More Vanunus are urgently needed. That is true not only in Israel but in every nuclear weapons state, declared and undeclared. Can anyone fail to recognize the value to world security of a heroic Pakistani, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian or North Korean Vanunu making comparable revelations?
And the world's need for such secret-telling is not limited to citizens of what nuclear weapons states presumptuously call rogue nations. Every nuclear weapons state has secret policies, aims, programs and plans that contradict its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the 1995 Declaration of Principles agreed to at the NPT Renewal Conference. Every official with knowledge of these violations could and should consider doing what Vanunu did.
That is what I should have done in the early '60s based on what I knew about the secret nuclear planning and practices of the United States when I consulted at the Defense Department, on loan from the Rand Corp., on problems of nuclear command and control. I drafted the Secretary of Defense Guidance to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the general nuclear war plans, and the extreme dangers of our practices and plan were apparent to me.
I now feel derelict for wrongfully keeping secret the documents in my safe revealing this catastrophically reckless posture. But I did not then have Vanunu's example to guide me.
When I finally did have an example in front of me -- that of young Americans who were choosing to go to prison rather than participate in what I too knew was a hopeless, immoral war -- I was inspired in 1971 to turn over a top- secret history of presidential lies about the war in Vietnam to 19 newspapers. I regret only that I didn't do it earlier, before the bombs started falling.
Vanunu should long since have been released from solitary and from prison, not because he has "suffered enough" but because what he did was the correct and courageous thing to do in the face of the foreseeable efforts to silence and punish him.
The outrageous and illegal restrictions proposed to be inflicted on him when he finally steps out of prison after 18 years should be widely protested and rejected, not only because they violate his fundamental human rights but because the world needs to hear this man's voice.
The cult and culture of secrecy in every nuclear weapons state have endangered humanity and continues to threaten its survival. Vanunu's challenge to that wrongful and dangerous secrecy must be joined worldwide.
