The Nuclear Dilemma:
A Humanistic Perspective

I

In Monsieur Verdoux a famous film, Charlie Chaplin plays the role of a little bank clerk, who chooses to adopt a blue-beared approach of amassing wealth for a secure future of his family. He embarks upon a programme of marrying wealthy women and then eliminating them through poison. A new poison had to be tested. He found a young girl just released from jail hopelessly impoverished and starved. He takes her to his "studio", and treats her with sumptuous food to her heart's content. He brings two glasses of wine. One, containing the poison, is placed before her. They both start conversing. The girl tells him how miserable she had been due to her frustrations in love. Touched by her story of gloom and despair, Chaplin suddenly exchanges the glass and places the poison free one before her. Later, he implores her to leave, even though the girl so overwhelmed with sympathy and favour did not wish to do so. He said: "Go away! you have corrupted my "morals"! The frail flicker of humanism despite the corroding and pernicious influence of "dehumanized" values, somehow saved the life of the poor girl. Now the glass of poison (nuclear) is placed before humanity, and the question is as to, who will exchange it. At the time when Heroshima was the target, humanity seemed totally tranquillised. It was the "triumph" of callous and heartless "morals", which led the bomb to be used without warning for "political" reasons.

Plato was a great teacher of humanity. He contended that morality decides politics. Machiavelli turned it upside down: Politics have nothing to do with morality. The nuclear dilemma is essentially rooted into finding the right answer. If Plato is right there is hope for the world __ a credible New World Order for peace. Machiavelli propounded a hopeless recipe, which transformed science into serving the military aims leading to the split of loyalties to the state and common humanity.

There were, however, a category of scientists like Bridgman, who absolved the scientists of any social responsibility and of pleaded for their good life. Such a situation according to Kahler reflects the social condition of our time. "The most frightening aspect of our present world is not the horrors in themselves, the atrocities, the technological exterminations, but the one fact at the very root of it all: the fading away of any human criterion, the disruption of the contents and substrata of human responsibility. There is a fatal correlation, vicious circle in which we seem to be caught: Without a human community there is no human responsibility of the individual, and without such responsibility, without true morality in this purely human sense, no human community can maintain itself".

The Machiavellian ethos thus produced nuclear giants, but ethical infants and only accentuated the great work of "subjugation and conquest". In his profoundly revealing book, "The Conquest

Continues", an eminent linguist, Chomsky says: "Not much had changed by this century. In 1920, Winston Churchill felt that poison gas was just right for use against "uncivilized tribes" of Kurds and Afghans. A disarmament convention in 1932 sought to ban the bombing of civilians, but Britain's Lloyad George insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers."

There was a pertinent effort soon after World War II, on the part of US, to maintain the status quo, using economic blockade, military intervention and human rights violations to keep the Third World under their control.

This was to demarcate the world between the affluent and the deprived.

Coming to a closer event __ the Gulf War, Ramsay Clark, a conscientious objector, makes it very explicit: "The Bush administration argued that the United States, was only responding to the actions of Saddam Hussain who, Americans were told, had invaded his smaller neighbour without provocation or warning. But a careful look at American involvement in the region reveals that the US government, not Iraq, bears prime responsibility for the war, which was planned in Washington long before the first Iraqi soldier entered Kuwait .... The Gulf War was fought not to restore Kuwait's sovereignty, as President Bush proclaimed, but to establish US power over the region and its oil."

Clark also mentioned that in contrast to its reaction to Iraq's relatively bloodless entry into Kuwait ten years later, Washington expressed no moral outrage at the 1980 Iraqi attack on Iran, as the attack had served US interests by weakening both. Reagan administration told the New York Times: "We wanted to avoid victory by both sides" and Henry Kissinger, very bluntly expressed: "I hope they kill each other" and "too bad they both can't lose."

The utter callousness and insensitivity to human values can be gauged from the fact that the US generals used fuel-air explosives (FAEs), napalm bombs, cluster bombs, and the GBU-28 `super bomb, against the norms of United Nation law. These deadly weapons (FAEs) of near-nuclear capabilities, unquestionably targeted civilians, and the bombing was a `deadly calculated and deeply immoral strategy to bring Iraq to its knees by destroying the essential facilities and supporting systems of the entire society'.

It has been very poignantly stated by Clark: "when patriotism proclaims a nationalist superiority over others, it is racist, when it compels absolute obedience to authority it is fascist. When patriotism calls for the use of force to have its way, it becomes criminal. The greatest moral cowardice is obedience to an order to commit an immoral act. Might does not makes right any nation any more than it does any individual. When patriotism seduces a people to celebrate a military slaughter, the people have lost their vision". The vision" indeed has been lofty - "freedom", "democracy", "prosperity", "friendship", "giving", but the practice has been overwhelmingly apposite - a typical manifestation of Myrdal's __ American Dilemma". This mind set is evident from the most "chilling" expression of George Bush, in his interview to Los Angels Times (Robert Sheer), in his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1980, in which he pleaded that a nuclear war was winnable. "You have a survivability of command in control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of percentage of your citizens and you have capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict upon you. That's the way you can have a winner". Could then Bush be humane or sensitive to the colossal tragedy that was let loose on the Iraqis?

New York Times (March 8, 1992), in a 46 page document carries a post cold war fantasy of American's political and military mission that "no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or territory of the former Soviet Union." Iraq's destruction was a "defining event in US global leadership", and it unequivocally stated that the "overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region's oil" ... We must continue to play a strong role through enhanced deterrence and improved cooperative security". It presents a vision of World empire worthy of Alexander, Caesar or Genghiz Khan. It is no wonder that Bush inaugurated the end of Cold War era by invading Panama". To Chomsky, the `New World Order' has a very `familiar' face. "The south once again is to provide resources, cheap labour, markets, opportunities for investment and become a dumping ground for the North's Waste. Under the new imperatives, `economic weapons are more potent. The victory of capitalism has left the IMF, the World Bank, and GATT in charge as global managers." He thus rightly says, "the priorities are profits and power: democracy in more than form is a threat to be overcome; human rights are of instrumental value for propaganda purposes and nothing more". No "moral shame", he says, is expressed for action in Vietnam or more recently in Iraq.

In his book Preparing for the Twenty First Century, Paul Kennedy (as reviewed by James Kurth), opines: "The best way for both a nation and a person, to prepare for the 21st century will be what has always been the best way to prepare for uncertainty. That is to rely not so much upon outer supports of plans, programs and polices but upon the inner strengths of character - resiliency and resourcefulness, discipline and cooperation, endurance and courage and perhaps above all, faith and hope. When one thinks of the United States, these are not the qualities that fist come to mind ; indeed, the very idea of character hardly comes to mind at all." It is in this context that one has to view the authoritarian candour with which USA is pursuing the non-proliferation policy. Bundy, et. all. in "Rendering Nuclear Danger", advocates a policy "to assure that Russia remains the only nuclear weapon state among the successor states of the Soviet Union, and to reform or reinforce the worldwide effort to reduce the spread of nuclear weapon by applying the lessons learned in the case of Saddam Hussain." The New World Order, therefore, envisages a well-structured "have" and "have not" nuclear societies __ a sort of `pecking order' type of world.