A friend recently forwarded
me a “news” story about current (but not then) Republican frontrunner, Ted
Cruz. In it, Cruz was quoted as saying that gay people are “out to
exterminate us,” and that the answer was for southern states to “build a
nuclear bomb and use it to defend our right to believe in God as our one true
Father.”
A few chuckles later I
gently informed him that he had been taken for a satirical ride by the spoof
news site, Newslo.
But the scary part was that
the article was more than slightly believable. With all the bellicose
rhetoric — and yes, outright lies — being bandied about by Republican
candidates, it wasn’t so far fetched to believe that Cruz would use nuclear
weapons, against gays or whomever.
Whomever would probably be
Iran, based on comments Cruz has made so far. A strong critic of the
Obama administration’s Iran deal, Cruz told an Iowa audience during the recent
Caucus that: “If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, the test may not be
underground measured by an earthquake, the test may be in the skies of Tel Aviv
or New York or Los Angeles. We need a president who with unmistakable
clarity stands up and says under no circumstances will the nation of Iran ever
be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon.”
How exactly a Cruz
presidency would stand up and say no to Iran is unclear, because nuclear
weapons haven’t really come up much on the presidential campaign trail.
Yes there was the infamous triad debacle when Donald Trump fumbled the question
on the Republican CNN debate about which of the three legs would be his
priority. “For me, nuclear, the power, the devastation, is very important
to me,” Trump said, actually making it sound like he rather relished a nuclear
holocaust.
This ominous drift was
further compounded by the inept burbling of Trump spokesperson, Katrina
Pierson, who sounded like an extra in Cabaret during her laughable effort at
damage control on The O’Reilly Factor. “What good does it do to have a
good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?” she blurted.
None of this is
comforting. While the absence of discussion among candidates about
nuclear power is perhaps a good thing — it’s simply too irrelevant as a 21st
century energy source to be worthy of mention — the silence on nuclear weapons
policy is more ominous. If next November we elect a Republican president
who could, albeit not easily, decide to obliterate Tehran or Moscow or
Pyongyang, shouldn’t we know how he or she feels about the “use” of nuclear
weapons?
Or perhaps it doesn’t matter
what the candidates say. After all, President Obama stood in Prague on
April 5, 2009 and pronounced that: “today, I state clearly and with conviction
America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear
weapons.”
That got him the Nobel Peace
Prize, which some would like to see rescinded since Obama has now announced a
plan to squander one trillion in taxpayer dollars over the next three decades
on a new generation of nuclear warheads, bombers, submarines and
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Hillary Clinton distanced
herself from this plan while campaigning in Iowa, saying: “I’m going to look
into that. It doesn’t make sense to me.” Bernie Sanders pointed out
that the entire military budget of $600 billion is “larger than the next eight
countries.” But the Republican stable have all at least alluded to their
support for maintaining and upgrading the U.S. nuclear weapons cache.
According to the Center for
Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the U.S. is already spending $35 billion a
year on its nuclear arsenal. While it’s true that this bigger bill is
largely because costs are higher today than during the Cold War, it doesn’t
excuse the deliberate flouting of the commitment to disarm, binding under the
terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which the five “official” nuclear
weapons states have signed.
That’s why it was alarming
to read that the Center for American Progress had just released a report on
“how the Obama administration and Congress can modernize the nation’s nuclear
arsenal within its existing budget constraints — without undermining its moral
boundaries in the battle against nuclear proliferation and its conventional
capabilities to confront our current national security challenges.”
The report’s intent is to
offer cost-saving options to reduce the projected $1 trillion price tag, and it
does recommend cancellation of the new cruise missile and other cuts for a $120
billion savings. But accepting “modernization” rather than abolition
perpetuates the broadly-held Washington view that we continue to “need” nuclear
weapons. If we never drop this approach, how can we ever fully disarm?
The answer is, we
won’t. The CAP report takes for granted that the U.S. will continue to
violate the NPT, writing: “Nearly every missile, submarine, aircraft, and
warhead in the U.S. arsenal is nearing the end of its service life and must be
replaced” [emphasis added.] Replaced. Not abolished.
Although he was trying to
say the opposite in Prague, Obama in effect confirmed this view when he said:
“if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some
way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is
inevitable.”
The President of the United
States does not have his finger literally on the trigger that would launch
nuclear weapons. But the prospect of someone as crazy as Cruz or as
megalomaniac as Trump making that decision is chilling.
Mind you, if polls are to be
believed, Trump supporters would happily give him the green light to launch, as
long as the target is the fictional city of Agrabah, an invention of Disney’s
“Aladdin” and which Trump fans seem to believe is an actual ISIS hotbed.
Which is almost as frightening as the prospect of Trump carrying around
the infamous nuclear Football.
[…]
No comments:
Post a Comment