[01/16/1999-12/21/1999]: 42-t-26444787-20080359F-001-002-2013

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atomically, how does the role of war-making in society change? Does the
fact
that we spend more money each year on defense than the rest of the nations
on the U.N. Security Council combined contribute to the currency and
ethical
permission of military solutions to conflicts among people? In comparison,
how much are we investing each year in addressing the frictions that give
rise to military confrontation? What are those frictions and how might they
be relaxed? How many of these frictions are caused by fictions?
Is America letting the painful necessity of past military investment and
surrounding ideological inertia confound genuine progress towards a
peaceful
world community?
Giving journalists good reason to punctuate this question, we glimpsed this
fall an increasingly rare sharp distinction between the ideologies of
Democrat and Republican parties, in the tally of the Nuclear Test Ban Vote.
Despite one of President Clinton's finer hours in heartfelt effort for
passage, shockingly myopic, ethically vacant, and intellectually defective
posturing among Senate Republican leadership resulted'in the failure of
America to ratify a proclamation to the world with the moral: "We, the
inventors of the nuclear bomb and the only nation to have deployed it in
conflict, forever foreswear its offensive use, shall not attempt to
increase
its potency further, and shall open ourselves to inspection of commitment
to
this oath." 'Such is the basic spirit of the treaty.
As reported by CNN's John Cloud on October 18, 1999, "Allies were ...
upset.
Britain's government was 'deeply disappoint~d'; the Japanese Foreign
Minister 'extremely concerned.' To be sure, there was some justification
for
the anxiety. It's difficult to dissuade India and Pakistan from testing
nukes in each other's backyards if the U.S. won't promise to end testing.
'There is a collective sigh of relief in Indian government circles,' says
Bharat Karnad of the Center for policy Research in New Delhi. "Jesse Helms
[who, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led the
opposition] has taken India off the hook. '"
The fig leaf postulate of the GOP leadership goes something like this:
Mutually Assured Destruction - a game of apocalyptic chicken among nations
with twitchy fingers on red buttons and nuclear footballs - is the policy
that will convince other countries not to develop and test advanced nuclear
weaponry.
Meanwhile, industriousness paid by Cold War inertia invents and spreads
ever
more perfect machines of destruction, with ever sharpening focus of
lethality, packing ever more, concentrated bangs, through increasingly
invisible systems of delivery, presumably in the 'future to be orchestrated
on "secure" Web .sites clicked from distributed'centers of command floating
and.flying about the Earth.