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Nuclear Weapons Ban? What Needs to be Banned Is U.S. Arrogance
Johnstone, Diana
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/16/nuclear-weapons-ban-what-needs-to-be-banned-is-u-s-arrogance/Date Written: 2017-06-16 Publisher: Counterpunch Year Published: 2017 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX21085 Nuclear disarmament will be possible only when leaders in Washington recognize that other peoples also have a right and a will to live. Abstract: - Excerpt: The result of one high-level study went like this: "the general consensus has been that while a nuclear exchange would leave the U.S. in a seriously damaged condition, with many millions of casualties and little immediate war supporting capability, the U.S. would continue to exist as an organized and viable nation, and ultimately would prevail, whereas the USSR would not." Twenty year later, my father commented: "This basic situation has not changed. Nuclear weapons are still there and analysts are still analyzing how to use them." And still forty years after that, the basic situation has not changed, except possibly for the worse. What is worse is not only the arsenal, which now aims at achieving such accuracy and underground penetration that it could wipe out an adversary's command structure before it realizes what has happened. What is really much worse is the mentality that goes with those pretensions, notably the rise of a power-hungry clique called the "neoconservatives" that has in the past thirty years won official Washington over to its ambitions of US global supremacy. There is no longer an ideological enemy. There is just somebody else there who feels equally at home on this planet. Subject Headings |