James A. Stervenson :
© July 9, 2002
 

On Avoiding a Nuclear Holocaust, In Memorium

Less than eight months after this essay was composed, former U.S. Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Jr. passed away on February 19, 2003.  As a tireless and tenacious opponent of foolish and reckless military doctrine as well as military spending, retired Admiral Carroll unselfishly expended his talent and time to help lead the non-profit Center for Defense Information for seventeen years.  My family and I were extremely fortunate to have met him about fifteen years ago when he took time the time out of his hectic schedule to stay a night at our home and to speak against the nuclear arms race and nuclear war at a very small college in rural south Georgia.  He was one of those remarkable warm-hearted men of conscience who are too rare and too valuable to lose.  He was what every U.S. Naval officer should be.  Through war and peace, he was courageous, intelligent, honorable, prudent, and humane, supremely humane.  He was one of the best.
For a few days several weeks ago, the world’s media was filled with dire warnings about the possibility of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan.  Had such a war occurred, it would have been only the second time in history that nuclear weapons were exploded to kill so-called "enemies."  The first time, of course, was the U.S. atomic bombing of the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.  That event, according to some recent news reports, was a happening which many present-day Indian (mostly Hindu) and Pakistani (mostly Muslim) people have never even heard about.  And, by knowing very little or nothing about the effects of nuclear weapons during the recent crisis, tens of thousands of Indians and Pakistanis were very likely at the mercy of political and religious leaders who could more easily whipsaw them into a frenzy of hatred and fear by pushing the buttons of nationalism, ethnicity, and religion.  Meanwhile, millions of other Indians and Pakistanis were (and are) not only kept immobilized by their ignorance of the "horrors of nuclear war" but by their "daily battle for food, for water, for shelter, [and] for dignity."   It is those millions of hapless people, like the other creatures and plant life in their region of the earth, who would have had to pay the immediate and possibly catastrophic price for the inanity of their leaders’ desire to keep and use nuclear weapons.  And, then, the rest of us would have had to pay.  In fact, since 1945, all of us — everywhere on earth — have been paying in one way or another for those kinds of weapons as well as trillions of dollars of other lethal weapons.
And, although it now appears that the Indian-Pakistan nuclear war scare was greatly exaggerated by the press and for the domestic political purposes of conservative Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his Pakistani counterpart, the junta-installed Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf,  there is nothing to guarantee that such a nuclear holocaust will not be generated out of the next crisis between those states.  More importantly, despite this recently past crisis, there is nothing to suggest that we can rely on the "wisdom" of the world’s existing power elites to either meaningfully control or abolish nuclear weapons.  After all, it is those very political elites who, within the dictates and traditions of the current nation-state system, have devised the policies that have led to the building, deployment, proliferation, and potential use of nuclear weapons.  Indeed, the ranks of those elites are not only filled with the apologists for keeping nuclear weapons but the advocates of using them in war.  Somehow, in a way that only Stanley Kubrick’s great satirical film "Dr. Strangelove"  can appropriately capture, those apologists and advocates are judged to be perfectly sane by other powerful members of the world’s ruling socio-economic elites and many others.  On the other hand, those who suggest that the nuclear hawks' doctrines and policies are utter madness are regarded as insane.
Thus, when someone as presumably prestigious as the former Foreign Affairs managing editor and current Newsweek contributing editor, Fareed Zakaria, states the prevailing elite's view that "nuclear weapons have actually had a sobering effect on both India and Pakistan,"  his counterfactual claims go fundamentally unquestioned by those whom some considered to be his establishment patrons.  Likewise, those in Zakaria’s circle of thinkers do not seriously question his unproveable claim that the absence of major wars between India and Pakistan in the past 30 years has been due to those nations’ mutual acquisition of nuclear weapons.  On this topic, such conventional establishment thinkers easily slip through Alice’s rabbit hole into the wonderland of a Pollyanna realpolitik where they can play at being "tough-minded" and, therefore, at believing, in Zakaria’s words, that "nuclear deterrence is not pretty — remember the Cuban missile crisis — but it usually works."   Yet, proving that they have neither consistent principles nor valid arguments about the supposed anti-war virtue of nuclear deterrence, does anyone seriously believe that either Zaharia or any of his like-thinking, U.S. policy-making buddies will ever be found calling for the distribution of nuclear weapons to the Palestinians or Iraqis in order to bring about a situation between them and Israel which is similar to the supposed beneficial, anti-war effects of the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race/standoff?  In the Middle East case, it is a safe bet that the supposed virtue of arming the Palestinians and Iraqis with nukes in order to deter war between them and the already nuclear-armed Israelis would be denounced as totally absurd by such thinkers as Zaharia.
A similar failure of consistency is found in Zaharia’s fallacy of comparing the vastly different historical cases of the recent India-Pakistan crisis and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, to praise the principle of nuclear deterrence.  That claim, in the case of India and Pakistan, like its model and predecessor (i.e., the U.S. policy makers' assertion that only a massive, U.S. nuclear weapons build-up prevented a post-World War II Soviet attack on Western Europe) is virtually impossible to prove.  More importantly, as the contradictions in Zakaria’s own argument reveal, the fact that India and Pakistan have not yet had a hostile nuclear exchange does not mean that either they or other nations will never have one.  Indeed, tangled in his own "praise" of the anti-war value "of nukes," Zakaria is driven to confess that the whole edifice of the India-Pakistan nuclear deterrence is founded on the quick sand of luck.  Thus, after explaining that the leaders of both nations have threatened each other so often and so publicly that their "credibility" is on the line, Zakaria inadvertently admits to the underlying flaw in his argument of maintaining the peace with the "deterrence" of nuclear bombs when he writes, "If the United States and the Soviet Union had had a Cuban missile crisis every three months, at some point they could have gotten unlucky."
But if those like Zakaria are firmly ensconced in what some might term convoluted reasoning and the tradition of those considered Bismarckian, Hobbesian, "tough-minded," or half-crazed advocates of nuclear realpolitik like Walter Heller (father of the H-Bomb), Herman Kahn (guru of abstract nuclear war strategy and gaming), Thomas K. Jones (Reaganite nuclear war survivalist), and Paul Robinson (nuclear weapons promoter and director of Sandia National Laboratories),  Arundhati Roy is in the generally opposite tradition of universality and humane sensibility  that might be characterized by the thinking of those like Albert Einstein (physicist and democratic socialist), Bertrand Russell (philosopher and humanist), Carl Sagan (physicist and theorist of a suicidal "nuclear winter"), Jonathan Schell (anti-nuclear war author of Fate of the Earth), Eugene J. Carroll Jr. (retired U.S. Rear Admiral, tireless opponent of nuclear weapons/war and leader of Center for Defense Information) and, perhaps surprisingly, George F. Kennan (realpolitik, father of containment).   In many ways, Roy's outlook epitomizes the humane spirit that is needed if we are ever to escape the veritable army of sectarian political and religious partisans who try to imprison our thinking within their particular ideologies and agendas.  Describing where the small-minded men of state — Western, Indian, Pakistan, and elsewhere — have taken us, she denounces them and their inhuman talk of "first strike and second-strike capabilities as though they’re discussing a family boardgame."   These are the people who staff the governments that have so "ratcheted up" the "threshold of horror" that "nothing short of genocide or the prospect of nuclear war merits mention."   And by warping the options for settling disputes only through state and non-state terrorism, they have established the "principle" that war is the "solution" to terrorism.  The consequences of this view are tremendous because when such adherence to militarism becomes the dominant mode of thinking for various power elites and their followers and when "peaceful resistance is treated with contempt," it insures "that terrorists in the subcontinent [as well as elsewhere] now have the power to trigger a nuclear war."
And what of the West?  Well, according to Roy, their governments are brimming with policy makers who are as "comfortable with the notion of a wasted world" as are their nuclear-armed counterparts on the Indian/Pakistani subcontinent.   That explains, states Roy, why a few months ago, representing the "International Coalition Against Terror [which] makes war and preaches restraint," British Prime Minister Tony Blair combined a so-called "'peace’ mission" with a "business trip" and sold a billion dollars worth of the British-made Hawk fighter-bombers to the Indian government.   Indeed, the British are as "busy arming both sides"  on the subcontinent as are the Americans in arming the Israelis and the Saudis in the Middle East.  So, while the elite policy makers of both India and Pakistan routinely use the "problem" of Kashmir to distract their people’s attention from the persistence of "starvation, poverty, [and] disease,"  some war hawk policy makers in America are busy using the "war on terror" as a justification for developing the plans and means — Nuclear Posture Review — for employing nuclear weapons on conventional battlefields.   This means that some powerful U.S. policy makers are recklessly preparing to destroy a priceless six decades-long taboo and "firewall" against using nuclear weapons in conventional warfare as well as the policy of not using them against non-nuclear armed adversaries.  It also means that the American people may one day find themselves thinking, as did those helpless people in India and Pakistan who recently huddled together in fear and despair, "what a shame it would be to die now."   For, as retired Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll has perceptively warned, "'the first use of nuclear explosives in warfare breaches the firewall . . . and when we go on beyond that, we’re put at the mercy of the other side, which probably doesn’t have such ‘useful’ or ‘usable’ weapons [i.e., precision and sophisticated weapons].’"   But such considerations — or even the possible extinction of the "whole of human civilization,"  as Roy puts it — have never meant much to those who fancy themselves tough-minded realists.  Indeed, quite the opposite is true because, as Roy writes, they and their nuclear weaponry not only "violate everything that is humane," but they use their control over "nuclear weapons to blackmail the entire human race."   It all heightens their power.
Of course, there is nothing new about this.  People everywhere have not only long tolerated those whom Roy terms "the fiends who run the world,"  but they have tolerated their nuclear war fighting fantasies as well.  After going from the technology of mere nuclear bombs to thermonuclear hydrogen bombs (1945-1952) and from the strategy of deterrence known as MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction, 1949-1984) to the strategy of NUTS (Nuclear Utilization Target Selection),  and, since December 1960, to the ever evolving "Single Integrated Operation Plan" (SIOP), the U.S. military has been made ready to use nuclear weapons against specific targets in limited-war fighting situations (1984-present).   Meanwhile, among others, our Cold War nostalgists or neoconservative policy makers, such as Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and, to an apparently lesser extent, the head of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, have promoted the 2002, Nuclear Posture Review.  With this plan, as writer Gore Vidal once said about a similar insouciance toward nuclear warfare by some of the same policy makers, it means that "once more the unthinkable has become thinkable by the thoughtless."  The plan directs the U.S. military to "prepare contingency plans to use nuclear weapons . . . against China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria [and] against targets able to withstand nonnuclear attack;  in retaliation for attack with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons; or in the event of surprising military developments.’"   More importantly, the Nuclear Posture Review seems to be a part of the overall U.S. policy makers’ apparent strategic objective of worldwide military dominance.  This is reflected in such official documents as the 1999 report by the U.S. government’s Commission on National Security/21st Century entitled News World Coming:  American Security in the 21st Century,  the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review,  and the Pentagon’s 2000 "Joint Vision 2020."   This latter document and the Bush Administration's proposed military expenditures of over $2.495 trillion in fiscal years 2002-2007,  will enable the implementation of the U.S. military’s ambition for "full spectrum dominance."
Such military spending and the contents of these documents also mark a major acceleration in the rapid erosion of U.S. policy makers' doctrinal regard for the system of international law that has been recognized by virtually all states as being embodied in the U.N. Charter, U.N. resolutions, and decisions rendered by the World Court.  With their preference for U.S. unilateralism, some current U.S. policymakers have been embellishing upon former President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s contention that the U.S. will act "'multilaterally when we can, unilaterally when we must in an area important for our interests.’"   This prideful and neorealist superpower outlook, along with the military strategies and doctrines already mentioned, has now culminated in what scholar Richard Falk describes as the "Bush doctrine."  As a continuation of previous U.S. policy makers claims that Article 51 of the U.N. Charter does not actually mean what it explicitly states about the right of states to use force only against an "armed attack" or when authorized to use force by the U.N. Security Council, the Bush doctrine pushes the meaning of Albright’s view that Article 51 actually authorizes self defense against future attack to its ultimate conclusion.  In Falk’s words, the Bush doctrine "is the fullest articulation, so far, of the new strategic doctrine of pre-emption.  The radical idea being touted by the White House and Pentagon is that the United States has the right to use military force against any state that is seen as hostile or makes moves to acquire weapons of mass destruction — nuclear biological or chemical."   Explaining what this means that is "new," Falk writes, "Pre-emption . . . validates striking first . . . on the basis of a shadowy intentions, alleged potential links to terrorist groups, supposed plans and projects to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and anticipations of possible future dangers.  It is a doctrine without limits, without accountability to the U.N. or international law, without any dependence on a collective judgment of responsible governments and, what is worse, without any convincing demonstration of practical necessity."
Another way of putting what seems to be happening in the Bush II Administration is that powerful neoconservative U.S. policy makers have found the realities of the world’s complexities and its diverse cultural outlooks, political beliefs, values, and practices either too difficult or too frightening to tolerate, so they have chosen to emphasize the politics of military solutions rather than to undertake vital and sweeping policy changes.  And to get the enormous sums of money needed to pursue their military strategy and goals, they have reinvented the Cold War construct of a Manichaean world that is divided into all good on one side (i.e., those defined by them as non-terrorists) and all evil on the other (i.e., those defined by them as either terrorists or terrorist supporters).  And, as during the Cold War, this is leading to an endless series of distortions and oversimplifications about why "they hate us" as well as a reckless application of the double standard to "their" conduct and ours.  Of course, this sort of black and white simplicity not only permits U.S. policy makers to better manipulate the thinking of many people in the U.S., but it allows them to seriously contemplate unleashing the horrors of nuclear war on the peoples in whatever state or society that greatly offends them.  Accordingly, with the Nuclear Posture Review as its authorization, the U.S. Strategic Command has been directed to prepare a nuclear strategy and means for literally incinerating tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent people in places where most of them probably hate the man or men who dominate them more than does President George W. Bush and his more hawkish policy makers.
In short, as of today, some of our unimaginative and extremely parochial policy makers — following in the mediocre tradition of numerous like-minded predecessors — have not advanced us even a millimeter toward either safety or sanity with regards to nuclear weapons policies.  Even the latest U.S.-Russian treaty (not yet ratified) on nuclear weapons leaves each of those nations with 2,200 deployed strategic nuclear warheads — 4,000 more than enough to not only assure the complete incineration and annihilation of both societies but much of the rest of civilization as well — while it lets them keep total arsenals of more than 10,000 active and inactive, strategic and tactical warheads apiece.
And, naturally, like their U.S. policy making counterparts, the leaders and policy makers of other nuclear powers portray all who propose sensible and far-reaching nuclear weapons disarmament as naive or utopian.  They ridicule any vision of a nuclear weapons free world as hopelessly inane because, they argue, once the nuclear genie has been let out of the bottle, it cannot be returned.  Likewise, any proposal for dramatic cuts in the world’s nuclear arsenals — such as reducing the arsenals to no more than a deterrent force of about a score of warheads for each nuclear power  — is treated with contempt by those who arrogantly brag that all reason and realpolitik are on their side and only on their side.
But consider how such claims stand up against proposals for steep reductions in the world’s nuclear weapons arsenals by individuals who are as immersed in realpolitik as are the war hawks who are currently at the center of state power and are busy propelling us toward the day when the use of nuclear weapons will transcend a bad dream and become a nightmarish reality.  Attempting to avert that eventuality, in 1996, newly retired U.S. Air Force General Lee Butler, Army General Andrew Goodpaster and five dozen other senior military commanders from around the world proposed the ultimate elimination of all nuclear weapons on earth in a manner that is both gradual and "far more ambitious than current treaties."   Perhaps these experienced officers had come to realize better than most people what author Jonathan Schell meant when he wrote, "that life lived on top of a nuclear stockpile can[not] last."   Anyway, Goodpaster, Butler and the 60 other like-minded senior officers, who joined their appeal, contend that, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, U.S. and allied conventional forces are sufficiently powerful to deter "rogue states" from any really serious aggressive acts.  More importantly, the world’s existing nuclear arsenals of well over 35,000 nuclear weapons could be rapidly reduced to hundreds if  "'only a fraction of the ingenuity and resources as were devoted to their creation,’" were employed to bury them, says Butler.  In his words, "’the price already paid [for keeping the weapons] is too dear, the [future] risk run too great.’"
Yet, long before these knowledgeable officers made their appeal for some sanity in the policies of those presently holding and controlling nuclear weapons, others like the former chief scientific advisor to the British Ministry of Defense (1960-1966), Lord Solly Zuckerman,  had used their in-depth knowledge of nuclear weapons to oppose the pernicious thinking which emerged in the 1980s and which continues to contend that deterring nuclear war requires the ability to actually fight and win a nuclear war.  In that earlier period, Zuckerman — as realpolitik a thinker as they come — called for a halt to the U.S. nuclear strategists’ nonsense which maintained that nuclear deterrence could only be effective if each side believed that the other had the kinds of nuclear weapons that were capable of being used in a variety of ways to prevail in a nuclear war.  Such a mistaken concept of nuclear deterrence not only legitimated the Cold War nuclear arms race, but it destroyed the original meaning of deterrence because it eroded the basic premise of deterrence which is that nuclear weapons will be neither abolished nor used.  Already, before and after 1962, as more and more sophisticated warheads were added to the U.S. and Soviet arsenals, the idea of building only a minimum number of nuclear weapons to deter the use of any nuclear weapons had become obsolete.  And, as more and different warheads and delivery systems were produced, they were given more specific targets – even redundant target assignments.  As of 1989, Moscow and its immediate surroundings had almost 500 U.S. nuclear warheads aimed at it.   And, now, with the research and development (R&D) of new and different types of nuclear weapons being stimulated by the U.S. doctrine embodied in the Nuclear Posture Review, the testing of new weapons is likely to soon follow and that will probably urge other powers to join in a race to off-set the U.S. technological advances and, thereby, attempt to create a "credible" deterrent force of some sort.  But, as Zuckerman already pointed out in 1982, such a race and weapons buildup is dangerously provocative  because all that is really necessary to make nuclear war irrational and self destructive is a "minimal deterrent."   This means that any country's level of nuclear arms can be fixed by a rational determination of the minimum number of warheads that would deter a rational enemy from undertaking a nuclear strike. In other words, that number can be determined, not by competition and rivalry, but by each power’s independent judgment of what constitutes a finite and minimum level deterrent force.   As for completely irrational nuclear adversaries or suicidal religious/political fanatics, neither a nuclear weapons reduction to a "minimal deterrent" nor the additional deployment of more or different types of "usable" nuclear weapons will deter them.  And that goes for any type of National Missile Defense shield as well.  Indeed, an aggressive U.S. nuclear posture may even more readily provoke such foes to strike first and without qualms.   Meanwhile, the proliferation and/or non-state acquisition of nuclear weapons is likely to occur or continue.  And more and more of those weapons, so various U.S. officials keep warning us, are at risk of being obtained by U.S. enemies.
Now, apart from the U.S., Russia, and the United Kingdom, at least five other nations (France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel) and possibly some clandestine, non-state groups have some type of nuclear weapons. This means that the present situation may be far more dangerous than that of the previous Cold War era due to nuclear weapons proliferation and inadequate controls over the world’s nuclear weapons and the materials used for building them.  This situation is so inherently unstable that it should be regarded as intolerable by even the most mediocre of policy makers.  And, yet, if certain of the policy makers of the world’s only reigning superpower would boldly recognize that the U.S. is in a unique position to lead the world in a visionary proposal to control and eliminate nuclear weapons, there are tremendous possibilities for real statesmen.   At this juncture, the U.S. could lead the world in a historic example of building a regime of strict, verifiable, and international control over all nuclear weapons and vital nuclear bomb-making materials.  To be sure, such a revised world order would mean that the existing nature of nation-state sovereignty would have to be extensively modified.   The alternative, however, is the holocaust that we may experience because we, for too long, have refused to exercise our human ingenuity and good sense to think anew, or just again.
 So, now, what is needed for the security and health of millions of people in all nations is a radical solution that goes beyond those proposed during the Cold War by Zuckerman and by an equally tough-minded elder statesman, George F. Kennan.  Neither Zuckerman’s proposal for a reduction of all nuclear arsenals to a "minimum deterrent" level, nor Kennan’s proposal to make "50 percent" "across the board" reductions in both the U.S. and Russian (formally Soviet) arsenals,  nor the pre and post-9/11 Bush Administration proposed cuts are likely to protect the world’s people from a nuclear holocaust at some point during the 21st century.  The only proposal that is likely to prevent such a horror is one which envisions the U.S. in voluntarily leading all the other nuclear weapons-holding nations to destroy most and surrender the rest of all their nuclear weapons, including those held by the U.S., to an international agency.  This could be done in a manner similar to that which the U.S. originally proposed in the 1946 Acheson-Lillienthal plan or in the subsequent, less Soviet-accommodating plan submitted to the U.N. by U.S. diplomat Bernard Baruch.  That plan called for the strict control of the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology by the U.N.  It came at a time when the U.S. was the world’s only nuclear power, and both England and the Soviet Union rejected it in favor of their own ambitions to process nuclear weapons.  But it or similar plans can be resurrected or dusted off to inspire new plans.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower was absolutely right when he wrote that decision makers must "'understand that the era of armaments has ended, and the human race must conform its actions to this truth or die.’"   In fact, everyone needs to recognize the profound wisdom contained in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of April 11, 1955.  Only one week before Albert Einstein died, he and philosopher Bertrand Russell signed an appeal to humanity that was so powerful that no less a figure in realpolitik circles than George Kennan used it to conclude one of his own published efforts to avert a nuclear catastrophe.   The final, glorious paragraph of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto reads:  "There lies before us, if we chose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom.  Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels?  We appeal, as human beings, to human beings:  Remember your humanity and forget the rest.  If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death."
Of course, if that humanitarian appeal continues to be regarded as too idealistic or too "impractical" by those short-sighted commanders of the world’s nuclear weaponry and its nation-state system, perhaps such leaders might be persuaded by Roy’s moving description of the terror, horror, and fate that nuclear weapons hold for virtually everything.   Amid the mounting threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan several weeks ago, she answered the questions of Western journalists who repeatedly asked her why she had not yet fled Delhi with these poignant words:  "But where shall we go? . . . If I go away, and everything and everyone — every friend, every tree, every home, every dog, squirrel, and bird that I have known and loved — is incinerated, how shall I live on?  Who shall I love?  And who will love me back? . . . My husband’s writing a book on trees.  He has a section on how figs are pollinated.  Each fig only by its own specialized fig wasp.  There are nearly a thousand different species of fig wasps, each a precise, exquisite synchrony, the product of millions of years of evolution.  All the fig wasps will be nuked.  Zzzz.  Ash.  And my husband.  And his book. . . . [Nuclear] bombs . . . Whether they’re used or not, they violate everything that is humane.  They alter the meaning of life itself.  Why do we tolerate them?  Why do we tolerate these men who use nuclear weapons to blackmail the entire human race?"
If the answers to those questions are still "blowin in the wind" for most people, the rest of us must work to do what we can to insure that they will not be carried to our children on currents of radioactive dust.  As a practical first step in that endeavor, all concerned people should refer to the brief June 24, 2002, essay "End the Nuclear Danger:  An Urgent Call" that has been prepared and signed by Jonathan Schell, Randall Caroline Forsberg, and David Cortright.   It can be found at the link   HYPERLINK http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020624&s=schell2   http://www.thenation.com/ doc.mhtml ?i=20020624&s=schell2  on The Nation’s web site.  Individuals who may wish to sign the "Urgent Call" statement to pressure the leaders of all nuclear powers to abolish nuclear weapons in a "step by carefully inspected and verified step"  can do so at    HYPERLINK http://urgentcall.org   http://urgentcall.org  .  This is the time to act.  If we continue to allow the outmoded and dangerous thinking of our nuclear weapons/war policy makers to dominate our futures with their unimaginative, Machiavellian, and self-serving obsessions for power or self-aggrandizement, human civilization and every species on earth will be increasingly endangered.
To be sure the task is an uphill battle against an international and often militaristic-minded elite, but if millions of people can "imagine all the people/ living life in peace," and, then, join the dreamers to make the "world as one," that elite and their thinking can be moved.  It is to this which former President Eisenhower referred when he stated in 1959:  "'I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of the way and let them have it.’"   And, while the shortsighted, unimaginative policy makers of the world's nuclear powers are likely to resist every profound change in the status quo as "unrealistic," the rest of us must heed the visionary admonition of the French student protestors in 1968:  "Be realistic, Demand the Impossible!"  Then, if we are to save not only the human species but almost every other species on earth, including those of the fig wasps in India, from a future nuclear holocaust, we will have to rely on ourselves, educate ourselves, organize ourselves, and pressure intransigent policy makers to refashion the world’s obsolete nation-state system to either abolish or bring under strict international control all nuclear weapons and the crucial materials used to make them.  To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln's remarks on an earlier crisis, we must disenthrall ourselves from obsolete ideas and institutions, and, then, we can save ourselves and the fig wasps too. (E)
 PAGE   9
 

 PAGE   3
 
 

Notes to On Avoiding a Nuclear Holocaust

 Arundhati Roy, "War Talk:  Summer Games with Nuclear Bombs," The Nation, June 2002, 2,   HYPERLINK "http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=special&s=roy20020604"   www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=special&s=roy20020604 . (Cited as Roy, "War Talk.").  Roy is one of India’s most renowned contemporary writers.  She is a dissident leader in the struggle for environmental protection, economic and social justice, sensible and equitable globalization, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.  Her fine books include The God of Small Things (1997), The Cost of Living (1999), and Power Politics (2001).  Something about Roy’s critical outlook and gift of expression may be gleaned for the comments that Newsweek writer David Gates has written about Roy.  "Her image," he writes, "of America is something we should take seriously:  ‘Its merciless economic agenda . . . has munched the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.’  See David Gates, "The Voices of Dissent," Newsweek, 19 November 2001, 67.
  The annual cost of just maintaining the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal is $33 billion.  See Center for Defense Information (CDI), Letter to donors, December 23, 1997.
 Fareed Zakaria, "In Praise of Nukes (Gulp)," Newsweek, 10 June 2002, 33.  (Cited as Zakaria, "In Praise.").
  Stanley Kubrick’s inspired creation of "Dr. Strangelove" ("Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb," Produced and Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, 1963, Hawk Pictures -- Columbia Pictures) is a classic in film making and satirical black humor.  It is a superb denunciation of the Cold War nuclear arms race and right-wing fanaticism, as well as human foibles in general.  The single best dramatic film about the horrendous consequences of a limited nuclear war and the step-by-step escalation of actions leading to such a war is the British film "Threads" ("Threads," Produced and Directed by Mick Jackson, Written by Barry Hines, 1985, World Video -- A Western World Television, Inc. Company).  And one of the most poignant films about the lethal effects of radiation and the devastating aftermath of nuclear war is the unique American film "Testament"("Testament," Produced by Jonathan Bernstein, Directed by Lynne Littleman, Screenplay by John Sacret Young, 1983, Paramount Pictures).  Seeing these films is as close as anyone should ever get to experiencing a nuclear war.
  Zakaria, "In Praise."
 Zakaria, "In Praise."  Zakaria’s contentions in regards to nuclear strategy and deterrence merely reflect the dominant, current power elite's official contention that nuclear weapons can be made "'usable’" for both conventional and unconventional warfare.  In his analysis of that development, Raffi Khatchadourian outlined the recent history of that shift toward using nuclear weapons in Khatchadourian's article "Relearning to Love the Bomb."  The following excerpts from his article will not only highlight that history, but they will illustrate the conventionality of Zakaria’s views:
"Yet within the U.S. military establishment, nuclear weapons do not appear to be irrevocably sliding down the path to extinction.  Quite the contrary – over the past several years there has been a growing push both within and outside government to make nuclear weapons more ‘usable’ . . .
It’s difficult to pinpoint the genesis of this line of thinking within the military community, but one important document is Paul Robinson’s 2001 white paper, 'Pursuing a New Nuclear Weapons Policy for the 21st Century.’  In this apologia for atomic weaponry, Robinson, director of Sandia National Laboratories, laments that ‘far too many people . . . were beginning to believe that perhaps nuclear weapons no longer had value.’  He [like Zakaria] warns that atomic bombs play an important role in global security and that since they cannot be reinvented, they must be adapted to respond to biological or chemical attacks and targeted at the leaders of rogue states and their arsenals. . . .
[Also] Stephen Younger, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is part of the Defense Department, . . . wrote . . . an influential study published in June 2000 [that] 'a benefit of lower-yield weapons is that the collateral damage sustained by the near target area may be reduced . . . in attacks near urban areas.'
Younger’s ideas were echoed in a similar report by the National Institute for Public Policy, a non-profit defense think tank, which was published last year and which forms the bedrocks of the [current] Bush II Administration’s nuclear policy.  A number of that report’s authors were brought into government with the Bush II Administration, and they have taken influential positions in shaping policy.  Last July Adm. Richard Mies, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Strategic Command, told Congress, the NIPP report was a 'good blueprint to follow' in drafting future nuclear policy. . . .
This January [2002] the Pentagon delivered to Congress its top-secret Nuclear Posture Review, outlining a revised U.S. nuclear-weapons policy.  This review hews closely to the NIPP report and the work of Robinson and Younger.  It states that the country’s nuclear arsenal will be cut, but many warheads removed from deployment will be kept in storage . . .  It also explains that nuclear weapons will be ‘integrated with new non-nuclear strategic capabilities,’ according to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld."  See Raffi Khatchadourian, "Relearning to Love the Bomb," The Nation, 2 April 2002, 2-3, www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=20020401&s=khatchadourian. (Cited as Khatchadourian, "Relearning.").
 Zakaria, "In Praise." As an Indian-born American citizen, Zakaria has probably ingratiated himself with the U.S. power elite because his outlook is so unassailably in accord with the fundamental values of that dominant elite:  competition, domination, self-aggrandizement, and wealth accumulation.  For just one recent example, in his Newsweek commentary entitled "Europe:  Make Peace With War," Zakaria verifies his credentials as a spokesperson and policy-shaper of the industrial core-power elite when he recommends that if Europe "wants to be a global power . . . Europe has to get back into the business of making war."  And, then, he bemoans the fact that a 20th century of warfare, including two world wars, have induced the Europeans to "remain reluctant to believe that military power can be useful in solving problems."  He suggests that, with an annual spending of "only $140 billion on defense," the Europeans are woefully behind the U.S. annual spending of "$347 billion" (actually, according to the fiscal year (FY) 2002 figures calculated by CDI, the amount is $350.8 billion).  See Zakaria, "Europe:  Make Peace With War," Newsweek, 3 June 2002, 35.  And what is the pay-off for these kinds of so-called thoughts?  Well, in a New York Times profile of Zakaria, Elisabeth Bumiller, notes the social-climbing successes of Zakaria and also points out his conservative appeal with these words:  "Mr. Zakaria says he likes moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats . . . Condoleezza Rice . . . calls him ‘intelligent about just about every area of the world.’"  See "Profile of a SAJAer:  Fareed Zakaria," 2002, 1, 2, 5,   HYPERLINK "http://www.saja.org/zakaria.html"   www.saja.org/ zakaria.html .
  Thomas K. Jones served in Ronald Reagan’s Administration of nuclear war hawks and "Star Wars" warriors like George Bush I, Donald Rumsfeld, Frank Carlucci, Richard Pipes, Eugene V. Rostow, and, to a lesser extent Richard Perle.  Jones, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, is famous for insouciantly declaring, "'If there are enough shovels to go around [in the event of a nuclear war] everybody’s going to make it.’"  Because, he said, "'It’s the dirt that does it.’"  For those in Jones’s Strangeloveian universe, millions of Americans could survive a full scale nuclear war if they were just provided with shovels and could cover themselves in holes with three feet of dirt stacked on boards or doors over their bodies.  See Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels:  Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, New York:  Random House, 1982, 18;  Khatchadourian, "Relearning," 2-3.
 These two basic and contrasting outlooks — the first far less humane than the second — are exceedingly important because, in an age when nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons of mass destruction may be unleashed on all peoples, the personalities of the leaders who control those weapons can have an irreversible impact on hundreds of millions of people.  After all, when crises deepen, multiply, and become more frequent, leaders not only have less and less decision time, but they often have less and less accurate and reliable information.  Then, as response time shortens and psychological pressures mount, decision makers fall back on their long-held, deeply ingrained values and fundamental beliefs.  They make decisions on the basis of their visceral reactions.  For example, according to political analyst Christopher Hitchens, one of President George Bush II’s "closest associates" told Hitchens that "Bush’s conservatism [read elitism] was a startling thing to behold, something innate and instinctive. . . . To this President, it is an axiom that the rich are the means of elevating the poor, and that it is therefore the rich who need elevation [read:  more wealth, income, power and privileges]." See Christopher Hitchens, "Hey, I’m doing my best,"  The Observer, 20 January 2002, 3,   HYPERLINK "http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,636241,00.html"   www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,636241,00.html .  Obviously, such innate class empathy for the rich is 180 degrees away from the empathy that people like Roy feel for those in the class of the poor and powerless.  At any rate, if history is any guide, we are likely to find that most of those in the tradition of elitism and realpolitik will be far less inclined to think in terms of the lost innocent lives that their decisions are likely to cost than will be those whose upbringing or humane instincts direct them away from the exploitation and sacrifice of others.
 George F. Kennan brilliantly cuts to the essentials regarding nuclear weapons and their political usage when he defines the nature and purpose of "true weapons."  As he incisively states, "A true weapon is at best something with which you endeavor to affect the behavior of another society by influencing the minds, the calculations, the intentions, of the men who control it; it is not something with which you destroy indiscriminately the lives, the substance, the culture, the civilization, the hopes, of entire peoples. . . ."  Therefore, he concludes with the same implacable logic, "the nuclear bomb is the most useless weapon ever invented.  It can be employed to no constructive purpose.  It is not even an effective defense against itself.  It is only something with which, in a moment of petulance or panic, you perpetrate upon the helpless people of another country such fearful acts of destruction as no sane person would ever wish to have upon his conscience."  See George F. Kennan, "A Modest Proposal," New York Review of Books, 16 July 1981, 14.
 Roy, "War Talk," 1.
 Roy, "War Talk," 2.
 Roy, "War Talk," 2.
 Roy, "War Talk," 2.
 Roy, "War Talk," 2;  Roy observed that the cost of "a single Hawk bomber . . . could provide 1.5 million [Indian] people with clean drinking water for life."  See Ibid.
 Roy, "War Talk," 2.
 Roy, "War Talk," 2.
 The genesis of the nuclear-war-fighting thinking and doctrines that are integral to the Nuclear Posture Review may be traced at least as far back as the 1975-1976 CIA "Team B" that the then CIA Director George Bush-the-elder put together from the group of conservative, nuclear war hawks that he had brought into the CIA from outside its ranks.  These people included, among others, Richard Pipes (Chair of Team B), Paul Nitze (chief author of the 1950, NSC-68 memorandum that became the cornerstone of all subsequent U.S. Cold War policy), William Van Cleave, and Daniel O. Graham.  They had the aim of proving that the CIA’s official assessment of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons build-up was wrong.  The CIA had concluded that the Soviets were seeking only nuclear strategic "parity" with the U.S., and Team B undertook a recalculation of such things as the portion of the Soviet Gross National Product going to defense and its Civil Defense program.  Well, when you look, you find.  So, Team B crunched and interpreted the data to prove that the original CIA’s assessment of Soviet intentions was wrong.  According to its findings, Team B had discovered an immense Soviet nuclear threat.  And, later, some of its members (e.g., Nitze and Pipes) went into the ultra-conservative Committee on the Present Danger.  Actually, Nitze and Pipes had already been in the process of forming the Committee on the Present Danger when they were appointed to Team B.  Anyway, many of the members of the Committee –  Charles Tyroler II (director), Eugene Rostow, Paul Green, Geoffrey Kemp, Fred Ikle, R.G. Stillwell, Richard Perle, William Van Cleave, William Casey, John Lehman, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Colin Gray, George Shultz, and W. Allen Wallis – went on to take high-level policy making positions in the Ronald Reagan and George Bush I Administrations.  These are the people, and types of people, who maintain that a nuclear war can be fought and won.  Indeed, when journalist Robert Scheer asked the then Republican primary challenger to Ronald Reagan’s first presidential campaign bid for the Republican presidential nomination, George Bush-the-elder, "how one won in a nuclear exchange," Bush replied, "You have a survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of yours citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict upon you.  That’s the way you can have a winner . . ."  To which, Scheer asked how many Americans Bush thought would survive a nuclear exchange, five or less percent?  And Bush, the creator of Team B, replied that there would be "more than that" "[if] everybody fired everything he had . . ."  Such is the mindless thinking of the leading policy makers of who have guided (and continue to guide) the nuclear policies of the U.S.  See Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels:  Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, New York:  Random House, 1982, 53-65, 30-52, 29.
 Roy, "War Talk," 1.
 Khatchadourian, "Relearning," 4.
 Roy, "War Talk," 2.
 Roy, "War Talk," 3.
 Roy, "War Talk," 2.
 NUTS was implemented by President Ronald Reagan’s "Presidential Directive 59" (PD 59), "Defense Guidance, 1984-1988," and "National Security Decision Directive 182" (NSDD 182).
 Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter, "The War Planners," Esquire, January 1989, 68.  Also, John Barry and Evan Thomas, "Dropping the Bomb," Newsweek, 25 June 2001, 28.
 Paul Richter, "U.S. Works Up Plan for Using Nuclear Arms," Los Angeles Times, 9 March 2002, at latimes.com, 1-2,   HYPERLINK "http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/1a-030902bomb.story"   www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/1a-030902bomb.story .
 James M. Cypher, "Return of the Iron Triangle:  The New Military Buildup," Dollars and Sense, 2002, 1, www.dollarsandsense.org/2002/cypher0102.htm .
 Center for Defense Information (CDI), "Issue Brief, Reshaping the Military for Asymmetric Warfare," October 5, 2001, 5, www.cdi.org/press/press_releases/ 2001/ terrorism100501-pr.cfm; also Richard Reeves, "The American Empire’s Provisional Press," 4 April 2002, 1, Richardreeves.com.wysiwyg://17/http://richardreeves.com/.
 Department of Defense (DoD), "Joint Vision 2020," Approval Authority:  General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Office of Primary Responsibility:  Director for Strategic Plans and Policy, J5; Strategic Division, Washington, D.C.:  U.S. Government Printing Office, June 2000, 1-7, 20.
 CDI, "Fiscal Year 2003 Pentagon Budget Request, Budget Authority," February 4, 2002, 1, www.cdi.org/issues/budget/FY03topline-pr.cfm.  CDI noted that these figures included "Defense Emergency Response Funds (FY 2002-2007)" and the total figure for FY 2002 "includes $3.2 billion for ‘Civilian accrual’ which in the other years is included in the actual DoD budget.  Totals may not add up due to rounding."
 Noam Chomsky, "Whose World Order:  Conflicting Visions," U. of Calgary, Canada, September 22, 1998, Audio recording.
 Richard Falk, "The New Bush Doctrine," The Nation, July 15, 2002, 1, www.thenation. com/docPrint.mhtml?i=20020715&s=falk.  My emphasis.
 Falk, 1-2.  The entirety of Falk's remarks in this passage were as follows: "Pre-emption . . . validates striking first – not in a crisis, as was done by Israel with plausible, if not entirely convincing, justification in the 1967 war, when enemy Arab troops were massing on its borders after dismissing the U.N. war-preventing presence, but on the basis of a shadowy intentions, alleged potential links to terrorist groups, supposed plans and projects to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and anticipations of possible future dangers.  It is a doctrine without limits, without accountability to the U.N. or international law, without any dependence on a collective judgment of responsible governments and, what is worse, without any convincing demonstration of practical necessity."
Elaborating on the violation that this U.S. doctrine of pre-emptive military attack does to existing international law, Falk writes, "This new approach repudiate the core idea of the United Nations Charter (reinforced by decisions of the World Court in the Hague), which prohibits any use of international force that is not undertaken in self-defense after the occurrence of an armed attack across an international boundary [e.g., Iraq’s attack on Kuwait in 1990] or pursuant to a decision by the U.N. Security Council."  See Falk, 1.
 George F. Kennan is one of those who would be very likely to condemn the poverty of intellect that is represented in the thinking of those in the Bush Administration who are propounding the ideas and doctrines of nuclear war fighting that are embodied in the Nuclear Posture Review.  Long ago, he noted that it represents a total failure of intellect for decision makers to imagine that nuclear weapons are even "true weapons" because, rather than affecting changes of policy in those who lead other societies, nuclear weapons "destroy indiscriminately the lives, the substance, the culture, the civilization, the hopes of entire peoples."  In short, according to Kennan’s experienced opinion and high standard of reasoning, only the pathologically insane or intellectually impoverished would use nuclear weapons.  With his words condemning such decision makers in 1981, he wrote the thoughts that still apply:  "What a confession of intellectual poverty it would be — what a bankruptcy of intelligent statesmanship — if we had to admit that such blind, senseless, and irreparable destruction [wrought by using nuclear bombs] was the best use we could make of what we have come to view as the leading element of our military strength!  To my mind, the nuclear bomb . . . can be employed to no constructive purpose . . .  It is only something with which . . . you perpetrate upon the helpless people of another country such fearful acts of destruction as no sane person would ever wish to have upon his conscience."  See George Kennan, "A Modest Proposal," New York Review of Books, 16 July 1981, 14.
 Jonathan Schell, Randall Caroline Forsberg, and David Cortright, "End the Nuclear Danger:  An Urgent Call," The Nation, 24 June 2002, 1,   HYPERLINK "http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=20020624&s=schell2"   www.thenation.com/docPrint. mhtml?i=20020624&s=schell2 .  (Cited as "End the Nuclear Danger.").
 These serious proposals must, and usually do, include mutually verifiable controls and inspections over all aspects of nuclear arms such as numbers kept, numbers destroyed, types of weapons, storage locations, control of bomb-making materials, security of weapons and weapon launching systems, etc.  One such thoroughgoing 2002 proposal ("Urgent Call") has been issued by the long-time activists against nuclear weapons Jonathan Schell, Randall Caroline Forsberg, and David Cortright.  It calls for a verifiable reduction of U.S. and Russian arsenals to 1,000 warheads each.  The outline for the complete proposal may be found at this link:   HYPERLINK "http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=20020624&s=schell2"   www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml? i=20020624&s=schell2 .  See Schell, "Urgent Call," 1.
 Steven Komarow, "Ex-generals declare war on nukes," USA Today, 5 December 1996, 3A.  According to this issue of USA Today, General Lee Butler served under former Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Colin Powell as his strategic war planner, and Butler also spent 27 of his 37 years in the Air Force maintaining nuclear weapons and planning for nuclear war.  When he retired in 1994, he was head of the U.S. Strategic Command that "oversees nuclear bombers and missiles."  General Goodpaster was one of NATO’s top commanders during part of Cold War.
According to a June 2001 Newsweek issue, when Butler arrived at the Strategic Command, he discovered that the U.S. had so many nuclear weapons and was adding more with every new weapons system that the Pentagon purchased that the "generals needed to add new targets for the new weapons, until they were aiming at targets [in the Soviet Union] as small and insignificant as rural railroad sidings."  Yet, with between 10,000 and 12,500 targets in the Soviet Union on the SIOP, even after Butler "took an ax to the SIOP," the "SIOP is actually 20 percent larger today than it was after Butler had finished [cutting]."  Finding this situation unacceptable before the events of 9/11 had occurred, President Bush II and Rumsfeld apparently wanted to cut the nukes back, and they brought Butler back as a consultant to do so.  Before 9/11, he joined by Perle, might have brought some sanity to the U.S. nuclear weapons strategy because, as Perle is quoted as saying, "’I see no reason why we can’t go well below 1,000.  I want the lowest number possible, under the tightest control possible.’"  According to Newsweek, Perle and Butler agree with what President John Kennedy’s national security advisor McGeorge Bundy wrote in 1969:  "'even one hydrogen bomb on one city’ would be ‘a catastrophic blunder;  ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history.'"  Now, unfortunately, if the promulgation of the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review is any guide, that sort of thinking and any meaningful notion of deep cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal is passe among important U.S. policy makers.  See John Barry and Evan Thomas, "Dropping the Bomb," Newsweek, 25 June 2001, 30.
 Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth, New York:  Avon Books, 1982, 161.
 Komarow, USA Today.  The U.S. spends $33 billion a year to maintain its nuclear weapons so that they can be launched to hit virtually any place in the world.  According to Newsweek, in 2001, the U.S. nuclear arsenal included: 5,400 warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles, 1,750 nuclear bombs and cruise missiles on B-2 and B-52 bombers, 1,670 tactical nuclear weapon, and around 10,000 nuclear warheads stored in bunkers around the U.S.  The "grand" total of all these come to 18,820 nuclear bombs.  And the Russians, together with some of the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union, have a similar number.  Those weapons, however, are apparently held in a much less protected and secure environment than those in the U.S.  See Barry and Thomas, Newsweek, 28.  All this means that, while some nuclear weapons reductions between the U.S. and the Russians (including the former Soviet Union) have been undertaken, the numbers of warheads ready to fire and in storage are virtually the same as in 1983.  At that time, the world’s nuclear weapons stockpiles stood at the equivalent of about 16 billion tons of TNT.  Compared to the 3 million tons of TNT that were exploded in all of World War II, this means that, as of that date, and probably today, the world’s nuclear powers have the capacity to explode 5.5 World War IIs every hour for 40 days and 40 nights.  See Ruth Leger Sivard complier and editor, World Military and Social Expenditures, 1983, Washington, D.C., World Priorities, 1983, 18.  Finally, according to the Center for Defense Information (CDI) in 1997-99, about 3,000 of the Russian strategic warheads and 2,500 of the U.S. strategic warheads were (and probably still are) on "’hair trigger’ alert, ready to fire at a moment’s notice."  See CDI, Letters to donors, December 23, 1997, and November 1999.
 In his fine critical review of Solly Zukerman’s Nuclear Illusion and Reality (1982) and of Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982), historian and political analyst Theodore Draper showered high praise on Zukerman’s book as one "that contains more useful knowledge and wisdom about nuclear warfare than a small library on the subject."  Draper’s review of Schell’s best selling work, however, was much less favorable.  He faulted it for falling into the "same genre of political fantasy and millennial daydreaming" as that other "classic of puerility" The Greening of America.  Draper’s critique of Schell’s book, however, exaggerated its flaws on the same basis that men of realpolitik always use to denigrate those who propose dramatic reforms in the status quo.  In other words, those in the realpolitik camp charge that the reform solution is too utopian and, consequently, must be rejected.  But the value of Schell’s book is that it highlights the full range of devastating consequences that are highly likely to flow from nuclear warfare — biological, philosophical, sociological, and cosmological.  In a world of distraction and disinformation, Schell’s tremendous, best selling accomplishment was to awaken hundreds of thousands of readers to the full horrors of nuclear war.  And his recent sponsorship of the "Urgent Call" to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons, meets all of the requirements of being "practical" that thinkers like Draper always stress are necessary.  See Theodore Draper, "How Not to Think About Nuclear War," New York Review of Books, 13 July 1982, 42, 36.
 Barry and Thomas, Newsweek, 30.
 Solly Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusion and Reality, New York, Viking Press, 1982, 102-106, 108, 120, 133.
 As the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union spiraled out of sane control, Zuckerman and a few of his colleagues argued for a "more reasonable strategic nuclear policy" based on the concept of "'minimal deterrence.’"  For him and his colleagues, he wrote, it "seemed to us inconceivable that . . . any country would try to further some aggressive aim if the risk were the total destruction of its own capital city, let alone that of its ten largest cities. . . . [But, he added] unfortunately, the concept of deterrence has always been too vague for definition in terms of units of destruction.  [And] once the numbers game took over, reason flew out of the window."  See Zuckerman, 47-48.
 Some idea of how low that threshold could be, perhaps, is found in the following observations and findings presented by Zuckerman:  A typical "city killing" nuclear weapon is a one megaton warhead (1 kiloton, or kt, is equal to 1,000 tons of conventional, chemical high explosive (e.g., TNT); 1 megaton is equal to 1,000 kt; the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were rated at 15 kt, plus or minus one or two kt).  Now, the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment conducted an official 1979 study of what would happen if a one-megaton warhead exploded, without warning and at night, in Detroit, Michigan.  With no other city suffering an attack, a ground burst among Detroit’s 4.3 million inhabitants would kill 250,000 people instantly and leave 500,000 wounded.  There would be an "'immediate loss of power in a major sector of the total US power grid,’" and the total medical facilities of the U.S., concluded the study, would be "'severely overburdened.’"  If the bomb were to be detonated at 6,000 feet above the city, the number of fatalities would be almost doubled and the wounded "greatly increased."  This study is supported by others undertaken in the U.S., England, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.  In fact, a 1979 report prepared for the U.S. Congress (Economic and Social Consequences of Nuclear Attacks on the United States) noted that 25 percent of the U.S. population (a higher percentage now) lives in only 10 cities, and that, if those cities were hit by nuclear bombs, "organized national life in the USA" would be eliminated.  Moreover, given the huge nuclear arsenals that still exist, to destroy 71 of the "'largest Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas’" of the U.S. and 62 percent of the American population the former Soviet Union (now Russia) would have had to expend only "30 per cent of its strategic forces."  To bring about a "corresponding level of destruction" in the former Soviet Union (now Russia), the U.S. would have had to expend only "'10 per cent of current [1979] U.S. strategic force loadings’"  (See Zuckerman, 15-16, 30, 38-39).  Nuclear bomb explosions are designed to maximize fires.  They burn more people to death than they destroy by blast in their immediate effects.  And they naturally cause additional huge numbers of people to be burned with not immediately fatal injuries.  Yet, as of the early 1980s, there were only "1,000-2,000 burn beds in the United States."  And probably only a few hundred or a thousand more today.  Now, since a single nuclear warhead that is detonated over a major city "would produce tens of thousands of burn victims, and destroy hospitals as well," only a miniscule number of burn casualties would receive the sort of sophisticated, extensive treatment that is required to help those who suffer from extensive burns.  See Barry M. Casher and Lucy Dyke, "slide 115," The Nuclear War Graphics Project, 1981.
 This is the point made by former Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll earlier in this text, but it is a point more fully explored in the recent writings of Chalmers Johnson, Gore Vidal, Patrick J. Buchanan, and Robert Fisk, among others.  See Chalmers Johnson, Blowback:  The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000).  He writes "’Blowback is shorthand for saying that a nation reaps what is sows. . . .  Empire is the problem. . . .  [The U.S.’s] imperial pretensions [and] [m]ore imperialist projects simply generate more blowback. . . .  U.S. leaders . . . should also understand that their efforts to maintain imperial hegemony inevitably generates multiple forms of blowbacks."  (Blowback, 223, 229).  See Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace:  How We Got to Be So Hated (2002) in which is featured a chart of over 200 U.S. military operation since 1947, and about which Vidal noted in a recent  interview:  "And people in the countries who are recipients of our bombs get angry. . . .  And that’s why we got to be so hated."  (Marc Cooper, Interview with Gore Vidal, "The Last Defender of the American Republic?"  LA Weekly, 5-11 July 2002, 1, 2, 3, www.laweekly.com/ ink/printime.php?eid=36259).  See Patrick J. Buchanan, "What price the American Empire?" WorldNetDaily, 29 May 2002, 1, 2, www.wnd.com/news/printer-friendly. asp/ARTICLE_ID=27771 in which he writes that most imperialist powers had to endure "terror" until they "went home."  He adds, "The price of empire is terror.  The price of occupation is terror.  The price of interventionism is terror. . . . [so]  Is the empire worth it?  French, Brits, even Soviets said no.  They went home.  And nothing over there — not oil, not bases in Saudi Arabia, not global hegemony — is worth risking nuclear terror over here."  See Robert Fisk, "There is a firestorm coming and it is being provoked by Mr. Bush," The Independent, Independent.co.uk, 9 June 2002, 3,   HYPERLINK "http://argument.ihndependent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=298681"   http://argument. independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=298681  in which he writes:  "Mr. Bush goes on to do exactly what his enemies want:  to provoke Muslims and Arabs, to praise their enemies and demonize their countries, to bomb and starve Iraq and give uncritical support to Israel and maintain his support for the dictatorships of the Middle East. . . .  There is a firestorm coming.  And . . . we are provoking it."
 Unfortunately, the ideological obsessions and war-promoting plans President George Bush II’s leading neoconservative foreign policy advisors does not hold out much promise for great changes.  The inferior quality of those in the Bush Administration has been detailed by Harold Meyerson in a caustic article entitled "Axis of Incompetence."  Characterizing such people as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and others by using such disparaging terms as ideologues, nostalgists, geopolitical counterparts of the survivalists, and Hobbesian tough guys who are afflicted with parochialism, xenophobia, simplicity, and willful insularity, Meyerson notes that great thinkers and visionary diplomats need not apply for President Bush’s team.  People of the caliber and sophistication of Hans Morganthau, George F. Kennan, James F. Byrnes, Dean Acheson or even Colin Powell cannot fit into "the president’s keep-it-simple weltanschauung," according to Meyerson.  See Harold Meyerson, "Axis of Incompetence," Prospect, 20 May 2002, 1-3, www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/ V13/9/meyerson-h.html.  Something of the daring behind the imagination of those cosmopolitan thinkers and diplomats might be gained by the political evolution of President Truman’s Secretary of State James F. Byrnes.  As one who, early in the Truman Administration, urged Truman to use the atomic bomb as diplomatic leverage against the Soviets, Byrnes learned (after the failure of the 1945 London Foreign Ministers Conference in London) that atomic diplomacy — the U.S. was the only nuclear power in 1945 — had its limitations when he tried to broker with the Soviets.  By the time he attended a Moscow conference at the end of 1945, Byrnes was opposed to "'using the bomb for political purposes,’" and he called for the international control of atomic energy.  This reversal of his earlier position and attempt to depoliticize the atomic bomb revealed his diplomatic flexibility, but it also brought, according to historian Thomas J. McCormick, "the whole weight of the American foreign policy establishment down upon him.  The hard-line containment policy crowd – Arthur S. Vandenberg, Tom Connally, Summer Wells, William Leahy, George F. Kennan, James Forrestal, and a host of others — not only brought about Byrnes’s political down fall, but they also introduced more and more inflexible policies toward the Soviet Union.  See Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century:  United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After, 2nd Ed., Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins UP, 1995, 66-67.
 In his own succinct description of the anachronistic nature of the nation-state system due to the advent of nuclear weapons, writer/activist Jonathan Schell began his analysis with a quote that epitomizes Einstein’s "farseeing" political and scientific wisdom.  Einstein, who advocated, in 1945, a "world government" to which United States, the Soviet Union, and England committed all their military resources (including nuclear weapons), wrote, "'[T]he unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.’"  As Schell continued this line of thinking, "We live with one foot . . . in the nuclear world. . . . But . . . we go on living in the pre-nuclear world, as though . . . sovereign nations could still employ the instruments of violence as instruments of policy. . . .  The combination is the source of our immediate peril.  For governments still acting within a system of independent nation-states . . . are driven to try to defend merely national interests with means of destruction that threaten . . . planetary doom."  But, Schell adds, "no matter how strenuously statesmen may assert the ‘sovereign’ power of their nations, the fact is that they are all caught in an increasingly fine mesh of global life, in which the survival of each nation depends on the survival of all."  Thus, he concludes, "There is no ‘sovereign’ right to destroy the earthly creation on which everyone depends for survival . . ."  See Albert Einstein, "The Complaint of Peace" [originally entitled "Einstein on Peace" in the Atlantic Monthly, November 1945], in J. Kelley Sowards, ed. Makers of the Western Tradition:  Portraits from History, Vol. II, Fourth Ed., New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1987, 225; Schell, 188, 177.
 George F. Kennan, "A Modest Proposal," The New York Review of Books, 16 July 1981, 16.
 Schell, 6.
 George F. Kennan, "A Modest Proposal," 16;  See also George F. Kennan, Nuclear Delusion:  Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age, New York:  Pantheon Books, [1976] 1983, 182.
 Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, Russell-Einstein Manifesto, April 11, 1955, in J. Kelley Sowards, ed.  Makers of the Western Tradition:  Portraits from History, vol. II, Fourth Ed., New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1987, 243.
 Roy, "War Talk," 1, 3.
 Jonathan Schell is the author of The Fate of the Earth and a Harold Willens Peace Fellow of the Nation Institute.  Randall Caroline Forsberg is the author of the manifesto of the 1980s nuclear weapons freeze campaign entitled "Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race."  David Cortright is president of the Fourth Freedom Forum and the former Executive Director of SANE, an anti-nuclear weapons and war organization.
 "End the Nuclear Danger," 2.
 John J. Shanahan, "Letter from the [CDI] Director," The Defense Monitor, Vol. XXV, No. 5, July 1996, 7.