
    • Through the efforts of the U.N., more than 500 international treaties—on human rights, terrorism, refugees, disarmament, and the oceans—were enacted.
    • The U.N. has aided more than 50 million refugees fleeing war, famine, or persecution, including over 19 million of them—mostly women and children—who are today receiving food, shelter, medical aid, education, and repatriation assistance.
    • The U.N. sponsored world women’s conferences that set the agenda for advancing women’s rights, including the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which has been ratified by 180 countries.
    • The U.N.’s World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian agency, feeds some 90 million hungry people in 80 countries every year.

    And these are only some of the many accomplishments of the world organization.

    For Americans, this worldwide program is quite a bargain. The cost to every American of the regular budget of the United Nations is slightly more than $1 a year—less than the price of a soda. Actually, the cost is lower than it is supposed to be. U.N. budget contributions are calculated according to each nation’s share of the global economy which, in the case of the United States, is 34 percent. But the U.S. government has unilaterally set a cap on its contributions at 22 percent. By contrast, the Japanese pay closer to $2 per person. That $1 a year for the U.N. might also be compared to the annual cost of the U.S. military budget to every American man, women, and child: $1,600!

    Unfortunately, the U.S. government doesn’t appear to consider U.N. activities a bargain at all. In June 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation (H.R. 2745) mandating cuts to the U.S. contribution to the U.N. and blocking U.S. contributions to new U.N. peacekeeping missions if the world organization does not agree to a list of items dictated by Washington. More recently, similar legislation was introduced into the U.S. Senate (S. 1394 and 1383).

    Nor is such behavior limited to Congress. The Bush administration has also sought to undermine the U.N. By nominating John Bolton—a U.S. government official who repeatedly expressed contempt for U.N. operations–to serve as U.S. ambassador to the world body, President George W. Bush made this clear enough and, thereby, created a scandal of major proportions. When the choice of Bolton proved too much for even the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate to stomach, Bush gave Bolton the job through a recess appointment.

    In the context of the furor over Bolton’s nomination, one would have expected him to adopt a cautious, low-key approach at the U.N. Instead, however, Bolton threw months of delicate negotiations over the September 2005 U.N. summit conference into disarray by proposing more than 700 changes to what seemed to many countries to be a near-final agreement. Ultimately, the agreement unraveled, and a number of potential advances went down the drain.

    The Bush administration has been just as critical of the U.N.’s Mohamed ElBaradei, who, by talking of the responsibilities of the nuclear powers as well as the non-nuclear powers under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has refused to accept the U.S. government’s double standard as to nuclear weapons. As the New York Times reported on October 7: “Mr. ElBaradei won a third term as chief of the I.A.E.A. earlier this year despite opposition from Washington. He had overwhelming support from the rest of the world community.” Commenting on his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, ElBaradei was less direct about his difficulties with the U.S. government, but his meaning was clear enough. “The prize will strengthen my resolve and that of my colleagues,” he said, “to speak truth to power.”

    And so the Cinderella story of the United Nations continues. Despite the U.N.’s vital role in world affairs, the United States and—to a lesser extent—the other great powers are determined to keep it weak and impoverished. Unfortunately, in this case there is no Prince Charming to push past the wicked stepmother and stepsisters and reward Cinderella for her virtue. But, hopefully, the public, like the Nobel committee, recognizes that, despite the arrogant, self-interested, and reckless behavior of powerful nation-states, a global institution exists that serves all of humanity.

    Dr. Wittner, a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Associate, is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

    Originally published by the History News Network.

  • The Political Rehabilitation of Joseph Rotblat

    By the time of his death, which occurred on August 31, 2005, Joseph Roblat was a revered figure. A top nuclear physicist, Rotblat received—among many other honors and awards–a British knighthood and, together with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (an organization that he had helped to found), the Nobel Peace Prize (1995). As the president of the Pugwash conferences recalled: “Joseph Rotblat was a towering figure in the search for peace in the world, who dedicated his life to trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and ultimately to rid the world of war itself.”

    But Rotblat’s steadfast support for nuclear disarmament and peace did not always receive such plaudits, as I discovered when I conducted two interviews with him and did extensive research in formerly secret British government records.

    Born in Warsaw in 1908, Rotblat moved to Britain in 1939, where he became a promising young physicist. During World War II, when he feared that Nazi Germany might develop the atomic bomb, he came to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project, America’s own atomic bomb program that he—like many other scientists—hoped would deter Germany’s launching of a nuclear war. But, in late 1944, when Rotblat learned that the German bomb program had been a failure, he resigned from the Manhattan project and returned to London to engage in nonmilitary work. This decision, taken for humanitarian reasons, plunged him into hot water with the authorities. Shortly after telling his U.S. supervisor of his plan to leave Los Alamos, he was accused by U.S. intelligence of being a Soviet spy. The charge, totally without merit, was eventually dropped.

    Back in Britain, Rotblat engaged in peaceful research and, in the postwar years, helped to organize the Atomic Scientists’ Association (ASA), which drew together some of that country’s top scientists. Much like America’s Federation of American Scientists, the ASA promoted nuclear arms control and disarmament. However, British government officials, then more interested in building nuclear weapons than in eliminating them, looked askance at its activities. In 1947-48, when the ASA organized an Atomic Train to bring the dangers of nuclear weapons (and the supposed benefits of peaceful nuclear power) to the attention of the British public, Prime Minister Clement Attlee objected strongly to plans for government cooperation with it. In March 1948, when Rotblat invited Attlee to visit the Atomic Train during its stay in London, the foreign secretary and the defense minister advised the prime minister to reject the offer, which he did.

    Rotblat’s relations with the British government continued on a difficult course in the 1950s. Working closely with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Rotblat signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of July 9, 1955, which warned nations that if they persisted in their plans for nuclear war, civilization would be utterly destroyed. This venture, in turn, led to the Pugwash conferences—so named because they began in 1957 at a private estate in Pugwash, Nova Scotia. Designed to bring together scientists on both sides of the “iron curtain” for serious, non-polemical discussions of the nuclear menace, these conferences were low-key operations, with little publicity outside of scientific circles. Nevertheless, British officials were deeply suspicious of the Pugwash conferences and of Rotblat, who did most of the organizational work for them and, in 1959, became Pugwash secretary-general.

    Convinced that “the Communists” wanted to use the 1958 Pugwash conference “to secure support for the Soviet demand for the banning of nuclear weapons,” the British Foreign Office initially sought to promote an attitude of skepticism toward it. But, when Rotblat asked J.D. Cockcroft, a member of Britain’s Atomic Energy Authority, to suggest who might be invited to it, Cockcroft and the Foreign Office decided that a better strategy would be to go with the flow and arrange for the participation of a staunch proponent of the British government’s position in the meeting, which they did.

    Although one British diplomat noted that the conference “passed off quietly enough, and not too unsuccessfully from our point of view,” the British government remained on guard. Learning of plans for another Pugwash conference, in Vienna, the Foreign Office warned of the possibility “that this will be more dangerous from our point of view than its predecessors.” Communist participants might launch “a major propaganda drive against nuclear weapons,” and “the organizing committee consists of Lord Russell and Professor Rotblat.” From the British government’s standpoint, the Pugwash conferences were little better than “Communist front gatherings.”

    But British policy gradually began to shift, as the government grew more interested in nuclear arms controls. Asked by Rotblat if he would like to join the advisory body of the British Pugwash committee, Cockcroft referred the matter to the Foreign Office, which responded that he should do so, as it would help prevent Pugwash from “being exploited for propaganda purposes.” Although the Foreign Office did not think he should attend the next Pugwash conference, in Moscow, during 1960, it reversed course that summer and urged him to recruit additional politically reliable scientists to attend. Indeed, it now sought to take over the Pugwash movement for its own purposes. In response to a suggestion by Cockcroft, a Foreign Office official opined that “it would be most helpful if the Royal Society could be persuaded to sponsor British participation . . . and if this were to lead to the winding up of the present Pugwash Committee.”

    But the plans for a takeover failed. When the British government suggested topics for Pugwash meetings and more government officials who should be invited to them, Rotblat resisted, much to government dismay. In October 1963, a Foreign Office official complained that “the difficulty is to get Prof. Rotblat to pay any attention to what we think. . . . He is no doubt jealous of his independence and scientific integrity.” Securing “a new organizer for the British delegation seems to be the first need, but I do not know if there is any hope of this.”

    Nonetheless, despite lingering resentment at Rotblat’s independence and integrity, the British government had arrived at a positive appraisal of the Pugwash conferences. As a British defense ministry official declared in January 1962: Pugwash was “now a very respectable organization.” When the Home Office, clinging to past policy, advised that Pugwash was “a dirty word,” the Foreign Office retorted that the movement now enjoyed “official blessing.” Explaining the turnabout, a Foreign Office official stated that “the process of educating” Soviet experts is “bound to be of some use to us.” Furthermore, “we ourselves may pick up some useful ideas from our own scientists . . . and are not likely to be embarrassed by anything which they suggest.” Finally, “if there is ever to be a breakthrough, it is not inconceivable that the way might be prepared by a conference of this kind.”

    In fact, there soon was a breakthrough: the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963—a nuclear arms control measure that the Pugwash conferences played a key part in generating. The British government had no doubt about the connection, and in 1964 it honored Rotblat with a CBE—Commander of the British Empire—for his organization of the Pugwash conferences.

    And so it goes. Today’s dangerously peace-minded heretic is tomorrow’s hero. Abraham Lincoln—that staunch critic of the Mexican War—became America’s best-loved President. Robert LaFollette—reviled and burned in effigy for his opposition to World War I—emerged as one of this nation’s most respected senators. Martin Luther King, Jr.—condemned for his protests against the Vietnam War—is now honored as this country’s great peacemaker.

    Perhaps today, when governments promise us endless military buildups and wars, opposition politicians should take note of this phenomenon.

    Lawrence S. Wittner, a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Associate, is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). He is a member of POTUS, HNN’s presidential history/politics blog.

  • Sixty Years After the Bombs

    It has been 60 years since the U.S. government used atomic bombs to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The weapons killed 200,000 people outright and left tens of thousands of others dying of radiation-induced cancers or afflicted by birth defects, immunological disorders and psychological traumas. It was a grim beginning to the nuclear age and led millions of people around the globe to conclude that the world stood on the brink of destruction.

    Fortunately, since 1945, we have managed to avert that fate. Thanks to widespread public pressure and the efforts of some far-sighted statesmen, governments around the world have exercised a surprising level of nuclear restraint. They have resisted the temptation to carry their quarrels to the level of nuclear war and have agreed to important nuclear arms control and disarmament measures.

    Perhaps the most important of these measures is the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed by virtually all nations. Under its provisions, non-nuclear nations pledged to forgo developing nuclear weapons and nuclear nations pledged to divest themselves of their own nuclear weapons. In this fashion, nations agreed to move toward a nuclear-free world.

    As a result, out of almost 200 nations, only eight – Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and the United States – are now nuclear states, although another, North Korea, might have them, too. Furthermore, the number of nuclear weapons in existence has declined, from about 70,000 at the height of the Cold War to some 30,000 today.

    Unfortunately, during the past decade, this modest progress has been reversed. The Republican-dominated U.S. Senate rejected ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, India and Pakistan became nuclear states and additional nations have shown signs of joining the nuclear line.

    The policies of the Bush administration have been regressive. It has spurned the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, pulled the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and abandoned negotiations for nuclear arms control and disarmament. It also has championed the development of new U.S. nuclear weapons – despite the fact that the U.S. already possesses some 10,000 of them – and affirmed its willingness to initiate nuclear war. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration’s policies helped to wreck the recent NPT review conference at the U.N., where nations condemned its double standard.

    The Bush administration’s determination to preserve U.S. nuclear options seems particularly inappropriate to its “war on terror.” There is no morally acceptable way to employ nuclear weapons against terrorists, for terrorists do not control fixed territory. Instead, they intermingle with the general population and cannot be bombarded with nuclear weapons without causing a Hiroshima-style massacre of civilians.

    Conversely, the maintenance of nuclear stockpiles by the United States and other nations provides terrorists with the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons through theft, bribery or purchase. Thus, the only way to ensure against a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons or materials is to eliminate them from national arsenals.

    In these increasingly dangerous circumstances, many thousands of Americans – joined by concerned people around the globe – will be holding events this August to commemorate the atomic bombings and to demand that the nations of the world get back on track to nuclear disarmament. On Aug. 6, the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, these actions will be especially large and prominent at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab in New Mexico, the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab in California, the U.S. nuclear test site in Nevada and the Y-12 Nuclear Facility in Tennessee. On Aug. 9, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, there will be candlelight vigils held at city halls across the United States.

    There also is pressure for nuclear disarmament emerging in Congress, where Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., has introduced a resolution in the House (HR 373) calling for a comprehensive disarmament program. “There will be no security for America or our world,” she said, “unless we take all steps necessary for nuclear disarmament.”

    Today, 60 years after the inception of the nuclear era, these words are all too true. Thus far, through nuclear restraint, we have managed to stave off the specter of nuclear annihilation that has haunted the world since 1945. The future remains a race between wisdom and catastrophe.

    Lawrence S. Wittner, a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Associate, is professor of history at the State University of New York/Albany and author of “Toward Nuclear Abolition.”

    Originally published by the Washington Examiner.

  • Memories of Hiroshima

    In late July 2004, as I opened the window curtains of my posh room in the Rihga Royal Hotel and looked out at the city of Hiroshima, I was struck by how marvelously it had been restored. Fifty-nine years ago, Hiroshima had been nearly obliterated by the fire and blast of the U.S. atomic bombing, which killed 140,000 people by the end of 1945 and left tens of thousands of others dying slowly and painfully from radiation poisoning. Now the city had been thoroughly rebuilt, with its sea of modern buildings, surrounded by green mountains, glittering in the sunshine. More than a million people lived there.

    Decades ago, Danilo Dolci, the Italian pacifist, had criticized the rebuilding of Hiroshima, claiming that its ruins should be left as a symbol of the horrors of nuclear war. It was a harsh judgment, but I could understand his point. If the human race could tidy up from its murderous nuclear follies this well, what would prevent it from repeating them? In a variety of forms, this question pressed heavily upon me throughout my stay in Japan.

    I was visiting the country for ten days to lecture on nuclear disarmament-related issues. As the author of a recently-completed trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb, I had been asked to speak at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, at the Peace Research Institute of Meiji Gakuin University (in Tokyo), at assorted venues in Tokyo and Hiroshima as an overseas guest of Gensuikin (the Japan Congress Against Atomic & Hydrogen Bombs), and by the Hiroshima Association for Nuclear Weapons Abolition. Through these talks and conversations with activists, I probably learned more from the Japanese than they learned from me.

    In a number of ways, the Japanese peace and disarmament movement was experiencing a difficult time. Although it continued to constitute a powerful presence in the nation’s life, its membership was declining and young people, particularly, did not seem to be drawn to it. Symptomatically, the number of visitors to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was dwindling. To many Japanese, the antinuclear campaign seemed frozen in time, irrelevant to contemporary events. In addition, Gensuikin, one of the two major nuclear disarmament groups in Japan, had been undermined by the collapse of the staunchly antimilitarist Socialist Party and by the ebbing strength of the labor movement–for decades its two key pillars of support. Meanwhile, the leaders of the ruling conservative party (Japan’s misnamed Liberal Democratic Party) were planning to “revise” Article 9, the antiwar clause of Japan’s constitution. They had even begun to talk about developing nuclear weapons for Japan. Also, there was great frustration at the militarism of the Bush administration–particularly its war upon Iraq, its abandonment of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and its plan to build new nuclear weapons.

    Overall, then, there was a sense of frustration and, at times, pessimism, among peace-minded Japanese people. Again and again, I heard the question raised: With the hibakusha (the survivors of the atomic bombing) now elderly and dying, who will take up their key role in the nuclear disarmament campaign? When, during a Gensuikin-organized press conference, I was asked that question by a Japanese newspaper reporter, I did my best to answer it. But I am not sure I did a very good job.

    On the other hand, Japan’s nuclear disarmament campaign had a level of strength and integration in the broader society that North American peace groups might well envy. Gensuikin’s annual conference, which opened in Hiroshima on August 4, drew 3,500 registered participants. Its opening session, with thousands of activists in attendance, featured powerful antinuclear speeches not only by Shigetoshi Iwamatsu and Shingo Fukuyama (the chair and secretary general of Gensuikin), but by Tadatoshi Akiba (Mayor of Hiroshima and Chair of Mayors for Peace, a worldwide organization) and the president of Rengo (Japan’s labor federation). Its press conference was covered sympathetically by Japan’s major newspapers. Its local groups, usually headed by labor union activists, worked throughout Japan on issues ranging from opposing nuclear weapons, to defending Article 9, to agitating against the expansion of U.S. military bases.

    Furthermore, Japan’s nuclear disarmament movement found a powerful supporter in Hiroshima’s Mayor Akiba. A mathematician who was educated at MIT and, despite his progressive views, elected to the highest office in this rather conservative city, Akiba was a dynamic proponent of the movement. His administration had given very substantial funding to the Hiroshima Peace Institute and, in 2004, its staff members and the speakers at its annual symposium (including this writer) were wined and dined by the mayor at his official residence.

    Addressing Hiroshima’s annual atomic bombing commemoration ceremony on August 6, Akiba delivered an eloquent plea for the abolition of nuclear weapons. “The city of Hiroshima,” he stated, “along with the Mayors for Peace and our 611 member cities in 109 countries and regions,” had declared the period through the following August a “Year of Remembrance and Action for a Nuclear-Free World.” The goal would be the signing of a Nuclear Weapons Convention in 2010 and the abolition of nuclear weapons by 2020. He also denounced “the egocentric view of the U.S. government” (which had been “ignoring the United Nations and its foundation of international law”), criticized terrorists for their “reliance on violence-amplifying” strategies, and condemned North Korea and other nations for “buying into the worthless policy of `nuclear insurance.’”

    The August 6 commemoration ceremony at which Akiba spoke was quite impressive. Boy scouts and girl scouts distributed bouquets of flowers to participants, school children attended in large numbers, and perhaps 20,000 people turned out for the event, conducted in the Peace Park under a broiling sun. A representative of the United Nations delivered a speech by Secretary-General Kofi Annan that warned of “the shadow of nuclear war hanging over our world.” Two local sixth graders spoke of children’s stake in world peace. Even conservative Japanese Prime Minister Junichero Koizumi addressed the assemblage, professing his concern for peace and nuclear disarmament–although members of the audience later criticized his mumbled statement, which, given his dispatch of Japanese troops to Iraq and disdain for Article 9, they considered quite hypocritical.

    The most moving events occurred that evening, when thousands of people gathered to float colored lanterns down Hiroshima’s rivers, in honor of the lives lost in the atomic bombing. Unlike the commemoration ceremony, this was an informal venture, and the milling crowds, diverse music, and disparate activities in the adjoining Peace Park gave it a more spontaneous flavor.

    As our small group of Gensuikin activists and their overseas guests wended its way through the crowd, we came upon the Children’s Peace Monument, a statue of young Sadako Sasaki. At age two, Sadako had survived the atomic attack on Hiroshima; but, at age twelve, she was stricken by radiation-induced leukemia. Despite the pain, she began folding paper (origami) cranes in the hope of a cure, for there is a Japanese legend that if one folds a thousand cranes, one will be granted a wish. Sadako, however, died before reaching that number. Thereafter, her grief-stricken friends completed the process, and ever since then millions of Japanese schoolchildren–and people around the world–have folded cranes in her memory.

    As we approached Sadako’s statue, I noticed the vast number of tiny cranes that had been so carefully folded and strung together. And there was a group of young Japanese schoolchildren on the site, singing songs of peace. The children, I thought, were absolutely beautiful, and as I listened to their high-pitched voices raised in song, I had to make an effort not to burst into tears. How could the rulers of nations have approved the atomic bombing of such children in the past? How could they still be making plans to slaughter them in the future?

    Mulling over my experiences in Japan, I think that people should worry less about Hiroshima’s reconstruction and the aging of the hibakusha. We do not require the ruins of cities or even the testimony of survivors to remind us of the need to reject nuclear weapons. We have only to look at the beauty of the world–and especially its children–to understand that nuclear war is a monstrous crime.

    Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).