Chomsky Warns Of Repeating Hiroshima
Noam Chomsky, MIT Institute Professor
August 17, 2005
The following opinion column is reprinted with permission from The New York
Times Syndicate.
This month's anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompts
only the most somber reflection and most fervent hope that the horror may
never be repeated.
In the subsequent 60 years, those bombings have haunted the world's
imagination but not so much as to curb the development and spread of
infinitely more lethal weapons of mass destruction.
A related concern, discussed in technical literature well before Sept. 11,
2001, is that nuclear weapons may sooner or later fall into the hands of
terrorist groups.
The recent explosions and casualties in London are yet another reminder of
how the cycle of attack and response could escalate, unpredictably, even to
a point horrifically worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
The world's reigning power accords itself the right to wage war at will,
under a doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense" that covers any contingency
it chooses.
The means of destruction are to be unlimited.
U.S. military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world
combined, while arms sales by 38 North American companies (one in Canada)
account for more than 60 percent of the world total (which has risen 25
percent since 2002).
There have been efforts to strengthen the thin thread on which survival
hangs. The most important is the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT),
which came into force in 1970. The regular five-year review conference of
the NPT took place at the United Nations in May.
The NPT has been facing collapse, primarily because of the failure of the
nuclear states to live up to their obligation under Article VI to pursue
"good faith"
efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. The United States has led the way in
refusal to abide by the Article VI obligations. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of
the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasizes that "reluctance by one
party to fulfill its obligations breeds reluctance in others."
President Jimmy Carter blasted the United States as "the major culprit in
this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from
proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders
not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted
plans to test and develop new weapons, including anti-ballistic missiles,
the earth-penetrating 'bunker buster' and perhaps some new 'small' bombs.
They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear
weapons against non-nuclear states."
The thread has almost snapped in the years since Hiroshima, repeatedly. The
best known case was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, "the most
dangerous moment in human history," as Arthur Schlesinger, historian and
former adviser to President John F. Kennedy, observed in October 2002 at a
retrospective conference in Havana.
The world "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear disaster," recalls Robert
McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, who also attended the retrospective.
In the May-June issue of the magazine Foreign Policy, he accompanies this
reminder with a renewed warning of "apocalypse soon."
McNamara regards "current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal,
militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous," creating "unacceptable
risks to other nations and to our own," both the risk of "accidental or
inadvertent nuclear launch," which is "unacceptably high," and of nuclear
attack by terrorists. McNamara endorses the judgment of William Perry,
President Bill Clinton's defense secretary, that "there is a greater than 50
percent probability of a nuclear strike on U.S. targets within a decade."
Similar judgments are commonly expressed by prominent strategic analysts. In
his book "Nuclear Terrorism,"
the Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison reports the
"consensus in the national security community" (of which he has been a part)
that a "dirty bomb" attack is "inevitable" and an attack with a nuclear
weapon highly likely, if fissionable materials--the essential
ingredient--are not retrieved and secured.
Allison reviews the partial success of efforts to do so since the early
1990s, under the initiatives of Sen. Sam Nunn and Sen. Richard Lugar, and
the setback to these programs from the first days of the Bush
administration, paralyzed by what Sen. Joseph Biden called "ideological
idiocy".
The Washington leadership has put aside
nonproliferation programs and devoted its energies and resources to driving
the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the
catastrophe it created in Iraq.
The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along
with jihadi terrorism.
A high-level review of the "war on terror" two years after the invasion
"focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists,
schooled in Iraq over the past couple of years," Susan B. Glasser reported
in The Washington Post.
"Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to
anticipate what one called 'the bleed out' of hundreds or thousands of
Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle
East and Western Europe. 'It's a new piece of a new equation,' a former
senior Bush administration official said. 'If you don't know who they are in
Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?'"
Peter Bergen, a U.S. terrorism specialist, says in The Boston Globe that
"the President is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism,
but this is a front we created."
Shortly after the London bombing, Chatham House, Britain's premier foreign
affairs institution, released a study drawing the obvious conclusion-denied
with outrage by the government--that "the U.K. is at particular risk because
it is the closest ally of the United States, has deployed armed forces in
the military campaigns to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and in
Iraq ... [and is] a pillion passenger" of American policy, sitting behind
the driver of the motorcycle.
The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it
is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity. While
speculation is pointless, reaction to the threat of another Hiroshima is
definitely not.
On the contrary, it is urgent, particularly in the United States, because of
Washington's primary role in accelerating the race to destruction by
extending its historically unique military dominance, and in the U.K., which
goes along with it as its closest ally.
Noam Chomsky is a linguistics professor at MIT. His most recent book is
"Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" (Henry Holt and
Co., 2003).
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