The Way The World Ends

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1021-24.htm

Published on Saturday, October 21, 2006 by The Ottawa Citizen (Canada)

The Way the World Ends

With all the hype about North Korea, we're forgetting that the world is still staring down the barrels of thousands of U.S. and Russian ICBMs

by Helen Caldicott

It is difficult to underestimate the problems associated with North Korea's recent nuclear weapons test. Following a small atomic explosion in a mountainous area of North Korea of less than one kiloton -- the Hiroshima bomb was 13 kilotons -- the U.S. administration is encouraging draconian economic sanctions to be enacted against a desperately poor country where millions of people are malnourished and that will further ostracize a paranoid regime, while the rest of the world looks on with horror as the nuclear arms race threatens to spiral out of control.

While lateral proliferation is indeed an incredibly serious problem as ever-more countries prepare to enter the portals of the nuclear club, one consistent outstanding nuclear threat that continues to endanger most planetary species is ignored by the international community.
In fact, the real "rogue" nations that continue to hold the world at nuclear ransom are Russia and the United States. Contrary to popular belief, the threat of a massive nuclear attack -- whether by accident, human fallibility or malfeasance -- has increased.

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.According to the Center for Defense Information, a group that analyzes U.S. defence policy, in the event of a suspected attack, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command has only three minutes to decide if a nuclear attack warning is valid. He has 10 minutes to locate the president for a 30-second briefing on attack options, and the president then has three minutes to decide to launch the warheads and to consider which pre-set targeting plan to use.

Helen Caldicott is a pediatrician and president of the Washington-based Nuclear Policy Research Institute. She is the author of Nuclear Power is Not the Answer.

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I am convinced that should this world ever end, it will end by our own hand. It won't be by any meteor hitting us, or the planet getting sucked into a black hole, or any natural disaster. It will come by own hand, because we are our own worst enemy. Not only do we live in denial about our own bodies regarding what we do to them by smoking, drinking, taking drugs, and other excesses, we also live in denial regarding what our behavior is doing to defile our planet, the only home we have to live on. And now, the spectre of nuclear weapons and a new arms race brings home more starkly than ever our own mortality at our own hands, and our lack of true morality and strength in standing up for what is right.

The United States and Russia have to take the lead to disarm all nuclear weapons and call upon all other states that have them to do the same. Then perhaps North Korea and other nations which feel threatened by the bullying of nations who have no moral highground on this issue will follow. However, I don't see that happening in the immediate future no matter which Party runs this country, and that saddens and outrages me.

The dawn of the nuclear age was not a dawn to celebrate. It was a step in a direction down a road we never should have tred upon. And now, we may surely be leading to our own demise unless we once and for all begin to focus on that which we dare not think about.

We also have no moral authority to claim that we are using "diplomacy" regarding this issue with any other nation when we have missiles at the ready... When we have the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth... When we have the capacity to kill huge numbers of innocent people with the pushing of just one button (now in the hands of a madman)... When we are the only nation on this planet to have done just that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I don't expect to see nuclear weapons gone in my lifetime, but I have every reason and right to hope that they will be gone in the lifetime of my child. Of course, to have true hope for that, the human species would have to evolve to where it should be at this point in history were it a species that actually learned from its mistakes. Dare I hope for that? Will we even survive to see that day?

Nuclear weapons are a blight on humanity and they represent a species that has now given away their morality to a true evil. They are the weapons of the insane, and they need to be removed from our planet. The only way that will even have a chance of happening however, is for those nations which think they are the rulers of the world to pull in their arrogance and pretense, and begin acting like human beings...So I suppose I truly then have something to worry about.

With a nuclear arsenal behind your back.

the commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command has only three minutes to decide if a nuclear attack warning is valid. He has 10 minutes to locate the president for a 30-second briefing on attack options, and the president then has three minutes to decide to launch the warheads and to consider which pre-set targeting plan to use."

It takes junior at least 20 min. to decide which shoe to tie. As Americans argue over the ethics and strategies of war, if we were ever attacked by nuclear warheads, this is what it would come down to. Ideally we would have 16 min. and 30 sec. to make a decision, not factoring in the chance of mis-communications and this is the scenario for a "suspected attack" vs. an unsuspected one. Whether the US and all other countries ever disarm their missiles, what is just as imperative to me is who our Commander and Chief is and how little time that there is to make such important decisions.

That type of evolution will not occur. Morally and intellectually, unfortunately, we will hopefully LAST through the mix of pragmatism and strengthened civilizing forces until the REAL evolution of physically removing bad genes from the brain and power pool mixes in with the honed skills of discipline and judgment and strong civil societies. Until then the repression and opposition of suicidal flaws will be small, misdirected, dishonest in application by traditional authority, dangerous in the extreme commensurate to scientific power.

The simple answers by a race truly committed to intelligence, simple survival or ANY necessary good would mean the sacrifice, immediate and total of the nuclear energy industry up to any capacity for producing at all for development of weapons grade material. As an environmental threat and the hypocrisy of regimes who want the dual purpose energy source(energy then weapons) it becomes fundamentally logical to repress the entire pursuit. The next real threat that is more irrepressible and a necessary part of human progress is biological manipulation. Maybe the nightmare of one will pre-empt the inevitable horror of the other if the human race is truly incapable of surviving the evolution of knowledge. Maybe external factors of natural environmental disaster will take the unwary head of the bumbling homo sapien empire.

But to show ourselves worthy of reason and a future the atomic industry should be scaled back toward temporary oblivion- UNTIL we actually do have a more trustworthy human race to manage the knowledge progress that has overtaken us.

Since the simple fact- like repressed studies of global warming- that unnecessary nuclear energy is a gateway by regimes toward the bomb club is not even on the global radar screen- we are far from getting people to stopping this madness.