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NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, AUGTEMBER 200
THE ATOMIC BOMB
BY J. R. S.
There was a dark age in the minds of humans when
the nature of the universe was largely a mystery to people
Even educated people could be found to be uncertain about
what was known Many different theories of the nature of things
could equally command the minds of humans. Subtle scientific
theories were largely dismissed by the population as insignificant
or irrelevant.
During that time, on a day in August 1939, Alexander
Sachs brought Franklin D. Roosevelt a letter signed by Albert
Einstein, expressing his belief that an atomic bomb was possible
and that Adolf Hitler might likely already be working on it. It is
ironic that one of Roosevelt’s most famous sayings was “We
have nothing to fear but fear itself.” It was the fear of an atomic
bomb that created the bomb, and it is fitting that the Bomb then
became the embodiment and sum of all our fears.
It is easy for us to wonder if the Bomb at this moment
could have been left in the realm of the hypothetical; that we
might have left Pandora's box closed had we known that the
Axis powers were not developing it. I ask myself what I would
have done were I in Roosevelt's position, and am ashamed to
admit I couldn’t say for sure without the retrospection of history
to provide guidance. Oppenheimer certainly was horrified at what
he participated in, and Einstein was quoted as saying that if he
had only known (the course of his life) he would have been a
tailor.
But on two terrible August mornings in the sky above
Japan, in the blackest episode of 1945, the darkness that
enveloped the world’s consciousness like a fog was burned
away by a flash hotter than the surface of the Sun. The subtle
but powerful theories carefully gathered and secretly tested in
the laboratory were suddenly wielded with an awesome fury that
until that moment could have only been ascribed unto the hand
of God.
When what had happened in Japan became known,
there was in the minds of people around the world a single
thought about the Bomb: that “I don’t exactly understand how
it works, but it does and it is made by humans.” Before the
Bomb people on the whole ascribed more certainty in religious
and political ideologies than in the fickle theories of scientists.
Suddenly a new age was upon us where human beings now
held knowledge of the universe for certain through science.
This idea eclipsed all past philosophy in an instant with its power.
Before, ideas spread slowly, gaining acceptance gradually as
a function of social interaction. Sometimes it took centuries for
even sensible ideas to prevail. Now, suddenly, it was clear,
beyond all doubt, that it was the scientist who possessed certain
insight on the nature of the universe.
Later, during the Cold War, as these terrible devices
grew and proliferated in the hands of humans another realization
came to be: that the Hydrogen Bomb could destroy every life on
the Earth. The idea that the fate of the world lay in human hands
was effectively the end of humanity’s cognitive childhood; the
day we ceased to be children in our father’s garden. The stark
enlightenment that the fate of our world is in our human hands
speaks out that we as a species have reached a point that
demands our concertion of action on the course of our current
and future affairs, not only in regards to the Bomb but to our
entire action on the Earth. The universe is now known with more
intimate certainty than ever before, and the great irony of this
age is that it was not a constructive impulse of scientific curiosity
that brought us into the light but rather the fear and horror of
apocalypse that took the lives of tens of millions of people during
the World Wars of the 20th century.
If we are to endure, it will be from our ability to accept
this enlightenment and take up the burden of responsibility.
With the whole world in the balance, let our actions be guided
by these gentle hands of enlightenment and not by the arcane
vestiges of our barbarous past. Let us build a world that our
children can bless us for when they lay us in our graves to rest
and they take it as their inheritance.
DETERRENCE IS TERRORISM
The fear that another country had or was developing
an Atomic Bomb was the alleged reason why the USA built
the Bomb in the first place. After having built the Bomb it was
physically possible to have decided to keep it a secret and not
use it, but it was demonstrated unilaterally and asymmetrically
against a prostrate Japan. Arguably, this was to demonstrate
the possession and will to use the Bomb to engender fear in the
rest of the world, especially the Communist world by the most
belligerent act of international terrorism in history.
After Hiroshima, Stalin built his Bomb because he was
terrified by President Truman's actions When the USSR tested
its Bomb in 1949, England and France became terrified and
they tested their Bombs in 1952 and 1960, respectively. Nuclear
powers began to deploy nuclear weapons in allied countries,
but in the fall of 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis terrified the world.
Terrorized by these developments, and by the wars in Korea and
Indochina, China tested its Bomb in 1964
Around this time, the nuclear powers embarked on an
attempt to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but India,
terrified at the Chinese having a Bomb, tested their Bomb in
1974, and Israel secretly became a nuclear power, convincing
Pakistan to build their Bomb with the same terror that every other
power felt Now desperate to defend themselves from the threats
of the USA, the Iranians and North Koreans are (probably) build
ing their Bombs today.
Nuclear powers proliferated in order to deter attack from
other nuclear powers, and this deterrence convinced their non
nuclear adversaries to proliferate nuclear weapons and other
weapons of mass destruction The fear that deterrence seeks
to create in other countries is the same fear that drives them to
proliferate WMD in a self-perpetuating positive feedback loop
Nonproliferation, when spoken about by a nuclear power
such as the U.S., was never very credible to former colonies of
imperial powers. The currency of empire is easy victory through
the economy of effort of using overwhelming power and terror
to obtain political goals. Armies, navies and airforces are most
effective against poorly armed weak nations, not equal forces
Before nuclear weapons, it was chemical weapons, and before
I
JEAN CAILLON
them the machinegun versus the musket, the repeater rifle
versus spear and arrow. The British gassed Kurds in the 1920s
when they created the states of Turkey and Iraq. It is this econ
omy of force that permits victory: the British Empire was not the
result of luck in some fit of absentmindedness.
The deterrent value of WMD is neutralized when both
sides have them. Or more accurately put, deterrence is trans
formed into Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) where both
sides have, but dare not use, WMD. Both Allies and Axis
shadowed every major battle of World War 2 with chemical
weapons reserves, but refrained from using them for fear of
retaliation. Curiously, the Allies, concerned about the advantage
of DDT, censored all literature about Organophosphates, and
the Germans took this to imply that the USA had, as they had,
discovered Tabum. Tabum was the first nerve agent and it made
fosgene chlorine and mustard gas seem like children’s play
things in its ability to inflict casualties. Arguably, their fear that
we had developed Tabum as well, deterred them from using
what could have given them a profound tactical advantage. I
wonder what the Nazis would have done if they had known the
truth; would they have acted like the U S. did when we knew the
Japanese did not have the ability to respond?
In a world where many nations have become armed
with nuclear weapons, the economy of force enjoyed by the first
nuclear powers is lost. Worse is the fact that the proliferation
of nuclear weapons raises the likelihood that otherwise conven
tional small wars will explode into thermonuclear annihilation.
Imagine, if you will, that every general and field marshal in World
War 2 had ready access to tactical and strategic nuclear weap
ons and maybe some of them even in secret. There wouldn’t be
a single scorched radioactive stone left on top of another in any
city today, if that had been the case.
offensively. This thought that we could have our cake and eat
it too, that we could have both deterrence and disarmament,
was advanced by the world’s nuclear powers. The public intent
of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), signed by 183 non
nuclear nations and five nuclear powers, holds the signatories’
agreement to not build or deploy nuclear weapons in return for
the nuclear powers' promise to eliminate their existing offensive
nuclear weapons and to not develop new ones.
Without the reduction in the existing nuclear powers’
nuclear forces, the credibility of the treaty is lost. The hidden
intent of the NPT might be to prevent the loss of the advantage
of the nuclear military powers over non-nuclear neocolonies.
And this is the ultimate cause of the war in the Persian Gulf.
That is not to say the invasion of Iraq had anything to do with
anything other than its oil. It is just that the issue is so tightly
bound up with the subject of deterrence that it is the critical
issue.
For some reason the nuclear nations have failed entirely
to disarm their nuclear stockpiles, doing exactly the opposite,
with the U S. greatly in the lead with armaments of unimaginable
proportions. The 1995 extension of the NPT was not signed by
India and many other countries because of the failure of the
world’s nuclear powers to disarm and stop development of new
weapons, and in a way the proto-colonial attitude of the USA
drove India to testing five nuclear Bombs in 1998, and Pakistan
to respond in kind. The greatest action that has destabilized the
world, however, has to be the demonstration of unilateral power
politics by the invasion of Iraq.
The major reason why the four-day Operation Desert
Storm did not advance to Baghdad in 1991 was because the
U.S. feared the Iraqi forces had weaponized a strain of Anthrax,
for which ‘Coalition forces’ had no defense against and could not
guarantee less than 200,000 military and civilian deaths from a
single attack. It is unclear whether or not Saudi Arabia realized
this danger when it requested the Coalition provide enough
vaccine for the royal ruling family and for its armed forces,
but what is beyond credible dispute is that the USA, using
the settlement of the war and UN inspectors, made exquisitely
certain there were no weapons of mass destruction prior to
the subsequent re-invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The idea arose that, in case the better angels of our
natures do not prevail and we find ourselves back in war,
perhaps it would be best to limit the number and proliferation
of WMD to a level that might deter without being effective
The point was demonstrated to the rest of the world that
if you credibly possess WMD, the Americans will not invade you,
and if you don't, they will invade you. The value of deterrence
through armament with WMD over any other costs is clearly
demonstrated by the so-called “preemptive” war against Iraq.
If the value of nonproliferation to the non-nuclear nations was
neutralized by the inaction of the nuclear nations to disarm, it is
entirely lost when the actions of powerful nations demonstrate
that not proliferating extends an invitation to invasion. A pre
emptive war to encourage nonproliferation is like engaging
in prostitution to regain virginity, because invasion is what
deterrence seeks to prevent.
Preemption in history was the excuse used for the
majority of wars of aggression and cannot make any positive
contribution toward nonproliferation because it highlights that
deterrence is more effective than political assurances gained
from nonproliferation or disarmament. The entire process
of deterrence, even with conventional weapons, is to provide
security through producing the fear of attack in the mind of a
possible enemy. Preemption increases the determination to
obtain better deterrent and defensive forces. Nations will now
move mountains to obtain deterrence at any cost as swiftly and
secretly as possible because they feel it is necessary for their
security. Opposing this position will bear a premium of difficulty
because it will have to overcome the virtue of such a position
being true in fact.
The advocation that the possession of nuclear weapons
and other WMDs can produce in other nations the opposite
effect to what it produced in the U.S. is not a cognitive notion
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