10/16/2001
In World War II, for fear of a bloody and sustained invasion with no assurance of success, we dropped a nuclear weapon on one of the most powerful nations in the world to force their surrender. That's the story, more or less. Probably it's a little uglier than that; we destroyed two cities, for one thing, and that's a much heavier weight of guilt to bear, if one might have sufficed. More damningly, it must be asked whether we used the new bomb chiefly because we newly possessed it and wanted to try it out. It was developed with Nazi Germany in mind; to keep them from achieving it first, and presumably to be used against them. But that enemy had already been vanquished when the new power came into our hands, and it seems all too convenient that we turned at once to use it against our only remaining enemy.
Did it save us from a terrible land war and another million dead soldiers? Probably. A fair trade? It's hard to say it was--we destroyed cities, two cities of civilians. Then again, we have our own to look after; the end of the war saved a great many Americans, and it's also hard to dispute that this is indeed the legitimate business of the American government. Anyway that's the story. We only learned of the lingering effects of radiation by watching them unfold in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so for better or for worse, our hands are clean of deliberately inflicting these new horrors on anyone in that instance.
When nuclear weapons became well known for horrible sicknesses and the as well as for huge blasts, their use became a political taboo, while their production became a global game of chicken. And that's the world in which most living people have grown up.
The underappreciated Ren & Stimpy summed up our position with respect to our nuclear arsenal at the end of probably their best episode, "Space Madness." Cadet Stimpy is set to the task of watching over the bright red History Eraser Button--to ensure that nobody ever pushes it. Temptation, in the person of a plaid-jacketed announcer, is too much for Stimpy, of course. But in classic Gary Larson style, the real joke is in the setup: the preposterous supposition that anybody would ever deliberately build a History Eraser Button for any reason at all. But this is precisely our world. The temptation too.
A few things have changed since the classic Cold War arms race. First, we no longer have a rival; we are undisputed and alone as the world's most powerful single force. Those nuclear weapons we still have cannot be hurled in desperation, our of need, at perilous enemies too great for us to confront in any other way; no enemies exist who would not be squashed handily by our conventional forces. It cannot be argued that we need nuclear weapons as weapons. And the madcap sophistry of doomsday weapons as deterrence breaks down in the face of terrorist enemies. For two reasons: first, nuclear weapons can only be used on large targets, and terrorists are small targets; and second, people who are already willing to die in their own attacks are scarcely likely to be deterred by the prospect of dying in yours.
The second change is the definition of nuclear weapons. Throughout the Cold War the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons was a very clear one. Lately it is much much less clear.
Two very different technoligies have blurred the line. One we know has been used already: depleted uranium rounds, and to a lesser extent, DU armor. The other we know has been quite ofhandedly considered for use by the American military within the last five years: the B61-11, or "bunker buster."
I want to be clear here: there are two kinds of bunker buster. One is nuclear and one, the GBU-28, is not--it's just a big old explosive in a hard shell. We know we have been dropping at least one of those two kinds in Afghanistan. There's really not much way of knowing which, for now. I don't mean to suggest that our government has already been dropping nuclear weapons and their fallout on the heads of pathetic Afghanis without telling us. I have no real idea whether they've been doing that. What I want to emphasize is that they could, and to suggest that they'd be perfectly happy to, and that if they did, they'd take their sweet time in telling us.
Here are the facts as I have them regarding depleted-uranium armaments: the military likes them because they're dense and heavy as hell, and for a couple other characteristics; and indeed it cannot be denied that DU rounds are top-notch for blowing stuff up. Meanwhile, the DU waste is toxic to a disputed extent; not because it's so wildly radioactive, actually, so much as because it's a heavy metal and poisons you if you inhale it, rather the same way lead might, if lead were floating around as a dust in the atmosphere. We used scads of DU in Iraq and some sources say incidences of cancer there have increased fivefold since that war. DU is also a front-running candidate for the cause of Gulf War Syndrome, which the Pentagon finally got round to acknowledging might exist after being hounded for years. A similar phenomenon is noted in Kosovo after our use of a lot of DU there.
A quick survey shows a sharply marked divide in opinions. Any website ending in .gov or .mil or associated with NATO or the UN insists that DU has been shown to be more or less harmless, as long as you don't hang out inside a vehicle that was gutted with DU rounds, and that a host of scientists agree with them. Any source not associated with these organizations will insist that the stuff is toxic as all hell. A handful of European governments are pulling their troops out of Kosovo because of our use of DU there.
In all reasonability, I can't say that I'm qualified to judge between these claims, and that talk about large numbers of scientists does give me pause. It would sound like any other disputed question we really can't answer--except for the universality of government associations with every party who says the stuff is safe. We cannot ignore the profit motive.
If you think I'm stretching here--they wouldn't lie so outright about a health risk, they'd know they couldn't get away with it, maybe--then think about the tobacco industry. Think about the heads of all the major tobacco producers lining up in a congressional hearing and perjuring themselves in front of all the world, claiming not to know of any adverse health effects associated with cigarettes, or of any addictive properties of nicotine. All the world knows what cigarettes are. Every one of us knows. And we know the executives of the corpulent outfits that roll them know it, too. And we know why they'd want to pretend otherwise. Nobody needs to ask.
Or, if you like, think of Bill Clinton, caught in the act of lying about his stupid affair, turning from denial to mortification the moment he realized he couldn't bluff through. Clear as a bell through the whole useless circus of the impeachment was the fact that Bill Clinton would have said absolutely anything he thought he had to, if it would keep him in power as long as possible. That fact in itself is easily the creepiest thing about his otherwise remarkably skillful and relatively benevolent presidency.
Or--I'm trying to reach everybody here--think of recreational murderer Pope Alexander VI, probably the single most depraved Pope of a long long line of astoundingly vile Popes, presiding over the emergency marriage of his daughter, Lucrezia. There he stood and pronounced Lucrezia, round as a pear with a child who might as easily have been her father's or her brother's as her lover's, a virgin--as the church rang with the howling laughter of the crowd.
These are all true stories and that matters. Choose the one that works for you but for me the tobacco barons are the most sinister. If ever there was proof on camera that people will lie to protect a convenient source of revenue, and that to the people in that most temptable position, the most morally distinct of mitigating considerations are just not compelling enough to match the allure of that profit, that was it. They will say anything.
So. There's Depleted Uranium. Is that a nuclear weapon? Well, no, it's a nuclear byproduct used as a weapon. It may or may not be radiation used as a weapon, and that may or may not be deliberate. Not the easy question it used to be.
Slightly less thorny is the question of the B61-11. President Bush halted development of nuclear weapons in 1989. Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996. Virtually immediately, we broke that agreement, putting together the B61-11, dismissing this as merely putting a new casing together for an old warhead--as if doing this could not safely be assumed to fall under the the category of weapons development.
The idea of the B61-11 is to fall from a height in its spiffy strengthened casing and burrow under ground--to a depth estimated anywhere from ten to one hundred feet, depending who's talking--and explode safely there, obliterating any bunker that might be buried there without releasing any radiation aboveground. Except that by virtually all accounts, the bomb really doesn't go all that deep, and anyway a few feet of dirt cannot contain an explosion whose smallest estimated power is 5 kilotons (one-third the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima). It cracks the bunker, we don't doubt that--but it also kicks tons upon tons of freshly irradiated soil into the atmosphere.
This, surely, is a nuclear weapon, beyond dispute. We have it. We have plenty of nuclear weapons, of course. But this one has already been considered for use, in the late 90s, against Libya and against Iraq--in a chillingly offhand way that seems to have gone unnoticed by anyone at all except the government of Russia.
There are two critical windshifts here. One, of course, is the casual willingness of our military to nuke other nations now that the big bear isn't poised across the Bering to match us, unconditionally, blow for blow. We've had these toys for so long without being allowed to play with them... that temptation will never leave us as long as we have them, and it's a critically important concern.
The other, though, is the target. Libya and Afghanistan are no rival powers, so menacing that we are forced to unleash our direst attack. This is not Japan. Afghanistan is a miserable rubbleyard full of shrapnel, populated by the unwilling, starving subjects of a bloodthirsty regime. When did it happen that the planet's most destructive arms became tools for hunting small game? Is that the way they're thinking, or do they just regard any nation with whom we're currently displeased as an acceptable test range for whatever we feel the need to try out? Nobody thinks Libya would beat the US in a conventional war. No single nation on Earth would. So why talk of beating them back with our most horrible power?
Again, I have no real idea whether we have even considered the use of the B61-11 in this current bombardment (calling it a war badly exaggerates the Afghani ability to fight us at all). But I do know that a government statement to the contrary will have no bearing on the truth.
One great step worse than the habitual lying of our government is our acceptance of it. If we do begin to use the B61-11, or if it turns out we already have, it will not remain secret forever--the Islamic world will know immediately, and foreign press will, with luck, make enough of a fuss about it that the question will have to be asked here in the US. And here's what will happen: the ex-president's son will admit the use of the bomb, but he'll bury it in a long sentence about its judicious use, carefully naming other weapons that were also used. Above all, he will harp on the unsupported assertions that its use was decided with great care, that he and his generals remain convinced that the decision was a good one, and that using the bomb has been very successful. On and on. He will spend the most possible time saying these meaningless things and de-emphasize the admission of the use of nuclear weapons on a basically helpless country as far as he can, because he believes he knows better than we do and that he should be allowed to do as he sees fit.
And we'll swallow it. We'll look around nervously, trying to see what other people will do, and we'll think to ourselves that something doesn't seem right about this, but that after all the man in the president's office knows more about bombs than we do, and in the end we'll realize we have no idea what we can do about it anyway--and we'll let it go.
Think for a minute about the fundamentally undemocratic basis on which nuclear politics rest. A group of nations who attained the bomb quickly after its invention were declared--by themselves, naturally--to be the security council, the nuclear nations. Other nations are not allowed to have the big gun--except that when they manage to develop it anyway, as India and Pakistan have, and Korea before them, it is clear that nothing can be done about it. The idea, of course, is that membership in this higher caste of nations denotes responsibility; we must guard against the aquisition of nukes by "rogue states" who might not use them as wisely as the responsible nations do.
We are the prototypical responsible nation. We take it upon ourselves to chastise such nations as we deem irresponsible. We trash other nations regularly when they're in our way or we think maybe they might be. We back regimes that have been sanctioned by the UN. When we bother signing global treaties at all, we cheerfully ignore them (unless they pertain to giving our corporations maximum power over other people's governments, in which case we are their chief author and we keep them as secret as we possibly can). We are answerable to no one, and most of our citizens--and all of our politicians, seemingly--believe that this is the natural order of things. It is our place to be strongest. It is our place to judge the world around us. It is our place to be unassailable and above reproach, while it is the place of lesser nations to give us their money.
We are the rogue state. We have been for decades. Now we are a rogue state under an unelected leader who seems personally dedicated to every last one of our most destructive policies. There are two ways to change that: we can root out our own corruption from the inside, or we can keep barreling forward until a sufficiently powerful group of nations finally forms a leaguer against us. What we cannot do is preserve things as they are--or as they were before the attack. One way or another we will be made to amend our conduct eventually.