Leave Him Alone?

Yesterday, I sent out an action alert asking our members to write to President Obama and ask him to cancel next week’s test of a Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. Thousands of people immediately took action, asking him not only to cancel next week’s test, but also to work quickly in his second term to decommission land-based ICBMs.

As always, I am deeply grateful to our thousands of dedicated members who take action to support the elimination of nuclear weapons. This wide support from around the United States gives us the public voice we need to be able to get our foot in the door in Washington, DC.

I got a couple of replies from people to the effect of, “Come on, give the guy [Obama] a break. He just won re-election. Let’s savor this victory for a while.”

Here’s why I disagree with that assessment:

• The Air Force isn’t planning to give us, or the Marshall Islanders (the target of the November 14 test), a break by postponing the test. 
• Conducting this test would be a terrible message to send to the world immediately after the President’s re-election. We’re talking about a missile that carries thermonuclear warheads at least eight times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
• We are trying to hold President Obama to his 2008 campaign promise to “renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons.”

To read more about why the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation believes that the United States should decommission its land-based Minuteman III missiles, see this article in the Christian Science Monitor by NAPF President David Krieger and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

Nuclear Iran Does Not Increase Stability: 8 Reasons

In the July issue of Foreign Affairs, international relations scholar and founder of neorealism, Kenneth Waltz, published a column not only defending nuclear deterrence theory, but also supporting the Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon (part of the column can be found on the website of USA Today). Waltz identifies three possible futures that could be had depending on the actions of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. I find his analysis selective and the publishing of such opinions as legitimate in both the academic and mainstream press, without acknowledging the disastrous consequences that are possible in the case that his presumptions are false, to be reprehensible. I thus write this response.

One of the biggest issues with Waltz’s analysis is his complete dismissal of the incomprehensible dangers of nuclear weapons. He writes, “A palpable sense of crisis still looms,” and then dismisses it by saying, “It should not.”¹ In the words of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation president David Krieger, “fear is a healthy mechanism when one is confronted by something fearful.”² The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs killed 200,000 initially and many more in the months and years after. The current warheads are much larger than those two, plus new reports discuss how the nuclear famine that would follow a limited nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India could kill over 1 billion human beings.³ Luckily for us, Mr. Waltz is not worried. He thinks, “A nuclear-armed Iran would probably be the best possible result of the standoff and the one most likely to restore stability to the Middle East.” I beg to differ.