When good countries have bad weapons, or is it vice-versa?

Ira Chernus, in a piece off the CommonDreams website, makes the essential point. During the Cold War, we had decades of "arms control" talks, largely between the two superpowers -- with the emphasis upon superpower control and regulation of the arms race, not disarmament itself. Of course, in our minds, we always were the good country with the good weapons of mass destruction (wmd). Unfortunately, in a world of proliferating weapons of mass destruction of every sort, this has now become the Bush principle for global armament and disarmament.

The are-you-with-us-or-against-us question -- for this administration -- is: are you a good guy with good wmd, or a bad guy with bad wmd. We're ready to take the bad guys out by force and support the good guys in their proliferating efforts as long as they remain on the good side of our imperial urges. So, as Chernus says, John Bolton, recently in Israel sorting out the next set of countries we plan to de-proliferate, has become the Undersecretary of State for (Bad) Arms Control.

But that's a dicey thought, even by this administration's standards. After all, these days you increasingly need a scorecard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times columnist, makes the point simply and cleverly enough in "A Tip on Iraq From Those Who Walked That Road," commenting, "The alliances on 'Survivor' have more stability and logic than those currently held by the United States. We need a weekly two-hour special to keep us in the know." )

Right now, the administration's deproliferation policies have mainly panicked smaller powers like North Korea into rushing to create nuclear holsters and atomic six-guns for that prospective shoot out on Main Street -- and, of course, they in turn are panicking good guys and bad guys alike: Japan, Taiwan, Iran and so on. But, as James Carroll makes clear in his latest Boston Globe column, we've taken our eyes off the two other great nuclear powers -- Russia and China (though its arsenal is still modest indeed) -- who, it seems, are beginning to follow us down the path that leads to what Chernus calls a "world of duct tape and plastic sheeting."

Yet more centrally, as an article in the Guardian based on leaked Pentagon documents indicates, this administration is unbelievably hot to trot in a nuclear world. Next August there is to be a secret meeting to prepare the way for whole new generations of nuclear weapons to be securely fastened in proliferating American holsters and readied for use in a widening range of circumstances.

The madness of all this can hardly be grasped, especially since any move toward, or dream of, total dominance based on such weapons just manages to drop ever more information into the world about how to make such weapons ever more cheaply and efficiently. And, as many proliferation wars as we care to fight, we can't deproliferate brains, which is where the real knowledge that could turn this world into rubble remains alive and well. Tom

http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=437

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