Predator Syndrome

Nuclear gravity bombs at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., are amongthe 5200 warheads in the U.S. nuclear stockpile

There are twenty thousand nuclearweapons on the planet, a quarter ofthem ready for launch at a moment'ssuicidal impulse, aimed at countries thatstopped beingenemies twodecades ago.

It's six minutesto midnight." D i s a r m a -ment" has asmuch cachet inAmerica's corridorsof poweras "socialism."And the U.S.

House, bless itsevil heart, hasjust sliced theAchilles' tendonof peace. Itrecently passed the National Defense AuthorizationAct of 2011, which has many seriouslyworrisome provisions, two of whichstand in stark, grinning contrast to one another.

One part of the bill, which now heads tothe Senate, would give the president unilateralauthority to pursue the "war on terror"anywhere in the world. Anywhere evil resides,the president could go after it, no congressionalapproval needed. It's kind of likethat already, but this would legalize thestreamlining of war and help push the UnitedStates, in its role as global superpower, completelybeyond the constraints of democracy.Another part of the bill hampers implementationof the New START nuclear armscontrol treaty between the U.S. and Russia,which calls for a modest reduction by bothcountries to 1,550 deployed nuclearweapons. The bill ties implementation ofSTART to weapon systems "modernization,"ensuring that warhead reduction has nothingto do with disarmament.

Lawrence Korb and Alex Rothman, writingrecently on Huffington Post, point outthat the bill puts three restrictions on the implementationof START:

It bars funding for warhead reduction untilthe Departments of Defense and Energy certifytheir commitment to spend $180 billionin nuclear weapons modernization over thenext decade; it prohibits the elimination ofnon-deployed warheads until two next-generationnuclear facilities become operational(right now scheduled for 2024); and "in ahistorically unprecedented move," Korb andRothman write, "the NDAA attempts to barthe president from unilaterally reducing theU.S. nuclear stockpile below New STARTlevels or amending U.S. nuclear targetingstrategy without congressional approval."In other words, the bill would grant thecurrent and all future presidents the authorityto wage war unilaterally, that is, "war on terror,"an unwinnable and therefore endlesswar against a concept or tactic; but it wouldprohibit the president from pursuing peaceunilaterally, by reducing the country's obscenestockpile of thousands of undeployed,unimaginably destructive nuclear weaponsbelow START levels.

U.S. nuclearweapons planning isbased on the conceptof "fewer but newer— nuclear weaponsforever," JackieCabasso, executive directorof the WesternStates Legal Foundation,recently commentedto the InterPress Service.And the RepublicancontrolledHouse ishell-bent on craftingthe perfect predatorstate, one that canwage war without theleast need to entertaindoubt or acknowledgeconscience.

"Citizens who brawlon the streets are punished,"writes BarbaraEhrenreich in Blood Rites, her study of theroots of war. "Nations that go to war arefeared and often respected. . . . At a more archaiclevel of the imagination, the nation-asorganismbecomes something more, or less,than human. Here is a ‘creature' that, accordingto Hegel, requires blood in order to sustainits life — the blood of actual humanbeings. We recognize, in this view of a nation,another version of humanity's primordialenemy and original deity: the predatorbeast."

This is our dilemma, those of us — mostof humanity, I'm quite certain — on the otherside of the nuclear divide, wanting a futurefor our children far saner than present reality.The sustaining myth of the nation-state isconquest and domination, and the morepower a nation attains, the more, I fear, itgrounds itself in this myth.Thus, while historical forces have pushedthe United States into a role of extraordinaryleadership, with unprecedented global reachand influence, at a time when a new sort ofgeopolitics is crucial if the species is to survive,our national vision has grown, I fear,ever more stunted. The country's controllingforces, infected with predator syndrome,have committed themselves to the futile visionof more of the same, and this vision isespecially futile in the realm of nuclearweapons and nuclear war.

Nuclear weapons forever!What is it going to take to cause a shift, aletting go at the national level of the myththat might makes right? As individuals, mostpeople begin letting go of it before adolescence.Yet at a national level, the worst of our impulsesrise and converge. They become consensus.We are now governed by theconsensus that the United States has everyright to continue not simply to possess but todevelop, at staggering cost, new generationsof nuclear weapons, to make them more efficient,more usable . . . toward an end no onedares say.

But that end is clear enough to those outsidethe consensus. All we need is the rightenemy.

(Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, contributor to One World, Many Peaces and a nationally syndicated writer) Robert C. Koehler.

[ BY ROBERT C. KOEHLER ]