George Bush leads the US toward a policy of unilateral, pre-emptive counterproliferation warfighting strategy.
Abolish nuclear weapons
The Cold War may be over, but this does not mean nuclear weapons
have disappeared. Far from it: There are over 30,000 nuclear
weapons in the world, with more than a thousand of them ready to
launch at a moment's notice, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Over 400 reactors in warships and nuclear submarines are still
circlingthe globe. Some are rotting away on the bottom of the ocean
or in adistant port somewhere in Russia. Accidents such as the
Russiansubmarine, the Kursk, tragically sinking in the Barents Sea
can happenevery day, anywhere.
Over 2,000 nuclear weapons tests have left a legacy of global
andregional contamination. People living near the test sites have
sufferedfrom cancers, stillbirths, miscarriages and other health
effects -- and are still suffering today. Manyhad to leave their
hometown or island as it became too contaminated tolive there.
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The nuclear threat has quite literally scaled down in the last
twodecades. While the prospect of an all out exchange of arsenals
betweenRussia and the US has receded, the 15 kilotons of
destructionthat obliterated Hiroshima could today be accomplished
with a lunch-boxsized bomb. George Bush talks openly of developing
new "more useable"nuclear weapons. Even more alarmingly, the
administration continues toseek approval for a programme geared
toward designing more robust, more'usable' nuclear weapons.
The prospects of a nuclear weapon actuallybeing used are perhaps
greater today than during the cold war.
Today, the number of countries involved in active weapons
programsis increasing. A growing number of countries are lining up
to join thenuclear club, increasing the chance that a nuclear
catastrophe willhappen somewhere on the planet.
George Bush's war on Weapons of Mass Descruction had its
firstconcrete result when the number of countries in the world with
declarednuclear weapons increased to 8 from 7, when North Korea
announced thatit had built "enough nuclear weapons to deter a US
attack."
Nuclear brinkmanship is inevitable in a climate of
nuclearhypocrisy. Only when all countries pursue nuclear
disarmament in goodfaith can we begin putting the nuclear genie
back in the bottle bybanning the use and manufacture of the nuclear
materials at the heart of the bomb.
The only thing that will stop the threat is the voice of the
second superpower: world opinion.