MB Civic

Here’s the strange thing: Since 2001, our media has been filled with terrifying nuclear headlines. The Iraqi bomb (you remember those “mushroom clouds” about to rise over American cities), the North Korean bomb, and the Iranian bomb have been almost obsessively in the news. Of course, the Iraqi bomb turned out to be embarrassingly nonexistent; experts still consider the Iranian bomb years away (if it happens); and the North Korean bomb, while quite real, remains a less than impressive weapon, based on a less than spectacular nuclear test in October 2006.

And yet these are the nuclear weapons that have taken all our attention. How many of you have ever heard of Complex 2030 or know that, as William Hartung and Frida Berrigan pointed out recently, the Bush administration is, on average, putting more money into our nuclear arsenal (over $6 billion this year) than went into it in the Cold War era? Or that, if all goes according to administration projections, this figure should hit $7.4 billion a year by 2012? And Complex 2030 — aiming, as the name implies, at a thoroughly updated, upgraded American arsenal 23 years from now — involves producing, among many other things, the Reliable Replacement Warhead, our first new warhead in two decades. (The Energy Department just selected its design.) In addition, the Bush administration has worked hard to break down the barrier between nuclear and conventional weapons, absorbing nuclear weapons into its plans for its new Global Strike force, supposedly able to hit any target on the planet “with a few hours’ notice,” and repeatedly leaking the news that it might consider using the “nuclear option” against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

As Dilip Hiro, Middle Eastern expert and author most recently of Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World’s Vanishing Oil Resources, makes clear, there are not two nuclear worlds — that of the nuclear “rogues” and that of the “nuclear club”; there is only one. Our nuclear world and theirs are intimately linked by an ever more volatile version of the old Cold War doctrine of deterrence. The more we invest in, and maintain, a vast nuclear arsenal, the more we slot those weapons into our strategic and tactical planning, the more such weapons will proliferate elsewhere. The Bush administration came into office ready to crush nuclear proliferators. Instead, when its history is written, it will undoubtedly be seen as a nuclear proliferation machine, threatening to bring its own nightmare scenario — such weaponry in the hands of a terrorist band for whom “deterrence” would have no meaning whatsoever — ever closer to reality. — Tom

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/print/174808/Tomgram%253A%2520%2520Dilip%2520Hiro%252C%2520A%2520Catch-22%2520Nuclear%2520World