Bush goes nuclear with India
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Posted on March 6, 2006
Filed Under Ecological hope, Environmental disasters
Among the many threats to human extinction, one that most people hardly think about these days is the threat of nuclear war. We think it went away with the demise of the Soviet Union. When we do think about it, attention tends to be focused on Iran, which right now is in a struggle with the United Nations and many of its member nations over its intentions to begin enriching uranium – for peaceful purposes, says its government; for possible weapons development, says the US and some of its allies. The UN would like to have the ability to carry out inspections to verify Iranian intentions.
But while that debate captures attention, President George Bush just opened a huge loophole in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, an international agreement that has mostly worked at controlling the proliferation of the technology needed to develop nuclear weapons. India has refused to sign the treaty. It is already nuclear-armed and working to develop its nuclear military capacity further, while keeping the program shielded from international inspection. And for this behavior, it has just been richly rewarded. Bush has agreed to share nuclear technology with India – for peaceful purposes, of course. Yet, under the treaty, and by US law, the US is prohibited from sharing nuclear technology unless India gives up its military program.
Less than four years ago, India and Pakistan were embroiled in a near-war scenario over the contested province of Kashmir. The war threat included the possibility of a nuclear exchange, which the Pentagon estimated could kill more than 12 million people immediately, and perhaps millions more in subsequent firestorms and from contamination of soils, water, and air. It would also put radioactive fallout into the atmosphere to float around the world.
It is a dangerous game Bush is playing. For decades now, successive US administrations (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton) have resisted the step Bush took last week. As columnist Bob Herbert recounts in today’s New York Times, “A cornerstone of the nonproliferation strategy has been the refusal to share nuclear energy technology with nations unwilling to abide by the provisions of the nonproliferation treaty.”
Bush claims India to be an exception, but no one believes that will stand. Other countries are likely to seek out similar bilateral exceptions to the rule. The countries that now have nuclear weapons technology include the US, France, Great Britain, Russia, China (the original “nuclear club” when the treaty was signed in the 1960s), Israel, Pakistan, India, with North Korea either close behind or already there. It’s a lucrative business, nuclear technology, and Bush just accelerated the race.
“It’s a terrible deal, a disaster,” Herbert quotes Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Institute. “The Indians are free to make as much nuclear material as they want. Meanwhile, we’re going to sell them fuel for their civilian reactors. That frees up their resources for the military side, and that stinks.”
Herbert’s article this morning summed up the situation very well. I would like to create a link to his op-ed, but unfortunately, the Times is now making people pay to read him, so let me include a few more quotes here:
“The president…moved the world a step closer to an accelerated nuclear arms race in Asia and elsewhere,” he writes. He quotes Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), one of the agreement’s leading opponents: “We’ve had a consensus for a generation that the world will cooperate to restrict the spread of these nuclear materials. If this consensus breaks down, then we increase exponentially the likelihood that the catastrophic event that [John F.] Kennedy warned about will, in fact, occur.”
And what did JFK warn about? “Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”
Over the next four decades, even under the shadows of the Cold War, governments worked to get the menace of nuclear weapons under control, with the hope of one day soon eliminating them altogether. But Bush just gave the nuclear apocalypse a good kick forward.
Talk about an ecological challenge to US society.
You can help stop this new manifestation of madness. This deal must be approved by Congress. Yell, scream, email, phone, write your members of Congress and demand that they stop this madness, force Bush to abide by US and international law, STOP THIS DEAL! [see Action page]
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Thanks for an important post and an important blog. I will be reading this regularly in order to help knock down the naysayers and those folks who have their heads in the sand — or somewhere else!