OPINION: NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT VANISHES WITH A WHIMPER
by Josh Yuknott
Don't fly toward the light!
Washington (WPI) - With hardly a whisper to the American public, and even less to the balance of the Earth’s population, the Bush Administration yesterday quietly buried the planet’s security goal of the last six decades. Despite the fact that "nuclear disarmament" placidly vanished from the Bush administration's lexicon long ago, yesterday’s almost off-hand announcement by Linton Brooks, head the National Nuclear Security Administration, sent waves of dread, despair and disbelief shuddering across the earth’s crust, reverberating like a nightmarish tsunami over and over, slowly crashing into the world’s incredulous collective consciousness. This was the first time a top government official publicly declared that a goal, enshrined in hundreds of important international agreements, welded like steel into the defensive policies of all civilized nations and the single most admired and desired objective of all the world’s populations since the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, will no longer be pursued.
"The United States will, for the foreseeable future, need to retain both nuclear forces and the capabilities to sustain and modernize those forces," Brooks stated Friday as he addressed the East Tennessee Economic Council in the city of Oak Ridge, which is home to a major nuclear weapons complex, the safest location on the surface of the earth that the administration could ascertain to be most free from both public scrutiny and the potential for protest.
"I do not see any chance of the political conditions for abolition arising in my lifetime, nor do I think abolition could be verified if it were negotiated," he Mr. Linton said, suggesting to the world that perhaps his lifetime should be shortened.
This horrifying Doomsday announcement explodes literally hundreds of verbal commitments given by every previous US administrations since Dwight Eisenhower to both our global negotiating partners and the larger international community.
As recently as September 1998, Presidents Bill Clinton of the US and Boris Yeltsin of Russia signed a joint statement, reaffirming the two countries' commitment to "the ultimate goal of nuclear disarmament".
More significantly, unambiguous disarmament clauses are contained in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty signed in 1968 by all leading nuclear powers of that era, including the United States, and now used to rein in nuclear ambitions by countries like Iran and North Korea.
In the preamble to that accord, the signatories agreed "to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery."
Elsewhere in the treaty every civilized, and legitimately worried, nation then in existence reaffirmed their commitment to nuclear disarmament in more binding language in the treaty's Article VI, which states that "each of the parties to the treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament."
However, not having campaigned on behalf of or been elected to do so, the Bush Administration has gently been abandoning all previous foreign policy commitments, treaties, contracts and negotiations to establish a new “World’s Only Super-Power,” foreign policy. This policy, long kept from public view, sets complete world military domination as it’s central objective.
Original authors of the plan, now-disgraced architects of the invasion of Iraq, Richard Perle and Paul Wofowitz, devised the strategy after playing RISK for nearly 36 hours in college. 
The document, long a source of amusement for White House staffers finally found a VIP who took its demoniacal precepts seriously. Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense to Ronald Regan, stumbled across the document, and not realizing that it was beery satire, embraced the plan and endeavored to sell it to the President.
Regan, well known for his sense of humor, believed that Mr. Cheney was pulling his leg. Pardoned felon Oliver North, who witnessed a meeting where Mr. Cheney tried to persuade the President into adopting the policy recalled, ”The President had once read the paper, on a campaign bus ride someplace. He laughed all the way through it! ‘If only!,’ he said after finishing it.
At the conference on Nicaragua we all attended Cheney again brought it up. This time the president said, “Dick, don’t you get it? That is Goldwater’s wet dream! We don’t play God. Drop it will you, it was a joke.”
After yesterday’s announcement it appears that Mr. Cheney was not convinced but managed to find a new President who himself, “Didn’t get it.” "Sorry world!" North added.
Josh Yoknott is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at Harvad University.
Don't fly toward the light!Washington (WPI) - With hardly a whisper to the American public, and even less to the balance of the Earth’s population, the Bush Administration yesterday quietly buried the planet’s security goal of the last six decades. Despite the fact that "nuclear disarmament" placidly vanished from the Bush administration's lexicon long ago, yesterday’s almost off-hand announcement by Linton Brooks, head the National Nuclear Security Administration, sent waves of dread, despair and disbelief shuddering across the earth’s crust, reverberating like a nightmarish tsunami over and over, slowly crashing into the world’s incredulous collective consciousness. This was the first time a top government official publicly declared that a goal, enshrined in hundreds of important international agreements, welded like steel into the defensive policies of all civilized nations and the single most admired and desired objective of all the world’s populations since the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, will no longer be pursued.
"The United States will, for the foreseeable future, need to retain both nuclear forces and the capabilities to sustain and modernize those forces," Brooks stated Friday as he addressed the East Tennessee Economic Council in the city of Oak Ridge, which is home to a major nuclear weapons complex, the safest location on the surface of the earth that the administration could ascertain to be most free from both public scrutiny and the potential for protest."I do not see any chance of the political conditions for abolition arising in my lifetime, nor do I think abolition could be verified if it were negotiated," he Mr. Linton said, suggesting to the world that perhaps his lifetime should be shortened.
This horrifying Doomsday announcement explodes literally hundreds of verbal commitments given by every previous US administrations since Dwight Eisenhower to both our global negotiating partners and the larger international community.As recently as September 1998, Presidents Bill Clinton of the US and Boris Yeltsin of Russia signed a joint statement, reaffirming the two countries' commitment to "the ultimate goal of nuclear disarmament".
More significantly, unambiguous disarmament clauses are contained in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty signed in 1968 by all leading nuclear powers of that era, including the United States, and now used to rein in nuclear ambitions by countries like Iran and North Korea.
In the preamble to that accord, the signatories agreed "to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery."Elsewhere in the treaty every civilized, and legitimately worried, nation then in existence reaffirmed their commitment to nuclear disarmament in more binding language in the treaty's Article VI, which states that "each of the parties to the treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament."
However, not having campaigned on behalf of or been elected to do so, the Bush Administration has gently been abandoning all previous foreign policy commitments, treaties, contracts and negotiations to establish a new “World’s Only Super-Power,” foreign policy. This policy, long kept from public view, sets complete world military domination as it’s central objective.
Original authors of the plan, now-disgraced architects of the invasion of Iraq, Richard Perle and Paul Wofowitz, devised the strategy after playing RISK for nearly 36 hours in college. 
The document, long a source of amusement for White House staffers finally found a VIP who took its demoniacal precepts seriously. Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense to Ronald Regan, stumbled across the document, and not realizing that it was beery satire, embraced the plan and endeavored to sell it to the President. Regan, well known for his sense of humor, believed that Mr. Cheney was pulling his leg. Pardoned felon Oliver North, who witnessed a meeting where Mr. Cheney tried to persuade the President into adopting the policy recalled, ”The President had once read the paper, on a campaign bus ride someplace. He laughed all the way through it! ‘If only!,’ he said after finishing it.
At the conference on Nicaragua we all attended Cheney again brought it up. This time the president said, “Dick, don’t you get it? That is Goldwater’s wet dream! We don’t play God. Drop it will you, it was a joke.”After yesterday’s announcement it appears that Mr. Cheney was not convinced but managed to find a new President who himself, “Didn’t get it.” "Sorry world!" North added.
Josh Yoknott is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at Harvad University.
posted by World News Intl. at 11:28 AM
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