Abstract
The Bush administration's nuclear agenda is a dazzling, 180 degree turn toward the abyss. It makes a certain cockeyed sense–if the president's goal is to go down in history as the man who wiped away 50 years of arms control efforts, that is.
For nearly six decades, the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons has been respected. But now, the Bush administration says, the United States should abandon that taboo in favor of “more usable” nukes. And by constantly discussing the two top Bush-wish-list weapons simultaneously (the mini-nuke and the “robust nuclear earth penetrator”), it has convinced some members of Congress that the goal is one tiny, fallout-free, almost friendly bomb that will magically eradicate deeply buried targets and do so with such precision that surrounding buildings will remain intact, local populations undisturbed.
Building new weapons will mean new tests under the Nevada desert, so the lead time required to prepare for new tests is being shortened. In mid-May, Princeton nuclear specialist Frank von Hippel, who served in the Clinton White House (and is a longtime friend and editorial adviser to the Bulletin), told the press that the inside word in the Bush administration is that, given a second term, testing will resume as soon as 2007. That would break what would be, by then, a 15-year moratorium–and end any hope for the test ban treaty, which the president, of course, has already repudiated.
Even after tests were moved underground, some accidental venting in the atmosphere occurred, so it would seem natural that the citizens of Nevada and Utah, the two states that suffered most from the effects of fallout, might not favor renewed testing. One might also imagine that their representatives in Congress would want to support that view.
Yet faced with an either/or choice between the wishes of their constituents and the wishes of their party's leaders, Republican representatives of these states are doing their best to appear to choose both. Utah's senators, Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, favor new-nukes money. But Bennett wants health issues aired before approving testing and Hatch is “not sure” he would actually vote for new tests.
Nevada's John Ensign voted with the administration. Other Nevada Republicans, like Cong. Jon Porter, are on board as well.
The administration's eagerness to get on with developing and testing “usable” nukes would seem to be the best reason for a renewal of the peace and disarmament movement, described by Larry Wittner as a genuine, worldwide, grassroots, people's movement. He argues in this issue that it was the movement that forced governments to stop testing and scale back nuclear deployments during the Cold War. The movement, Wittner maintains, was powerful and could be so again.
Let's hope he's right.
The Ironies of progress: Two articles in this issue take a long look at important women who achieved national recognition through their own hard work in their respective fields. Their efforts led to appointments to positions of prominence in areas dealing with national security–and to the gender-free opportunity to screw up same.