“Uncontroversial” Mass Destruction
“There are two sets of scenarios in which a US president might order a nuclear strike. The first is relatively straightforward and uncontroversial: launching a retaliatory attack after or during an enemy nuclear attack.”
Richard Betts and Matthew Waxman, who wrote this sentence in Foreign Policy magazine, ignore military, scientific and humanitarian exposés, reports and confessions that have unified most of the world against any and all use of nuclear weapons. After decades of well-documented analysis of their effects, the bland assertion that war with nuclear weapons would be “uncontroversial” betrays ignorance of the literature or the deliberate use of disinformation, or both.
International stigmatization of the Bomb (outside nuclear weapons states) reached an extraordinary milestone last July 7 when the UN adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—the first legally binding international agreement to prohibit nuclear weapons, with the goal of leading to their total elimination. With painstakingly research, the International Committee of the Red Cross was instrumental in informing the Ban Treaty negotiators that no state or international body could ever adequately address the inevitable, irreversible and catastrophic health effects of even a limited nuclear attack.
Betts and Waxman today sound much like presidential advisor and Cold War hawk Paul Nitze, whose 1956 article “Atoms, Strategy & Policy” in the same magazine considered “massive retaliation” versus “graduated deterrence.” Dr. Nitze wrote then: “The main point at issue between the two concepts is the reliance which should be placed upon the capacity to bomb centers of population and industry with nuclear weapons.”
Dr. Nitze, a life-long proponent of nuclear weapons, stunningly reversed himself in 1999 by completely rejecting US nuclear war policy. In a New York Times op/ed titled “A Threat Mostly to Ourselves” Nitze wrote, “I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them … adds nothing to our security. I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us.”
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