Kudos a Carlos for the link to the recent declaration of Robert MacNamara on the need to seriously change the BushAdmin’s policy regarding the use of nuclear weapons. MacNamara’s statements are inline with the ten principles he set out earlier in the Fog of War. The difference is that he uses much more strident language that is critical of how the BushAdmin has continued a policy that assumes that nuclear weapons will be part of U.S. military forces for at least the next several decades.

According to MacNamara, the BushAdmin must discontinue such a policy because,

The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons carries a very high risk of nuclear catastrophe. There is no way to reduce the risk to acceptable levels, other than to first eliminate the hair-trigger alert policy and later to eliminate or nearly eliminate nuclear weapons. The United States should move immediately to institute these actions, in cooperation with Russia. 

MacNamara reasons that the our continued reliance on nuclear weapons to assert our military predominance will inevitably lead to further their proliferation. He says that the BushAdmin’s nuclear program, alongside its refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty(CTBT), will be viewed as a break from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) treaty that says to nations without nuclear weapon, “We, with the strongest conventional military force in the world, require nuclear weapons in perpetuity, but you, facing potentially well-armed opponents, are never to be allowed even one nuclear weapon.” And as more and more states develop nuclear weapons, it increases the probability they will fall into the hands of terrorists.

Furthermore, MacNamara endorses former Secretary of Defense Perry’s statement that he has “never been more fearful of a nuclear detonation than now.… There is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear strike on U.S. targets within a decade.” The heart of the problem is that we are not debating the merits of our nuclear weapons policies, considering their military utility as weapons, the risk of accidental use, moral considerations, and how current policies impact the proliferation of weapons. MacNamara believes that if we were to hold such a debate that we would conclude that we must move promptly toward the elimination—or near elimination—of all nuclear weapons.

It seems that the US’s pride may lead to the near destruction of human life on earth. It’s a good thing we Christians know that the rapture is bound to happen sometime prior to such destruction….er, not!

Please pass along to others the seriousness of this problem. We are fallible in all our forms of governance and that is why we can’t trust ourselves to use easily nuclear weapons because the stakes are too high in terms of lives and damage to the earth.

dlw