July/August 2005 Editorial Judgment Call We are, and we are not, our governments. Power is built when individuals surrender dimensions of their autonomy into a common dream. The dream may be a dream of glory; it may be a dream of fear. Sometimes it is a dream of hope. Whatever the dream might be, power maintains itself by insisting the dream is true, or will shortly become true. Dreams may or may not have a vital relationship to facts. When a dream strays so far from reality that one cannot wake up, it turns into a nightmare. And the bitterest irony of this world is that those who are trapped by a dream, and those who suffer the horrors of the nightmare it becomes, are generally not the same people. The destructive power of nuclear weapons is well known, wrote a prominent statesman in the May/June issue of Foreign Policy, the preeminent journal of the trade, but given the United States’ continued reliance on them, it’s worth remembering the danger they present. A 2000 report by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War describes the likely effects of a single 1 megaton weapon—dozens of which are contained in the Russian and US inventories. At ground zero, the explosion creates a crater 300 feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter. Within one second, the atmosphere itself ignites into a fireball more than a half-mile in diameter. The surface of the fireball radiates nearly three times the light and heat of a comparable area of the surface of the sun, extinguishing in seconds all life below and radiating outward at the speed of light, causing instantaneous severe burns to people within one to three miles. A blast wave of compressed air reaches a distance of three miles in about 12 seconds, flattening factories and commercial buildings. Debris carried by winds of 250 mph inflicts lethal injuries throughout the area. At least 50 percent of people in the area die immediately, prior to any injuries from radiation or the developing firestorm. . . . The person making this citation, in an article entitled “Apocalypse Now,” is Robert S. McNamara, who was US Secretary of State during much of the Vietnam era. He is pleading for sanity, perhaps out of the experience of having suffered its opposite. We hope Mr. McNamara is struggling to wake up. But it is always easier to see the dangers, and seek to head off the consequences, of somebody else’s fantasy. No one is exempt from the seductions of a great dream. These days the American Dream, crossbred with a fervent reverie of Armageddon—when all shall be transformed—is becoming the fever dream of the world. In the insistence that such a vision is reality, must be reality, the current US administration halted all progress at May’s five-year review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty talks. “What about Iran? What about North Korea?” Administration representatives persisted, harping on the most marginal of nuclear wannabes. Meanwhile, the rest of the world pointed their fingers in the direction of the mighty United States: “What about you?” The most dangerous regime in the world at the moment is this regime. The country with the largest number of weapons of mass destruction is America. Of the nearly 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world, Russia and America own 95 percent. No one else can destroy all life on earth except Russia and America. The two rogue nations in the world are Russia and America, holding the world at nuclear ransom. Period. So veteran antinuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott, in a recent interview (“No Nukes is Good Nukes,” by Gregory Dicum, at grist.org), articulated an unpleasant and all-too- obvious truth. And the garment of assumed righteousness cannot adequately cover our shame. But the emperor never has any clothes. And the innocent heart and tongue may, at the right moment, still make the illusion vanish. In this issue, we turn to the innocent heart and tongue. We look at some who see through the prevailing dream of death. And we encourage the projection of possibilities that are more benign and less coercive, being closer to the vulnerability of the real. And while we do this, let us recall that the fantasy of being free of pain forever is the greatest killer on earth. A moment of silence, please, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki (sixty years); for Srebrenica (ten years); for all the other disasters that might or might not arrive. For the Day of Judgment will not descend upon us, we are promised, as long as anyone listens to the still, small voice of unity, the voice of silence. And then speaks. We can always wake up. It’s not impossible. It really is our call.
—Rabia Terri Harris, Interim Editor |
