Don’t Proliferate!
If only America knew how ridiculous its stance of nuclear non-proliferation seems abroad. In America, to us, we fixate on the threat of “unstable” regimes gaining access to nuclear technology, weaponizing it, and then threatening and possibly/likely using it against America or its allies. To this end, we view the nuclear technology ownership issue through the highly narrow prism of “proliferation”. You see thats quite different from how its seen here in India and elsewhere. Here the acquisition of nuclear technology is viewed as a pursuit of information, a mastery of science which any country should aspire to learn. They view America as attempting to intimidate others from equaling its knowledge and resent the West’s interfering with supplies to prevent scientific experimentation. Why should one country bottle up this knowledge? Perhaps if the West did away with its nuclear weapons, it would have some moral high ground on “proliferation”. The very notion of “non-proliferation” is seen as a transparent, hollow means by which America can preserve its upper hand over developing nations when it comes to geopolitical struggles and acquiring resources. The very regimes that Americans are told are “unstable” are usually anything but. Think of the fears the West had that two rivals- India and Pakistan would go nuclear, they despised one another, they had opposing religions, if the were to go nuclear, we would witness chaos. Both India and Pakistan have gone nuclear, and we have passed a decade without incident. The drummed up hysteria by elites in the West in hyping up fears of rogue regimes irrationally using nukes on one other all to protect its military advantage obscures one important fact- the only nation to actually use nuclear weapons against innocent civillians is in fact the one country who claims other countries cannot be trusted with such weapons. This is an unpleasant fact - but this fact which is buried as much as possible domestically is well known and considered abroad. One reason America and the World disagree perhaps is we emphasize different facts. Over 200,000 Japanese died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to America’s use of nuclear weapons. Imagine being in a small village; one villager kills 20 people with a gun, then seeks to prohibit all others from possessing guns, but keeps his gun on him. He justifies his ban, which he will impose himself on threat of shooting violators, by saying “Other villagers cannot not and must not be trusted with guns, some of them are crazy and they might actually use them against innocents. But I’m going to keep mine just in case.” Does this seem rational? This is how the proliferation lobby seems to the rest of the world. It is a total and complete sham.
On partially related note, I read a recent interview with Gore Vidal; I’m not going to comment, I realize his comments are incendiary; I’ll just paraphrase a few quotes from it below:
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Vidal started preaching his grandfather’s gospel of isolationism. “I am a patriot of the old republic that has slowly vanished during the expansionist years and disappeared completely in 1950 when the National Security State replaced it,” he says. “I want us to go from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy, and restore the constitution. We should leave the world alone, before they make us.” The US is only menaced, he says, because it menaces others. “In geopolitics as in physics, there is no action without reaction.”
- “Benjamin Franklin saw all this coming,” he says. “I quote him because most Americans don’t even know who he was now. You’ll have to explain to your readers.” Franklin was a writer, scientist and soldier who became one of the founding fathers of the United States. “In Philadelphia in 1781, when the constitution was being put together, he was an observer. He didn’t want to have any part of it, and as he was leaving the Constitution Hall in Philadelphia a couple of old ladies said, ‘Ah, Mr Franklin, what is going to happen?’ He told them: ‘Well, you’re going to get a Republic, if you can keep it. But every constitution of this sort has failed since the beginning of time due to the corruption of the people.’” So the American people are corrupt? Americans weren’t good enough for America? “Precisely. They were only good enough to be a restive colonial power – or the dregs of one.”
- He joined the army at the age of 17, glad to escape his mother. He spent the war posted in Italy and, for three years, Alaska. He is not surprised that this “frozen hell” has produced Sarah Palin, “the latest idol in America’s long cult of stupidity”. Alaska was, he says, “the place where all the crooks in America went to hide. And they produced her.”
- But there is, he says with sudden perkiness, some “good news. Afghanistan will be terminal for the American empire, yes. Which is a happy way of looking at it. We’ll be out of the empire game, rapidly. But it’s too late for the country and the constitution.” He raises his drink, and smiles ironically. “To a better republic,” he says, and drinks in one long gulp.
- Yet now, he says, it is clear the American experiment has been “a failure”. It was all for nothing. Soon the country will be ranked “somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs.” The Empire will collapse militarily in Afghanistan; the nation will collapse internally when Obama is broken “by the madhouse” and the Chinese call in the country’s debts. A ruined United States will then be “the Yellow Man’s Burden”
