Current Events for April

I was very much hoping we could talk about something else this month, but again, all eyes are on Iran and the US, and, I’m afraid, we need to keep our eyes right there for a while.

The man who made the biggest headlines was Seymour Hersh, who wrote an extensive article for the New Yorker magazine (April 17, 2006), explaining that the Bush administration is determined to achieve regime change in Iran and considers an extensive bombing campaign an effective means to that end. In case this current events column has not yet convinced you that nuclear weapons are a serious contemporary problem, Hersh says:

“The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this [nuclear] option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it ‘a juggernaut that has to be stopped.’ He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. ‘There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,’ the adviser told me. ‘This goes to high levels.’ The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. ‘The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,’ the adviser said. ‘And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.’

The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. ‘They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,’ he said.

The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability ‘for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.’ Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.”

Andrew Stephen in his cover story for the New Statesman magazine for April 17, 2006, starts out:

So the Third World War is imminent and the madman in the White House
bunker is about to nuke Iran. That, at least, is the message from the
veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. The
American media, however, seem far less concerned than the British: on
the morning the story was making headlines in the UK, Iran did not even
make the front pages of the Washington Post or New York Times. "Military
fantasies on Iran", a New York Times editorial sniffed on 11 April.
So who is right? Is this news or not? It depends on your point of departure. This may surprise people in Britain, but Washington is already working from the assumption that the US will launch some form of conventional-weapon attack on Iran during this presidency. That much is not news here. Indeed, the Bush administration is assuming that when that attack happens it will have the support of Britain and Australia.

Nuclear weapons, however, are another matter. Whether they might be used against Iran is a critical issue in the struggle under way between foreign-policy pragmatists and ideological zealots. Washington is divided between these two camps, of which the former is by far the bigger. It consists of sensible people inside the administration itself, the State Department, CIA, Pentagon and the powerful think-tanks, and its numbers are growing exponentially as the president's incompetence becomes undeniable to all but the most fanatical. Every day brings more defections. Even Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has fallen out with Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, and is on the verge of abandoning the ideological ship - just as Colin Powell did in private over Iraq, but not publicly until it was far too late.

The second Washington faction is tiny, but unstable and dangerous. It consists of a tiny handful of people. Only last month, after watching the German film Downfall, I wrote of the White House as a bunker, because that is what it is like: Bush, Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, attended by a dwindling band of neoconservatives, sit in their bunker, increasingly detached from reality, still insisting on viewing the world and plotting its course as they choose to do, unhindered by inconvenient realities. (American readers: I am not saying that Bush is like Hitler, but referring to the bunker mentality.)”

Eventually Stephen expressed his optimism that nuclear weapons will NOT be used because the group that wants to use them is too small and the former senior NATO nuclear strategist he interviewed said, “‘The only nuclear weapon that might penetrate a little before exploding is the B-61 bomb,’ he said. ‘If you penetrate a bunker, you create a Chernobyl. The fallout would spread all over the Middle East and who knows where else.’ There were too many targets, the Shias and Hezbollah would make Iraq even more hellish than it is, and the price of oil would immediately rise to more than $100 a barrel.”

So the debate goes on about whether or when the US will attack Iran, and whether or not it will use nuclear weapons. But the frightening reality is that the US is actively developing its capacity to fight with “tactical” nuclear weapons.
On March 31, Andrew Lichterman of Western States Legal Foundation, “provided evidence that the ‘Divine Strake’ experiment which will detonate 700 tons of explosive in the Nevada desert is intended to simulate the effects of a low-yield nuclear blast on underground structures.” Lichterman’s evidence (available at http://www.disarmamentactivist.org/) is more than persuasive. It is conclusive. The US government is planning to spend five days pouring truckload after truckload of high explosive into a pit to try to figure out what a low-yield nuclear weapon would do to a hardened bunker (like they have in Iran).

Meanwhile, according to Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, the US Navy is implementing a program designed to improve the accuracy of Trident missiles by a factor of ten, to the point where they will land within 10 yards of where they are aimed. The Navy is claiming that these more accurate Tridents will be used to hurl conventional warheads, but according to Mello, we already have missiles that accurate to carry conventional warheads. The only reason to improve the Trident is to hurl a low-yield nuclear weapon.

Ian Bruce writing for the March 13 issue of The Herald (http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/57867-print.shtml) informs us that,
“The US Navy is seeking funding to convert Trident nuclear submarine missiles to conventionally armed rapid-response weapons. The plan calls for a missile arsenal that is capable of striking any target within 6000 miles of a patrolling submarine in under 24 minutes, with a guaranteed accuracy of less than 10 yards.” He goes on to explain that these Tridents will be designed to carry conventional warheads.

But on March 12, writing for the Hearst Newspapers Eric Rosenberg said,
“The Pentagon is modifying its deadliest nuclear missile for use as a conventional weapon designed to destroy enemy targets thousands of miles away by slamming into them with brute force….Some national security analysts fret that using the missile as a conventional weapon could unwittingly spark a nuclear retaliation against the United States if Russia were to detect the launch of a conventional D-5 missile and conclude that it was under attack.

‘You are playing with fire here in deploying this system,’ said Bruce Blair, a former Air Force nuclear weapons officer and author on nuclear-weapons safety. ‘It's quite dangerous to be mixing up conventional and nuclear weapons in this way on the same submarine using the same delivery systems,’ said Blair, who heads up the non-partisan Center for Defense Information think tank.”

The Situation

So here’s the situation, as I see it. Washington seems to be assuming that the US will bomb Iran sometime while George W Bush is still president. Opinions are divided as to whether this attack should or will involve nuclear weapons. However, just to be prepared to take out all those hardened bunkers Iran has its nuclear facilities in, someone is planning to carry out an enormous conventional explosive test at the Nevada designed to simulate a low-yield nuclear warhead blowing up a hardened bunker. And, the Navy is improving the Trident missile to be able to carry a low-yield nuclear warhead exactly where it is supposed to go. And, even if the Tridents are really carrying conventional warheads, these are the same missiles that the Russians have long been prepared to retaliate against on launch. How will they know what sort of warhead it’s carrying? Or if its going to stop in Iran? Will they be warned in advance?

The Western Shoshone are fighting the Divine Strake, which is supposed to take place on their land. Maybe they’ll get some help this time. Keith Rogers writing on Apr. 12 for the Las Vegas Review-Journal informs us that, “Nevada environmental officials have halted a massive, non-nuclear explosion scheduled for June 2 at the Nevada Test Site until the federal agency hosting the blast shows it will comply with air quality standards and that hazardous particles can be tracked, letters released Tuesday reveal.”

The Divine Strake is off, but this is only a temporary postponement. The fact is, some very powerful people want to start using small nuclear weapons. I’m not at all sure the Western Shoshone, the state of Nevada, and even the uniformed brass in the Pentagon can stop them.

The A-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have for six decades been trying to tell us that we cannot hope to control nuclear weapons indefinitely. We must get rid of them, all of them, or they will be used. If they are used again, more will be used, and that will be the end of our civilization, maybe even our species. The survivors are starting to look disturbingly right.