Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Bush administration

  • America’s Blinders

    Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

    The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans—members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen—rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq. A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell’s presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his “evidence”: satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled “Irrefutable” and declared that after Powell’s talk “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

    It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

    One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

    If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

    But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.

    We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil,” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

    We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

    President Woodrow Wilson—so often characterized in our history books as an “idealist”—lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

    Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”

    Everyone lied about Vietnam—Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

    Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

    The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

    And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991—hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq’s taking of Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

    Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil?

    A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

    We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was “we the people” who established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.

    Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn’t talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

    Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

    Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that—not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor—is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

    If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there—the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be “checks and balances”—do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

    The deeply ingrained belief—no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general—that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to “pledge allegiance” (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.”

    And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” announcing that we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” There is also the unofficial national anthem “God Bless America,” and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation—just 5 percent of the world’s population—for his or her blessing. If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values—democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise—to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world. It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

    These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

    Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this “the American century,” saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

    Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was “the calling of our time.” Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: “The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities.”

    What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison—more than two million.

    A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice.

    Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

  • 16 Democrats Voice Concern about Draft Nuclear Document

    The Honorable George W. Bush President of the United States

    Dear Mr. President:

    We are writing you to express our strong concern about the draft U.S. nuclear weapons doctrine being prepared by the Pentagon. This draft calls for maintaining an aggressive nuclear posture with weapons on high alert to make pre-emptive strikes, if necessary on adversaries armed with weapons of mass destruction.

    We recognize that in large part the draft “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” is based on principles contained in the 1995 Nuclear Posture Review, the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and other directives published by the Bush administration since 2001. For instance, your 2002 National Security Presidential Directive 17 reportedly states, “The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force – including potentially nuclear weapons to the use of [weapons of mass destruction] against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies.”

    On the other hand, the language in the draft doctrine removes the ambiguity of the previous doctrine, and now suggests that your administration will use nuclear weapons to respond to non-nuclear WMD threats and suggests that this use could include pre-emptive nuclear strikes thereby increasing reliance on nuclear weapons.

    On page III-2 of the March 15, 2005 draft, it states that combatant commanders may request Presidential approval for pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons under such conditions as:

    • To counter an adversary intending to use weapons of mass destruction against U.S., multinational, or allies forces or civilian populations;
    • To counter an imminent attack from an adversary’s biological weapons that only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy;
    • To attack on adversary installations including weapons of mass destruction, deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons, or the command and control infrastructure required for the adversary to execute a WMD attack against the United States or its friends and allies;
    • To counter potentially overwhelming adversary conventional forces;
    • To demonstrate U.S. intent and capability to use nuclear weapons to deter adversary WMD use.

    We believe this effort to broaden the range of scenarios in which nuclear weapons might be contemplated is unwise and provocative.

    The costs of using a nuclear weapon in the cases contemplated would almost always outweigh the benefits. Many potential targets are near major population centers. Striking a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons cache would require perfect intelligence and is impossible to do without significant collateral damage.

    The draft doctrine says that the belligerent that initiates nuclear warfare may find itself the target of world condemnation but notes that no customary or conventional international law prohibits nations from using nuclear weapons in armed conflict. In other words, the draft Pentagon doctrine seems to conclude the United States is legally free to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively if it chooses, even against non-nuclear weapon states.

    This drastic shift in U.S. nuclear policy threatens the very foundation of nuclear arms control as shaped by the 1970 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which has helped prevent nuclear proliferation for over 35 years. In the context of efforts to strengthen and extend the treaty, the United States issued a negative nuclear security assurance in 1978, reiterated in 1995, that the United States would not use nuclear force against NPT member countries without nuclear weapons unless attacked by a non nuclear-weapon state that is allied with a nuclear-weapon state.

    The draft doctrine contradicts clear statements and assurances of your administration. On February 22, 2002 State Department spokesman Richard Boucher stated a similar version of the negative nuclear security pledge: “The United States reaffirms that it will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear- weapon state-parties to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an invasion or any other attack on the United States, its territories, its armed forces or other troops, its allies, or on a state toward which it has a security commitment carried out, or sustained by such a non-nuclear-weapon state in association with a nuclear weapon state.”

    Abandoning this clear negative security assurance under the NPT would further undermine the treaty and our many other efforts to prevent others developing or using nuclear weapons. Partly as a result of U.S. inflexibility on key disarmament issues, your administration has already squandered opportunities to build greater global support for measures to update and strengthen the nonproliferation system.

    In addition, this new doctrine, if approved, could exacerbate the danger of nuclear proliferation by giving states of concern, such as North Korea and Iran, an excuse to maintain their nuclear weapons options and would send a green light to the world’s nuclear states that it is permissible to use these weapons offensively.

    The draft nuclear doctrine also appears to undermine the credibility of other U.S. negative security assurances, such as those contained in the recent six-party statement of principles outlining the terms for the verifiable and complete dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities.

    Mr. President, it is one thing to threaten a devastating response to a biological or chemical weapons attack or the threat of a biological, chemical, or nuclear attack. It is quite another to say explicitly that the United States is prepared to counter non-nuclear weapons threats or attempt to pre-empt a suspected WMD attack by striking with nuclear weapons.

    As former Secretary of State Powell said in response to the possibility that India and Pakistan might use nuclear weapons during their confrontation in the summer of 2002: “Nuclear weapons in this day and age may serve some deterrent effect, and so be it, but to think of using them as just another weapon in what might start out as a conventional conflict in this day and age seems to me to be something that no side should be contemplating.”

    We urge you to personally review the draft doctrine and consider its serious negative consequences for U.S. national and international security interests. U.S. nuclear use policy and doctrine should be consistent with your often stated goal of significantly reducing the role and number of nuclear weapons worldwide.

    Thank you for considering our suggestions and we look forward to your reply.

    Sincerely,

    Sens. Dianne Feinstein (CA), Daniel Akaka (HI), Edward Kennedy (MA), Jack Reed (RI), Byron Dorgan (ND), John Kerry (MA), Frank Lautenberg (NJ) and Reps. Ellen Tauscher (CA), Neil Abercrombie (HI), Rob Andrews (NJ), Marty Meehan (MA), Ed Markey (MA), Susan Davis (CA), Loretta Sanchez (CA), Adam Smith (WA), and Mark Udall (CO).

  • A Declaration Of War

    The Bush administration has declared war on the world.

    The 450 changes that Washington is demanding to the action agenda that will culminate at the September 2005 United Nations summit don’t represent U.N. reform. They are a clear onslaught against any move that could strengthen the United Nations or international law.

    The upcoming summit was supposed to focus on strengthening and reforming the U.N. and address issues of aid and development, with a particular emphasis on implementing the U.N.’s five-year-old Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Most assumed this would be a forum for dialogue and debate, involving civil society activists from around the world challenging governments from the impoverished South and the wealthy North and the United Nations to create a viable global campaign against poverty and for internationalism.

    But now, there’s a different and even greater challenge. This is a declaration of U.S. unilateralism, uncompromising and ascendant. The United States has issued an open threat to the 190 other U.N. member states, the social movements and peoples of the entire world, and the United Nations itself. And it will take a quick and unofficially collaborative effort between all three of those elements to challenge the Bush administration juggernaut.

    The General Assembly’s package of proposed reforms, emerging after nine months of negotiations ahead of the summit, begins with new commitments to implement the Millennium Development Goals—established in 2000 as a set of international commitments aimed at reducing poverty by 2015. They were always insufficient, yet as weak as they are, they have yet to be implemented. The 2005 Millennium Plus Five summit intended to shore up the unmet commitments to those goals. In his reform proposals of March 2005, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called on governments north and south to see the implementation of the MDGs as a minimum requirement. Without at least that minimal level of poverty alleviation, he said, conflicts within and between states could spiral so far out of control that even a strengthened and reformed United Nations of the future would not be able to control the threats to international peace and security.

    When John Bolton, Bush’s hotly contested but newly appointed ambassador to the United Nations announced the U.S. proposed response, it was easy to assume this was just John Bolton running amok. After all, Bolton, a longtime U.N.-basher, has said: “There is no United Nations.” He has written in The Wall Street Journal that the United States has no legal obligation to abide by international treaties, even when they are signed and ratified. So it was no surprise when Bolton showed up three weeks before the summit, demanding a package of 450 changes in the document that had been painstakingly negotiated for almost a year.

    But, in fact, this isn’t about Bolton. This Bush administration’s position was vetted and approved in what the U.S. Mission to the U.N. bragged was a “thorough interagency process”—meaning the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and many more agencies all signed off. This is a clear statement of official U.S. policy—not the wish- ist of some marginalized extremist faction of neocon ideologues who will soon be reined in by the realists in charge. This time the extremist faction is in charge.

    The U.S. proposal package is designed to force the world to accept as its own the U.S. strategy of abandoning impoverished nations and peoples, rejecting international law, privileging ruthless market forces over any attempted regulation, sidelining the role of international institutions except for the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, and weakening, perhaps fatally, the United Nations itself.

    It begins by systematically deleting every one of the 35 specific references to the Millennium Development Goals. Every reference to concrete obligations for implementation of commitments is deleted. Setting a target figure of just 0.7 percent of GNP for wealthy countries to spend on aid? Deleted. Increasing aid for agriculture and trade opportunities in poor countries? Deleted. Helping the poorest countries, especially those in Africa, to deal with the impact of climate change? Deleted.

    The proposal puts at great risk treaties to which the United States is already a party, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.N. Summit draft referred to the NPT’s “three pillars: disarmament, non-proliferation and the peaceful use of nuclear energy.” That means that states without nukes would agree never to build or obtain them, but in return they would be guaranteed the right to produce nuclear energy for peaceful use. In return recognized nuclear weapons states—the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia—would commit, in Article VI of the NPT, to move toward “nuclear disarmament with the objective of eliminating all such weapons.” The proposed U.S. changes deleted all references to the three pillars and to Article VI.

    The U.S. deleted the statement that: “The use of force should be considered as an instrument of last resort.” That’s also not surprising given the Bush administration’s “invade first, choose your justifications later” mode of crisis resolution.

    Throughout the document, the United States demands changes that redefine and narrow what should be universal and binding rights and obligations. In the clearest reference to Iraq and Palestine, Washington narrowed the definition of the “right of self-determination of peoples” to eliminate those who “remain under colonial domination and foreign occupation.”

    Much of the U.S. effort aims to undermine the power of the U.N. in favor of absolute national sovereignty. On migration, for instance, the original language focused on enhancing international cooperation, linking migrant worker issues and development, and the human rights of migrants. The U.S. wants to scrap it all, replacing it with “the sovereign right of states to formulate and enforce national migration policies,” with international cooperation only to facilitate national laws. Human rights were deleted altogether.

    In the document’s section on strengthening the United Nations, the U.S. deleted all mention of enhancing the U.N.’s authority, focusing instead only on U.N. efficiency. Regarding the General Assembly the most democratic organ of the U.N. system—the United States deleted references to the Assembly’s centrality, its role in codifying international law, and, ultimately its authority, relegating it to a toothless talking shop. It even deleted reference to the Assembly’s role in Washington’s own pet project—management oversight of the U.N. secretariat—leaving the U.S.-dominated and undemocratic Security Council, along with the U.S. itself (in the person of a State Department official recently appointed head of management in Kofi Annan’s office) to play watchdog.

    The Bush administration has given the United Nations what it believes to be a stark choice: adopt the U.S. changes and acquiesce to becoming an adjunct of Washington and a tool of empire, or reject the changes and be consigned to insignificance.

    But the United Nations could choose a third option. It should not be forgotten that the U.N. itself has some practice in dealing with U.S. threats. President George W. Bush gave the U.N. these same two choices once before—in September 2002, when he threatened the global body with “irrelevance” if the U.N. did not embrace his call for war in Iraq. On that occasion, the United Nations made the third choice—the choice to grow a backbone, to reclaim its charter, and to join with people and governments around the world who were mobilized to say no to war. It was the beginning of eight months of triumph, in which governments and peoples and the U.N. stood together to defy the U.S. drive toward war and empire, and in doing so created what The New York Times called “the second super-power.”

    This time, as before, the United States has threatened and declared war on the United Nations and the world. As before, it’s time for that three-part superpower to rise again, to defend the U.N., and to say no to empire.

    Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, is the author of the forthcoming Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power (Interlink Publishing, Northampton MA, October 2005)

  • US Nuclear Hypocrisy: Bad For The World

    US Nuclear Hypocrisy: Bad For The World

    Every five years the parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty meet in a review conference to further the non-proliferation and disarmament goals of the treaty. This year the conference ended in a spectacular failure with no final document and no agreement on moving forward. For the first ten days of the conference, the US resisted agreement on an agenda that made any reference to past commitments.

    The failure of the treaty conference is overwhelmingly attributable to the nuclear policies of the Bush administration, which has disavowed previous US nuclear disarmament commitments under the treaty. The Bush administration does not seem to grasp the hypocrisy of pressing other nations to forego their nuclear options, while failing to fulfill its own obligations under the disarmament provisions of the treaty.

    The treaty is crumbling under the double standards of American policy, and may not be able to recover from the rigid “do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do” positions of the Bush administration. These policies are viewed by most of the world as high-level nuclear hypocrisy.

    Paul Meyer, the head of Canada’s delegation to the treaty conference, reflected on the conference, “The vast majority of states have to be acknowledged, but we did not get that kind of diplomacy from the US.” Former UK Foreign Minister Robin Cook also singled out the Bush administration in explaining the failure of the conference. “How strange,” he wrote, “that no delegation should have worked harder to frustrate agreement on what needs to be done than the representatives of George Bush.”

    What the US did at the treaty conference was to point the finger at Iran and North Korea, while refusing to discuss or even acknowledge its own failure to meet its obligations under the treaty. Five years ago, at the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, the parties to the treaty, including the US, agreed to 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament. Under the Bush administration, nearly all of these obligations have been disavowed.

    Although President Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, the Bush administration does not support it and refused to allow ratification of this treaty, which is part of the 13 Practical Steps, to even be discussed at the 2005 review conference. The parties to the treaty are aware that the Bush administration is seeking funding from Congress to continue work on new earth penetrating nuclear weapons (“bunker busters”), while telling other nations not to develop nuclear arms.

    They are also aware that the Bush administration has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue a destabilizing missile defense program, and has not supported a verifiable Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, although the US had agreed to support these treaties in the 13 Practical Steps.

    The failure of this treaty conference makes nuclear proliferation more likely, including proliferation to terrorist organizations that cannot be deterred from using the weapons. The fault for this failure does not lie with other governments as the Bush administration would have us believe. It does not lie with Egypt for seeking consideration of previous promises to achieve a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. Nor does the fault lie with Iran for seeking to enrich uranium for its nuclear energy program, as is done by many other states, including the US, under the provisions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It would no doubt be preferable to have the enrichment of uranium and the separation of plutonium, both of which can be used for nuclear weapons programs, done under strict international controls, but this requires a change in the treaty that must be applicable to all parties, not just to those singled out by the US.

    Nor can the fault be said to lie with those states that, having given up their option to develop nuclear weapons, sought renewed commitments from the nuclear weapons states not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states. It is hard to imagine a more reasonable request. Yet the US has refused to relinquish the option of first use of nuclear weapons, even against non-nuclear weapons states.

    The fault for the failure of the treaty conference lies clearly with the Bush administration, which must take full responsibility for undermining the security of every American by its double standards and nuclear hypocrisy.

    The American people must understand the full magnitude of the Bush administration’s failure at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. This may not happen because the administration has been so remarkably successful in spinning the news to suit its unilateralist, militarist and triumphalist worldviews.

    As Americans, we can not afford to wait until we experience an American Hiroshima before we wake up to the very real dangers posed by US nuclear policies. We must demand the reversal of these policies and the resumption of constructive engagement with the rest of the world.

    David Krieger is the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), and the Deputy Chair of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (www.inesglobal.org). He has written extensively on nuclear dangers.

  • Wake Up! Washington’s Alarming Foreign Policy

    The Rubicon is a small stream in northern Italy just south of the city of Ravenna. During the prime of the RomanRepublic, roughly the last two centuries B.C., it served as a northern boundary protecting the heartland of Italy and the city of Rome from its own imperial armies. An ancient Roman law made it treason for any general to cross the Rubicon and enter Italy proper with a standing army. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar, Rome’s most brilliant and successful general, stopped with his army at the Rubicon, contemplated what he was about to do, and then plunged south. The Republic exploded in civil war, Caesar became dictator and then in 44 B.C. was assassinated in the Roman Senate by politicians who saw themselves as ridding the Republic of a tyrant. However, Caesar’s death generated even more civil war, which ended only in 27 B.C. when his grand nephew, Octavian, took the title Augustus Caesar, abolished the Republic and established a military dictatorship with himself as “emperor” for life. Thus ended the great Roman experiment with democracy. Ever since, the phrase “to cross the Rubicon” has been a metaphor for starting on a course of action from which there is no turning back. It refers to the taking of an irrevocable step.

    I believe that on November 2, 2004, the United States crossed its own Rubicon. Until last year’s presidential election, ordinary citizens could claim that our foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq, was George Bush’s doing and that we had not voted for him. In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote and was appointed president by the Supreme Court. In 2004, he garnered 3.5 million more votes than John Kerry. The result is that Bush’s war changed into America’s war and his conduct of international relations became our own.

    This is important because it raises the question of whether restoring sanity and prudence to American foreign policy is still possible. During the Watergate scandal of the early ’70s, the president’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, once reproved White House counsel John Dean for speaking too frankly to Congress about the felonies President Nixon had ordered. “John,” he said, “once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s very hard to get it back in.” This homely warning by a former advertising executive who was to spend 18 months in prison for his own role in Watergate fairly accurately describes the situation of the United States after the reelection of George W. Bush.

    James Weinstein, the founding editor of In These Times, recently posed for me the question “How should US foreign policy be changed so that the United States can play a more positive role on the world stage?” For me, this raises at least three different problems that are interrelated. The first must be solved before we can address the second, and the second has to be corrected before it even makes sense to take up the third.

    Sinking the Ship of State

    First, the United States faces the imminent danger of bankruptcy, which, if it occurs, will render all further discussion of foreign policy moot. Within the next few months, the mother of all financial crises could ruin us and turn us into a North American version of Argentina, once the richest country in South America. To avoid this we must bring our massive trade and fiscal deficits under control and signal to the rest of the world that we understand elementary public finance and are not suicidally indifferent to our mounting debts.

    Second, our appalling international citizenship must be addressed. We routinely flout well-established norms upon which the reciprocity of other nations in their relations with us depends. This is a matter not so much of reforming our policies as of reforming attitudes. If we ignore this, changes in our actual foreign policies will not even be noticed by other nations of the world. I have in mind things like the Army’s and the CIA’s secret abduction and torture of people; the trigger-happy conduct of our poorly trained and poorly led troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; and our ideological bullying of other cultures because of our obsession with abortion and our contempt for international law (particularly the International Criminal Court) as illustrated by Bush’s nomination of John R. “Bonkers” Bolton to be US ambassador to the United Nations.

    Third, if we can overcome our imminent financial crisis and our penchant for boorish behavior abroad, we might then be able to reform our foreign policies. Among the issues here are the slow-moving evolutionary changes in the global balance of power that demand new approaches. The most important evidence that our life as the “sole” superpower is going to be exceedingly short is the fact that our monopoly of massive military power is being upstaged by other forms of influence. Chief among these is China’s extraordinary growth and our need to adjust to it.

    Let me discuss each of these three problems in greater depth.

    In 2004, the United States imported a record $617.7 billion more than it exported, a 24.4 percent increase over 2003. The annual deficit with China was $162 billion, the largest trade imbalance ever recorded by the United States with a single country. Equally important, as of March 9, 2005, the public debt of the United States was just over $7.7 trillion and climbing, making us easily the world’s largest net debtor nation. Refusing to pay for its profligate consumption patterns and military expenditures through taxes on its own citizens, the United States is financing these outlays by going into debt to Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and India. This situation has become increasingly unstable, as the United States requires capital imports of at least $2 billion per day to pay for its governmental expenditures. Any decision by Asian central banks to move significant parts of their foreign exchange reserves out of the dollar and into the euro or other currencies in order to protect themselves from dollar depreciation will likely produce a meltdown of the American economy. On February 21, 2005, the Korean central bank, which has some $200 billion in reserves, quietly announced that it intended to “diversify the currencies in which it invests.” The dollar fell sharply and the US stock market (although subsequently recovering) recorded its largest one-day fall in almost two years. This small incident is evidence of the knife-edge on which we are poised.

    Japan possesses the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, which at the end of January 2005 stood at around $841 billion. But China also sits on a $609.9 billion pile of US cash, earned from its trade surpluses with us. Meanwhile, the American government insults China in every way it can, particularly over the status of China’s breakaway province, the island of Taiwan. The distinguished economic analyst William Greider recently noted, “Any profligate debtor who insults his banker is unwise, to put it mildly. … American leadership has … become increasingly delusional – I mean that literally – and blind to the adverse balance of power accumulating against it.”

    These deficits and dependencies represent unusual economic statistics for a country with imperial pretensions. In the 19th century, the British Empire ran huge current account surpluses, which allowed it to ignore the economic consequences of disastrous imperialist ventures like the Boer War. On the eve of the First World War, Britain had a surplus amounting to 7 percent of its GDP. America’s current account deficit is close to 6 percent of our GDP.

    In order to regain any foreign confidence in the sanity of our government and the soundness of our policies, we need, at once, to reverse President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, including those on capital gains and estates (the rich are so well off they’ll hardly notice it), radically reduce our military expenditures, and stop subsidizing agribusinesses and the military-industrial complex. Only a few years ago the United States enjoyed substantial federal surpluses and was making inroads into its public debt. If we can regain fiscal solvency, the savers of Asia will probably continue to finance our indebtedness. If we do not, we risk a fear-driven flight from the dollar by all our financiers, collapse of our stock exchange and global recession for a couple of years – from which the rest of the world will ultimately emerge. But by then we who no longer produce much of anything valuable will have become a banana republic. Debate over our foreign policy will become irrelevant. We will have become dependent on the kindness of strangers.

    Ugly Americans

    Meanwhile, the bad manners of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their band of neoconservative fanatics from the American Enterprise Institute dominate the conduct of American foreign policy. It is simply unacceptable that after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal Congress has so far failed to launch an investigation into those in the executive branch who condoned it. It is equally unacceptable that the president’s chief apologist for the official but secret use of torture is now the attorney general, that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did not resign, and that the seventh investigation of the military by the military (this time headed by Vice Admiral Albert Church III) again whitewashed all officers and blamed only a few unlucky enlisted personnel on the night shift in one cellblock of Abu Ghraib prison. Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and a veteran of 23 years of service as an army officer, says in his book The New American Militarism of these dishonorable incidents: “The Abu Ghraib debacle showed American soldiers not as liberators but as tormentors, not as professionals but as sadists getting cheap thrills.” Until this is corrected, a president and secretary of state bloviating about freedom and democracy is received by the rest of the world as mere window-dressing.

    Foreign policy analysts devote considerable attention to the concept of “credibility” – whether or not a nation is trustworthy. There are several ways to lose one’s credibility. One is to politicize intelligence, as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney did in preparing for their preventive war against Iraq. Today, only a fool would take at face value something said by the CIA or our other secret intelligence services. China has already informed us that it does not believe our intelligence on North Korea, and our European allies have said the same thing about our apocalyptic estimates on Iran.

    Similarly, our bloated military establishment routinely makes pronouncements that are untrue. The scene of a bevy of generals and admirals – replete with campaign ribbons marching up and over their left shoulders – baldly lying to congressional committees is familiar to any viewer of our network newscasts.

    For example, on February 3, 1998, Marine pilots were goofing off in a military jet and cut the cables of a ski lift in northern Italy, plunging 20 individuals to their deaths. The Marine Corps did everything in its power to avoid responsibility for the disaster, then brought the pilots back to the States for court-martial, dismissed the case as an accident and exonerated the pilots. The Italians haven’t forgotten either the incident or how the United States treated an ally. On March 4, 2005, American soldiers opened fire on a civilian car en route to Baghdad airport, killing a high-ranking Italian intelligence officer and wounding the journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been released by kidnappers. The US military immediately started its cover-up, claiming that the car was speeding, that the soldiers had warned it with lights and warning shots and that the Italians had given no prior notice of the trip. Sgrena has contradicted everything our military said. The White House has called it a “horrific accident,” but whatever the explanation, we have once again made one of our closest European allies look like dupes for cooperating with us.

    In its arrogance and overconfidence, the Bush administration has managed to convince the rest of the world that our government is incompetent. The administration has not only tried to undercut treaties it finds inconvenient but refuses to engage in normal diplomacy with its allies to make such treaties more acceptable. Thus, administration representatives simply walked away from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming that tried to rein in carbon dioxide emissions, claiming that the economic costs were too high. (The United States generates far more such emissions than any other country.) All of the United States’ democratic allies continued to work on the treaty despite our boycott. On July 23, 2001, in Bonn, Germany, a compromise was reached on the severity of the cuts in emissions advanced industrial nations would have to make and on the penalties to be imposed if they do not, resulting in a legally binding treaty so far endorsed by more than 180 nations. The modified Kyoto Protocol is hardly perfect, but it is a start toward the reduction of greenhouse gases.

    Similarly, the United States and Israel walked out of the United Nations conference on racism held in Durban, South Africa, in August and September 2001. The nations that stayed on eventually voted down Syrian demands that language accusing Israel of racism be included. The conference’s final statement also produced an apology for slavery as a “crime against humanity” but did so without making slaveholding nations liable for reparations. Given the history of slavery in the United States and the degree to which the final document was adjusted to accommodate American concerns, our walkout seemed to be yet another display of imperial arrogance – a bald-faced message that “we” do not need “you” to run this world.

    Until the United States readopts the norms of civilized discourse among nations, it can expect other nations – quietly and privately – to do everything in their power to isolate and disengage from us.

    Future Reforms

    If through some miracle we were able to restore fiscal rationality, honesty and diplomacy to their rightful places in our government, then we could turn to reforming our foreign policies. First and foremost, we should get out of Iraq and demand that Congress never again fail to honor article 1, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution giving it the exclusive power to go to war. After that, I believe the critical areas in need of change are our policies toward Israel, imported oil, China and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, although the environment and relations with Latin America may be equally important.

    Perhaps the most catastrophic error of the Bush administration was to abandon the policies of all previous American administrations to seek an equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Bush instead joined Ariel Sharon in his expropriation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. As a result, the United States has lost all credibility, influence and trust in the Islamic world. In July 2004, Zogby International Surveys polled 3,300 Arabs in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. When asked whether respondents had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of the United States, the “unfavorables” ranged from 69 to 98 percent. In the year 2000 there were 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide, some 22 percent of the global population; through our policies we have turned most of them against the United States. We should resume at once the role of honest broker between the Israelis and Palestinians that former President Clinton pioneered.

    The United States imports about 3.8 billion barrels of oil a year, or about 10.6 million barrels a day. These imports are at the highest levels ever recorded and come increasingly from Persian Gulf countries. A cut-off of Saudi Arabia’s ability or willingness to sell its oil to us would, at the present time, constitute an economic catastrophe. By using currently available automotive technologies as well as those being incorporated today in new Toyota and Honda automobiles, we could end our entire dependency on Persian Gulf oil. We should do that before we are forced to do so.

    China’s gross domestic product in 2004 grew at a rate of 9.5 percent, easily the fastest among big countries. It is today the world’s sixth largest economy with a GDP of $1.4 trillion. It has also become the trading partner of choice for the developing world, absorbing huge amounts of food, raw materials, machinery and computers. Can the United States adjust peacefully to the reemergence of China – the world’s oldest, continuously extant civilization – this time as a modern superpower? Or is China’s ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war like those of the last century? That is what is at stake. A rich, capitalist China is not a threat to the United States and cooperation with it is our best guarantee of military security in the Pacific.

    Nothing is more threatening to our nation than the spread of nuclear weapons. We developed a good policy with the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which with its 188 adherents is the most widely supported arms control agreement ever enacted. Only India, Israel and Pakistan remained outside its terms until January 10, 2003, when North Korea withdrew. Under the treaty, the five nuclear-weapons states (the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom) agree to undertake nuclear disarmament, while the non-nuclear-weapons states agree not to develop or acquire such weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is authorized to inspect the non-nuclear-weapons states to ensure compliance. The Bush administration has virtually ruined this international agreement by attempting to denigrate the IAEA, by tolerating nuclear weapons in India, Israel, and Pakistan while fomenting wars against Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and by planning to develop new forms of nuclear weapons. Our policy should be to return at once to this established system of controls.

    Finally, the most important change we could make in American policy would be to dismantle our imperial presidency and restore a balance among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. The massive and secret powers of the Department of Defense and the CIA have subverted the republican structure of our democracy and left us exposed to the real danger of a military takeover. Reviving our constitutional system would do more than anything else to protect our peace and security.

    Chalmers Johnson is the author of the Blowback Trilogy. The first two books of which, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic – are now available in paperback. The third volume is being written.

    Originally published by In These Times – Online

  • Senator Feinstein Takes Commendable Stand Against New Nukes

    Concerned citizens from all over the US have been writing their Congressional representatives in opposition to the Bush administration’s plans to research and develop dangerous new nuclear weapons. Elected officials are feeling the heat from their constituents . Some members of Congress are taking commendable stands on this important issue . Sen ator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) in particular has been struggling to eliminate funding for new nuclear weapons. Below is a copy of a letter she is sending constituents in response to their letters.

    If you haven’t already, please take a moment to write to the President and your Members of Congress using the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Action Center.

    —

    Thank you for your letter regarding the development and use of nuclear weapons. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue. I am deeply concerned by the Bush Administration’s renewed emphasis on the development of so-called “low-yield” nuclear weapons. This policy includes the possible repeal of prohibitions on developing “low-yield” bombs and deep-penetration “bunker-busters.” Even more troubling is the fact that the Administration is contemplating giving nuclear armaments a role in the new doctrine of preemption. I believe that this is taking our Nation in exactly the wrong direction.

    There is no question that a full range of policy options for dealing with new and uncertain threats should be on the table.

    Nevertheless, I am concerned that the development of nuclear weapons by the United States would blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear forces, and in turn, diminish our ability to dissuade other nations from pursuing nuclear weapons.

    Again, thank you for your letter. Please know that I am closely monitoring these developments and will do what I can to limit the development of new nuclear weapons by our country. If you have additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact my Washington, DC office at (202) 224-3841.

    Sincerely yours,

    Dianne Feinstein
    United States Senator

    http://feinstein.senate.gov

    Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov . You can also receive electronic e-mail updates by subscribing to my e-mail list athttp://feinstein.senate.gov/issue.html

  • The United States Has Lost its Moral Authority

    Peoples the world around have a history of culture and religion. In the Mideast , the religion is predominantly Muslim and the culture tribal. The Muslim religion is strong, i.e., those that don’t conform are considered infidels; those of a tribal culture look for tribal leadership, not democracy. We liberated Kuwait , but it immediately rejected democracy.

    In 1996, a task force was formed in Jerusalem including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser. They submitted a plan for Israel to incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Clean Break. It proposed that negotiations with the Palestinians be cut off and, instead, the Mideast be made friendly to Israel by democratizing it. First Lebanon would be bombed, then Syria invaded on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction. Afterward, Saddam Hussein was to be removed in Iraq and replaced with a Hashemite ruler favorable to Israel .

    The plan was rejected by Netanyahu, so Perle started working for a similar approach to the Mideast for the United States . Taking on the support of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Cambone, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld et al., he enlisted the support of the Project for the New American Century.

    The plan hit paydirt with the election of George W. Bush. Perle took on the Defense Policy Board. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith became one, two and three at the Defense Department, and Cheney as vice president took Scooter Libby and David Wurmser as his deputies. Clean Break was streamlined to go directly into Iraq .

    Iraq , as a threat to the United States , was all contrived. Richard Clarke stated in his book, Against All Enemies, with John McLaughlin of the CIA confirming, that there was no evidence or intelligence of “Iraqi support for terrorism against the United States ” from 1993 until 2003 when we invaded. The State Department on 9/11 had a list of 45 countries wherein al Qaeda was operating. While the United States was listed, it didn’t list the country of Iraq .

    President Bush must have known that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq . We have no al Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorism from Iraq ; we were intentionally misled by the Bush administration.

    Which explains why President-elect Bush sought a briefing on Iraq from Defense Secretary William Cohen in January before taking the oath of office and why Iraq was the principal concern at his first National Security Council meeting – all before 9/11. When 9/11 occurred, we knew immediately that it was caused by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan . Within days we were not only going into Afghanistan , but President Bush was asking for a plan to invade Iraq – even though Iraq had no involvement.

    After 15 months, Iraq has yet to be secured. Its borders were left open after “mission accomplished,” allowing terrorists throughout the Mideast to come join with the insurgents to wreak havoc. As a result, our troops are hunkered down, going out to trouble spots and escorting convoys.

    In the war against terrorism, we’ve given the terrorists a cause and created more terrorism. Even though Saddam is gone, the majority of the Iraqi people want us gone. We have proven ourselves “infidels.” With more than 800 GIs killed, 5,000 maimed for life and a cost of $200 billion, come now the generals in command, both Richard Myers and John Abizaid, saying we can’t win. Back home the cover of The New Republic magazine asks, “Were We Wrong?”

    Walking guard duty tonight in Baghdad , a G.I. wonders why he should lose his life when his commander says he can’t win and the people back home can’t make up their mind. Unfortunately, the peoples of the world haven’t changed their minds. They are still against us. Heretofore, the world looked to the United States to do the right thing. No more. The United States has lost its moral authority.

    Originally published in The State on June 23, 2004

  • Why Shouldn’t Iran Seek Nuclear Weapons?

    It now seems difficult to dispute that the Iranian government is developing nuclear weapons, lying about it, and intent on continuing both come hell or high water. Why? Because the temptation for Iran to develop a nuclear arsenal of its own — driven by the contradictions of George Bush’s foreign and nuclear policies — is simply too seductive to resist.

    On Friday, June 18th, the IAEA strongly rebuked Tehran , saying: ” Iran ‘s cooperation has not been as full, timely, and proactive as it should have been.” The next day Iran ‘s top nuclear official, Hassan Rowhani, objected bitterly to the IAEA’s statement, reiterated his insistence that Tehran ‘s nuclear program is intended to generate electricity rather than warheads, and said that Tehran now would resume some of the nuclear activities it had previously suspended.

    In addition, the chair of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Ala’eddin Borujerdi, said the same day that the Majlis might now reject the Additional Protocol to the NPT, which allows unannounced and unfettered inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities. Under both international and Iranian law, the Additional Protocol cannot take effect without Majlis approval.

    Then, on Monday, June 21st, in a development difficult to believe wholly unrelated, Iran seized 3 British naval vessels and 8 British sailors — after Britain , along with France and Germany , had spearheaded the IAEA censure.

    Consider the outside world as viewed from Tehran . George Bush delivers his 2002 State of the Union address, and of all the countries in the world he singles out three as constituting an “axis of evil.” He announces his intent to instigate unilateral preemptive war against any nation that his Administration subjectively determines to be a potential threat. Defying almost universal world opinion, he actually commences such a war against one of those three — decapitating its regime, killing the supreme leader’s sons, and driving that leader himself into a pathetic hole in the ground. And he surrounds Iran on all four sides with bristling American military power — Iraq to the west, Afghanistan to the east, sprawling new American bases in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia to the north, and the unchallengeable U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf to the south.

    Iran , of course, cannot hope to take on the United States in any kind of direct military confrontation. But it can aspire to deter what must seem to them to be a quite real threat, someday, of American military aggression. How? By developing the capability to inflict unacceptable catastrophic damage on American interests or military forces abroad, on the American fleet in the Persian Gulf , or even on the American homeland itself. And by holding out even the mere possibility that it would respond to any American assault by employing that capability immediately, before it became too late, following the traditional military maxim of “use em or lose em.”

    There is, of course, only one thing that can provide Iran with that kind of deterrent capability. Hint: it’s not nuclear electricity.

    It is probably the case that for Tehran the perceived danger of a U.S. invasion is lower today than it might have been in 2002 or 2003. It is difficult to envision any U.S. president in the foreseeable future launching another unilateral preemptive first strike in the wake of the fiasco in Iraq . Imagine the political firestorm — even after a Bush reelection — if the Administration began contemplating another preemptive war, this time on Iran .

    But Tehran has no reason to believe that that shift in geostrategic dynamics has become permanent. It has resulted, after all, from external circumstances rather than from an internal American change of heart (or regime). On the contrary, it probably provides the mullahs with all the more reason to press ahead, in order to obtain the Great Deterrent before the Great Satan has a chance to regroup and refocus.

    Looming over Iran ‘s immediate perception of American threat is the nuclear double standard that so many other nations so resent. George Bush insists that selected other countries have no right to possess nuclear weapons, while at the same time making abundantly clear that we intend to retain thousands in perpetuity. To the rest of the world this is sanctimonious and self-righteous, suggesting that in our view we can be “trusted” with these weapons while others cannot. Such a position is factually questionable. It is morally indefensible. And it is utterly politically unsustainable.

    On Monday, June 21st, IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei delivered a blistering speech blaming this posture for much of his difficulty stemming nuclear proliferation in Iran and elsewhere. The time has come, he said, to “abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue nuclear weapons but morally acceptable for others to rely on them.”

    This is especially true when the original Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is understood in its original context. The NPT was not just a framework to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. It was, instead, a grand bargain — where the great many “nuclear have-nots” agreed to forego nuclear weapons while the few “nuclear haves” agreed eventually to get rid of theirs. Moreover, the United States recommitted itself to this covenant at the 30-year NPT Review Conference in spring 2000, where the NPT’s nuclear signatories pledged “an unequivocal undertaking . to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.”

    But the Bush Administration, rather than moving toward total elimination, is instead pursuing perpetual possession. Its Strangelovian nuclear war fighting posture contains plans for bunker busting “mini-nukes” — an oxymoron if there ever was one. (Just this June 15th the U.S. Senate — in a move probably not unnoticed in Tehran — endorsed new funding to study the development of such weapons.) It broadens the scope of military scenarios in which the U.S. might actually initiate a nuclear first-strike. It envisions new generations of strategic nuclear missiles in 2020, 2030, and 2040! Yet it says not one word about any “unequivocal undertaking” toward abolition.

    It is not just Tehran that, in all likelihood, is violating the NPT by pursuing a nuclear weapon capability. It is also Washington that is violating the NPT — by insisting on retaining our own nuclear weapon capability apparently for time everlasting.

    Earlier this month the Bush Administration announced plans to reduce our active nuclear inventory to no more than 2200 by 2012 (though thousands more would still be maintained “in reserve”). This would place us in compliance with the Moscow Treaty of 2002. But it would do almost nothing to reduce the actual dangers posed by nuclear weapons today. How does simple bean counting reduce the risk of nuclear terror, or a fatal nuclear miscalculation in a hot political crisis, or accidental atomic apocalypse? (Nuclear weapons, after all, are the prototypical example of the adage: “it only takes just one.”) Why don’t the Moscow Treaty or the latest plan say anywhere that these reductions are part of a larger vision, to be followed by further steps toward zero? How does an intention to reduce our nuclear inventory to 2200 by 2012 make Iran feel safer today (or, for that matter, in 2012)?

    Sadly for both the principles of the Democratic Party and the prospects for nuclear non-proliferation, Senator John Kerry has also conspicuously failed to question the nuclear status quo. He did release a plan to safeguard nuclear materials and reduce the risk of nuclear terror on June 1st, calling it his “number one security goal.” But while his plan said a great deal about nuclear weapons and nuclear materials in the hands of “shadowy figures,” it said very little about those in the hands of ourselves.

    Kerry did condemn Bush’s mini-nuke initiative. But it is one thing to oppose the development of new types of nuclear weapons, another to put the thousands we already possess on the table. Candidate Kerry may have grand plans to reduce the threat of nuclear terror. But he apparently has no plans to confront what can only be called America ‘s nuclear hypocrisy.

    The paradox of such an American nuclear posture is that the one country most insistent about retaining its nuclear weapons is the one country that needs them the least. The paramount geostrategic reality of the early 21st Century is America ‘s unchallengeable conventional military superiority over any conceivable combination of adversaries. Iran needs nuclear weapons to be able to inflict unacceptable catastrophic damage on a potential aggressor — and thereby hopefully deter any potential aggression. But Washington , unlike anyone else, can inflict unacceptable catastrophic damage on any country in the world with our conventional capabilities alone. If any country can deter any attack and repel any enemy without resorting to an atomic arsenal, it is us.

    Our nuclear weapons, in fact, are worse than useless for the real threats to Americans at the dawn of the 21st Century. Our armies and air forces didn’t protect us on 9/11. Our 13 aircraft carrier battle groups (no other country has even one) didn’t protect us on 9/11. And the thing that protected us the least on 9/11 was our bloated nuclear stockpile, our arsenal of the apocalypse. What could a single nuclear warhead have done to stop Mohammed Atta, or to have apprehended him, or even to have deterred him? How can all our nuclear bombers and missiles and submarines put together prevent some odious creature from smuggling a single nuclear warhead into an American city, and committing the greatest act of mass murder in all of human history?

    Nuclear weapons pollute the psyche with the arrogance of insuperable power. They create delusions of domination. With their calculations of mass casualties, they dehumanize our adversaries … and consequently ourselves. And in the age of American hyperpower, they provide American decisionmakers with very few additional policy options or political/military benefits. Yet their costs and risks approach the infinite.

    As Jonathan Schell has persuasively argued, the great irony of the Bush era is that both the Iraq war specifically and the preemption doctrine generally were supposed to be directed at curtailing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Instead, in all likelihood, they have exacerbated — in both frequency and intensity — the quest by others to acquire them. Isaac Newton’s laws of action and reaction do not apply solely to billiard balls. George Bush’s greatest historical legacy may be the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy.

    It is difficult not to conclude that the foreign policies and nuclear weapons policies of the Bush Administration, far from reducing the WMD danger, are instead leading us on a downward spiral toward immediate nuclear proliferation and eventual nuclear disaster. The only long-term choice is between a world of many dozen nuclear weapon states — where the detonation of a nuclear warhead in some great city of the world will become only a matter of time — or a world of zero nuclear weapon states. The United States can state unambiguously that we intend to walk down an irreversible path toward the light of a nuclear weapon free world. Or we can expect Iran and many others to join us on the road to a darker destination.

    Tad Daley served as National Issues Director for the presidential campaign of Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

  • The Two Sides of the Nuclear Coin

    Despite George W. Bush’s repeated warnings about nuclear proliferation, he and his fellow Republicans deserve much of the blame for it. Ever since the advent of the Bush administration, it has charged that other nations are acquiring nuclear weapons. Justifying war with Iraq, the administration hammered away at that nation’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. It has also assailed North Korea and Iran for their nuclear programs. On Feb. 11, in a major policy address, President Bush called for new steps to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. The world must act, he said, to “confront these dangers and to end them.”

    At the same time, the administration has virtually scrapped the longstanding U.S. policy of nuclear disarmament — exactly the policy that, over the decades, has provided the key to halting nuclear proliferation.

    In 1965, when the U.S. and Soviet governments worried about the prospect of nuclear weapons spreading to dozens of nations, they teamed up to submit nonproliferation treaties to the UN General Assembly. Non-nuclear nations immediately objected to these proposals, arguing that they would merely restrict the nuclear club to its current members (then the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China). Alva Myrdal, Sweden’s disarmament minister, insisted that “disarmament measures should be a matter of mutual renunciation.” Willy Brandt, West Germany’s foreign minister, argued that a nonproliferation treaty was justified “only if the nuclear states regard it as a step toward restrictions of their own armaments and toward disarmament.”

    Unlike the Bush administration, U.S. and Soviet leaders of the time recognized that nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament were two sides of the same coin. As a result, the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that emerged from the United Nations was substantially broadened. Non-nuclear states pledged “not to make or acquire nuclear weapons.” And nuclear nations agreed to take “effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” Further, when it signed and ratified this treaty, the U.S. government pledged not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that had endorsed the NPT and that were not allied with a nation possessing nuclear weapons.

    With this bargain struck between the nuclear haves and have-nots, nearly all nations signed the NPT. Over the next 30 years, only one additional nation (Israel) developed nuclear weapons. To some degree, the success of this nonproliferation policy reflected citizens’ campaigns for nuclear disarmament that stigmatized nuclear weapons and encouraged the signing of nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties. But it also resulted from the mutual renunciation features of the NPT, which paired abstention from building nuclear weapons by most nations with nuclear disarmament and non-threatening behavior by the others.

    Unfortunately, the NPT began unraveling in the late 1990s. The Republican-dominated U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a landmark measure negotiated and signed by President Clinton. Given their control of Congress, the Republicans also managed to advance plans for a national missile defense system, a venture that contravened a key arms control measure, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Meanwhile, India, pointing to the failure of the nuclear powers to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons, became a nuclear nation in 1998. This act provoked Pakistan to do the same.

    After the presidential election of 2000, U.S. policy tilted sharply against nuclear disarmament and other pledges made in the NPT. Ignoring the commitments made by his Democratic and Republican predecessors, Bush pulled the United States out of the ABM treaty, ordered the deployment of a missile defense system and rejected the test ban treaty. The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review called for sustaining and modernizing nuclear weapons for at least the next half-century. The review also included contingency plans for U.S. nuclear attacks upon non-nuclear nations, among them North Korea. In the fall of 2003, the Bush administration pushed legislation through Congress to authorize the development of new, “usable” nuclear weapons.

    Given this repudiation of NPT commitments, it’s not surprising that North Korea has pulled out of the NPT and, perhaps, has begun building nuclear weapons. Nor is it surprising that a number of other nations might be working to develop a nuclear weapons capability. If the nuclear powers cling to their nuclear weapons and threaten their use, then other nations will inevitably try to join the nuclear club.

    As Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has observed: “We all have to be moving away from nuclear weapons. It can’t be just a mandate from the United States that everybody goes in one direction while we go in another.” But this is exactly what the Bush administration — in yet another example of its go-it-alone foreign policy — is pressing for.

    Nuclear proliferation cannot be halted without nuclear disarmament. As the old song goes: “You can’t have one without the other!”
    *Mr. Wittner teaches 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). He is a writer for the History News Service.

  • What About the WMDs that Do Exist?

    Now that it’s acknowledged by all but hardcore supporters of the Bush administration that weapons of mass destruction were not present in Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion, it’s time to take a look at such weapons that do exist.

    According to the authoritative Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, there are more than 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world today. Eight nations are known to possess them (the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel). And a ninth (North Korea) might have some as well.

    The vast majority of these nuclear weapons are in the hands of the United States and Russia. Each of these nations maintains more than 2,000 of them on hair-trigger alert, ready at a moment’s notice to create a global holocaust in which hundreds of millions of people would die horribly. Even the much smaller nuclear arsenals of the other nuclear powers have the potential to cause unimaginable destruction.

    Recognizing the unprecedented dangers posed by nuclear weapons, the nations of the world have signed a number of important nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements over the past four decades. These include the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972 and two Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties, the first in 1972, the second in 1979.

    After a short hiatus occasioned by the revival of the Cold War, they were followed by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, two Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I, in 1991 and START II, in 1993), and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT, in 1996). These agreements limited nuclear proliferation, halted the nuclear arms race and reduced the number of nuclear weapons.

    The lynchpin of these agreements is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, in which the non-nuclear signatories agreed to forgo development of nuclear weapons in return for a pledge by the nuclear powers to move toward nuclear disarmament. A few non-nuclear countries, such as India, kept their options open by refusing to sign the treaty. But the overwhelming majority of nations signed the agreement, because they considered it a useful way to reverse the nuclear arms race.

    As late as the year 2000, the parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty promised an “unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” This included taking specific steps, such as preserving and strengthening the ABM Treaty and ratifying and putting into force the CTBT.

    Although the U.S. government is a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty — indeed, initiated it and lobbied hard for its acceptance — the Bush administration has decided that it will not be bound by the treaty’s provisions. It has pulled out of the ABM Treaty, an action that also has the effect of scrapping the START II Treaty. The administration has also rejected the CTBT and this past fall pushed legislation through Congress to begin building new nuclear weapons. A resumption of U.S. nuclear testing, halted in 1992, seems in the offing.

    How long other nations will put up with the flouting by the United States of the world’s arms control agreements before they resume the nuclear arms race themselves is anybody’s guess. But it probably won’t be very long.

    As in its other policy initiatives, the Bush administration has fallen back on the “war on terror” to justify its abandonment of nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties. But, as Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has noted, terrorist groups will not be affected by nuclear weapons. “A nuclear deterrent is clearly ineffective against such groups,” he declared this past October. “They have no cities that can be bombed in reply, nor are they focused on self-preservation.” By building additional nuclear weapons and provoking other nations to do the same thing, the Bush administration has enhanced the prospect of “loose nukes” becoming available to terrorists and other fanatics.

    Wouldn’t the United States be safer if there were fewer nuclear Weapons — or none? That’s what poll after poll has shown that the public thinks. And that’s what both Republican and Democratic presidents have argued since the advent of the nuclear era. Even Ronald Reagan, an early nuclear enthusiast, came around to recognizing the necessity for building a nuclear-free world.

    Evidently the Bush administration thinks otherwise. While talking loosely (and misleadingly) of nuclear dangers from “evil” regimes, it has jettisoned the U.S. government’s long-standing commitment to nuclear arms control and disarmament. Unless this policy is reversed, the world faces disasters of vast proportions.

    *Lawrence S. Wittner is a professor of history at the State University of New York/Albany and author of “Toward Nuclear Abolition” (2003). This article was orginally posted in the History News Service.