The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex.

• Author: Eland, Ivan
• Position: Book Review

By Helen Caldicott New York: The New Press, 2002. Pp. xx, 263. $16.95 paper.

As might be gleaned from the title of her recent book, The New Nuclear Danger, Helen Caldicott critiques from the left the Bush administration's policies on nuclear weapons and missile defense. Still, she does not spare the Clinton administration or Democratic politicians from blame for sparse accomplishments in arms control, nor does she spare praise for the first Bush administration's reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. She makes many cogent criticisms about current and prior administrations' nuclear policies and the excesses of the government-dominated military-industrial complex associated with nuclear weapons, but her often valid points are undermined by other far-fetched or alarmist arguments, sloppy research, and haphazard footnoting.

Caldicott astutely realizes that missile defense is being developed to act as a shield to allow dangerous U.S. military interventions against countries with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and with the long-range missiles to deliver them. She also intelligently questions why the United States needs to meddle in the affairs of countries around the globe. (She appropriately criticizes Bill Clinton for intervening militarily overseas more than any other president during the past twenty years in order to compensate for his sex scandal and his lack of military service.) Unfortunately, her critique from the left argues that such iron-fisted diplomacy goes hand-in-hand with "U.S. corporate globalization." The two, however, do not necessarily go together; she confuses mercantilism at gunpoint with peaceful trade and financial transactions by private parties leading to a more prosperous and interdependent world.

Caldicott also develops some evidence indicating that the Bush administration's grandiose missile-defense scheme might be aimed at achieving a nuclear first-strike capability against Russia and China, rather than at the stated goal of defending against small rogue nations such as North Korea. She argues that U.S. construction of the most sophisticated tracking and imaging radar in Norway, rather than in Japan, will probably make Russia and China worry that the United States will eventually replace hit-to-kill warheads on missile-defense interceptors with nuclear warheads. (Nuclear warheads for missile defense would be much more effective in mopping up the large number of warheads in a Russian or future Chinese...