Bush's More Dangerous Nuclear World

They make you take your shoes off before boarding a plane, but they don't adequately inspect cargo coming into our ports for terrorist bombs entering the country. They put children with common names on no-fly lists but they don't adequately protect nuclear power plants against terrorist acts. They keep people in jail for years without charge, torture people caught in random round-ups, and they demand to know what books American citizens read from their public libraries--yet the New York Times revealed, the Bush government actually posted what amounted to "a basic guide to building an atom bomb" on the Internet, for the world to see.

Now Bush Administration officials are all over the airwaves blaming everybody but themselves for this serious lapse of security. For weeks this information was available to Iran and any other country or group in the world. It was posted on a web site as documentation of the Iraqi nuclear program that had been abandoned in 1991, but which ostensibly was the reason for the Bush invasion of Iraq, even though there was little or no evidence it existed in 2002 and evidence that it did not.

It is one more illustrations of the fact that the Bush administration is not adequately protecting Americans, they only say they are. They are more interested in spreading fear that might help them politically, and in creating scary phantoms and simplistic imagery to make themselves look strong and competent, than in paying attention to what needs to be done.

But the Republican failure to act competently, intelligently and effectively on behalf of U.S. security is only part of this story. This criminal lack of attention to nuclear information dramatizes one of the most dangerous aspects of Bush policy: its attitudes on nuclear weapons.

With inconsistent and ineffective policies on Iran and North Korea, the Bushites are ill equipped to deal with the near term possibilities of significant nuclear proliferation in the world. It's estimated that as many as 40 countries have the technical skill to make atom bombs. Yet the Bush administration opposes international agreements that have restrained proliferation since the 1960s, when President Kennedy brought worldwide attention to this danger.

One reason is that the Bushites want to develop new nuclear weapons. With all the concerns if not panic over North Korea and Iran, the largest nuclear threat is overlooked. The idea that the end of the Cold War automatically ended the threat of thermonuclear apocalypse in the U.S. and for the world at large is false. Here are the facts, from Helen Caldicott, president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute:

Of the 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, the United States and Russia possess 96 per cent of them. Of these, Russia aims most of its 8,200 strategic nuclear warheads at U.S. and Canadian targets, while the U.S. aims most of its 7,000 offensive strategic hydrogen bombs on Russian missile silos and command centres. Each of these thermonuclear warheads has roughly 20 times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, according to a report on nuclear weapons by the National Resources Defense Council, a U.S. environmental group.

Of these 7,000 U.S. strategic weapons, 2,500 are deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles that are constantly maintained on hair-trigger alert ready for immediate launching, while the U.S. also maintains some 2,688 hydrogen bombs on missiles in its 14 Trident submarines, most ready for instantaneous launching.

A Rand study found that the chances of accidental thermonuclear war have actually increased since the end of the Cold War.

Terrifyingly, the early warning systems of both Russia and the U.S. register false alarms daily, triggered either by wildfires, satellite launchings or solar reflections off clouds or oceans. Of more immediate concern in both the United States and Russia is the threat of terrorists or hackers entering and disrupting the computerized early warning systems and command centres.

Now experts warn that the widely predicted and feared U.S. attack on Iran could trigger an accidental nuclear exchange if the Russians misinterpret missile launchings as an attack on their terroritory.

The process of deciding to launch these thermonuclear arsenals is designed to take minutes. In such an exchance, big cities like New York would be destroyed by several hydrogen bombs, and virtually everyone would die within days.

Most towns and cities with populations over 50,000 on the North American continent are targeted with at least one hydrogen bomb. Only 1,000 bombs exploding on 100 cities could induce nuclear winter and the end of most life on earth.

Why is this so? Perhaps the Bushite desire for new nuclear weapons discourages talking about the existing arsensals, but clearly the Bush Administration is not focusing attention on this major threat to America and the world. The Bushites would rather start a needless and tragic war, that now claims attention and resources that we need to be placing elsewhere.

With Bush and Cheney in the White House, together with a Congress they tightly control, we will not address this issue. We endanger ourselves and the world. This is perhaps the most silent and most deadly danger in the present moment.