Tomgram: Chip Ward on Pentagon Fireworks

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: The next post at this site will not be until Wednesday, July 5th. Tom]

One of the least noticed success stories of George Bush's years in power has been his administration's ability to focus the world's attention so singularly first on Saddam Hussein ‘s "nuclear program" -- remember that yellowcake brick road? -- which had absolutely no basis in reality; then on a meager (though frightening) North Korean nuclear force (of questionable use), and finally on a questionable Iranian nuclear bomb, which, according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate, is perhaps ten years away and yet somehow has been ever in our midst.

The near-civilization destroying Israeli nuclear arsenal is hardly ever even noted. The Pakistani/Indian arsenals, aimed at each other on a hair-trigger and constantly being upgraded, are rarely in the news (though they may be the most obvious flashpoint for a nuclear conflagration on the planet). Above all, the great nuclear arsenals of the two Cold War superpowers, those MAD (or mutually assured destruction) creations, have been allowed to slip into obscurity without faintly slipping into oblivion. The Russians are again upgrading their aging nuclear forces and, with an ever shakier military, have, if anything, become more reliant on nuclear power for great-power status; while the Bush administration has been eager to upgrade the already gargantuan American arsenal with various kinds of mini-nukes, "bunker busters," and other weapons of mass destruction.

Everyone knows that the only nuclear weapons ever used against civilian populations came out of the American arsenal on August 6th and 9th, 1945, obliterating the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everyone also knows that, since then, no power on Earth has ever used nuclear weapons against civilian populations -- an absolute truth that absolutely isn't so. In fact, the vast program of nuclear testing that the U.S. undertook in the American West from the 1950s into the early 1990s has taken a terrible disease toll on "downwinders," particularly the citizens of Utah and Nevada (and wherever else fallout landed in the U.S., not to say, on the planet) as did the Russian nuclear testing program on its citizenry (as did the French program, though they were cannier and tested their bombs not outside Avignon but in the South Seas).

The power of nuclear weapons was so beyond normal comprehension that the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, "the father of the atomic bomb," Robert Oppenheimer, on observing the first atomic test, immediately invoked the powers of the gods. As he described it (taken from Richard Rhodes book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb):

"We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."

Now, the most religiously zealous administration in our history is invoking the "divine" power to destroy untold millions in seconds in the happy pursuit and maintenance of global nuclear superiority. The Bush administration is, in fact, strikingly eager to proliferate in its supposed war against nuclear proliferation and so is willing once again to turn Americans into nuclear guinea pigs. Chip Ward, whose book Canaries on the Rim took up the earlier round of testing in the Western U.S., returns to the subject below, giving those Fourth of July fireworks a slightly different meaning. Tom

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