Irish interviewing Guantanamo men

The Irish government is talking to the US authorities about resettling two Guantanamo Bay Uzbek detainees.
There have been reports that officials will travel to the detention centre this week to interview the men.
The government had said it was willing to take some detainees, who cannot return home.
Amnesty International in Ireland has been running a campaign for Uzbek national Oybek Jamoldinivich Jabbarov to be allowed to come to Ireland.
He has been cleared for release, but cannot return to Uzbekistan for fear of torture and persecution.
It is understood that one of the men to be interviewed this week is Mr Jabbarov.
His lawyer, Michael Mone, told a US congressional committee hearing last year that Mr Jabbarov was living with his elderly mother and pregnant wife as refugees in northern Afghanistan when he was captured in 2001 and later transferred to the detention centre on Cuba.
The Uzbek had not been involved in fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance and was most likely handed over for a bounty, he said.
In June, Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheal Martin said they had told US authorities Ireland would accept two detainees to help close the detention facility, and two Uzbek nationals had been identified by the US.
"There is ongoing contact between the Irish authorities and the US authorities in relation to detainees from Guantanamo," a spokesman for the Department of Justice said.
Commissions
If admitted the men will probably be given leave to remain status.
Amnesty International said that Mr Jabbarov's wife and child were in a refugee camp in Pakistan and that he would be able to apply for them to join him.
US President Barak Obama has said Guantanamo Bay prison will close by 22 January 2010.
However, there are still a number of problems - what to do with the remaining detainees being the biggest.
Fewer than 20 out of about 245 inmates have been transferred from the detention centre in the six months since Mr Obama signed an order to close it within a year, the Associated Press news agency has reported.
More than 50 inmates have been cleared for transfer overseas. Mr Obama has said others will be tried by modified military commissions or in US courts.
But some cannot be returned to their home countries because of concern they will be tortured - and finding countries prepared to take them has proved difficult.
There is also the question of those who cannot be prosecuted under existing legal structures, yet who are deemed too dangerous for release.
The Guantanamo Bay detention centre was set up in January 2002 to hold suspects deemed to be "enemy combatants".

condemned the killing in Chechnya

Rights groups on Thursday condemned the killing in Chechnya of prominent human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, who has long documented abuses by government-backed militias there.
The killing has drawn attention to a worrying trend in which critics of Kremlin-installed Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov have been harassed or murdered. Human rights groups have blamed Mr. Kadyrov and his followers for abusing innocent civilians in their counterinsurgency campaign against Islamic militants. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed "outrage" and called for an inquiry, reports the BBC.
Ms. Estemirova was abducted Wednesday as she left her home in Grozny, Chechyna's capital, the BBC report adds. Her body was later found with gunshot wounds in neighboring Ingushetia. (Click here for a map of the region.)
Ms Estemirova ... had been gathering evidence - for the Russian human rights organization, Memorial - of a campaign of house-burnings by government-backed militiamen.
She was known to be a fierce political opponent of Chechnya's government.
Reuters reported that suspicion for the killing has quickly fallen on the Chechen president. Kadyrov was put in place by Vladimir Putin and has ruled restive Chechnya with an iron grip.
Memorial's chairman Oleg Orlov pointed the blame at ... Kadyrov, a former rebel turned Kremlin loyalist.
"I know, I am sure of it, who is guilty for the murder of Natalia.... Ramzan already threatened Natalia, insulted her, considered her a personal enemy."
The Guardian's Tom Parfit wrote a personal recollection of Estemirova, noting she was the latest of several critics of Kremlin policies in Chechnya who have been brutally silenced.
Kadyrov, a ... former rebel who came over to Russia's side and took power in 2007, is notorious for controlling thousands of armed devotees known as the "kadyrovtsy", who are now supposedly absorbed into official force structures. He brooks no dissent in his republic, and the kadyrovtsy have repeatedly been accused of torture, kidnappings and extra-judicial killings.
One person who wrote about their excesses was the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya (who was assassinated in 2006). Another who investigated abuses was the human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov (shot twice in the back of the head in central Moscow in January).
A third detractor, who told reporters that Kadyrov personally tortured him, was a former member of the president's bodyguard, Umar Israilov (shot dead in Vienna in January). A fourth, and Kadyrov's most vocal critic inside Chechnya, was Estemirova.
Human Rights Watch said that the murders of government opponents in Chechnya is a troubling trend, according to Reuters
"It seems to be open season on anyone trying to highlight the appalling human rights abuses in Chechnya... Ensuring her murder does not go unpunished would help to break the vicious cycle of abuse and impunity in Chechnya," said HRW's director Kenneth Roth.
In a report released last month, Human Rights Watch documented a pattern of house-burnings carried out by Chechen law enforcement against the families of alleged terrorists
"Russia has said its 'counterterrorism operation' in Chechnya is over, but human rights violations there certainly aren't," said Tanya Lokshina, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Russia office. "Burning down peoples' homes for the alleged sins of their families is a criminal tactic, and there is no reason why the government can't put a stop to it and hold the perpetrators accountable."

Uighurs rioting

ArayaHuman Rights Organization

منظمة الراية لحقوق الانسان

Arayahro@yahoo.ie

Uighurs rioting
Will China stop the nonsense and rhetoric saying: the crowds were stirred up by U.S.-exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer and her overseas followers.
Will they pay attention to human rights in china and give the Uighurs their rights without delay.
It is shameful of the Chinese administration when such hate crimes happen. Will they make sure the victims receive proper help and protection?
Chinese officials should never have stopped people praying like they did on Friday. This is similar to the policy of the old communist China which can only escalate ethnic tension.
Araya human rights organization urges China:
To give the Uighurs their rights
To protect the Uighurs .
To compensate all the victims of this outrage.

Administration

Hate Murder in German court

ArayaHuman Rights Organization

منظمة الراية لحقوق الانسان

Arayahro@yahoo.ie

Hate Murder in German court
A German man stabbed an Egyptian woman in a German court. When her husband attempted to rescue her, the security guard shot him in the leg. The woman was stabbed 18 times.
This tragedy happened in front of court personnel. Although racist attacks usually happen in the dark, away from police and courts, but in this incident the event happened in broad daylight in front of the legal team.
Our concern as a human rights organization: How come a person enters the courts with a weapon such as a knife? Don’t the courts have scanning machines? And if so was it working or not? And did the security officer allowed the knife to go through? Will justice take place? Will the government of Germany introduce a system by which it will phase out hate crimes between native and ethnic minorities in Germany, be it Muslims or others?
We request the government of Germany to furnish all facts, and to have a fair public trial, and proper compensation for the victim's family, and to make sure that such hate attacks do not happen again.
Dr Marwa Al-Sherbini, the victim, had the right to the same security as any person living on German soil. It is important that the legal rights of ethnic minorities and vulnerable groups are well respected in Germany.
Administration

PUBLIC DEBATE OBAMA’S AFGHAN WAR

PUBLIC DEBATE OBAMA’S AFGHAN WAR: Should foreign troops withdraw?Date: Wed 15 July 2009 7pmVenue: Davenport Hotel, Merrion Square, DublinSpeakers: * Robert Faucher (Chargé d'Affaires, US Embassy), * Jonathan Neale (US Author), * Sahar Saba (Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan).Chairman: Deaglán de Bréadún.Background Information * Why has Obama declared Afghanistan "the good war?" * Why are so many Western troops, including Irish military, involved in this war? * Why is the anti-war movement calling for all troops to be withdrawn?Afghanistan is descending into a hell-hole of chaos, corruption, crime and death. Estimates of civilian deaths caused by the 2001 invasion vary from 6,300 to 23,600. In May this year, U.S. planes dropped 2,000-pound bombs on three mud-brick villages in Western Afghanistan, killing up to 140 people. Over 1100 coalition soldiers have also been killed.The effects of the occupation have swelled support for the Taliban. The war is escalating and has spilled over into neighbouring Pakistan where attacks by US drone planes and the US backed Pakistani army assault on villages in the Swat Valley has left hundreds dead. and, Trócaire says that up to two million people have been displaced.Western forces are rowing ever further in behind the invasion. U.S. troop reinforcements, some 30,000 soldiers are beginning to arrive in southern Afghanistan. added to the 32,000 already there. The White House also wants to give Pakistan nearly $1.5 billion a year development aid and $400 million in fresh military assistance.Europe is deeply involved. ISAF troops (International Security Assistance Force) working under an expanded NATO command number 61,000 from 42 different countries, including at least ten officers from Ireland. Since October 2006 This is truly a war waged by western powers against a small poor country that has the misfortune to have a prized strategic position.Yet the west’s war is not popular with Afghanis. Opinion polls show Afghan confidence in the U.S. and the Afghan government plummeting, with now only 32% - down from 68% in 2005 - supporting the US performance. Yet this is the war that Obama wants to make his own. The stakes are very high but what is the war all about? Representatives from both the US Embassy (confirmed) and the Irish Dept. of Foreign Affairs have been invited to debate American and Afghani anti war activists. Come along and find out about this horrific situation.======================================================================To set-up a standing order with the Irish-Anti War Movement please go to the following link http://www.irishantiwar.org/files/standing-order-form.doc fill in the form and post to the Irish Anti-War Movement P.O. Box 9260 Dublin 1.To unsubscribe from this mailing list send a message to http://ie.mc271.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=info@irishantiwar.org with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line.If you have subscribed using the button on the web site you can unsubscirbe this way as well.To contact the webmaster send an email to http://ie.mc271.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=webmaster@irishantiwar.org or ring +353 0 878289243Irish Anti-War MovementTel (fixed) 353 (0) 1 8727912, Tel (mobile) 353 (0) 87 6329511 Postal Address Irish Anti-War MovementPO Box 9260Dublin 1

Real criminals do scape justice

McNamara: From the Tokyo Firestorm to the World Bank

Robert McNamara, who died yesterday, July 6, served as Kennedy’s , then as Johnson’s defense secretary. He contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their lands and death of many millions more round the world.
Just as George Kennan, one of the architects of the Cold War, helped bolt together the ramshackle scaffolding of bogus claims that provided the rationalization for Harry Truman’s great “arms scare” in 1948, launching the postwar arms race, McNamara tugged his forelock and said “Aye, aye, Sir” when Kennedy, campaigning against Nxon in the late 1950s attacked the Eisenhower/Nixon administration for having allowed a “missile gap” to develop that had now delivered America naked and helpless into the grip of the Soviet Union.
This was the biggest lie in the history of threat inflation and remains so to this day. At the moment when Kennedy, McNamara at his elbow, was flaying the Eisenhower administration for the infamous “gap”, the U.S. government from its spy planes that the Soviet Union had precisely one missile silo with an untested missile in it. The Russians knew that the US knew this, because they were fully primed about about the U-2 spy-plane overflights, most dramatically when U-2 pilot Gary Powers crashed near Sverdlovsk and told all to his captors
So when President Kennedy and Defense Secretary McNamara, took power in 1961, became privy to all intelligence from the spy flights, and announced that the U.S. was going to build 1000 ICBMs the Russians concluded that the US planned to wipe out the Soviet Union and immediately began a missile-building program of their own. So McNamara played a crucial, enabling role in the arms race in nuclear missiles. Before the “missile gap” it has been a “bomber race”.
It was entirely appropriate and logical that he began his services to the military working in Japan as a civilian analyst for Curt LeMay, the psychopathic Air Force general who ordered the raid that produced the Tokyo firestorm and who went on to become head of the Strategic Air Command and who boasted to Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis that his missiles and B-52s were ready, willing and able to reduce the Soviet Union to a “smoldering, irradiated ruin in three hours”, a deed he was eager to accomplish.
LeMay was expert in guiding bright young systems analysts like McNamara into giving him the ex post facto intellectual rationales for enterprises on which he had long since set his mind. McNamara was an early member of the “defense intellectuals”, including Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter and Herman Kahn, who developed the whole argot of “controlled escalation”, “nuclear exchanges” and “mutual assured destruction” that kept the nuclear weapons plants, aerospace factories and nuclear labs at Los Alamos and Livermore and Oak Ridge humming along, decade after decade. McNamara liked to claim later, as he did to Errol Morris, that it was he who advised LeMay to send in his planes at lower altitude, the better to incinerate Japanese cities, but the historical record does not give him this dignity. He was a small player in LeMay’s murderous game.
He faded comfortably away. The last time we saw him vividly was in 2004 as the star of Morris's wildly over-praised, documentary The Fog of War, talking comfortably about the millions of people he's helped to kill.
Time and again, McNamara got away with it in that film, cowering in the shadow of baroque monsters like LeMay or LBJ, choking up about his choice of Kennedy's gravesite in Arlington, sniffling at the memory of Johnson giving him the Medal of Freedom, spouting nonsense about how Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam, muffling himself in the ever- useful camouflage of the "fog of war."
Now, the "fog of war" is a tag usually attributed to von Clausewitz, though the great German philosopher and theorist of war never actually used the phrase. Eugenia Kiesling argued a couple of years ago in Military Review that the idea of fog--unreliable information--wasn't a central preoccupation of Clausewitz. "Eliminating fog", Kiesling wrote, "gives us a clearer and more useful understanding of Clausewitz's friction. It restores uncertainty and the intangible stresses of military command to their rightful centrality in 'On War'. It allows us to replace the simplistic message that war intelligence is important with the reminder that Clausewitz constantly emphasizes moral forces in war."
As presented by McNamara, through Morris, "the fog of war" usefully deflects attention from clear and unpleasant facts entirely unobscured by fog. Roberta Wohlstetter was a pioneer in this fogging technique back in the 1950s with her heavily subsidized Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, which deployed the idea of distracting "noise" as the phenomenon that prevented US commanders, ultimately Roosevelt, from comprehending the information that the Japanese were about to launch a surprise attack. Wohlstetterian "noise" thus obscured the fact that FDR wanted a Japanese provocation, knew the attack was coming, though not probably not its scale and destructiveness.
When McNamara looked back down memory lane there were no real shadows, just the sunlight of moral self-satisfaction: "I don't fault Truman for dropping the bomb"; "I never saw Kennedy more shocked" (after the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem); "never would I have authorized an illegal action" (after the Tonkin Gulf fakery); "I'm very proud of my accomplishments and I'm very sorry I made errors" (his life). Slabs of instructive history, like “the missile gap”, were entirely missing from Morris's film. In his later years he offered homilies about the menace of nuclear Armageddon, just like Kennan. It was cost-free for both men to say to say such things, grazing peacefully on the tranquil mountain pastures of their senior years. Why did they not encourage weapons designers in Los Alamos to mutiny, to resign? Or say that the atom spies in Los Alamos in the 1940s were right to try to level nuclear terror to some sort of balance? Why did they not extol the Berrigans and their comrades who served or are serving decades in prison for physically attacking nuclear missiles, beating the decks of the Sea Wolf nuclear submarine with their hammers.
It’s true that when he was head of the Ford Division of the Ford Motor Company in the mid- 1950s, McNamara did push for safety options--seat belts and padded instrument panels. Ford dealer brochures for the '56 models featured photos of how Ford and GM models fared in actual crashes, to GM's disadvantage. But as Ralph Nader describes it, in December, 1955, a top GM executive called Ford's vice president for sales and said Ford's safety campaign had to stop. These Ford executives, many of them formerly from GM, had a saying, Chevy could drop its price $25 to bankrupt Chrysler, $50 to bankrupt Ford. Ford ran up the white flag. The safety sales campaign stopped. McNamara took a long vacation in Florida, his career in Detroit in the balance, and came back a team player. Safety went through the windscreen and lay in a coma for years.
McNamara had very dirty hands, however hard he and admirers like Morris scrubbed them. Why did Defense Secretary McNamara overrule all expert review and procurement recommendations and insist that General Dynamics rather than Boeing make the disastrous F-111, at that time one of the largest procurement contracts in the Pentagon's history? Could it be that Henry Crown of Chicago was calling in some chits for his role in fixing the 1960 JFK vote in Cook County, Illinois? Crown, of Chicago Sand and Gravel, had $300 million of the mob's money in GD debentures, and after the disaster of the Convair, GD needed the F-111 to avoid going belly- up, taking the mob's $300 million with it. McNamara misled Congressional investigators about this for years afterward.
To interviewers McNamara paid great stress on JFK's "shock", just a few weeks before he himself was killed, at the assassination of South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. He also promoted the view that Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam. He oversaw the fakery of the Gulf of Tonkin "attack" that prompted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, whereby Congress gave LBJ legal authority to prosecute and escalate the war in Vietnam. He was a career "front man" for the Kennedys, called even to Chappaquiddick to help Ted Kennedy figure out what to say about it.
The Six Day War? Just before this '67 war the Israelis were ready to attack and knew they were going to win but couldn't get a clear go- ahead from the Johnson Administration. As the BBC documentary The 50 Years War narrates, Meir Amit, head of Israel's Mossad, flew to Washington. The crucial OK came from McNamara, thus launching Israel's long-planned, aggressive war on Egypt, Jordan and Syria, which led to present disasters. It was McNamara, after Israel's deliberate attack on the US ship Liberty during that war (with thirty-four US sailors dead and 174 wounded), who supervised the cover- up.
McNamara had a 13-year stint running the World Bank, whither he was dispatched by LBJ, Medal of Freedom in hand. McNamara liked to brandish his Bank years as his moral redemption and all too often his claim is accepted by those who have no knowledge of the actual, ghastly record. In fact the McNamara of the World Bank evolved naturally, organically, from the McNamara of Vietnam. The one was prolegomenon to the other, the McNamara-sponsored horrors in Vietnam perhaps on a narrower and more vivid scale, but ultimately lesser in dimension and consequence. No worthwhile portrayal of McNamara could possibly avoid McNamara's performance at the World Bank because there, within the overall constraints of the capitalist system he served, he was his own man. There was no LeMay, no LBJ issuing orders. And as his own man, McNamara amplified the ghastly blunders, corruptions and lethal cruelties of American power as inflicted upon Vietnam to a planetary scale. The best terse account of the McNamara years is in Bruce Rich's excellent history of the Bank, Mortgaging the Earth, published in 1994.
When McNamara took over the Bank, "development" loans (which were already outstripped by repayments) stood at $953 million and when he left, at $12.4 billion, which, discounting inflation, amounted to slightly more than a 6- fold increase. Just as he multiplied the troops in Vietnam, he ballooned the Bank's staff from 1,574 to 5,201. The Bank's shadow lengthened steadily over the Third World. Forests, in the Amazon, in Cameroon, in Malaysia, in Thailand, fell under the axe of "modernization". Peasants were forced from their lands. Dictators like Pinochet and Ceausescu were nourished with loans.
From Vietnam to the planet: The language of American idealism and high purpose was just the same. McNamara blared his mission of high purpose in 1973 in Nairobi, initiating the World Bank's crusade on poverty. "The powerful have a moral obligation to assist the poor and the weak." The result was disaster, draped, as in Vietnam with obsessive secrecy, empty claims of success and mostly successful efforts to extinguish internal dissent. And as with Vietnam, McNamara's obsession with statistics, produced a situation, (according to S. Shaheed Husain, then the Bank's vice president in charge of Operations) where, "without knowing it, McNamara manufactured data. If there was a gap in the numbers, he would ask staff to fill it, and others made it up for him."
At McNamara's direction the Bank would prepare five year "master country lending plans", set forth in "country programming papers. "In some cases, Rich writes, "even ministers of a nation's cabinet could not obtain access to these documents, which in smaller, poor countries, were viewed as international decrees on their economic fate."
These same "decrees" were drawn up by technocrats (in Vietnam they were the "advisers") often on the basis of a few short weeks in the target country. Corruption seethed. Most aid vanished into the hands of local elites who very often used the money to steal the resources--pasture, forest, water, of the very poor whom the Bank was professedly seeking to help. In Vietnam, Agent Orange and napalm.
Across the third world, the Bank underwrote "Green Revolution" technologies that the poorest peasants couldn't afford and that drenched land in pesticides and fertilizer. Vast infrastructural projects such as dams and kindred irrigation projects once again drove the poor from their lands, from in Brazil to India. It was the malign parable of "modernization" written across the face of the third world, with one catatrophe after another catastrophes prompted by the destruction of traditional subsistence rural economies.
The appropriation of smaller farms and common areas, Rich aptly comments, "resembled in some respects the enclosure of open lands in Britain prior to the Industrial Revolution--only this time on a global scale, intensified by Green Revolution agricultural technology." As an agent of methodical planetary destruction, McNamara should be ranked in the top tier of earth-wreckers of all time.
"Management", McNamara declared in 1967 "is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society." The managerial ideal for McNamara was managerial dictatorship. World Bank loans surged to Pinochet's Chile after Allende's overthrow, to Uruguay, to Argentina, to Brazil after the military coup, to the Philippines, to Suharto after the '65 coup in Indonesia.
And to the Romania of Ceausescu. McNamara poured money--$2.36 billion between 1974 and 1982--into the tyrant's hands. In 1980 Romania was the Bank's eighth biggest borrower. As McNamara crowed delightedly about his "faith in the financial morality of socialist countries" Ceausescu razed whole villages, turned hundreds of square miles of prime farm land into open- pit mines, polluted the air with coal and lignite, turned Rumania into one vast prison, applauded by the Bank in an amazing 1979 economic study as being a fine advertisement for the "Importance of Centralized Economic Control". Another section of that same 1979 report, titled "Development of Human Resources", featured these chilling words: "To improve the standards of living of the population as a beneficiary of the development process, the government has pursued policies to make better use of the population as a factor of production... An essential feature of the overall manpower policy has been ... to stimulate an increase in birth rates." Ceausescu forbade abortions, and cut off disrtribution of contraceptives. Result: ten of thousand of abandoned children, dumped in orphanages, another sacrificial hecatomb in McNamara's lethal hubris.
In his later years, McNamara never offered any reflection on the social system that produced and promoted him, a perfectly nice, well- spoken war criminal. As his inflation of his role in the foe- bombing of Japan showed, he could go so far as to falsely though complacently indict himself, while still shirking bigger, more terrifying and certainly more useful reflections on the system that blessed him and mercilessly killed millions upon millions under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon.
Like Speer, he got away with it, never having to hang his head or drop through a trap door with a rope around his neck, as he richly deserved.

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Counter Punch

Scrap all nuclear weaponsby

Khor Eng Lee(July 5, 2009):

In 1986 US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev claimed they had come very close to an agreement on total nuclear disarmament. And nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War. President Barack Obama has initiated another bold attempt to rid the world of nuclear weapons, calling them “the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.” As these weapons of mass destruction pose the greatest threat to human survival, all nations must pitch in to globalise Obama’s campaign and to put it through – to make this world nuclear-free.
IT WAS US president Franklin Roosevelt (1933-45), who had made the fateful political decision and given his “OK” on Jan 19, 1942 to the nuclear scientists and engineers to go ahead with research and development to build the first atomic bombs.And his successor, Harry Truman (1945-1953), authorised the use of the two A-bombs to destroy the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan on August 1945 – the first and hitherto the only time that such weapons of mass destruction were ever used in a war between nations.When Obama renewed the long drawn out campaign for nuclear abolition which he announced before a huge crowd outside the Prague Castle gates in the Czech capital on April 5, he stressed that the US has a moral responsibility to take the lead as the only nation to have used a nuclear weapon. There is every chance Obama might bring up the matter of renewing the START treaty, which calls for cuts in nuclear weapons, when he meets Russian president Dmitry Medvedev today.Four years after WWII, the Soviet explosion of a fission bomb (Joe One) in September 1949 was to trigger a nuclear arms race between the US under Truman and the Soviet Union under Stalin (general secretary 1922-53).Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61), the US military expanded its nuclear arsenal 20-fold (a stockpile of more then 24,000 nuclear weapons by the end of 1961). When he campaigned for Nixon in late October 1960, he told Americans that the US military had become “the most powerful on Earth ...”Eisenhower once said that every gun made is a theft from those who hunger. (The US will spend US$741 billion [RM2.6 trillion] on its military this year, nominally twice the American GNP of US$350 billion in 1960, accounting for nearly half of the global military expenditure, while as many as one billion people go hungry every day.)On nuclear disarmament, he said: “The alternative is so terrible that any risks there might be in advancing disarmament are as nothing.” But the words of this old and wise warrior went unheeded. Partly because, as they say, he didn’t walk the talk.By the time of the Cuban missile crisis on October 1962, the US had such a tremendous military nuclear superiority that Nikita Khrushchev (general secretary 1953-64) had vainly tried to erode American dominance by planting his SS-4 and SS-5 rockets on Cuban soil about 150km away from the shores of Florida. Each SS-4 carried a 3-megaton warhead. Only 30 years later did the US come to know that the Soviets had 162 warheads in Cuba.When President John F. Kennedy announced the crisis on Oct 22, 1962, he warned of full nuclear retaliation, called upon Chairman Khrushchev to remove all offensive weapons in Cuba, and urged a peaceful solution to the confrontation.Nuclear historian Richard Rhodes has noted that the US Strategic Air Command had put on board bombers nearly three thousand strategic nuclear weapons packing a gross 7,000 megatons (more than two tons a head for the world population of 3 billion in 1962). The SAC had also tried to provoke a Soviet alert by flying bombers towards Soviet targets, which would justify a devastating US first-strike.As Rhodes has put it, the first and only direct nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers was also very nearly the last. The two nuclear Goliaths had come close to the Apocalypse.Compelled to remove his missiles from Cuba, Khrushchev’s humiliation led to an unprecedented Soviet nuclear buildup which multiplied the number of its nuclear weapons by ten times within the next couple of decades. The Soviet Union reached nuclear parity with the US by 1978 and shortly afterwards the USSR overtook and outnuked the US numerically.When Reagan and Gorbachev met for the first time at Geneva in 1985 at the height of the Cold War, both leaders accused each other for “the mad arms race which had led the world to the brink of catastrophe” (to quote Gorbachev’s own words to describe a view fully shared by Reagan). In their joint communique, they declared that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Both also pledged not to seek military superiority (in word, but not in deed).Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs: “We prepared a policy statement containing a step-by-step programme for moving towards a nuclear-free world ...”Reagan wrote: “No one could ‘win’ a nuclear war (what the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr had told Roosevelt and Churchill in 1944). Yet as long as nuclear weapons were in existence, there would always be risks they would be used, and once the first nuclear weapon was unleashed, who knew where it would end?“My dream, then became a world free of nuclear weapons ...”On their second meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, October 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev said they had come very close to an agreement on dismantling and destroying their vast nuclear arsenals. They had discussed a 10-year plan (1986-96) to free the world from the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. But their dispute over Reagan’s pet project for a defence system against nuclear missiles (referred to as the SDI, Strategic Defence Initiative) torpedoed their plan for total nuclear disarmament.Donald Regan, chief of staff, sat next to Reagan in the limousine taking them back to the US Embassy. Regan has written in his memoir that Reagan said to him: “Don, we came so close. It’s just a shame.”“He placed his thumb and forefinger less than a half inch apart and added, ‘We were that close to an agreement.’ ”Gorbachev wrote: “Success was a mere step away, but SDI proved an insurmountable stumbling block ...”The SDI proved to be insurmountable to both leaders because while one of them was obsessed with it, the other was possessed by a fear of it.Moreover, they didn’t have their top priority right. SDI or nuclear disarmament?Both Reagan and Gorbachev were “just one step away” from going down in history as mankind’s greatest peacemakers.As with the original decision to go nuclear (made by Roosevelt and Stalin in the 1940s), the momentous decision to dismantle and destroy all nuclear weapons must be made by the supreme political masters of the day.The first US president to campaign publicly for complete nuclear disarmament, Obama has given a highly resonant “yes” to the elimination of all the nuclear weapons in the world’s arsenals. And now it’s time for Medvedev to give a matching “aye” as well. And then, all the other nations – their leaders and their people must also give their full support to this campaign for global survival and well-being to make this world nuclear free.
The second of a four-part series on total nuclear disarmament by retired journalist Khor Eng Lee will appear tomorrow.