Moments after hearing about North Korea’s nuclear test, I thought
of Albert Einstein’s statement that “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.”
During the six decades since Einstein spoke, experience has shown
that such understanding and insistence cannot be filtered through the
grid of hypocrisy. Nuclear weapons can’t be controlled by saying, in
effect, “Do as we say, not as we do.” By developing their own nuclear
weaponry, one nation after another has replied to the nuclear-armed
states: Whatever you say, we’ll do as you’ve done.
In early summer, with some fanfare, officials in Washington
announced the dismantling of the last W56 nuclear warhead -- a 1.2
megaton model from the 1960s. Self-congratulation was in the air, as a
statement hailed “our firm commitment to reducing the size of the
nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile to the lowest levels necessary for
national security needs.” That’s the kind of soothing PR that we’ve
been getting ever since the nuclear age began.
Right now, the U.S. government has upwards of 10,000 nuclear bombs
and warheads in its arsenal. And -- as the Washington Post uncritically
reported the same week as the announcement about the end of the W56
warhead -- Congress and the White House are resolutely moving ahead
with plans for “a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons” under the
rubric of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program: “The nation’s two
nuclear weapons design centers, the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore
national laboratories, are competing to design the first RRW.... A
second RRW design competition may provide an opportunity to the losing
lab.”
For more than 50 years, Washington has preached the global virtues
of “peaceful” nuclear power reactors -- while denying their huge
inherent dangers and their crucial role in proliferating nuclear
weaponry. The denial meant that people and the environment would suffer
all along the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to nuclear waste;
and that the 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island would be followed by
the continuing horrors of Chernobyl.
In recent decades, the denial has also spread nuclear weapons
across the planet. Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea can thank the
apostles of the nuclear-power gospel -- and the companion profiteers of
nuclear exports -- for the technological pipeline that has funneled the
capacity to develop nuclear weapons.
President Dwight Eisenhower’s delusional and deluding speech to
the U.N. General Assembly on Dec. 8, 1953, now has a macabre echo: “The
United States pledges before you -- and therefore before the world --
its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma -- to devote
its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous
inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but
consecrated to his life.”
Running parallel to the mendacious career of the “peaceful atom,”
U.S. foreign policy has hit new lows during the last several years. The
invasion of Iraq, on the pretext of non-existent WMDs, sent a powerful
message. If the U.S. government was inclined to launch an attack before
a country had the capability to generate a mushroom cloud, then the
country would be protected from such attack by developing nuclear
weapons as soon as possible.
Coupled with the contempt for genuine diplomacy that the Bush
administration has repeatedly shown, Washington’s eagerness to use
military might has fueled the dangers of a nuclear-weapons standoff
with North Korea. Two of the sacred axioms of the Bush regime --
secrecy and violence -- cannot solve this problem and in fact can only
make it worse. Einstein was correct; with nuclear weapons, “there is no
secret and there is no defense.”
As for “the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of
the world” -- that will need to come from us. Starting now.
Rest assured that while President Bush was at a podium in the
White House on Oct. 9 denouncing the North Korean nuclear test as a
“provocative act,” Karl Rove was hard at work to fine-tune plans for a
rhetorical onslaught linking this crisis to the “war on terror.” Bush
was already laying the groundwork for such an effort as he spoke --
warning of “a grave threat to the United States” if North Korea gives
nuclear-related technology to “any state or non-state actor.”
The Bush administration will do its best to exploit the North
Korean nuclear test to stave off a loss of the Republican majority in
Congress. We should not allow those efforts to obscure how Bush’s
reckless record has heightened the nuclear dangers for everyone.
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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