North Korea’s declaration that it possesses nuclear weapons should be a wake-up call for all Americans. How can the Bush administration expect other countries to abandon their nuclear aspirations when they have condoned, and are currently participating in,
nuclear proliferation?
When the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, publicly confessed to passing nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya last year, the Bush administration did next to nothing about it. Why? Because Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf — who knew about the whole thing according to Khan, an accusation that Musharraf denies — was our partner in the war on terror. When you have friends like these …
President Bush appears to be doing everything in his power to start a second nuclear arms race. Eerily, this week a test of the national missile defense shield failed for the third straight time in two years, according to the Los Angeles Times. Furthermore, the administration is pushing for additional research into less devastating, so-called “usable”
nuclear weapons.
This has the effect of pushing other countries into developing their own usable nukes in order to even the nuclear playing field. As the New York Times editorial board wrote on
Feb. 10, “America’s nuclear creativity should be focused on convincing nations like Iran and North Korea that nuclear weapons will not enhance their own security, not on setting a perverse contrary example.”
From backing out of the Kyoto Protocol — which took effect Wednesday and was ratified by 140 countries — to refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, to advancing a policy of preemptive war, the diplomacy-phobic Bush administration has done little except give rogue nations a giant excuse for their misbehavior. On the global stage, America acts as if international norms should apply to everyone but Americans. We have a “do as we say, not as we do” mentality; this arrogance has earned our government near universal hatred throughout the world. When President Bush proclaims, “Iran with a nuclear weapon would be a very destabilizing force in the world,” his words carry the stench of hypocrisy. Do American nukes, and our new breed of so-called usable nukes, have a stabilizing force?
If we really want to pursue a “Son of Star Wars” program, then we should do it multilaterally and transparently, so that everyone could be protected by the missile shield. We also need to double the international inspection effort of the International Atomic Energy Agency and make penalties for violations much more severe, as U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called for at Sunday’s security conference in Germany.
But most of all, the U.S. has to stop its own nuclear proliferation by abandoning research and development on usable nuclear weapons. In addition, we must work with other nations to reduce existing arsenals and account for and protect all nuclear stocks to ensure that one of those weapons doesn’t fall into the hands of a terrorist group like al-Qaida.
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