Series: What America Needs to Do to Achieve Its Foreign Policy Goals:

[struggle4progress]

Re Nuclear Weapons (2)

By William R. Polk <brief bio snipped>

America must renounce the threatening unilateralist approach to other nations proclaimed by the Bush administration to begin to reëstablish its leadership. Reëstablish is the key word. What I have to say is not so much an argument for change as for restoration, not radical but conservative, not theoretical but proven by experience. So, as Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in his First Inaugural Address, “let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.”

The most dramatic and potentially the most destructive problem in today’s world arises from the existence and spread of nuclear weapons. Nation-states have acquired them because they fear one another. There are today perhaps 20,000 of these lethal devices in widely scattered locations. Since America used them in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, governments came close to using them on several occasions: the French (backed by the then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff) wanted President Eisenhower to order the use of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Vietminh forces attacking at Dien Bien Phu; we now know (but did not know then) that Russian submarine commanders had the authority to fire them during the Cuban Missile Crisis;1 and the Indians and Pakistanis were at the edge of using them against one another at least twice. As long as they are available, it seems almost inevitable that sooner or later some government will use them.

It is not only that governments may decide to use these weapons that is dangerous. Keeping them secure is enormously expensive and requires a skilled and loyal bureaucracy. As with any large number of things, losing a few is easy.2 Americans think we are very good at managing our many arsenals, but I understand that even we are unable to account for all of them. Presumably at least some other nuclear powers are less exact than we. And some of them have trouble keeping the loyalty of their officials or even regularly paying their salaries. So the temptation to steal and sell is high. And the temptation is not restricted to “rogue” officials. Several governments have fostered the spread of technologies, materials and even manufacturing equipment as America did in both Saddam Husain’s Iraq and the Shah’s Iran. Pakistan recently followed the American lead. Probably other countries will do so in the future.

On nuclear weapons, the United States has an obviously double standard: they are acceptable when our friends have them but not when others seek to acquire them. Of course, such a standard is justified in national terms. But it is not acceptable to those (like North Korea) which fear us or those (like India and Pakistan) which have regional rivals they fear. The head of Indian’s nuclear weapons program stated flatly that India “could scarcely accept a regime that arbitrarily divided nuclear haves from have-nots.” 3 In fact, it did not. While they have not publicly stated their positions, others have or probably will follow. Israel, which has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is known to have between 400 and 600 nuclear weapons while Iran, which has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is believed to be on the way toward acquiring them. <snip>

http://www.hnn.us/articles/13507.html

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. we need to get back

to what it was like before Bush. He has done great harm to US foreign policy. Hopefully it is not irrepairable.

[wli]

2. nuclear war is a question of when, not if

Thanks to Bushler, Cheney, et al (possibly even due to direct arms dealing activities if suspicions regarding the Plame affair are true).