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by Frieda Gardner, W A M M
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In True Majority’s 2006 “Hiroshima Day” video, Ben (of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream) drops one BB pellet representing 15 Hiroshima-size nuclear bombs. Then he drops six BBs, enough to wipe out all of Russia. Next, the screen fills with 10,000 clattering little BBs, the equivalent of 150,000 Hiroshima-size bombs. Finally, over the field of BBs, we see the figure $17.6 billion, the annual financial outlay to maintain our nuclear arsenal. Naturally, Ben adds some suggestions about what that big money could pay for instead. (Fill in your own blank.)
America is the Number One Nuclear Big Guy on this planet. It is also the only time-tested, proven nuclear danger. Approximately 214,000 deaths (direct and associated) resulted from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Throughout the long, radioactive, bomb-sheltered, paranoid years of the Cold War, America and the USSR by example taught other nations — old, new and emerging — how to become a major power and gain a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Countries got a seat at the table by building, testing and successfully detonating a sizeable nuclear bomb. True, the Russians always lagged slightly behind America in nuclear might, but they fully engaged with the United States in the terrorizing game of Mutually Assured Destruction. It took China quite a while to secure its place but it has now joined the United States, Russia, England, and France in the one UN body responsible by charter for overseeing the peace and security of the globe.
Members of the UN Security Council are not the only nuclear players, of course. India and Pakistan felt sufficiently rich and unsafe to become members of the nuclear “club.” And then there is the not-to-be-officially-mentioned-much-less-acknowledged presence of Israel, America’s most powerful and perpetually needy client state, which will neither deny nor admit to having the capital ‘B’ Bomb. Perhaps encouraged by America’s sometimes casual disregard for treaty obligations, none of these three nations has seen fit to sign the1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
So here we are in the globally heated-up summer of 2006. Remembrance of what it means to enact a nuclear war has been pushed to the back pages of political consciousness by an explosion of death and danger that seems alternately predictable and surprising. Examples:
1) Israel, with the blessing of the United States, is exercising what it calls “asymmetrical deterrence” by bombing and invading Lebanon because of Hezbollah rocket fire into Israel. (That such incidents have taken place in the past without such murderous response goes without press mention.) Our secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said to be an historian, describes the Israeli government’s desire to punish Hezbollah as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Diplomats familiar with the UN charter, the Geneva Conventions, and theories of “just” warfare invoke the principle of “proportionality” when noting that more than 100 Lebanese die for every Israeli who dies. (As of August 3 the figures were 900 Lebanese to 62 Israelis.) In the middle distance are three-quarters of a million displaced Lebanese.
2) As part of its Hezbollah punishment, Israel has subjected members of Hamas, the legally elected Palestinian government, to arrest and has bombed Hamas headquarters and other facilities inside Gaza.
3) The popularity of Hezbollah in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East has of course skyrocketed during Israel’s war on Lebanon. David once again draws more sympathy and attention than Goliath. Meanwhile,
4) American generals in Iraq have finally used the words “civil war” to describe the fearsome death and destruction we brought to Iraq when we decided it needed not a theocratic state, but some good old-fashioned freedom and democracy.
5) Further information on U. S. war crimes in Iraq piles up daily.
6) Afghanistan, where we are still at war, faces an insurgent Taliban and the death tolls there also rise daily.
7) The Bush Administration is sufficiently worried about continuing news of war crimes to be proposing “amendments” to the War Crimes Act which carries jail sentences for those violating the Geneva Conventions. While torture, murder, rape, and hostage-taking would still remain illegal, “outrages upon personal dignity” (eg. forced nakedness, use of attack dogs, and sexual humiliation) would be exempt.
It is a frightening summer. Some commentators recall August 1914, when one small assassination seemed to “cause” World War I. And indeed the world feels awash in variables, not just 1 through 7 above, but obscenities like Exxon’s record-breaking profits, and the 12,000-ton oil spill into the Mediterranean caused by Israel’s bombing of the Jiyyeah power plant in Lebanon. While the price of gas rises, the economic status of America’s middle class remains precarious, while the poor grow steadily poorer.
Then of course the globe is in fact heating up, causing environmental disturbances everywhere. And alas, a recent poll has discovered that 50 percent of American citizens still believe there are weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. The Bush Administration knows nothing if not how to manipulate fear in order to encourage projected hostility.
So what about all those BBs?
They represent the nuclear weapons seeded around the warming globe. For a while last spring it seemed that this summer’s Big Bad Story would be Iran’s nukes (the ones projected to be ready in six to ten years). There’s lots of editorial worry about what a fully-armed Iran would mean, and sober discussion of whether or not the (elected) president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, is insane or merely wicked. There’s also plenty of outraged rhetoric from the United States and some of its allies claiming “Iran would be breaking its treaty agreement!” Just as it had in the case of Iraq’s WMD, the United States had presented its concerns to the United Nations. Of course, according to Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, our Department of Defense was also prudently drawing up plans for a pre-emptive (and probably asymmetrical) invasion of Iran.
In back of the back-page reports about the Iran nukes story was a very similar one about North Korea. America, busy as it’s been in the Middle East, is not happy about Kim Jong-il either, and has brought its concerns to the United Nations. How deeply concerned the Bush Administration is about the actual danger posed by any of these rogue-nuke countries is an intriguing question. This past spring, for example, our government violated (!) one provision of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by agreeing to sell nuclear material to India for domestic use only, even though India has itself refused to sign the NNPT. (Stay tuned for news from Pakistan.)
Given our history since the final days of World War II, given the way the Bush Administration handles foreign policy, and given the summer just passed, we have not a toe to stand on — morally, politically, and in all likelihood economically — when it comes to talking to Iran or North Korea about nuclear arms. Like the bully down the block, we set a bad example, fail to play fairly with others, don’t like to take much account of the other’s point of view, and like to frame things short, simple and to our point.
For those of us in the peace and justice movement, it is never time for despair.
Stockpiles of nuclear weapons worldwide are at their lowest level in 45 years, though thanks more to the demise of the Russian power than to United States initiatives. Both here and abroad, we hear the words “ceasefire” and “negotiation” more and more, in the midst of the great and fruitless violence. It’s amazing to learn that as far back as 1974, a proposal for a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone was passed as a UN resolution and is currently being revived (see resources at the end). And always, we are in the streets. Unreported in the mainstream press, 10,000 Israelis and Palestinians demonstrated together in Tel Aviv against the war on Lebanon. Code Pink women fasting against the Iraq war in front of the White House flew to Jordan to talk to members of Iraq’s Parliament moved by their sacrifice.
When the news is off, I imagine the quiet words of people like Mohamed El-Baradei of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, and of UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, who worked so hard to forestall America’s headlong invasion of Iraq. Negotiation is hard, undramatic work, often boring to hear about; it doesn’t televise well and it takes a long time. But it’s the harbor I want us to be driven into. |
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© 2006 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete September 2006 Index - click here
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