"The
contortions of putting the genie back into the lamp are so difficult that not
even Obama can do it. And it's unlikely that any of his immediate successors
will suffer the loss of presidential power that would result from being
deprived of the ultimate weapon."
The nuclear bomb: Is there any hope of putting the nuclear genie back into it proverbial lamp? Recent history doesn't make it look like a promising prospect.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was
responsible for letting the genie out of the lamp. And now his successor, Barak
Obama, wants to force it back into the magical artifact. That Democratic
president, who with his deployment of New Deal social policy, confronted
the greatest economic crisis of the 20th century known as the Great Depression,
is also the man behind the U.S. nuclear program, which was initially launched
to deal with Nazi Germany.
Dubbed the Manhattan Project and
developed mostly at Los
Alamos Laboratory, the White House initiative produced weapons that emerged
under another president, Harry Truman. Truman ordered weapons dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki that would then light the fuse of the arms race and the Cold War. Through a quirk of
history, a president named Obama, who has sought to follow in Roosevelt’s steps
regarding the methods for tackling the economic crisis and has even adopted his
idea of changing the era politically - is the one raising the elimination of
nuclear weapons as a goal of humanity.
In his recent book Bomb
Power, historian Garry Wills writes that acquiring the power of total
destruction that came along with the nuclear bomb has led to a transformation
that “altered the most profound constitutional roots” of the U.S. presidency.
The concentration of power in the hands of the president to the detriment to
the legislature and judiciary; the everlasting state of emergency in which the security
apparatus and intelligence agencies have been placed; as well as the increasing
burden of state secrecy, can all be explained by the enormous power of
destruction that has been put in the hands of a single person.
And the effects of nuclear
weapon on the U.S. presidency have been replicated within the structures of power
of all countries that have obtained The Bomb. A superpower is a country with
a ruler authorized to push the button that triggers a nuclear attack - a task that
requires a system of encrypted communications carried by an underling, usually
a military officer, who accompanies such a ruler wherever he or she may go.
Possessing
nuclear weapons has been and remains the highest mark of sovereign power and an
obligation of respect from friend and foe alike. Around the complexities of atomic
fission and its utility for building vast arsenals of missiles - ready to
destroy the entire planet several times over - are focused two enigmas that
surround sovereignty itself: the arcane nature of nuclear policy which is accessible
only to a few, and its identification with the power of the sovereign, which
means the right of life and death that a single person wields over the rest of us
mortals.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
Although the dangers posed by
nuclear proliferation and the uncontrolled spread of fissile material are more
than clear, the 20 years that have passed since the end of the Cold War demonstrate
how difficult it will be to get the nuclear genie back into the lamp it escaped
from 70 years ago. The contribution to peace provided by the reverential fear of
these weapons, used only once in history, has now reverted to the maximum possible
danger to humanity; particularly if they fall into the hands of terrorist
groups. But resistance to retracing their steps on the part of all countries that
possess them are enormous, starting with the leading superpower, which is now
also the one carrying out an exceptional push for the denuclearization of the
world.
Thanks only to the fact that
he has made the investments needed to keep the dissuasive capacity of his country
intact in the coming decades, Obama has been able to link his new nuclear
doctrine with the signing of a revised Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty [START] with Russia, the Nuclear Security
Summit in Washington, and the next revision of the Non-Proliferation
Treaty.
Just take France as an
example: It cannot officially disagree with Obama's objectives, but it has
already shown its discomfort with a horizon that would leave it without one of the
three cards that make France stand out as a power with global ambition (the
first, its voting parity with Germany within E.U. institutions, was lost in the
Treaty of Nice - which
means its right of veto in the U.N. Security Council is all that remains of that
card).
The contortions of putting
the genie back into the lamp are so difficult that not even Obama can do it. And
it's unlikely that any of his immediate successors will suffer the loss of
presidential power that would result from being deprived of the ultimate
weapon. The attempt to twist the neck of the nuclear genie makes evident the greatest
of paradoxes: it will occur only with the decision of the greatest
military superpower in history; and only with the decision of its president, by
virtue of the vast power of his office and the possession of this greatest
mystery of power.
