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Nuclear weapons – proliferating nonsense (4)

By JK Obatala
25 February 2015   |   11:00 pm
Note to Online Readers…Due to a processing mishap, the last eight lines were left off the  domestic hardcopy version of part “(3)” .So I am repeating those lines in “(4)” —hopefully with the forbearance of my Internet audiences, at home and abroad.       If nuclear weapons were eliminated, I’d probably start training as an astronaut,…

Note to Online Readers…Due to a processing mishap, the last eight lines were left off the  domestic hardcopy version of part “(3)” .So I am repeating those lines in “(4)” —hopefully with the forbearance of my Internet audiences, at home and abroad. 

     If nuclear weapons were eliminated, I’d probably start training as an astronaut, even at 72. I’d rather be fired off to another world, than live on a planet where war between industrialized states is, once again, feasible.

     Without the discipline imposed by mutually assured destruction (MAD), we’d be in World War III almost overnight! NATO and the U.S., for example, have itchy trigger fingers. They like to rush into other people’s countries with guns blazing—which they really want to do to Russia, over Ukraine.

     But as Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the then Soviet Union, reminded U.S. President John F. Kennedy, in the early ‘60s: Russia has some “nuclear salve,” to sooth the American itch!

     As more countries get this “salve,” NATO nations have fewer places to drop their bombs. Should the stuff become too easy to acquire, sources of cheap raw materials will dry up. Defense industries will stagnate, as stealth bombers collect cobwebs and cruise missiles decay in their silos.

     Hence U.S. President Dwight David Eisenhower warned famously, in 1961, against the “disastrous rise of military power” by a menacing “military industrial complex”. It is the organs of this military industrial nexus that equates the spread of atomic weaponry with the end-time.

     This is sheer demagoguery—disinformation, designed to play on the ignorance and fears of the uninformed. I’m not saying that anyone should be able to pull into a weapons depot, pluck their money down and drive away with a 9000 pound nuclear device!

      But neither do I believe that an elite coterie Caucasoid and Mongoloid countries have been cosmically ordained to wield the enormous power that such devices confer. If one nation is so armed, any other country with the capacity to build—and manage—a bomb should do so.

       I’m not aware of any rule in nature, or in any of the holy books, which make the spread of nuclear weapons inherently evil. If anything, just the opposite is true. Nuclear armaments have helped to stabilize the global political system. More nuclear weapons can only bring more stability.

     “In fact,” argues Kenneth Waltz, senior research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, “by reducing imbalances in military power, new nuclear states generally produce more regional and international stability, not less”.

     “Power…,” he wrote, in USA Today, “begs to be balanced”. Accordingly, “policymakers and citizens worldwide should take comfort from the fact that where nuclear capabilities have emerged, so, too, has stability. When it comes to nuclear weapons, now as ever, more could be better”.   

     One important fact that intellectuals and policy makers in Sub-Saharan Africa—a yawning power vacuum– failed to appreciate, is the genetics of NPT. Populations in most of the signatory countries have racial (genetic) ties to at least one nuclear armed state! Their physical survival is thus assured.

     This is not the case with Black member countries. There is no industrialized, nuclear armed state, anywhere on Earth that can protect Black populations or prevent the seizure and settlement of African land. (China, for instance, may be planning to settle as many as 300 million people in Africa.)

     Secondly, the destructive power of nuclear weapons is such that the present global dichotomy—between nuclear “haves” and “have-nots’–is inherently more threatening, to unarmed Black people, than the “uncontrolled” spread of atomic bombs could ever be.

     Why should only China, Russia, France, Britain, the U.S.A., and those countries that have managed to slip through the strategic net, possess nuclear weapons? The implications are that the rest of us are unworthy—guilty of Original Nuclear sin!

     During the apartheid era, for instance, South Africa built six nuclear bombs—and developed a missile system to deliver them. But when the ruling National Party decided, in 1989, to end apartheid, the military dismantled the bombs.

     Playing to copious applause from the Western world, the F.W. De Clerk government destroyed or shipped out of the country, most missiles and related technology—preventing the Black race, whose resources were used to build the bomb, from achieving nuclear status.    

     To be continued.

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