Rumsfeld's Baby Nukes And The Terror War

by Abhinav Aima

As the Pentagon's star is in its ascendancy, the defense secretary is calling for a nuclear weapon for battlefield tactics: A Tactical Nuclear Weapon to be used to help fight the "war on terror." The idea for the deployment of such a nuclear weapon is popular with the president, who persuaded the U.S. Congress to lift the ban on further development of nuclear weapons in his first term.

According to the Washington Post, Rumsfeld's favorite toy is the nuclear burrowing bunker buster. Such a weapon, it is argued, could dig deep into the ground or a cave in order to destroy "terrorists" hiding there. The notion that "terrorists" live in caves and tunnels underground is one that is particularly publicized by this administration, even though most of its captured terrorists have been found living in urban cities in Pakistan. Of course, the nuclear burrowing bunker buster could also be used very effectively to bring down a large multi-storied building, and kill everyone and everything in it.

Unless the American public takes it upon itself to stop it, the government of the United States, under the orders of President Bush, may soon deploy such nuclear weapons into the arsenal of its air, land and naval forces for the specific purpose of targeting what the government claims are terrorist targets and their collaterals. This may seem to be quite a sensational claim, but the ease and efficiency with which the U.S. government deployed depleted uranium ammunition and munitions establishes clear precedents that the vast ignorance and apathy among the American public may largely support the deployment of Baby Nukes.

The American public, for the large part, has not seen the evidence of the rise in diagnosis of cancer among the populations that have been the unlucky benefactors of recent freedom operations. Bush Sr. used depleted Uranium ammunition in the freeing of Kuwait, Clinton used them to free Kosovo and Bush W. used them to free the Iraqis. The U.S. Army has also refused comment on sicknesses claimed by soldiers who handled depleted Uranium munitions or passed through areas of its use.

The American press has been singularly slow and unwilling to follow up on the charges that the use of radioactive munitions is souring the liberty of its recipients with radiation borne diseases. Among Europe's finest, Robert Fisk stands alone for having repeatedly exposed the human face of the aftermath of the use of such weaponry.

Fisk, of course, has little influence on the American masses, and CNN would be loathe to approach this issue, thanks largely to the fact that its senior editors have not yet regained from smarting at the public whipping they received over their coverage of the alleged use of chemical weapons by American forces in Vietnam, or Operation Tailwind, which aired in 1998. Only a moron would expect any kind of critical review of the current administration's policy at Fox News.

Given the large scale dominance of official sources in all Pentagon and White House reporting, the onus now largely falls upon educators and local civic bodies to bring the issue of the dangers of developing and using nuclear weapons back on the national agenda, with an eye on the facts regarding the dangers of both producing and using such weapons.

As any physicist will tell you, the explosion of a nuclear weapon, irrespective of its size, will create a radioactive area of a significant size such that a failure in human intelligence or the often repeated cycle of collateral damage will cause an exponentially larger casualty rate than a conventional weapon. Even a nuclear burrowing bunker buster would release lethal doses of radiation into the earth and the air. If a nuclear weapon were to explode near a crop field or a source of drinking water, the human tragedy would be all the more significant.

The idea of using nuclear weapons against its enemies is another means for the Bush administration to use a weapon of infinite terror against those whom Bush deems terrorists. Yet the unabashed recklessness with which this administration commits follies should give pause to most intelligent people when deciding whether weapons of such awesome and terrible destructive capacity should be in the hands of a president whose doctrine of foreign policy is based predominantly on preemptive wars.

Take a few minutes to examine some recent gaffs that led to civilian casualties in Iraq:

In May 2004 the U.S. military bombed people it believed were terrorists being smuggled in from Syria into Iraq. The victims claimed to have been celebrating a wedding. Among the victims was Nazar al-Khalid, a well-known Iraqi wedding singer who often traveled to Syria. If the military had used a "small" nuclear weapon to destroy smuggler routes, the radiation might have seeped into Syria thereby causing an international incident.

Similarly, in the first few days of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration dropped conventional bombs on a restaurant where Saddam Hussein was allegedly dining with his sons. The bombs killed Iraqi civilians, mostly Christians, a little known facts thanks largely due to the American media focusing purely on Saddam's DNA as their natural "out" from such a story. Again, the use of a "small" nuclear weapon in such a scenario would have killed many more Iraqi civilians, and condemned hundreds to a slow torturous death of radiation related sickness.

There are those, of course, who would argue that the American military or the president would never use such a nuclear weapon against civilians. Hiroshima and Nagasaki jump to my mind, but those of course are cities that were bombed in order to "save millions of American lives." That quote is the ready response most Americans have for standing by the nuking of two Japanese cities. And if you think such line of inquiry is limited to those with a limited education, examine this e-mail response from a college student:

"In a famous quote, a Japanese military leader (I'm sorry that I forgot his name) after the war was asked how he felt about the atomic bomb attacks. He said something to the effect of 'Do you think that if we had had a weapon like that we would have hesitated to use it?'"

Surely, many Americans may similarly believe, Osama bin Laden would not think twice before using a nuclear weapon on Americans, so why should we not use one on him first?

Primarily because the first-strike use of nuclear weapons is acknowledged by international law and, so the Republicans understand this, morality to be a heinous act of cowardice and evil. This understanding of the international standards still did not stop the United States and the Soviet Union to race into building thousands of such nuclear weapons, with the Soviet Union always trying to keep up, and thereby also prompting many little nations to build hundreds of such nuclear weapons and delivery systems in order to attain effective proven nuclear deterrence to assure Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD.

That was, of course, till Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush declared, in all seriousness, that a nuclear war was a "winnable war" for America. That comment led many in the Soviet Union and the rest of the civilized world to believe that America would launch a large scale nuclear attack on "communism" if it believed it could get away with it. It took years of diplomacy and public protests across the world to convince the Reagan-Bush team that they would not be able to avoid the global backlash for a "winnable" nuclear war.

And so here we are today, back to square one-and-a-half, with Reagan-era civil servants hissing into the president's ear, and George W. Bush telling us that the war on terrorism is a "winnable war" and it will involve the use of nuclear weapons. Bush once famously invited terrorists in Iraq to "bring it on." Then they brung it, and the president is still trying to declare victory and leave.

A nuclear challenge to terrorism is an extremely overblown and ill-advised maneuver. In the least, it will prompt borderline nuclear states, such as Iran, to build nuclear weapons, and it will cause existing nuclear states, such as China and North Korea, to accelerate production. And if an American nuclear weapon, even a "small" one, is used against Muslims, it will be extremely difficult to regulate the flow of nuclear technology and material out of the hands of Islamic radicals. This is primarily because such regulations rely heavily on the handlers of such technology and material to police themselves, as in Pakistan, and many of the handlers are moderate Muslims who have, so far, stayed away from participating in the war on and of terror.

Given this president's uncanny knack for bringing out the worst in the people he addresses at high noon, it would be prudent to examine his ability to load his six-shooters with nuclear weapons. Because if Bush builds it, they will come.