Letters to the Editor
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Might makes Right
The U.S. has sent a very simple message to the world:
If you don't have nuclear weapons, then you *shouldn't* have them, and we will prevent you from getting them.
However, if you somehow manage to acquire them, then welcome to the club! You will be afforded respect.
This primitive and dangerous message, which can be understood by an 8 year old child, has been heard by the rest of the world.
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Missing the point
Jonathan Schell says: " I would say, though, that the surefire way of ensuring that Iran will go for the bomb is to attack them. If, the day before, they were ready to stop short of having the bomb, the day after, they'll go for it and they'll get it, too."
He, like just about everyone else, is missing the essential point. If Bush bombs Iran, Iran won't wait until it has its nuclear weapons; it will attack our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a vengeance. They have three to four times the number of our forces there, already overstretched and decimated after going on five years of war there. We don't have nearly enough reinforcements to meet that threat. And nearly all war materiel for our forces in Iraq must be shipped to Kuwait, the last 800 miles through the narrow Strait of Formuz and the Persian Gulf, with Iran controlling the entire northeast shores of those waters. Even with our still powerful naval and air protection Iran could make that shipping very difficult and costly. The stuff must then traverse supply routes close to Iran to reach Baghdad and other locations where needed, easy prey for the Iranian military and its Iraqi Shiite militia allies.
A war with Iran now could not be won with conventional weapons alone!
Faced with almost certain annihilation of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan or ignominious surrender, the pressure on Bush and Cheney to use nuclear weapons would be overwhelming. Assuming they need any pressure.
Are even they so dense as to not realize that bombing Iran will lead inevitably to use of nuclear weapons? Or was that their Plan B for the Iraq war all along.
And will Russia and China, among the major nuclear powers, accede to nuclear weapons being used so close to their borders? Or will it precipitate the World War III Bush claims stopping the Iranians from developing the bomb would prevent?
Schell's concepts are based on the assumption that all the world leaders are rational. But is that assumption valid for Bush and Cheney? And faced with irrational foes, the rational are ofter forced into irrational acts of their own.
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A Bomb By Any Other Phrase
How naive are we, really?
It's incredibly clever to say nuclear weaponry is the "Bomb of the mind", and yes, I get it--it's in our consciousness, etc, etc...
But it's simplistic to believe what Jonathan Schell asks our("nuclear-superior") countries to do, could work.I'm the biggest pacifist you'll meet, but how do put your nuclear arms on the table, and say "Okay, we're reducing, so you guys, stop proliferating..." and expect them to actually do so?
And even if we could trust everyone ELSE to do as we ask, to trust that they will honor their commitments,and keep their promises, we(the US) have already lost credibility just about everywhere in the world, through the us vs. them/good vs. evil mentality of the George W. crew, and that means:
Why would the rest of the world trust US?
I'll read Jonathan Schell's latest book, and I'll get my boots dusted off. I just hope there's still time.
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You can't uninvent something
The basic physics and chemistry of a bomb is fairly well understood in the theoretical sense. 10 years ago we had computational models sufficiently sophisticated to forgo real testing in lieu of simulations. Which prompted the French to fire off some last real tests as a protest, really against the US and to somehow force us to give them that technology. In either case the hard part is engineering not research. The process of crafting one of these devices and making it reliable enough to use is the real challenge. But every step of the way you learn something about how to do that. You can't simply uninvent something, you can't wave a wand over a holy book and declare that everyone will forget what's in it, can you? That's why abolition is naive. Arms control is not. As we see, any nation with the money and the desire to build one of these things can make the attempt be it research, theft, or just purchasing it. Some examples lesser known are South Africa, Argentina and Brazil which all developed programs and then stopped. In the future you may see Taiwan and South Korea, Nigeria, Indonesia embark on their own programs. And contrary to popular wisdom, neither Japan nor Germany are actually barred from nuclear weapons research. They are prohibited from progressing past the point where they would be approx. 30 days from completion of a functional weapon. So the challenge is to limit proliferation across countries and to limit proliferation within countries.
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Good Article, a few points missed
Regarding the vast over production of nuclear arms in the 60s and 70s, Schell fails to mention the economics of nuclear arms. Producing them, and their related facilities, were highly profitable to certain sectors of the US economy.
Also, the most likely Iranian response to a US attack on their nuclear facilities would be to destabilize Iraq by covert means. An attack on Iraq by conventional forces would be easily repelled by the US military even if the Iranians had a 10:1 superiority in manpower. Remember they could barely contain Saddam's army.
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iMac on his knees? Which model?
The detail is nice if you get it right.
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"Missile Envy"
"Again, getting the bomb is like striking a pose, like a Byronic or Napoleonic hero. Seeming to be a great power. There is a nice line in the new Richard Rhodes book, "Arsenals of Folly," in which someone says: The reason we don't want to get rid of nuclear weapons is that then we'd walk down the street in a different way. That may be close to the essence of what it's all about. Without these weapons, you can't be quite so cocky." - Jonathan Schell
This quote reminds me of a book written by Dr. Helen Caldicott, the renowned anti-nuclear pediatrician from Australia and one of the founding members of "Physicians for Social Responsibility".
Her book is about the world-wide nuclear arms race and is aptly titled, "Missile Envy". And of course we will all recall Robert Scheer's wonderful book on the constant under-lying threat of nuclear war which was written during the Reagan years. Once, when having a discussion about the aftermath of a nuclear exchange with the then Soviet Union, Reagan said, "If everyone just digs a hole in the Earth and gets in it they'll be saved." But in fact, one would be digging his own grave.
Thus the title of Robert Scheer's book, "With Enough Shovels".
I loved Jonathan Schell's book "The Fate of the Earth". I remember it was so powerful that The New Yorker published the entire book over three consecutive weeks!
"The splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking. Thus we drift toward unparalled catastrophe." - Albert Einstein