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August 3, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
July 30, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Branding September 11
PS Burton
Financial
Journalism:
A Very Small Cog
Tom Stephens
Hypocrites in the House:
Fast Track After Midnight
Dave Marsh
Censorship
Goes Global
July 29, 2002
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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Weekend
Edition
August 3, 2002
Bush: Small
Mind & Big Nukes
Nuclear Apartheid
by David Krieger
These are difficult times for peace. Since the
Bush administration assumed power in the United States, there
has been a steady beating on the drums of war accompanied by
a systematic undermining of the foundations of international
law. The September 11th terrorist attacks against the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon bolstered the Bush administration's plans
to secure US global military dominance through increased military
budgets, deployment of missile defenses, development of more
usable nuclear weapons and the weaponization of space. Congress
has largely acquiesced in supporting these plans.
The United States has always held to
a double standard with regard to nuclear weapons. This double
standard was given legal form in the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT), in which five countries were designated as nuclear
weapons states (United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom,
France  and China), and the rest were
designated as non-nuclear weapons states. The latter agreed in
the treaty not to develop or acquire nuclear weapons in exchange
for a promise by the nuclear weapons states to pursue good faith
negotiations to achieve nuclear disarmament.
Throughout the life of the NPT, the non-nuclear
weapons states have called for more tangible signs of progress
toward achieving the nuclear disarmament promise of the nuclear
weapons states. They were successful in 2000 in getting the nuclear
weapons states to commit unequivocally to undertake the elimination
of their nuclear arsenals. However, the nuclear weapons states,
and particularly the United States, have broken this promise
as well as a string of other promises with regard to their NPT
obligations.
Now the United States has gone even further.
It has developed policies for the preemptive use of nuclear weapons.
In its secret 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which was leaked to
the media in March 2002, the United States outlined its intention
to develop contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against
seven countries (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea, Russia
and China). Five of these are non-nuclear weapons states, which
at a minimum contradicts the spirit of the NPT as well as previous
US security assurances to non-nuclear weapons states.
President Bush, flush with popularity
from his war against Afghanistan, continues to threaten war against
Iraq. The principal reason he gives for attacking Iraq is to
replace its leader, Saddam Hussein, and to preemptively strike
Iraq for its refusal to allow UN inspectors to assess whether
or not it is developing weapons of mass destruction.
Prior to the Bush administration, the
US had a policy of nuclear deterrence, far from a policy that
provided the United States with security from nuclear attack.
The Bush administration has criticized deterrence policy but
yet maintained it, while at the same time promoting policies
of preemption.
Preemption is the new catch-word of Bush's
nuclear policy. It is a means of assuring that a nuclear double
standard continues to exist. It is a policy of nuclear apartheid
in which select states are bestowed (or bestow upon themselves)
nuclear privilege while others are attacked for seeking to enter
the elite club of nuclear powers.
Ironically, Bush's nuclear policy makes
it more likely that terrorists will obtain nuclear weapons or
materials. The fraudulent arms control agreement that was signed
in May 2002 by Bush and Putin, the Strategic Offensive Reductions
Treaty (SORT), allows thousands of nuclear warheads to be put
in storage rather than destroying them. These stored nuclear
warheads will be tempting targets for terrorists as will be the
thousands of tons of nuclear materials available throughout the
world that could be fashioned into nuclear or radiological weapons.
The Bush administration is spending only approximately one-third
of the three billion dollars per year called for by the US blue
ribbon commission to prevent Russian nuclear materials from falling
into the hands of terrorists.
Bush's withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic
Missile (ABM) Treaty and his advances toward deployment of missile
defenses are compelling China to substantially strengthen its
nuclear forces aimed at the United States, as China forewarned
it would do in these circumstances. Under Bush's leadership,
US allies in Europe and Asia will be brought in as "partners"
in a global missile defense system that will be hugely expensive,
unlikely to be effective and provide no protection against terrorists
who would initiate their attacks, nuclear and otherwise, without
launching missiles.
Mr. Bush is squandering US leadership
potential for global cooperation under international law, and
instead pursuing policies that are based on military dominance,
uncertain technology and nuclear apartheid. They are policies
rooted in arrogance and certain to fail. They are, in fact, already
failing by their allocation of resources to increasing the militarization
of the planet rather than to meeting existing basic human needs
that would help eradicate the fertile breeding grounds for continued
terrorism and hatred of the United States.
David Krieger
is president of the Nuclear
Age Peace Foundation. He is the co-author with Daisaku
Ikeda of Choose
Hope: Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age recently
published by Middleway Press. He can be contacted at dkrieger@napf.org.
Today's
Features
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
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