All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our next guest is Lawrence Wittner.
He's an award-winning American historian, writer, and activist.
He is professor of history emeritus at SUNY Albany, and his latest book is called Working for Peace and Justice, Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual.
His website is lawrencewittner.com, and he's got this great piece at commondreams.org called Try a Little Nuclear Sanity.
Yes, please.
Thank you.
Welcome to the show.
Lawrence, how are you?
Fine, Scott.
How are you today?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us here.
I would like some nuclear sanity.
Thanks for offering.
So would I.
Yeah.
There's a thing called the SANE Act.
What a great name for an act, assuming it's not like the Patriot Act and it's actually pushing something insane.
But I'll take it for face value for now.
What do we got here?
Well, it's legislation introduced by Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts on February 8th of this year.
It's the Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures Act, H.R.
3974, and it would cut $100 billion from the U.S. nuclear weapons budget over the next ten years by reducing the current fleet of U.S. nuclear submarines, delaying the purchase of new nuclear submarines, reducing the number of ICBMs, delaying a new bomber program, and ending the nuclear mission of air bombers.
So basically it calls for a major cutback in the U.S. nuclear weapons budget, which is a very large budget.
Now how much is it per year?
$100 billion over ten years?
So I guess if we extrapolate it out and assume that it's evenly spread, $10 billion a year.
But what is the total nuclear weapons budget every year?
Do you know?
Well, it's something like $60 billion.
That's money spent not only on maintaining current nuclear weapons and replacing them with more modern weapons, but also with maintaining and indeed building new nuclear weapons labs at a tremendous cost.
One of the compromises that the Obama administration made with Republican opponents of the New START Treaty a year or so back was that he would spend a lot of money, over $100 billion of federal government money, on building up the nuclear labs, building new ones, and getting ready for a new surge of nuclear weapons.
So that basically the government, despite talk of the goal of a nuclear-free world, is looking into the distant future in terms of maintaining and upgrading its nuclear weapons program.
Well now, I'm sorry.
I don't remember if I read this in your article or where I read.
Somebody's saying that Russia is now being brought into the missile shield.
I guess, you know, the excuse was that, well, this is to protect Poland from Iran.
So the Russians, I guess, are calling our bluff and saying, oh, okay, well, we want to help protect Poland from Iran, too.
Since it's not about Russia at all, you won't mind.
And I wonder, do they get away with calling our bluff on that?
And are they, in fact, being brought in?
Do you know?
As far as I know, they're not.
The Russians certainly have made that point, that if the U.S. government needs this missile defense shield to defend Europe against Iranian missiles, then they, the Russians, would be glad to cooperate.
But the U.S. government won't go for that and insists on having a missile defense shield that it controls and the Russians have no part of.
So there's a real conflict between Russia and the United States as this missile defense program, and it's not going away.
Well, is it even fair for us to call it a missile defense program?
Maybe it's kind of one, or maybe you have an opinion about this.
It seems to me like it's not a missile defense program.
It's just one part of the first strike posture, where we're trying to build up such, at least in the minds of our war commanders, such an ability to overwhelm the Russians that the mutually assured destruction balance is thrown off.
And now it's only assured that we will destroy them and we'll be able to shoot down enough of their nukes on the way up, or that kind of thing with our airborne lasers and our satellite weapons and whatever, where we would be able to succeed in a first strike.
And I don't know how many cities they think is acceptable or whatever, but that's really what they're going for, isn't it?
First strike capability to cancel out Russia's ability to incredibly deter us?
Well, that may be what the U.S. government is going for.
It's hard to fathom motives.
Certainly it would give the United States, if it worked, which is quite questionable, but if its missile defense system worked, then it would give the United States an advantage, since it could neutralize Soviet nuclear deterrence of the United States and allow the United States to have a first strike or more effective first strike against the Soviet Union.
For many years people have debated this whole idea of missile defense called during the Reagan years Star Wars, and the defenders of the system say, well, it's merely defensive.
It's not aggressive in any way.
The critics of the missile defense system say that it's part of warfare, that is, just as soldiers of old would carry not only a sword but a shield.
So this shield enables the swordsmen to fight more effectively in the future conflict, and therefore when discussing defense and offense, you have to take into account the fact that a shield will help with warlike behavior.
Well, I'm kind of amazed by this whole thing.
When I was elementary school age in the 1980s, it was still the Cold War, and it was sort of, you know, detente was over, and it was the renewed brinksmanship of the Reagan years, and it seemed like at least some kind of probability we could actually get into a full-scale humankind extinction level nuclear war with the USSR, and yet the USSR has been gone for more than 20 years now, and it just seems like it couldn't be.
Like we must be stuck in the wrong dimension or something if we still have thousands of these things pointed at each other when Soviet communism is over, and the Russian military, you know, pulled back behind the Ural Mountains and set all their satellites free.
Well, most of their satellites free.
It's just, I guess it was even the Secretary of Defense's office, Robert Gates' office, put out this report saying we really only need 14 H-bombs, and we could bomb, you know, Beijing and Moscow and Paris, and whoever we need to deter, we'd have plenty.
Tehran?
Yeah.
Well, it's certainly clear that the current nuclear weapons budget, nuclear weapons arsenal that the United States maintains, is part of Cold War thinking.
That is, there's been no upgrading in thought since that time, no understanding that it's time to reassess what's going on in the world.
So Congressman Markey, at the time of introducing the SANE Act, said America's nuclear weapons budget is locked in a Cold War time machine, and I think that's true.
Well, let's pick this up on the other side of the break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Lawrence Whitner.
He's got this great piece at CommonDreams.org.
Try a little nuclear sanity.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Coming up, the interview I recorded with James Bamford yesterday afternoon.
But right now we're talking with Lawrence Whitner about the H-bomb, and more specifically about the SANE Act in the Congress, introduced by Congressman Edward Markey to cut $100 billion.
It's a start from America's nuclear weapons budget over the next ten years.
Tell us a little bit more about Edward Markey and how much support he has, how big of a deal this is perceived to be inside the Congress, whether you think it's really going anywhere, those kinds of things.
Well, it's still somewhat marginal, but it's growing in support.
There are 45 co-sponsors to this SANE Act.
It's been endorsed by a variety of peace groups, and it has the support of the National Council of Churches, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
So it has some possibilities of getting traction in this Congress.
Congressman Markey, I should note, has long been a critic of nuclear weapons.
He's no newcomer to this cause.
And in fact, during the 1980s, he was converted to it by the late Randy Forsberg, who founded the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, trying to stop the nuclear arms race during the early 1980s.
And SANE, of course, was the Committee for SANE Nuclear Policy, running from the late 1950s through 1987, when it merged with the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.
So the name SANE Act, I think, is designed to ring a bell with people who remember that history and understand that there's a long-term citizens' campaign against nuclear weapons and saving the world from nuclear war.
Isn't it strange how the most important issue ever, the future survival of all of mankind, is seen most of the time like the province of some hippies and some elbow-patch professors, and nobody else seems to really care or think that this matters as an issue very much.
Of course, there's the Friends Committee.
But other than that, if you ask people, what are the most important issues in America or whatever, getting rid of the nukes is probably 100th on the list or something.
Well, you know, if you ask people whether they would like to get rid of nuclear weapons, they say yes, by overwhelming majority.
So there's tremendous support for a nuclear-free world.
But on the other hand, I think you're right that it's not the issue that's on the front burner or in the front of their mind.
They're more concerned about a variety of other immediate matters.
So that it's only when a crisis, a nuclear crisis looms, such as the Reagan administration's threats of nuclear war against the Soviet Union and vice versa, that people get out in the streets and they demonstrate and they join mass campaigns against nuclear weapons.
At this point, I think that the nuclear question has receded from the forefront of public debate.
But nonetheless, it should be there, since nuclear weapons are the means to destroy the world and all living things.
Well, and you also make a good point in your article, Lawrence, when you say that it's really been the nonproliferation treaty that has done the most, that was an American-created treaty and pushed by the United States on the rest of the world, that you guys promised not to get nukes and we'll promise to one day get rid of ours.
And that, for the most part, it's really worked, even if they're trying to use it as a tripwire for war against Iran right now.
Right, right.
The United States didn't want that kind of treaty initially.
It got together with the Soviet Union during the early 1960s and began to work at a treaty to prevent other nations from developing nuclear weapons, to get the other nations to sign on and say they would not build the bomb.
But the other nations said, well, we're not going to sign that sort of treaty.
How about you're saying you'll get rid of your nuclear weapon?
So eventually the treaty was a compromise provided, as you said, for the nonnuclear powers to pledge not to develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear powers to swear that they would get rid of theirs.
So naturally the nuclear powers have been dragging their heels ever since and don't really want to get rid of them, but when pressed they're willing to make some progress on that score.
So in fact this agreement has worked somewhat.
There are far fewer nuclear weapons in the world today.
There are about 20,000 of them still remaining, as compared to the height of the Cold War when there were some 70,000 in existence.
But nonetheless those last 20,000 are going to be abandoned only with great reluctance by their possessors.
So the struggle goes on, and I would suggest that your listeners, if they're really concerned about the future survival of the world against this nuclear menace, should contact their members of Congress and urge them to get behind the SANE Act and other measures that will get rid of nuclear weapons, for good and for all.
I can imagine with my imagination a bunch of congressmen being shocked to find out that, wow, did you guys get a bunch of phone calls about this SANE Act today?
Me too.
Isn't it shocking all of a sudden how many people are getting behind this issue that we usually don't hear a peep about?
Wouldn't it be nice if we could shock them a little bit and get some of those phones to ring, get some of those congresspeople to at least take notice?
Right, right.
I think so.
It really has been popular pressure that's led to arms control treaties, such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but also the other nuclear arms and disarmament treaties.
And without that popular pressure, governments are not going to move on this score.
Governments drift very easily, as we know, into war, especially when they have very powerful weapons.
So they become very dangerous at that point, and therefore the only way we can ensure that they don't fight nuclear wars is to force them to get rid of their nuclear weapons.
I saw a thing on the Science Channel or something or other years ago, Discovery Channel years ago, where some mathematician said, Well, I'm a mathematician, and as long as there are thousands of nuclear weapons in the world, then there's a probability greater than zero that they will be used at some point.
And that seems like a convincing enough argument right there to get rid of all of them.
Right, absolutely.
You know, terrorism is a danger, and Iran developing nuclear weapons is a danger, but those are dangers that would not exist in a nuclear-free world.
So only by getting rid of nuclear weapons and the materials for making them will we ever be safe from nuclear war.
Well, you know, even though I was bashing him earlier for his brinksmanship, Ronald Reagan, even though he failed to pull it off, because apparently he believed in the myth of Star Wars under 80s technology, but anyway, he believed that he was on some kind of mission from God to abolish nuclear weapons, to make a deal with the Soviet Union to get rid of all of them, and I guess then use our moral superiority to insist on the abolition of the rest of the nukes on Earth, too, in the hands of the Europeans and the Chinese and the Israelis, etc.
But he blew it, and he didn't pull it off, but maybe the anti-nuclear activists could improve their spin a little bit if they adopted and used Ronald Reagan as their mascot, and had Ronald Reagan's face on all of their propaganda, and said, we must create a nuclear-weapons-free world like Ronald Reagan wanted, then that way you're attacking the right from the right, and you're showing the broad-based, bipartisan consensus on this issue.
Think of all the space between you, Professor Whitner, and Ronald Reagan.
We all agree on getting rid of the nukes.
See what I mean?
Well, I think you're right.
I think nuclear weapons are not an issue for the right or for the left.
They're an issue for all people who value their families and friends and loved ones, and don't want to see them consumed in nuclear war.
Arms control and disarmament treaties have been sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats, and I think they should be.
Right.
Absolutely.
Okay, well, right on.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Okay, thank you.
We're sure with you.
All right, everybody, that is Lawrence S. Whitner, Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY Albany, and author of Working for Peace and Justice, Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual.
We'll be right back with that Bamford interview after this.
