[Mb-civic] News Media in the 60th Year of the Nuclear Age

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-12/11solomon.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
News Media in the 60th Year of the Nuclear Age 
December 11, 2004
By Norman Solomon 

Top officials in Washington are now promoting jitters about Iran's nuclear
activities, while media outlets amplify the message. A confrontation with
Tehran is on the second-term Bush agenda. So, we're encouraged to
obliquely think about the unthinkable.

But no one can get very far trying to comprehend the enormity of nuclear
weapons. They've shadowed human consciousness for six decades. From the
outset, deception has been key.

Lies from the White House have been part of the nuclear rationalizing
process ever since August 1945. President Harry Truman spoke to the
American public three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Calling
the civilian-filled Japanese city a "military base," Truman said: "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,
insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

Actually, U.S. planners had sought a large urban area for the nuclear
cross hairs because -- as Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves
later acknowledged -- it was "desirable that the first target be of such
size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more
definitely determine the power of the bomb." Thirty-five years later, when
I looked at the U.S. Energy Department's official roster of "Announced
United States Nuclear Tests," the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were on the list.

We're now six decades into the Nuclear Age. And we're farther than ever,
it seems, from a momentously difficult truth that Albert Einstein uttered
during its first years, when the U.S. government still held a monopoly on
the split atom. "This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into
the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms," he wrote. "For 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."

Today, no phrase could better describe U.S. foreign policies -- or
American media coverage -- than "narrow nationalisms." The officials keep
putting on a proudly jingoistic show, and journalists report it without
fundamental challenge.

So, any whiff of sanity is conspicuous. Just before Thanksgiving, when the
House and Senate voted to cut funding of research for a new line of
tactical nuclear weapons including "bunker buster" warheads, the decision
was reported as the most significant victory for arms-control advocates
since the early 1990s. That's because the nuclear-weapons industry has
been running amok for so long.

While Uncle Sam continues to maintain a nuclear arsenal capable of
destroying life on Earth, the American finger-wagging at Iran is something
righteous to behold.

Current alarms, wailing about an alleged Iranian program to develop
nuclear weapons, are being set off by the same Bush administration
officials who declared that an invasion of Iraq was imperative because
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, he didn't.

But that hasn't stopped the Bush team from launching the same kind of
media campaign against Iran -- based on unverified claims by Iranian
exiles with a track record of inaccuracy and a clear motive to pull
Washington into military action. Sound familiar?

We ought to be able to recognize what's wrong with U.S. officials who
lecture Iran about the evils of nuclear-arms proliferation while winking
at Israel's arsenal, estimated to include 200 nuclear weapons.

When Einstein called for "the aroused understanding and insistence of the
peoples of the world," he was describing a need that news media ought to
help fill. But instead, mostly we get the official stories: dumbed-down,
simplistic, and -- yes -- narrowly nationalistic. The themes are those of
Washington's powerful: our nukes good, our allies' nukes pretty good,
unauthorized nukes very bad.

That sort of propaganda drumbeat won't be convincing to people who doubt
that a Christian Bomb is good and a Jewish Bomb is good but an Islamic
Bomb is bad. You don't have to be an Einstein to understand that people
are rarely persuaded by hypocritical messages along the lines of "Do as we
say, not as we do."

Norman Solomon is co-author, with Reese Erlich, of "Target Iraq: What the
News Media Didn't Tell You." His columns and other writings can be found
at ."Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience With Atomic
Radiation" (Delacorte Press, 1982), a book by Harvey Wasserman and Norman
Solomon, is online at:http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/


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