A Nuclear Road of No Return

Building a new generation of battlefield nuclear weapons sets the stage for another round of the most dangerous arms race imaginable. What has been forgotten in all of the patriotic hoopla is that it is our country that pioneered the creation of weapons of mass destruction over the last half-century. And it was our dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, that sparked the arms race of the Cold War.

Faced with the reality that nuclear weapons are useful only for mass international suicide, every U.S. president since World War II has pursued a policy of nuclear arms control. Every administration, that is, until this one, which from its first days has made clear its inveterate hostility to arms control. It attacked the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and resurrected the corpse of the "Star Wars" nuclear defense program, even as Bush's first Nuclear Posture Review telegraphed the development of battlefield nuclear weapons and threatened their use against "rogue" nations.

"We're moving away from more than five decades of efforts to delegitimize the use of nuclear weapons," warned Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a dissenter on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Following our lead, why shouldn't India and Pakistan develop battlefield nuclear weapons? Or Beijing for use against Taiwan and vice versa? After getting China and most nations to accept a testing ban, why would this administration seek to resume testing?

The current preponderance of our military power, combined with our overweening, xenophobic fear of the rest of the world, has corrupted all rational thought. Sadly, no one will listen to the mayor of Hiroshima, who last month wrote Bush to warn that new U.S. nuclear weapons development represented "a frontal attack on the process of nuclear disarmament."

But why listen to someone from Hiroshima? What do those people know about weapons of mass destruction?