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November 21, 2008 at 13:34:38
Promoted to Headline (H2) on 11/21/08: by Bob Koehler (Posted by bobkoehler) Page 1 of 2 page(s) |
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Nobody opines sagely anymore that the races will never get along, calmly ladling conventional certainties over the earnest idealism of civil-rights activists. But we live in a world so permeated with militarized fear of demagogic leaders and rogue states that nuclear deterrence retains enough of the default credibility it had during the Cold War, as the opposite of utopian naïveté, that common sense is still on the defensive. No matter that some of the most prominent old Cold Warriors have lost their faith in nuclear weapons, and grasp that us vs. them security concepts are disastrously counterproductive in today’s more complex, more nationally porous global reality, and have downgraded that era’s most notorious acronym — M.A.D., as in Mutually Assured Destruction — to just plain mad. “U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage . . .” Let' those words reverberate, as we ponder their seriousness: “. . . to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons . . . and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world. . . . (which) is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era.”
They were written, in early 2007, by two former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz; a former secretary of defense, William Perry; and former Sen. Sam Nunn, long-time chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. All are ex-hawks, stalwart defenders of the Free World back in the day, but here they are speaking in humbler language, language that is plaintive and almost prayer-like, of “a world free” — of nuclear weapons.
They warn: “. . .the U.S. soon will be compelled to enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence. It is far from certain that we can successfully replicate the old Soviet-American ‘mutually assured destruction’ with an increasing number of potential nuclear enemies world-wide without dramatically increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used.”
And they quote JFK: “The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.”
Their words have given courage to editorial boards here and there. In August, the San Francisco Chronicle, citing the support of “well-known realists” Kissinger and Shultz, editorialized that “the United States should take the lead in building a consensus for reducing, and ultimately disarming, global stocks of nuclear weapons.”
In other words, reduction of the world’s supply of 25,000 nuclear weapons isn’t enough. Foreswearing “the next generation” of nuclear weapons, and the multi-billion-dollar weapons industry hell-bent on birthing it, isn’t enough. National and, indeed, human security demands nothing short of the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, a goal that can only be achieved, in the words of Kissinger, et al, as a global “joint enterprise” — you know, with international or trans-national cooperation, kind of the opposite of the Bush/neocon vision of American hegemony and its comic-book battle with evil.
“U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage . . .”
So far this remains the cry of the powerless. The old Cold Warriors are out of the game now, as they lend their voices and their realpolitik bona fides to those who were never in the game. And therefore these voices, no matter their urgency, can still be dismissed as utopian and “a bit Pollyanaish” (a comment I received recently) because the vision they are articulating doesn’t have the status of conventional wisdom yet.
The default response is still too easily a mocking flicker of “father knows best,” a replay of the old canards of institutional racism. The races can never get along. Bad people are out there; we have to protect ourselves.
Only someone currently in full possession of the blessings and curses of power can give this vision the credibility of inevitability, which brings me to my point: We have just elected such a person president, and, as the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg put it, “there is already the feel of the beginning of a new era.” The prevailing fabric of political cynicism has a gash from top to bottom, and a global yearning for change rushes in.
Why else are a million and a half people expected to pack the D.C. mall for Barack Obama’s inauguration? Scalpers are selling tickets to the event for as high $60,000. History is screaming. Surely it is a cry for international cooperation, a safer world, a new way of thinking. Surely it is a cry that we step away from the madness of our nuclear suicide pact.
But only the man of the moment can give this cry political traction. Obama needs more than our cheers. He needs our ultimatum as well: our insistence that he step into the future we voted for.
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No No No!
History is screaming: No No NO! While the mass of the population has quietly gone along with our nuclear war fighting elite’s plea for the build up of nuclear weapons, conditioned on the belief that they are designed to protect us, some day some way the people will figure it all out. These weapons were never intended to be for our protection, rather from the beginning of the nuclear age, our nuclear war fighting elite planned to immolate the mass of humanity. As recently as May 23 of 2008 a Minuteman III caught on fire in a silo in Cheyenne, Wyoming. A battery charger was connected to the power supply, to insure against having a weak battery when the time came to launch this missile upon us. Moisture got into the charger and started a fire that did 1 million dollars in damage; though we were saved from a much worse catastrophe had that missile been launched. The nuclear-armed Minuteman III can be launched in a 1-minute time frame. It is a solid fuel rocket that cannot be recalled. It, and large numbers of others, is still sitting on a ‘Hair trigger’ alert status. One missile launch and the human race are done for. You may have to ask yourself a few questions about the people who have built these weapons of genocidal mass destruction. First question: “Have they ever done anything but lie, thieve and murder for a living?” Second question: “Do you think that they may decide to destroy you and your world before you figure it out?” Third question: “Are you pleased that they have taken your money to produce a threat that was and still is intended to lead to your destruction?” Forth question: “Do you have a ‘lantern’ to get into the underground shelter system that they have provided for themselves to relax in while they put the rest of us to the nuclear torch?” If you have never received your ‘Lantern,’ that indicates that you are not invited into the underground and are certain to remain on the surface and be destroyed with the rest of the mass of humanity. ‘Lantern’ is the term that is used by the clever to designate that they have been given the credentials to find their way to sneak into the underground and hide while we are destroyed on the surface. An interesting aspect of our nuclear war fighting elites repeated attempts to exterminate us, is that we are now dealing with the 4th generation of nuclear war fighting elite. They are continuing the old traditional ways, and have set their sights upon finally getting a full-blown nuclear holocaust underway. That was the plan from 1946, and is still the plan to day. You can watch the “Night of the Living Dead,” for free on the internet. It has a few clues about what it is all about in it. Or you can read for free; The Politics of Extraterrestrials" . by Patrick (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 519 comments [22 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Nov 22, 2008 at 7:27:23 PM  (0+)
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right on Bob
The people have been systematically kept in the dark about the true horrors of these weapons from the Manhattan Project to the present. No reports of radiation sickness were allowed out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The insidious and irreversible effects of depleted uranium weapons have been known since the beginning but kept covered up by the policy advocated in the infamous Los Alamos memo, which instructs military personnel writing reports to disinform of environmental consequences that would lead to political defeat of illegal weapons of indiscriminate and mass destruction. Kennedy had to enlist the help of Gofman and Sternglass to thwart the mad Dr. Strangelove's plan Operation Plowshare to dig a new Panama Canal with hydrogen bombs. If biologists had not spoken in Congress against nuclear weapons exploded in earth's atmosphere, there would not have been an atmospheric test ban treaty. The highest plutonium levels of major population centers in the early seventies was in Hawaii where a decade of enormous atomic explosions in the South Pacific rained out this deadly man made isotope. According to the oldest cancer registries that go back about a century, exposure to the nuclear era has coincided with an epidemic of cancers at a time when infectious diseases dropped. The Russian nuclear weapons program created probably the world's most polluted site near Chelyabinsk during the fifties. One can not even stand next to one lake there for a few minutes, now or forever, after it received a steady outflow of poisons from the nuclear weapons program. But that is just the whimper, not the bang ending. Now it really comes to a showdown on who can walk the talk. But with one of the world's rogue nuclear states firmly in control of the US government, with terrifying proliferation by both proxy and master, it will take all of humanity's highest consciousness for survival to turn back the era of mutually assured destruction and bring the planet into hope for an age of Aquarius. by io (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 100 comments [11 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Nov 23, 2008 at 2:30:10 AM (0+)
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