Current Events June 2006
Iran
Recently, Condoleeza Rice said the U.S. was ready to sit down at the table with Iran—if Iran would only stop enriching uranium. In response, President Ahmadinejad said he would be more than happy to sit down with the US, but Iran will certainly not give up its right to enrich uranium. We are still on a collision course, with the concomitant danger that the nuclear taboo will be broken, but we have discoursed at length about this danger in previous months.
North Korea
On May 18, 19 and 20, a rash of articles shifted our focus to another nuclear danger. Writing for Reuters, George Nishiyama warned:
North Korea may be preparing to launch a long-range ballistic missile that could reach parts of the United States, Japanese media reports said on Friday, but Japan's government said it did not believe a launch was imminent.
Quoting unidentified South Korean government officials, public broadcaster NHK said satellite pictures showed there had been signs since early this month around a site in northeastern North Korea that pointed to a possible firing in the near future.
Analysts have said, though, that development of a multiple-stage version of a ballistic missile that can take payloads deep into the continental United States is years away….
The latest reports come amid a deadlock in six-party talks aimed at dismantling North Korea's nuclear programs, and ahead of a visit to China next week by the chief U.S. negotiator to the talks that involve the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and host China.
The United States said a missile launch could heighten worries over North Korea's weapons and expose unwillingness in Pyongyang to heed international concern over its military programs.
"If, in fact, North Korea did launch a long-range missile, it would be a real source of concern to the international community," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.
The concern would be over "what it says about North Korea and North Korea's desire to engage with the rest of the world and to address some of the concerns that the rest of the world has had about their behavior," he added.
North Korea has said in numerous official media reports that it is building a nuclear deterrent to counter U.S. hostility. The United States believes North Korea has one or two nuclear bombs and the ability to build more….
NHK said the missile appeared to be a Taepodong-2, which previous reports have said has a range of more than 4,200 miles, making it capable of hitting Alaska with a light payload….
North Korea shocked the world in August 1998 when it fired a Taepodong missile that flew over Japan before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
The key sentence in this report is, “North Korea has said in numerous official media reports that it is building a nuclear deterrent to counter U.S. hostility.” This raises the question: Is having one or two nuclear bombs enough to deter the US from something? If so, then shouldn’t every nation on Earth, especially those with a tense relationship with the US, get themselves a bomb?
But let’s think about this strategy a bit more deeply. Under what conditions would North Korea, a nation so weak it can hardly feed itself, benefit from the use of a nuclear weapon? If, for example, US and South Korean troops began marching through the demilitarized zone determined to take Pyongyang, would that be a good time for Kim Jong Il to fire a couple nukes at the invading hordes? Only if he wanted to see his own country and nearly everyone in it go up in radioactive smoke.
Or, what if the other five parties to the six-party talks decide to embargo North Korea and starve them into submission? Would that be a good time to threaten Seoul and Tokyo? And what if the threat were ignored? Would it be advantageous to North Korea to follow through with that threat? Can anyone think of a way North Korea could use its one or two nukes that would not result in its total obliteration from the map?
While we’re at it, let’s go back to Iran for a moment. President Ahmadinejad is famous for having said that Israel should be wiped off the map. This statement, and a generally bad attitude toward Israel, is ostensibly why Israeli politicians can grab headlines by assuring the Israeli people that they will never, ever allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But what would Iran gain by using nuclear weapons to wipe out Israel? How long would Iran last after launching such an attack? Are we to believe that Iran’s president or its military or its people would be willing to permanently sacrifice themselves and their entire nation to deliver a knock-out blow to Israel? Is it possible for whole nations to be suicide bombers?
Fear of nations with nuclear weapons is obsolete. It is utterly impossible for any nation other than the US to obtain any advantage whatsoever by openly using a nuclear weapon. And yet, grown men and women talk with straight, even somber faces about the potential nuclear threat from Iran or North Korea or Pakistan. Why is this?
True, any enemy nation with nuclear weapons could hand such a weapon to terrorists or could hire its own terrorists to deliver that weapon, but judging from what we now know about the Cold War, the most important reason is the fact that nuclear weapons are a multi-trillion dollar scam.
Bechtel Corporation
During the Cold War, the military-industrial complexes in both the US and Soviet Union greatly exaggerated the mutual risk of nuclear attack in order to maintain a level of public fear high enough to justify the expenditure of 5.5 trillion dollars (just in the US) on nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
Today, along with many other military functions, nuclear weapons are being privatized. As you might expect, the main beneficiary of our new-found fear of Iran and North Korea will be Bechtel Corporation. Frida Berrigan in an article entitled Privatizing the Apocalypse begins:
Started as the super-secret "Project Y" in 1943, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has long been the keystone institution of the American nuclear-weapons producing complex. It was the birthplace of Fat Man and Little Boy, the two nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Last year, the University of California, which has managed the lab for the Department of Energy since its inception, decided to put Los Alamos on the auction block. In December 2005, construction giant Bechtel won a $553 million yearly management contract to run the sprawling complex, which employs more than 13,000 people and has an estimated $2.2 billion annual budget.
Berrigan goes on to explain why Bechtel might want to get more directly involved in the nuclear game:
To answer that question, you have to begin with the post-Cold War quest of the nuclear laboratories for a new identity and raison d'être. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the loss of the other superpower as a nuclear twin and target, and an international shift in favor of nuclear disarmament sent Los Alamos and the whole U.S. nuclear complex into existential crisis: Who are we? What is our role? What do we do now that nuclear weapons have no obvious role in a world of, at best, medium-sized military enemies? Throughout the Clinton years, these questions multiplied while the nuclear arsenal remained relatively stable. More recently, with a lot of fancy footwork, a few friends in Congress, and the ear of a White House eager to be known for something other than the Long War on global terrorism, the labs finally came up with a winning solution that has Bechtel and other military contractors seeing dollar signs.
They found their salvation in a few lines of the Nuclear Posture Review, released in January 2002, where the Bush administration asserted: "The need is clear for a revitalized nuclear weapons complex that will be able, if directed, to design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads in response to new national requirements; and maintain readiness to resume underground testing if required."
There's gold in that there sentence. During the Cold War, spending on nuclear weapons averaged $4.2 billion a year (in current dollars). Almost two decades after the "nuclear animosity" between the two great superpowers ended, the United States is spending one-and-a-half times the Cold War average on nuclear weapons. In 2001, the weapons-activities budget of the Department of Energy, which oversees the nuclear weapons complex through its "semi-autonomous" National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), totaled $5.19 billion; and a "revitalized nuclear weapons complex," ready to "design, develop, manufacture, and certify new warheads," means a more than billion-dollar jump in spending to $6.4 billion by fiscal year 2006.
And that's just the beginning. The NNSA's five-year "National Security Plan" calls for annual increases to reach $7.76 billion by 2009. David Hobson, Republican congressional representative from Ohio, calls this kind of budgeting "the ultimate white-collar welfare," saying that the weapons complex can be "viewed as a jobs program for PhDs."
There you have an extremely clear explanation of why we still have a nuclear weapons program. Unfortunately, it might also be an explanation for why the nuclear taboo will soon be broken. Bechtel Corporation and its partners would hate for nuclear weapons to be banned, eliminated and taken out of the budget.
The CIA stated long ago that if the US were ever attacked with a nuclear weapon, that weapon would probably not be fired from or dropped by a nation. It would be delivered in a van or a pick-up truck by terrorists, the only type of group that could conceivably benefit from the use of a nuclear weapon. Terrorists, or nations acting secretly like terrorists, cannot be deterred by a nuclear threat. Thus, the nuclear industry has lost “deterrence” as its perpetual selling point. Now, the industry desperately needs to find ways to actually use nuclear weapons in the war on terror. Bechtel is betting they will find some.
The only way to actually prevent the use of a nuclear weapon is for the international community to: 1) stigmatize nuclear weapons and maintain the nuclear taboo, 2) find and destroy all nuclear weapons, and 3) put all fissile materials under strict and effective international control. Bechtel could actually make plenty of money dismantling nuclear weapons and cleaning up the mess, but the profits probably aren’t as high, and they wouldn’t last as long. Unfortunately, new nukes are a growth industry, that is, until a few get used.