flying over hiroshima 1945....

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Revisiting Hiroshima

By Noam Chomsky

 

08/02/05 " ICH " -- -- THIS month's anniversary of the

bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompts only the most

sombre 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 9-11, 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-defence "

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 over 60 per cent of

the world total (which rose 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, 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 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

El-Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency,

emphasizes that " reluctance by one party to fulfil 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

antiballistic 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 defence

secretary, who also attended the retrospective. In the

May-June issue of 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 defence

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, 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 Sen. Sam

Nunn and Sen. Richard Lugar, and the setback to these

programmes from the first days of the Bush administration,

paralysed by what Sen. Joseph Biden called " ideological idiocy. "

 

The Washington leadership has put aside nonproliferation

programmes 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 years, " Susan B. Glasser reports 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? " '

 

US terrorism specialist Peter Bergen 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 Taleban

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.

 

Noam Chomsky 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.

 

 

" God was my co-pilot, but we crashed in the Andes and I had to eat him. "