DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA It's still a MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD
world By William D Hartung
There was a time when nuclear weapons were
a significant part of our national conversation.
Addressing the issue of potential atomic
annihilation was once described by nuclear
theorist Herman Kahn as "thinking about the
unthinkable", but that didn't keep us from
thinking, talking, fantasizing, worrying about it,
or putting images of possible nuclear nightmares
(often transmuted to invading aliens or outer
space) endlessly on screen.
Now, on a
planet still overstocked with city-busting,
world-ending weaponry, in which almost 67 years
have passed since a nuclear weapon was last used,
the only nuke that Americans regularly hear about
is one that doesn't exist: Iran's. The nearly 20,000
nuclear weapons on
missiles, planes, and submarines possessed by
Russia, the United States, France, the United
Kingdom, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North
Korea are barely mentioned in what passes for
press coverage of the nuclear issue.
Today, nuclear destruction finds itself at
the end of a long queue of anxieties about our
planet and its fate. For some reason, we trust
ourselves, our allies, and even our former enemies
with nuclear arms - evidently so deeply that we
don't seem to think the staggering arsenals filled
with weaponry that could put the devastation of
Hiroshima to shame are worth covering or dealing
with. Even the disaster at Fukushima last year
didn't revive an interest in the weaponry that
goes with the "peaceful" atom in our world.
Attending to the bomb in a MAD
world Our views of the nuclear issue
haven't always been so shortsighted. In the 1950s,
editor and essayist Norman Cousins was typical in
frequently tackling nuclear weapons issues for the
widely read magazine Saturday Review. In the late
1950s and beyond, the Ban the Bomb movement forced
the nuclear weapons issue onto the global agenda,
gaining international attention when it was
revealed that Strontium-90, a byproduct of nuclear
testing, was making its way into mothers' breast
milk. In those years, the nuclear issue became
personal as well as political.
In the
early 1960s, President John F Kennedy responded to
public pressure by signing a treaty with Russia
that banned atmospheric nuclear testing (and so
further Strontium-90 fallout). He also gave a
dramatic speech to the United Nations in which he
spoke of the nuclear arms race as a "sword of
Damocles" hanging over the human race, poised to
destroy us at any moment.
Popular films
like Fail-Safe and Dr Strangelove
captured both the dangers and the absurdity of the
superpower arms race. And when, on the night of
October 22, 1962, Kennedy took to the airwaves to
warn the American people that a Cuban missile
crisis was underway, that it was nuclear in
nature, that a Soviet nuclear attack and a "full
retaliatory strike on the Soviet Union" were
possibilities - arguably the closest we have come
to a global nuclear war - it certainly got
everyone's attention.
All things nuclear
receded from public consciousness as the Vietnam
War escalated and became the focus of antiwar
activism and debate, but the nuclear issue came
back with a vengeance in the Ronald Reagan years
of the early 1980s when superpower confrontations
once again were in the headlines. A growing
anti-nuclear movement first focused on a
near-disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear
plant in Pennsylvania (the Fukushima of its
moment) and then on the superpower nuclear
stand-off that went by the name of "mutually
assured destruction" or, appropriately enough, the
acronym MAD.
The Nuclear Freeze Campaign
generated scores of anti-nuclear resolutions in
cities and towns around the country, and in June
1982, a record-breaking million people gathered in
New York City's Central Park to call for nuclear
disarmament. If anyone managed to miss this
historic outpouring of anti-nuclear sentiment, ABC
news aired a prime-time, made-for-TV movie, The
Day After, that offered a remarkably graphic
depiction of the missiles leaving their silos and
the devastating consequences of a nuclear war. It
riveted a nation.
The collapse of the
Soviet Union and the end of that planetary
superpower rivalry less than a decade later took
nuclear weapons out of the news. After all, with
the Cold War over and no other rivals to the
United States, who needed such weaponry or a MAD
world either? The only problem was that the global
nuclear landscape was left more or less intact,
mission-less but largely untouched (with the
proliferation of the weapons to other countries
ongoing). Unacknowledged as it may be, in some
sense MAD still exists, even if we prefer to
pretend that it doesn't.
A MAD world
that no one cares to notice More than 20
years later, the only nuclear issue considered
worth the bother is stopping the spread of the
bomb to a couple of admittedly scary and
problematic regimes: Iran and North Korea. Their
nuclear efforts make the news regularly and garner
attention (to the point of obsession) in media and
government circles. But remind me: when was the
last time you read about what should be the
ultimate (and obvious) goal - getting rid of
nuclear weapons altogether?
This has been
our reality, despite President Obama's pledge in
Prague back in 2009 to seek "the peace and
security of a world without nuclear weapons", and
the passage of a modest but important New START
arms reduction treaty between the United States
and Russia in 2010. It remains our reality,
despite a dawning realization in budget-anxious
Washington that we may no longer be able to afford
to throw money (as presently planned) at nuclear
projects ranging from new ballistic-missile
submarines to new facilities for building nuclear
warhead components - all of which are slated to
keep the secret global nuclear arms race alive and
well decades into the future.
If Iran is
worth talking about - and it is, given the
implications of an Iranian bomb for further
nuclear proliferation in the Middle East - what
about the arsenals of the actual nuclear states?
What about Pakistan, a destabilizing country which
has at least 110 nuclear warheads and counting,
and continues to view India as its primary
adversary despite US efforts to get it to focus on
al-Qaeda and the Taliban?
What about
India's roughly 100 nuclear warheads, meant to
send a message not just to Pakistan but to
neighboring China as well? And will China hold pat
at 240 or so nuclear weapons in the face of US
nuclear modernization efforts and plans to
surround it with missile defense systems that
could, in theory if not practice, blunt China's
nuclear deterrent force?
Will Israel
continue to get a free pass on its officially
unacknowledged possession of up to 200 nuclear
warheads and its refusal to join the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty? Who are France and the
United Kingdom targeting with their forces of 300
and 225 nuclear warheads, respectively? How long
will it take North Korea to develop miniaturized
nuclear bombs and deploy them on workable,
long-range missiles? And is New START the
beginning or the end of mutual US and Russian arms
reductions?
Many of these questions are
far more important than whether Iran gets the
bomb, but they get, at best, only a tiny fraction
of the attention that Tehran's nuclear program is
receiving. Concern about Pakistan's nuclear
arsenal and a fear of loose nukes in a
destabilizing country is certainly part of the
subtext of US policy towards Islamabad. Little
effort has been made of late, however, to
encourage Pakistan and India to engage in talks
aimed at reconciling their differences and opening
the way for discussions on reducing their nuclear
arsenals.
The last serious effort -
centered on the contentious issue of Kashmir -
reached its high point in 2007 under the regime of
Pakistani autocrat Pervez Musharraf, and it went
awry in the wake of political changes within his
country and Pakistani-backed terrorist attacks on
India. If anything, the tensions now being
generated by US drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal
borderlands and other affronts, intended or not,
to Pakistan's sovereignty have undermined any
possibility of Washington brokering a
rapprochement between Pakistan and India.
In addition, starting in the George W Bush
years, the US has been selling India nuclear fuel
and equipment. This has been part of a
controversial agreement that violates prior US
commitments to forgo nuclear trade with any nation
that has refused to join the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (a pact India has not
signed). Although US assistance is nominally
directed towards India's civilian nuclear program,
it helps free up resources that India can use to
expand its nuclear weapons arsenal.
The
"tilt" towards India that began during the Bush
administration has continued under Obama. Only
recently, for instance, a State Department
official bragged about US progress in selling
advanced weaponry to New Delhi. Meanwhile, F-16s
that Washington supplied to the Pakistani military
back in the heyday of the US-Pakistan alliance may
have already been adapted to serve as nuclear
delivery vehicles in the event of a nuclear
confrontation with India.
China has long
adhered to a de facto policy of minimum deterrence
- keeping just enough nuclear weapons to dissuade
another nation from attacking it with nuclear
arms. But this posture has not prevented Beijing
from seeking to improve the quality of its
long-range ballistic missiles. And if China feels
threatened by continued targeting by the United
States or by sea-based American interceptors
deployed to the region, it could easily increase
its arsenal to ensure the "safety" of its
deterrent. Beijing will also be keeping a watchful
eye on India as its nuclear stockpile continues to
grow.
Ever since Ronald Reagan - egged on
by mad scientists like Edward Teller and
right-wing zealots like Lt Gen Daniel O Graham -
pledged to build a perfect anti-nuclear shield
that would render nuclear weapons "impotent and
obsolete" missile defense has had a powerful
domestic constituency in the United States. This
has been the case despite the huge cost and
high-profile failures of various iterations of the
missile defense concept.
The only concrete
achievement of three decades of missile defense
research and development so far has been to make
Russia suspicious of US intentions. Even now,
rightly or not, Russia is extremely concerned
about the planned installation of US missile
defenses in Europe that Washington insists will be
focused on future Iranian nuclear weapons. Moscow
feels that they could just as easily be turned on
Russia.
If President Obama wins a second
term, he will undoubtedly hope to finesse this
issue and open the door to further joint
reductions in nuclear forces, or possibly even
consider reducing this country's nuclear arsenal
significantly, whether or not Russia initially
goes along.
Recent bellicose rhetoric from
Moscow underscores its sensitivity to the missile
defense issue, which may yet scuttle any plans for
serious nuclear negotiations. Given that the US
and Russia together possess more than 90% of the
world's nuclear weapons, an impasse between the
two nuclear superpowers (even if they are not
"super" in other respects) will undercut any
leverage they might have to encourage other
nations to embark on a path leading to global
nuclear reductions.
In his 1960s ode to
nuclear proliferation, Who's Next, Tom
Lehrer included the line "Israel's getting tense,
wants one in self-defense". In fact, Israel was
the first - and for now the only - Middle Eastern
nation to get the bomb, with reports that it can
deliver a nuclear warhead not only from land-based
missiles but also via cruise missiles launched
from nuclear submarines. Whatever it may say about
Israel's technical capabilities in the military
field, Israel's nuclear arsenal may also be
undermining its defense, particularly if it helps
spur Iran to build its own nukes. And
irresponsible talk by some Israeli officials about
attacking Iran only increases the chance that
Tehran will decide to go nuclear.
It is
hard to handicap the grim, "unthinkable" but
hardly inconceivable prospect that August 9, 1945,
will not prove to be the last time that nuclear
weapons are used on this planet. Perhaps some of
the loose nuclear materials or inadequately
guarded nuclear weapons littering the globe -
particularly, but not solely, in the states of the
former Soviet Union - might fall into the hands of
a terrorist group. Perhaps an Islamic
fundamentalist government will seize power in
Pakistan and go a step too far in nuclear
brinkmanship with India over Kashmir. Maybe the
Israeli leadership will strike out at Iran with
nuclear weapons in an effort to keep Tehran from
going nuclear. Maybe there will be a
miscommunication or false alarm that will result
in the United States or Russia launching one of
their nuclear weapons that are still in Cold
War-style, hair-trigger mode.
Although
none of these scenarios, including a terrorist
nuclear attack, may be as likely as nuclear
alarmists sometimes suggest, as long as the world
remains massively stocked with nuclear weapons,
one of them - or some other scenario yet to be
imagined - is always possible. The notion that
Iran can't be trusted with such a weapon obscures
a larger point: given their power to destroy life
on a monumental scale, no individual and no
government can ultimately be trusted with the
bomb.
The only way to be safe from nuclear
weapons is to get rid of them - not just the
Iranian one that doesn't yet exist, but all of
them. It's a daunting task. It's also a subject
that's out of the news and off anyone's agenda at
the moment, but if it is ever to be achieved, we
at least need to start talking about it. Soon.
William D Hartung is the
director of the Arms and Security Project at the
Center for International Policy, a TomDispatch
regular, and the author of Prophets of War:
Lockheed Martin and the Making of the
Military-Industrial Complex. (To catch Timothy
MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which
Hartung discusses the upside-down world of global
nuclear politics, click here or download it to
your iPod here.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
