Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
25, 2003
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
Recent
Stories
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
25, 2003
The Threat is Not
Gone
The
Second Nuclear Age
By DAVID KRIEGER
"The world has entered a new nuclear
age, a second nuclear age. The danger is rising that nuclear
weapons will be used against the United States. Just as bad,
the danger is rising that the United States will use nuclear
weapons against others...."
Jonathan Schell
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup
of the Soviet Union, many Americans gave a deep sigh of relief
and pronounced the nuclear threat at an end. It was a heady time.
I can remember being asked, "What will the Nuclear Age Peace
Foundation do now that the nuclear threat is gone?" My response
was that the nuclear threat was still with us despite these momentous
changes in the geopolitical landscape. It was far too soon to
pronounce the Nuclear Age dead.
In retrospect, from a vantage point of
more than 12 years after these tectonic shifts in geopolitics,
we can see that the Nuclear Age, with new and growing dangers,
is still with us. The first half-century of the Nuclear Age was
marked by a mad arms race between the United States and the former
Soviet Union that resulted in the development and deployment
of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons capable of destroying
civilization and most life on Earth.
While the nuclear standoff between the
US and former USSR is no longer the extraordinary danger it was,
new nuclear dangers have arisen that have led many astute observers
to the conclusion that we have entered a second Nuclear Age.
Among these new dangers are:
* the nuclear standoff between nuclear-armed
rivals India and Pakistan, two countries that have more than
a fifty-year history of warfare and serious tensions;
* the partial breakdown of command and
control systems that protect nuclear weapons and weapons-grade
nuclear materials in the former Soviet countries, giving rise
to the increased possibility that these weapons and materials
could fall into the hands of other countries and terrorist organizations;
* the pursuit of nuclear weapons programs
and the development of nuclear arsenals by countries, such as
North Korea and Iran, that feel threatened by the Bush administration's
policy of preemptive war;
* the impetus that Israel's nuclear arsenal
gives to other countries in the Middle East to develop their
own nuclear arsenals;
* the provocative policies of the Bush
administration to pursue smaller, more usable nuclear weapons
and those with a specific use in warfare such as the so-called
"bunker busters," blurring the distinction between
conventional and nuclear arms; and
* the possibility that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, which has already lost its first member, North Korea,
could fall apart due to the failure of the nuclear weapons states
to fulfill their obligations under Article VI of the Treaty to
engage in good faith efforts to achieve nuclear disarmament.
The United States, as the world's sole
surviving superpower, has had the opportunity to lead the world
toward a nuclear weapons free future. It is an opportunity that
our country has largely rejected, and has done so at its own
peril. Political leaders in the United States have yet to grasp
that nuclear weapons make us less secure rather than more so,
and their policies have reflected this failure to comprehend
the dangers of the second Nuclear Age.
In the year 2000, the parties to the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including the United States,
agreed to 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament. These included
"[a]n unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon states
to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals,"
along with specific steps such as ratification and entry into
force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), preserving
and strengthening the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, and
applying the principle of irreversibility to nuclear disarmament.
In each of these areas the United States,
under the Bush administration, has led in the opposite direction.
The administration's policies have sent a message to the world
that the world's strongest military power finds nuclear weapons
useful for its national security and plans to maintain its nuclear
arsenal for the indefinite future. The Bush administration has
opposed ratification of the CTBT and has withdrawn from the ABM
Treaty. Its approach to nuclear disarmament has been to employ
maximum flexibility and make reductions fully reversible.
The US pact with Russia, the Strategic
Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), signed by Presidents Bush
and Putin in May 2002, calls for reductions in deployed strategic
nuclear weapons to between 1,700 and 2,200 weapons on each side
by the year 2012. The treaty has no timetable other than the
final date to achieve these reductions, and there is no requirement
to make these reductions irreversible. The Bush administration
has already announced that it plans to put the weapons it takes
off active deployment status into storage ready for redeployment
on short notice. The Russians are likely to follow suit, creating
more opportunity for the stored nuclear weapons in both countries
to fall into the hands of terrorists. In the meantime, the US
and Russia are each maintaining over 2,000 nuclear weapons on
hair-trigger alert, subject to being launched accidentally.
In addition, the Bush administration
pursued an illegal preventive war against Iraq because of its
purported, but never found, weapons of mass destruction. This
action sent a message to North Korea, Iran and other states that
if they want to be more secure from US attack, they had better
develop nuclear forces to deter the US.
North Korea has repeatedly made a simple
request of the US. They have asked for security assurances from
the US that they will not be attacked. This is not unreasonable
considering that the Korean War has never officially ended, that
the US maintains some 40,000 troops near the Demilitarized Zone
that separates the two Koreas, that the US keeps nuclear-armed
submarines in the waters off the Korean Peninsula, and that the
Bush administration has pursued a doctrine of preemption. In
return for a Non-Aggression Pact from the US, the North Koreans
have indicated that they would give up their nuclear weapons
program and rejoin the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It would be a great shame if Americans
only awakened to the dangers of the second Nuclear Age with the
detonation of one or more nuclear weapons somewhere in the world.
Given the increased threats associated with terrorism and the
dangers that nuclear weapons or bomb-grade nuclear materials
could fall into the hands of terrorists, it is not beyond the
realm of possibility that the next detonation of a nuclear weapon
or other weapon of mass destruction could take place in a city
in the United States.
It is of critical importance that Americans
be made aware of these dangers and reverse our policies before
we are confronted by such tragedy. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
has set forth a series of needed steps that have been widely
endorsed by prominent leaders, including 38 Nobel Laureates,
in its Appeal to End the Nuclear Weapons Threat to Humanity and
All Life. These steps are de-alerting all nuclear weapons, reaffirming
commitments to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty, commencing good faith negotiations on a treaty
to eliminate all nuclear weapons, declaring a policy of No First
Use of nuclear weapons and reallocating resources from nuclear
arsenals to improving human health, education and welfare throughout
the world.
Our challenge is to translate this program
into action. It will require a sea change in the thinking of
US political leaders. This cannot happen without a grassroots
movement from below, that is, from ordinary citizens, who hold
the highest office in the land. The starting point is the recognition
that the Nuclear Age did not end with the fall of the Berlin
Wall, and that we are now living in the second Nuclear Age. We
ask for your support in this fight for the future of humanity
and all life on our planet.
David Krieger
is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the editor
of Hope in a Dark Time (Capra Press, 2003), and author of Choose
Hope, Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age (Middleway
Press, 2002).
He can be contacted at: dkrieger@napf.org.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the
Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|