We must act now to prevent another Hiroshima - or Worse by Noam Chomsky, Walter Cronkite 8:39pm 3rd Aug, 2005   Published: August 6, 2005    "We must act now to prevent another Hiroshima - or Worse", by Noam Chomsky. (The lndependent/UK)    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.    August 6, 2005    "Hiroshima's Lessons loom large, 60 Years Later", by Walter Cronkite. (Madison Capital Times)    The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago were stunning and sobering events. They brought World War II to an end, and everyone was thankful for that. Not too many of us stopped to think about the full implications of those bombs for our future. We were too busy celebrating the end of that terrible war.    One of the people who had it absolutely right at the very beginning about the meaning of Hiroshima was the great French writer Albert Camus. He wrote in a French resistance newspaper: "Our technological civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests." We are still facing that choice.    Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. tested nuclear weapons in the atmosphere until the early 1960s, while they continued to create more efficient weapons. It didn't take either country long to get those weapons on intercontinental ballistic missiles and then submarine-launched ballistic missiles. They created a situation in which the world could be destroyed in a matter of minutes. This threat of a massive nuclear exchange was thought to provide an ad hoc policy to prevent nuclear war. It was called the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, for which the acronym was MAD. Never was an acronym more accurately descriptive.    We came very close to a nuclear exchange between Washington and Moscow in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a very frightening time, and we can all be thankful that sanity managed to prevail. There were high-ranking U.S. officials at the time who were pressing for bombing Cuba, which would have meant a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. That was one of many close calls during the Cold War.    With the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be a real chance again to put nuclear dangers behind us, and once again the opportunity was largely missed. Today, in the 60th year of the Nuclear Age, we still have some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and some 4,000 of these are on hair-trigger alert. You have to wonder about a species that seems so incapable of eliminating the greatest danger to its own survival. Not so incidentally, the United States has more nuclear weapons in its arsenal than any other nation.    There has been much emphasis in the news about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in such countries as North Korea. All countries should abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Few Americans are aware, however, that the treaty also provides that the U.S. and other nuclear weapon states must reduce their numbers of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, disarmament by nuclear weapon states receives limited attention in news reporting, at least within the United States. I think this might be because the continuing existence of our own vast arsenal doesn't seem to Americans, even if they are aware of it, to be nearly as dangerous as the threat of new nations acquiring the ghastly weapons.    The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the hibakusha - have continually warned, "Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist." In the end, I believe this is the most important lesson of Hiroshima. We must eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us.    The best security, perhaps the only security, against nuclear weapons being used again, or getting into the hands of terrorists, is to eliminate them. Most of the people of the world already know this. Now it is up to the world's people to impress the urgency of this situation upon their governments. We must act now. The future depends upon us.    Anything less would be to abandon our responsibility to future generations.    (Walter Cronkite, anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981, hosts "Lessons From Hiroshima, 60 Years Later," now airing on public radio stations nationwide).    © Copyright 2005 The Capital Times
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