Radioactive hype.

• Author: Mueller, John
• Position: Clear and Present Dangers - Essay

LET ME be clear at the outset (since it will likely be forgotten by readers who manage to get past this paragraph) that I consider dissuading more countries from obtaining nuclear weapons to be quite a good idea and preventing terrorists from getting them to be an even better one. Indeed, I am even persuaded from time to time that the world might well be better off if the countries who now have them gave them up. Perhaps we could start with the French, who cling to an arsenal presumably under the imaginative notion that the weapons might one day prove useful should Nice be savagely bombarded from the sea or should a truly unacceptable number of Africans in former French colonies take up English.

My concern, however, is that the obsessive quest to control nuclear proliferation--particularly since the end of the Cold War--has been substantially counterproductive and has often inflicted dire costs. Specifically, the effort to prevent proliferation has enhanced the appeal of--or desperate desire for--nuclear weapons for some regimes, even as it has resulted in far more deaths than have been caused by all nuclear--or even all Weapons of Mass Destruction--detonations in all of history.

Presidents, White House hopefuls, congressmen, those in the threat-assessment business and the American public are convinced the biggest danger to the United States, and perhaps even the entire world order, comes from the two-pronged threat of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. This concern is understandable, but it is overwrought and has had undesirable consequences.

Casualties of the Non-proliferation Quest

THE QUEST to prevent atomic spread and the resulting destruction has been bipartisan. The current disastrous Iraq War, with deaths that may well run into the hundreds of thousands, is a key case in point. It was almost entirely sold by the Republican administration as a venture required to keep Saddam Hussein's pathetic--and fully containable and deterrable--rogue state from developing nuclear and other potentially threatening weapons, and to prevent him from palming off some of these to eager and congenial terrorists. Democrats have derided the war as "unnecessary", but the bulk of them only came to that conclusion when neither weapons nor weapons programs were found in Iraq: Many of them have made it clear they would support military. action and its attendant bloodshed if the intelligence about Saddam's programs had been accurate.

However, the devastation of Iraq in the service of limiting proliferation did not begin with Bush's war in 2003; this time they just embellished the terrorism angle. Over the previous 13 years, Iraqis suffered under economic sanctions visited upon them by both Democratic and Republican administrations that were designed to force Saddam from office (and effectively from life since he had no viable sanctuary elsewhere) while keeping the country from developing chemical, biological and especially nuclear weapons. The goals certainly had their admirable side. But, as multiple studies have shown, the sanctions proved to be a necessary cause of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, most of them children under the age of five--the most innocent of civilians.

One might have imagined that the people carrying out this policy with its horrific and well-known consequences would from time to time have been asked whether the results were worth the costs. To my knowledge, this happened only once, on television's 60 Minutes in 1996. Madeleine Albright, then the American ambassador to the United Nations, was asked, "We have heard that a half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.... Is the price worth it?" Albright did not dispute the number and acknowledged it to be "a very hard choice." But, she concluded, "We think the price is worth it", pointing out that because of sanctions Saddam had recognized Kuwait and had come "cleaner on some of these weapons programs."

A Lexis-Nexis search suggests that Albright's dismissal of the devastation on a prominent television show went completely unremarked upon by the U.S. media. In the Middle East, however, it was covered widely and repeatedly. Osama bin Laden was among the outraged and used the punishment that sanctions were inflicting on Iraqi civilians as a centerpiece in his many diatribes against heartless American policy in the region.

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