[Mb-civic] Chomsky: We Must Act Now to Prevent Another Hiroshima - or Worse

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Published on Saturday, August 6, 2005 by the lndependent/UK 

We Must Act Now to Prevent Another Hiroshima - or Worse 
The explosions in London are a reminder of how the cycle of attack 
and response could escalate 

by Noam Chomsky 

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0806-25.htm  

This month's anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 
prompts only the most somber reflection and most fervent hope that 
the horror may never be repeated.  

In the subsequent 60 years, those bombings have haunted the world's 
imagination but not so much as to curb the development and spread of 
infinitely more lethal weapons of mass destruction.

A related concern, discussed in technical literature well before 11 
September 2001, is that nuclear weapons may sooner or later fall into 
the hands of terrorist groups.

The recent explosions and casualties in London are yet another 
reminder of how the cycle of attack and response could escalate, 
unpredictably, even to a point horrifically worse than Hiroshima or 
Nagasaki.

The world's reigning power accords itself the right to wage war at will, 
under a doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense" that covers any 
contingency it chooses. The means of destruction are to be unlimited.

US military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world 
combined, while arms sales by 38 North American companies (one in 
Canada) account for more than 60 per cent of the world total (which 
has risen 25 per cent since 2002).

There have been efforts to strengthen the thin thread on which survival 
hangs. The most important is the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty 
(NPT), which came into force in 1970. The regular five-year review 
conference of the NPT took place at the United Nations in May.

The NPT has been facing collapse, primarily because of the failure of 
the nuclear states to live up to their obligation under Article VI to 
pursue "good faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. The United 
States has led the way in refusal to abide by the Article VI obligations. 
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 
emphasizes that "reluctance by one party to fulfill its obligations breeds 
reluctance in others".

President Jimmy Carter blasted the United States as "the major culprit 
in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world 
from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, 
American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints 
but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, 
including Anti-Ballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating 'bunker buster' 
and perhaps some new 'small' bombs. They also have abandoned 
past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against 
non-nuclear states".

The thread has almost snapped in the years since Hiroshima, 
repeatedly. The best known case was the Cuban missile crisis of 
October 1962, "the most dangerous moment in human history", as 
Arthur Schlesinger, historian and former adviser to President John F 
Kennedy, observed in October 2002 at a retrospective conference in 
Havana.

The world "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear disaster", recalls 
Robert McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, who also attended 
the retrospective. In the May-June issue of the magazine Foreign 
Policy, he accompanies this reminder with a renewed warning of 
"apocalypse soon".

McNamara regards "current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, 
illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous", creating 
"unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own", both the risk of 
"accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch", which is "unacceptably 
high", and of nuclear attack by terrorists. McNamara endorses the 
judgment of William Perry, President Bill Clinton's defense secretary, 
that "there is a greater than 50 per cent probability of a nuclear strike 
on US targets within a decade".

Similar judgments are commonly expressed by prominent strategic 
analysts. In his book Nuclear Terrorism, the Harvard international 
relations specialist Graham Allison reports the "consensus in the 
national security community" (of which he has been a part) that a "dirty 
bomb" attack is "inevitable", and an attack with a nuclear weapon 
highly likely, if fissionable materials - the essential ingredient - are not 
retrieved and secured.

Allison reviews the partial success of efforts to do so since the early 
1990s, under the initiatives of Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Richard 
Lugar, and the setback to these programs from the first days of the 
Bush administration, paralyzed by what Senator Joseph Biden called 
"ideological idiocy".

The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programs 
and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by 
extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created 
in Iraq.

The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along 
with jihadi terrorism.

A high-level review of the "war on terror" two years after the invasion 
"focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, 
schooled in Iraq over the past couple of years", Susan B Glasser 
reported in The Washington Post.

"Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to 
anticipate what one called 'the bleed out' of hundreds or thousands of 
Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the 
Middle East and Western Europe. 'It's a new piece of a new equation,' 
a former senior Bush administration official said. 'If you don't know who 
they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or 
London?'"

Peter Bergen, a US terrorism specialist, says in The Boston Globe that 
"the President is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, 
but this is a front we created".

Shortly after the London bombing, Chatham House, Britain's premier 
foreign affairs institution, released a study drawing the obvious 
conclusion - denied with outrage by the Government - that "the UK is at 
particular risk because it is the closest ally of the United States, has 
deployed armed forces in the military campaigns to topple the Taliban 
regime in Afghanistan and in Iraq ... [and is] a pillion passenger" of 
American policy, sitting behind the driver of the motorcycle.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, 
but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with 
equanimity. While speculation is pointless, reaction to the threat of 
another Hiroshima is definitely not.

On the contrary, it is urgent, particularly in the United States, because 
of Washington's primary role in accelerating the race to destruction by 
extending its historically unique military dominance, and in the UK, 
which goes along with it as its closest ally.

The author is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute 
of Technology and the author, most recently, of Hegemony or Survival: 
America's Quest for Global Dominance

© Copyright 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.


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