Rohan Pearce
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, to be held in New York May 2-27, is likely to be used by the Bush administration as a platform for more shrill denunciations of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program, probably with a verbal assault on the North Korean regime thrown in for good measure. How ironic, then, that the conference starts less than a week after US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushed for Congressional funding for research into new nuclear weapons.
In theory, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which began in 1968, was intended to halt efforts to acquire nuclear weapons technology and lead to eventual disarmament. In reality, it has served to cement a near monopoly on nukes for the three imperialist powers permitted to have such weapons under the treaty — the US, France and Britain — and China and Russia.
Jon Wolfsthal wrote, in an April 14 article published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, that the "overwhelming sense" among states that don't possess nuclear weapons is that the US "and other nuclear states are not serious about their commitments to disarm".
The 2000 NPT Review Conference agreed on 13 steps to begin the implementation of Article VI, which calls for nuclear-weapons' states' disarmament. But, reported the Associate Press on April 24, "Since then, the Bush administration has rejected the test-ban treaty, withdrawn from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, pushed research on new nuclear weapons and talked of potential use of nuclear arms against non-nuclear countries — all steps viewed by critics as contrary to the NPT's commitment to disarmament".
Washington's attempt to back away from NPT commitments have been so extreme as to not just draw fire from the peace movement, but from establishment figures including former US president Jimmy Carter and Robert McNamara, US defence secretary during the Vietnam War. The latter wrote in Foreign Policy that he "would characterise current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous".
On April 27 Rumsfeld, defending a US$22.5 million funding request over 2006 and 2007, told the Senate defence appropriations subcommittee that it made "all the sense in the world" to research the development of a "robust nuclear earth penetrator", a nuclear weapon capable of destroying deeply buried or otherwise well protected targets.
Rumsfeld told the committee that the "only thing we have is very large, very dirty nuclear weapons. So the choice is: Do we want to have nothing and only a large, dirty nuclear weapon, or would we rather have something in between? That is the issue."
The research into new nuclear weapons such as the proposed "earth penetrator" is part of the public rehabilitation of battlefield use of nuclear weapons by the US, even against non-nuclear enemies. The Pentagon's January 2002 Nuclear Posture Review called for the development of "mini-nukes", which could be more easily used in such a way than the mainstay of Washington's nuclear arsenal.
"The Bush administration wants to have nuclear weapons in the regular battlefield arsenal of its armed forces in order to use them in the same way that they'd use a conventional artillery shell piece, a conventional missile, an ordinary cannon", Richard Butler, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, told SBS's Dateline in May 2003.
According to Slate's Fred Kaplan, the US department of energy's nuclear weapons budget for 2005 is $6.5 billion. In an April 23 article for the online journal, Kaplan added that "President Bush is requesting $6.8 billion more for next year and a total of $30 billion over the following four years. This does not include his much-cherished missile-defense program, by the way. This is simply for the maintenance, modernization, development, and production of nuclear bombs and warheads."
From Green Left Weekly, May 4, 2005.
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