Maybe They Should Hand Out a Nobel Prize for War
The awarding of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed ElBaradei of the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency is a victory for the international disarmament movement as well as a clear expression of faith in the role of the UN as peacekeeper.
It’s also a slap in the face to the Bush Administration from the international community: One month prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, ElBaradei and his committee made it clear that Iraq had no nuclear-creating capacity, the existence of which was a major claim for taking out Saddam Hussein.
Still Bush went ahead with the invasion. (It’s too bad there’s no Nobel Prize for War.)
American presidents, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush have propagated the exceptionalist belief that only the U.S.—and, of course, a few key allies—is responsible enough to handle such weapons of mass destruction. Americans seem to agree, or at least their media do. Rarely do the mainstream media ever refer to our nuclear cache as “weapons of mass destruction.” To be sure, the movement to abolish nuclear weapons might well take greater hold here if we begin to see things in this way.
The official rationale is that we only use atomic weapons for peace, as political leverage. History shows us that’s not the case. We have used nuclear power twice, albeit only three days apart, to obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (contrary to popular memory, a second city was indeed bombed) and kill more than 200,000 people. Tens of thousands were seriously injured or disfigured, or experienced life-long illnesses due to the bomb’s aftereffects.
Some argue that this act of destruction was in fact an act of peace, to end the Second World War swiftly and ensure fewer deaths in the long run. (See the heated "Trial of Harry Truman" which took place at this web site in August 2001.) It did end the war immediately, but there's substantial historical evidence to contradict the latter part of that argument. (For a recent discussion of historians' continuing disagreement about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Gar Alperovitz's article of August 3, 2005 posted on the web site CommonDreams.org.)
Truman and his advisors just didn’t know what would happen in a military invasion in the summer of 1945; but more important, they never took the time to find out what would happen after an atomic bomb was dropped on real people—and yet decided to drop it anyway.
Americans doubtless feel bad for those Japanese citizens who became our unintended victims. But the U.S. government’s present reliance on nuclear weapons as a deterrent and its argument that it’s the only government capable of using them wisely makes it clear how much we’ve forgotten in sixty years.
The rest of the world will surely welcome the decision to award ElBaradei the prize, just as they stood in the millions on February 15, 2003 to protest Bush’s desire to go to war in the face of ElBaradei’s findings and the absence of any other WMDs. I hope Americans, too, will welcome the decision, as it has an important lesson to teach us all. Mainly, that nuclear weapons should be viewed as an evil force in anyone’s hands, even the hands of the United States of America.