[IP] The fate of the Earth: A Fascinating Discussion of Nuclear Weapons and Civilization

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger@ibd.com>
Date: December 4, 2007 10:06:57 PM EST
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>, David Farber <dave@farber.net 
>
Subject: The fate of the Earth: A Fascinating Discussion of Nuclear  
Weapons and Civilization

[Don't let the subtitle fool you, this article is much deeper than  
political partisanship - Rob ]

The fate of the Earth, the Bush years
Jonathan Schell: "Everybody who has ever marched against nuclear  
weapons should dust off their boots and get back in the fray."

By Tom Engelhardt

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/12/05/nuclear_weapons/index.html

Dec. 5, 2007 | Enter Jonathan Schell's small office at the Nation  
Institute only if you don't mind experiencing a slightly vertiginous  
feeling. Books are everywhere -- in boxes on the floor, on every  
surface, in, along and perilously stacked above shelves. If you took a  
wrong step, you could at least imagine disappearing in a tsunami of  
tumbling books. "That's my Hannah Arendt pile up there," he says,  
gesturing toward a shelf I'm examining. He's sitting at his desk, his  
legs up and an iMac perched on his knees. Even here, he wears a jacket  
-- black corduroy in this case -- a blue button-down shirt, grey  
slacks, and on his feet the leather shoes of a man who has yet to  
enter the all-comfort Age of Nike. Glasses are perched on his nose,  
and his face, when he looks up, is welcoming and well lived in.

Only the titles of the books scattered everywhere hint at the less  
than mild-mannered reality of his life: "Living With the Bomb,"  
"Empire," "The Next War," "Savage Dreams," "The Tragedy of American  
Diplomacy," "The United States and the Legacy of the Vietnam War," and  
-- all in Japanese characters but for a single word in English --  
"Hiroshima." It's hard to believe that this modest-looking man once  
rode in a forward air controller's small plane in Vietnam, surveying  
the wholesale destruction of two provinces for what became his 1968  
book, "The Military Half," or that his 1982 bestselling book on the  
nuclear conundrum, "The Fate of the Earth," was one of the sparks for  
the greatest anti-nuclear movement of our -- or any other -- lifetime.  
In one way or another in those days, he jostled with millions of  
demonstrators and activists; most of the time since, while writing for  
the New Yorker, then Newsday, and now the Nation, he has remained a  
largely one-man campaign against nuclear annihilation and nuclear  
"forgetfulness," as well as for the abolition of such weapons from the  
fateful face of our Earth.

Several days after the publication of his latest nuclear book, "The  
Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger," at a moment when the  
Bush administration, long focused on nuclear weapons, fictional and  
real, was up to its ears in a potential nuclear crisis involving  
Pakistan, we sit down in the conference room of the Nation Institute,  
where he is a fellow (as am I). With two cheap tape recorders rolling  
and Tam Turse, the official photographer of TomDispatch, snapping  
photos, we begin to explore the mysteries of the nuclear crisis -- and  
conundrum -- that has occupied much of his life and threatened the  
planet for the last 62 years. He speaks with emphasis, but in a  
measured way, stopping from time to time to carefully consider his  
answers.

So, take us on a little tour of our world in terms of nuclear weapons.

The way I think of it, in the Cold War, the nuclear age was in a sort  
of adolescence. Just a two-power or, at most, a five- or six-sided  
affair. Now, it's in its prime. We already have nine nuclear powers,  
with lots of aspirers to the club waiting in the wings. The nuclear  
weapon is fulfilling its destiny, which was known from the very  
beginning of the nuclear age: to be available to all who wanted it,  
whether or not they choose to actually build the thing.

In a certain sense, we're just beginning to face the nuclear danger in  
its inescapable, quintessential form. At key moments in the nuclear  
age, the public has suddenly gotten very worked up about its peril.  
Now, if I am not mistaken, could be another such moment. Everybody who  
has ever marched or spoken up against nuclear weapons should dust off  
their hiking boots and get back in the fray.

Once upon a time, of course, we would have said that the Cold War  
superpower standoff with tens of thousands of such weapons was its  
quintessential form.

But that was not correct. The Cold War was in fact a temporary two- 
power disguise for a threat that was essentially universal in double  
sense: No. 1, it could destroy everybody; No. 2, over the long run,  
anybody was going to be able to acquire it. There's still a ways to  
go, but we've already reached the verge at which it's imaginable that  
a mere terrorist group could get its hands on the bomb technology, or  
even on a ready-made bomb.

That's part of the universalization that was written into the bomb's  
genetic code. Once a terrorist group has such a weapon, deterrence --  
a relic of the Cold War -- is no longer operable. So this supposed  
solution, which seemed to work, after a fashion, for more than four  
decades, is now essentially out the window and we're in the market for  
another solution, which must be geared to this matured form of danger  
in which the weaponry can pop up anywhere.

That's a different riddle, but one faced way back in 1945 by the  
atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project, who made the first bomb.  
They grasped what was coming. That's why they immediately put together  
a proposal to ban nuclear weapons altogether -- the so-called  
Lilienthal-Acheson Plan.

It was all or nothing. They, of course, were just projecting, based on  
the realities of science and the physics of the weapon which they knew  
so well. Now, the world they feared is becoming a reality: North Korea  
is a nuclear power -- and so is disintegrating Pakistan.

As you point out in your new book, "The Seventh Decade," the Bush  
Doctrine has pushed us into a situation in which we can, strangely  
enough, see all this far more clearly.

That's exactly right. The Bush Doctrine had one virtue. As an imperial  
solution -- the United States will stop proliferation by military  
force, if need be, wherever it arises -- it was also an attempt at a  
universal solution. Unfortunately, it backfired horrendously. It's in  
a shambles. We waged a war in a country that didn't have nuclear  
weapons, meanwhile letting North Korea get them.

So once again, as at the end of the Cold War, we're without a workable  
policy for dealing with nuclear danger. But, today, for the very first  
time, we are goaded by events toward creating a policy that fits the  
essential nature of the danger. Just as that danger is universal  
because any country -- even a terrorist group -- can potentially get  
hold of the bomb, so we need a universal solution, which can only be  
what the atomic scientists said it was in 1945 -- to roll back, ban  
and abolish all nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapons technology.

Next page: It's always present and will always be present

<snip>

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Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
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