How a world-ending weapon disappeared from our lives, but not our world July 9, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Nuclear weapons/power, War.Tags: china nuclear, diplomacy, India nuclear, iran nuclear, israel nuclear, non-proliferation, nuclear, nuclear deterrance, nuclear power, nuclear proliferation, nuclear stockpile, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, Pakistan nuclear, roger hollander, start treaty, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, william d. hartrung
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Roger’s note: when I was a small child I was afraid of the dark, and the only way I could peacefully fall asleep was to pull my blanket over my head. Somehow, irrationally, it made me feel safe from whatever out there I was afraid of. As you will read in the article posted below, “out there” are 20,000 nuclear warheads in the hands of the governments of nine nations, some less stable than others. Enough nuclear power to blow our planet to bits a number of time. Why am I calling this to your attention? Actually, I am not sure. It just seems to me that a strategy more practical than pulling a blanket of our collective heads is called for. And good luck in getting to sleep tonight.
By William D. Hartung, TomDispatch
The Ringhals atomic power station near Varberg, Sweden(Credit: AP/Bjorn Larsson Rosvall)
There was a time when nuclear weapons were a significant part of our national conversation. Addressing the issue of potential atomic annihilation was once described by nuclear theorist Herman Kahn as “thinking about the unthinkable,” but that didn’t keep us from thinking, talking, fantasizing, and worrying about it, or putting images of possible nuclear nightmares (often transmuted to invading aliens or outer space) endlessly on screen.
Now, on a planet still overstocked with city-busting, world-ending weaponry, in which almost 67 years have passed since a nuclear weapon was last used, the only nuke that Americans regularly hear about is one that doesn’t exist: Iran’s. The nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons on missiles, planes, and submarines possessed by Russia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea are barely mentioned in what passes for press coverage of the nuclear issue.
Today, nuclear destruction finds itself at the end of a long queue of anxieties about our planet and its fate. For some reason, we trust ourselves, our allies, and even our former enemies with nuclear arms — evidently so deeply that we don’t seem to think the staggering arsenals filled with weaponry that could put the devastation of Hiroshima to shame are worth covering or dealing with. Even the disaster at Fukushima last year didn’t revive an interest in the weaponry that goes with the “peaceful” atom in our world.
Attending to the Bomb in a MAD World
Our views of the nuclear issue haven’t always been so shortsighted. In the 1950s, editor and essayist Norman Cousins was typical in frequently tackling nuclear weapons issues for the widely read magazine Saturday Review. In the late 1950s and beyond, the Ban the Bomb movement forced the nuclear weapons issue onto the global agenda, gaining international attention when it was revealed that Strontium-90, a byproduct of nuclear testing, was making its way into mothers’ breast milk. In those years, the nuclear issue became personal as well as political.
In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy responded to public pressure by signing a treaty with Russia that banned atmospheric nuclear testing (and so further Strontium-90 fallout). He also gave a dramatic speech to the United Nations in which he spoke of the nuclear arms race as a “sword of Damocles” hanging over the human race, poised to destroy us at any moment.
Popular films like Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove captured both the dangers and the absurdity of the superpower arms race. And when, on the night of October 22, 1962, Kennedy took to the airwaves to warn the American people that a Cuban missile crisis was underway, that it was nuclear in nature, and that a Soviet nuclear attack and a “full retaliatory strike on the Soviet Union” were possibilities — arguably the closest we have come to a global nuclear war — it certainly got everyone’s attention.
All things nuclear receded from public consciousness as the Vietnam War escalated and became the focus of antiwar activism and debate, but the nuclear issue came back with a vengeance in the Reagan years of the early 1980s when superpower confrontations once again were in the headlines. A growing anti-nuclear movement first focused on a near-disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania (the Fukushima of its moment) and then on the superpower nuclear stand-off that went by the name of “mutually assured destruction” or, appropriately enough, the acronym MAD.
The Nuclear Freeze Campaign generated scores of anti-nuclear resolutions in cities and towns around the country, and in June 1982, a record-breaking million people gathered in New York City’s Central Park to call for nuclear disarmament. If anyone managed to miss this historic outpouring of anti-nuclear sentiment, ABC news aired a prime-time, made-for-TV movie, The Day After, that offered a remarkably graphic depiction of the missiles leaving their silos and the devastating consequences of a nuclear war. It riveted a nation.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of that planetary superpower rivalry less than a decade later took nuclear weapons out of the news. After all, with the Cold War over and no other rivals to the United States, who needed such weaponry or a MAD world, either? The only problem was that the global nuclear landscape was left more or less intact, mission-less but largely untouched (with the proliferation of the weapons to other countries ongoing). Unacknowledged as it may be, in some sense MAD still exists, even if we prefer to pretend that it doesn’t.
A MAD World That No One Cares to Notice
More than 20 years later, the only nuclear issue considered worth the bother is stopping the spread of the bomb to a couple of admittedly scary and problematic regimes: Iran and North Korea. Their nuclear efforts regularly make the news and garner attention (to the point of obsession) in media and government circles. But remind me: When was the last time you read about what should be the ultimate (and obvious) goal — getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether?
This has been our reality, despite President Obama’s pledge in Prague back in 2009 to seek “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” and the passage of a modest but important New START arms-reduction treaty between the United States and Russia in 2010. It remains our reality, despite a dawning realization in budget-anxious Washington that we may no longer be able to afford to throw money (as presently planned) at nuclear projects ranging from new ballistic-missile submarines to new facilities for building nuclear warhead components — all of which are slated to keep the secret global nuclear arms race alive and well decades into the future.
If Iran is worth talking about — and it is, given the implications of an Iranian bomb for further nuclear proliferation in the Middle East — what about the arsenals of the actual nuclear states? What about Pakistan, a destabilizing country which has at least 110 nuclear warheads and counting, and which continues to view India as its primary adversary despite U.S. efforts to get it to focus on al Qaida and the Taliban? What about India’s roughly 100 nuclear warheads, meant to send a message not just to Pakistan but to neighboring China as well? And will China hold pat at 240 or so nuclear weapons in the face of U.S. nuclear modernization efforts and plans to surround it with missile defense systems that could, in theory if not practice, blunt China’s nuclear deterrent force?
Will Israel continue to get a free pass on its officially unacknowledged possession of up to 200 nuclear warheads and its refusal to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Who are France and the United Kingdom targeting with their forces of 300 and 225 nuclear warheads, respectively? How long will it take North Korea to develop miniaturized nuclear bombs and deploy them on workable, long-range missiles? And is New START the beginning or the end of mutual U.S. and Russian arms reductions?
Many of these questions are far more important than whether Iran gets the bomb, but they get, at best, only a tiny fraction of the attention that Tehran’s nuclear program is receiving. Concern about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and a fear of loose nukes in a destabilizing country is certainly part of the subtext of U.S. policy towards Islamabad. Little effort has been made of late, however, to encourage Pakistan and India to engage in talks aimed at reconciling their differences and opening the way for discussions on reducing their nuclear arsenals.
The last serious effort – centered on the contentious issue of Kashmir — reached its high point in 2007 under the regime of Pakistani autocrat Pervez Musharraf, and it went awry in the wake of political changes within his country and Pakistani-backed terrorist attacks on India. If anything, the tensions now being generated by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands and other affronts, intended or not, to Pakistan’s sovereignty have undermined any possibility of Washington brokering a rapprochement between Pakistan and India.
In addition, starting in the Bush years, the U.S. has been selling India nuclear fuel and equipment. This has been part of a controversial agreement that violates prior U.S. commitments to forgo nuclear trade with any nation that has refused to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (a pact India has not signed). Although U.S. assistance is nominally directed towards India’s civilian nuclear program, it helps free up resources that India can use to expand its nuclear weapons arsenal.
The “tilt” towards India that began during the Bush administration has continued under Obama. Only recently, for instance, a State Department official bragged about U.S. progress in selling advanced weaponry to New Delhi. Meanwhile, F-16s that Washington supplied to the Pakistani military back in the heyday of the U.S.-Pakistan alliance may have already been adapted to serve as nuclear delivery vehicles in the event of a nuclear confrontation with India.
China has long adhered to a de facto policy of minimum deterrence — keeping just enough nuclear weapons to dissuade another nation from attacking it with nuclear arms. But this posture has not prevented Beijing from seeking to improve the quality of its long-range ballistic missiles. And if China feels threatened by continued targeting by the United States or by sea-based American interceptors deployed to the region, it could easily increase its arsenal to ensure the “safety” of its deterrent. Beijing will also be keeping a watchful eye on India as its nuclear stockpile continues to grow.
Ever since Ronald Reagan — egged on by mad scientists like Edward Teller and right-wing zealots like Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham – pledged to build a perfect anti-nuclear shield that would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” missile defense has had a powerful domestic constituency in the United States. This has been the case despite the huge cost and high-profile failures of various iterations of the missile defense concept.
The only concrete achievement of three decades of missile defense research and development so far has been to make Russia suspicious of U.S. intentions. Even now, rightly or not, Russia is extremely concerned about the planned installation of U.S. missile defenses in Europe that Washington insists will be focused on future Iranian nuclear weapons. Moscow feels that they could just as easily be turned on Russia. If President Obama wins a second term, he will undoubtedly hope to finesse this issue and open the door to further joint reductions in nuclear forces, or possibly even consider reducing this country’s nuclear arsenal significantly, whether or not Russia initially goes along.
Recent bellicose rhetoric from Moscow underscores its sensitivity to the missile defense issue, which may yet scuttle any plans for serious nuclear negotiations. Given that the U.S. and Russia together possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, an impasse between the two nuclear superpowers (even if they are not “super” in other respects) will undercut any leverage they might have to encourage other nations to embark on a path leading to global nuclear reductions.
In his 1960s ode to nuclear proliferation, “Who’s Next?” Tom Lehrer included the line “Israel’s getting tense, wants one in self-defense.” In fact, Israel was the first — and for now the only — Middle Eastern nation to get the bomb, with reports that it can deliver a nuclear warhead not only from land-based missiles but also via cruise missiles launched from nuclear submarines. Whatever it may say about Israel’s technical capabilities in the military field, Israel’s nuclear arsenal may also be undermining its defense, particularly if it helps spur Iran to build its own nukes. And irresponsible talk by some Israeli officials about attacking Iran only increases the chance that Tehran will decide to go nuclear.
It is hard to handicap the grim, “unthinkable,” but hardly inconceivable prospect that August 9, 1945, will not prove to be the last time that nuclear weapons are used on this planet. Perhaps some of the loose nuclear materials or inadequately guarded nuclear weapons littering the globe — particularly, but not solely, in the states of the former Soviet Union — might fall into the hands of a terrorist group. Perhaps an Islamic fundamentalist government will seize power in Pakistan and go a step too far in nuclear brinkmanship with India over Kashmir. Maybe the Israeli leadership will strike out at Iran with nuclear weapons in an effort to keep Tehran from going nuclear. Maybe there will be a miscommunication or false alarm that will result in the United States or Russia launching one of their nuclear weapons that are still in Cold War-style, hair-trigger mode.
Although none of these scenarios, including a terrorist nuclear attack, may be as likely as nuclear alarmists sometimes suggest, as long as the world remains massively stocked with nuclear weapons, one of them — or some other scenario yet to be imagined — is always possible. The notion that Iran can’t be trusted with such a weapon obscures a larger point: Given their power to destroy life on a monumental scale, no individual and no government can ultimately be trusted with the bomb.
The only way to be safe from nuclear weapons is to get rid of them — not just the Iranian one that doesn’t yet exist, but all of them. It’s a daunting task. It’s also a subject that’s out of the news and off anyone’s agenda at the moment, but if it is ever to be achieved, we at least need to start talking about it. Soon.
William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Hartung discusses the upside-down world of global nuclear politics, click here or download it to your iPod here.)
The Obama Doctrine and the Dangers of the $185 Billion Increase in US Nuclear War Preparations August 5, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Nuclear weapons/power, War.Tags: arms race, bric, first-strike, joseph gerson, military budget, nuclear, nuclear proliferation, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, obama doctrine, peace movement, roger hollander, test ban, test ban treaty, U.S. imperialism, war, war president
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Roger’s note: below this article I have posted Gar Alperovitz’s arugment against the official rational for droping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We continue to face the urgent imperative of eliminating the world’s nuclear arsenals before they eliminate us.
World Conference Against A- and H- Bombs, Hiroshima, August 3, 2011
Minosan Konichi-wa. I come with deep sympathy for all that the people of Japan have suffered as a result of the March 11 catastrophes and I am inspired by the resilience of the Japanese people and the Japanese peace movement.
I return to Hiroshima with humility and anger at what the government that speaks in my name has inflicted here and is preparing for the future. And, who cannot but feel rage at the ways Japanese lives have been sacrificed and your economy undermined. Like the decision to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, human ambition and greed, not simply nature, were responsible for what you, your friends and communities have suffered from Fukushima.
Also see: “Nuclear War or Real Security?”
Let me begin with a few words about the US political landscape, the fluid state of the global (dis)order and the emerging Obama Doctrine.
The sad truth is that President Bush has been succeeded by another US war president. The US remains at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama escalated the Pakistan and Yemen wars and the aggressive military exercises in the Yellow and South China Seas. Washington has deepened its alliances across the Asia-Pacific with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Australia and India and in Europe with NATO’s new “strategic concept.”
Recall that during last winter’s Korean crisis, the US sent the nuclear powered and nuclear capable USS George Washington into the Yellow Sea, which Beijing claims as its exclusive territorial waters. As former US Ambassador R. Stapleton Roy put it, “we poked China in the eye because we could.” Whether we agree with Beijing’s claim or not, competing international claims should be addressed through law and diplomacy, not by signaling possible future nuclear attacks.
The strategic debate in US elite circles focuses on the relative US decline and the rise of China and the other BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India and China] nations. The dominant question is whether war with rising powers – especially China – is inevitable or if there are alternatives. Of course, the Know Nothings of the Tea Party are focused on cutting essential human services, and some may not even know where to find Japan or China on a map.
It is in this context that a recent article in Foreign Affairs asserted that after an initial phase of “multilateral entrenchment, we now have an Obama Doctrine: aggressive “counterpunching.”
Obama arrived at the White House with the US having become an isolated pariah nation. His initial priorities were to “Wind down [the Iraq and Afghanistan] wars, reestablish American standing and leadership … and focus on a broader set of priorities, from Asia and the global economy to a nuclear-nonproliferation regime.”(1) This included embracing the G-20, re-engaging Asia-Pacific multilateral organizations and Obama’s Prague and Cairo speeches. The BRICs were unimpressed.
Now, having revitalized its alliances, especially in the Asia-Pacific and Europe, Obama and company have turned to “counterpunching,” reasserting US power and influence across the world “when challenged by other countries, reassuring allies and signaling resolve to potential rivals ….”(2) In addition to the poking of China in its Yellow Sea eye, this includes deepening economic and military ties with most of China’s neighbors, declaring freedom of navigation in the South China Sea a core US interest and the accelerated pace of “military exercises” in contested waters.
In the Middle East, the Obama administration has used military and other leverage to limit the Arab Spring. In North Africa, Libya is the first of NATO’s new “strategic concept” wars, with European allies having increased war-fighting responsibilities.
Where do nuclear weapons fit into this picture and why was the deal made with Congressional Republicans to spend an additional $185 billion to “modernize” the US nuclear arsenal and its delivery systems?
While some believe that, “the Obama administration’s nuclear weapons policy appears to be schizophrenic,” that is not the case. Obama’s Prague speech was part of a diplomatic offensive designed to achieve the nation’s pre-eminent strategic goal: preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and thus reducing the risk of nuclear attacks against the United States. Following the recommendations of Shultz, Kissinger, and others, Obama acknowledged the Untied States’ Article VI NPT abolition obligations and demonstrated commitments to at least limited disarmament. We had Prague, Obama’s special Security Council session, the Nuclear Security Summit, New START and preparations for CTBT ratification.
But there is a less visible operational side to US nuclear strategies: the first strike doctrine and the administration’s commitment that “as long as nuclear weapons exist, we the United States will maintain a[n] … effective nuclear arsenal.” The US is building the nuclear arsenal needed to enforce empire for decades to come. The deal that secured New START ratification committed Obama to “a major modernization effort to revitalize” the nation’s genocidal strategic nuclear warheads and its massive arsenal of stockpiled nuclear weapons. The extra $185 billion will pay to expand the nuclear weapons production infrastructure, train a new generation of nuclear weapons designers and technicians, extend the murderous “life” of aging nuclear warheads and replace so-called “old delivery systems.”(3)
While it seems counterintuitive, in addition to maintaining enough strategic warheads to completely destroy Russia or China and bring on nuclear winter, the Pentagon will be modernizing low-yield nuclear weapons and make them deliverable by the new nuclear-capable F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and cruise missiles. B-61 nuclear bombs will be converted to lower-yield warheads. Funding will be there to replace the fleet of Trident submarines and to increase the accuracy of the missiles they carry. There are also plans for a new generation of nuclear-capable drones and air launched cruise missiles.
We are warned that “as nuclear weapons proliferate, it becomes increasingly likely that the United States will find itself in conventional conflicts with nuclear-armed adversaries. So, senior analysts tell us that “deterring weak, desperate adversaries from using their nuclear trump card will be a major challenge” and that the US “must possess nuclear weapons that a president might actually use.”(4) The $185 billion program is there to reinforce US nuclear threats and to increase the probability that future US presidents will not fear pushing the nuclear button.
Of course, Washington is not the only power preparing for nuclear war. Despite last year’s NPT Review Conference, all the nuclear powers are modernizing and/or expanding their arsenals. We continue to face the urgent imperative of eliminating the world’s nuclear arsenals before they eliminate us.
In the US, both elite and community-based forces are campaigning for abolition. Our movement is committed to winning negotiation of a nuclear weapons abolition convention, and we have long made the links between nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Some are preparing for Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ratification.
But with the massive US budget reductions and the resulting loss of essential government services, our greatest chance for near-term success lies in the growing movement to cut Pentagon spending so that human needs are met. President Obama and the Tea Party Republicans are rehashing the policies that led to the Great Depression. The military budget – already 60 percent of discretionary spending is being increased, while trillions needed for under funded schools, railways, health care, jobs and environmental safety are being cut.
Reinforced by the calls of the US Council of Mayors for abolition and to slash Pentagon spending, we now have a growing popular wave of organized labor, faith communities and the peace movement demanding “Move the Money” and “Fund Our Communities – Not War!” One of AFSC’s [American Friends Service Committee’s] unique contributions is highlighting the need to put spending for nuclear weapons on the chopping block.
Other organizing includes an extended national Nuclear Free Future month. We began early in Boston with a Nuclear Free Festival on Trinity Day. There, as an expression of solidarity with your responses to Fukushima and Gensuikyo’s abolition campaigning, activists signed this banner. In the fall, we will be exhibiting Hiroshima Hibakusha Kayashige Junko’s paintings at Harvard University. And to build the our movement’s capacity to challenge militarization in the Asia-Pacific, we have organized a Peace Forum with the Chinese People’s Association for Disarmament and Peace, in which Gensuikyo will play leading roles.
Friends, none of this is enough. The 3-11 catastrophes mark a third great turning point in modern Japanese history, after the Black Ships and the Meiji Revolution and the 15-Year War and its resulting calamities. How will Japan recreate itself? With the peace marchers from Tohoku and this World Conference we are assured that the people of 21st-century Japan will continue to serve as the vanguard for the abolition of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
Together, with imagination and persistence, WE SHALL OVERCOME!
No More Fukushimas! No More Hiroshimas! No More Nagasakis! No More Hibakusha!!
Footnotes:
1. Daniel W. Drezner, “Does Obama Have a Grand Strategy?” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2011.
2. Ibid.
3. Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, “The Case for Modernizing America’s Nukes,” Foreign Affairs, July 6, 2011.
4. Ibid
Dr. Joseph Gerson is disarmament coordinator of the American Friend Service Committee and director of its Peace and Economic Security Program. His most recent book is “Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World.”
On the Sixty-Sixth Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima
Today is the 66th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Though most Americans are unaware of the fact, increasing numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended: Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,” as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral than American liberals in the years following World War II.
By the summer of 1945 Japan was essentially defeated, its navy at the bottom of the ocean; its air force limited by fuel, equipment, and other shortages; its army facing defeat on all fronts; and its cities subjected to bombing that was all but impossible to challenge. With Germany out of the war, the United States and Britain were about to bring their full power to bear on what was left of the Japanese military. Moreover, the Soviet Union—at this point in time still neutral—was getting ready to attack on the Asian mainland: the Red Army, fresh from victory over Hitler, was poised to strike across the Manchurian border.
Long before the bombings occurred in August 1945—indeed, as early as late April 1945, more than three months before Hiroshima—U.S. intelligence advised that the Japanese were likely to surrender when the Soviet Union entered the war if they were assured that it did not imply national annihilation. An April 29 Joint Intelligence Staff document put it this way: “If at any time the U.S.S.R. should enter the war, all Japanese will realize that absolute defeat is inevitable.”
For this reason—because it would drastically shorten the war—before the atomic bomb was successfully tested (on July 16, 1945) the U.S. had strongly and repeatedly urged the Soviet Union to join the battle as soon after the defeat of Hitler as possible. A target date of three months after Germany’s surrender was agreed upon—which put the planned Red Army attack date at roughly August 8, the war in Europe having ended on May 8. (In late July the date was temporarily extended by a week.)
Nor was there any doubt that the Soviet Union would join the war for its own reasons. At the Potsdam Conference in July (before the successful atomic test) President Truman entered the following in his diary after meeting with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin on July 17: “He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about.”
The next day, July 18, in a private letter to his wife, the President wrote: “I’ve gotten what I came for—Stalin goes to war August 15 with no strings on it…I’ll say that we’ll end the war a year sooner now…”
The President had also been urged to offer assurances that the Japanese Emperor would be allowed to remain in some form of powerless figurehead role by many top advisers—including, importantly, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, the man who oversaw the development of the atomic bomb. Before the bomb was used he explicitly urged the President that in his judgment the war would end if such assurances were given—without the use of the atomic bomb.
Nor were there insuperable political obstacles to this approach: Leadings newspapers like the Washington Post, along with leaders of the opposition Republican Party were publically demanding such a course. (Moreover, the U.S. Army wanted to maintain the Emperor in some role so as to use his authority both to order surrender and to help manage Japan during the occupation period after war’s end—which, of course, is what, in fact, was done: Japan still has an Emperor.)
As the President’s diary entry and letter to his wife indicate, there is little doubt that he understood the advice given by the intelligence experts as to the likely impact of the upcoming Russian attack. Further evidence is also available on this central point: The American and British Joint Chiefs of Staff—the very top military leaders of the two nations—also met at Potsdam to consolidate planning for the final stages of the war in the Pacific. General Sir Hastings Ismay, Chief of Staff to the British Minister of Defence, summarized the latest (early July) combined US-UK intelligence evidence for Prime Minister Churchill this way: “[W]hen Russia came into the war against Japan, the Japanese would probably wish to get out on almost any terms short of the dethronement of the Emperor.”
The July joint intelligence finding, of course, for the most part simply restated what had been the essential view of American intelligence and many of the President’s top advisers throughout the spring and summer months leading up to the July meeting at Potsdam.
Among the many reasons the shock of Soviet entry was expected to be so powerful were: first, that it would directly challenge the Japanese army in what had been one of its most important strongholds, Manchuria; second, it would signal that there was literally no hope once the third of the three Great Powers was no longer neutral; and third, and perhaps even more important, with the Japanese economy in disarray Japanese leaders were extremely fearful that leftist groups might be powerfully encouraged, politically, if the Soviet Union were to play a major role in Japan’s defeat.
Furthermore, U.S. intelligence had broken Japanese codes and knew Japanese leaders were frantically hoping against hope as they attempted to arrange some form of settlement with Moscow as a mediator. Since their strategy was so heavily focused on what the Russians might or might not do, this further underscored the judgment that when the Red Army attacked, the end would not be far off: the illusory hope of a negotiation through Moscow would be thoroughly dashed as Soviet tanks rolled into Manchuria.
Instead, the United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a significant factor.
Some modern analysts have urged that Japanese military planning to thwart an invasion was much more advanced than had previously been understood, and hence more threatening to U.S. plans. Others have argued that Japanese military leaders were much more ardently committed to one or more of four proposed ‘conditions’ to attach to a surrender than a number of experts hold, and hence, again, would likely have fought hard to continue the war.
It is, of course, impossible to know whether the advice given by top U.S. and British intelligence that a Russian attack would likely to produce surrender was correct. We do know that the President ignored such judgments and the advice of people like Secretary of War Stimson that the war could be ended in other ways when he made his decision. This, of course, is an important fact in its own right in considering whether the decision was justified, since so many civilian lives were sacrificed in the two bombings.
Moreover, many leading historians who have studied both the U.S. and Japanese records carefully (including, among others, Barton Bernstein and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa) have concluded that Japan was indeed in such dire straits that–as U.S. and British intelligence had urged long before the bombings–the war would, in fact, have likely ended before the November invasion target date once the Russians entered.
It is also important to note that there was very little to lose by using the Russian attack to end the war. The atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9. There were still three months to go before the first landing could take place in November. If the early August Russian attack did not work as expected, the bombs could obviously have been used anyway long before any lives were lost in the landing.
(Since use of the atomic bombs and Russia’s entry into the war came at almost exactly the same time, scholars have debated at great length which factor influenced the surrender decision more. This, of course, is a very different question from whether using the atomic bomb was justified as the only way to end the war. Still, it is instructive to note that speaking privately to top Army officials on August 14 the Japanese Emperor stated bluntly: “The military situation has changed suddenly. The Soviet Union entered the war against us. Suicide attacks can’t compete with the power of science. Therefore, there is no alternative…” And the Imperial Rescript the Emperor issued to officers and soldiers to make sure they would lay down their arms stated: “Now that the Soviet Union has entered the war, to continue under the present conditions at home and abroad would only result in further useless damage… Therefore…I am going to make peace.”)
The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that (quite apart from the inaccuracy of this figure, as noted by Samuel Walker) most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.
Here is how General Dwight D. Eisenhower reports he reacted when he was told by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that the atomic bomb would be used: “During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”
In another public statement the man who later became President of the United States was blunt: “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
General Curtis LeMay, the tough cigar-smoking Army Air Force “hawk,” was also dismayed. Shortly after the bombings he stated publically: “The war would have been over in two weeks. . . . The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, went public with this statement: “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. . . . The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.”
I noted above the report General Sir Hastings Ismay, Chief of Staff to the British Minister of Defence, made to Prime Minister Churchill that “when Russia came into the war against Japan, the Japanese would probably wish to get out on almost any terms short of the dethronement of the Emperor.” On hearing that the atomic test was successful, Ismay’s private reaction was one of “revulsion.”
Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one. Even more important, well before the atomic bombs were used, contemporary documents record show that Marshall felt “these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave–telling the Japanese that we intend to destroy such centers….”
As the document concerning Marshall’s views suggests, the question of whether the use of the atomic bomb was justified turns not only on whether other options were available, and whether top leaders were advised of this. It also turns on whether the bombs had to be used against a largely civilian target rather than a strictly military target—which, in fact, was the explicit choice since although there were Japanese troops in the cities, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki was deemed militarily vital by U.S. planners. (This is one of the reasons neither had been heavily bombed up to this point in the war.) Moreover, targeting was aimed explicitly on non-military facilities surrounded by workers’ homes. Here we can gain further insight from two additional, equally conservative military leaders.
Many years later President Richard Nixon recalled that “[General Douglas] MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the Bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants. . . . MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off.”
Although many others could be cited, here, finally, is the statement of another conservative, a man who was a close friend of President Truman’s, his Chief of Staff (as well as President Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff), and the five star Admiral who presided over meetings of the Combined U.S.-U.K. Chiefs of Staff during the war—William D. Leahy: “[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
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Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative. Among his most recent books are America Beyond Capitalism and (with Lew Daly) Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back.
How the US Hid Shocking Hiroshima Footage For Decades August 5, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in History, Nuclear weapons/power, War.Tags: akira kurosawa, atomic bomb, daniel mcgovern, greg mitchell, harry truman, herbert sussan, hiroshima, history, japan, nagasaki, nuclear proliferation, nuclear warfare, nuclear weapons, roger hollander, world war II
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coverup of nuclear footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki affects us to this day.
The following article first appeared on the Web site of The Nation. For more great
content from the Nation, sign up for its e-mail
newsletters here.
In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan sixty-six years ago this
week, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight
suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This
included vivid color footage shot by U.S. military crews and black-and-white
Japanese newsreel film.
The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for twenty-five years, and
the shocking US military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. While the
suppression of nuclear truths stretched over decades, Hiroshima sank into “a
kind of hole in human history,” as the writer Mary McCarthy observed. The United
States engaged in a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race. Thousands of nuclear
warheads remain in the world, often under loose control; the United States
retains its “first-strike” nuclear policy; and much of the world is partly or
largely dependent on nuclear power plants, which pose their own hazards.
Our nuclear entrapment continues to this day—you might call it “From
Hiroshima to Fukushima.”
The color US military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and
has never been fully aired. It rests today at the National Archives in College
Park, Maryland, in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF.
When that footage finally emerged, I spoke with and corresponded with the man
at the center of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern, who directed
the US military film-makers in 1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept
watch on all of the top-secret material for decades. I also interviewed one of
his key assistants, Herbert Sussan, and some of the Japanese survivors they
filmed.
Now I’ve written a book and e-book about this, titled Atomic Cover-up:
Two US Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never
Made. You can view some of the suppressed footage here or below.
“I always had the sense,” Dan McGovern told me, “that people in the Atomic
Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force—it was also
sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those [film]
images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child…. They didn’t
want the general public to know what their weapons had done—at a time they were
planning on more bomb tests. We didn’t want the material out because…we were
sorry for our sins.”
Sussan, meanwhile, struggled for years to get some of the American footage
aired on national TV, taking his request as high as President Truman, Robert F.
Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow, to no avail.
The Japanese Newsreel Footage
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the center
of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilians instantly and perhaps 50,000
more in the days and months to follow. Three days later, it exploded another
atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and
dooming tens of thousands of others. Within days, Japan had surrendered, and the
US readied plans for occupying the defeated country—and documenting the first
atomic catastrophe.
But the Japanese also wanted to study it. Within days of the second atomic
attack, officials at the Tokyo-based newsreel company Nippon Eigasha discussed
shooting film in the two stricken cities. When the first rushes came back to
Toyko, Akira Iwasaki, the chief producer, felt “every frame burned into my
brain,” he later said.
At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in the atomic
cities beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious affliction was attacking
many of those who survived the initial blasts (claims that were largely taken to
be propaganda). Newspaper photographs of victims were non-existent, or
censored. Life magazine would later observe that for years “the
world…knew only the physical facts of atomic destruction.”
Tens of thousands of American GIs occupied the two cities. Because of the
alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions.
Then, on October 24, 1945, a Japanese cameraman in Nagasaki was ordered to
stop shooting by an American military policeman. His film, and then the rest of
the 26,000 feet of Nippon Eisasha footage, was confiscated by the US General
Headquarters (GHQ). An order soon arrived banning all further filming. It was at
this point that Lt. Daniel McGovern took charge.
Shooting the US Military Footage
In early September, 1945, less than a month after the two bombs fell, Lt.
McGovern—who as a member of Hollywood’s famed First Motion Picture Unit shot
some of the footage for William Wyler’s “Memphis Belle”—had become one of the
first Americans to arrive in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a director with the
US Strategic Bombing Survey, organized by the Army the previous November to
study the effects of the air campaign against Germany, and now Japan.
As he made plans to shoot the official American record, McGovern learned
about the seizure of the Japanese footage. He felt it would be a waste to not
take advantage of the newsreel footage, noting in a letter to his superiors that
“the conditions under which it was taken will not be duplicated, until another
atomic bomb is released under combat conditions.” McGovern proposed hiring some
of the Japanese crew to edit and “caption” the material, so it would have
“scientific value.” He took charge of this effort in early January 1946.
At the same time, McGovern was ordered by General Douglas MacArthur on
January 1, 1946, to document the results of the US air campaign in more than
twenty Japanese cities. His crew would shoot exclusively on color film,
Kodachrome and Technicolor, rarely used at the time even in Hollywood. McGovern
assembled a crew of eleven, including two civilians. Third in command was a
young lieutenant from New York named Herbert Sussan.
The unit left Tokyo in a specially outfitted train, and made it to Nagasaki.
“Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation I met there,” Sussan
later told me. “We were the only people with adequate ability and equipment to
make a record of this holocaust…I felt that if we did not capture this horror on
film, no one would ever really understand the dimensions of what had happened.
At that time people back home had not seen anything but black and white pictures
of blasted buildings or a mushroom cloud.”
Along with the rest of McGovern’s crew, Sussan documented the physical
effects of the bomb, including the ghostly shadows of vaporized civilians burned
into walls; and, most chillingly, dozens of people in hospitals who had survived
(at least momentarily) and were asked to display their burns, scars, and other
lingering effects for the camera as a warning to the world. At the Red Cross
Hospital in Hiroshima, a Japanese physician traced the hideous, bright red scars
that covered several of the patients—and then took off his white doctor’s shirt
and displayed his own burns and cuts.
After sticking a camera on a rail car and building their own tracks through
the ruins, the Americans filmed hair-raising tracking
shots that could have been lifted right from a Hollywood movie. Their chief
cameramen was a Japanese man, Harry Mimura, who in 1943 had shot Sanshiro
Sugata—the first feature film by a then-unknown Japanese director named
Akira Kurosawa.
The Suppression Begins
While all this was going on,
the Japanese newsreel team was completing its work of editing and labeling all
their black and white footage into a rough cut of just under three hours. At
this point, several members of Japanese team took the courageous step of
ordering from the lab a duplicate of the footage they had shot before the
Americans took over the project—and hiding it in a ceiling at the lab. Then they
handed over their footage.
The following month, McGovern was abruptly ordered to return to the United
States. He hauled the 90,000 feet of color footage, on dozens of reels in huge
footlockers, to the Pentagon and turned it over to General Orvil Anderson.
Locked up and declared top secret, it did not see the light of day for more than
thirty years. McGovern would be charged with watching over it. Sussan would
become obsessed with finding it and getting it aired.
Fearful that his film might get “buried,” McGovern stayed on at the Pentagon
as an aide to Gen. Anderson, who was fascinated by the footage and had no qualms
about showing it to the American people. “He was that kind of man, he didn’t
give a damn what people thought,” McGovern told me. “He just wanted the story
told.”
Once they eyeballed the footage, however, most of the top brass didn’t want
it widely shown and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was also opposed,
according to McGovern. It nixed a Warner Brothers feature film project based on
the footage that Anderson had negotiated, while paying another studio about
$80,000 to help make four training films.
In a March 3, 1947, memo, Francis E. Rundell, a major in the Air Corps,
explained that the film would be classified “secret.” This was determined “after
study of subject material, especially concerning footage taken at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.”
The color footage was shipped to the Wright-Patterson base in Ohio. McGovern
went along after being told to put an I.D. number on the film “and not let
anyone touch it—and that’s the way it stayed,” as he put it. After cataloging
it, he placed it in a vault in the top secret area.
“Dan McGovern stayed with the film all the time,” Sussan later said. “He told
me they could not release the film [because] what it showed was too
horrible.”
Sussan wrote a letter to President Truman, suggesting that a film based on
the footage “would vividly and clearly reveal the implications and effects of
the weapons that confront us at this serious moment in our history.” A reply
from a Truman aide threw cold water on that idea, saying such a film would lack
“wide public appeal.” (He also censored the first Hollywood movie, an MGM epic,
about the bomb, a wild tale, as
I wrote here last week.)
McGovern, meanwhile, continued to “babysit” the film, now at Norton Air Force
base in California.
The Japanese Footage Emerges
At the same time, McGovern was looking after the Japanese footage. The
Japanese government repeatedly asked the US for the full footage of what was
known in that country as “the film of illusion,” to no avail.
Despite rising nuclear fears in the 1960s, before and after the Cuban missile
crisis, few in the United States challenged the consensus view that dropping the
bomb on two Japanese cities was necessary. The United States maintained its
“first-use” nuclear policy: under certain circumstances it would strike first
with the bomb and ask questions later. In other words, there was no real taboo
against using the bomb. This notion of acceptability had started with Hiroshima.
A firm line against using nuclear weapons had been drawn—in the sand. The United
States, in fact, had threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban missile
crisis and on other occasions.
On September 12, 1967, the Air Force transferred the Japanese footage to the
National Archives Audio Visual Branch in Washington, with the film “not to be
released without approval of DOD (Department of Defense).”
Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark
histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to discover a clipping from
a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend. It indicated that the US had finally shipped
to Japan a copy of black and white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return.
From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had
been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a
look.
Attempting to create a subtle, quiet, even poetic, black and white film, he
and his associates cut it from 160 to sixteen minutes, with a montage of human
effects clustered near the end for impact. “Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945” proved to
be a sketchy but quite moving document of the aftermath of the bombing, captured
in grainy but often startling black and white images: shadows of objects or
people burned into walls, ruins of schools, miles of razed landscape viewed from
the roof of a building.
In the weeks ahead, however, none of the (then) three TV networks expressed
interest in airing it. “Only NBC thought it might use the film,” Barnouw later
wrote, “if it could find a ‘news hook.’ We dared not speculate what kind of
event this might call for.” But then an article appeared
in Parade magazine, and an editorial in the Boston
Globe blasted the networks, saying that everyone in the country should see
this film:
This at last pushed public television into the void. What was then called
National Educational Television (NET) agreed to show the documentary on August
3, 1970, to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the dropping of the
bomb.
The American Footage Comes Out
About a decade later, by pure chance, Herb Sussan would spark the
emergence of the American footage, ending its decades in the dark.
In the mid-1970s, Japanese antinuclear activists, led by a Tokyo teacher
named Tsutomu Iwakura, discovered that few pictures of the aftermath of the
atomic bombings existed in their country. Many had been seized by the US
military after the war, they learned, and taken out of Japan. The Japanese had
as little visual exposure to the true effects of the bomb as most Americans.
Activists managed to track down hundreds of pictures in archives and private
collections and published them in a popular book. In 1979 they mounted an
exhibit at the United Nations in New York.
There, by chance, Iwakura met Sussan, who told him about the US military
footage.
Iwakura made a few calls and found that the color footage, recently
declassified, might be at the National Archives. A trip to Washington, DC,
verified this. He found eighty reels of film. About one-fifth of the footage
covered the atomic cities. According to a shot list, reel #11010 included, for
example: “School, deaf and dumb, blast effect, damaged Commercial school
demolished School, engineering, demolished.School, Shirayama elementary,
demolished, blast effect Tenements, demolished.”
The film had been quietly declassified a few years earlier, but no one in the
outside world knew it. An archivist there told me at the time, “If no one knows
about the film to ask for it, it’s as closed as when it was classified.”
Eventually 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million dollars and
Iwakura was able to buy the film. He then traveled around Japan filming
survivors who had posed for Sussan and McGovern in 1946. Iwakura quickly
completed a documentary called Prophecy and in late spring 1982
arranged for a New York premiere.
Later a small part of the McGovern/Sussan footage turned up for the first
time in an American film, one of the sensations of the New York Film Festival,
called Dark Circle. Its co-director, Chris Beaver, told me, “No wonder
the government didn’t want us to see it. I think they didn’t want Americans to
see themselves in that picture. It’s one thing to know about that and another
thing to see it.”
Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American
newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release. And
Sussan was now ill with a form of lymphoma doctors had found in soldiers exposed
to radiation in atomic tests during the 1950s—or in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Still, the question of precisely why the footage remained secret for so long
lingered. But McGovern told me, “The main reason it was classified was because
of the horror, the devastation. The medical effects were pretty gory. The
attitude was: do not show any medical effects. Don’t make people sick.”
But who was behind this? “I always had the sense,” McGovern answered, “that
people in the AEC were sorry they had dropped the bomb. The Air Force—it was
also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those
images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. But the AEC,
they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over
everybody. If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were
the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first US nuclear tests
after the war.”
As Dark Circle director Chris Beaver had said, “With the government
trying to sell the public on a new civil defense program and Reagan arguing that
a nuclear war is survivable, this footage could be awfully bad
publicity.”
Today
In the summer of 1984, I made my own pilgrimage to the atomic cities, to walk
in the footsteps of Dan McGovern and Herb Sussan, and meet some of the people
they filmed in 1946. (The month-long grant was arranged by the current mayor of
Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba. My new book has a lengthy
chapter describing what it’s like to be in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to
intervieww survivors.) By then, the McGovern/ Sussan footage had turned up in
several new documentaries. On September 2, 1985, however, Herb Sussan passed
away. His final request to his children: Would they scatter his ashes at ground
zero in Hiroshima?
In the mid-1990s, researching Hiroshima in America, a book I would
write with Robert Jay Lifton, I discovered the deeper context for suppression of
the US Army film: it was part of a broad effort to suppress a wide range of
material related to the atomic bombings, including photographs, newspaper
reports on radiation effects, information about the decision to drop the bomb,
even a Hollywood movie.
Then, in 2003, as chief adviser to a documentary film, Original Child
Bomb, I urged director Carey Schonegevel to draw on the atomic footage as
much as possible. Original Child Bomb went on to debut at the 2004
Tribeca Film Festival, win the top Silverdocs award, and debut on the Sundance
cable channel. After sixty years at least a small portion of that footage
reached part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful form its
creators intended.
Americans who saw were finally able to fully judge for themselves what
McGovern and Sussan were trying to accomplish in shooting the film, why the
authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if
widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race—and the nuclear
proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today. But only small parts of the
movie have been used (see the video below), only a small number of Americans
have seen any of it. A major documentary on the footage, and the suppression,
should still be made.
Publisher and author of nine books
Look Out, Obama Seems to Be Planning for a Lot More War May 10, 2010
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, War.Tags: al-Qaeda, china, defense department, defense industry, jack smith, military, military industrial complex, military planning, non-proliferation, nuclear proliferation, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, obama war, Pentagon, qdr, Robert Gates, roger hollander, U.S. imperialism, war, war spending
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Jack Smith, Asia Times, May 8, 2010
There’s more war in America’s future – a great deal more, judging by the Barack Obama administration’s reports, pronouncements and actions in recent months.
These documents and deeds include the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the Ballistic Missile Defense Report, the nuclear security summit in New York and the May 3-28 United Nations nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference, as well as the continuing wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the 2011 Pentagon war budget request.
The United States government presides as a military colossus of unrivalled dimension, but the QDR, which was published in February, suggests Washington views America as being constantly under the threat of attack from a multitude of fearsome forces bent on its destruction. As such, trillions more dollars must be invested in present and future wars – ostensibly to make safe the besieged homeland.
The NPR says the long-range US goal is a “nuclear-free” world, but despite token reductions in its arsenal of such weapons, the Pentagon is strengthening its nuclear force and bolstering it with a devastating “conventional deterrent” intended to strike any target in the world within one hour. In addition this document, published in April, retains “hair-trigger” nuclear launch readiness, refuses to declare its nuclear force is for deterrence only (suggesting offensive use) and for the first time authorizes a nuclear attack, if necessary, on a non-nuclear state (Iran).
Meanwhile, Obama is vigorously expanding the George W Bush administration’s wars, and enhancing and deploying America’s unparalleled military power.
The Obama administration’s one positive achievement in terms of militarism and war was the April 9 signing in Prague of the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia that reduces deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 warheads each. It was a step forward, but all agree it was extremely modest, and it does not even faintly diminish the danger of nuclear war.
The QDR is a 128-page Defense Department report mandated by congress to be compiled every four years to put forward a 20-year projection of US military planning. A 20-member civilian panel, selected by the Pentagon and congress, analyzes the document and suggests changes in order to provide an “independent” perspective. Eleven of the members, including the panel’s co-chairmen – former defense secretary William Perry and former national security adviser Stephen Hadley – are employed by the defense industry.
Although the Pentagon is working on preparations for a possible World War III and beyond, the new report is largely focused on the relatively near future and only generalizes about the longer term. Of the QDR’s many priorities three stand out.
The first priority is to “prevail in today’s wars” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and wherever else Washington’s post-9/11 military intrusions penetrate in coming years. Introducing the report February 1, Bush-Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued this significant statement: “Success in wars to come will depend on success in these wars in progress.” The “wars to come” were not identified. Further, the QDR states that military victory in Iraq and Afghanistanis “is only the first step toward achieving our strategic objectives”.
Second, while in the past the US concentrated on the ability to fight two big wars simultaneously, the QDR suggests that’s not enough. Now, the Obama administration posits the “need for a robust force capable of protecting US interests against a multiplicity of threats, including two capable nation-state aggressors.”
Now it’s two-plus wars – the plus being the obligation to “conduct large-scale counter-insurgency, stability and counter-terrorism operations in a wide range of environments”, mainly in small, poor countries like Afghanistan. Other “plus” targets include “non-state actors” such as al-Qaeda, “failed states” such as Somali, and medium-size but well-defended states that do not bend the knee to Uncle Sam, such as Iran or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and some day perhaps Venezuela.
Third, it’s fairly obvious from the QDR, though not acknowledged, that the Obama government believes China and Russia are the two possible “nation-state aggressors” against which Washington must prepare to “defend” itself. Neither Beijing nor Moscow has taken any action to justify the Pentagon’s assumption that they will ever be suicidal enough to attack the far more powerful United States.
After all, the US, with 4.54% of the world’s population, invests more on war and war preparations than the rest of the world combined. Obama’s 2010 Pentagon budget is US$680 billion, but the real total is double that when all Washington’s national security expenditures in other departmental budgets are also included, such as the cost of nuclear weapons, the 16 intelligence agencies, Homeland Security and interest on war debts, among other programs.
Annual war-related expenditures are well over $1 trillion. In calling for a discretionary freeze on government programs in January’s state of the union address, Obama specifically exempted Pentagon/national security expenditures from the freeze. Obama is a big war spender. His $708 billion Pentagon allotment for fiscal 2011 (not counting a pending $33 billion Congress will approve for the Afghan “surge”) exceeds Bush’s highest budget of $651 billion for fiscal 2009.
At present, US military power permeates the entire world. As the QDR notes: “The United States is a global power with global responsibilities. Including operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, approximately 400,000 US military personnel are forward-stationed or rotationally deployed around the world.”
The Pentagon presides over 1,000 overseas military bases (including those in the war zones), great fleets in every ocean, a globe-spanning air force, military satellites in space and nuclear missiles on hair trigger alert pre-targeted on “enemy” or potential “enemy” cities and military facilities. A reading of the QDR shows none of this will change except for upgrading, enlarging (the Pentagon just added six new bases in Colombia) and adding new systems such as Prompt Global Strike, an important new offensive weapon system, which we shall discuss below.
The phrase “full spectrum military dominance” – an expression concocted by the neo-conservatives in the 1990s that was adopted by the Bush administration to define its aggressive military strategy – was cleverly not included in the 2010 QDR, but retaining and augmenting dominance remains the Pentagon’s prime preoccupation.
The QDR is peppered with expressions such as “America’s interests and role in the world require armed forces with unmatched capabilities” and calls for “the continued dominance of America’s Armed Forces in large-scale force-on-force warfare”. Gates went further in his February 1 press conference: “The United States needs a broad portfolio of military capabilities, with maximum versatility across the widest possible spectrum of conflicts.” Obama bragged recently that he commanded “the finest military in the history of the world”.
Evidently, the Pentagon is planning to engage in numerous future wars interrupted by brief periods of peace while preparing for the next war. Given that the only entity expressing an interest in attacking the United States is al-Qaeda – a non-government paramilitary organization of extreme religious fanatics with about a thousand reliable active members around the world – it is obvious that America’s unprecedented military might is actually intended for another purpose.
In our view that “other purpose” is geopolitical – to strengthen even further the Pentagon’s military machine to assure that the United States retains its position as the dominant global hegemon at a time of acute indebtedness, the severe erosion of its manufacturing base, near gridlock in domestic politics, and the swift rise to global prominence of several other nations and blocs.
The QDR touches on this with admirable delicacy: “The distribution of global political, economic and military power is shifting and becoming more diffuse. The rise of China, the world’s most populous country, and India, the world’s largest democracy, will continue to reshape the international system. While the United States will remain the most powerful actor, it must increasingly cooperate with key allies and partners to build and sustain peace and security. Whether and how rising powers fully integrate into the global system will be among this century’s defining questions, and are thus central to America’s interests.”
At the moment, the QDR indicates Washington is worried about foreign “anti-access” strategies that limit its “power projection capabilities” in various parts of the world. What this means is that certain countries such as China and Russia are developing sophisticated new weapons that match those of the US, thus “impeding” the deployment of American forces to wherever the Pentagon desires. For instance:
China is developing and fielding large numbers of advanced medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles, new attack submarines equipped with advanced weapons, increasingly capable long-range air defense systems, electronic warfare and computer network attack capabilities, advanced fighter aircraft and counter-space systems. China has shared only limited information about the pace, scope and ultimate aims of its military modernization programs, raising a number of legitimate questions regarding its long-term intentions.
To counter this trend in China and elsewhere, the Pentagon is planning, at a huge and unannounced cost, the following enhancements: “Expand future long-range strike capabilities; Exploit advantages in subsurface operations; Increase the resiliency of US forward posture and base infrastructure; Assure access to space and the use of space assets; Enhance the robustness of key ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) capabilities; Defeat enemy sensors and engagement systems; and Enhance the presence and responsiveness of US forces abroad.”
In addition, the US not only targets China with nuclear missiles and bombs, it is surrounding the country (and Russia as well, of course) with anti-ballistic missiles. The purpose is plain: In case the US finds it “necessary” to launch ballistic missiles toward China, the ABMs will be able to destroy its limited retaliatory capacity.
According to an article in the February 22 issue of China Daily, the country’s English-language newspaper: “Washington appears determined to surround China with US-built anti-missile systems, military scholars have observed … Air force colonel Dai Xu, a renowned military strategist, wrote in an article released this month that ‘China is in a crescent-shaped ring of encirclement. The ring begins in Japan, stretches through nations in the South China Sea to India, and ends in Afghanistan’.”
Compared to the Bush administration’s 2006 QDR, there has been a conscious effort to tone down the anti-China rhetoric in the current document. But it is entirely clear that China is number one in the QDR’s references to “potentially hostile nation states”.
According to the February 18 Defense News, a publication that serves the military-industrial complex, “Analysts say the QDR attempts to address the threat posed by China without further enraging Beijing. ‘If you look at the list of further enhancements to US forces and capabilities … those are primarily capabilities needed for defeating China, not Iran, North Korea or Hezbollah,’ said Roger Cliff, a China military specialist at Rand. ‘So even though not a lot of time is spent naming China … analysis of the China threat is nonetheless driving a lot of the modernization programs described in the QDR’.”
Incidentally, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, this year’s Chinese defense budget, for a country four times larger than the United States, is $78 billion, compared to the $664 billion for the Pentagon (without all the national security extras harbored in other department budgets). China possesses 100-200 nuclear warheads compared to America’s 9,326 (when both deployed and stored weapons are included). China is contemplating the construction of an aircraft carrier; the US Navy floats 11 of them. China has no military bases abroad.
In our view, China appears to be constructing weapons for defense, not offense against the US – and its foreign policy is based on refusing to be pushed around by Washington while doing everything possible to avoid a serious confrontation.
Russia as well is treated better in the new QDR than in 2006, but it is included with China in most cases. Despite Moscow’s huge nuclear deterrent and abundant oil and gas supplies, it’s only “potential enemy” number two in terms of the big powers. Washington feels more threatened by Beijing. This is largely because of China’s size, rapid development, fairly successful state-guided capitalist economy directed by the Communist Party, and the fact that it is on the road to becoming the world’s economic leader, surpassing the US in 20 to 40 years.
It seems fairly obvious, but hardly mentioned publicly, that this is an extremely dangerous situation. China does not seek to dominate the world, nor will it allow itself to be dominated. Beijing supports the concept of a multipolar world order, with a number of countries and blocs playing roles. At issue, perhaps, is who will be first among equals.
Washington prefers the situation that has existed these 20 years after the implosion of the Soviet Union and much of the socialist world left the United States as the remaining military superpower and boss of the expanded capitalist bloc. During this time Washington has functioned as the unipolar world hegemon and doesn’t want to relinquish the title.
This is all changing now as other countries rise, led by China, and the US appears to be in gradual decline. How the transition to multi-polarity is handled over the next couple of decades may determine whether or not a disastrous war will be avoided.
War, Peace and Obama’s Nobel November 7, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Foreign Policy, Iran, Israel, Gaza & Middle East, Pakistan, Peace, War, Women.Tags: iaea resolution, India nuclear, iran nuclear, israel nuclear, malalai joya, nculear weapons, Noam Chomsky, nobel committee, nobel peace, nobel peace prize, non-proliferation treaty, npt, nuclear non-proliferation, nuclear proliferation, Obama, obama nuclear, obama peace, Pakistan nuclear, peace, resolution 1887, roger hollander, security council, war
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The hopes and prospects for peace aren’t well aligned-not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama.
The prize “seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership,” Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times.
The nature of the Bush-Obama transition bears directly on the likelihood that the prayers and encouragement might lead to progress.
The Nobel committee’s concerns were valid. They singled out Obama’s rhetoric on reducing nuclear weapons.
Right now Iran’s nuclear ambitions dominate the headlines. The warnings are that Iran may be concealing something from the International Atomic Energy Agency and violating U.N. Security Council Resolution 1887, passed last month and hailed as a victory for Obama’s efforts to contain Iran.
Meanwhile, a debate continues on whether Obama’s recent decision to reconfigure missile-defense systems in Europe is a capitulation to the Russians or a pragmatic step to defend the West from Iranian nuclear attack.
Silence is often more eloquent than loud clamor, so let us attend to what is unspoken.
Amid the furor over Iranian duplicity, the IAEA passed a resolution calling on Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and open its nuclear facilities to inspection.
The United States and Europe tried to block the IAEA resolution, but it passed anyway. The media virtually ignored the event.
The United States assured Israel that it would support Israel’s rejection of the resolution-reaffirming a secret understanding that has allowed Israel to maintain a nuclear arsenal closed to international inspections, according to officials familiar with the arrangements. Again, the media were silent.
Indian officials greeted U.N. Resolution 1887 by announcing that India “can now build nuclear weapons with the same destructive power as those in the arsenals of the world’s major nuclear powers,” the Financial Times reported.
Both India and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear weapons programs. They have twice come dangerously close to nuclear war, and the problems that almost ignited this catastrophe are very much alive.
Obama greeted Resolution 1887 differently. The day before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his inspiring commitment to peace, the Pentagon announced it was accelerating delivery of the most lethal non-nuclear weapons in the arsenal: 13-ton bombs for B-2 and B-52 stealth bombers, designed to destroy deeply hidden bunkers shielded by 10,000 pounds of reinforced concrete.
It’s no secret the bunker busters could be deployed against Iran.
Planning for these “massive ordnance penetrators” began in the Bush years but languished until Obama called for developing them rapidly when he came into office.
Passed unanimously, Resolution 1887 calls for the end of threats of force and for all countries to join the NPT, as Iran did long ago. NPT non-signers are India, Israel and Pakistan, all of which developed nuclear weapons with U.S. help, in violation of the NPT.
Iran hasn’t invaded another country for hundreds of years-unlike the United States, Israel and India (which occupies Kashmir, brutally).
The threat from Iran is minuscule. If Iran had nuclear weapons and delivery systems and prepared to use them, the country would be vaporized.
To believe Iran would use nuclear weapons to attack Israel, or anyone, “amounts to assuming that Iran’s leaders are insane” and that they look forward to being reduced to “radioactive dust,” strategic analyst Leonard Weiss observes, adding that Israel’s missile-carrying submarines are “virtually impervious to preemptive military attack,” not to speak of the immense U.S. arsenal.
In naval maneuvers in July, Israel sent its Dolphin class subs, capable of carrying nuclear missiles, through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, sometimes accompanied by warships, to a position from which they could attack Iran-as they have a “sovereign right” to do, according to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.
Not for the first time, what is veiled in silence would receive front-page headlines in societies that valued their freedom and were concerned with the fate of the world.
The Iranian regime is harsh and repressive, and no humane person wants Iran-or anyone else-to have nuclear weapons. But a little honesty would not hurt in addressing these problems.
The Nobel Peace Prize, of course, is not concerned solely with reducing the threat of terminal nuclear war, but rather with war generally, and the preparation for war. In this regard, the selection of Obama raised eyebrows, not least in Iran, surrounded by U.S. occupying armies.
On Iran’s borders in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, Obama has escalated Bush’s war and is likely to proceed on that course, perhaps sharply.
Obama has made clear that the United States intends to retain a long-term major presence in the region. That much is signaled by the huge city-within-a city called “the Baghdad Embassy,” unlike any embassy in the world.
Obama has announced the construction of mega-embassies in Islamabad and Kabul, and huge consulates in Peshawar and elsewhere.
Nonpartisan budget and security monitors report in Government Executive that the “administration’s request for $538 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal 2010 and its stated intention to maintain a high level of funding in the coming years put the president on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II. And that’s not counting the additional $130 billion the administration is requesting to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, with even more war spending slated for future years.”
The Nobel Peace Prize committee might well have made truly worthy choices, prominent among them the remarkable Afghan activist Malalai Joya.
This brave woman survived the Russians, and then the radical Islamists whose brutality was so extreme that the population welcomed the Taliban. Joya has withstood the Taliban and now the return of the warlords under the Karzai government.
Throughout, Joya worked effectively for human rights, particularly for women; she was elected to parliament and then expelled when she continued to denounce warlord atrocities. She now lives underground under heavy protection, but she continues the struggle, in word and deed. By such actions, repeated everywhere as best we can, the prospects for peace edge closer to hopes.
Fallout of US-India Nuke Deal October 25, 2008
Posted by rogerhollander in Political Commentary.Tags: China Pakistan nuclear, civilian nuclear program, India nuclear, nonproliferation, nuclear exports, nuclear power plants, nuclear proliferation, nuclear race, Pakistan nuclear, U.S India nuclear deal
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Friday 24 October 2008
by: Howard Lafranchi, The Christian Science Monitor
China’s agreement to help Pakistan build two nuclear power plants is prompting warnings that the new US-India civilian nuclear deal is pushing other countries to pursue their own nuclear relationships. (Photo: Reuters)
Could China’s plan to help Pakistan build nuclear power plants be the first of many pacts in the region?
Washington – China’s agreement to help Pakistan build two nuclear power plants is prompting warnings that the new US-India civilian nuclear deal is already pushing other countries to pursue their own nuclear relationships.
The concern among South Asia experts and nonproliferation advocates is that the American deal allowing India to pursue an expanded civilian nuclear program with limited safeguards is prompting other countries in a volatile region to seek a similar deal – something the US had said would not happen.
“You can’t help but hear about China supplying Pakistan with nuclear power plants and see it as a reaction to the US-India deal,” says Michael Krepon, a South Asia nuclear proliferation expert at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington. “Pakistan is desperate for energy, as is India, but there are lower-cost and shorter-timeline options for producing it, so there is something else going on here and in the Middle East.”
That “something else” – whether a result of Iran pursuing a nuclear program it claims is peaceful or Saudi Arabia talking nuclear power with the US – is a regional scramble to counterbalance the nuclear plans of often untrusted neighbors. In the case of Pakistan, it’s the pursuit of a counterweight to offset the expanding US-India strategic partnership – particularly in the nuclear realm – through a similar, though less ambitious, partnership with China.
Announcement of China’s intentions to add two nuclear plants to the Chinese-built one Pakistan already has came during a visit by Pakistan’s new president, Asif Ali Zardari, to Beijing last week.
Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, told reporters after the visit that Chinese officials are sympathetic to Pakistan’s concerns about the “discriminatory nature” of the US-India deal. He suggested China, Pakistan’s longtime ally, was acting partly in the interest of a balance of power in South Asia.
US Had Claimed No Nuclear Race
Still, the announcement left many questions unanswered, regional analysts say, including how Pakistan would pay for the projects when it is in a deep economic crisis and seeking aid from the International Monetary Fund to avoid defaulting on billions of dollars in debt.
Mr. Zardari returned to Islamabad without the billions in loans he is believed to have sought from China, so speculation has arisen that the nuclear deal was something of a consolation prize. “It could be a political fig leaf, since Zardari didn’t get the financial package he wanted, or China could be legitimately concerned about the US-India deal, it’s hard to know,” says Jon Wolfsthal, a nonproliferation expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
What is clear, he says, is that the US-India deal – which gives India, once a nuclear pariah for refusing to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, access to international nuclear technology and to fuel for nuclear power plants – is having an “I-want-some-too” impact. “The US-India deal makes it harder for the US to argue that countries like China shouldn’t pursue nuclear trade with a country like Pakistan,” Mr. Wolfsthal says.
As it pressed earlier this year for international approval of its pact with India from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) – an assembly of countries that seeks to control proliferation of nuclear weapons by limiting export of nuclear fuel and materials – the US made the case that India had been a responsible steward of its nuclear materials and had earned special treatment.
US officials on various occasions have stressed that the deal would not open the door to a nuclear race in South Asia or anywhere else. In Delhi last month, US ambassador to India, David Mulford, responded to a journalist’s query by saying that there was “no possibility” that China would seek a similar deal with Pakistan.
Of course, China might not seek approval from the NSG for its deal with Pakistan, some experts say. Instead, it might claim the deal is grandfathered under its earlier nuclear agreements with Pakistan. Another possibility: Having acquiesced as part of the NSG to the US-India deal, China might seek approval of its Pakistan deal to test how far the group would go in discriminating between countries.
India’s Nonreaction
Some nonproliferation advocates worry that the China-Pakistan deal – and the international silence that has met the announcement so far – could suggest that determination to control nuclear proliferation is weakening.
“India’s silence suggests, if anything, that they are smiling on this, so the question is, why?” says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington. “One answer may be that they are more interested in trashing the international restrictions and the Nuclear Suppliers Group that limit them, than in denying Pakistan access to reactors.”
Still, he says that does not explain why US officials and members of Congress who questioned the deal with India have remained mum.
The Stimson Center’s Mr. Krepon says he would not expect India to “beat the drums on this” for a number of reasons. One, he says, is that India would expect the China-Pakistan deal to go to the NSG, and would anticipate the group putting tighter restrictions on Pakistan.
He adds that, contrary to the US-promoted notion, India “does not have a blemish-free record” on proliferation. But he says Pakistan’s is “worse,” with Exhibit A being the A.Q. Khan network of clandestine nuclear exports.
At the same time Krepon says India can hardly jump to the attack on a deal that comes on the heels of its own success with nuclear powers. “It’s in India’s interest to maintain its own freedom of action,” he says. “They got a sweetheart deal.”
Another explanation for India’s silence has more to do with its vision of itself as a rising global power that is now playing on a different field from its traditional rival next door. “On one level,” says CSIS’s Wolfsthal, “the Indians are saying ‘We’re not going to respond to everything the Pakistanis do, we’re playing at the big boys’ table now.’ “
roger hollander 
The U.S. Seeks the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East December 10, 2014
Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza & Middle East, Nuclear weapons/power.Tags: Iraq, Iraq war, israel, israel nuclear, matt peppe, Middle East, non-proliferation, npt, nuclear, nuclear proliferation, nuclear weapons, uss liberty, wmd
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The resolution passed by a margin of 151-4. Only the United States, Israel, Canada and Micronesia voted against it. In a separate resolution, the U.S. and Israel stood alone against 177 other countries who supported further efforts to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. That resolution calls for a “prohibition on the development and manufacture of new types of weapons of mass destruction and new systems of such weapons.”
In March 2003, George W. Bush proclaimed that he was authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 687 to use force against Iraq to rid the country of WMD. Iraq presented such an existential threat that an immediate war was the only conceivable means of dealing with the situation. After Bush did invade Iraq and kill 500,000 Iraqis and create millions of widows, orphans and refugees, what was obvious all along was proven: the administration’s claims about Iraqi WMD were nothing more than lies and distortions.
The administration knew full well that Israel, however, did have a large-scale, rogue WMD program when Bush cited UNSC Resolution 687 as his legal justification for invading Iraq. Four U.S. Presidents have all ignored the actual text in Resolution 687 which declares “the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons.”
The only country to ever have used nuclear weapons – by dropping two on a country that had been trying for weeks to surrender – has consistently provided Israel with a diplomatic shield in the United Nations. On top of guaranteeing their right to violate international law with impunity, the U.S. has showered Israel with over $140 billion in military aid that amounts to more than $3 billion per year.
Even without its WMD, Israel would pose a grave threat to peace with its army and conventional weapons alone. Israel has repeatedly violated the sovereignty of its neighboring countries, the most flagrant example being the aggressive invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982 which killed 20,000 people. Unlike Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Israel has even attacked the United States itself. In 1967, Israeli warplanes bombarded the USS Liberty, killing 34 American servicemen. Israel’s possession of WMD only compounds their destructive capacity.
Israel is one of only four countries in the world (India, Pakistan and South Sudan) that has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This landmark treaty, in force since 1970, binds signing nations to work together stop the spread of nuclear weapons and work towards disarmament.
While it was long understood that the two ethnic exclusivist regimes maintained close military ties, the first concrete evidence that Israel tried to sell South Africa nuclear warheads emerged several years ago when American scholar Sasha Polakow-Suransky obtained declassified documents from the South African archives.
“South African documents show that the apartheid-era military wanted the missiles as a deterrent and for potential strikes against neighbouring states,” reported the Guardian.
The paper goes on to note that “the collaboration on military technology only grew over the following years. South Africa also provided much of the yellowcake uranium that Israel required to develop its weapons.”
South Africa easily could have followed through with potential nuclear strikes against its neighbors. In 1988, the SADF were being chased out of Angola by Cuban troops assisting the Angolan government. South Africa was illegally occupying the Southeastern part of Angola in a bid to topple that country’s government and install a puppet government friendly to the apartheid regime. Years later, Fidel Castro recounted the potential danger of nuclear strikes Cubans faced as their forces pushed forward to repel the aggression of the South African troops.
“The main problem was the fact that the racist South Africans possessed, according to our calculations, between 10 and 12 nuclear arms,” Castro wrote. “They had carried out tests in oceans or frozen areas to the South. President Ronald Reagan had authorized such tests, and the device necessary for blasting the nuclear charge was among the equipment delivered by Israel.”
Since it developed and used the first nuclear weapons, the United States government has supported weapons of mass destruction on principle. They also refuse the concept of nuclear weapons solely as self-defense, never having accepted a no-first-use policy for nuclear weapons as the Soviet Union had.
The U.S. has never had any moral or legal inhibitions about countries it chooses having a right to WMD. For countries that support the U.S. government’s self-professed right to rule the world, there is no danger to peace or to the survival of civilization itself that Washington will not tolerate and enable.