RESISTANCE REFLECTIONS

by Jack & FeliceCohen-Joppa, Editors

"An eye for an eye makes everyone blind." - Gandhi

Shortly after India's recent nuclear test explosions, the Pakistani Foreign Minister said "It seems that the Indian leadership has gone berserk."  He obviously knows the condition: Pakistan has now followed suit. In two weeks time, the earth has been subjected to 10 nuclear weapons tests.

But as we know, the leader in this Fool's Parade is certainly the United States.  The $4.7 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) under construction at California's Livermore Nuclear weapons lab is the centerpiece of U.S.efforts to develop fourth generation nuclear weapons and test them in the laboratory. Sane critics observe that NIF really amounts to "Nuclear Insanity Forever."

People who helped to close the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant through education, agitation, and resistance over the past two decades gathered recently in Boulder,Colorado, and at the nearby gates of Rocky Flats to pat themselves on the back.  But only lightly.  There was also a clear recognition that the government's plutonium machine shop has merely "gone 90's": it was upgraded, downsized, and relocated to a more favorable corporate and labor climate, south of the Colorado border, at Los Alamos.

And while Clinton chides India and Pakistan to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, their nuclear tests demonstrate the pointlessness of the treaty.  Despite all ofour best efforts for more than a generation, we've been trumped by technology.

Our goal is nuclear abolition or nothing, and as King observed, "nonviolence or nonexistence."  Arms control is not disarmament.  Faith in the regime of arms control, the hope that incrementalism will lead to disarmament faster than technology outpaces the diplomats is indeed a deceptive and futile hope.

Confoundingly, even nuclear abolition may not be enough.  Also in Colorado, an international group of activists recently gathered to survey the horrifying future of space warfare and build global awareness of and opposition to U.S. plans for domination of the "final frontier."  Space warriors happily preach the end of nuclear weapons as we know them, but only because their own weapons are, literally and strategically, above all that.

It is altogether fitting, then, that the last few months of tension among the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction have produced another type of proliferation: that of nuclear inspection and verification teams comprised of citizens whose allegiance is global, not national, but who are assuming responsibility for the weapons in their own midst, deployed in their name.

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last updated July 10 1998