Posted on: Wednesday, March 27, 2002

EDITORIAL
The moral high ground and nuclear weapons

The genie is out of the bottle. No one can stuff it back in and ram the stopper home.

More than a half-century later, controversy endures over whether the United States might have defeated Japan in World War II without releasing the ghastly specter of nuclear weaponry.

But the Germans had already been working on it; the Soviets soon had it.

The Cold War escalated our nightmares from incinerated cities to nuclear winter. The U.S.-Soviet arms race gave us, along with mutually assured destruction, overkill — the capacity to end life on Earth.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came the shortlived hope that nuclear disarmament was now possible. But a situation in some ways even more dangerous has replaced the symmetrical standoff between the superpowers.

What had been an exclusive nuclear "club" of states that pledged to wield their nuclear weapons in a responsible manner — assuming, importantly, that sanity and nuclear weapons can really coexist at all — is suddenly open to anyone with sufficient money and determination. Penny-ante powers like Iraq, North Korea and even ad hoc terrorist organizations now seek their own counterbalance to Western ascendancy.

Adm. Dennis Blair, commander of U.S. Pacific forces with headquarters here at Camp Smith, told a gathering of Pacific Island leaders the other day at the East-West Center that the nuclear standoff between Pakistan and India is extremely volatile.

Radical organizations that want war between the two countries "could set off a spiral of events that result in nuclear conflict. That is the nightmare," said Blair.

He described the tightrope walked by American diplomats trying to improve relations with India while deepening the alliance with Pakistan in the war on terrorism. And he alluded to the sense of powerlessness of Washington, with or without its nuclear deterrent, to control this situation.

The response of the Bush administration to the new nuclear era is disquieting in itself. While it has properly and prudently prepared contingency plans for fitting response to a variety of possibilities in a variety of countries, it has also promoted some loose talk about developing "first strike" capabilities and a willingness to use them.

Work on preliminary designs for a new hydrogen bomb that could destroy targets possibly buried deep underground in places like Iraq, Iran and North Korea is clearly intended to take out an enemy's capabilities before he can use them. But development of such weapons can only command other nations to follow suit. To abandon our previous pledge not to resort to a first strike is to encourage development of first-strike capabilities worldwide.

As the last superpower, the United States must beware giving the impression that it intends to dominate the world through nuclear terror. Only by continuing to forswear nuclear first strikes can America maintain the moral high ground.