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  • Army Teaches Wrong Lesson in Nation’s High Schools

    This article was originally published on War Is A Crime.

    This summer the world will pause to commemorate the 68th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Most Americans are still supportive of Truman’s decision despite overwhelming historical evidence the bomb had “nothing to do with the end of the war,” in the words ofMajor General Curtis E. LeMay.

    Americans suffer from a misinformation campaign initially perpetrated by the Truman administration and carried on to this day by high school textbooks that continue to tell the story as if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were indispensible in ending the war and saving countless American lives. The historical record is clear, however.  As President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

    There is no hint of controversy regarding the decision to drop the bomb in the majority of texts in use in American classrooms and many textbooks contain blatant historical inaccuracies, but the greatest purveyor of historical mistruth is the U.S. Army’s  Leadership, Education and Training (LET 3) Custom Edition for Army JROTC.  JROTC is the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. More than a half million American high school students are enrolled in JROTC classes nationwide.

    JROTC students do more than march in uniform on the football field.  They study government (The unit on constitutional law is entitled “You the People”), and they study a “history” of sorts.    The JROTC treatment of Truman’s decision to drop the bomb is riddled with falsehoods and leaves students convinced that destroying those cities was the right thing to do.

    Thanks to policymakers and military leaders of the era who have subsequently told their stories, we know today what transpired. We can also thank Professor Gar Alperovitz of the University of Maryland for a stellar academic career dedicated to analyzing American policy in this regard. Quite simply, President Truman dropped those bombs on a defeated Japan to tell the Russians and the world to back off. We had two bombs and we were going to use them.  In a typically cavalier fashion, Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., Commander, U.S. Third Fleet remarked, “It was a mistake to ever drop [the bomb]. . .they had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. .”

    Today we know:

    • The bombs weren’t needed to win the war. Every top U.S. military leader of the era has since stated that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were militarily insignificant.
    • The idea that dropping the bombs saved a million American lives is completely fabricated.  The war against Japan could have been “won” without additional loss of life.
    • The Japanese had been trying to surrender for months.  They simply wanted to guarantee their emperor’s safety, a desire the Americans eventually allowed.
    • The Japanese would have unconditionally given up without the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the Soviet Union entered the war.
    • The bombing was not so much the last military chapter of the Second World War as it was the first Chapter of the Cold War.

    The authors of the JROTC course book grapple with the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan within the context of an ethical case study where students discuss ethical choices and consequences inherent in a series of historical events. Rather than presenting an unbiased version of events, the discussion is tainted by a strong preference toward bombing Japan, complete with falsehoods and inexcusable omissions.

    The JROTC text packages all the most prevalent misperceptions regarding Truman’s decision into one outrageous historical account. The U.S. Army is teaching high school students that using atomic weaponry was necessary to forestall a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland that would have cost a million American lives. The text leaves the impression that the Japanese military in mid-1945 was extraordinarily powerful and that the Japanese were fanatical in their resolve to resist. The text also perpetrates the falsehood that the top brass supported the bombing when in fact all of the top brass subsequently came out to object to its use. Finally, and perhaps most egregiously, the Army’s version of events distorts the complex geostrategic mix involving the Soviets.

    The Army text leaves out Japanese attempts to surrender. The book makes no mention of the prior agreements to bring the Soviets into the war against Japan or the Soviet declaration of war on August 8th. The JROTC text fails to recognize that Japanese power quickly disintegrated during the first 6 months of 1945, especially after the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killing more than 300,000 people, figures that exclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book doesn’t describe absolute American control of Japanese skies in the summer of 1945.

    Consider the following selections from Leadership, Education and Training 3:

    “The Soviet Union had not participated in the Pacific campaign, choosing to remain neutral with Japan while fighting for survival against Germany. Truman was in Potsdam meeting with Churchill, trying to enlist the aide of Stalin, when he learned of the atomic test at Trinity.”

    At face value this is true, but this statement represents the totality of the Army’s discussion of the Soviet role.  The JROTC text minimizes the importance of the Soviets while elevating the significance of the atomic bombings in bringing about Japan’s surrender. The Soviets are portrayed as being weak but it was Stalin’s decision to enter the war and the Red Army’s assault on Manchuria on August 9th and subsequent rapid advance through weak Japanese defenses that caused the Japanese to immediately sue for peace.

    Truman and his trusted advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes both believed the bomb would keep the Russians in line in Eastern Europe.  Dropping the bomb launched the Cold War. It wasn’t necessary to end World War II.

    During the Tehran Conference in 1943 Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan after Hitler was defeated.  In 1945 at the Yalta Conference Stalin agreed to enter the War with Japan within three months of the end of the war in Europe. The Soviet invasion began on August 8, 1945, precisely three months after the German surrender on May 8th. The start of the invasion fell between the atomic bombings of Hiroshima, on August 6, and Nagasaki, on August 9.  In the words ofAir Force General Claire Chennault,”Russia’s entry into the Japanese war was the decisive factor in speeding its end and would have been so even if no atomic bombs had been dropped.”  An examination of the Japanese historical record confirms this point.  It is reprehensible for the Army to omit a more thorough discussion of the pivotal role of the Soviet Union in bringing about an end to the war.

    “Truman was troubled by the mounting casualties in the Pacific as Allied forces drew nearer the Japanese home islands. Driven by the Bushido warrior code, the Japanese were prepared to resist to the last, and more willing to die than surrender.”

    Truman knew a week before Potsdam that Japan’s emperorhad intervened to attempt to end the war and there were several attempts at peace before this.  Japan was prepared to surrender, provided that it could retain its emperor but Truman had two bombs and he was determined to use them to fire a kind of a shot across the bow to the Soviets as post-war Europe was taking shape. General Douglas MacArthur understood it this way. “The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”

    Colonel Charles Bonesteel, Chief of the War Department Operations Division Policy poignantly described the situation in the summer of 1945, “The poor damn Japanese were putting feelers out by the ton so to speak — through Russia.”

    “The Joint Chiefs told Truman to expect over 1,000,000 American casualties and even larger number of Japanese dead in the pending attack on the home islands.”

    This is false. There’s no record of the Joint Chiefs of Staff formally studying the decision and they never made an official recommendation to the President, according to Alperovitz. Additionally, the Joint Chiefs never claimed to be involved.  The claim of 1 million casualties as a result of an (unnecessary) American invasion is a complete fabrication.  It originated from a 1947 Harper’s article by Secretary of War Stimson.  Stimson invented the number.  It is not based on a shred of historical evidence.

    For his part, President Truman randomly selected the number of American lives ostensibly saved as a result of dropping the bomb.  He said it would “save thousands of American lives.” He later remarked, “It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are.”  He also said, “I thought 200,000 of our young men would be saved by making that decision.”

    The Japanese position was hopeless by the summer of 1945. They were trying to surrender because they were defeated. According to Brigadier Gen. Carter W. Clarke, “We brought them down to an abject surrender through the accelerated sinking of their merchant marine and hunger alone, and when we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”  Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Henry H. “Hap” Arnold looked at the situation from the air, “The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.”

    “By August 1945, the United States had two nuclear bombs in its arsenal. On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Over 140,000 Japanese were killed in the blast, and an uncounted number died from the lingering effects of radiation. On August 9, 1945, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The next day, August 10, 1945, Japan indicated its willingness to surrender.”

    Japan had been indicating its “willingness to surrender” for some time before the bombs were dropped.  The Japanese finally acceded to allied surrender terms because the Soviets had invaded Manchuria the day before.

    Every top American military leader was revolted by Truman’s decision to drop the bomb. They couldn’t see its military necessity. It is incomprehensible that the today’s Army feels compelled to contradict its greatest leaders who understood the role of the military in relation to its political superiors. Commander of the U.S. Army Strategic Air Force, General Carl Spaatz understood the separation.He said,”The dropping of the atomic bomb was done by a military man under military orders. We’re supposed to carry out orders and not question them.  “That was purely a political decision. [It] wasn’t a military decision..”

    Top Naval officers joined in the chorus. Admiral William D. Leahy, the President’s Chief of Staff said, “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

    Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet echoed the sentiments of his colleagues, “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace… The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.”

    “Truman appointed a committee to evaluate using the atomic bomb. The committee examined many options, including a demonstration in Tokyo Bay, but Los Alamos was uncertain the device would detonate. Rather than lose a valuable war asset, and to emphasize its destructive power, the committee recommended dropping the atomic bomb on a city.”

    Secretary of State James Byrnes, Truman’s personal representative on the Interim Committee, was the most influential member of the committee and steered policy in the direction of using the new weapon without warning on a Japanese city.  It was Byrnes who saw the bomb as a promising way to keep the Soviets in line in the post-war era.

    Impressionable high school juniors are on the receiving end of this despicable propaganda. It is astonishing how easily the Army’s authors dismiss a quarter-million lives.

    The discussion of the decision to drop the bomb in the JROTC text ends with the following:

    “When thinking of ethical decisions that affected U.S. and world history, try to imagine how history would have been changed if the Atomic bomb had not been dropped on Japan during World War II. Would the war have continued much longer?  Would the U.S. have been attacked again by the Japanese, as they had been at Pearl Harbor the year before [sic]?  Because the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan on August 8th, do you think that thousands of Soviet and U.S. soldiers would have lost their lives?”

    Based on the information contained in the JROTC text, it is “clear” to American high school students that the war would have dragged on indefinitely if we hadn’t dropped the bomb. We had to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki to keep the Japanese from attacking America as they did in 1941, and we had to do this to save American and Soviet lives!

    JROTC lessons are developed and taught by Senior Army Instructors (SAIs) and Assistant Instructors (IAs). Although SAI’s have college degrees, they are typically not state-certified teachers.  AIs must be retired from the Army and may be hired with a high school diploma provided they earn an associate’s degree within five years. AIs are the only unsupervised non-professionals allowed to instruct students in classrooms in most states across the country.

    Public school officials rarely exercise control over the curricular content of the JROTC program or the professional qualifications of its instructors. It’s time they did.

    Pat Elder is the Director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy.

  • What Obama Did and Did Not Say

    This article was published on the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s blog Waging Peace Today

    President Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday was all about the economy. Even when he was talking about education, national security or energy, he was talking about the economy.
    There were two things that really struck me in his speech: one thing that he said, and one thing that he didn’t say.
    The president recognizes that we need to slash the bloated Pentagon budget, though whether he’ll adopt Rep. Barney Frank’s (D-MA) plan to cut the Pentagon budget by 25% or more is unlikely. But, on Tuesday, Obama said, “We’ll…reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use.”
    This statement was sufficiently vague to keep all but the most rabid militarists from immediately criticizing his position. I think that some proof of what exactly Obama was referring to came today in the draft 2010 Department of Energy budget: ZERO dollars for new nuclear weapons (currently called the Reliable Replacement Warhead program).
    The other thing that really struck me in his speech was the very noticeable omission of nuclear power as a critical part of our energy future. Solar? Check. Wind? Check. Efficiency? Check. “Clean” coal? Um…check. Nuclear power? No thanks.
    Let’s ignore for a moment that “clean coal” is about as asinine as calling nuclear power “clean, safe and reliable.” Barack Obama comes from the state of Illinois, the state with the most nuclear power plants and arguably the strongest base of the nuclear power lobby. Obama accepted campaign money from nuclear power pushers. He campaigned on an energy platform that included nuclear power as part of the energy mix.
    What has he discovered in his first 40 days in office? Hopefully all of the following:

    • There is still no “permanent” solution to the nuclear waste problem, and there is no solution in sight;
    • The nuclear power industry cannot survive without massive government subsidies;
    • New nuclear power plants take so many years to approve and construct that they cannot help us to meet our immediate carbon reduction requirements;
    • Once you take into account the lifecycle carbon footprint of nuclear power (uranium mining, construction, operation, waste storage, decommissioning), it doesn’t look so carbon-free;
    • Investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency are more economically sensible and will eliminate CO2 emissions more effectively.

    With continued public pressure, it is possible for the evil twins of the 20th century, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, to be eliminated for good.

     

    Rick Wayman is Director of Programs at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • Do Nuclear Weapons Really Deter Aggression?

    Lawrence WittnerIt’s often said that nuclear weapons have protected nations from military attack.

     

    But is there any solid evidence to bolster this contention? Without such evidence, the argument that nuclear weapons prevented something that never occurred is simply a counter-factual abstraction that cannot be proved.

     

    Ronald Reagan — the hardest of military hard-liners — was not at all impressed by airy claims that U.S. nuclear weapons prevented Soviet aggression. Kenneth Adelman, a hawkish official in the Reagan administration, recalled that when he “hammered home the risks of a nuclear-free world” to the president, Reagan retorted that “we couldn’t know that nuclear weapons had kept the peace in Europe for forty years, maybe other things had.” Adelman described another interchange with Reagan that went the same way. When Adelman argued that “eliminating all nuclear weapons was impossible,” as they had kept the peace in Europe, Reagan responded sharply that “it wasn’t clear that nuclear weapons had kept the peace. Maybe other things, like the Marshall Plan and NATO, had kept the peace.” (Kenneth Adelman, The Great Universal Embrace, pp. 69, 318.)

     

    In short, without any solid evidence, we don’t know that nuclear weapons have prevented or will prevent military aggression.

     

    We do know, of course, that since 1945, many nations not in possession of nuclear weapons and not part of the alliance systems of the nuclear powers have not experienced a military attack. Clearly, they survived just fine without nuclear deterrence.

     

    And we also know that nuclear weapons in U.S. hands did not prevent non-nuclear North Korea from invading South Korea or non-nuclear China from sending its armies to attack U.S. military forces in the ensuing Korean War. Nor did massive U.S. nuclear might prevent the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Also, the thousands of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal did nothing to deter the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on U.S. territory.

     

    Similarly, nuclear weapons in Soviet (and later Russian) hands did not prevent U.S. military intervention in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Nor did Soviet nuclear weapons prevent CIA-fomented military action to overthrow the governments of Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, and other nations.

     

    Other nuclear powers have also discovered the irrelevance of their nuclear arsenals. British nuclear weapons did not stop non-nuclear Argentina’s invasion of Britain’s Falkland Islands. Moreover, Israel’s nuclear weapons did not prevent non-nuclear Egypt and non-nuclear Syria from attacking Israel’s armed forces in 1973 or non-nuclear Iraq from launching missile attacks on Israeli cities in 1991. Perhaps most chillingly, in 1999, when both India and Pakistan possessed nuclear weapons, the two nations — long at odds — sent their troops into battle against one another in what became known as the Kargil War.

     

    Of course, the argument is often made that nuclear weapons have deterred a nuclear attack. But, again, as this attack never took place, how can we be sure about the cause of this non-occurrence?

     

    Certainly, U.S. officials don’t appear to find their policy of nuclear deterrence very reassuring. Indeed, if they were as certain that nuclear weapons prevent nuclear attack as they claim to be, why are they so intent upon building “missile defense” systems to block such an attack — despite the fact that, after squandering more than $150 billion on such defense systems, there is no indication that they work? Or, to put it more generally, if the thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons safeguard the United States from a nuclear attack by another nation, why is a defense against such an attack needed?

     

    Another indication that nuclear weapons do not provide security against a nuclear attack is the determination of the U.S. and Israeli governments to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state. After all, if nuclear deterrence works, there is no need to worry about Iran (or any other nation) acquiring nuclear weapons.

     

    The fact is that, today, there is no safety from war to be found in nuclear weaponry, any more than there was safety in the past produced by fighter planes, battleships, bombers, poison gas, and other devastating weapons. Instead, by raising the ante in the ages-old game of armed conflict, nuclear weapons have merely increased the possibility that, however a war begins, it will end in mass destruction of terrifying dimensions.

     

    Sensible people and wise government leaders have understood for some time now that a more promising route to national and international security is to work at curbing the practice of war while, at the same time, banning its most dangerous and destructive implements. This alternative route requires patient diplomacy, international treaties, citizen activism, the United Nations, and arms control and disarmament measures. It’s a less dramatic and less demagogic approach than brandishing nuclear weapons on the world scene. But, ultimately, it’s a lot safer.

  • Cow Most Sacred: Why Military Spending Remains Untouchable

    This article was originally published by TomDispatch.com.


    In defense circles, “cutting” the Pentagon budget has once again become a topic of conversation.  Americans should not confuse that talk with reality.  Any cuts exacted will at most reduce the rate of growth.  The essential facts remain: U.S. military outlays today equal that of every other nation on the planet combined, a situation without precedent in modern history.


    The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War — this despite the absence of anything remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a “peer competitor.”  Evil Empire?  It exists only in the fevered imaginations of those who quiver at the prospect of China adding a rust-bucket Russian aircraft carrier to its fleet or who take seriously the ravings of radical Islamists promising from deep inside their caves to unite the Umma in a new caliphate.


    What are Americans getting for their money?  Sadly, not much.  Despite extraordinary expenditures (not to mention exertions and sacrifices by U.S. forces), the return on investment is, to be generous, unimpressive.  The chief lesson to emerge from the battlefields of the post-9/11 era is this: the Pentagon possesses next to no ability to translate “military supremacy” into meaningful victory.


    Washington knows how to start wars and how to prolong them, but is clueless when it comes to ending them.  Iraq, the latest addition to the roster of America’s forgotten wars, stands as exhibit A.  Each bomb that blows up in Baghdad or some other Iraqi city, splattering blood all over the streets, testifies to the manifest absurdity of judging “the surge” as the epic feat of arms celebrated by the Petraeus lobby.


    The problems are strategic as well as operational.  Old Cold War-era expectations that projecting U.S. power will enhance American clout and standing no longer apply, especially in the Islamic world.  There, American military activities are instead fostering instability and inciting anti-Americanism.  For Exhibit B, see the deepening morass that Washington refers to as AfPak or the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations.


    Add to that the mountain of evidence showing that Pentagon, Inc. is a miserably managed enterprise: hide-bound, bloated, slow-moving, and prone to wasting resources on a prodigious scale — nowhere more so than in weapons procurement and the outsourcing of previously military functions to “contractors.”  When it comes to national security, effectiveness (what works) should rightly take precedence over efficiency (at what cost?) as the overriding measure of merit.  Yet beyond a certain level, inefficiency undermines effectiveness, with the Pentagon stubbornly and habitually exceeding that level.  By comparison, Detroit’s much-maligned Big Three offer models of well-run enterprises.


    Impregnable Defenses


    All of this takes place against the backdrop of mounting problems at home: stubbornly high unemployment, trillion-dollar federal deficits, massive and mounting debt, and domestic needs like education, infrastructure, and employment crying out for attention.


    Yet the defense budget — a misnomer since for Pentagon, Inc. defense per se figures as an afterthought — remains a sacred cow.  Why is that?


    The answer lies first in understanding the defenses arrayed around that cow to ensure that it remains untouched and untouchable.  Exemplifying what the military likes to call a “defense in depth,” that protective shield consists of four distinct but mutually supporting layers.


    Institutional Self-Interest: Victory in World War II produced not peace, but an atmosphere of permanent national security crisis.  As never before in U.S. history, threats to the nation’s existence seemed omnipresent, an attitude first born in the late 1940s that still persists today.  In Washington, fear — partly genuine, partly contrived — triggered a powerful response.


    One result was the emergence of the national security state, an array of institutions that depended on (and therefore strove to perpetuate) this atmosphere of crisis to justify their existence, status, prerogatives, and budgetary claims.  In addition, a permanent arms industry arose, which soon became a major source of jobs and corporate profits.  Politicians of both parties were quick to identify the advantages of aligning with this “military-industrial complex,” as President Eisenhower described it.


    Allied with (and feeding off of) this vast apparatus that transformed tax dollars into appropriations, corporate profits, campaign contributions, and votes was an intellectual axis of sorts  — government-supported laboratories, university research institutes, publications, think tanks, and lobbying firms (many staffed by former or would-be senior officials) — devoted to identifying (or conjuring up) ostensible national security challenges and alarms, always assumed to be serious and getting worse, and then devising responses to them.


    The upshot: within Washington, the voices carrying weight in any national security “debate” all share a predisposition for sustaining very high levels of military spending for reasons having increasingly little to do with the well-being of the country.


    Strategic Inertia: In a 1948 State Department document, diplomat George F. Kennan offered this observation: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population.”  The challenge facing American policymakers, he continued, was “to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this disparity.”  Here we have a description of American purposes that is far more candid than all of the rhetoric about promoting freedom and democracy, seeking world peace, or exercising global leadership.


    The end of World War II found the United States in a spectacularly privileged position.  Not for nothing do Americans remember the immediate postwar era as a Golden Age of middle-class prosperity.  Policymakers since Kennan’s time have sought to preserve that globally privileged position.  The effort has been a largely futile one.


    By 1950 at the latest, those policymakers (with Kennan by then a notable dissenter) had concluded that the possession and deployment of military power held the key to preserving America’s exalted status.  The presence of U.S. forces abroad and a demonstrated willingness to intervene, whether overtly or covertly, just about anywhere on the planet would promote stability, ensure U.S. access to markets and resources, and generally serve to enhance the country’s influence in the eyes of friend and foe alike — this was the idea, at least.


    In postwar Europe and postwar Japan, this formula achieved considerable success.  Elsewhere — notably in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and (especially after 1980) in the so-called Greater Middle East — it either produced mixed results or failed catastrophically.  Certainly, the events of the post-9/11 era provide little reason to believe that this presence/power-projection paradigm will provide an antidote to the threat posed by violent anti-Western jihadism.  If anything, adherence to it is exacerbating the problem by creating ever greater anti-American animus.


    One might think that the manifest shortcomings of the presence/power-projection approach — trillions expended in Iraq for what? — might stimulate present-day Washington to pose some first-order questions about basic U.S. national security strategy.  A certain amount of introspection would seem to be called for.  Could, for example, the effort to sustain what remains of America’s privileged status benefit from another approach?


    Yet there are few indications that our political leaders, the senior-most echelons of the officer corps, or those who shape opinion outside of government are capable of seriously entertaining any such debate.  Whether through ignorance, arrogance, or a lack of imagination, the pre-existing strategic paradigm stubbornly persists; so, too, as if by default do the high levels of military spending that the strategy entails.


    Cultural Dissonance: The rise of the Tea Party movement should disabuse any American of the thought that the cleavages produced by the “culture wars” have healed.  The cultural upheaval touched off by the 1960s and centered on Vietnam remains unfinished business in this country.


    Among other things, the sixties destroyed an American consensus, forged during World War II, about the meaning of patriotism.  During the so-called Good War, love of country implied, even required, deference to the state, shown most clearly in the willingness of individuals to accept the government’s authority to mandate military service.  GI’s, the vast majority of them draftees, were the embodiment of American patriotism, risking life and limb to defend the country.


    The GI of World War II had been an American Everyman.  Those soldiers both represented and reflected the values of the nation from which they came (a perception affirmed by the ironic fact that the military adhered to prevailing standards of racial segregation).  It was “our army” because that army was “us.”


    With Vietnam, things became more complicated.  The war’s supporters argued that the World War II tradition still applied: patriotism required deference to the commands of the state.  Opponents of the war, especially those facing the prospect of conscription, insisted otherwise.  They revived the distinction, formulated a generation earlier by the radical journalist Randolph Bourne, that distinguished between the country and the state.  Real patriots, the ones who most truly loved their country, were those who opposed state policies they regarded as misguided, illegal, or immoral.


    In many respects, the soldiers who fought the Vietnam War found themselves caught uncomfortably in the center of this dispute.  Was the soldier who died in Vietnam a martyr, a tragic figure, or a sap?  Who deserved greater admiration:  the soldier who fought bravely and uncomplainingly or the one who served and then turned against the war?  Or was the war resister — the one who never served at all — the real hero?


    War’s end left these matters disconcertingly unresolved.  President Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to kill the draft in favor of an All-Volunteer Force, predicated on the notion that the country might be better served with a military that was no longer “us,” only complicated things further.  So, too, did the trends in American politics where bona fide war heroes (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain) routinely lost to opponents whose military credentials were non-existent or exceedingly slight (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama), yet who demonstrated once in office a remarkable propensity for expending American blood (none belonging to members of their own families) in places like Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  It was all more than a little unseemly.


    Patriotism, once a simple concept, had become both confusing and contentious.  What obligations, if any, did patriotism impose?  And if the answer was none — the option Americans seemed increasingly to prefer — then was patriotism itself still a viable proposition?


    Wanting to answer that question in the affirmative — to distract attention from the fact that patriotism had become little more than an excuse for fireworks displays and taking the occasional day off from work — people and politicians alike found a way to do so by exalting those Americans actually choosing to serve in uniform.  The thinking went this way: soldiers offer living proof that America is a place still worth dying for, that patriotism (at least in some quarters) remains alive and well; by common consent, therefore, soldiers are the nation’s “best,” committed to “something bigger than self” in a land otherwise increasingly absorbed in pursuing a material and narcissistic definition of self-fulfillment.


    In effect, soldiers offer much-needed assurance that old-fashioned values still survive, even if confined to a small and unrepresentative segment of American society.  Rather than Everyman, today’s warrior has ascended to the status of icon, deemed morally superior to the nation for which he or she fights, the repository of virtues that prop up, however precariously, the nation’s increasingly sketchy claim to singularity.


    Politically, therefore, “supporting the troops” has become a categorical imperative across the political spectrum.  In theory, such support might find expression in a determination to protect those troops from abuse, and so translate into wariness about committing soldiers to unnecessary or unnecessarily costly wars.  In practice, however, “supporting the troops” has found expression in an insistence upon providing the Pentagon with open-ended drawing rights on the nation’s treasury, thereby creating massive barriers to any proposal to affect more than symbolic reductions in military spending.


    Misremembered History: The duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled anti-interventionist position.  Both parties are war parties.  They differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for interventionism.  The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize human rights.  The results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism that sustains a never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays.


    American politics once nourished a lively anti-interventionist tradition.  Leading proponents included luminaries such as George Washington and John Quincy Adams.  That tradition found its basis not in principled pacifism, a position that has never attracted widespread support in this country, but in pragmatic realism.  What happened to that realist tradition?  Simply put, World War II killed it — or at least discredited it.  In the intense and divisive debate that occurred in 1939-1941, the anti-interventionists lost, their cause thereafter tarred with the label “isolationism.”


    The passage of time has transformed World War II from a massive tragedy into a morality tale, one that casts opponents of intervention as blackguards.  Whether explicitly or implicitly, the debate over how the United States should respond to some ostensible threat — Iraq in 2003, Iran today — replays the debate finally ended by the events of December 7, 1941.  To express skepticism about the necessity and prudence of using military power is to invite the charge of being an appeaser or an isolationist.  Few politicians or individuals aspiring to power will risk the consequences of being tagged with that label.


    In this sense, American politics remains stuck in the 1930s — always discovering a new Hitler, always privileging Churchillian rhetoric — even though the circumstances in which we live today bear scant resemblance to that earlier time.  There was only one Hitler and he’s long dead.  As for Churchill, his achievements and legacy are far more mixed than his battalions of defenders are willing to acknowledge.  And if any one figure deserves particular credit for demolishing Hitler’s Reich and winning World War II, it’s Josef Stalin, a dictator as vile and murderous as Hitler himself.


    Until Americans accept these facts, until they come to a more nuanced view of World War II that takes fully into account the political and moral implications of the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union and the U.S. campaign of obliteration bombing directed against Germany and Japan, the mythic version of “the Good War” will continue to provide glib justifications for continuing to dodge that perennial question: How much is enough?


    Like concentric security barriers arrayed around the Pentagon, these four factors — institutional self-interest, strategic inertia, cultural dissonance, and misremembered history — insulate the military budget from serious scrutiny.  For advocates of a militarized approach to policy, they provide invaluable assets, to be defended at all costs.

  • Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico: Urgent Call for Action

    Vaya aquí para la versión española.

    The massive and ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused by a drilling rig explosion and eventual collapse of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform leased by British Petroleum is already considered the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history and possibly the entire world’s. The consequences of this continued oil spill flow from the ocean’s depth is incalculable…we are truly in uncharted territory!

    Jean-Michel Cousteau, president of Ocean Futures Society, along with his late father, the legendary Captain Jacques Cousteau, have made enormous contributions to our knowledge and understanding of our planet’s oceans and diverse bodies of water. A few days ago, accompanied by a group of dedicated scientists from his organization, Jean-Michel traveled to the accident site in the Gulf of Mexico. They are voluntarily there to assess the situation and to help collaborate in finding solutions.

    Jean-Michel said this “I have been on site at the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and the Prestige oil spill in Spain, but they don’t compare with the magnitude of this Gulf spill. We will look for immediate solutions but may mostly find reasons why this must never happen again and what must be done for the future.”

    We are faced with a terrible question after observing the desperate and so far failed attempts to control or cap the oil gusher.

    What is the environmental impact and extent of damage to the marine ecosystems and the coastal zones, so rich in bio-diversity of both plant and animal? The Gulf of Mexico is home to one of the largest barrier reefs in the world, the Mesoamerican Reef, unique in the Western Hemisphere and second in size only to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. An ancient natural system dating back 225 million years, the reefs function as a natural barrier to storms and hurricanes and are critical to the survival of plant and animal species. It is an important defense against coastal erosion as well. The fragility of these ecosystems is well known and is particularly susceptible to contamination threats. More than 400 species live in the islands and marshlands at risk of oil toxicity AND oxygen depletion occasioned by the oil dispersants used to break up the oil threaten fish and plankton with serious domino effects all the way up the food chain. In the states of Louisiana and Florida, hundreds of thousands of birds and other animals are already dying and in grave danger.

    When the Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground in Prince William Sound twenty-one years ago, it spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil that contaminated all in its path – the water, the beaches, the rocks, the birds, the marine animals and plants – eventually covering 1,300 miles of coastline and 11,000 square miles of ocean with the black sludge. The limitations of our human resources to combat the disaster were underscored by visuals of a clean-up effort undertaken by 12,000 people using shovels and paper towels. After twenty-one years, the negative impact of the spill continues to be felt in this formerly pristine area with a myriad of adverse effects that has decreased the “wilderness character” of the area. To put the new disaster into perspective, it is estimated that the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spillage now spews into the Gulf of Mexico every FOUR days. We seem to be no better prepared for such a disaster 21 years later.

    Some in the political and media communities cynically argue that this is a natural “phenomenon”, that some oil natively exists in the water and that the ocean will cleanse itself of this oil…naturally. Nothing could be further from the truth! Crude oil is the result of a heterogeneous mix of fossilized organic compounds, predominantly hydrocarbons deposited into the earth’s sedimentary strata millions of years ago. The hydrocarbons are insoluble in water and thus do not mix with the ocean’s water. The dark brown waves of sludge wash up on the beaches, marshes and wetlands intact and undiluted by the water destroying all animal and plant life in its wake.

    This oil spill, vastly larger, worse and more intense than any supertanker event, is located at a profound depth in the ocean – spewing massive amounts of oil from more than 1 and 1/2 miles deep. The origin of this environmental disaster creates a hidden menace beneath the water’s surface. A team of University of Georgia scientists has confirmed clouds, or oil plumes, containing small particulate oil matter in the depths of the ocean, a number of which are several hundred feet thick and extend for several miles. This bespeaks to the real ecological catastrophe in the Gulf. Sharks and turtles are already swimming through this toxic soup and dying. There is no way to predict what will happen if the crude oil flow cannot be sufficiently mitigated in the coming months, or worse, if it continues to spill until the well is exhausted. In any event, no argument can be made but that the negative and adverse effects are inestimable and catastrophic.

    Let us also not lose sight of another fundamental axiom…Environmental contamination knows no borders. It needs no passport to travel to the far reaches of our treasured planet. Underwater currents and anticipated seasonal cyclonic activity will no doubt carry millions of gallons to already precarious habitats in the Arctic and the Antarctic. So let us not feel secure or, worse, detached from this disaster simply because we are not in its direct causal path.

    What lessons are there to be learned from past oil spills that have been repeated without cessation for the last twenty years?  This tragedy mandates that we continue to develop technologies that are designed with better margins of safety and triple failsafe backups as a priority. We should honestly and transparently execute the periodic evaluative reviews required of both equipment and personnel in adherence with our current regulatory law. By all preliminary accounts, British Petroleum, in their rush to create a revenue generating well, did not follow the correct, established procedures on this oil rig and dismissed repeated warnings by people at the well site. We need to develop a mindset, both as a society and especially in the business culture that plans for prevention.

    As the old saying goes: Why is there never enough time to prevent a mistake but always enough time to fix one? The truly sad statement about the way we deal with these “mistakes” up until now is that we not only don’t take the correct, preventive steps, but faced with the specter of a disaster, we neither allot the correct amount of time or resources to correct it…the Exxon Valdez and Katrina standing out as stark reminders of this modus operandi. To be constantly surprised and left impotent by these man-made catastrophes speak to an arrogance that overrules common sense. If the result of failed preventive measures in this arena is too dire to contemplate, then perhaps deep sea drilling is not an option.

    Jean Michel Cousteau concurs. He has stated: “The sad side of the human species is that we talk a lot and take very little action until we have a catastrophe on our hands.”

    We cannot change what has occurred, but we must learn the lessons from this calamity. As a society, we need to refocus and change the way we act toward our environment; how we rapaciously exploit our natural resources (both flora and fauna) thinking that technology will solve all the ills created by that voracious appetite. We must adopt a new philosophy: one that has a more balanced approach to the use of the earth’s resources and to our relationship with nature…of which we are only a small part. We need to accept that nature is a lot more complex than we believe it to be and that technology is a lot more limited than we want it to be.

  • Desastre en el Golfo de México: Una nueva llamada de emergencia

    Click here for the English version.


    El derrame de petróleo crudo en el Golfo de México causado por la plataforma de la BP (British Petroleum) se considera ya como el  riesgo ambiental más grave al que se haya enfrentado nunca Estados Unidos y tal vez el mundo. Las consecuencias del continuo flujo del hidrocarburo desde el fondo del mar son incalculables.


    Jean-Michel Cousteau, presidente de Ocean Futures Society, junto con su padre, el legendario e inolvidable defensor de los mares, el capitán Jacques Cousteau, ha contribuido enormemente al conocimiento de los océanos y cuerpos de agua de nuestro


    mundo. Hace unos días,  Jean-Michel acompañado por un grupo de dedicados científicos de su organización se desplazó al sitio del accidente. Ahí están trabajando en forma voluntaria tratando de colaborar para encontrar soluciones.


    Jean-Michel ha declarado lo siguiente: “He sido testigo de sucesos como el desastre del derrame de los buque-tanques  Exxon Valdez en Alaska y Prestige en España, pero nada de eso se compara con la magnitud de lo que estamos viviendo.  Debemos encontrar respuestas inmediatas y a la vez evitar que situaciones como estas se repitan.  Estas contaminaciones de los mares del planeta son una amenaza directa para la vida en general”.


    Viendo los intentos desesperados y fallidos por sellar el pozo de petróleo, nos enfrentamos a esta agónica pregunta. ¿Qué daños se han ocasionado ya al ecosistema marino y las zonas costeras tan ricas en su diversidad animal y vegetal? En el  Golfo de México se extiende una de las más grandes barreras de arrecife del mundo , el Arrecife Mesoamericano, tan sólo superado por la Gran Barrera de Arrecife de Australia.  Es por demás conocida la enorme fragilidad de estos increíbles eco-sistemas ante las contaminaciones.  Los humedales de los Estados de Lousiana y la Florida, hábitat de cientos de miles de aves y una gran diversidad animal, están en grave peligro.


    Hace 21 años, cuando el buque-tanque de la Exxon encalló en el arrecife del estrecho de Prince William, el barco derramó 11 millones de galones de crudo los cuales contaminaron playas, rocas, aves, animales marinos y plantas. La impotencia del ser humano se vio reflejada cuando los trabajos de limpieza fueron efectuados por más de 12 mil personas usando palas y toallas de papel.


     Las consecuencias del impacto ecológico aún se siguen sintiendo en lo que fue un sitio prístino que ha cambiado negativamente para siempre.   Para hacer una comparación, se estima que cada cuatro días las aguas del Golfo de México reciben el equivalente a un cargamento entero del Exxon Valdez.  


    Algunos políticos y comentaristas de los medios, rayando en el cinismo, han dicho que este es un ‘fenómeno’ natural y que el mar se encargará de arreglarlo por sí mismo. Nada es más lejano a la verdad. El petróleo crudo es el resultado de la mezcla heterogénea de compuestos orgánicos de origen fósil, principalmente hidrocarburos, depositados hace millones de años en los distintos sedimentos terrestres. Los hidrocarburos son insolubles y por lo tanto no se mezclan con el agua del mar. Las marejadas negras llegan sin cambios a las playas, esteros y humedales de las costas, destruyendo a su paso toda la vida animal y vegetal.


    Este derrame, es mucho más intenso que los de los buque-petroleros y se localiza a enormes profundidades – más de un kilómetro y medio-  y mide ya miles de metros de espesor bajo el agua.  No hay forma de predecir qué ocurrirá, y mucho menos si el crudo sigue fluyendo durante meses y tal vez durante años, hasta que se agote el manto submarino.


    No perdamos de vista un axioma fundamental. La contaminación no conoce fronteras ni necesita pasaporte para alcanzar los sitios más lejanos del planeta. Las corrientes submarinas y la actual temporada ciclónica, llevarán sin duda alguna millones de galones de este crudo a sitios como el Ártico y la Antártida. En otras palabras, no nos sintamos ‘seguros’ sólo porque no vivamos cerca del sitio de este desastre.


    ¿Qué lecciones deberíamos aprender de algo que se ha repetido sin cesar desde hace ya más de dos décadas?  Sabiendo que el mundo es impredecible significa que nuestras tecnologías deben diseñarse con mayores márgenes de seguridad y efectuar con toda honestidad las revisiones periódicas necesarias tanto a equipos como personal.  Tal parece que este no fue el caso de la plataforma de BP.  Debemos anticiparnos a lo peor, planear para prevenir y aún así, tener otro plan en el caso de que fallen las prevenciones.  Ser sorprendidos constantemente por las catástrofes sólo indica que la arrogancia domina más nuestros actos que el sentido común.


    Jean-Michel Cousteau ha dicho a este respecto: “Algo muy triste de la especie humana es que hablamos mucho pero actuamos muy poco hasta que tenemos un nuevo desastre en nuestras manos”


    Ya no podemos cambiar lo que ha ocurrido, pero debemos aprender de esto.  Hay que enfocar en forma completamente diferente la forma como actuamos, como explotamos los recursos naturales de nuestro mundo tratando de depender siempre de las tecnologías. Hay que desarrollar una nueva filosofía para el uso apropiado de ellas y nuestra relación con la naturaleza, de la cual solo formamos parte.  Hay que aceptar el hecho de que la naturaleza es mucho más compleja de lo que creemos entender, y que la tecnología es mucho más limitada de lo que queremos creer.

  • My Once-in-a-Generation Cut? The Armed Forces. All of them.

    This article was originally published by The Guardian.

    I say cut defence. I don’t mean nibble at it or slice it. I mean cut it, all £45bn of it. George Osborne yesterday asked the nation “for once in a generation” to think the unthinkable, to offer not just percentage cuts but “whether government needs to provide certain public services at all”.

    What do we really get from the army, the navy and the air force beyond soldiers dying in distant wars and a tingle when the band marches by? Is the tingle worth £45bn, more than the total spent on schools? Why does Osborne “ringfence” defence when everyone knows its budget is a bankruptcy waiting to happen, when Labour ministers bought the wrong kit for wars that they insisted it fight?

    Osborne cannot believe the armed forces are so vital or so efficient as to be excused the star chamber’s “fundamental re-evaluation of their role”. He knows their management and procurement have long been an insult to the taxpayer. The reason for his timidity must be that, like David Cameron, he is a young man scared of old generals.

    I was content to be expensively defended against the threat of global communism. With the end of the cold war in the 1990s that threat vanished. In its place was a fantasy proposition, that some unspecified but potent “enemy” lurked in the seas and skies around Britain. Where is it?

    Each incoming government since 1990 has held so-called defence reviews “to match capabilities to policy objectives”. I helped with one in 1997, and it was rubbish from start to finish, a cosmetic attempt to justify the colossal procurements then in train, and in such a way that any cut would present Labour as “soft” on defence.

    Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and George Robertson, the then defence secretary were terrified into submission. They agreed to a parody of generals fighting the last war but one. They bought new destroyers to defeat the U-boat menace. They bought new carriers to save the British empire. They bought Eurofighters to duel with Russian air aces. Trident submarines with nuclear warheads went on cruising the deep, deterring no one, just so Blair could walk tall at conferences.

    Each weekend, the tranquillity of the Welsh countryside is shattered by inane jets screaming through the mountain valleys playing at Lord of the Rings. With modern bombs, no plane need fly that low, and the jets are said to burn more fuel in half an hour than a school in a year. Any other service wasting so much money would be laughed out of court. Yet the Treasury grovels before the exotic virility of it all.

    Labour lacked the guts to admit that it was crazy to plan for another Falklands war. It dared not admit that the procurement executive was fit for nothing but appeasing weapons manufacturers. No armies were massing on the continent poised to attack. No navies were plotting to throttle our islands and starve us into submission. No missiles were fizzing in bunkers across Asia with Birmingham or Leeds in their sights. As for the colonies, if it costs £45bn to protect the Falklands, Gibraltar and the Caymans, it must be the most ridiculous empire in history. It would be cheaper to give each colony independence and a billion a year.

    Lobbyists reply that all defence expenditure is precautionary. You cannot predict every threat and it takes time to rearm should one emerge. That argument might have held during the cold war and, strictly up to a point, today. But at the present scale it is wholly implausible.

    All spending on insurance – be it on health or the police or environmental protection – requires some assessment of risk. Otherwise spending is open-ended. After the cold war there was much talk of a peace dividend and the defence industry went into intellectual overdrive. It conjured up a new “war” jargon, as in the war on drugs, on terror, on piracy, on genocide. The navy was needed to fight drug gangs in the Caribbean, pirates off Somalia and gun-runners in the Persian Gulf. In all such “wars” performance has been dire, because each threat was defined to justify service expenditure rather than the other way round.

    Whenever I ask a defence pundit against whom he is defending me, the answer is a wink and a smile: “You never know.” The world is a messy place. Better safe than sorry. It is like demanding crash barriers along every pavement in case cars go out of control, or examining school children for diseases every day. You never know. The truth is, we are now spending £45bn on heebie-jeebies.

    For the past 20 years, Britain’s armed forces have encouraged foreign policy into one war after another, none of them remotely to do with the nation’s security. Asked why he was standing in an Afghan desert earlier this year, Brown had to claim absurdly that he was “making London’s streets safer”. Some wars, as in Iraq, have been a sickening waste of money and young lives. Others in Kosovo and Afghanistan honour a Nato commitment that had nothing to do with collective security. Like many armies in history, Nato has become an alliance in search of a purpose. Coalition ministers are citing Canada as a shining example of how to cut. Canada is wasting no more money in Afghanistan.

    Despite Blair’s politics of fear, Britain entered the 21st century safer than at any time since the Norman conquest. I am defended already, by the police, the security services and a myriad regulators and inspectors. Defence spending does not add to this. It is like winning the Olympics – a magnificent, extravagant national boast, so embedded in the British psyche that politicians (and newspapers) dare not question it. Yet Osborne asked that every public service should “once in a generation” go back to basics and ask what it really delivers for its money. Why not defence?

    There are many evils that threaten the British people at present, but I cannot think of one that absolutely demands £45bn to deter it. Soldiers, sailors and air crews are no protection against terrorists, who anyway are not that much of a threat. No country is an aggressor against the British state. No country would attack us were the government to put its troops into reserve and mothball its ships, tanks and planes. Let us get real.

    I am all for being defended, but at the present price I am entitled to ask against whom and how. Of all the public services that should justify themselves from ground zero, defence is the first.

  • Lying About Nuclear Weapons

    One of the most popular muckraking American journalists of the late twentieth century, I.F. Stone, once remarked:  “All governments lie.”  Even a prominent government official — Andrei Gromyko, the veteran Soviet diplomat — once admitted, in a weak moment:  “Governments are never sincere.”

    This gloomy assessment appears all too true when it comes to national security policy, and particularly so with respect to nuclear weapons.  Indeed, in early March, a new Japanese political party — swept into governmental power last year thanks to a political upheaval — revealed that its predecessors had lied for more than four decades about one of the most hallowed principles in Japanese public life:  Japan’s nuclear-free status.

    In 1968, Japan’s ruling conservatives — the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) — under enormous pressure from an antinuclear public, had proclaimed Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles:  the government would not manufacture, own, or allow the entry of nuclear weapons into Japan.  Ever since that time, there has been considerable controversy over whether U.S. warships in Japanese harbors were armed with nuclear weapons.  As it was hard to imagine how U.S. nuclear warships could dispose of their nuclear weapons before entering Japanese harbors, massive antinuclear demonstrations erupted in Japan’s port cities.  Meanwhile, the U.S. government refused to confirm or deny that its warships carried nuclear weapons, while the Japanese government swore that they did not.

    In recent years, although occasional statements by U.S. government officials indicated that nuclear weapons were probably entering Japan aboard U.S. warships, the Japanese government clung to its lies.  The latest denial was by Taro Aso, the last LDP prime minister before the new Democratic Party of Japan administration revealed the long record of deception.  A Foreign Ministry official told the Associated Press that he and other high-ranking officials of the past feared that disclosing the agreements with the American government to bring nuclear weapons into Japan would have created massive upheaval in Japanese life and, perhaps, toppled the prime minister.  “The political costs were too great,” he explained.

    Actually, in the case of nuclear weapons, the Japanese government had been playing a double game for years.  During the 1950s, Japanese officials issued numerous protests against nuclear weapons testing that were designed less to halt the testing than to soothe public opinion.  In May 1956, the Japanese ambassador explained that his government’s protests were “largely a public opinion matter inside Japan.”  The following day, secretly apologizing for delivering a diplomatic note calling for a halt to U.S. nuclear testing — and “off-the-record,” expressing his disagreement with it — the second in command at the Japanese embassy depicted it as an attempt to woo parliament and public opinion.

    Much the same policy continued in subsequent years.  In 1957, explaining his government’s critique of nuclear testing, the Japanese foreign minister told U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and other U.S. officials that “the Japanese people, old and young, are very sensitive on this question.”  Thus, “the Japanese government was placed in a position where it had to lodge a protest.”  He added, apologetically, that if the government failed to criticize nuclear testing, “the very existence of the Liberal Democratic Party might be endangered.”

    In the early 1960s, when the U.S. government resumed underground and, later, atmospheric nuclear testing, the Japanese government again assailed nuclear tests, but as in the past accompanied such statements with private assurances to U.S. officials that the protests had been made “to offset domestic political pressures.”  Secretly, some Japanese officials went so far as to remark that they favored Japan’s development of nuclear weapons.

    Thus, the Japanese government’s duplicity in connection with the Three Non-Nuclear Principles should not come as a total surprise.

    Of course, lying about nuclear weapons has not been limited to Japanese officials.  The French government argued for years that it was developing nuclear energy solely for peaceful purposes — until it abruptly moved forward with its nuclear weapons program.  The Indian government denied that it had conducted a nuclear weapons test in 1974, when it set off a “Peaceful Nuclear Explosion.”  Meanwhile, the Soviet government, while posing for decades as a fierce foe of nuclear weapons, developed the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.  As for the U.S. government, it lied for years about the dangers of nuclear testing, downplayed the ability to detect nuclear testing and development abroad, and made nuclear disarmament offers based on their propaganda value.  One of the more interesting nuclear gambits has been pursued by the Israeli government, which has never admitted that it possesses nuclear weapons — although that government had Mordechai Vanunu kidnapped, tried, and locked in prison for eighteen years (eleven of them in solitary confinement) for the “crime” of publicly revealing their existence.

    In addition, one might ask what has been done to honor the pledge, made at the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference of 2000, for an “unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear weapons states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals”?  At the moment, there remain more than 23,000 nuclear weapons, 96 percent of them in the hands of Russia and the United States.

    But this outrageous record is only part of the story.  Over the years, intense pressure from disarmament organizations and the general public has forced reluctant governments to abandon their foremost nuclear ambitions.  Indeed, numerous non-nuclear nations have decided to forgo the nuclear option, while nuclear nations have scrapped roughly two-thirds of their nuclear weapons and have backed away from plans for nuclear war.  And this May, when the 2010 NPT review conference convenes at the United Nations, there will be a massive public outpouring of people from diverse nations demanding that long-promised — but never delivered — nuclear-free world.  Good luck to them!  They certainly deserve better than further nuclear lies and duplicity.

  • A Global Push for Clean Energy: The International Renewable Energy Agency

    This article was originally published by YES! Magazine.

    Since 1995, when more than 170 nations voted to extend the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, civil society has been calling for the establishment of an international agency to promote renewable energy sources to take the place of fossil fuels without resorting to nuclear power.

    Recognizing the “inextricable link” between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, Abolition 2000, a global network for the elimination of nuclear weapons, drafted a model statute for the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and lobbied nations around the world to institute it. [1] Joining with other grassroots networks working to avoid catastrophic climate change through a transition to sustainable energy, activists spoke up at numerous international meetings and conferences and conferred with national environmental departments, seeking support for an energy agency focused solely on clean, safe, renewable energy.

    In January 2009, one year ago, Germany, Denmark, and Spain launched the founding meeting for IRENA in Bonn, Germany. [2] A year later, 142 of the 192 member states of the United Nations, as well as the European Union, have signed the IRENA statute. The agency has opened headquarters in Abu Dhabi and branch offices in Bonn and Vienna, and its interim-director general, Helene Pelosse, a former French environmental minister who held positions in trade and finance as well, is determined to hire a staff comprised of at least 50 percent women.

    IRENA is committed to becoming a principal driving force in promoting a rapid transition toward the sustainable use of a renewable energy on a global scale. It has a mandate to promote all forms of renewable energy produced in a sustainable manner, including solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower, ocean, and appropriate bio energy. It will provide practical advice and support for both industrialized and developing countries, helping them to build capacity and improve their regulatory frameworks.

    This year, “IRENA will focus on building a network of international renewable energy experts, starting to map the global potential of renewables, and build up a comprehensive database of policies to promote renewable energy,” said Pelosse. It “will become a one-stop-shop for up-to-date and relevant information on renewable energy.” [3] As a pilot project, IRENA will help develop renewable energy for a number of islands within the Kingdom of Tonga that lack basic electricity. [4]

    Every 30 minutes, enough of the sun’s energy reaches the Earth’s surface to meet global energy demand for an entire year. Wind can satisfy the world’s electricity needs 40 times over, and meet all global energy demands five times over. The geothermal energy stored in the top six miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times the energy of the world’s known oil and gas resources. Tidal, wave, and small hydropower can also provide vast stores of energy everywhere on earth, abundant and free for every person on our planet, rich and poor alike. [5]

    While the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been committed to promoting nuclear power and the International Energy Agency (IEA) was established in the 1970s to handle the crisis in fossil fuel distribution, only IRENA will be solely dedicated to promoting clean, safe, renewable energy from the abundant energy resources of our planet.

    As a derivative of the Greek word eirene, meaning “peace,” IRENA is particularly well-named. The rapid development of renewable energy will enable us to forego our reliance on fossil and nuclear fuels, the continued misuse of which will lead inevitably to climate catastrophe, nuclear proliferation, and perpetual resource wars. Universal reliance on sustainable energy will instead create a promising path toward creating peace on earth.

    Sources

    1. www.abolition2000.org/?page_id=153

    2. www.irena.org

    3. www.ameinfo.com/221385.html

    4. www.irena.org/downloads/newsletter/IRENA_Newsletter_Web.pdf

    5. www.abolition2000.org/a2000-files/sustainable-now.pdf

  • How to Protect Our Nuclear Deterrent

    This article was originally published by the Wall Street Journal

    The four of us have come together, now joined by many others, to
    support a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, to
    prevent their spread into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately to
    end them as a threat to the world. We do so in recognition of a clear
    and threatening development.

    The accelerating spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear know-how, and
    nuclear material has brought us to a tipping point. We face a very real
    possibility that the deadliest weapons ever invented could fall into
    dangerous hands.

    But as we work to reduce nuclear weaponry and to realize the vision
    of a world without nuclear weapons, we recognize the necessity to
    maintain the safety, security and reliability of our own weapons. They
    need to be safe so they do not detonate unintentionally; secure so they
    cannot be used by an unauthorized party; and reliable so they can
    continue to provide the deterrent we need so long as other countries
    have these weapons. This is a solemn responsibility, given the extreme
    consequences of potential failure on any one of these counts.

    For the past 15 years these tasks have
    been successfully performed by the engineers and scientists at the
    nation’s nuclear-weapons production plants and at the three national
    laboratories (Lawrence Livermore in California, Los Alamos in New
    Mexico, and Sandia in New Mexico and California). Teams of gifted
    people, using increasingly powerful and sophisticated equipment, have
    produced methods of certifying that the stockpile meets the required
    high standards. The work of these scientists has enabled the secretary
    of defense and the secretary of energy to certify the safety, security
    and the reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile every year since the
    certification program was initiated in 1995.

    The three labs in particular should be applauded for the success they
    have achieved in extending the life of existing weapons. Their work has
    led to important advances in the scientific understanding of nuclear
    explosions and obviated the need for underground nuclear explosive
    tests.

    Yet there are potential problems ahead, as identified by the
    Strategic Posture Commission led by former Defense Secretaries Perry and
    James R. Schlesinger. This commission, which submitted its report to
    Congress last year, calls for significant investments in a repaired and
    modernized nuclear weapons infrastructure and added resources for the
    three national laboratories.

    These investments are urgently needed to undo the adverse
    consequences of deep reductions over the past five years in the
    laboratories’ budgets for the science, technology and engineering
    programs that support and underwrite the nation’s nuclear deterrent. The
    United States must continue to attract, develop and retain the
    outstanding scientists, engineers, designers and technicians we will
    need to maintain our nuclear arsenal, whatever its size, for as long as
    the nation’s security requires it.

    This scientific capability is equally important to the long-term goal
    of achieving and maintaining a world free of nuclear weapons—with all
    the attendant expertise on verification, detection, prevention and
    enforcement that is required.

    Our recommendations for maintaining a safe, secure and reliable
    nuclear arsenal are consistent with the findings of a recently completed
    technical study commissioned by the National Nuclear Security
    Administration in the Department of Energy. This study was performed by
    JASON, an independent defense advisory group of senior scientists who
    had full access to the pertinent classified information.

    The JASON study found that the
    “[l]ifetimes of today’s nuclear warheads could be extended for decades,
    with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using approaches similar to
    those employed in Life Extension Programs to date.” But the JASON
    scientists also expressed concern that “[a]ll options for extending the
    life of the nuclear weapons stockpile rely on the continuing maintenance
    and renewal of expertise and capabilities in science, technology,
    engineering, and production unique to the nuclear weapons program.” The
    study team said it was “concerned that this expertise is threatened by
    lack of program stability, perceived lack of mission importance, and
    degradation of the work environment.”

    These concerns can and must be addressed by providing adequate and
    stable funding for the program. Maintaining high confidence in our
    nuclear arsenal is critical as the number of these weapons goes down. It
    is also consistent with and necessary for U.S. leadership in
    nonproliferation, risk reduction, and arms reduction goals.

    By providing for the long-term investments required, we also
    strengthen trust and confidence in our technical capabilities to take
    the essential steps needed to reduce nuclear dangers throughout the
    globe. These steps include preventing proliferation and preventing
    nuclear weapons or weapons-usable material from getting into dangerous
    hands.

    If we are to succeed in avoiding these
    dangers, increased international cooperation is vital. As we work to
    build this cooperation, our friends and allies, as well as our
    adversaries, will take note of our own actions in the nuclear arena.
    Providing for this nation’s defense will always take precedence over all
    other priorities.

    Departures from our existing
    stewardship strategies should be taken when they are essential to
    maintain a safe, secure and effective deterrent. But as our colleague
    Bill Perry noted in his preface to America’s Strategic Posture report,
    we must “move in two parallel paths—one path which reduces nuclear
    dangers by maintaining our deterrence, and the other which reduces
    nuclear dangers through arms control and international programs to
    prevent proliferation.” Given today’s threats of nuclear proliferation
    and nuclear terrorism, these are not mutually exclusive imperatives. To
    protect our nation’s security, we must succeed in both.

    Beyond our concern about our own stockpile, we have a deep security
    interest in ensuring that all nuclear weapons everywhere are resistant
    to accidental detonation and to detonation by terrorists or other
    unauthorized users. We should seek a dialogue with other states that
    possess nuclear weapons and share our safety and security concepts and
    technologies consistent with our own national security.