Nuclear Proliferation

NUCLEAR SANCTIMONY & HYPOCRISY
Hal Pepinsky
August 25, 2009
It’s a slow news day in the U.S. nation’s capital. Congress and the president are on vacation.
What then does a Washington based radio news network, NPR, do to fill the space? The last couple of days I woke up with “Morning Edition” that no military options were ruled out with Iran and that the US govt (USG in State Dept parlance) was concerned about Burma/Myanmar’s nuclear threat.
I’m bothered that attention on which nation state might get a nuclear bomb is an escape valve, what Freud called “projection,” of the hazardous waste problem the U.S. has on its own hands. Nerve gas stockpiles aside, the U.S. has thousands of nuclear bombs still in inventory.
I believe that I were threatened by Euro-American occupation of my homeland, I would regard Western campaigns against nuclear proliferation as one more example of colonialist exceptionalism: It’s not about me. It’s about your trying to be like me (i.e., immune from invasion because a national government can take a few hundred thousand of “your people” out if you dare to extinguish me and mine from history.
In particular, the idea that possessors of nuclear bombs (warheads, call them what you will) I deny that we in my country have any moral standing to preach to nations about possessing enough of a nuclear threat to say—if you take me out I take many of you with me. Our continuing position as having thousands of nuclear bombs (as against guerrilla “ied”s) in our military arsenal is simply a case of what people in my Midwestern region of the U.S. call the pot calling the kettle black.
If we want others to let go of firepower, may my people take the lead. Love and peace--hal