In the aftermath of the imposition of emergency in Pakistan, there’s a sense of acute anxiety about what’s happening there and its implications for U.S. security. Fears that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons could fall into extremists’ hands, that anti-U.S. sentiments could ramp up, that there could be a regime change that leaves fundamentalists in power, and that there could be other fallout of instability, are being fanned by the media.
Over the past six decades, the United States has used its nuclear arsenal in five often inter-related ways. The first was, obviously, battlefield use, with the “battlefield” writ large to include the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The long -held consensus among scholars has been that these first atomic bombings were not necessary to end the war against Japan, and that they were designed to serve a second function of the U.S. nuclear arsenal: dictating the parameters of the global (dis)order by implicitly terrorizing U.S. enemies and allies (“vassal states” in the words of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.) The third function, first practiced by Harry Truman during the 1946 crisis over Azerbaijan in northern Iran and relied on repeatedly in U.S. wars in Asia and the Middle East, as well as during crises over Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis, has been to threaten opponents with first strike nuclear attacks in order to terrorize them into negotiating on terms acceptable to the United States or, as in the Bush wars against Iraq, to ensure that desperate governments do not defend themselves with chemical or biological weapons. Once the Soviet Union joined the nuclear club, the U.S. arsenal began to play a fourth role, making U.S. conventional forces, in the words of former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, “meaningful instruments of military and political power.” As Noam Chomsky explains, Brown was saying that implicit and explicit U.S. nuclear threats were repeatedly used to intimidate those who might consider intervening militarily to assist those we are determined to attack.
In his 2005 inaugural address, President George W. Bush declared that the United States would support
democratic movements around the world and work to end tyranny. Furthermore, he pledged to those struggling
for freedom that the United States would "not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors." Despite
these promises, the Bush administration—with the apparent acquiescence of the Democratic-controlled
Congress—has instead decided to continue U.S. support for the dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf,
Pakistan’s president.
This past Wednesday, I was among a group of American religious leaders and scholars who met with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York. In what was billed as an inter-faith dialogue, we frankly shared our strong opposition to certain Iranian government policies and provocative statements made by the Iranian president. At the same time, we avoided the insulting language employed by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger before a public audience two days earlier.
With the Bush administration continuing to threaten Iran, what do to has become a hot topic for the presidential candidates. As the American presidential race moves forward, the topic of Iran will likely remain a fixture in an election dominated by issues of national security and foreign policy.
Some said Kim Jong Il was crazy. Others declared that he was canny. When the North Korean leader pushed his country through the door of the nuclear club in October 2006 with the explosion of a nuclear device of unknown size and technical capability, he certainly shook up the international community. Observers feared that the explosion would trigger a new arms race in East Asia. Japan could turn its plutonium stockpile and nuclear know-how into an arsenal in as little as six months. South Korea and Taiwan would follow suit, and China would enlarge its rather small supply of strategic weaponry. The regime established by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in the late 1960s, which discouraged but didn’t entirely prevent new entrants to the nuclear club, would be dead—and Kim Jong Il’s fingerprints would be all over the murder weapon.
President George W. Bush’s address before the United Nations General Assembly on September 19 appeared to be designed for the domestic U.S. audience. Indeed, few of the foreign delegations or international journalists present could take seriously his rhetoric regarding the promotion of democracy in the Middle East, given the reality of U.S. policy in the region.
Headline news about the threat of nuclear terrorism and the concerns about the nuclear capabilities and ambitions of Iran and North Korea regimes has led some Washington policy makers and pundits to conclude that the nuclear nonproliferation system has failed. A new strategy, they say, must be developed to replace it, or, perhaps, we must even accept that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable.
Daryl Kimball contends that I and my former boss, Ted Galen Carpenter (vice president of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute), are "like the Bush policy team" because we advanced "the proposition that aggressive and erratic regimes with nuclear weapons are a threat to their neighbors, while nuclear arsenals in the hands of stable, democratic, U.S. allies are not."