We Must Act
Now To Prevent
Another Hiroshima - Or Worse
By Noam Chomsky
20 August , 2005
lndependent
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.