4-21-05, 9:15 am

The United States possesses enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over and over again. The Bush administration wants to use this fact for economic gain and political advantage. Despite popular opposition to building or using nuclear weapons, and broad support for disarmament, Bush has other plans, including weakening or dismantling international agreements.

Unfortunately for Bush, his predecessors signed and have abided, mainly, by legal and principled obligations embodied in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed and approved in 1968 and in effect since 1970. NPT essentially calls for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states, the end of the nuclear arms race, and eventual nuclear disarmament. From the context of this statement, however, it is clear that Bush regards the US commitment to be exclusively oriented towards enforcing the non-proliferation articles of the treaty. He sidesteps the tricky question of the commitment to disarmament by current nuclear weapons states and to stop the arms race.

While his statement refers to the Moscow Treaty of 2002, described as 'a sham' or ''a memorandum of conversation' masquerading as treaty,' by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the outcome of the Bush-Putin talks in 2002 was that both countries agreed to ignore each others' violations of legally-binding treaties and nuclear reduction agreements with actual verifiable enforcement components.

In other words, Moscow 2002 was a Bush PR stunt to provide some cover for the re-direction of US nuclear policy away from arms control, reduction, and eventual disarmament officially unveiled later in 2002.

This new position was publicly developed as a Bush administration policy in December 2002 in a document titled 'National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD),' which, despite its agreeable title, officially set aside the legal obligation the US is bound to under the NPT treaty.

No case was made to the American people or to Congress. A new policy that had long festered in the far-right sections of the Republican Party and the bowels of the Pentagon finally had its chance to make a public appearance.

Hard right administration officials that are the architects of Bush's reinterpretation of NPT include Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and others who have long rejected the basic agreement enshrined in the NPT. Feith and Bolton who both received promotions – as shaky as Bolton's may be now – in the second term of the administration, do not want an equitable balance of power between nuclear and non-nuclear states.

They do not want to eliminate nuclear weapons at all. Disarmament is an anathema to their way of thinking. They helped engineer the administration's rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a key legal ingredient for both non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament, and the unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

The so-called pre-emptive doctrine elaborated in the national strategy document, the stated willingness to use nuclear weapons in a first strike against non-nuclear states, is also a break with the commitment to the NPT.

They want the US to control as much of the nuclear stockpile as possible to ensure their ability to dictate the global agenda.

The logic of Bush's reinterpretation of the NPT promotes a new arms race thought to be anachronistic with the end of the Cold War, wrote George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in 2003. 'So long as some states are allowed to possess nuclear weapons legitimately and derive the benefits that flow from them,' Perkovich argued, 'then other states ... will want them too – including, perhaps, the successors to the governments the Bush administration currently opposes.'

Since Bush announced his new view of the NPT, Iran and North Korea have openly sought nuclear programs, with North Korea succeeding in making weapons. Brazil and South Korea too have re-opened their nuclear programs and the progress South Korea has made towards a bomb hasn't been fully divulged as of yet.

Far from having made the world safer, the Bush administration, unless it ends its current political maneuvering and fully and sincerely adheres to the principles and responsibilities of Article 6 of the NPT as well as the rest of it, is laying the groundwork for one of the most dangerous periods in human history.

We are rapidly approaching a point of no return that threatens humanity. The US has to return to the original premise of the NPT and call for non-proliferation as well as nuclear disarmament with sound verification procedures and honest negotiations.



--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached by e-mail at jwendland@PoliticalAffairs.net.