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The explosions in London are a reminder of how the cycle of attack and response
could escalate
This month's anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompts
only the most somber reflection and most fervent hope that the horror may never
be repeated.
In the subsequent 60 years, those bombings have haunted the world's imagination
but not so much as to curb the development and spread of infinitely more lethal
weapons of mass destruction.
A related concern, discussed in technical literature well before 11 September
2001, is that nuclear weapons may sooner or later fall into the hands of terrorist
groups.
The recent explosions and casualties in London are yet another reminder of
how the cycle of attack and response could escalate, unpredictably, even to
a point horrifically worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
The world's reigning power accords itself the right to wage war at will, under
a doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense" that covers any contingency
it chooses. The means of destruction are to be unlimited.
US military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world combined,
while arms sales by 38 North American companies (one in Canada) account for
more than 60 per cent of the world total (which has risen 25 per cent since
2002).
There have been efforts to strengthen the thin thread on which survival hangs.
The most important is the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which came
into force in 1970. The regular five-year review conference of the NPT took
place at the United Nations in May.
The NPT has been facing collapse, primarily because of the failure of the nuclear
states to live up to their obligation under Article VI to pursue "good
faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. The United States has led
the way in refusal to abide by the Article VI obligations. Mohamed ElBaradei,
head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasizes that "reluctance
by one party to fulfill its obligations breeds reluctance in others".
President Jimmy Carter blasted the United States as "the major culprit
in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation
threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have
abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and
develop new weapons, including Anti-Ballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating
'bunker buster' and perhaps some new 'small' bombs. They also have abandoned
past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear
states".
The thread has almost snapped in the years since Hiroshima, repeatedly. The
best known case was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, "the most
dangerous moment in human history", as Arthur Schlesinger, historian and
former adviser to President John F Kennedy, observed in October 2002 at a retrospective
conference in Havana.
The world "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear disaster", recalls
Robert McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, who also attended the retrospective.
In the May-June issue of the magazine Foreign Policy, he accompanies this reminder
with a renewed warning of "apocalypse soon".
McNamara regards "current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal,
militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous", creating "unacceptable
risks to other nations and to our own", both the risk of "accidental
or inadvertent nuclear launch", which is "unacceptably high",
and of nuclear attack by terrorists. McNamara endorses the judgment of William
Perry, President Bill Clinton's defense secretary, that "there is a greater
than 50 per cent probability of a nuclear strike on US targets within a decade".
Similar judgments are commonly expressed by prominent strategic analysts. In
his book Nuclear Terrorism, the Harvard international relations specialist Graham
Allison reports the "consensus in the national security community"
(of which he has been a part) that a "dirty bomb" attack is "inevitable",
and an attack with a nuclear weapon highly likely, if fissionable materials
- the essential ingredient - are not retrieved and secured.
Allison reviews the partial success of efforts to do so since the early 1990s,
under the initiatives of Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Richard Lugar, and the
setback to these programs from the first days of the Bush administration, paralyzed
by what Senator Joseph Biden called "ideological idiocy".
The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programs and devoted
its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit,
then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.
The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with
jihadi terrorism.
A high-level review of the "war on terror" two years after the invasion
"focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists,
schooled in Iraq over the past couple of years", Susan B Glasser reported
in The Washington Post.
"Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to
anticipate what one called 'the bleed out' of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained
jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western
Europe. 'It's a new piece of a new equation,' a former senior Bush administration
official said. 'If you don't know who they are in Iraq, how are you going to
locate them in Istanbul or London?'"
Peter Bergen, a US terrorism specialist, says in The Boston Globe that "the
President is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this
is a front we created".
Shortly after the London bombing, Chatham House, Britain's premier foreign
affairs institution, released a study drawing the obvious conclusion - denied
with outrage by the Government - that "the UK is at particular risk because
it is the closest ally of the United States, has deployed armed forces in the
military campaigns to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and in Iraq ...
[and is] a pillion passenger" of American policy, sitting behind the driver
of the motorcycle.
The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it
is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity. While
speculation is pointless, reaction to the threat of another Hiroshima is definitely
not.
On the contrary, it is urgent, particularly in the United States, because of
Washington's primary role in accelerating the race to destruction by extending
its historically unique military dominance, and in the UK, which goes along
with it as its closest ally.