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[Big_Bird]

Welcome to the Nuclear Club!

By NORMAN SOLOMON

Moments after hearing about North Korea's nuclear test, I thought of Albert Einstein's statement that "there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world."

During the six decades since Einstein spoke, experience has shown that such understanding and insistence cannot be filtered through the grid of hypocrisy. Nuclear weapons can't be controlled by saying, in effect, "Do as we say, not as we do." By developing their own nuclear weaponry, one nation after another has replied to the nuclear-armed states: Whatever you say, we'll do as you've done.

In early summer, with some fanfare, officials in Washington announced the dismantling of the last W56 nuclear warhead -- a 1.2 megaton model from the 1960s. Self-congratulation was in the air, as a statement hailed "our firm commitment to reducing the size of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile to the lowest levels necessary for national security needs." That's the kind of soothing PR that we've been getting ever since the nuclear age began.

Right now, the U.S. government has upwards of 10,000 nuclear bombs and warheads in its arsenal. And -- as the Washington Post uncritically reported the same week as the announcement about the end of the W56 warhead -- Congress and the White House are resolutely moving ahead with plans for "a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons" under the rubric of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program: "The nation's two nuclear weapons design centers, the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, are competing to design the first RRW.... A second RRW design competition may provide an opportunity to the losing lab."

For more than 50 years, Washington has preached the global virtues of "peaceful" nuclear power reactors -- while denying their huge inherent dangers and their crucial role in proliferating nuclear weaponry. The denial meant that people and the environment would suffer all along the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to nuclear waste; and that the 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island would be followed by the continuing horrors of Chernobyl.

In recent decades, the denial has also spread nuclear weapons across the planet. Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea can thank the apostles of the nuclear-power gospel -- and the companion profiteers of nuclear exports -- for the technological pipeline that has funneled the capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

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[Richard Krainium]

Yea, welcome!

[Summer Wine]