- KARACHI -- Robert McNamara,
who served as US secretary of defence under President John F Kennedy and
President Lyndon B Johnson from 1961 to 1968 and as president of the World
Bank from 1968 to 1981, and who is the author of several books including
"Blundering Into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear
Age" (1986) and "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam"
(1999), has characterised current US nuclear weapons policy as "immoral,
illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous."
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- Writing in the May/June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy,
an American bi-monthly journal, McNamara says in an article titled "Apocalypse
Soon": "It is time, well past time, in my view, for the United
States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy
tool...The risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch is unacceptably
high. Far from reducing these risks, the Bush administration has signaled
that it is committed to keeping the US nuclear arsenal as a mainstay of
its military power, a commitment that is simultaneously eroding the international
norms that have limited the spread of nuclear weapons and fissile materials
for 50 years."
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- McNamara, whose counsel as secretary of defence helped
the Kennedy administration avert nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile
Crisis of 1962, says: "Much of the current US nuclear policy has been
in place since before I was secretary of defence, and it has only grown
more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years."
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- During the seven years that McNamara served as secretary
of defence, under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, both US and Soviet understanding
of the political and military implications of the introduction of nuclear
weapons was evolving slowly. In the following thirteeen years, while president
of the World Bank, McNamara was unable to participate in the debate that
developed over how best to strengthen US security in a nuclear world, discussion
of trust bans, nuclear freezes, new weapons programmes, arms control agreements,
etc. In the years since leaving the World Bank, McNamara has done so through
publication of a series of a series of articles, often in association with
others, in Foreign Affairs (a journal published by the New York-based Council
on Foreign Relations) and the Atlantic Monthly, through lectures before
the Council on Foreign Relations and on American university campuses, and
through his book "Blundering Into Disaster".
-
- In his article in the May/June 2005 issue of Foreign
Policy (published to coincide with the opening of a month-long UN conference
in New York to review the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1969), McNamara
writes: "Today, the United States has deployed approximately 4,500
strategic, offensive warheads. Russia has roughly 3,800. The strategic
forces of Britain, France and China are considerably smaller, with 200-400
nuclear weapons in each state's arsenal. The new nuclear states of India
and Pakistan have fewer than 100 weapons each. North Korea now claims to
have developed nuclear weapons, and US intelligence agencies estimate that
Pyongyang has enough fissile material for 2-8 bombs."
-
- Intriguingly, McNamara makes no mention of Israel's nuclear
weapons, even though it has an arsenal of over 200 warheads including hydrogen
bombs. His failure to mention this fact cannot be an oversight. Which only
goes to show just how powerful is the influence of the Jewish lobby in
the US, making even the likes of McNamara tread warily when it comes to
saying anything that could be construed as criticism of Israel. When Syria
proposed a "Nuclear-Free" Middle East in January 2003, a few
weeks before the US invasion of Iraq, the silence in Washington was defeaning.
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- According to McNamara, the average US warhead has a destructive
power 20 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. "Of the 8,000 active or
operational US warheads, 2,000 are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched
on 15 minutes, warning," says McNamara, adding: "How are these
weapons to be used? The United States has never endorsed the policy of
no first use,, not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have
been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons, by the
decision of one person, the president, against either a nuclear or non-nuclear
enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so. For decades,
US nuclear forces have been sufficiently strong to absorb a first strike
and then inflict unacceptable, damage on an opponent. This has been and
(so long as we face a nuclear-armed, potential adversary) must continue
to be the foundation of our nuclear deterrent."
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- In McNamara's time as secretary of defence, the commander
of the US Strategic Air Command (SAC) carried with him a secure telephone,
no matter where he went, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a
year. The telephone of the commander, whose headquarters were in Omaha,
Nebraska (the base to which President George W Bush flew on board Air Force
One on September 11, 2001, in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade
Centre and the Pentagon), was linked to the underground command post of
the North American Defence Command, deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado,
and to the US president, wherever he happened to be. "The president
always had at hand nuclear release codes in the so-called football, a briefcase
carried for the president at all times by a US military officer,"
says McNamara.
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- According to McNamara, the SAC commander's orders were
to answer the telephone by no later than the end of the third ring. "If
it rang, and he was informed that a nuclear attack of enemy ballistic missiles
appeared to be underway, he was allowed 2 to 3 minutes to decide whether
the warning was valid (over the years, the United States has received many
false warnings), and if so, how the United States should respond,"
says McNamara. "He was then given approximately 10 minutes to determine
what to recommend, to locate and advise the president, permit the president
to discuss the situation with two or three close advisers (presumably the
secretary of defence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and
to receive the president's decision and pass it immediately, along with
the codes to the launch sites."
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- McNamara says: "The president had essentially two
options: He could decide to ride out the attack and defer until later any
decision to launch a retaliatory strike. Or, he could order an immediate
retaliatory strike, from a menu of options, thereby launching US weapons
that were targeted on the opponent's military-industrial assets. Our opponents
in Moscow presumably had and have similar arrangements."
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- This, in fact, was the doctrine of "Mutually Assured
Destruction", or MAD, an appropriate acronym for what can only be
regarded as a policy of total insanity, given the fact that the United
States and Russia possessed, and still possess, enough nuclear weapons
in their arsenals to wipe out the whole of humanity several times over.
Yet the Bush administration would have people believe that it is Iran's
fledgling nuclear programme (which Tehran insists is entirely peaceful
in nature and aimed at generating electricity from a nuclear power plant
it is building with Russian help) and North Korea's alleged two or three
nuclear weapons that represent the greatest threat to world peace.
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- In the months leading up to the US invasion of Iraq on
March 20, 2003, the Bush administration had repeatedly claimed that Iraq's
alleged "weapons of mass destruction" posed an "imminent
threat to the national security of the United States." As the whole
world knew even back then, however, and as even the Bush administration
has now been forced to admit, Iraq possessed no WMD. In July 2004 the US
formally announced that its search for Iraqi WMD had been abandoned. In
fact, the Bush administration knew all along that Iraqi had no WMD. All
the administration's claims about the so-called "Iraqi threat"
(claims aided and abetted by hawkish sections of the US media) were nothing
but lies aimed at giving the US an excuse to attack and occupy Iraq. Now,
judging from the noises coming out of Washington, it seems to be Iran's
turn.
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- Says McNamara: "The whole situation seems to be
so bizarre as to be beyond belief. On any given day, as we go about our
business, the president is prepared to make a decision within 20 minutes
that could launch one of the most devastating weapons in the world. To
declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust
requires 20 minutes deliberation by the president and his advisors. But
that is what we have lived with for 40 years. With very few changes, this
system remains largely intact, including the football,, the president's
constant companion."
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- http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/may2005-daily/14-05-2005/world/w8.htm
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