Yes, who?

Giving Up Those Weapons: After Libya, Who Is Next?
Michael Gordon for the New York Times

Washington, Dec. 31 - Undoing a weapons program is one of the rarest of decisions for an absolute leader.

After South Africa's apartheid government was replaced by black majority rule, South Africa astonished the world by disclosing that it had developed six nuclear weapons and then allowing the United Nations nuclear inspections agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to disarm it. That decision, in effect, was the result of a naturally occurring "regime change." ...

But the larger issue is whether North Korea and Iran can be similarly disarmed and, if so, how best to go about it.

How's this for an even larger issue: Instead of focusing on nations in the Middle East whose nuclear weapons program was "moribund" (Iraq) or years away from any significant development (Libya) or just reaching the point of suspicion (Iran), how about we pay attention to the one nation in the region that already has nuclear weapons?

That nation, of course, is Israel, whose 200-400 nukes makes it the world's fifth largest nuclear power, behind the US, Russia, France, and China, and ahead of the UK. (In a previous post, I said Israel was the sixth-largest such power. That was incorrect.)

A first step would be to stop allowing Israel to get away with denying the fact, as it continues to do. An illustration of that pattern of denial was described in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on December 26:

This week, setting off a debate that proved tempestuous even by the Knesset's grand-opera standards, a senior ultra-Orthodox deputy was heard to say "The state of Israel should dismantle its nuclear weaponry like Libya is doing, and Israel will have to depend on Ha-shem [literally "the Name," signifying the Almighty]." ...

But the greater roar came from another quarter - the fact that the issue had been mentioned at all.

Just as the United Tora Judaism legislator, Meir Porush, refrained from using the explicit Hebrew name for God, Israeli officials have for more than three decades scrupulously avoided using the words "Israel's nuclear weaponry," instead persuing a policy of what has been called constructive ambiguity.

That evasion should no longer be tolerated. Nor should the silence about the rest of the so-called "unconventional" weapons continue. Haaretz goes on to quote a column by Peter Preston in the Guardian.

"And over in the other WMD basket, nobody much dissents when a report by the office of technology assessment for the US Congress concludes that Israel has 'undeclared offensive chemical warfare capabilities' and is 'generally reported as having an undeclared offensive biological warfare programme'. Bombs, missiles, delivery systems, gases, germs? Tel Aviv has the lot."

Granted, the US has a type of consistency in this: Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are all acceptable so long as they're in the hands of our friends. Thus, Israel gets the same treatment as Saddam Hussein did in the 1980s: some public tut-tutting, some private reassurances, and lots of opportunities to buy. But "consistent," while implying neither "logical" nor "moral," can greatly overlap "foolish" as it delays justice and does more to maintain insecurity than to resolve it.

It's time to put a stop to it. Now.

But even beyond that, there's the largest issue of all: How can we be disarmed? We celebrate ourselves as the only standing superpower while we blunder and bluster around the world, demanding other nations turn themselves into combinations of Oscar Arias and Mohandas Gandhi while we recast ourselves as a fusion of Curtis LeMay and Ares.

We are the world's largest possessor of weapons of mass destruction - nuclear weapons - and have made clear our intent to build "better" ones. "Bunker busters," designed to destroy underground targets and originally intended for use against the USSR, are morphing into "mini-nukes" for use against chemical/biological weapons sites (as well as enemy soldiers in the field). This first newly-designed nuclear weapon since 1988 would require the first nuclear tests since 1992. (A more technical description of these weapons and possible effects can be found in the November 2003 issue of Physics Today, linked here.) The Pentagon wants to build a new facility to produce 500 plutonium pits (the shells of plutonium that are the triggers in nuclear weapons) a year. The "Star Wars" missile defense is still alive even though, like the old bunker busters, the enemy against which it was designed is no longer thought a threat. All in all, as the Defense Monitor (published by the admirable Center for Defense Information) says in its April-May, 2003 issue,

[t]he administration of President George W. Bush is requesting $399.1 billion for the military in fiscal year 2004 ($379.9 billion for the Defense Department and $19.3 billion for the nuclear weapons functions of the Department of Energy). This is $16.9 billion above current levels, an increase of 4.4 percent.

According to Pentagon projections, the defense budget will grow to $503 billion in fiscal year 2009. In all, the administration plans to spend $2.7 TRILLION on the military over the next six years.

This is a period of yearly deficits in the multiple hundreds of billions of dollars. But deficits be damned, we have an empire to conquer. We have resources to dominate - theirs. And we have an economy to destroy - ours.

This is insane. Madness. Morally warped, logically vapid, economically idiotic. I say it again: It's time to put a stop to it. Now.