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94664
Sun, 12/13/2009 - 00:46
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Nuclear wisdom
TEHRAN, Dec. 12 (MNA) -- “The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war,” declared Nobel Peace Prize laureate Linus Pauling in a lecture presented in December of 1963.
Nuclear weapons are thousands of times more powerful than conventional weapons. By analogy, nuclear wisdom is thousands of times more powerful than conventional wisdom.
Conventional wisdom views the world in terms of threats to economic domination and perceives the nuclear bomb as its ultimate weapon. Nuclear wisdom views the world in terms of threats to fulfilling human needs and perceives justice as its ultimate weapon.
Dr. Pauling’s words, spoken after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for 1962, are an example of nuclear wisdom. They remain an antidote to the insane conventional wisdom prevailing in the United States, which assumes as axiomatic the veracity of American exceptionalism, the inevitability of war, and the necessity of ever-increasing “defense” budgets to ensure U.S. hegemony.
In December 1964, another Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., warned, “Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race which no one can win to a positive contest to harness man’s creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all of the nations of the world.”
At the time Dr. King spoke those eloquent words, the U.S. had already amassed over 30,000 nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Meaningful progress towards disarmament and world peace remains elusive as a renewed nuclear arms race looms, which would include deploying weapons in space. War, poverty, hunger, and injustice continue to plague humanity just as they did 45 years ago.
The conventional wisdom of the Cold War postulated the need to stockpile ever more powerful nuclear bombs to counter the “communist threat”. It viewed the United States as the unique peace-loving defender of human rights among the nations of the world that would never use its nuclear arsenal to attack others, albeit the obvious non sequitur of the U.S. nuclear first strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The conventional wisdom of that day also postulated the survivability of a massive nuclear attack. Schools conducted duck-and-cover drills, neighbors built backyard bomb shelters to protect against radioactive fallout, and the DEW line radar installations in Canada scanned the skies for the Soviet nuclear missile attack which never came.
Another dictum embraced by conventional wisdom was the need for atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. I vividly recall my mother’s shock and outrage when she learned that the milk she bought was contaminated with the carcinogens strontium 90 and iodine 131 due to radioactive fallout from nearby U.S. open-air atomic bomb explosions. The children who drank that fallout-laced milk face up to twice the risk of thyroid cancer.
Conventional wisdom paved the way for nuclear arms to become a tool of U.S. foreign policy. Those nations that behaved in a manner consistent with the United States’ perceived interests were rewarded with the requisite atomic bomb-building technology and those that did not were branded as pariahs and denied nuclear expertise.
Pakistan, for example, was permitted to pursue the technology for an atomic bomb while the U.S. high command looked the other way. However, the tacit U.S. permission to build nuclear weapons was withdrawn after former president and prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ventured upon the scorned path of humanitarian efforts to actually help his people by nationalizing key industries and implementing land reform policies. First warned by Henry Kissinger that he “would have to pay a heavy price,” he was then arrested on the orders of U.S.-supported dictator General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and finally executed on April 4, 1979.
Israel is another case in point and remains an undeclared nuclear player to this day, with an estimated arsenal of 200 nuclear weapons. The U.S. was well aware of the Dimona nuclear facility by 1958 and was convinced that Israel was seeking atomic bombs. While never officially condoning the Zionist nuclear arms program, the U.S. also did nothing to stop it, and watched as Israel’s arsenal grew from two weapons in 1967 to over 200 today.
Today, the conventional wisdom doggedly drones that Iran is a nuclear threat, despite the fact that Iran doesn’t possess a single nuclear weapon, has no nuclear weapons program, and has openly declared its abhorrence of nuclear warfare.
Recently, another world famous Black American has won the Nobel Peace Prize. “Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics,” declared the Norwegian Nobel Committee, adding, “The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations.”
I congratulate President Obama on receipt of this honor, but fail to see any substantive progress being made on the issue of nuclear disarmament. Thirteen years have passed since the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was signed, and while President Obama has voiced his support, it still remains to be ratified. In fact, the United States was the only nation to vote against a 2008 UN General Assembly resolution calling for its entry into force.
Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican’s Permanent Observer at the UN, also questioned progress on disarmament, referring to the 13-year-old CTBT and the lack of nine ratifications preventing its enforcement. The archbishop also questioned the efforts of world leaders who increased military spending by 4 percent in a year of economic crisis.
The U.S., China, Israel, and North Korea have all failed to ratify the treaty while Pakistan and India have outright refused to sign it. Former IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei warned, “Without the CTBT, we will continue to see qualitative development of nuclear weapons. Without the CTBT in force, we risk that new countries might in fact be tempted to test nuclear weapons -- without violating any legal norm.”
Our collective experience over the last 50-odd years has shown that the nuclear powers lack the ability, incentive, determination, and, I might add, the wisdom to resolve these issues. As succinctly put by Dr. King, “We will take direct action against injustice despite the failure of governmental and other official agencies to act first.”
The nuclear wisdom expressed by Dr. King and Dr. Pauling compels us to take action. For if Iran poses a hypothetical threat, then logically, how much more menacing is the threat posed by Israel’s very real arsenal of 200-plus nuclear weapons? And how much graver is the threat posed by the U.S. arsenal of 2,200 operationally deployed nuclear warheads with thousands more stockpiled as spares?
We must replace the conventional wisdom of maintaining world peace by threat of nuclear mass destruction with the nuclear wisdom of abolishing war and maintaining peace through justice. As the world’s most daunting nuclear power, the U.S. is obligated to take the lead and must be compelled by all peaceful means to do so.
As a first step, the U.S. could lead the way by ratifying the CTBT. As a second step, it could renounce the use of nuclear weapons as Iran has done. As a third step, the U.S. could formally apologize for the nuclear atrocities it committed against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And as a giant fourth step, it could set an example for the world by beginning to disarm unilaterally.
But this is undoubtedly expecting too much of a country that seems obsessed with squandering billions of dollars to rescue banks while ignoring an ever-increasing number of jobless and homeless citizens.
(Dec. 13 Times Perspective Column, by Yuram Abdullah Weiler)
Nuclear weapons are thousands of times more powerful than conventional weapons. By analogy, nuclear wisdom is thousands of times more powerful than conventional wisdom.
Conventional wisdom views the world in terms of threats to economic domination and perceives the nuclear bomb as its ultimate weapon. Nuclear wisdom views the world in terms of threats to fulfilling human needs and perceives justice as its ultimate weapon.
Dr. Pauling’s words, spoken after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for 1962, are an example of nuclear wisdom. They remain an antidote to the insane conventional wisdom prevailing in the United States, which assumes as axiomatic the veracity of American exceptionalism, the inevitability of war, and the necessity of ever-increasing “defense” budgets to ensure U.S. hegemony.
In December 1964, another Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., warned, “Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race which no one can win to a positive contest to harness man’s creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all of the nations of the world.”
At the time Dr. King spoke those eloquent words, the U.S. had already amassed over 30,000 nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Meaningful progress towards disarmament and world peace remains elusive as a renewed nuclear arms race looms, which would include deploying weapons in space. War, poverty, hunger, and injustice continue to plague humanity just as they did 45 years ago.
The conventional wisdom of the Cold War postulated the need to stockpile ever more powerful nuclear bombs to counter the “communist threat”. It viewed the United States as the unique peace-loving defender of human rights among the nations of the world that would never use its nuclear arsenal to attack others, albeit the obvious non sequitur of the U.S. nuclear first strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The conventional wisdom of that day also postulated the survivability of a massive nuclear attack. Schools conducted duck-and-cover drills, neighbors built backyard bomb shelters to protect against radioactive fallout, and the DEW line radar installations in Canada scanned the skies for the Soviet nuclear missile attack which never came.
Another dictum embraced by conventional wisdom was the need for atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. I vividly recall my mother’s shock and outrage when she learned that the milk she bought was contaminated with the carcinogens strontium 90 and iodine 131 due to radioactive fallout from nearby U.S. open-air atomic bomb explosions. The children who drank that fallout-laced milk face up to twice the risk of thyroid cancer.
Conventional wisdom paved the way for nuclear arms to become a tool of U.S. foreign policy. Those nations that behaved in a manner consistent with the United States’ perceived interests were rewarded with the requisite atomic bomb-building technology and those that did not were branded as pariahs and denied nuclear expertise.
Pakistan, for example, was permitted to pursue the technology for an atomic bomb while the U.S. high command looked the other way. However, the tacit U.S. permission to build nuclear weapons was withdrawn after former president and prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ventured upon the scorned path of humanitarian efforts to actually help his people by nationalizing key industries and implementing land reform policies. First warned by Henry Kissinger that he “would have to pay a heavy price,” he was then arrested on the orders of U.S.-supported dictator General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and finally executed on April 4, 1979.
Israel is another case in point and remains an undeclared nuclear player to this day, with an estimated arsenal of 200 nuclear weapons. The U.S. was well aware of the Dimona nuclear facility by 1958 and was convinced that Israel was seeking atomic bombs. While never officially condoning the Zionist nuclear arms program, the U.S. also did nothing to stop it, and watched as Israel’s arsenal grew from two weapons in 1967 to over 200 today.
Today, the conventional wisdom doggedly drones that Iran is a nuclear threat, despite the fact that Iran doesn’t possess a single nuclear weapon, has no nuclear weapons program, and has openly declared its abhorrence of nuclear warfare.
Recently, another world famous Black American has won the Nobel Peace Prize. “Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics,” declared the Norwegian Nobel Committee, adding, “The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations.”
I congratulate President Obama on receipt of this honor, but fail to see any substantive progress being made on the issue of nuclear disarmament. Thirteen years have passed since the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was signed, and while President Obama has voiced his support, it still remains to be ratified. In fact, the United States was the only nation to vote against a 2008 UN General Assembly resolution calling for its entry into force.
Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican’s Permanent Observer at the UN, also questioned progress on disarmament, referring to the 13-year-old CTBT and the lack of nine ratifications preventing its enforcement. The archbishop also questioned the efforts of world leaders who increased military spending by 4 percent in a year of economic crisis.
The U.S., China, Israel, and North Korea have all failed to ratify the treaty while Pakistan and India have outright refused to sign it. Former IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei warned, “Without the CTBT, we will continue to see qualitative development of nuclear weapons. Without the CTBT in force, we risk that new countries might in fact be tempted to test nuclear weapons -- without violating any legal norm.”
Our collective experience over the last 50-odd years has shown that the nuclear powers lack the ability, incentive, determination, and, I might add, the wisdom to resolve these issues. As succinctly put by Dr. King, “We will take direct action against injustice despite the failure of governmental and other official agencies to act first.”
The nuclear wisdom expressed by Dr. King and Dr. Pauling compels us to take action. For if Iran poses a hypothetical threat, then logically, how much more menacing is the threat posed by Israel’s very real arsenal of 200-plus nuclear weapons? And how much graver is the threat posed by the U.S. arsenal of 2,200 operationally deployed nuclear warheads with thousands more stockpiled as spares?
We must replace the conventional wisdom of maintaining world peace by threat of nuclear mass destruction with the nuclear wisdom of abolishing war and maintaining peace through justice. As the world’s most daunting nuclear power, the U.S. is obligated to take the lead and must be compelled by all peaceful means to do so.
As a first step, the U.S. could lead the way by ratifying the CTBT. As a second step, it could renounce the use of nuclear weapons as Iran has done. As a third step, the U.S. could formally apologize for the nuclear atrocities it committed against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And as a giant fourth step, it could set an example for the world by beginning to disarm unilaterally.
But this is undoubtedly expecting too much of a country that seems obsessed with squandering billions of dollars to rescue banks while ignoring an ever-increasing number of jobless and homeless citizens.
(Dec. 13 Times Perspective Column, by Yuram Abdullah Weiler)
