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News :: Miscellaneous |
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The Time of the Nuclear Nightmare Must Have A Stop |
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by Douglas Mattern
Email: worldcit (nospam) best.com (unverified!) |
10 Aug 2001
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"But thoughts, the slaves of life, and life, time’s fool,
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Time must have a stop." Henry IV, Shakespeare |
With President Bush’s intention to build the anti-missile system, in opposition to world opinion and the danger of igniting a new arms race, we need to realize that more than a decade after the Cold War we are still only 30-minutes or less from nuclear incineration.
Today, both Russia and the U.S. have thousands of nuclear warheads on a hair-trigger alert, ready to launch within a few minutes notice. The Center for Defense Information (CDI) in Washington, D.C. reports \"if launched today, within minutes the two sides would be firing at each other up to 4,000 high-yield nuclear warheads – the explosive equivalent of nearly 100,000 Hiroshima bombs.
Newsweek International reports the U.S. nuclear arsenal today \"includes 5,400 warheads loaded on intercontinental ballistic missiles at land and sea; an additional 1,750 nuclear bombs and cruise missiles ready to be launched from B-2 and B-52 bombers; a further 1,670 nuclear weapons classified as tactical\". And just in case, an additional 10,000 or so nuclear warheads are held in bunkers around the U.S. as a hedge against future surprises.\"
In 1999, Russia had 20,000 nuclear bombs. China has 434. United Kingdom 200. France 482. Israel 100+. Pakistan 15-25. India 60+.
McGeorge Bundy, advisor to President Kennedy, wrote in 1969 that \"in the real world even one hydrogen bomb on one city would be a catastrophe; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history.\"
At the height of the cold war, in the mid-1980s under the Reagan Administration, the U.S. had 16,000 Soviet targets with 500 targeted on the Moscow area alone. We can be sure a similar amount was targeted on some U.S. cities.
Utter madness! And yet it continues. In response to President Bush’s intention to build the antimissile system the Russians sent a message by successfully test firing their Stiletto, or SS-19, ICBM. This missile can carry six warheads, each with a force of one to two megatons, or 50 to 100 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. They have 105 of these missiles. Their older SS-18 ICBMs can carry 10-12 independently targeted nuclear warheads.
For the U.S., in addition to the genocidal explosive power of land-based ICBMs, one U.S. Trident submarine carries 24 missiles that can launch 192 nuclear warheads to separate targets, each warhead eight times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Just one of these submarines is history’s worst possible nightmare. There are 18 Trident submarines in the world today.
With all of these weapons the risk of \"accidental\" nuclear war is an ever-present danger, as we are reminded with more \"close calls\" to nuclear incineration being exposed. The latest \"known\" incident was in November 1995, when the monitors of the Russian Strategic Rocket Force at the Olengrosk early-warning radar-site registered the launch of a U.S.-Norwegian research missile probe of the upper atmosphere.
To the Russians, the missile’s trajectory looked like a U.S. Trident missile. That set off alarms of the Russian nuclear weapons command, which notified President Yeltsin, who reportedly activated his \"nuclear briefcase,\" and for a few minutes the fate of this nation hung on Yeltsin’s judgment.
Steven Cohen, writing in the Nation Magazine, says we are moving into \"a world more dangerous than ever before. For the first time in history, a fully nuclearized nation is in a process of collapse. The result is potentially catastrophic.\" Cohen reports that Russia’s early warning system, along with its nuclear maintenance and control, is in a state of disintegration.
We don’t know how many close calls have occurred, or that are occurring today, but in all cases we have been lucky, and to depend on luck or the reasoning of any given president or prime minister or early warning system is utter lunacy.
But things are getting worse! President Bush has requested U.S. Nuclear weapons scientists to determine how quickly they could restart nuclear testing under the Nevada desert. This would be in violation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). It’s reported that President Bush and his team of reconstituted cold warriors plan to let the CTBT languish in the Senate where it has no chance of passing.
The Bush administration also plans to abrogate the ABM treaty of 1972 and proceed with the \"son of Star Wars\" antimissile system, known as NMD (National Missile Defense). Reuters news service reported on July 12 that the Untied States has told Russia and its allies that it expects its development of a missile defense will conflict with the ABM Treaty in months, not years. The Associated Press reported on July 13 that the State Department has notified it diplomats around the world that estimates of a U.S.anti-missile system will soon come into conflict with the ABM Treaty.
It is clear that NMD is just the first step in the militarization of space. George Friedman, an intelligence consultant and author of \"The Future of War,\" calls the NMD a Trojan horse, as the real issue is the coming weaponization of space.
The U.S. Space Command, which was created by the Pentagon in 1985, has as its motto: dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investments. The Space Command’s document \"Vision 20/20\" emphasizes how the global economy will widen the gulf between the halves and have-nots and concludes that the U.S. will need the ability to control space and from space to dominate the earth below. General Ronald Fogleman, USAF, Ret. said: \"Space in and of itself is going to be very quickly recognized as the 4th dimension of warfare.\"
Back in 1967 the U.S. took the leading role in initiating the Other Space Treaty that banned all nations from deploying weapons in space. In 1999, 173 nations voted to reaffirm this UN agreement. Three nations refused: the United States, Israel and Micronesia.
The highest priority in our world today is to end this madness. In addition to stopping the NMD program, it is imperative that all U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads be taken off hair-trigger alert status. This would greatly diminish the possibility of a nuclear exchange by miscalculation or accident. A further imperative is to place the warheads in storage depots where inspectors from the nuclear powers and the UN would monitor them. This would virtually end the possibility of nuclear war by accident or decision, because diplomacy and reasoning would become dominant before the warheads could be reloaded on the missiles.
We could then move from a MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) world to a safe and sane one. The ultimate imperative, of course, is to abolish all nuclear weapons. As the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons warned, \"the risk of use of nuclear weapons has increased, and the proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used—accidentally or by decision – defines credibility.\"
With the opposite opinion, both Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Colin Powell argue that we must retain a MAD world; that our security is with Russia and the U.S. retaining the ability to destroy each other, and that somehow this fear prevents it from happening.
This criminal nonsense has been with us for five decades, with the vast majority of people living most of their lives under the nuclear threat of annihilation. What kind of people, what kind of civilization, what kind of moral system permits this madness to continue?
Perhaps even more disturbing than the conclusion of the Canberra Commission comes from UN Secretary General Koffi Annan. Less than a year ago the secretary general stated that \"the possibility of nuclear war is a very real and a very terrifying possibility\" in the 21st century.
In 1998, 117 world leaders, including former Russian and U.S. leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Jimmy Carter, appealed to the nuclear weapons states to declare nuclear abolition as their goal.
At the U.S. Conference of Mayors in June of this year, current and former mayors of 37 large cities called on President Bush to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons \"with all deliberate speed,\" and \"to declare your firm commitment in the task of eliminating nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.\"
Tony Benn, prominent member of the British Parliament and a leader of the Labour Party, warns that to press ahead with the Star Wars project will inevitably trigger a global arms race. Mr. Benn said the main advocates of this mad scheme are the military industrial complex in the U.S. who fear peace would harm their profits and undermine the sales of weapons all over the world. Mr. Benn issued a plea to revitalize the anti-war campaigns that existed in the past, but this time on an international scale and linked to the ideas that were launched in Seattle
The playwright Anton Chekhov said that if a gun appears in the first act of a play, it will be fired by the third act. With U.S. plans to begin the militarization of space, the third act of this nuclear nightmare has begun with George W. Bush as director. The scriptwriters are his team of old cold warriors, the ever-present but secret government of the CIA and the National Security Council, and the military/industrial complex.
For this reason the \"time\" of purely human folly of possessing nuclear weapons and a world based on mutual assured destruction must, indeed, \"have a stop\". It is imperative that we join together as never before, and with an unyielding determination, to abolish the nuclear gun on the wall before it is fired and the architects of destruction bring down the curtain on civilization.
Douglas Mattern (Email: worldcit (at) best.com) is the president of the Association of World Citizens; a San Francisco based international peace organization with branches in 50 countries. |
See also:
http://www.worldcitizens.org/index.shtml
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