Jeff Sallot

Nuclear disarmament is back on the international agenda where it belongs, thanks to the efforts of U.S. President Barack Obama who is determined to earn the Nobel Peace Prize he’s already received. Obama understands that nuclear warheads are a threat to that most fundamental of human rights, the right to live. Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate killers, terror weapons.

Nukes kill not just enemy soldiers, but the innocent as well. Many old people, young mothers, little children and thousands of other non-combatants perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the two times nuclear bombs were ever used; by the United States, to end World War Two in 1945.

The human race survived decades of Cold War because of a combination of fear, restraint, occasional statesmanship and a lot of blind luck.

Even so, we paid a heavy price.

As American historian Garry Wills reminds us in his new book, Bomb Power, the terrible force of nuclear weapons and the secrecy surrounding their development and deployment had other sad consequences. Cold War imperatives — real and imagined — brought us the national security state and deeply eroded our democratic rights.

Wills, a prominent U.S. Catholic writer and intellectual of the first order, says the bomb created an “anxiety of continuing crisis, so that society was pervasively militarized” and power was centralized in the White House.

An unaccountable executive abused its power. Under George W. Bush’s administration U.S. citizens were wiretapped without judicial warrants, suspects were detained without legal counsel, a form of global kidnapping called “rendition” became common, and American officials tortured prisoners and called it “enhanced interrogation.”

And when Bush and other presidents could no longer hide those abuses behind the cloak of national security they tried to justify them.

Human rights became Cold War “collateral damage.”

Wills, a meticulous historian, says the erosion began with the top secret Manhattan Project, the frenzied, no-holds-barred effort to invent the first atomic bomb in the early 1940s.

But the excessive secrecy and abuses of rights pale in comparison to the existential threat posed by nukes themselves.
President Obama recognizes that the nuclear threat did not disappear when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

No, not by a long shot. Instead:

• We have a nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan, political rivals that are locked in a hotly contested border dispute.
• Iran is challenging Israel’s nuclear weapons monopoly in the Middle East.
• North Korea’s nukes now threaten South Korea, Japan and other neighbours.

But these are potential threats coming from world capitals and governments. The political elites in these countries aren’t particularly suicidal. We know where they live.

The bigger threat is from terrorist gangs with no fixed address. Al-Qaida is a death cult that has not yet run out of recruits willing to become suicide bombers.

As Obama says, “the single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term and long-term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon. This is something that could change the security landscape in this country and around the world for years to come.”

On the eve of a recent summit meeting to discuss locking down nuclear weapons material, Obama said “we know that organizations like al-Qaida are in the process of trying to secure nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, and would have no compunction at using them.” A terrorist threat to detonate a nuclear weapon in a major city changes everything for the U.S. and it friends and allies, Canada included.

Many thoughtful people in security agencies, foreign and defence ministries and diplomatic posts around the world ask themselves what any U.S. president might do when confronted with a choice between a nuke going off at home or abandoning a long-held foreign policy position. Would a U.S. president, for example, be willing to risk the destruction of Chicago to defend the interests of Israel?

The nuclear terror threat need not be slam-dunk real, but simply credible. What would you do if your military chiefs told you, “Mr. President, there’s a fifty-fifth chance al-Qaida is bluffing and they can’t really blow up a U.S. city if you don’t change your Middle East Policy”? Your odds are better playing Russian Roulette.
This horrible scenario is exactly what Obama is getting at when he warns about terrorists with nukes changing the security landscape of the planet.

We may be near that point already. Consider the case of A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist, acclaimed as a national hero at home, who has confessed to running an international nuclear proliferation ring. Is there another Dr. Khan out there? The previous George W. Bush U.S. let the Pakistani government off lightly in the Khan affair. Obama is determined to prevent any similar dangerous caper on his watch. He’s made a good start by signing a new strategic nuclear weapons reduction treaty with the Russians. He convened a nuclear non-proliferation summit meeting of 47 countries in Washington. He’s reminded the American people that the eventual elimination of all of the world’s nukes is his objective.

In fact, eliminating all nuclear weapons — every last one in the world — has been official U.S. policy under successive administrations, Republicans and Democrats alike, since the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1968.

This isn’t radical stuff Obama is talking about. It’s just sanity.

Jeff Sallot joined the faculty of the Carleton University School of Journalism and Communication 2007 after a long reporting career at The Globe and Mail.  He’s been the Globe’s bureau chief in Moscow, Ottawa and Edmonton, the lead political correspondent for the Globe’s website during federal elections, and has reported from every corner of Canada, and from more than 30 foreign countries.