Loose nukes
McCarthy, Abigail
tainly has been a deep influence on American civilization, but what is going on now results mainly from the culture wars waged in the United States since the 1960s. These have subordinated...
...Our leaders have been distracted, our sources of information have been distracted, and so have we...
...We turned on the radio and tuned into KBS, the Kenyan Commonweal 9 October9,1998...
...It was also the belief of the 250,000 who marched in Calcutta on the same anniversary and chanted, "We don't want the bomb...
...It was obvious in face of such facts that the president's focus in Russia should have been, as Allison said, getting control of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction...
...All nations should move in concert toward the same goal...
...They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command...
...Starr and the Congress have made of the affair...
...I would say that if the mainstream press, or an influential part of it, refused to report unsubstantiated and salacious or scandalous allegations from partisan sources, refused to reprint such reports published elsewhere, and applied a serious standard of public interest to matters invading individual privacy, this could do much to restore responsibility to public life...
...We want peace...
...They have not forsworn first use, and do not seem to have the will to move toward the elimination of nuclear weapons...
...As dust began to drift earthward from the bomb site, the sky over downtown Nairobi became very dark...
...It was understood that no one's interest was served by overturning a code of public decorum which protected the essential privacies of a civilized society...
...We could see people running in one direction, then sharply turning and running in another, in crazy-quilt patterns...
...These have subordinated political differences, which by definition are negotiable, to an ideological struggle over values intended to change American society...
...To defend the people's right to privacy is to defend the people, and to defend liberty...
...Those who want change are inclined to conclude that they are isolated and that action is futile...
...Concern affects policy and eventually brings action...
...That was certainly the belief of the 50,000 who assembled in Hiroshima this year on the fifty-third anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing...
...The anniversary was scarcely noticed here in the country responsible for that bombing and the devastation it wrought...
...asked a friend...
...And then rather suddenly the city streets, generally filled with teeming crowds at 10:45 in the morning, became deserted...
...The above is enough to call to mind and affirm Thomas Merton's prediction (quoted in the August-September Catholic Worker): "It is the sane ones, the welladapted ones, who can, without qualms and without nausea, aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared....The sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons for firing the shot...
...After the Flame Deluge in Miller's story, the world is left a barren desert where barbarians and monstrosities roam...
...In a prophetic best seller of the fifties, Walter Miller's Canticle of Leibowitz--a book worth revisiting now-it is called the Flame Deluge...
...The political conflicts of the past were also ruthless, but they served political, class, regional, and moneyed interests...
...Expressed public hatred of politicians, as of journalists, is unprecedented...
...It was obvious that something terrible had happened...
...Today, this is condemned as hypocrisy...
...So lying in bed at the Stanley Hotel in downtown Nairobi on the morning of August 7, completely exhausted from our eight-hour Paris-Nairobi trip, we were not quite sure what we heard...
...Its continued support for Bill Clinton, despite what has been revealed about his behavior, demonstrates popular distaste for what Mr...
...It has already failed to Commonweal 8 October 9, 1998 vote the funds necessary for its implementation...
...The American public does not like this...
...The end of the cold war makes it possible...
...Start with 7,000 nuclear warheads: armed, mounted on missiles, capable of arriving at targets in the United States less than an hour after a decision to launch," he wrote, and added other horrifying details of Russia's still-existing super-power arsenal...
...Strategic Command, and General Andrew Goodpaster, for the abolition of nuclear weapons...
...If the Congress and the states want to install government by popular referendum, let them do so...
...Under the existing Constitution, it is the duty of the Congress to judge...
...Sex and scandal are mere weapons of opportunity...
...Only after thirty-two generations does a kind of civilization emerge...
...India's test was motivated in part by our failure to reduce our weapons significantly...
...And matters very much...
...9 1998, Los Angeles Times Syndicate efore President Bill Clinton went to Russia in September, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison, now director of Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, called attention to the reason Russia's economic disaster matters to us...
...We face "the threat of 'loose nukes,' the theft of one or a dozen weapons, sale to a rogue state or terrorist group, and their use to threaten or attack Americans at home and abroad...
...This combat allows no compromise or negotiation...
...What Merton adverts to is the universal failure of imagination--the apparent inability to conceive of what "the great festival of destruction" would mean...
...Not a person or moving car could be seen...
...Distracted, we have let time slip by, but with our full attention and that of other nations we have to believe that nuclear abolition can be achieved...
...Failure to ratify the treaty underscores that those who represent us still give assent to the concept of nuclear deterrence...
...Moreover, it is likely that the Senate will not muster the two-thirds majority necessary to ratify the proposed worldwide test-ban treaty...
...And that civilization again begins to repeat the development of nuclear weapons...
...All this is a very bad sign for representative government...
...But government by public opinion polls is government by impulsive judgment and unconsidered opinion...
...The press, for example, says that competitive pressures make it impossible not to collaborate in the destruction of privacy...
...What happened...
...But we did feel the pressure from the blast, and knew that we were at least tangentially involved in something very different and very big...
...We can work for a concerted international inspection program...
...Too many interests profit from the present situation...
...Beyond appealing to an unrecoverable past, I have little that is constructive to propose...
...Our worries were confirmed when we looked out the window of our third-floor room...
...Are we doomed to it, Lord," asks the author in the foreword, "chained to the pendulum of our mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing...
...We can insist on the dismantling of existing weapons...
...Bruce Martin Russell, author of the hopeful article, "We Can End the Arms Race," in the same issue of the Catholic Worker, assures us that "in a world of spreading transparency no country could expect to produce...such weapons" against such a program...
...Edwin Xavier Travers THE BOMB NEXT DOOR On the scene in Nairobi El y wife and I had never heard a bomb go off before...
...What we can do is summon and express concern...
...Today's ideological wars are aimed at the elimination of enemy ideas from the American moral landscape...
...Add this to our comparatively tepid responses to the nuclear arming of India and Pakistan--and to news of a vast secret underground nuclear facility in North Korea--and it is clear that, as normal citizens, we do not fully comprehend the danger or give thought to what our national policy should be...
...Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall...
...Clinton and Yeltsin signed a pallid minor missile agreement and announced it at a press conference where questions about the Lewinsky affair were as numerous as were any questions on policy...
...There is so little we can do...
...It would seem that the only sensible answer to that cry is to respond now to the 1996 call of an international group of generals and admirals, including General Lee Butler, former head of the U.S...
...Paper--even reams of computer paper--and other debris filled the air...
...Nothing now is barred...
...Cars came to a stop and drivers jumped out, trying to comprehend what had happened...
...But who will take such a lead...
...Remember the stirring words of that December 5 statement: "We have been presented with a challenge of the highest possible historical importance: the creation of a nudear-weapon-free world...
...There was in the past a public code of conduct in Washington, and in American society, concerning private lives, which was generally respected, if often in the breach...
...And because of their sanity, they will have no qualms at all when the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake...
...Congress is mandated to represent the people, not pander to them...
...Those who did so would be attacked for abridging the people's right to know, although this is a false argument...
...But what good would it do if we were not distracted--if we were fully aware...
...Miller calls his book "a cry for sanity in our silent night of madness...
...The public's revulsion against the fanatical partisanship which exists on both right and left (the abortion and homosexual wars, for example, display equivalent fanaticisms) is partly responsible for the extremely low level of electoral participation in the United States today...
...Congress justified what it has done as allowing the people to judge...
...It is vital that we address this our most serious problem without delay...
...The members of the group came from the declared nuclearweapons countries---China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States--from the emergent nuclear countries--India, Israel, and Pakistan-and the major non-nuclear powers-Germany and Japan...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 17
