So North Korea is nuclear - so what?

1. Bush’s Nuclear Apocalypse -- by Chris Hedges

The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missile destroyer USS Mason and the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News, is, as I write, making its way to the Straits of Hormuz off Iran. The ships will be in place to strike Iran by the end of the month. It may be a bluff. It may be a feint. It may be a simple show of American power. But I doubt it.

War with Iran—a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East—is probable by the end of the Bush administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks. This administration, claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especially the Middle East, defined three states at the start of its reign as “the Axis of Evil.” They were Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran. Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing about Central America. He knows nothing about the Middle East. He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.

These men advocate a doctrine of permanent war, a doctrine which, as William R. Polk points out, is a slight corruption of Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution. These two revolutionary doctrines serve the same function, to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to silence domestic critics who challenge leaders in a time of national crisis. It works. The citizens of the United States, slowly being stripped of their civil liberties, are being herded sheep-like, once again, over a cliff.

But this war will be different. It will be catastrophic. It will usher in the apocalyptic nightmares spun out in the dark, fantastic visions of the Christian right. And there are those around the president who see this vision as preordained by God; indeed, the president himself may hold such a vision.

The hypocrisy of this vaunted moral crusade is not lost on those in the Middle East. Iran actually signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has violated a codicil of that treaty written by European foreign ministers, but this codicil was never ratified by the Iranian parliament. I do not dispute Iran’s intentions to acquire nuclear weapons nor do I minimize the danger should it acquire them in the estimated five to 10 years. But contrast Iran with Pakistan, India and Israel. These three countries refused to sign the treaty and developed nuclear weapons programs in secret. Israel now has an estimated 400 to 600 nuclear weapons. The word “Dimona,” the name of the city where the nuclear facilities are located in Israel, is shorthand in the Muslim world for the deadly Israeli threat to Muslims’ existence. What lessons did the Iranians learn from our Israeli, Pakistani and Indian allies?

Given that we are actively engaged in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regime by recruiting tribal groups and ethnic minorities inside Iran to rebel, given that we use apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what must be done to the Iranian regime, given that other countries in the Middle East such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are making noises about developing a nuclear capacity, and given that, with the touch of a button Israel could obliterate Iran, what do we expect from the Iranians? On top of this, the Iranian regime grasps that the doctrine of permanent war entails making “preemptive” and unprovoked strikes.

Those in Washington who advocate this war, knowing as little about the limitations and chaos of war as they do about the Middle East, believe they can hit about 1,000 sites inside Iran to wipe out nuclear production and cripple the 850,000-man Iranian army. The disaster in southern Lebanon, where the Israeli air campaign not only failed to break Hezbollah but united most Lebanese behind the militant group, is dismissed. These ideologues, after all, do not live in a reality-based universe. The massive Israeli bombing of Lebanon failed to pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when we begin to pound a country of 70 million people? As retired General Wesley K. Clark and others have pointed out, once you begin an air campaign it is only a matter of time before you have to put troops on the ground or accept defeat, as the Israelis had to do in Lebanon. And if we begin dropping bunker busters, cruise missiles and iron fragmentation bombs on Iran this is the choice that must be faced—either sending American forces into Iran to fight a protracted and futile guerrilla war or walking away in humiliation.

“As a people we are enormously forgetful,” Dr. Polk, one of the country’s leading scholars on the Middle East, told an Oct. 13 gathering of the Foreign Policy Association in New York. “We should have learned from history that foreign powers can’t win guerrilla wars. The British learned this from our ancestors in the American Revolution and re-learned it in Ireland. Napoleon learned it in Spain. The Germans learned it in Yugoslavia. We should have learned it in Vietnam and the Russians learned it in Afghanistan and are learning it all over again in Chechnya and we are learning it, of course, in Iraq. Guerrilla wars are almost unwinnable. As a people we are also very vain. Our way of life is the only way. We should have learned that the rich and powerful can’t always succeed against the poor and less powerful.”

An attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with Silkworm missile attacks by Iran on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a huge, global depression. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey will turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We will see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and the widespread sabotage of oil production in the Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for American troops as Shiites and Sunnis, for the first time, unite against their foreign occupiers.

The country, however, that will pay the biggest price will be Israel. And the sad irony is that those planning this war think of themselves as allies of the Jewish state. A conflagration of this magnitude could see Israel drawn back in Lebanon and sucked into a regional war, one that would over time spell the final chapter in the Zionist experiment in the Middle East. The Israelis aptly call their nuclear program “the Samson option.” The Biblical Samson ripped down the pillars of the temple and killed everyone around him, along with himself.

If you are sure you will be raptured into heaven, your clothes left behind with the nonbelievers, then this news should cheer you up. If you are rational, however, these may be some of the last few weeks or months in which to enjoy what is left of our beleaguered, dying republic and way of life.

(Chris Hedges is the author of the bestselling and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and What Every Person Should Know about War . His newest book, Losing Moses on the Freeway will be published in June 2005 by Free Press.)


2. Welcome to the Nuclear Club -- by Norman Solomon

Moments after hearing about North Korea's nuclear test, I thought of Albert Einstein's statement that "there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world."

During the six decades since Einstein spoke, experience has shown that such understanding and insistence cannot be filtered through the grid of hypocrisy. Nuclear weapons can't be controlled by saying, in effect, "Do as we say, not as we do." By developing their own nuclear weaponry, one nation after another has replied to the nuclear-armed states: Whatever you say, we'll do as you've done.

In early summer, with some fanfare, officials in Washington announced the dismantling of the last W56 nuclear warhead -- a 1.2 megaton model from the 1960s. Self-congratulation was in the air, as a statement hailed "our firm commitment to reducing the size of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile to the lowest levels necessary for national security needs." That's the kind of soothing PR that we've been getting ever since the nuclear age began.

Right now, the U.S. government has upwards of 10,000 nuclear bombs and warheads in its arsenal. And -- as the Washington Post uncritically reported the same week as the announcement about the end of the W56 warhead -- Congress and the White House are resolutely moving ahead with plans for "a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons" under the rubric of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program: "The nation's two nuclear weapons design centers, the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, are competing to design the first RRW.... A second RRW design competition may provide an opportunity to the losing lab."

For more than 50 years, Washington has preached the global virtues of "peaceful" nuclear power reactors -- while denying their huge inherent dangers and their crucial role in proliferating nuclear weaponry. The denial meant that people and the environment would suffer all along the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to nuclear waste; and that the 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island would be followed by the continuing horrors of Chernobyl.

In recent decades, the denial has also spread nuclear weapons across the planet. Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea can thank the apostles of the nuclear-power gospel -- and the companion profiteers of nuclear exports -- for the technological pipeline that has funneled the capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

President Dwight Eisenhower's delusional and deluding speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Dec. 8, 1953, now has a macabre echo: "The United States pledges before you -- and therefore before the world -- its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma -- to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life."

Running parallel to the mendacious career of the "peaceful atom," U.S. foreign policy has hit new lows during the last several years. The invasion of Iraq, on the pretext of non-existent WMDs, sent a powerful message. If the U.S. government was inclined to launch an attack before a country had the capability to generate a mushroom cloud, then the country would be protected from such attack by developing nuclear weapons as soon as possible.

Coupled with the contempt for genuine diplomacy that the Bush administration has repeatedly shown, Washington's eagerness to use military might has fueled the dangers of a nuclear-weapons standoff with North Korea. Two of the sacred axioms of the Bush regime -- secrecy and violence -- cannot solve this problem and in fact can only make it worse. Einstein was correct; with nuclear weapons, "there is no secret and there is no defense."

As for "the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world" -- that will need to come from us. Starting now.

Rest assured that while President Bush was at a podium in the White House on Monday denouncing the North Korean nuclear test as a "provocative act," Karl Rove was hard at work to fine-tune plans for a rhetorical onslaught linking this crisis to the "war on terror." Bush was already laying the groundwork for such an effort as he spoke -- warning of "a grave threat to the United States" if North Korea gives nuclear-related technology to "any state or non-state actor."

For the next four weeks, the Bush administration will do its best to exploit the North Korean nuclear test to stave off a loss of the Republican majority in Congress. We should not allow those efforts to obscure how Bush's reckless record has heightened the nuclear dangers for everyone.

(The paperback edition of Norman Solomon's latest book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death , was published this summer. For information, go to: www.warmadeeasy.com)


3. Mutually Assured Disruption – by DAVID FRUM

THE North Korean nuclear test — if that indeed is what it was — signals the catastrophic collapse of a dozen years of American policy. Over that period, two of the world’s most dangerous regimes, Pakistan and North Korea, have developed nuclear weapons and the missiles to launch them. Iran, arguably the most dangerous of them all, will surely follow, unless some dramatic action is soon taken.

It is, alas, an iron law of modern diplomacy that the failure of any diplomatic process only proves the need for more of the process that has just failed. Thus those who have long supported negotiating with North Korea are now calling for the Bush administration to begin direct talks with the Kim Jong-il regime. Sorry, but all this would accomplish would be to reward an actual proliferator in order to preserve the illusion that the world still has a meaningful nonproliferation regime.

Some even suggest, in worried tones, that the North Korean test might provoke Japan to go nuclear, as if the worst possible consequence of nuclear weapons in the hands of one of America’s direst enemies would be the acquisition of nuclear weapons by one of America’s best friends.

A new approach is needed. America has three key strategic goals in the wake of the North Korean nuclear test. The first is to enhance the security of those American allies most directly threatened by North Korean nuclear weapons: Japan and South Korea.

The second is to exact a price from North Korea for its nuclear program severe enough to frighten Iran and any other rogue regimes considering following the North Korean path.

The last is to punish China. North Korea could not have completed its bomb if China, which provides the country an immense amount of food and energy aid, had strongly opposed it. Apparently, Beijing sees some potential gain in the uncertainty that North Korea’s status brings. If China can engage in such conduct cost-free, what will deter Russia from aiding the Iranian nuclear program, or Pakistan someday aiding a Saudi or Egyptian one?

To meet these three goals, the United States should adopt four swift policy responses:

• Step up the development and deployment of existing missile defense systems.

The United States has already fielded 11 missile interceptors, nine in Alaska and two in California. The Navy has designed ship-based interceptors as well. As we well know, they are not perfect — but they are something.

Until now this lack of perfection has been allowed to block full deployment of the technology. But missile defenses do not need to be perfect to complicate any aggressive action by a comparatively weak power like North Korea against the United States or its allies.

And deploying a missile defense of growing effectiveness also helps achieve another goal — it would indirectly punish China by corroding the power of the missiles China uses to intimidate Taiwan.

• End humanitarian aid to North Korea and pressure South Korea to do the same.

Since 1995, the United States has provided more than two million tons of food aid to North Korea, plus considerable energy assistance. Officially, Washington says it has “delinked” its humanitarian aid from strategic concerns. Many United States officials believe that continuing this aid will sustain hopes for a better American-North Korean relationship in the future. Yet if the United States continues to send such aid even after an illicit nuclear test, North Korean leaders may well conclude that their aggressive actions have won them almost absolute impunity.

An end to humanitarian aid would not only exact a considerable direct price from North Korea, but it would also hurt China. Chinese leaders often justify their refusal to pressure North Korea by citing the risk of an economic collapse that would send millions of refugees northward into China. We could call that bluff: if a North Korean economic collapse is a thing China fears, why should the United States and South Korea shoulder the cost of helping to avert it? Let China pay the full cost of underwriting its aggressive client state.

• Invite Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore to join NATO — and even invite Taiwan to send observers to NATO meetings.

Perhaps North Korea and China imagine that the nuclear test has tilted the strategic balance in the Pacific in their favors. Now would be a good time to disabuse each of them of any such illusion. We need a tighter and stronger security arrangement in the Pacific region, one from which rogue states and those who support them are pointedly excluded. The NATO allies have agreed to expand the organization well beyond Western Europe; now we need to persuade them to make it global.

• Encourage Japan to renounce the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent.

World War II ended long ago, and it’s time to put an end to the silly pretense that today’s democratic Japan owes a burden of guilt to today’s rising China. A nuclear Japan is the thing China and North Korea dread most (after, perhaps, a nuclear South Korea or Taiwan).

Not only would the nuclearization of Japan be a punishment of China and North Korea, but it would go far to meet our goal of dissuading Iran — it would show Tehran that the United States and its friends will aggressively seek to correct any attempt by rogue states to unsettle any regional nuclear balance. The analogue for Iran, of course, would be the threat of American aid to improve Israel’s capacity to hit targets with nuclear weapons.

Countries like North Korea and Iran seek nuclear weapons because they imagine that those weapons will enhance their security and power. The way to contain them is to convince them otherwise. When nonproliferation can be prevented by negotiation, that is always preferred. But when negotiation fails, as it has failed in North Korea and is failing in Iran, rogue regimes must be made to suffer for their dangerous nuclear ambitions.

(David Frum, a speechwriter for President Bush from 2001 to 2002, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the co-author of “An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror.”)


4. All Nine Nuclear Powers Are Violating Non-Proliferation Treaty -- by Scott Galindez

As North Korea becomes the eighth confirmed nuclear power (Israel is not confirmed but considered the ninth) some of the blame has to go to the original five nuclear powers. When the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty went into effect in 1970, the five countries who had nuclear bombs - the US, France, China, Great Britain, and the USSR - agreed to work to reduce and eventually eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

Now, 36 years later, no disarmament talks are taking place between those countries. North Korea has been a "threshold" country since the late 80s. The fall of the Soviet Union eliminated shared security arrangements and prompted North Korea to aggressively pursue a nuclear weapon.

The Clinton administration, recognizing the threat, entered into an agreement with North Korea to provide reactors for peaceful use in exchange for an end to the weapons program. In 2003, North Korea announced they were leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty and reconstituting its weapons program, citing US failure to deliver the reactors.

North Korea's joining the list of nations with nuclear weapons is a sad day for our world. As was the day that the United States became the first nuclear power, and the Soviet Union the second, etc.… As long as one country possesses the ability to annihilate another it is only natural for those without that power to seek it.

In the early 90s, during the lead-up to the extension of the treaty, the US and other nuclear powers agreed to stop testing nuclear weapons. It was widely believed that without that step many other "threshold" nations would not have remained in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has been a long time since the original five nuclear powers have made any progress in negotiating a reduction in their arsenals; in fact the Bush administration is building new lower-yield nukes with conventional uses that could spur a new arms race.

If all of the nuclear powers that are condemning North Korea are serious about stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, perhaps they should read and come into compliance with the following section of the treaty they first signed in 1970 and extended in 1995:
Article VI Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

It should also be noted that it is possible for countries to leave the nuclear club. North Korea would have been the 10th country if South Africa hadn't abolished their nuclear weapons.

Iran May Not Be Next

In 2003, during his winning presidential campaign in Brazil, candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva criticized the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty as unfair. "If someone asks me to disarm and keep a slingshot while he comes at me with a cannon, what good does that do?" da Silva asked in a speech. He later said Brazil has no intention to develop nuclear arms. That is a good thing; I support non-proliferation, but the sentiment that da Silva expressed will continue to grow as more and more nations feel they are being conned by the nuclear powers.

Let us hope that North Korea is the last to build the bomb, but let's also hope that one day North Korea, France, Great Britain, Israel, Pakistan, India, Russia, China, and the United States dismantle the bombs they have and eliminate the threat of nuclear annihilation.

(Scott Galindez is the Managing Editor of Truthout.)