Since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago, nuclear
weaponry has been mostly relegated to back pages and mental back burners
in the United States. A big media uproar about nuclear weapons is apt to
happen only when the man in the Oval Office has chosen to make an issue
of them.
Sometimes a “nuclear threat” has been imaginary. During the lead-up
to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration went into rhetorical
overdrive -- fabricating evidence and warning that an ostensible smoking
gun could turn into a mushroom cloud. The White House publicly obsessed
about an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program that didn’t exist.
In sharp contrast, North Korea really seems to have a nuclear
warhead or two. And because the Pyongyang regime is apparently
nuclear-armed, Bush isn’t likely to order an attack on that country, as
he did against Iraq and as he has been not-too-subtly threatening to do
against Iran.
By all credible accounts, Tehran is at least several years -- and
probably more like a full decade -- away from acquiring a nuclear bomb.
But America’s top officials and leading pundits have been sounding urgent
alarms.
Judging from the frequent denunciations of some countries for
alleged plans to build a nuclear arsenal, you might think that the U.S.
media are down on nuclear weapons. Not so.
Red-white-and-blue nuclear weaponry has been depicted by U.S. news
media as a reassuring guarantor of national security -- or at worst an
unfortunate necessity -- since the nuclear age went public 61 years ago
with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
That first atomic bombing of Japan came three days before an initial
presidential lie about U.S. nuclear weapons policies. The lie was huge,
but very few journalists in the United States have ever done so much as
murmur a complaint about it.
On Aug. 9, 1945, President Harry Truman told the public this
whopper: “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, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.”
Actually, the U.S. government went out of its way to select Japanese
cities of sufficient size to showcase the extent of the A-bomb’s deadly
power -- in Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and in Nagasaki on Aug. 9. As a result of
those two bombings, hundreds of thousands of civilians died, immediately
or eventually. If Truman’s conscience had been clear, it’s doubtful he
would have felt compelled to engage in such a basic distortion at the
dawn of the nuclear era.
The scientific know-how of the Manhattan Project that developed the
atomic bomb was headquartered at the secret Los Alamos laboratory in
northern New Mexico beginning in the spring of 1943. Today, that one
laboratory has a $2 billion annual budget, with most of the money devoted
to the lab’s key role in helping to maintain the “reliability and safety”
of the U.S. government’s nuclear arsenal -- which currently includes
about 10,000 thermonuclear weapons. But you’d have to search far and wide
to find mainstream American news coverage that raises fundamental
questions about that arsenal as any kind of “nuclear threat.”
Meanwhile, experts say that the Israeli government now has about 200
nuclear weapons. Israel’s military actions in recent weeks underscore its
willingness to use high-tech weaponry for reckless offensives that kill
many civilians.
But in U.S. news media, the implicit message is that American
nuclear bombs are A-OK, and the fact that Washington’s ally Israel
maintains a large nuclear arsenal is supposed to be no cause for major
concern.
Until the moment when events prove otherwise, the policy of
deploying an array of nuclear weapons with the rationale of “deterrence”
can convince the faithful that the nuclear priesthood in Washington is
worthy of our trust.
But, going deeper than nationalistic blind faith, some important
questions should be considered. Last week, the Latin American writer
Eduardo Galeano asked two of them: “Who calibrates the universal
dangerometer? Was Iran the country that dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki
and Hiroshima?”
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The paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy:
How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” was published this
summer. For information, go to:
www.warmadeeasy.com.
