The clamor for nuclear disarmament is being raised by millions the world over not only by established peace and anti-nuclear organizations, but by NGOs, scientific panels, retired generals, eminent military and civilian officials, nuclear weapons designers, and international judges. With the influential weight of these new voices, the United States has an opportunity to reconsider official nuclear weapons policy and to achieve four important victories in route to the bomb's abolition: A pledge of "no first use"; a promise of no use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-armed states; a disclosure and accounting of secret military programs; a formal renunciation of the "usefulness" of the bomb. In the following pages I will present a brief review of each of these four issues.

Pledge "No First Use"

The United States' atomic bombings were the "first use" of nuclear weapons in more ways than one. In modern parlance, nuclear "first use" means the escalation from conventional bombing or the threat of it, to the initiation of nuclear warfare. The U.S. government was not only the first to use nuclear weapons in war but the first to escalate from conventional to nuclear bombardment. The Pentagon still uses the "first use" threat, as in the 1991 Persian Gulf bombing campaign, during which government officials, including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Secretary of State James Baker, "continued to publicly hint that the United States might retaliate with nuclear weapons." Following their lead, U.S. Representative Dan Burton (R-IN), syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, and others publicly advocated bombing Iraq with nuclear weapons in the midst of the U.S.-led bombardment.

In April 1996, the Clinton administration's Herald Smith publicly threatened to use nuclear weapons against the African state of Libya -- a member in good standing of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty -- for allegedly building a weapons plant. When then Defense Secretary William Perry was questioned about Smith's threat, he only reiterated it, saying about using U.S. nuclear weapons against non-nuclear Libya, "...we would not forswear that possibility." (The nonproliferation treaty forbids any nuclear attack against states that are party to it.)

Last November [1997], the Clinton administration made public in Presidential Policy Directive 60 the "first-use" intentions of its nuclear warfare planners. The announcement was that U.S. H-bombs are aimed at Third World nations said by the Department of State to be administered by "rogue" governments. "The directive is notable for language that would allow the United States to launch nuclear weapons in response to the use of chemical or biological weapons..." The presidential announcement was accompanied by a statement by senior National Security Council staffer Robert Bell who said, "The [Directive] requires a wide range of nuclear retaliatory options, from a limited strike to a more general nuclear exchange." And "Clinton ordered that the military...reserve the right to use nuclear arms first, even before the detonation of an enemy warhead."

This newly announced first-strike policy flies in the face of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the nation's highest scientific advisory group, which recommended last June that the United States, "declare that it will not be the first to use nuclear weapons in war or crisis." The Clinton administration seemed to directly dismiss the NAS's advice when, in April 1998, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow flatly refused to rule out the possible use of nuclear warheads against Iraq, saying "...we do not rule out in advance any capability available to us."

Pledging "no first use" would save billions of dollars in research and development, as well as the cost of maintenance of systems designed to strike first: the MX, Trident I and II, Cruise and Minuteman III missiles, and the B-1 and Stealth bombers. Forswearing nuclear "first use" wouldn't be risky in geopolitical terms because the United States has no nuclear-armed enemies, and all the other nuclear-armed states (Britain, China, France, India, Israel, and Russia) are either allies, "most favored nations," clients, or military Don Quixoties.

Further, a "no first use" pledge would free U.S. presidents from threatening to go nuclear, officially unacknowledged terrorism they have practiced many times. Putting an end to these ultimate bomb threats would bring U.S. actions in line with its current rhetoric: President Clinton denounced "nuclear terrorism" on June 15, 1995, en route to the summit meeting in Halifax.

Significantly, the nuclear weapons states who have used their first strike "master card" believe they've succeeded with their dreadful risk-taking-the way an extortionist can get what he wants without ever pulling the trigger. Nuclear war planners want to keep this "ace" up their sleeve. Sadly, since official history has it that the U.S. Army Air Corps' atomic bombings of Japan were justified, there is a heavy stigma against formally renouncing another first use. To do so might seem to call into question the rationale of having crossed the line back then.

Promise No Nuclear Strikes

Using the bomb against non-nuclear Japan followed the mass destruction of Dresden and Hamburg in Germany and the indiscriminate fire bombings of Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama, and Tokyo in Japan. In August 1945, the power disparity between nuclear and "conventional" firestorms must have appeared small. However, the atom bomb's real punch-initially denied and by nature delayed for many years-is now known to be cancer, leukemia, birth defects, and weakened immune system function for generation upon generation. Today's U.S. warheads are from 12 to 96 times the magnitude of the Hiroshima blast: from 150 kiloton (Kt) warheads on Cruise missiles, to the 1,200 Kt (1.2 megaton) B-83 bombs aboard the air force's heavy bombers.

The deadly power of modern H-bombs (more accurately "radiation bombs" [that kill people with an intense wave of neutrons and gamma rays]) gives the demand for a "non-nuclear immunity" pledge the advantage of being fair and rational. The so-called "rogue states" that the U.S. State Department claims want to join the Nuclear Club -- Libya, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Cuba -- have a combined military budget of $15.3 billion (Libya: $1 billion; N. Korea $6 billion; Iraq: $3 billion; Iran: $2 billion; Syria: $3 billion; Cuba: $0.3 billion). This is less than one-ninth of the Pentagon's annual $300-plus billion (including NASA, Energy Department, and National Guard). The 1991 Persian Gulf bombardment and the decade-long bombings of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, proved to the non-nuclear states and all the world and should have proved to our own, that nuclear weapons are superfluous and totally unnecessary when the government chooses to destroy small countries.

The agreement on non-nuclear immunity made May 11, 1995 by the five declared Nuclear Club members will not quell legitimate charges of hypocrisy made against them. The pact is full of exceptions and is not binding. Only China has made an unequivocal pledge: "At no time and under no circumstances will China be the first to use nuclear weapons and (China) undertakes unconditionally not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries and nuclear-free zones."

In spite of the possible taint of impropriety that may accrue to the atomic bombings of Japan, the United States should end its opposition to adopting China's unambiguous language and promise never to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.

Secret Military Programs

The building, testing, and unleashing of the bomb in 1945 was done in total secrecy by the Manhattan Project. The Project provided the unprecedented political insurance that was necessary for such extravagant spending on such a dubious program. It might never have "worked." One consequence of the Project's leap into hidden government spending-ironically, all done in the name of combating anti-democratic militarism-is that a militarized and anti-democratic process was institutional-ized.

Witness the 4,000 secret radiation experiments conducted under the auspices of the U.S. military against more than 16,000 U.S. civilians: pregnant women, retarded children, prison inmates, cancer patients, the terminally ill, and stolen cadavers. Former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary confessed shock about the U.S. scientist's actions. "I said, `Who were these people [conducting the experiments] and why did this happen?' The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany." Official misconduct on such a scale could not have occurred without the nuclear establishment's grant of complete secrecy.

If further proof were needed that such official secrecy breeds more wrong-doing than it prevents, we have hundreds of thousands of tons of military radioactive wastes that have been injected into deep wells, dumped into the water table, buried in shallow trenches, and thrown into the oceans (our nuclear submarines still routinely release "allowable" amounts of liquid and gaseous radioactive wastes into the oceans), that will threaten living things with cancer and reproductive abnormalities forever. The U.S. government's cover-up of these ethical and environmental outrages was exposed in 20 front-page New York Times articles in 1989.

The classified Pentagon budget has now ballooned to about $30 billion or more per year. The official secrecy this fund is afforded protects programs and adventures that may not be legal, but, because they're secret, cannot be challenged in Congress, the courts, or the press. Indeed, the secret budget continues to exist because the boondoggles that it keeps secret could not withstand public or Congressional oversight.

One example is the Navy's Project ELF, which for years has been attacked in Congress as a "cold war relic." The ELF transmitter sends one-way orders to submerged, nuclear-armed U.S. and British submarines around the world. This nuclear war "starter pistol" was saved from certain cancellation in April 1995 by a so-called "classified emergency reason" originating with the Navy. The nuclear war fighting function of ELF (along with its potentially harmful non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation), made it an easy target for deficit hawks, so its budget had earlier been cut. The Navy's maneuver-by way of the "secret emergency" which is still unknown to the public-convinced a House-Senate conference committee to restore the funding. U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), who has repeatedly sponsored legislation to terminate Project ELF, was unconvinced by what he called an "eleventh-hour trick," saying, "The Navy explicitly told me there was no 'classified' reason for maintaining ELF." Hundreds of these cold war dinosaurs are still being maintained inside secret programs that, if made public, would make laughing stocks of the military contractors-and the taxpayers.

Admit the Uselessness of the Bomb

Calling nuclear warheads "fundamentally useless," the National Academy of Sciences, in the June 1997 report mentioned earlier, charged that current U.S. nuclear war fighting plans were "largely unchanged form the cold war era" when 30,000 H-bombs were targeted at the former USSR and China. This NAS rejection of the bomb is a far cry from current State Department policy and amounts to a startling condemnation of official U.S. history.

There has for 50 years been a debate about whether the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "necessary." Although critical voices have generally been drowned by the soothing official paradox that "the Bomb saved lives," negative answers are not hard to find. In 1945, Brig. Gen. Bonnie Feller wrote, "Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan's unconditional surrender." Historian Gar Alperovitz (Atomic Diplomacy, Penguin Books, 1985 and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, Random House, 1996) has said, "I think it can be proven that the bomb was not only unnecessary but known in advance not to be necessary." President Dwight Eisenhower said it wasn't necessary: "First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."

These charges, as contrary to the government story as they are, share a wrongheaded implication; namely, that nuclear warfare could conceivably be "necessary" or "excusable" under some circumstances. That most people in the United States still believe this to be true, is the result of decades of myth-making started by President Truman, who said, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

Downtown Hiroshima -- August 1945 -- A "military base" ?

Taking President Truman at his word, the 140,000 civilians killed at Hiroshima are the minimum to be expected when exploding a small nuclear weapon on a "military base." At this rate today's "small" (Cruise missile) warheads, which are 12 times the power of Truman's bomb, might "avoid" killing any more, but would kill a minimum of 1.68 million civilians.

The ability to think of such acts as "necessary" -- and to prepare and to threaten them -- requires the adoption of a learned indifference that insulates the conscience of the executioner. Such a deep-seated denial is needed in order to excuse any mass destruction because, generally, the rightness of indiscriminate attacks is not debatable whether in Oklahoma City, Sarajevo, Rwanda, or Hiroshima. Furthermore, since the H-bomb can produce only uncontrollable, widespread, and long-term results, it follows that the rationalization of U.S. nuclear war planning has hardly changed since 1945. Consider how similar to President Truman's words (above) are those of the U.S. State Department's recent declaration to the International Court of Justice (the World Court) on the question of the legality of using nuclear weapons: "Nuclear weapons can be directed at a military target and can be used in a discriminate manner."

This artful lie, the engine of the nuclear weapons establishment, amounts to the cynical and outlawed notion that good can come from the commission of mass destruction. The State Department's claim cannot, no matter how often or skillfully repeated, make the effects of even one nuclear warhead limited, controllable, militarily practical or ethically justifiable.

In his October 3, 1996 speech to the State of the World Forum in San Francisco, Gen. George Lee Butler became the first U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) commander in history to condemn U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear war policy, a policy he had molded and implemented, saying in part, "A renewed appreciation for the obscene power of a single nuclear weapon is taking a new hold on our consciousness..." He delivered the same statement to the National Press Club December 4, 1996. In a more recent essay, Gen. Butler has said that President Clinton's nuclear war policy is based on the mistaken belief that "nuclear weapons retain an aura of utility." Gen. Butler argues that "Too many of us have failed to properly understand the risks and consequences of nuclear war. [Nuclear weapons'] effects transcend time and place, poisoning the earth and deforming its inhabitants for generation[s]." Butler concludes that, "The likely consequences of nuclear war have no politically, militarily or morally acceptable justification, and therefore the threat to use nuclear weapons is indefensible."

Conclusion

Even if the official history and rationalizations surrounding the 1945 atomic bombings are not rejected by a majority, these four conclusive steps-a pledge of "no first use," a promise of non-nuclear immunity, the abandonment of secret military budgets, and the renunciation of nuclear war's "usefulness" might be taken in view of what is indisputably known about nuclear weapons. Furthermore, crucial and compelling demands have been issued in recent months by dozens of authorities who now agree that nuclear abolition is necessary and possible. For example, last February at the National Press Club, 117 world leaders -- among them former President Jimmy Carter, former President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau -- called upon nuclear weapons states to "declare unambiguously that their goal is ultimate abolition"; in April 1997 Dr. Hans Bethe, a Nobel Prize winner and the most senior of the living scientists who built the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, wrote to President Clinton calling on him to withdraw the $2.2 billion in funding set for nuclear weapons development; in December 1996, 62 retired generals and admirals from around the world published a declaration in major papers urging that "the following...must be undertaken now...long term international nuclear policy must be based on the declared principle of continuous, complete and irrevocable elimination of nuclear weapons."

A practical mechanism and working blueprint for verifiable nuclear disarmament was proposed August 14, 1996 by the international Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. The commission was made up of 17 prominent experts from around the world including Gen. Butler, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Joseph Rotblat. International legal authority for such a program was reaffirmed by the July 8, 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (the World Court), which (besides outlawing the threatened use of nuclear weapons) declared that nuclear weapons states are under a binding obligation to proceed with the elimination of nuclear weapons under the terms of the 1970/1995 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

These are the obvious, decisive, and available reasons and means by which to achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons. The goal can be reached only if those of us demanding it will amplify our voices and refuse to take no for an answer.

John M. LaForge is co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental action group based in Wisconsin, and editor of its quarterly newsletter The Pathfinder (PO Box 649, Luck, WI 54853). His articles on nuclear power and weapons have appeared in Z Magazine, The Progressive, Earth Island Journal, and Sociological Imagination.

This article was first published as "Nuclear Politics - Nuclear Disarmament - Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's lessons still to be learned," in the July/August 1998 issue of Z Magazine. Reprinted with permission.