Going Ballistic
Saving L.A. from nuclear terror
By Tad Daley
Medium Range Ballistic Missions
Western leaders would do well to recall that the very first word in the very first work of Western literature, Homer’s Iliad, is menis.
Anger. Wrath. Rage.
During the Vietnam War, it was often said that every time we killed a Viet Cong guerrilla, we created two more. Isaac Newton’s laws of action and reaction do not apply only to billiard balls. The Bush administration has consistently rejected any suggestion that we consider what might motivate impressionable young Muslim men to show up on Al Qaeda’s doorstep. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan blithely dismissed the “truce” that Osama bin Laden floated on January 19, 2006, indicating that President Bush had given it not a nanosecond’s consideration. “We do not negotiate with terrorists,” he said. “We put them out of business.”
But can’t we be more in the international arena than a hammer looking for nails? Do Americans have even a clue about the depth of the bitterness, the scale of the humiliations, the extent of the resentments simmering around the planet toward us? George Bush’s foreign policies have made us new foreign enemies. George Bush’s defense policies have weakened our defenses. George Bush’s responses to 9/11 have made future 9/11’s – possibly far worse than the original 9/11 – far more likely to occur.
So much for Republicans being “strong on defense.”
There are undoubtedly hard-core terror types out there who are determined to attack us no matter what. Obviously, we must do everything we can to prevent them from acting, and to make sure that we get them before they get us.
But thousands more out there are still thinking about it. Thousands of young Muslim men are on the fence. They have perhaps spent their childhoods in madrasa Islamic religious schools. Their families have lived in poverty for as long as anyone can remember. They are unemployed and idle. They are looking for some purpose in life, some meaning, perhaps even some cause worth dying for.
The next president must do more than simply threaten these potential perpetrators, if we want to dissuade them from marching down the dead end terrorist road. Perhaps we could talk in a serious way about global economic inequality, about the cultural humiliations arguably at the root of the so-called “clash of civilizations.” We might actually seek to dry up some of the swamps of hopelessness, exploitation, and despair around the world. We might offer the dispossessed some rewards for the better choice, some hope and opportunity, some promise of full participation in a prosperous and peaceful global civilization. We might act on the world stage with a little less hubris and a little more humility. We might recall the admonition of Abraham Lincoln as our Civil War wound to its bitter close, when he said, “The only lasting way to eliminate an enemy is to make him your friend.”
And he was a Republican.
But even these kinds of steps, important though they are, are unlikely to save us indefinitely from the nightmare of nuclear terror. We need to do more than prevent the bad guys from gaining access to nuclear devices in the short term. We need to do more too than reduce the motivations for seeking access to nuclear devices in the medium term. In the long term, our only real hope for saving ourselves from the nightmare of nuclear terror is to get rid of the nuclear weapons themselves. Every last one.
The Long and Winding Road
Some call it “America’s nuclear hypocrisy,” others the “nuclear double standard,” others still “nuclear narcissism.” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad often calls it “nuclear apartheid.”
Why is it that some countries can possess thousands of nuclear weapons without a whisper of comment, while when others aspire to even one, it generates a torrent of righteous indignation? What’s the principle? What’s the argument?
It is never said. And it cannot last.
The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, one of the great peace activists of the 20th century, who died in 2006, liked to quote Mahatma Gandhi, who said, “A fat man cannot speak persuasively to a skinny man about the virtues of not overeating.” To much of the rest of the world, the nuclear double standard appears sanctimonious and self-righteous, and based on the notion that some are responsible enough to be “trusted” with these weapons of the apocalypse, while others are not.
President Bush himself, perhaps unwittingly, often manages to let slip this conceit of cultural superiority. “We owe it to our children,” he said in August of 2002, “to free the world from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of those who hate freedom.” “We cannot allow the world’s most dangerous men,” he insisted at the end of 2005, “to get their hands on the world’s most dangerous weapons.”
Here, surely, we have the most candid, unvarnished answer to the $64,000 nuclear question. Some are rational, sober, righteous ... and hence can be trusted with the nuclear prize. Others are simply too “dangerous,” or not sufficiently “freedom loving,” to be permitted the same.
And who will decide? Who will render subjective, ad hoc, case-by-case verdicts on whether certain leaders or peoples can be trusted with nuclear weapons? Who will serve as prosecutor, judge, jury, and enforcer?
Why the Freedom Lovers, of course, in whose hands nuclear weapons already reside.
The nuclear double standard is militarily unnecessary, morally indefensible, and politically unsustainable. Try to imagine the human community in 2018, or 2045, or 2077, with the same small group of “great powers” still clinging to the nuclear chimera, still insisting that nuclear weapons are vital for their own national security but unnecessary for the national security of others. Then try to imagine all the other states in the world just placidly and permanently acquiescing to that – no bitterness, no resentment, no aspirations to challenge the nuclear status quo and obtain a few nuclear weapons of their own.
The mere act of performing such a thought experiment demonstrates the wild improbability that such a future history might ever come to pass. If we refuse forever to relinquish our nuclear weapons, then we had better get used to a world not with nine nuclear weapon states, as today, but 18, or 45, or 77. That world will provide that many more opportunities for just one really bad nuclear warhead to find its way into the hands of just one group of really bad guys. And what will that mean for us, for Los Angeles?
It will mean we will simply have to await our fate, our date with our nuclear terror destiny.
A comprehensive nuclear policy agenda, one fully integrating non-proliferation with disarmament, should become the most important immediate foreign policy priority for the new president who takes office on January 20, 2009. Such a policy agenda should contain many of the kinds of short- and medium-term steps described above to diminish the danger of nuclear terror.
But that nuclear policy agenda should also state, unambiguously, that we are committed to the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons – ours and everyone else’s. It must describe abolition not as some utopian fantasy, but instead as a concrete political goal. And it should begin to discern the path, and commence negotiations, toward a universal, verifiable, and enforceable Nuclear Weapons Convention requiring the phased dismantling and destruction of every nuclear weapon on Planet Earth, imposing strict worldwide controls with rigorous international inspection provisions over all things nuclear, and legally prohibiting nuclear weapons from ever being constructed again.
Our best shot at dodging the nuclear terror bullet forever is to get serious, now, about moving toward a nuclear-weapon- free world.
Published: 07/16/2008
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