How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Well, now that Kim Jong Il has detonated a bomb in an underground test, it seems inevitable that all hell will break loose--at least on a rhetorical level. Were there not real perils to humanity in this kind of power game, the sequence leading to the event would be the stuff of a black comedy. The neo-conservative cabal that took over the reigns of U.S. government, (which, as I pointed out earlier was, even before 9/11, clearly determined to go to war somewhere), early on sabotaged any hope of peace on the Korean peninsula by labelling North Korea part of the "axis of evil." This, in spite of the fact that during the Clinton years, North and South Korea seemed to be moving closer to rapprochement, if not actual reunification. The "Sunshine Policy" seemed to be working. Trade agreements had begun, family members were reunited, movement across the DMZ had begun. Kim Dae Jung was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the fifty year old bifurcation of the peninsula. The axis of evil speech, in combination with the almost insane saber-rattling of the U.S. statement of its security policies which put forth a policy of pre-emptive war, put a rapid end to any hopes for an end to conflict in that part of the world. Why, if our new, post Cold War enemy had been identified as Islamic terrorists, the cabal decided to throw into the political stew the regimes in Pyongyang and Havana is only a mystery if we look for rational behavior from the cabal. If a declared enemy of the U.S. had any doubt about our capacity for violating international law and invading and occupying a declared enemy state, all such doubts ended after the invasion of Iraq. It was only a question of time before Kim Jong Il would puff up his feathers and brandish the only weapon the U.S. seems to respect. As this political time bomb ticks away, the ticking in Tehran seems to get louder and louder. The existence of nuclear weapons anywhere represents a threat to humanity. But this is not what drives U.S. policy. The Bush administration in fact has torn up its own treaty commitments with regard to proliferation, and has perversely shown a willingness to dangerously augment the Indian nuclear arsenal--an arsenal that came close to being somewhat depleted in a recent conflict with India's erstwhile brothers in Pakistan. We seem only interested in not allowing nuclear weapons to proliferate in any but our client states. If there were a list of responses to the question, "Why do they hate us?", an admittedly disingenuous parlor game in any case, probably only second to the maltreatment of the Palestinians would be Israel's hardly secret possession of over two hundred nuclear warheads. More fundamentally, "proliferation" is an interesting concept. Whatever happened to "disarmament," a word and a concept that seems to have disappeared from the dictionary of U.S. policy. In the absence of a threat from a counter-balancing super power, why does the U.S. need a nuclear arsenal at all? Imagine how the 21st century might have begun had the U.S. celebrated the end of the Cold War by announcing its commitment to the total abolition of nuclear warfare.