The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was pleased to welcome Robert Scheer, one of the nation’s most outspoken and progressive journalists, Professor of Communications at the University of Southern California, and Editor-In-Chief of Truthdig.com, to deliver the 15th Annual Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future.
Scheer’s lecture, entitled “War, Peace, Truth and the Media,” took place on Thursday, February 18, 2016 at 7:00 p.m. at the Faulkner Gallery, 40 E. Anapamu St., Santa Barbara, California.
Robert Scheer has built a reputation for powerful social and political writing during his 30 years as a journalist. His work appears in national media, and his in-depth interviews of prominent political and cultural figures have made international headlines.
Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and lauched a nationally syndicated column, which is now based at truthdig.com.
Presently, Mr. Scheer can be heard on his new podcast “Scheer Intelligence” and the radio program “Left, Right and Center” on KCRW. He is also a clinical professor of communication at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and he has written ten books, among them “Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power” and “With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War.”
For more information on the Kelly Lecture series, as well as video, audio and photos of Robert Scheer’s lecture, click here.
With few exceptions, the major Hollywood movie studios have ignored the ongoing peril of nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. While moviemakers can generally rely on stories about zombies, mutants and superheroes to draw today’s crowds, films that spark genuine fear for the survival of our nation and world have become rare.
Three decades ago, however, several films depicting either circumstances leading up to a Third World War, or dire post-cataclysmic worlds, were spurring wide debate. If the late 1950s and early 1960s were the first golden age of nuclear-menace movies, including “On the Beach,” “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” “Fail-Safe,” and “Seven Days in May,” 1983 and 1984 can be seen as the second such age – and, so far, the last.
Thirty years ago, international events clearly were exacerbating the worries of people already concerned about U.S.-Soviet relations. The year 1982 had seen NATO moving ahead with plans to place new mid-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Secretary of State Alexander Haig was talking freely about “levels” of nuclear war, how such wars might be “limited,” and whether the U.S. could someday explode a nuclear bomb as a warning to scare Russian leaders during a crisis. President Ronald Reagan’s “defense modernization program” was a euphemism for a vast arms build-up seeking to add 17,000 warheads to the 25,000 that the U.S. already had. The government also had begun planning to pump much more funding into civil defense shelters.
As tensions between the U.S. and the USSR persisted, the nuclear freeze movement hit its full stride. Protests and state and local referenda on the issue abounded. In one event, some 500,000 people gathered in New York’s Central Park in June 1982 to demand the bilateral freeze that Reagan fervently opposed.
In theaters and on TV, anxiety over nuclear war was reflected in acclaimed movies such as “Threads” in Great Britain and “Testament” in the U.S. – both stark depictions of people suffering and dying amid nuclear fallout. The movie that reached the greatest audience was “The Day After,” a 1983 ABC-TV production watched by a record 100 million people. The program dramatized the nuclear destruction of Lawrence, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., and shocked and depressed many – including Reagan, who supposedly was profoundly troubled by it.
But it’s the 1983 nuclear action-adventure movie “WarGames” that probably is remembered most today as a memorable artifact of that era. The film presents the story of David Lightman (Matthew Broderick), a high school student, computer prodigy and hacker who uses a dial-up modem to play what he thinks is a computer game – only to reach a top-secret system at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The intrusion is accidental but triggers a domino effect that accelerates toward world war, as government computer experts and generals find themselves helpless to halt the “game” that NORAD’s overzealous computer has initiated on Lightman’s suggestion.
The movie was a huge, and perhaps unexpected, summer hit, grossing $79.6 million at the box office. It earned high praise from most critics and received three Oscar nominations. It also led to new media attention to whether accidental nuclear war was more likely in a new age of easy, widespread availability of computers. In addition, for the first time for the young audiences of the ’80s, “WarGames” made vivid the implications of U.S. nuclear missiles being on high-alert: the impossibly brief amount of time that the White House, and military, have to decide if signs of an enemy attack are real or a mistake.
To mark the 30th-anniversary year of “WarGames,” NAPF talked to John Badham, the film’s director. Badham (also known for his direction of the 1977 iconic disco movie “Saturday Night Fever”), was brought in by MGM/United Artists early in the film’s production to replace another director. Badham’s decision to mix the right amounts of humor, action and teen romance into the film is now credited with making it a smash hit – without sacrificing a serious moral about the futility of war and a nightmarish quality of dread that persists throughout.
The following is an edited version of the conversation.
KAZEL: I’ve been watching nuclear-war-related movies from the early ’60s and late ’50s, and the ’80s, and it seems a lot of the directors and producers who did those projects went into them with strong political views about the arms race. I know that Stanley Kubrick was deeply troubled about nuclear war, and Sidney Lumet was worried about it – and so were several of the actors who did [Lumet’s] Fail-Safe. Do you remember having any strong feelings about the topic before you were asked to directWarGames?
BADHAM: It was a time, going of course back to the middle 1940s, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that even as a real youngster you became aware of the power of nuclear weapons and the frightening danger of them. In my grammar school, and this is late 1940s, we were having nuclear-war drills, as silly as they were – duck-and-cover and all that. It was very much on our minds. It was an environment setting up for the McCarthy business in the 1950s and that kind of paranoia. It’s always interesting that it takes a while for those kinds of worries to emerge in the popular media, in the form of Strangelove and Fail-Safe. Were they not almost the same year?
KAZEL: Yes, Fail-Safe came out just a few months after Strangelove[in 1964].
BADHAM: Right. Strangelove was such a definitive piece, but then along comes Lumet with a much darker take on it, in a way, because it was so serious. There was no laughing allowed (laughs) in the theater for Fail-Safe.
KAZEL: I’ve read your stepfather retired as a brigadier general in the Air Force. He served in both World War I and II?
BADHAM: He learned to fly in WWI.
KAZEL: Did you also serve in the military?
BADHAM: I did. I was in the Air Force from 1964 to 1970, some active duty and some National Guard – California National Guard.
KAZEL: Did you actually fly?
BADHAM: No, I was a medic. My father was all for me going to Officer Candidate School, and so on. But I had other thoughts – directing theater and directing movies. I think for a brief while I disappointed him until he started coming to my sets and saying, “Well, I guess the kid may survive after all.”
KAZEL: So, you’ve said before that Dr. Strangelove is one of your favorite movies. I was wondering what made it such a great film to you, and also what you thought of Kubrick’s decision to make it a very funny, black comedy instead of his original idea to do it as a serious suspense film.
BADHAM: Was that his original idea?
KAZEL: Yes, then he rewrote the script.
BADHAM: Well, once you got involved in the casting of Peter Sellers, that starts to twist it right there. You know, it [farce] is almost unavoidable. But, it certainly happens with films. My friend, the late Frank Pierson, who wrote the screenplay for Cat Ballou, said that what he was given to rewrite was a very serious piece. A serious Western. He kept going to the producers and saying, “Guys, it keeps coming out funny. I don’t know what to tell you.” Maybe they [the writers of Dr. Strangelove] started to think it was more accessible and less grim if they were to approach it in this way – that they would get the message across clearly without totally alienating an audience. As interesting as Fail-Safe is, it’s a tough one to take.
KAZEL: You have said before that you really disliked Fail-Safe, actually.
BADHAM: The reality of it is so heavy. It’s hard to enjoy that movie. (Laughs.) I don’t dislike it — you know, Sidney Lumet doesn’t do anything that you can really dislike. But the tone of it can sometimes be a downer.
KAZEL: Leonard Goldberg [producer of WarGames] said the idea, the goal of WarGamesfrom the start was just to create entertainment. In fact, as you know, when the script was first developed, it wasn’t even about nuclear war. It was just about a kid who was a genius. I think the title was “The Genius.”
BADHAM: That’s right.
KAZEL: When you were making the film, did you have any political goals in mind?
BADHAM: I’m one of those people who believe you tell the story, not the message. The old Broadway saying is, if you want to send a message, use Western Union. Now, I guess you could tweet it. (Laughs.) Walter Kerr, the drama critic for the Times, used to say, “They sold the play for a pot of message” – you know, a funny old Biblical reference. So, the message comes out of the subject matter. In this particular case, we’re talking about a very strong character of a little boy who starts in playfully, playing [computer] games and gets in way over his head. Out of it…you begin to see the other terrifying possibilities as we continue to automate our [military] system.
But a strong story about a character is what caught my attention, and that led you to something else entirely – which was made very accessible by the playfulness of this little boy and the almost black-comic situation he found himself in. There’s certainly a lot of influence from Dr. Strangelove coming to me, though I tried not to think about it while I was doing WarGames because that was not a place to go. But certainly the humor that’s sprinkled liberally throughout comes from the perception that as frightening as this is, it’s also kind of funny.
[Under the original director] they were treating it, in every scene I saw, in the tone of Fail-Safe. The actors, the lighting, the direction – it was extremely dark. The Matthew Broderick character was seen as a dark, rebellious kid lurking up in his room doing God-knows-what. I said to Leonard [Goldberg], if I could do that in high school – show a girl how I could change her grade [using a home computer], I would be peeing in my pants with excitement. I mean, good God, could you imagine how terrific that would be? You’d feel just on top of the world.
I took the script and changed the character of The General [commander of NORAD] to someone who had a great, funny Southern sense of humor, based a lot on my father.
KAZEL: To me, it seems a strong difference between what you did, and what Kubrick did, is you didn’t want to make the military or the government officials seem like idiots or clowns, or crazy. Some of the adults in your movie were eccentric or strange, but they were very earnestly trying to prevent World War III – something that the kid had started.
BADHAM: I think it’s easy to kind of write off the danger when you’re looking at people who are being portrayed as idiots. As much as I love Peter Sellers’ portrayal of the crazy scientist in the wheelchair with the arm that won’t behave, you have a tendency to write them off. A lot of what WarGames is talking about is technology taking over on us, and even though we may have good intentions and are trying to do our best, it could bulldoze us.
Of course we see evidence of this all the time. Larry Lasker and Walter Parkes, the screenwriters, and I, started talking back in those early days about the possibilities of cyber war, and what could happen if what was then innocent hacking became really serious stuff. Of course, that’s what we’re watching now. I don’t think we were prescient. I just think we were letting our imaginations say, “Where could this go to?”
KAZEL: Even though the movie seems dated in some ways, as you’re saying, in other ways — the threat of cyber warfare and the idea that unauthorized people could tap into a nuclear defense system — seems even more possible now than in the ‘80s.
BADHAM: Right. We’re seeing it. Our government’s going in and messing with Iran’s system. The Chinese government is coming in and tapping the New York Times’ addresses. It is sort of spooky. We’re in that age. Information is just flying everywhere, with nobody able to control it the way they’d like to control it.
KAZEL: Do you think that your film appeals to audiences of today? Can young people take something away from it?
BADHAM: Well, yes. It’s still very appealing to young film watchers because of the characters they can relate to. Once they get past the ancient, dated [home computer] equipment…it’s still fun for them to relate to it. At the end, I think, as you see what could catastrophically go wrong, it’s as clear as a bell.
KAZEL: The nuclear freeze movement was reaching its height right around the time that the movie came out. Do you think the context of what was happening in the world had a lot to do with drawing people to see WarGames, or would it have been popular with a youthful audience regardless of the events of the time?
BADHAM: I think the concept was just appealing. We’re talking about a 16-year-old boy who suddenly breaks into NORAD and almost starts [a war]? And, a very appealing young character. You know, the movie was in the Top 10 of the year, I think, and yet there’s not a star in it. Dabney Coleman was our big name. (Laughs.) And advertising was not necessarily great. There was just something about the package that seemed like this would be fun. People don’t really want to go to the theater to be lectured to, or frightened in a real way. They like to be frightened by Jaws because they’re not going in the water. … We were walking a fine line in that movie between how threatening and frightening would we make it.
KAZEL: Do you think a movie such as WarGames – about the danger of nuclear war, and deterrence theory, games theory – could be made today? Would there be any audience, or would studios be interested in it?
BADHAM: Well, at the time, nobody wanted to make WarGames. Leonard [Goldberg] managed to get it set up with United Artists…. It was tough to make, and the attitude of the studios was, “It’s about some kid with a computer, and who believes that?” Nobody got it. And yet, lots of imitations came out – lots of films trying to copy it afterwards, about kid geniuses running around.
KAZEL: Is it your impression that your film changed the way any leaders thought about nuclear weapons? It seems President Reagan may have thought that the movie was, in some ways, factual. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon has written that Ronald and Nancy Reagan screened the film before its release, and at a meeting with some Democratic congressmen to talk about the MX missile, he put aside his notes and started talking in a very excited way about WarGames and how it showed that a kid with a computer could break into NORAD.
BADHAM: Well, he certainly had a history, as an actor, of being able to suspend his disbelief and think about the possibilities: Could this happen and wouldn’t it be interesting? People have told me that maybe the Star Wars [strategic missile defense] initiative was bolstered by his seeing WarGames. … It definitely got some people thinking about it. I know we did a running in Washington that I attended, at the Motion Picture Association, where Dr. Helen Caldicott, who ran [Physicians for Social Responsibility] and Sen. Alan Cranston came. There definitely was an effort on MGM and United Artists’ part to get politicians aware of the film.
KAZEL: I think many people who saw WarGames when they were young still have strong memories of it. Also, there’s a page on Facebook dedicated to the movie, and a lot of people post messages saying they’ve discovered it for the first time and that it’s one of their favorite films. When you were making it, did you have any clue it would endure as long as it has?
BADHAM: Quite honestly, I don’t think about things like that. I can only judge my initial reaction, which on reading that script was a very powerful reaction to the characters and the situation they found themselves in. A similar thing happened to me with Saturday Night Fever. I just loved that script. I had an amazingly strong reaction to it. Other people did not. Studio executives just dismissed it as a little movie. People asked me afterward, did I know that Saturday Night Fever was going to be this giant hit? No, I didn’t know. I just knew I really liked it and thank goodness, for once, my taste and the public’s tastes were in sync.
KAZEL: For WarGames, could a movie of its type have had anything other than a happy ending? At the end, everyone is smiling and hugging and the NORAD officers are throwing papers into the air. The final music is very lighthearted and breezy. There was very little criticism of the movie, but some critics have said there wasn’t even a glimmer of anything menacing at the end, or that nuclear weapons were still a huge danger.
BADHAM: That was definitely the ending that everybody wanted. I did not have a good idea at the time of [implying] that there is still something lurking in the background, that [the risks] haven’t gone away, as a little dangling thing to put out there. We were under the gun in delivering this to the theaters because it had been promised and we had started late. So we flew through post-production, and everybody was very happy with that kind of ending – though I absolutely understand what you’re telling me, and that criticism is very fair. It might have added a whole layer of extra texture and meaning to the film.
KAZEL: They [studio executives] wanted it entertaining instead of dark because the demographics of theater audiences had changed since the days of Fail-Safe?
BADHAM: Yeah. You can look at Fail-Safe and say, that really didn’t go anywhere. People who liked films, maybe, saw it. Here [with WarGames, we said,] “We’re going to spend a lot of money on a dodgy subject. Let’s at least make it entertaining.”
Badham, 73, now teaches would-be directors in the film program at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. Historically, he says, he’s refused to read critics’ reviews of his films, good or bad, so he was unaware that Chicago Tribune movie maven, the late Gene Siskel, in 1983 wrote glowingly of his nuclear-brink hit. “Who is to say that WarGames won’t have the same connection to this generation of moviegoers that the wicked burlesque of Strangelove had to a generation earlier,” Siskel asked. In particular, the critic lauded the film’s spotlight on the growing role of computers in military systems, writing that “we have come to trust our computers more than ourselves, thus allowing our own personal responsibility for the future to be taken out of our hands and placed on autopilot.”
In WarGames, the teenage protagonist finds that no one understands or appreciates hackers, who haven’t appeared on the country’s radar screens yet. He’s arrested by the FBI, which accuses him of espionage. Much has changed. Today, the government is giving young hackers jobs. According to Fast Company magazine, the Pentagon believes cyber attacks on U.S. computer networks soared 17-fold between 2009 and 2011. Last year, the National Security Agency said it was supplying government-designed curriculums to four U.S. universities so that college computer hackers can be fast-tracked into cyber-security jobs, not only at the NSA but at such places as the CIA and nuclear weapons labs.
The curriculum recommended by NSA would be right at home on David Lightman’s bookshelf: Applied Cryptography, The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing, Practical Malware Analysis.
At one of the colleges that have adopted the coursework, the government-run Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., cyber-warfare students also take part in a special 11-week project: War games.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based freelance writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
One of the ironies of the current international situation is that, although some government leaders now talk of building a nuclear weapons-free world, there has been limited public mobilization around that goal — at least compared to the action-packed 1980s.
However, global public opinion is strikingly antinuclear. In December 2008, an opinion poll conducted of more than 19,000 respondents in 21 nations found that, in 20 countries, large majorities — ranging from 62 to 93 percent — favored an international agreement for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. Even in Pakistan, the one holdout nation, 46 percent (a plurality) would support such an agreement. Among respondents in the nuclear powers, there was strong support for nuclear abolition. This included 62 percent of the respondents in India, 67 percent in Israel, 69 percent in Russia, 77 percent in the United States, 81 percent in Britain, 83 percent in China and 87 percent in France.
But public resistance to the bomb is not as strong as these poll figures seem to suggest.
Supporting the Bomb
For starters, a portion of society agrees with their governments that they’re safer when they are militarily powerful. Some people, of course, are simply militarists, who look approvingly upon weapons and war. Others genuinely believe in “peace through strength,” an idea championed by government officials, who play upon this theme.
Furthermore, popular resistance to nuclear weapons tends to wane when progress toward addressing nuclear dangers occurs. For example, the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 not only halted most contamination of the Earth’s atmosphere by nuclear tests, but also convinced many people that the great powers were on the road to halting their nuclear arms race. As a result, the nuclear disarmament movement declined. A similar phenomenon occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the United States and the Soviet Union signed the INF Treaty. U.S.-Soviet nuclear confrontation eased and the Cold War came to an end. Although public protest against nuclear weapons didn’t disappear, it certainly dwindled.
Indeed, today, the public in many nations seems complacent about the menace of nuclear weapons. While opposition to nuclear weapons is widespread, it does not run deep. For example, those people who said in late 2008 that they “strongly” favored a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons constituted only 20 percent of respondents in Pakistan, 31 percent in India, 38 percent in Russia, 39 percent in the United States, and 42 percent in Israel — although, admittedly, majorities (ranging from 55 to 60 percent) took this position in Britain, France, and China. Another sign support for a nuclear-free world is weaker than implied by its favorability ratings is that an April 2010 poll among Americans found that, although a large majority said they favored nuclear abolition, 87 percent considered this goal unrealistic.
Yet another sign of the shallowness of popular support is that, despite widespread peace and disarmament movement efforts to mobilize supporters of nuclear abolition around the U.N.’s nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference this past May, the level of public protest fell far short of the antinuclear outpourings of the 1980s. Indeed, even with the encouragement of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the organizing efforts of numerous peace groups, the best turnout the worldwide nuclear abolition movement could manage was some 15,000 antinuclear demonstrators on May 2.
That the nuclear disarmament issue does not have the same salience today as in earlier periods can be attributed, in part, to people feeling less directly threatened by nuclear weapons preparations and nuclear war. After all, the present U.S.-Russian nuclear confrontation seems far less dangerous than the U.S.-Soviet nuclear confrontation of the past. Today, nuclear war seems more likely to erupt in South Asia, between India and Pakistan. People living far from these nations find it easy to ignore this dangerous scenario.
Lack of Information
The public is also very poorly informed about what is happening with respect to nuclear weapons. Although the mass media devoted enormous air time and column space to Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons capability, they have devoted scant resources to educate the public on the nuclear weapons that do exist and on the dangers they pose to human survival. A 2010 survey of people from their teens through thirties in eight countries found that large majorities didn’t know that Russia, China, Britain, France and other nations possessed nuclear weapons. In fact, only 59 percent of American respondents knew that their own country possessed nuclear weapons. Among British respondents, just 43 percent knew that Britain maintained a nuclear arsenal.
Public ignorance of nuclear issues occurs largely thanks to the commercial mass media’s focus on trivia and sensationalism. This emphasis on lightweight entertainment often reflects the interests of the media’s corporate owners and sponsors, who do their best to avoid fanning the flames of public discontent — or at least discontent with corporate and military elites. But the public is complicit with the blackout on nuclear matters, for many people prefer to avoid thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear war.
Thus, although there is widespread opposition to nuclear weapons, it lacks intensity and the global publics are ill-informed about nuclear dangers and nuclear disarmament.
Lessons for Peace and Disarmament Groups
The first is that nuclear disarmament and nuclear abolition have majority public support. Second, this support must be strengthened if progress is to be made toward a nuclear-free world.
To strengthen public support, these organizations could emphasize the following themes:
Nuclear weapons are suicidal. Numerous analysts have observed there will be no winners in a nuclear war. A nuclear exchange between nations will kill many millions of people on both sides of the conflict and leave the survivors living in a nuclear wasteland, in which — as Soviet party secretary Nikita Khrushchev once suggested — the living might well envy the dead. Even longtime nuclear enthusiast Ronald Reagan eventually concluded, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
There are no safe havens from a nuclear war. Even in the event of a small-scale nuclear war — a regional conflict with relatively few nuclear weapons — the results would be catastrophic. A study published in the January 2010 issue of the Scientific American concluded that, should such a war occur between India and Pakistan, the consequences would not be confined to that region. The firestorms generated by the conflict would put massive amounts of smoke into the upper atmosphere and create a nuclear winter around the globe. With the sun blocked, the Earth’s surface would become cold, dark, and dry. Agriculture around the world would collapse, and mass starvation would follow.
Nuclear weapons possession does not guarantee security. This contention defies the conventional wisdom of national security elites and a portion of the public. Yet consider the case of the United States. It was the first nation to develop atomic bombs, and for some time had a monopoly of them. In response, the Soviet government built atomic bombs. Then the two nations competed in building hydrogen bombs, guided missiles, and missiles with multiple warheads. Meanwhile, seven other nations built nuclear weapons. Each year, all these nations felt less and less secure. And they were less secure, because the more they increased their capacity to threaten others, the more they were threatened in return.
Concurrently, these nations also found themselves entangled in bloody conventional wars. Their adversaries — the Chinese, the Koreans, the Algerians, the Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis, and other peoples — were not deterred by the nuclear weapons of their opponents. “Throughout the wide range of our foreign policies,” recalled Dean Rusk, the former U.S. Secretary of State, “I was struck by the irrelevance of nuclear weapons to decision making.”
Nor do nuclear arsenals protect a country from external terrorist assault. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men staged the largest terrorist attack on the United States in its history. Given that terrorists are not state actors, it is difficult to imagine how nuclear weapons could be used strategically in the “war on terror” as either a deterrent or in military conflict.
There is a significant possibility of accidental nuclear war. During the Cold War and subsequent decades, there have been numerous false alarms about an enemy attack. Many of these came close to triggering a nuclear response, which would have had devastating consequences. In addition, emerging nuclear states may not have the same safeguards in place that were developed during the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, widening the possibilities of an inadvertent nuclear response. Furthermore, nuclear weapons can be exploded accidentally during their maintenance or transportation.
As long as nuclear weapons exist, there will be a temptation to use them. Warfare has been an ingrained habit for thousands of years, and it’s unlikely this practice will soon be ended. As long as wars exist, governments will be tempted to draw upon nuclear weapons to win them.
Nuclear weapons emerged in the context of World War II. Not surprisingly, the first country to develop such weapons, the United States, used them to destroy Japanese cities. President Harry Truman later stated, when discussing his authorization of the atomic bombing, “When you have a weapon that will win the war, you’d be foolish if you didn’t use it.” Recalling his conversation with Truman about the bomb, at Potsdam, Winston Churchill wrote, “There was never a moment’s discussion as to whether the atomic bomb should be used.” It was “never even an issue.”
Of course, nuclear-armed nations have not used nuclear weapons in war since 1945. But this reflects the effectiveness of popular pressure against nuclear war, rather than the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence. Indeed, if nuclear deterrence worked, governments would not be desperately trying to stop nuclear proliferation and deploy missile defense systems. Thus, we cannot assume that, in the context of bitter wars and threats to national survival, nuclear restraint will continue forever. Indeed, we can conclude, the longer nuclear weapons exist, the greater the possibility they will be used in war.
As long as nuclear weapons exist, terrorists can acquire them. Terrorists cannot build nuclear weapons by themselves. The creation of such weapons requires vast resources, substantial territory and a good deal of scientific knowledge. The only way terrorists will attain a nuclear capability is by obtaining the weapons from the arsenals of the nuclear powers — either by donation, by purchase or by theft. Therefore, a nuclear-free world would end the threat of nuclear terrorism.
Expanding educational outreach to the public along these lines will not be easy, given corporate control of the mass communications media. Nevertheless, the internet provides new possibilities for grassroots communication. Even within the corporate press, more could be done to encourage letters to the editor and the placement of op-ed pieces. In addition, nuclear disarmament groups could reach broad audiences by working through the very substantial networks of sympathetic organizations, such as religious bodies, unions, environmental groups, and professional associations.
Intensifying the level of popular mobilization can in turn push reluctant governments further down the road toward a nuclear weapons-free world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that can do so.
Presented at the “Think Outside the Bomb” National Youth Conference on Nuclear Issues, Washington DC, April 21, 2007
On August 6, 1945, the bomb that we are trying to think outside of here today was used as a weapon of mass destruction for the first time in history. The United States, engaged in a fierce war with Japan, dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, destroying it almost entirely. The blast, heat, and radiation killed more than 140,000 people. The White House delivered the dramatic news about the dawn of the atomic age through a press release of a presidential statement. The press release set the tone for much of the media coverage to come in the final days of the war and the months after. It emphasized vengeance as a motive for bombing Hiroshima. It focused on the technological achievement in producing the bomb. At the same time it omitted any mention of radiation, a key feature of the new weapon. The White House also implied that Hiroshima had been targeted because it had an army base, but failed to mention that the aiming point for the bomb had been the center of a city of more than 300,000 civilians. [1]
After the White House statement, came 14 press releases from the War Department. [2] This concerted government media campaign anticipated the possibility of public controversy. As General Leslie Groves, head of the secret project to build the bomb, put it, “it may be necessary to control the situation by the issuance of carefully written press releases.” [3]
Controlling the situation was exactly what General Groves did. A few months earlier he had hired the New York Times science reporter, William Laurence, to become the bomb’s publicist in waiting. Groves’s investment paid off handsomely. Laurence crafted press releases and stories, many of them rhapsodic, about the exciting dawn of a new scientific age, about the heroic effort to produce and use the bomb, and about the positive aspects of atomic energy. Laurence, perhaps the first fully embedded journalist in history, helped shape how we Americans came to think about nuclear weapons and energy. He and other members of the media helped put in place a narrative that legitimized the use of nuclear weapons and absorbed the bomb into American life. They did this by accepting government control of information about atomic power, downplaying the dangers of radiation and marginalizing the civilian victims, obscuring the fact that President Truman could have avoided the bomb in forcing Japan’s surrender, and, in other ways, normalizing the existence of nuclear weapons.
There has always been a tension between national security and press freedom [4]—one can see this, for example, in how the Bush administration in its early years enjoyed limited critical scrutiny from the press, mostly because of 911 and the threat of terrorism. The limited scrutiny made it easier for the administration to go to war, despite a case for war that was as weak then as it is now. The same tension between security and freedom held true in World War II. The project to build the atomic bomb was understandably never discussed openly. But the Truman administration kept the existence of the bomb a secret until its combat use.
The administration could have chosen a different path. For example, many scientists recommended that the administration disclose the existence of the bomb and at least attempt to force Japanese surrender through a nonlethal demonstration of the bomb’s power. But despite the efforts of some scientists and the misgivings of some Truman administration and military officials, the US dropped the bomb on an unsuspecting enemy. Once they used it, the administration had to justify its use and this is where the American media came in.
Much of the coverage of the first few days after the Hiroshima bombing bore the stamp of William Laurence’s work. [5] Either directly through his New York Times byline or through newspaper stories based on material handed to journalists that Laurence had crafted, the media reflected to a large degree an uncritical pro-bomb viewpoint. News reports noted, for example, that the bomb had obliterated an army base, that science had now harnessed the power of the universe, and that revenge had finally been visited on the Japanese. Initial editorial opinion was almost uniformly supportive of the use of the bomb. [6]
As the Washington Post commented, reflecting a widespread view, “However much we deplore the necessity, a struggle to the death commits all combatants to inflicting a maximum amount of destruction on the enemy…” [7] It wasn’t until eight years later that the Post appeared to take back these words: On the day of his retirement in 1953, Washington Post editor Herb Elliston told a reporter that he had many regrets as he looked back over his tenure. “One thing I regret is our editorial support of the A-bombing of Japan. It didn’t jibe with our expressed feeling [before the bomb was dropped] that Japan was already beaten.” [8]
All in all, the initial coverage of the atomic attack was remarkably faithful to the official, pro-bomb viewpoint. [9] As General Groves commented, “most newspapers published our releases in their entirety.” [10] Perhaps not surprisingly (and reflecting the uncritical wartime mood), the Washington Press Club, soon after the Hiroshima bombing, responded to the news by offering its members a new drink, an Atomic Cocktail. [11]
But Laurence represented a-bomb championing at its most vigilant and enthusiastic. He heralded the bomb in poetic, at times biblical terms. And with his descriptions he helped set the predominant image of the a-bomb and of the atomic era—an enormous, powerful mushroom cloud that held viewers in awe—an image that photography and film cemented through repetition. In Laurence’s atomic portraits, the victims simply didn’t merit attention, but the mushroom cloud did. In his eyewitness account of the Nagasaki bombing, for example, he described the explosion in terms of wonder and incredulity:
“Awe-struck, we watched [the pillar of purple fire] shoot upward … becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the clouds…. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes…. [J]ust when it appeared as though the thing has settled down … there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom…. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam… As the first mushroom floated off into the blue it changed its shape into a flowerlike form, its giant petal curving downward, creamy white outside, rose-colored inside.” [12]
In his long New York Times article, which included eight paragraphs on individual crew members and others on the mission, [13] Laurence said virtually nothing about the victims. When he did, it was just to dismiss them:
“Does one feel any pity or compassion for the poor devils about to die? Not when one thinks about Pearl Harbor and the Death March on Bataan.”
Laurence’s dismissal of the victims of the first use of nuclear weapons was not uncommon. Media focus on righteous vengeance, supposed necessity of the bombings, and the technological accomplishment of American and Allied science pushed the dead and dying out of the spotlight. [14] Government censorship aided in this marginalization, especially through censorship about radiation and of visual evidence.
The first photograph of Japanese victims appeared in Life magazine about two months after the end of the war. [15] But the magazine used a caption to undercut the power of the photos. The caption stated that the photographer “reported that [the] injuries looked like those he had seen when he photographed men burned at Pearl Harbor.” [16] For the most part, photographs of the human cost of the atomic bombings seldom appeared in the American media until the 1950s, [17] by which time they would have had little influence on nuclear policy, which had fully absorbed nuclear arms and power into American military planning and civilian life.
The early media neglect of Japanese victims was reinforced by the lack of emphasis on radiation In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, due partly to censorship. The first serious attempt at explaining what had happened in Japan came from an Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett. Almost a month after Hiroshima had been bombed, Burchett arrived there and understood the horror of the bomb for the first time. Initially supportive of the bomb’s use, Burchett ultimately rejected nuclear weapons because of what he had seen in Hiroshima. Reporting from the scene of the devastation, his account differed dramatically from that of other journalists:
“In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm—from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.
“Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.” [18]
A war correspondent who had reported from many battlefronts, Burchett compared Hiroshima with what he had witnessed elsewhere: “In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war…. When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction.” [19]
Burchett’s reference to the atomic plague immediately moved the War Department into action. At first they ordered Burchett to leave Japan. Then the camera he had used in Hiroshima mysteriously disappeared. The US occupation authorities claimed that Burchett had been taken in by Japanese propaganda about radiation. [20] They decided to let him stay in Japan and opted instead to deal with his charges about atomic sickness by simply denying that radiation had caused any problems. As a result, a New York Times reporter who had a week earlier reported witnessing sickness and death due to the lingering effects of the atomic bomb simply reversed the truth. He now reported that according to the head of the US atomic mission to Japan the bomb had not produced any “dangerous, lingering radioactivity.” [21] The Washington Post uncritically noted that the atomic mission staff had been unable to find any Japanese person suffering from radiation sickness. [22]
To drive home the point that radiation was not a problem, General Groves invited thirty reporters out to the New Mexico site where the bomb had first been tested two months earlier. This effort paid off with a banner headline in the New York Times: “U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales; Tests on New Mexico Range Confirm That Blast, and Not Radiation, Took Toll,” [23] Life magazine concluded after the escorted tour in New Mexico that no Japanese person could have died as a result of lingering radiation. [24]
In fact, radiation killed thousands of Japanese in the months after the bomb was dropped. The 1960 population census in Japan estimated that the leukemia mortality rate for persons entering Hiroshima within three days of the bombing was three times higher than it was in all of Japan. [25]
The ease with which many reporters went along with official tales about the bomb is evident as well in their acceptance of the bomb’s necessity for ending the war. Necessity in this case had three aspects: vengeance, war-driven inevitability (which was sometimes regrettable), and absence of other reasonable means for ending the war. The last aspect has survived most tenaciously up to the present. According to this view, Truman simply didn’t have any choice except to use the bomb; if he had not, somewhere between half and one million American casualties would have resulted from an invasion of the Japanese homeland. I won’t address this issue here, except to say that historians have picked apart this myth over the years, so much so that even the former chief historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission calls the bomb vs invasion view of history a myth. [26]
As the media helped to cleanse the new weapon of criticism, it also exalted the benefits of nuclearism to American life. A few months after the bombing, Atlantic magazine commented that “Through medical advances alone, atomic energy has already saved more lives than were snuffed out at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” [27] Life magazine regularly featured picture spreads and stories about the beauty and splendor of atomic energy and the glory of atomic miracles such as a Million Volt Cancer Treatment. [28] The magazine did this hand in hand with the government. For several years after the war, the photos of atomic images that Life published came mostly from the Army or the Atomic Energy Commission, rather than from its own photographers. [29] In the imagery and narrative that unfolded over time, the magazine implicitly urged its readers to set aside residual fears of atomic weapons—just as the arms race was heating up—and instead focus on the benefits and benevolence of the nuclear establishment. [30] Thus the dual nature of most media coverage—limiting the negative view of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while playing up the positive aspects of nuclearism—not only eased the bomb into American life, but it also eased the way for an all out arms race with the Soviet Union.
As the bomb got absorbed into American life and military planning, the media largely continued to toe the administration’s line about nuclear issues. Nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands and in the American heartland—in places like Nevada—produced little scrutiny. As the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been marginalized, so were the radiation victims in the Marshall Islands and the downwinders at home.
To be sure, the mass media did pose some challenges to the official narrative—John Hersey’s Hiroshima is the premier example. News outlets did publish contrary opinion and information occasionally. [31] But there was no concerted effort to investigate government claims and challenge the view of nuclear weapons that settled into place after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
* * * * * * * *
Having laid out this rather bleak story, I do want to end with a quote from Wilfred Burchett, who along with Hersey and a few others, showed what the media was capable of doing when it sided with humanity rather than with official narratives and nuclear glory: As Burchett put it,
“In visiting Hiroshima, I felt that I was seeing in the last days of [World War 2] what would be the fate of hundreds of cities in a [World War 3]. If that does not make a journalist want to shape history in the right direction, what does?” [32]
Uday Mohan is the Director of Research for American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute.
Footnotes
[1] Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Grossett/Putnam, 1995), 5.
[2] Ibid., 10. Compare Lifton and Mitchell’s account with the Department of Energy’s account of the Manhattan Project’s public relations campaign (www.mbe.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/public_reaction.htm).
[4 See, especially, Jeffery A. Smith. War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power (New York: Oxford University Press,1999).
[5] For Laurence’s impact, see ibid.; Beverly D. Keever, News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2004); and Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
[6] Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 24.
[8] “Elliston Reviews Post’s Role in Tackling Public Problems,” Washington Post, April 20, 1953, 7. For more on journalistic dissent, see Uday Mohan and Leo Maley III, “Orthodoxy and Dissent: The American News Media and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb Against Japan, 1945-1995,” in Cultural Difference, Media Memories: Anglo-American Images of Japan, ed. Phil Hammond (London: Cassell, 1997), and Uday Mohan and Leo Maley III, “Journalists and the Bomb,” op-ed distributed by the History News Service (HNS) in 2000 and published in several US newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution (published as “Blasting the A-Bomb,” 8/7/00, A11). HNS version available at www.h-net.org/~hns/articles/2000/080100a.html.
[9] An important issue not addressed here is the sense of dread the atomic bomb introduced into American life. News coverage and commentary reflected this sense of dread, but a public conversation about nuclear weapons never developed, partly because the media helped justify the atomic bombing of Japan and legitimize the existence of nuclear weapons.
[10] Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 10.
[11] Allan M. Winkler, Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 27.
[12] William L. Laurence, “Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki Told By Flight Member,” New York Times, September 9, 1945, 1 and 35.
[14] This media emphasis was perhaps understandable given the wartime mood, hatred of the Japanese, and government censorship. But at the same time, there were dissenters who suggested that a different perspective was possible regarding the use of the bomb. See references in endnote 8 and Leo Maley III and Uday Mohan, “Time to Confront the Ethics of Hiroshima,” op-ed for History News Service (www.h-net.org/~hns/articles/2005/080405b.html) published in 2005 in various U.S. newspapers; Uday Mohan and Leo Maley III, “Hiroshima: Military Voices of Dissent,” op-ed for History News Service (www.h-net.org/~hns/articles/2001/072601b.html) published in 2001 in various U.S. newspapers; and Leo Maley III and Uday Mohan, “Second-Guessing Hiroshima,” op-ed for History News Service (www.h-net.org/~hns/articles/1998/072998a.html) published in 1998 in various U.S. newspapers.
[15] George H. Roeder Jr., “Making Things Visible: Learning from the Censors,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 93.
[18] Quoted in Richard Tanter, “Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War: Wilfred Burchett and Hiroshima,” in Ben Kiernan, ed., Burchett Reporting the Other Side of the World, 1939-1983 (London: Quartet, 1986), 18.
[20] Amy Goodman with David Goodman, “Hiroshima Cover-Up: How the War Department’s Timesman Won a Pulitzer,” in Goodman with Goodman, The Exceptions to the Rulers (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 295.
[21] Lawrence’s September 5, 1945 article quoted and described in Goodman with Goodman, “Hiroshima Cover-Up,” 299-300. However, Lawrence does note in his later article that the atomic mission chief confirmed that some Japanese had died because of low counts of white corpuscles, rather than from blast- or burn-related wounds: William H. Lawrence, “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin; What Our Superfortresses Did to a Japanese Plane Production Center,” New York Times, September 13, 1945. 4. Three days earlier, Lawrence had largely dismissed Japanese claims of the lingering dangers from the atomic attack, but did note that a Dutch medical officer had confirmed that “some persons” (presumably referring to Allied POWs) had died from a “mysterious relapse” and that four Dutch soldiers had died both of their wounds and uranium after-effects: Lawrence, “Atom Bomb Killed Nagasaki Captives; 8 Allied Prisoners Victims– Survivor Doubts After-Effect,” New York Times, September 10, 1945, 1.
[22] “Radioactivity at Hiroshima Discounted,” Washington Post, September 13, 1945, 2.
[23] William L. Laurence, “U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales; Tests on New Mexico Range Confirm That Blast, and Not Radiation, Took Toll,” New York Times, September 12, 1945. 1 and 4.
[24] Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 52.
[25] Tanter, “Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War,” 26.
[26] See J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 5-6. For detailed accounts of the decision to use the bomb, see Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995) and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
[27] Quoted in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon), 123.
[28] Peter Bacon Hales, “The Mass Aesthetic of Holocaust: American Media Construct the Atomic Bomb,” Tokyo Daigaku Amerika Kenkyu Shiryo Senta Ninpo 17 (March 1996): 10.
[31] A few U.S. officials and leaders responded to these challenges with an article intended to silence the critics. Henry Stimson, who had been secretary of war under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, responded with a seemingly authoritative essay (written with the assistance of General Groves, Harvard University President James Conant, and others): “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” published in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s. For background on the intent behind and drafting of this article, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Diplomatic History 17 (Winter 1993), 35-72; James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Knopf, 1993), 279-304; and Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 445-492.
[32] Quoted in Tanter, “Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War,” 37.
United Nations – When it comes to reporting on nuclear arms, the U.S. news media let readers and viewers down, giving them only part of the story, former news anchor Walter Cronkite said Wednesday.
The celebrated CBS retiree, joining in a panel discussion on the sidelines of a U.N. conference on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, said narrow reporting means the U.S. public is “largely unaware” that the 1970 treaty obliges their government to move toward full nuclear disarmament.
“There’s been a lot in the news about nonproliferation,” Cronkite said, referring to Iran and North Korea, whose nuclear programs, under fire from the U.S. government, make daily headlines.
“But, unfortunately, the nuclear disarmament obligations of the nuclear weapons states receive far less attention in news reporting, at least in our United States,” he said.
Another panelist, Marian Hobbs, New Zealand’s minister for disarmament, also criticized media coverage of arms control.
“We need the media. We want a media that informs us of other people’s opinions, not just American opinion, or your country’s opinion,” she told the international audience.
Under the nonproliferation treaty, more than 180 countries commit to not pursuing nuclear arms, in exchange for a commitment by five nuclear powers — the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China — to negotiate toward nuclear disarmament.
North Korea has announced its withdrawal from the pact and says it has built nuclear weapons. Washington contends Iran’s nuclear program, which Tehran says is meant to produce electricity, is a cover for plans to build weapons.
Nonweapons states, on the other hand, complain increasingly that U.S. actions, such as talk of building new nuclear arms, run counter to treaty obligations.
Cronkite agreed.
“It simply seems the United States and other nuclear weapons states are actually trying to evade their obligations and responsibilities under the treaty,” he said, adding that he visited Hiroshima after the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of that Japanese city and since then has been “a campaigner to get rid of every nuclear weapon.”
Walter Cronkite is an eminent broadcast journalist and recipient of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2004 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award.
Top officials in Washington are now promoting jitters about Iran’s nuclear activities, while media outlets amplify the message. A confrontation with Tehran is on the second-term Bush agenda. So, we’re encouraged to obliquely think about the unthinkable.
But no one can get very far trying to comprehend the enormity of nuclear weapons. They’ve shadowed human consciousness for six decades. From the outset, deception has been key.
Lies from the White House have been part of the nuclear rationalizing process ever since August 1945. President Harry Truman spoke to the American public three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Calling the civilian-filled Japanese city a “military base,” Truman said: “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”
Actually, U.S. planners had sought a large urban area for the nuclear cross hairs because – as Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves later acknowledged – it was “desirable that the first target be of such size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb.” Thirty-five years later, when I looked at the U.S. Energy Department’s official roster of “Announced United States Nuclear Tests,” the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were on the list.
We’re now six decades into the Nuclear Age. And we’re farther than ever, it seems, from a momentously difficult truth that Albert Einstein uttered during its first years, when the U.S. government still held a monopoly on the split atom. “This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms,” he wrote. “For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world.”
Today, no phrase could better describe U.S. foreign policies – or American media coverage – than “narrow nationalisms.” The officials keep putting on a proudly jingoistic show, and journalists report it without fundamental challenge.
So, any whiff of sanity is conspicuous. Just before Thanksgiving, when the House and Senate voted to cut funding of research for a new line of tactical nuclear weapons including “bunker buster” warheads, the decision was reported as the most significant victory for arms-control advocates since the early 1990s. That’s because the nuclear-weapons industry has been running amok for so long.
While Uncle Sam continues to maintain a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying life on Earth, the American finger-wagging at Iran is something righteous to behold.
Current alarms, wailing about an alleged Iranian program to develop nuclear weapons, are being set off by the same Bush administration officials who declared that an invasion of Iraq was imperative because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, he didn’t. But that hasn’t stopped the Bush team from launching the same kind of media campaign against Iran – based on unverified claims by Iranian exiles with a track record of inaccuracy and a clear motive to pull Washington into military action. Sound familiar?
We ought to be able to recognize what’s wrong with U.S. officials who lecture Iran about the evils of nuclear-arms proliferation while winking at Israel’s arsenal, estimated to include 200 nuclear weapons.
When Einstein called for “the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world,” he was describing a need that news media ought to help fill. But instead, mostly we get the official stories: dumbed-down, simplistic, and – yes – narrowly nationalistic. The themes are those of Washington’s powerful: our nukes good, our allies’ nukes pretty good, unauthorized nukes very bad.
That sort of propaganda drumbeat won’t be convincing to people who doubt that a Christian Bomb is good and a Jewish Bomb is good but an Islamic Bomb is bad. You don’t have to be an Einstein to understand that people are rarely persuaded by hypocritical messages along the lines of “Do as we say, not as we do.”
There is a force – a secret force hidden wisely from our view – that makes you and me, this newspaper, our planet, our sun and the Milky Way galaxy stretching trillions of miles around us. This force is omnipresent, coursing through every particle of your body. Indeed, this force IS you. It is the most powerful force we know, a force that makes the Universe we see, by the balance – the equilibrium – in its eternal action.
57 years ago, this equilibrium was shattered when human beings split atoms within a primitive nuclear weapon. Through intervening decades, the phrase “weapon of mass destruction” has become all too well known in our lexicon.
I became familiar with the controversy surrounding weapons of mass destruction in the late 1970s, when my father and mother organized Utahns United Against the Nuclear Arms race, an activist movement that confronted the United States military and ultimately helped to defeat the monstrous MX missile “shell game” basing plan. Before and since that era, other historic visionaries have battled the nuclear weapon insanity and its obscene policy fig leaf, mutually assured destruction.
But life took me in other directions. into business, investment, and the technology breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade I pursued the American entrepreneurial dream as a CEO, driven by innovation and measured by profit. I was successful and content in this pursuit. That is, until I came to appreciate that there are other kinds of weapons of mass destruction than those launched from bunkers, subs and planes.
Since 1998, I have come to realize that weapons of mass destruction come in many forms.
A global economic program that rapes the natural world is a weapon of mass destruction far more lethal than any device in any arsenal of this world.
An energy policy that invests in destructive rather than benign production is a weapon of mass destruction.
Copyright and patent laws that artificially inflate the cost of sharing stories, songs, and science are weapons of mass destruction.
Education systems that fail our children are weapons of mass destruction.
Media that places ratings over truth is a weapon of mass destruction.
A national security policy that shreds the sacred civil liberties within our democracy, and which sheds the international obligations between democracies, is a weapon of mass destruction.
Indeed, a nation – our nation – whose high-school history teacher has a deeper grasp of world affairs than the man it entrusts with the future history of the world… is a weapon of mass destruction.
To be sure, Saddam Hussein’s attempts to develop devices of mass destruction must be halted by the community of nations. But at the same time, we must ask ourselves: how can such devices best be eliminated from every nation’s arsenal? Shall it be by the development, testing and deployment of more such devices by a 21st century empire? Or rather by the global abolition of them, and a global program of verification, catalyzed by the greatest democracy the world has ever known?
To me, one thing seems certain: we will not succeed in eliminating devices of mass destruction while we fail in eliminating policies of mass destruction. I find myself in rare agreement with George Bush in saying that we cannot allow the world’s worst leaders to use the world’s most dangerous weapons. I am hard pressed to identify a single major policy initiative of the Bush administration that is not a weapon of mass destruction.
The elections of 2002 and 2004 are our opportunities for regime change. Let us use them wisely.
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was pleased to welcome Robert Scheer, one of the nation’s most outspoken and progressive journalists, Professor of Communications at the University of Southern California, and Editor-In-Chief of Truthdig.com, to deliver the 15th Annual Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future.