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This
month's anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompts
only the most somber reflection and most fervent hope that the horror
may never be repeated.
In the subsequent 60 years, those bombings have haunted the world's
imagination but not so much as to curb the development and spread of
infinitely more lethal weapons of mass destruction.
A related concern, discussed in technical literature well before 9-11,
is that nuclear weapons may sooner or later fall into the hands of
terrorist groups.
The recent explosions
and casualties in London are yet another reminder of how the cycle of
attack and response could escalate, unpredictably, even to a point
horrifically worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
The world's reigning power accords itself the right to
wage war at will, under a doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense" that
covers any contingency it chooses. The means of destruction are to be
unlimited.
U.S.
military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world
combined, while arms sales by 38 North American companies (one in
Canada) account for over 60 percent of the world total (which rose 25
percent since 2002).
There
have been efforts to strengthen the thin thread on which survival
hangs. The most important is the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,
which came into force in 1970. The regular five-year review conference
of the NPT took place at the United Nations in May.
The NPT
has been facing collapse, primarily because of the failure of the
nuclear states to live up their obligation under Article VI to pursue
"good faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. The United States
has led the way in refusal to abide by the Article VI obligations.
Mohamed El-Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency,
emphasizes that "reluctance by one party to fulfill its obligations
breeds reluctance in others."
President
Jimmy Carter blasted the United States as "the major culprit in this
erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from
proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American
leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also
have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including
antiballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating 'bunker buster' and
perhaps some new 'small' bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges
and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear
states."
The
thread has almost snapped in the years since Hiroshima, repeatedly.
The best known case was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, "the
most dangerous moment in human history," as Arthur Schlesinger,
historian and former adviser to President John F. Kennedy, observed in
October 2002 at a retrospective conference in Havana.
The world
"came within a hair's breadth of nuclear disaster," recalls Robert
McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, who also attended the
retrospective. In the May-June issue of Foreign Policy, he accompanies
this reminder with a renewed warning of "apocalypse soon."
McNamara
regards "current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal,
militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous," creating
"unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own," both the risk of
"accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch," which is "unacceptably
high," and of nuclear attack by terrorists. McNamara endorses the
judgment of William Perry, President Bill Clinton's defense secretary,
that "there is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear
strike on U.S. targets within a decade."
Similar
judgments are commonly expressed by prominent strategic analysts. In
his book "Nuclear Terrorism," Harvard international relations
specialist Graham Allison reports the "consensus in the national
security community" (of which he has been a part) that a "dirty bomb"
attack is "inevitable," and an attack with a nuclear weapon highly
likely, if fissionable materials _ the essential ingredient _ are not
retrieved and secured.
Allison
reviews the partial success of efforts to do so since the early 1990s,
under the initiatives of Sen. Sam Nunn and Sen. Richard Lugar, and the
setback to these programs from the first days of the Bush
administration, paralyzed by what Sen. Joseph Biden called
"ideological idiocy."
The
Washington leadership has put aside nonproliferation programs and
devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by
extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created
in Iraq.
The
threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along
with jihadi terrorism.
A
high-level review of the "war on terror" two years after the invasion
"focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of
terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple years," Susan B.
Glasser reports in The Washington Post. "Top government officials are
increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called
'the bleed out' of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists
back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western
Europe. 'It's a new piece of a new equation,' a former senior Bush
administration official said. 'If you don't know who they are in Iraq,
how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?'"
U.S. terrorism
specialist Peter Bergen says in The Boston Globe that "the president
is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this
is a front we created."
Shortly after the London bombing, Chatham House, Britain's premier
foreign affairs institution, released a study drawing the obvious
conclusion _ denied with outrage by the government _ that "the UK is
at particular risk because it is the closest ally of the United
States, has deployed armed forces in the military campaigns to topple
the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and in Iraq ... (and is) a pillion
passenger" of American policy, sitting behind the driver of the
motorcycle.
The probability of
apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely
too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity. While
speculation is pointless, reaction to the threat of another Hiroshima
is definitely not.
On
the contrary, it is urgent, particularly in the United States, because
of Washington's primary role in accelerating the race to destruction
by extending its historically unique military dominance.
Noam
Chomsky
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate
August 2005
Psicolinea September 2005
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