Bush Nuclear Policy: A Recipe for Global Terror
Time to Mobilize to Ban the Bomb
Alice Slater 
This past August, during the very same week that the world commemorated the 58th anniversary of the only use of nuclear weapons – an act which obliterated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – more than 150 military contractors, scientists from the weapons labs, and other US government officials gathered at the headquarters of the US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska to plot and plan for the possibility of "full-scale nuclear war" calling for the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons – more "usable" so-called "mini-nukes and "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators" armed with atomic warheads five times more powerful than the US atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and killed more than 200,000 people. These weapons are designed to burrow through rock or concrete to hit underground targets, and would result in huge releases of lethal radioactivity. Plans are afoot to start a new bomb factory to replace the one closed at Rocky Flats, Colorado, closed at the end of the Cold War and one of the most polluted spots on earth thanks to previous production of plutonium cores for US hydrogen bombs. While the US and Russia have about 6,000 active nuclear weapons, the US plans to produce 450 new bomb cores a year – more than the present bombs stockpiled by China: 400; France: 350, or England: 200. Bush is moving to shorten the time to restart nuclear testing at the Nevada test site and has succeeded in lifting the restrictions that were placed on the production of "mini-nukes" by Congress.
How did we get to this awful state, with North Korea and Iran threatening nuclear break-out and even Japan now talking about developing nuclear weapons of its own? What action can ordinary citizens take to end the nuclear madness and provide for real global security?
President Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation, is often remembered for warning Americans to guard against dangers to our "liberties and democratic processes" from the "military-industrial" complex. But equally telling, and not as well-known, he also warned them against the "danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite", noting that the "prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded."
The fact is, Doctor Strangeloves have been driving this nuclear arms race in partnership with military contractors engaged in pork barrel politics with a corrupt Congress, spreading nuclear production contracts around the country to the great detriment of national health, and security. From the first time some limits were placed on nuclear development, when the Limited Test Ban Treaty was negotiated in 1963 because of the shock and horror at the amount of radioactive strontium-90 found in baby's teeth, the labs made sure there was continued funding to enable testing to go underground. And when Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996 to cut off nuclear testing, he bought off the labs with a $4.6 billion annual program – the so-called "stockpile stewardship" program – in which nuclear testing was now done in computer-simulated virtual reality with the help of so-called "subcritical tests", 1,000 feet below the desert floor, where plutonium is blown up with chemicals without causing a chain reaction. This program created a vast loophole in the not-so-comprehensive-Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It is the fruits of this deal with the weapons labs that produced the research for the new nukes Bush is now prepared to put into production.
Bush in his 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, took these programs to a new level, expanding the role of nuclear weapons in US national security policy, including the use of nuclear weapons in "immediate, potential or unexpected contingencies" against a number of countries, specifically named, including Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The Nuclear Posture Review called for the retention of a diversity of nuclear weapons options and charged the weapons labs with the mission of developing both "offensive and "defensive" nuclear and other high-tech weapons. Bush is now baldly threatening to pre-emptively attack – including with nuclear weapons – any other country that dares to think about developing nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons of their own. Early in 2003, a Theater Nuclear Planning Document was created for Iraq. And there are war games being played in the Pacific against North Korea as well as a new "Proliferation Security Initiative," in which eleven countries – US, UK, Spain, Japan, Australia, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, France and Germany – are planning to formalize arrangements to illegally interdict vessels and aircrafts that are suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction, their delivery vehicles and other weapons material. The labs are also taking on a role in so-called "homeland security" and theater nuclear war planning and have opened new biological weapons research divisions at both Los Alamos and Livermore.
While Bush and the majority in the US Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, and most of the corporate media keep stirring the pot in the US with scare stories about nuclear proliferation from so called "rogue" states, we hardly hear about the essential bargain of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed in 1970, in which it was agreed that countries would not acquire nuclear weapons in return for a promise from the then five nuclear weapons states – US, Russia, England, France, and China – to give up their nuclear weapons. After 25 years, in 1995, the countries re-convened in a Review and Extension conference, to appraise what had been accomplished over the past quarter century and to determine whether the treaty should be renewed. There were now triple the number of nuclear weapons on the planet then when the treaty was first signed. NGOs gathered from all over the world to lobby the delegates at the UN conference to hold the nuclear weapons states accountable and demand more progress on nuclear disarmament. But the treaty was extended indefinitely and unconditionally, promising only to negotiate a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and to continue to have five-year reviews of "systematic and progressive efforts" for nuclear disarmament. A global network, Abolition 2000, was formed calling for a treaty to be negotiated by the year 2000. They produced the model Nuclear Weapons Convention now an official UN document submitted by Costa Rica and enrolled over 2,000 organizations in more than 90 countries.
The CTBT was negotiated the next year in the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, which operates by consensus. The treaty was brought to the United Nations General Assembly for signatures even though India refused to join the consensus, arguing that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was not comprehensive as it allowed loopholes for computer-simulated virtual reality testing and "subcritical" nuclear tests of new nuclear weapons. Clinton's deal with the Dr. Strangeloves for this high-tech nuclear weapons development program has now resulted in 19 "subcritical" tests, and a $20 million new facility for above ground laboratory tests is scheduled to use a 90 foot long barrel apparatus, JASPER, which stands for Joint Actinide Shock Physics Experimental Research, to shoot gunpowder and compressed nitrogen gas to at a gram-size amount of plutonium bomb material at 24 times the speed of sound.
India had quietly tested in 1974, and not wanting to be left behind in the new "modernized" nuclear testing regime in the US, broke out of the pack and overtly tested to catch up, swiftly followed by Pakistan. Although the CIA and other intelligence agencies say they were caught by surprise by India's testing, many NGOs who had followed the US machinations during the NPT and CTBT process predicted this outcome. And a few years later, not to be left behind, Russia was doing subcritical tests also. Although France and China, to their credit, closed their test sites, they both have elaborate laboratory testing of new nuclear weapons.
In 2000, the NPT had its first five-year review since the extension. A group of middle powers, the New Agenda Coalition – Ireland, South Africa, Egypt, New Zealand, Sweden, and Brazil (Slovenia dropped out under US arm-twisting) with the help of a global network of NGO's, were able to negotiate and extract promises from the nuclear weapons states for 13 important steps toward nuclear disarmament, including making nuclear disarmament irreversible, maintaining the strategic stability of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, ratifying the CTBT, and changing weapons policy so as not to rely on nuclear weapons. I was at the final session of the 2000 Review – they had stopped the clock at midnight on Friday – the last day of the conference – and worked until five in the morning. The next day at 6:00 PM, the thirteen steps were agreed to by all the nations. But, significantly, both Russia and China took exception to the final document, saying that if the US went ahead with plans to weaponize space, all bets were off.
China has been calling for a treaty to prevent the weaponization of space for the past several years. It was joined last year by Russia in that call. The US path to "dominate and control the military use of space to protect US interests and investments "according to the mission statement of the US Space Command is well known and feared around the world. If the US is planning to dominate space, other countries will seek the only equalizer that they think will protect them – a nuclear weapon of their own. That's what we're seeing now in Iran and North Korea. Ironically, Iran is getting its nuclear power legally under the Faustian bargain of the NPT which gave the non-nuclear states an "inalienable right" to the so-called "peaceful" use of nuclear technology. Since every nuclear power plant is a bomb factory, we need to deal with not only nuclear weapons but nuclear power as well. And for the first time, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has openly addressed Israel's nuclear arsenal, in a class with China, France and England, with about 300 warheads.
The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, responsible for verifying and inspecting nuclear proliferation and disarmament, called on the United States in August to set a good example to the rest of the world. He said, "The US government demands that other nations not possess nuclear weapons. Meanwhile it is arming itself," ElBaradei said. Criticizing the US plan for a missile defense shield, he said, "Then a small number of privileged countries will be under a nuclear protective shield, with the rest of the world outside... In truth there are no good or bad nuclear weapons. If we do not give up such double standards, we will have even more nuclear powers. We are at a turning point now... The five nuclear powers must send a clear message to the world: we, too, disarm. Either we take the risk emanating from proliferation seriously or we have to live with the consequences. So far, we'd rather act like a fire brigade. Today Iraq, tomorrow North Korea, the day after Iran. And after that?"
What Can NGOs Do?
It's time to say no to nukes and war. Bombing every country in the name of stopping nuclear proliferation is immoral and hypocritical. To stop nuclear proliferation we need to close all the tests sites, put the weapons designers out to pasture, ban all nuclear bombs, and support a treaty to prevent the weaponization of space. In spring 2004, the governments of the world will gather again at the United Nations for a Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee meeting steeped in hypocrisy to discuss their broken promises to rid the world of the nuclear scourge – promises made over 30 years ago in 1970. Let us once again take to the streets around the world – united in our opposition to the growing threat of nuclear war! We cannot permit the United States and its partners in war crimes to bomb every country that tries to defend itself against the new imperial juggernaut by developing nuclear "deterrents" of their own. Working with the global peace movement, let the call go out from the World Social Forum in Mumbai that it's time to ban the bomb. Nuclear disarmament is already prominently on the agenda for that meeting. It will be an opportunity for nuclear abolitionists to make connections with the anti-corporate globalization movement and make the case that nuclear weapons are the ultimate enforcement mechanism for the powers of empire, working in the service of transnational corporations which are looting and polluting our planet.
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