07/09/13 – Lawrence S. Wittner – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager whose site is unique on the web.
Subscribers are allowed a window into Mike's very real main account and receive announcements and explanations for all his market moves.
The Federal Reserve has been inflating the money supply to finance the bank bailouts and terror war overseas.
So Mike's betting on commodities, mining stocks, European markets, and other hedges against a depreciating dollar.
Play along on paper or with real money and then be your own judge of Mike's investment strategies.
Let's see what happens at WallStreetWindow.com.
All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
My website is ScottHorton.org and you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slash Scott Horton Show.
Please do.
Retweet me.
Slash Scott Horton Show.
All right.
Our first guest on the show today is Lawrence S. Wittner.
He is Professor Emeritus at the College of Arts and Sciences in the History Department, more specifically there, at the University of Albany.
Welcome back to the show.
Lawrence, how are you doing?
Fine, Scott.
How are you today?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And now the thing about nuclear weapons is it's an evergreen topic because our government will never get rid of the things.
And even though there's hardly ever any attention paid to nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons policy in the news, thankfully they're not in use very regularly or anything.
And so they kind of fall under everybody's radar.
But at the same time, it's the most important issue on the planet, of course.
The future of our species hangs in the balance here.
So that's why I know you're so concerned about this issue and I appreciate your continued attention to it after all this time.
This latest one at HNN.
US, that's the History News Network, HNN.
US.
It's called Still Preparing for Nuclear War.
And it's a bummer.
Oh, man.
How many nuclear weapons does the U.S. government own and control right now again?
It currently has 7,700.
And that's, of course, in spite of the president's pledge back in April of 2009 to be working for a nuclear weapons-free world.
So there's been a real betrayal of Obama's promises on those lines.
Well, now, I want to get back to that number in just a second.
But you brought up that great speech that he gave in Prague in the Czech Republic back in 2009.
And I remember watching it live on TV.
I don't know if it was on C-SPAN or maybe streaming online or whatever.
But anyway, the whole first half of the speech, the crowd was really enthused, like a bunch of American college students, you know, wow, Barack Obama is saying hopeful things.
It's so exciting.
And the second half of the speech, he started saying, yeah, we'll achieve this sometime in your great-grandchildren's lifetime or something like that.
And he started making it really clear that what he was really there to do was to try to get the Czech Republic to put the radar stations there for his anti-missile systems on the Russian border in Poland.
And the crowd, unlike a bunch of American college students, they all got it real quick and you could actually, you know, hear they all real died down, all the murmur and excitement in the crowd died down.
And everybody started crossing their arms and looking at him like, what did you just say?
And by the time he was done, he made it clear that I'm a liar and nothing I said in the first half of this speech should have been taken seriously whatsoever.
Thanks.
Have a good one.
Bye.
Well, yes.
Pretty much that way.
He certainly backed off since that time.
And even in that speech, there were indications that he was in no hurry to get rid of nuclear weapons.
He said something about perhaps this wouldn't be achieved during his lifetime.
Well, it certainly won't be at this rate.
Indeed, there are still some 17,000 nuclear weapons around the world.
There are nine nations that possess them and many others that are, of course, trying to build them.
So it's a very dangerous situation, Scott.
And I think your listeners shouldn't be gulled into complacency by soothing words about disarmament.
It doesn't really seem to be taking place.
Certainly not not fast enough.
Right.
And now the thing is, too, I like to think of John Mueller a lot from the University of Chicago.
You may be familiar.
He wrote a book called Overblown about the terrorist threat and what a non-threat it really is.
You're more likely to slip in the bathtub or get struck by lightning or shot by a cop or that kind of thing, you know.
And he says the same thing about nukes.
He says, you know, Lincoln always threatened that the South was going to invade and conquer the North.
And FDR always threatened that the Japanese were going to come and conquer, invade and conquer the United States.
And people have been crying wolf about nuclear weapons since they were invented, that this is going to lead to the end of mankind.
And yet everywhere that they spread, peace breaks out.
Even Mao Zedong, you give him an H bomb and he starts kind of relaxing a little bit about, you know, in all of his bellicose statements and starts becoming more responsible because of the awesome power in his hands.
And so maybe, you know, really mad has proven pretty effective at preventing major power war.
Obviously, we still pick on the poor Afghans.
But but we are mandatory, at least for enemies or friends, if not allies with Russia, China and every major power in Europe, because everybody's holding H bombs.
Right.
Well, I think that's incorrect, Scott.
I think that obviously we haven't had a nuclear war since 1945.
But there have been times when no other nation has had nuclear weapons.
That is, up through 1949, the fall of that year, the Soviet Union didn't have any.
And yet that didn't in itself stop the United States from from using nuclear weapons against Russia.
And in fact, in various confrontations since that time, there have been bloody wars.
One hundred million people or so died during the 20th century.
Many of them in the second half of the 20th century.
And nuclear weapons didn't bring peace.
I think we've been lucky so far that nuclear war hasn't broken out since 1945.
But I think that if we if we continue the practice of warfare and continue to have massive nuclear arsenals, that at some point or other, they're going to be used again.
After all, the whole history of the human race has been a history of warfare and violence.
And the United States government certainly has been involved in that numerous times since 1945.
So why should we assume that the U.S. government has suddenly become tenderhearted and won't use nuclear weapons?
It did use them in 1945, after all.
Right.
And of course, as good old Bob McNamara points out in the movie Fog of War, and he was one of the guys who helped Curtis LeMay with organizing the firebombing of Japan.
They killed just as many or more people with the firebombing in Japan as with the nukes.
In fact, there was just a thing I read recently at Foreign Policy about the end of the war and how the this is at foreign policy dot com.
I think it was about how the Japanese military command hardly took the nukes into account when they were deciding to go ahead and surrender, that it was all because Joe Stalin's Red Army was coming and they decided to go ahead and call it quits then.
And of course, they were, I guess, concerned that they could lose the city with one shot.
But they were losing entire cities overnight in single nights of bombing raids, as it was anyway.
So that wasn't really even the deal breaker that ended the war.
And of course, all the threat about the Americans who would have died invading Japan is contingent on the premise that we're demanding unconditional surrender and you will unconditionally surrender or we will invade you, which is, of course, a decision made on our side of the war, not on their side.
Right.
Right.
I think that that's true.
And it's not at all clear that nuclear weapons forced the surrender of Japan.
It seems to me, having been through many of those government records, that the the the U.S. troops had won the war in the Far East by by August of 1945.
And it's those troops we should be thanking, not the men who built nuclear weapons.
But to go back to your other point about nuclear weapons making the world more peaceful, it's been a very violent world since 1945.
And there's no sign that the world's growing more peaceful, although some people have argued that.
And I think we should tell that to the millions who have who have been wounded or crippled or or whose whose whose families have watched their their their sons go to their death.
So I think that we have a real problem with nuclear weapons.
We've often slipped into nuclear war through accident or through miscalculation.
And nuclear weapons have been lost.
They've fallen out of planes.
Fortunately, they haven't exploded at those times.
So I think it's it's a a powder keg just waiting to go off in the context of of armed violence.
And we really have to do something about it.
And the two things we can do about it, it seems to me, are number one, we can get rid of nuclear weapons.
And number two, we can try to rein in the propensity of nations to go to war over fairly trivial matters.
All right, now, well, why don't you go ahead and elaborate on that last point?
Because I'm not putting words in your mouth, but typically, that means something like empower the UN Security Council even more that somehow that'll make peace break out, maybe give them control over the nukes or something.
Well, I think no one should have control over them.
I think they should be abolished and stigmatized and so on, rather than continue.
For example, in this recent piece you mentioned, the U.S. government maintained, well, I point out that in the so-called nuclear employment strategy recently released by the Pentagon, the U.S. government maintained that U.S. nuclear weapons were not only for the purpose of deterrence, but for other purposes, too.
It didn't state what purposes, but it's clear that the U.S. government is giving itself carte blanche to use nuclear weapons when it wants to use them.
And that might be in a future war.
It might be for an attack on some other nation when the U.S. government feels angry at it and so on.
So, furthermore, the U.S. triad of nuclear forces, the air, land, and sea-based nuclear submarines are all to be maintained as they have been in the past.
So, the old game goes on, and the old game may explode in our faces and those of other nations.
And furthermore, the world is bristling with nuclear weapons, 17,000 of them, as I mentioned.
And if even a small fraction of those are exploded, it won't be like the Hiroshima bombing, which was one small nuclear weapon, but a worldwide nuclear war that's going to destroy world civilization, that's going to destroy billions of people in a very short period of time.
So, while the firebombing of Tokyo and other nations was certainly terrible during the Second World War, the reality is that was a very inefficient way to massacre millions of people.
It took a great deal of firebombing to do that.
But even a small-scale nuclear war can accomplish that within 10 or 20 minutes.
Right.
Okay, now, so there's a lot of different things to go over here already so far, one of them being this posture review thing, let me get the name of it right, I'm sorry, it's the...
Nuclear Employment Strategy.
Nuclear Employment Strategy.
Okay, now, part of, I don't think it was the Czech speech, I think it was after that, maybe it was the Czech speech.
But anyway, at some point here in the recent past, Obama did announce that he was changing the nuclear posture so that now we only hold nukes for defensive purposes and we will no longer threaten first strike against any country in the world unless we're accusing that country of illegally and secretly developing nuclear weapons on their own, Iran.
Which, of course, that's not true about Iran, but that's what he was talking about was, we promise no nuclear first strikes except against Iran.
We don't promise that.
But I think what you're telling me is, nah, when it comes down to the real paperwork, they're not renouncing a first strike even against Australia here.
They're not renouncing first strike against anyone.
That's correct.
In 2010, the administration's Nuclear Posture Review, which was an earlier statement about its nuclear intentions, declared that the U.S. government would work toward making deterrence of nuclear attack the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons.
But this latest statement, the Nuclear Employment Strategy, which was issued this last June, last month, stated that that was not the policy today.
That is, that the U.S. government had not agreed to make deterrence the only possible use of U.S. nuclear weapons.
So the U.S. government still feels free to have a first strike against other nations, or to threaten other nations with a first strike if they don't shape up.
So it's a very dangerous situation.
And in the context of making threats against other nations, other nations themselves may make counter-threats or plan to use nuclear weapons against the United States.
Or if they don't have nuclear weapons, they may decide that the only safety lies in building them themselves.
Right.
I just realized while you were answering there that I actually failed.
I believe your answer would be the same, but I failed to construct that question accurately because I remembered the previous statement better now.
It says we renounce first strike against any non-nuclear weapon state, except Iran.
But we maintain that we still could use first strike against nuclear weapon states, which I guess would include England and France and Israel too.
Right.
But anyway, but you're saying that not even that.
No, they still are maintaining that they declare first strike intention, however you use the jargon, against any state, nuclear weapon state or not, or Iran or not.
They don't say.
In fact, they don't say what their policy is.
All they're doing is to rule out a deterrence-only strategy for nuclear weapons.
Right, but we know what that means.
That's all that can mean, right?
Right.
So if they say that they're not limited to a deterrence for the use of nuclear weapons, then obviously they can use them all sorts of ways.
Well, maybe they're just talking about mining asteroids or something.
Oh, no, I guess not.
They're talking about killing people.
Now, here's the thing too.
I appreciate the fact that you pointed out that Hiroshima was nothing compared to the thermonuclear weapons of today.
I know a little bit about this just because I had great teachers by chance when I was a kid who showed me the nuclear cafe and some things like that, and so I got to learn all about the A-bomb and the H-bomb and what's the difference and whatever.
But I know Dan Ellsberg has said on the show before that when he gives a speech about nukes, he'll ask the crowd, the audience, whether they're older adults or whether they're college students or anything, not to answer what is the difference, but do you know the difference between an A-bomb and an H-bomb?
And he says hardly anyone ever raises their hand.
People really have no idea, as the way he puts it.
The A-bomb is just the blasting cap for the H-bomb.
The H-bomb that, not all of them, but depending on how it's constructed, could kill all of Houston in one shot.
That's the kind of weapons we're talking about here, correct?
Oh, absolutely.
And for anyone who's never been to Houston, Houston is the fifth largest city in the world, and it's so spread out.
It's Texas, right, and it's on flat ground, too.
It's so spread out, it's just unbelievable.
If you've ever been there, the idea of one bomb being able to erase that and kill all the people there is unbelievable.
That's the point there.
Yes, well, the H-bomb, which is a thermonuclear weapon, can be built.
It can be 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb.
And most H-bombs today, in fact, are substantially more powerful than the atomic bombs used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And, of course, there are some 17,000 of them out there.
Okay, now that's U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan.
Is that everybody?
And North Korea.
Oh, and North Korea now, right.
And the South Africans had them, but they gave them up before turning power over to the blacks.
That's correct.
That's correct.
So I would maintain that one, well, let me go back a step here.
Polls have shown for many years that the public not only doesn't like a nuclear war, but it doesn't like the maintenance of nuclear weapons.
That is, the public supports getting rid of them.
It supports disarmament agreements, and it supports nuclear abolition, creating a nuclear weapons-free world.
But the politicians have not wanted to follow suit.
Nonetheless, the South African government, in its final days, was very concerned about the worldwide anti-apartheid campaign and the obloquy that it had gained for maintaining a racist system.
And, therefore, it felt that one way it could win public sentiment back to its side would be to abolish its nuclear arsenal.
Really?
I thought it was just because they were racist and they were afraid of what the blacks might do with them once they took power or something like that.
Well, they may have been afraid of that, too.
But certainly one aspect of their decision was that they were seeking to gain world sympathy and support.
And in some ways they did.
Every time there is a nuclear disarmament agreement, this wins support for the nations that engage in it.
Just as the building of new nuclear weapons or becoming a nuclear weapons state stirs up tremendous hostility on the part of the world public or fear on the part of the world public.
So that if the United States really wanted to win the approbation of other nations, it should be pressing forward with a nuclear disarmament agreement.
And as we saw at Prague, that idea was very popular.
Well, you know, obviously this could never be the policy.
But I just wonder as a thought experiment whether you think it's just completely crazy or, yeah, makes sense.
That I think that we could just, the U.S., could unilaterally disarm nuclear weapons.
We've got plenty of conventional power to threaten to carpet bomb any capital city in the world of any nation state that would dare try to take advantage of the fact that they've got nukes now and we don't.
Something like that.
And that really it would just be a great way to set the example for the rest of the world that that era is over and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is right.
It's insane to have nuclear weapons.
And it's time to get rid of them all.
You know, wouldn't that work?
I mean, who's going to attack us?
The Russians are going to sneak attack and destroy all of North America.
To what end?
Right.
Even if we didn't have any nukes at all.
That's what I think.
What do you think?
Well, I agree with you.
And it's very striking that today the Russians, who used to be hellbent on nuclear disarmament, have now eased off that plan.
And a key reason is that they're so outclassed by the United States when it comes to conventional weapons that they're suddenly thinking, well, maybe we should keep a good number of nuclear weapons just for insurance against the United States.
Because it's so vastly more powerful when it comes to its Air Force and its Navy and so on.
Not in terms of nuclear weapons, but in terms of conventional weapons.
In fact, I think a key reason that so many national security officials of the past now favor building a nuclear weapons free world, people like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and William Perry and so on, now agree that the United States would be safer without nuclear weapons and without the world having them, generally speaking, is that they realize the United States is so much stronger than other nations when it comes to a conventional weaponry that actually the United States would be much safer in a world without nuclear weapons.
Right.
You know, one of the things that, I guess I just hadn't thought that much about this, but Dan Ellsberg always just points out over and over again, forest fires.
Once you start setting off nukes, first of all, all infrastructure for accomplishing anything is over.
Right?
And then secondly, all of wilderness is burning.
And who's going to put it out and who's going to grow the crops next year when there ain't no sunlight?
And you know what?
I mean, you really could be talking about even in places on the far side of the world, in no man's land, way far away from any nuclear targets, where they all starve to.
Yes.
Well, and in fact, there have been articles published in the Scientific American and other science journals that have dealt with the effects of a very small-scale nuclear war, say between India and Pakistan, that is nations with very small nuclear arsenals.
And that would be so deadly, not just to the population there through blast and fire, but for the atmosphere as well, that it would create a nuclear winter around the world, including here, and thoroughly destroy agriculture and lead to massive starvation around the world.
So it's not merely those who would die in the actual nuclear war who are going to suffer, but people all around the world, millions and millions of whom would simply starve to death.
It's kind of funny what kind of creatures we are, that we have these things at all.
Well, who's we?
You and I don't own them, but whoever.
No.
The human beings are capable of holding themselves hostage, the entire species hostage like this, that some governments would do this to the rest of mankind.
It's just crazy.
Right, absolutely.
Well, I think what has happened and why this has happened in this way is that for thousands of years, have resorted to violence, to force, to defend themselves and to defend their homes and their cities and their countries and so on.
So in that sense, it seems to have made sense.
But as warfare has grown ever more destructive, as we've had a first and second world wars, as we've developed nuclear weapons, that old pattern of defending oneself through violence has grown more and more self-defeating.
So we've reached the end of the game in a way.
We can't keep doing that.
We have to develop other behavior patterns.
We have to have a peaceful trade, for example, rather than trade based on wars and seizing foreign oil through military conquest and so on.
We can't go on playing that old game or else we're doomed.
Yeah, it seems simple enough.
And again, I guess this is where we started was there's nothing ever in the news, thank goodness, that really brings this to people's attention because nobody's used nukes against anyone in so long.
And yet, I guess I saw some mathematician years ago say, hey, look, as long as we have thousands of these things, there's a probability greater than zero that they're going to be used at some point.
And we've really got to focus and make this the center of our attention and get to work on getting rid of these things and just creating a culture where no one accepts this any longer.
The USSR is gone.
We've got to get rid of these things and create a consensus about that.
It shouldn't be hard.
I really appreciate your time.
Sorry, I was going to ask you one more thing, but now I'm looking at the clock and I know I can't.
But thank you very much for all your work on this subject and for your time on the show today, Lawrence.
Yes, thank you, Scott.
And I hope people will take a look at my book, Confronting the Bomb, which deals with many of these questions.
Confronting the Bomb.
I'm sorry I did not have your whole bio here in front of me.
Just your university went here.
Professor of History Emeritus Lawrence S. Wittner from the University of Albany.
Thanks again.
Yeah, thank you, Scott.
Bye now.
Hey, all.
Scott Worden here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Are you sick of the neocons in the Israel lobby pretending as though they've earned some kind of monopoly on foreign policy wisdom in Washington, D.C.?
These peanut clowns who've never been right about anything?
Well, the Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first, telling the lobby to go take a hike.
The empire's bad enough without the neocons making it all about the interests of a foreign state.
Help C&I promote peace.
Visit their site at councilforthenationalinterest.org and click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey, all.
Scott Worden here to tell you about this great new project, Listen and Think Audio at listenandthink.com.
They've got two new audio books read by the deepest voice in libertarianism, the great historian Jeff Riggenbach, Our Last Hope, Rediscovering the Lost Path to Liberty by Michael Meharry of the Tenth Amendment Center is available now.
And Beyond Democracy, co-authored by Frank Karsten of the Mises Institute Netherlands and journalist Carl Beckman, will be released this month.
And they're only just getting started.
So check out listenandthink.com.
You may be able to get your first audio book absolutely free.
That's Listen and Think Audio at listenandthink.com.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
I think you ought to consider subscribing to the Future of Freedom, the journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation, in print or online.
The Future of Freedom features the best writers in the libertarian movement.
The fearless Jacob Hornberger, individualist anarchist Sheldon Richman, and crusading journalist Jim Bovard, along with Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, Tim Kelly, Richard Ebling, and many more.
And the July issue features one by your favorite radio host on America's Middle East policy, entitled Stupidity or the Plan.
So head on over to fff.org.
Subscribe and sign up for the Future of Freedom in print or online.
That's fff.org.
Subscribe.
And tell them Scott sent you.
Oh, man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my...
Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights.
That's right.
It's just a harmless, stainless steel, business card-sized copy of the Bill of Rights from securityedition.com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty-destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the Bill of Rights Security Edition from securityedition.com.
It's the size of a business card, so it fits right in your wallet.
And it's guaranteed to trip the metal detectors wherever the police state goes.
That's securityedition.com.
And don't forget their great Fourth Amendment socks.
Hey, guys.
I got his laptop.
Hey, everybody.
Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, Why We're Saying We're Not Still Winning War on Civil Liberties, and, of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
But I'm happy to talk to you about anything about anything else you've heard me cover on the show as well.
So check out YouTube.com/Scott Horton Show for some examples and email Scott at Scott Horton dot org for more details.
See you there.