From rachel-replies@rachel.org Sun Jul  4 14:41:35 2004
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 09:12:31 -0400
From: Rachel News 
To: RACHEL-NEWS@LISTS.RACHEL.ORG
Subject: Rachel's #794: Fiery Hell, Pt. 3

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RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS #794
http://www.rachel.org
June 24, 2004

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FIERY HELL ON EARTH, Pt. 3

In this series, we are searching for answers to the question,
"Why is the U.S. failing to stop, and in some cases actually
promoting, the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide?" (See
Rachel's #792 and #793.)

Answers to this question will help us understand President
Bush's philosophy of environmental protection -- or perhaps the
philosophy of his core supporters in the Republican Party on
whom he is depending in the 2004 election.

President Bush has made it clear that he understands the threat
posed by nuclear weapons, materials and know-how in the wrong
hands. He has said, "We will not permit the world's most
dangerous regimes and terrorists to threaten us with the
world's most destructive weapons."[1]

This was not an isolated statement.  In two key White House
policy documents published in 2002, the Bush administration
concluded that, "The threat of weapons of mass destruction is
the highest priority for the United States and should be for
other countries."[2,3]

The President has spoken out strongly and repeatedly on the
matter and has even said that failure on this issue will be
judged "harshly" by history.

When the White House published its National Strategy to Combat
Weapons of Mass Destruction in Dec., 2002, the President said,
"The gravest danger facing the Nation lies at the crossroads of
radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared
that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence
indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United
States will not allow these efforts to succeed.... History will
judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to
act."[3]

Yet the evidence is overwhelming that the U.S. is failing to
act on this growing threat. (See Rachel's #792, #793.) Indeed,
the Bush administration is actively engaged in spreading
nuclear technology and know-how into the hands of
potentially-unstable nations.

On June 20, 2004, the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace published a 96-page report agreeing with the Bush
administration that, "Terrorist acquisition of nuclear weapons
poses the greatest single threat to the United States."[4, pg.
25].

However, the Carnegie report points out, "The [Bush]
administration has not put money or significant political
effort behind [its] proposals."[4, pg. 13]

According to the Carnegie report, the President's proposed
budget for 2005 actually reduces the funds available for U.S.
efforts to curb the spread of weapons-grade plutonium and
uranium world-wide, and reduces the U.S. financial contribution
to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) "whose
responsibilities have greatly increased while its budget has
stayed flat."[4, pg. 13]

Nuclear-armed terrorists are the No. 1 threat to the U.S., and
the No. 2 threat is nuclear-armed states like Pakistan and
North Korea. As the Carnegie report says, "National instability
or a radical change in government could lead to the collapse of
state control over weapons and nuclear materials and the
migration of nuclear scientists to other nations or to the
service of other groups."

However, instead of trying to keep nuclear technology and
know-how out of the hands of such states, the Bush
administration is actively encouraging U.S. corporations to
sell their nuclear hardware and know-how abroad. On a recent
trip to China, Vice-President Cheney was peddling Westinghouse
nuclear power plants, even though China has announced that it
intends to transfer nuclear technology to Pakistan.[5]

These contradictory facts are deeply perplexing.  I have been
reviewing the available literature on this subject for the past
two years, trying to answer the question, "Why is the Bush
administration promoting nuclear weapons, materials and
know-how world-wide?"

Naturally, all my answers are merely hypotheses because I have
no special knowledge of what motivates the President, the
Vice-President, their core supporters in the House and Senate,
and their advisors in the Pentagon. I only know what's in the
public record.

So let us begin. In the remainder of this series, I will
examine the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis #1: Simple incompetence and confusion among the
nation's defense agencies. Perhaps they actually want to curb
the spread of nuclear technologies but just can't manage the
task.

Hypothesis #2: Perfectly normal corporate profit goals combined
with the ever-pressing need for re-election campaign
contributions. Perhaps the administration is promoting nuclear
power to reward potential campaign contributors in the nuclear
business, such as Westinghouse, General Electric, Framatone
(formerly Babcock & Wilcox), Bechtel, Halliburton, Brown &
Root, and other large-scale construction firms that build
nuclear power plants and the infrastructure they require
(roads, power lines, special docks at seaports, fuel processing
plants, security apparatus and training, and so forth.)

Hypothesis #3: Nuclear power is needed now to prevent nations
and regions from "going solar." Because each nuclear power
plant requires an investment measured in billions of dollars,
and because nuclear power plants are dangerous, they require
(and thus maintain) the highly-centralized, top-down,
quasi-military social structure that modern transnational
corporations provide. The "military-industrial" complex that
President Eisenhower warned us about in 1961 is epitomized by
nuclear technologies.

Solar power on the other hand can be small-scale,
locally-controlled, definitely not dangerous, much less subject
to terrorist disruption,[6] and therefore much more compatible
with an open, democratic social structure that might, as time
passes, erode corporate control. Therefore, in a sense, solar
power is dangerous and even subversive because it could subvert
"business as usual."

Hypothesis #4: Just as nuclear power plants require and promote
a centralized, quasi-military, corporatized social structure,
so also does a world awash in weapons-grade uranium and
plutonium.

So long as a there is a thriving black market in weapons-grade
nuclear materials. then we can more easily justify a $450
billion annual military budget, a network of U.S. espionage
agencies active now in 80 countries,[7] and pre-emptive wars
such as the one now in Iraq (and others reportedly being
readied now by the Pentagon against Syria, Lebanon, Libya,
Iran, Somalia, and Sudan[8]).

Whether your job is military, civilian, or somewhere in
between, if you're in the business of fighting the nation's
perceived enemies, and your want your business to thrive, then
enemies armed with small nuclear weapons may be the best kind
of enemies to have. Everyone will support your work against
such enemies. They will even follow you into war against such
enemies.

Hypothesis #5: Now we enter the realm of realpolitik, the kind
of world that Henry Kissinger inhabits, where thinking the
unthinkable is routine.[9]

Is it possible that some people within the Bush administration,
(or among groups whom the Bush administration considers
essential to its electoral success in 2004), might imagine
benefits from a rogue nation or group detonating a small
nuclear weapon in Jerusalem or even New York?

Here are some crackpot speculations perhaps worth considering:

a) Maybe detonation of a small nuclear weapon would serve to
remind the current generation how dangerous nuclear technology
really is. A rogue nuclear detonation would quickly bring the
civilian nuclear power industry to an end. It might also spur
the international community to quickly sweep up the tons of
weapons-grade plutonium and enriched uranium lying about in
40-or-so nations.

b) A rogue nuclear detonation would almost certainly spell the
end of democracy as we know it. Major portions of the bill of
rights would probably be canceled within hours.

Recall that the Bush adminstration saw the mass murders on 9/11
as sufficient reason to scrap the legal doctrine of habeas
corpus which was formalized in English law in 1679 and was
embodied a century later in the U.S. Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court has "recognized the fact that `[t]he
writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for
safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless
state action.'[10]

A writ of habeas corpus is a judge's mandate to a prison
official ordering that an inmate be brought before the court so
the court can determine whether or not that person is
imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he or she should be
released from custody. Without habeas corpus, people can be
imprisoned forever without any recourse whatsoever. Even the
fact of their imprisonment can be kept secret. This is what the
Bush administration has said it aims to do at Guantanamo Bay
and perhaps at other quasi-military prisons the U.S. maintains
around the world.

Seeing the right of habeas corpus repealed in response to the
mass murders of 9/11, everyone has to be impressed by the
fragility of what seemed like the immutable underpinnings of
democracy and indeed civilization itself. The enemies of
democracy -- inside the U.S. and outside -- can see as well as
anyone that a nuclear detonation in New York would almost
surely end the American experiment in self-rule.

c) There is a growing movement in the U.S. to erase the barrier
that separates church and state, to replace our secular
government with a religious government.[11] We can see the
beginnings of such thinking in the Texas State Republican Party
Platform for 2004, which says, "The Republican Party of Texas
affirms that the United States of American is a Christian
nation." And: "The Party understands that the Ten Commandments
are the basis of our basic freedoms and the cornerstone of
Western legal tradition." And: "Our Party pledges to exert its
influence to restore the original intent of the First Amendment
of the United States Constitution and dispel the myth of the
separation of Church and State."[12]

By removing the Constitutional wall that separates church and
state, some people merely hope to get a free handout from
Washington for their religious group (the President's
"faith-based initiative" gave $1.1 billion of taxpayer funds to
religious organizations during 2003).[13]

Others have much larger goals, hoping to institute a fully
theocratic order in which their idea of Christian Biblical law
replaces our secular democracy, essentially repealing the
enlightment and returning the world to the 17th century.[11]

d) There is a different, and much larger, group of Christians
who say they believe that their personal salvation depends upon
the return of Christ to Earth and that this second coming of
Christ requires a specific series of events to unfold in the
Middle East, including the battle of Armageddon, which many
interpret to mean a nuclear World War III.

These believers in Armageddon theology include the Reverend
Billy Graham, the Reverend Pat Robertson, the singer Pat Boone,
the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Jr., Gary Bauer,
Republican strategist Ed McAteer, advice columnist Laura
Schlessinger, writer Hal Lindsey ("The Late, Great Planet
Earth"), the Reverend Tim LaHaye (co-author of the 11-volume
"Left Behind" series), House Majority Leader Tom Delay
(R-Tex.), U.S. Senator James N. Inhofe (R-Ok., Chairman of the
Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works), Attorney
General John Ashcroft, and many others in top leadership
positions within the Bush adminstration.

Author Grace Halsell -- herself a born-again Christian from
Texas -- toured the Holy Land in the Middle East twice with
followers of the Reverend Jerry Falwell. Halsell then wrote a
book about her experiences. In "Prophecy and Politics," which
she subtitled, "Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear
War," Halsell wrote, "I have heard Falwell preach on nuclear
Armageddon, and I saw his face turn radiant at the thought."
[14, pg. 197]
                                            --Peter Montague
[To be continued.]

====

[1] President Bush quoted in Dafna Linzer, "Report Faults U.S.
Action on Nuclear Proliferation," Washington Post June 21,
2004.

[2] The National Security Strategy of the United States of
America (Sept., 2002), available at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html

[3] National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction
(December, 2002), available at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/12/WMDStrategy.pdf

[4] George Perkovich and others, Universal Compliance; A
Strategy for Nuclear Security (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, June, 2004). Draft available
at http://www.ceip.org/strategy .

[5] H. Josef Hebert, "Cheney to shop Westinghouse nuke
technology to China," Salt Lake City (Utah) Tribune April 10,
2004.

[6 Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, Brittle Power; Energy
Strategy for National Security (Brown House Publishing:
Andoiver, Mass., 1982).

[7] Dan Balz and Bob Woodward, "Bush Awaits History's Judgment;
President's Scorecard Shows Much Left to Do," Washington Post
February 3, 2002, pg. A1.

[8] General Wesley R. Clark, "The Clark Critique," Newsweek
Sept. 29, 2003, pg. 31, which is an excerpt from Clark's book,
"Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire"
(Public Affairs, 2003; ISBN: 1586482777).

[9]  See the video, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, based on the
book of the same title by British journalist Christopher
Hitchens (Verso paperback, 2002; ISBN: 1859843980); for the
video, see http://www.thetrialsofhenrykissinger.com/trials.html

[10] Brown v. Vasquez, 952 F.2d 1164, 1166 (9th Cir. 1991),
cert. denied, 112 S.Ct. 1778 (1992).

[11] See, for example, Frederick Clarkson, "Theocratic
Dominionism Gains Influence," Public Eye Magazine Vol. 8, Nos.
1 and 2 (March and June, 1994). Available at
http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=400 . And see Joan
Bokaer, "The Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican
Party," available in text format (no pictures) at
http://www.rachel./org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=407 and in a 2
megabyte PDF file at
http://www.rachel./org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=407 or you can
find start reading the 19-page web document at
http://www.4religious-right.info/ .

[12] "2004 [Texas] State Republican Party Platform" available
at http://www.texasgop.org/library/platform.php

[13] Elisabeth Bumiller, "Preaching to the Choir, Bush
Encourages Religious Gathering," New York Times June 2, 2004,
pg. A17.

[14] Grace Halsell, Prophecy and Politics; Militant Evangelists
on the Road to Nuclear War (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill &
Co., 1986). ISBN 0-88208-210-8.

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RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 160
New Brunswick, N.J. 08903
Fax (732) 791-4603; E-mail: erf@rachel.org

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