No hearing for peace.

• Position: Lack of coverage of the call for nuclear disarmament by 21 retired US generals and admirals - Editorial

On December 4, twenty-one retired U.S. generals and admirals--some at the highest level of our nuclear-weapons chain of command--did an astonishing thing: They renounced the nuclear orthodoxy and called for the "continuous, complete, and irrevocable elimination of nuclear weapons."

General Lee Butler was head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command from 1992 to 1994. It was his job to target U.S. nuclear weapons. In the event of nuclear war, it would have been his job to send the detonating order down the line.

Now Butler has pulled an about-face. "Nuclear weapons are inherently dangerous, highly expensive, militarily inefficient, and morally indefensible," he said, adding that U.S. nuclear policy is "fundamentally irrational" since it jeopardizes all of humanity.

General William Odom, former Director of the National Security Agency, also came out for disarmament. He may have been motivated by his own unique knowledge of the risks of an accidental, or "falsealarm," nuclear conflagration. When Odom was an aide to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Adviser, he had the following horrifying experience, as related by Thomas Powers in The New York Review of Books:

"The North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), from its bomb-proof post deep beneath Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, informed Odom that the Soviet Union had launched 220 missiles targeted on the United States," Powers writes. "Odom, at three o'clock in the morning, called Brzezinski, who prepared himself to notify the President in time for the United States to retaliate--that is, within three to seven minutes after the Soviet launch.

"Soon Odom called again to confirm the bad news, adding that the revised, now-correct number of attacking Soviet missiles was 2,200-the long-dreaded, allout, Pearl Harbor-style first strike intended to destroy American missiles in their silos.

"Brzezinski did not wake his wife; he was convinced everyone would soon be...