by CKR
My first reaction to Seymour Hersh’s latest article was something like shock and awe. Then I put it away for a while, breathed deeply, and went back to it.
The military is always working on war plans. That’s their job. In this context, their working on war plans for Iraq is no surprise. But Hersh knows this, and he says that activity has ratcheted up, with heated discussions about the possible use of nuclear weapons coming from the civilian side and suggestions of resignations on the military side if that option is pressed. This military has grown up on the idea that the United States would not be the first to use nuclear weapons, and they feel strongly about it.
Hersh’s sources are all anonymous. Unfortunately, this limits my ability to guess whether they know what they’re talking about. The talk about air strikes against Iran has been around for a while, occasionally nuclearly embellished. It’s been easy to write it off as saber-rattling, but a source I didn’t bookmark noted that serious diplomatic saber-rattling would be quietly conveyed to the Iranians via the back door, not published in the newspapers. So we can speculate that the administration is inept or that people in the know are worried about another bold stroke by the geniuses who brought us the Iraq war. Joe Cirincione, whose opinion I respect, sees a pattern.
Iran is at least three years away from having nuclear weapons, maybe as much as ten. Paul and Jeffrey have written and linked well about this, and there’s only a little that I can add. Three years allows time for negotiations. We can wonder why there seems to be such a rush to military action; we may note the imminence of an election in the United States along with continuing unhappy news for the President. Hersh also refers, in an interview, to President Bush’s “messianic” ambitions, which have been noted by others as well. It’s legitimate to question how far this “messianism” goes, but I’ll leave that for another post.
What most worries me is the willingness of some of the administration’s civilians and associated politicians to use nuclear weapons. To use nuclear weapons before anyone else does, against a nation that doesn’t have nuclear weapons. Hersh would have done us a service by publishing their names, although perhaps his sources weren’t willing to go that far. Meteor Blades speculates: Stephen Cambone, Linton Brooks, Steven Hadley, J.D. Crouch, James Woolsey.
There has been talk about using nuclear weapons to show other countries they’d better kowtow to the United States. (Didn’t bookmark that either; will try to find a link.) This is of a piece with the comments from the Iraq war that every now and then, the United States has to slam a small country against a wall. Seems to me that the United States both has a big enough military to make such points obvious and is doing badly enough in Iraq that it’s been ineffective in making this point.
I keep wondering how such a casual attitude toward nuclear weapons comes about. Some of us grew up terrified of the air-raid drills and the pictures of devastation in books and films like On the Beach. As time went on, mutual nuclear destruction disappeared from the public eye. The end of the Soviet Union allowed us to think that it was no longer possible, for a few years anyway.
Whether nuclear weapons would become like any others was much debated during the fifties and sixties. The idea that everyone might have them gave rise to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Lumping them as WMD with chemical and biological weapons, which are much less destructive, made them seem a bit less dreadful.
The attacks on the nuclear weapons design laboratories, particularly Los Alamos, seem to have been directed toward the now-accomplished goal of privatization. Christopher Cox, grandson of Richard Nixon and now head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, led the charge in accusing Los Alamos of allowing Wen Ho Lee to transmit nuclear weapons information to the Chinese. Livermore’s contract is coming up for bid.
Certainly making a nuclear weapons design laboratory just one more contractor also makes it easier to consider nuclear weapons just one more part of the arsenal.
Los Alamos had a reputation for standing up to dumb ideas that issued forth from the government. Oppenheimer argued against the hydrogen bomb. Star Wars? No thanks, can’t work (and still doesn’t). Can a defense contractor demonstrate that kind of assertiveness?
Hersh quotes one of his sources:
“Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re shouted down.”I wonder if those civilians in the Pentagon have gone through this training.
We “nuke” a cup of water in the microwave. Maybe nucular doesn’t seem as bad as nuclear. Words wear out and betray their realities. Add that to the strong desire power produces for more of itself, and I guess that explains those civilians who think that airstrikes are needed against Iran, and that nukes will be a fine part of them.