Profiteers and nuclear war

Editors, Asheville Global Report,

The clock is ticking and corporate profits are driving US nuclear policy. The Bush administration’s nuclear posture review (NPR) reverses the nuclear arms policy of the preceding three presidents and undermines major international arms control treaties, placing the world in a collision course with destruction. The NPR establishes the broad outline of Pentagon planning for US nuclear strategy, force levels and infrastructure for the next 10 years and beyond. It also endorses significant revisions to the nuclear war planning process to enhance its flexibility and responsiveness, which would allow the Pentagon to generate new nuclear attack plans and have them approved quickly in a crisis.

Bush’s NPR lowers the threshold for use of nuclear weapons while expanding the nuclear hit list to include a wide range of potential adversaries, whether or not those nations possess nuclear weapons. The current list which was “leaked” to national media include China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Syria. Situations that could trigger US first strike would include: for use of chemical or biological weapons, destroying hardened underground targets, an attack by Iraq on Israel or one of its neighbors, a military conflict over the status of Taiwan, a North Korean attack on South Korea, or simply as a response to “surprising developments.” This understandably strains already fragile international relations.

To create a more flexible, useable arsenal the NPR promotes major modernization and expansion of the nuclear weapons complex and endorses the development of battlefield lower-yield nuclear weapons (mini-nukes). The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak  Ridge, TN will cost a minimum of $4 billion to be rebuilt, facilitating a “surge” in weapons production.

The Bush administration took what could have been perfect timing for definitive movement toward elimination of nuclear weapons and instead created the Moscow Treaty between the US and Russia, which encourages a continued global arms race. Although both sides agreed to reduce their deployed strategic weapons to no more than 2,200 each by the year 2012 (a number sufficient to blow each other up many times over), none of the weapons removed from hair trigger alert will be destroyed, but will instead be put in storage to be brought back out at any time with only three months notice.

The ripple effect -- or should I say the beginning of a tidal wave effect -- of obvious US abhorrence for international constraint is an increased emphasis on nuclear weapons as the ultimate “defense.” Already Japan’s most powerful politicians have begun to consider acquiring nuclear weapons in response to a perceived threat from China.

India and Pakistan are close to nuclear war with over 12 million lives at risk. The leaders of both sides have threatened to use nuclear weapons and neither side feels they can back down without serious political cost.

As the US flouts international law and nuclear weapons continue to flourish, so do the materials and technical knowledge. It will only be a matter of time before the US is itself a target. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has called the use of weapons of mass destruction on American soil “inevitable.”

So what drives our nuclear posture? Defense? No. The defense industry has more power now than ever before. The nuclear posture was co-written by members of think tanks partially funded by the defense industry. Many of these members are now in positions of power in the Bush administration. Thirty-two top appointees to cabinet-level agencies and the White House staff are former executives, consultants, or major shareholders of the top defense contractors. As an April 2001 account in the conservative Washington Times noted, Rumsfeld made corporate experience a virtual litmus test for appointment to key positions in the Pentagon. All of these members are in key positions to help the arms industry flourish. Business, as they say, is booming.

The nuclear threat is moving forward at a breakneck pace. In a time in which foreign policies and weapons production are decided upon not for protection but for corporate profits, it is up to global citizens to stand up and demand a halt to this nuclear madness, to demand that nuclear weapons be dismantled at Y-12, not upgraded. Y-12 should work for the production of peace, not the production of death.  We stand at the crossroads. It is our time to be heard.

You are invited to the August 4th Action at the gates of Y-12. Info available at www.stopthebombs.org

For more information about the role of the arms lobby in the Bush administration’s radical reversal of two decades of US nuclear policy go to www.worldpolicy.org  

Paloma Galindo
Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance
Oak Ridge, Tennessee