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Philip Berrigan’s
Nightmare: That the “game” of 57 years of nuclearism, and its consequent wasting of our lives and planet be revealed. (P. Berrigan) Recently special attention has been brought to bear on the dangers posed by weapons of mass destruction—notably, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by ever more countries and the specter of nuclear terrorism. Today, writes Benjamin Schwartz in “The Perils of Primacy” (The Atlantic, January/ February 2006) one country is on the verge of establishing true nuclear primacy. “Ironically, America’s nuclear dominance may dramatically diminish its security.” In “The End of Mutual Assured Destruction” Kair A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press demonstrate the deep decay of Russia’s nuclear capabilities and the absence of any Chinese threat. On the other hand, America’s nuclear forces have become far more lethal. These improvements are inconsistent with the aim of simply deterring an adversary’s nuclear attack. They are necessary for a disarming “counter-strike” aimed at pre-empting a nuclear attack—and hence winning a nuclear war. “What the planned force appears best suited to provide . . . is a preemptive counterforce capability against Russia and China (emphasis in original).” In the June 2005 Atlantic, Robert D. Kaplan presents a strategy for what he calls World War V: “How We Would Fight China” The Middle East is just a blip. The American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty-first century. The United States will act, for the most part, unilaterally, and the functional substitute for a NATO of the Pacific will be the U.S. Pacific Command, known as PACOM. Unencumbered by a diplomatic bureaucracy,. PACOM is a large but nimble nuclear-driven construct. “The result is likely to be the defining military conflict of the twenty-first century: if not a big war with China, then a series of Cold War-style standoffs that stretch over years and decades.” But, confronted with the growing nuclear imbalance, Russia and China will be forced to redress it. “We should expect a new, prolonged, and intense nuclear arms race,” Lieber and Press conclude. The end of America’s “no first use” nuclear weapons policy has aroused a somewhat predictable response in other nations. Chinese major general Zhu Chenghu announced in July 2005 that China’s government was under internal pressure to change its “no first use” policy. “If the Americans draw their missiles and position guided ammunition on to the target zone on China’s territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons.” Moscow and Beijing will surely buy deterrence by spreading out their nuclear forces, decentralizing their command-andcontrol systems and implementing “launch on warning” policies. All these steps can cause crises to escalate uncontrollably. They could trigger the unauthorized or accidental use of nuclear weapons; this could lead to inadvertent nuclear war. Benjamin Schwartz, the literary editor and national editor of The Atlantic, concluded his essay, “The Perils of Primacy: When Too Much Power Means not enough Security”: Without any public scrutiny or debate the United States has emerged as the nuclear hegemon in possession of a destabilizing first-strike capability . . . the condition itself is the problem . . . It’s time for scrutiny and debate to begin. Of course, Philip Berrigan spent his whole adult life exposing the problem and was imprisoned eleven years for his efforts. In fact all of the high-tech weapons and their producers mentioned by Schwartz and Kaplan were at one time the objects of non-violent actions by Berrigan and Plowshares. “The Point of No Return” by William Langewiesche (The Atlantic, January/February 2006) explains how Pakistan’s A.0 Khan showed that any country could have made a nuclear bomb. ‘Then he showed—not once but three times—why the nuclear trade will never shut down.” At the same time the United States placed greater importance on propping up various Pakistani regimes and supporting India’s nuclear program for geopolitical reasons than stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. The result: a nuclear confrontation in which Steve Coll in a New Yorker essay, “The Stand-Off,” writes: Still, some Indian and Pakistani military officers and civilian officials I spoke to say that the 2001-02 war scare was their Cuban missile crisis—a confrontation that came so close to catastrophe that it shocked both sides into a new approach to nuclear deterrence, one that is grounded in military restraint, political patience, and negotiations about underlying grievances. Coll visited Jaswant Singh, a former Indian foreign minister. Singh concluded that India must try to develop its own model for a campaign against terrorism. “The American experience has led you to an excessive militarization. I’m not sure that is the answer.” In the Middle East the United States and Israel with the cooperation of some European countries have been stoking a climate of fear to justify a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In January Jacques Chirac made a highly irresponsible statement that France might resort to nuclear weapons to retaliate for acts of state-sponsored terrorism, a posture that could only persuade Iran to deter such nuclear trash-talk by attempting to get the bomb. (See Richard Falk, “Storm Clouds Over Asia,” The Nation.) The United States, bogged down in a ground war in Iraq, would welcome a high-tech vaporization of alleged missile sites in Iran. According to John Bolton, the American ambassador to the U.N., who is a long-time Cheney confidant and protege of Jesse Helms, the solution to war is more war. Ironically, Bolton, while Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, was an ardent champion of the nuclear “bunker-buster” to attack suspected nuclear missile sites and also sought to purge the nuclear non-proliferation treaty of any mention of disarmament. Upon arrival at the U.N., Bolton campaigned for the ouster of Mohammad El Baradei, the Head of the International Atomic Energy Commission for being a “devious liberal internationalist” and “too soft on Iran.” El Baradei, a refined and popular diplomat and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, is the antithesis of Bolton. He argues the practical wisdom of seeking multi-lateral nuclear disarmament as the only course that has any prospect of halting proliferation. Furthermore an attack on Iran would further weaken the U.N. and international law and would have far-reaching worldwide consequences. In short, “the Iran confrontation is best regarded as one more wake-up call for the nuclear weapons states,” writes Richard Falk in his The Nation article. The contempt of Bolton for Mohammad El Baradei reflects the downfall of civilian diplomacy and active peace groups. Peace is no longer serious; only war is serious. The military metaphysics, to which the civilian elite (whether Republican or Democrat) now clings, defines warfare as the only reality, that is to say, the necessity of our time. Thus the condition that worried C. Wright Mills in 1956 has come to pass in our own day. Mills wrote “men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without a foreseeable end.” While in earlier times Americans had received history as “a peaceful continuum interrupted by war,” today planning, preparing and waging war have become “the normal state and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.” And “the only accepted ‘plan’ for peace is the loaded pistol.” (See The Power Elite. This book, written in 1956, could have been written yesterday with only the names changed.) Andrew Bacevich in a “short take” in Commonweal entitled “The Cult of National Security” observes the problem as stemming not from conspirators in the White House but from twin convictions to which all members of the political elite, and much of the public, devotedly subscribe: According to the first of these convictions, the United States is a nation under siege, beset by dire threats, its very survival at risk. According to the second, only the capacity and willingness to use all of the instruments of executive and military power, instantly and without hesitation, keep our enemies at bay. The national security state demands a vast arsenal of strategic high-tech and nuclear weapons systems kept ready for instant employment. Fifty percent of the Department of Energy budget goes to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a semi-autonomous and secret branch. Although nuclear testing was ended in 1993, at Livermore, California the National Ignition Facility (NIF) fires laser beams at radioactive hydrogen fuel pellets in order to study the effects of a nuclear fusion explosion. Los Alamos, for its part, got the Dual Access Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test (DARHT), which uses giant x-ray machines to create images of mock nuclear weapons. These devoted armies of scientist-bureaucrats planning, managing, budgeting, and elevating group-think to a fine art, have, since the 1950s, manufactured the fallacious (even fraudulent) case for vulnerability to nudge their strategic “priesthood” around a corner and down a path ending some four decades later in a fully developed argument for nuclear hegemony and preventive war as the cornerstone of U.S. strategy. Habits and routines that became hard-wired during the cold war, but whose relevance to a post-9/11 world has become highly questionable, require critical reexamination. These include that national-security policy should remain the special purview of a small elite operating in an atmosphere of secrecy; that the principal mission of the Department of Defense is not defense but “global power projection.” It’s amazing how Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense can produce a 439 billion spending plan and still skimp on funding the troops in Iraq,” editorializes the New York Times. The military services continue to pour their money into fighting fictive superpowers in the wild blue yonder and on and beyond the seven seas. Billions for the construction of stealth destroyers and new nuclear attack submarines, billions for new stealth bombers and fighter jets. “In all, the Pentagon is asking for 84 billion to buy weapons systems and 73 billion more for research and development” (New York Times). This criminal misallocation of resources enables the corporate-military-scientific contractors to do just fine, while the veterans from Iraq and the victims of Katrina need help from Washington. Bacevich suggests that we might focus on a question that has thus far remained largely off limits:
Of course dissenting views already exist. A rich tradition of American pacifism abhors the resort to violence as always and in every case wrong. Advocates of disarmament argue that by their very existence weapons are an incitement to violence. In the latter camp, the shortest road to peace begins with the beating of swords into ploughshares. These are principled views that deserve a hearing, more so today than ever. By discomfiting the majority, advocates of such views serve the common good. Finally, words from Phil Berrigan to Father John McNamee, dated December 2, 1992.
David Graham |