• Forty & Counting

• The Wind from Somewhere

• Crying Wolf & Becoming the Too Fat Frog

• Paradise Lost, Hell’s Apples & the CIA

• Downwind from Nuclear
  Holocaust and Wacko

• An Ethic of Life
  An Ethic of Death

• Red State: Blue State

• The Burning Of Earth

• Wahoo Memories & Iranian Democracy

• On Bullying

• War and Debt: The Don Reeves Alternative to a Draft

• Killing the Huddled Masses Yearning to Be Free

• How to Win in a Gilded Age

• On Fear

• Holy Lands, Unholy Wars

• On Sacrifice

• Education & Tax Justice

Downwind from Nuclear Holocaust
and Wacko

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

I don’t get fan mail. My wife sometimes tells me I have done a good job. My ‘good old boys’ Monday luncheon group occasionally discusses a column I wrote. That’s about it.

But recently, with great emotion, I received fan messages from people I don’t even know. I had written a Lincoln Journal Star guest editorial on the “brainwashed peaceniks” who’d organized the Hiroshima Day lantern float at Holmes Lake August 5. In the op-ed, I suggested that competent military people and historians doubted that Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced the Japanese surrender. I argued that the bomb violated the highest principles of international law and “Just War” theory calling for the avoidance of civilian deaths. I said that whatever we think of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, we cannot continue the proliferation of nuclear arms in the U.S., Pakistan, India, Israel, the UK, France, China, Russia and so forth. Proliferation only purposes more innocent deaths.

My fans soon appeared. One told me that, like most UNL professors, I did not love America. Another told me that I had better find out fast whether or not I was an Israelite because God would destroy me if I wasn’t. Other judgments said that I was pathetic, near the top of nonsense, wacko, ripe for the cat’s litter box (that really hurt both me and Sapphire, my kitty), and an arrogant professor from a smugly titled organization. Gerard Harbison — a UNL chemistry prof who has opposed the repatriation of Indian remains and, as he says in a Scarlet article, is busy “keeping the world safe” with his own science — called what I had written “tendentious nonsense.” With praise like that, who could avoid pride?

None of my responders disputed the military authority of my generals and admirals — Eisenhower, Leahy, LeMay, Marshall. None dealt with the historians — Gar Alperowitz of the University of Maryland, Herbert Bix of SUNY, Ernest R. May of Harvard and Barton Bernstein of Stanford — who questioned the efficacy of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki attack and nuclear armaments in general. Harbison cited the neo-con Oliver Kamm’s inaccurate article for The Guardian. No one else provided even pseudo-evidence. Yet no one said that we needed more nukes and more nuclear nations. Apparently, only the White House, the nuclear industry and a few military types believe that.

A few favorable comments appeared. Jody P. wrote:

One’s perspective changes when one is “in harm’s way”… I wonder what the perspective was of the innocent women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [One can get an idea from Ibuse’s Black Rain.] I imagine it made 9/11 look pretty tame by comparison. Even if you assume that dropping those bombs was somehow justified, I don’t see how anyone could deny that it was still a tragedy. Many Americans talk casually about nuking such-and-such country back to the Stone Age. But when it comes to being on the receiving end of a mushroom cloud, or even the 9/11 attacks, Americans don’t seem to like the idea nearly so much.

Jody is right. How can the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians appear right because the armies of our opponents did similar things? The attacks on my column were full of pictures of the cruelty of “the Japs.” We can concede that they were cruel. Does that justify cruelty in us? How can murder justify murder? If we end up launching a nuclear attack on Iran over White House allegations that they’re creating like weapons, how does that make it any less of a tragedy?

In February, Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh wrote that “the Pentagon is continuing intensive planning for a possible bombing attack on Iran, a process that began last year at the direction of the president” — a plan “that can be implemented, upon orders from the president, within twenty-four hours” and could include nuclear weapons. Indeed the president refused to take nukes off the Iran table. New weapons developed for field use heighten the possibility of a nuclear attack. Under CONPLAN 8022, the president can order the commander at StratCom to take out a target in one hour, and the commander has the choice of whether to do so with a conventional or nuclear weapon.

No consultation. No congressional input. A StratCom commander can decide to start a nuclear war. And some of your neighbors in Omaha and Bellevue might very well be the ones implementing the attack.

Given that we have had one president, Nixon, who by friendly accounts was often drunk; given that we have now or have had, in the recent past, others at the top of the executive branch who had been senile, emotionally unstable or recovering alcoholics and drug users, the Congress and the government appear to have vested a dangerously inordinate amount of power in one or two people. And yet the Constitution, on the power to make war, is still pretty clear about it being a congressional responsibility. (Mario Cuomo has recently made the same argument).

We need to raise our voices for a repeal of the president’s power to declare war through StratCom, for a return of StratCom to its traditionally ‘defensive’ mission, and ultimately, for the multilateral abolition of nuclear weapons. StratCom’s in our backyard, and Nebraskans for Peace has a particular obligation to alert the world of these dangers.

(But we will need money for that — a lot of money. At the StratCom-focused Annual Peace Conference in Omaha October 6, we will be making an appeal for people to include the Nebraska Peace Foundation in their wills and bequests so that, among other things, NFP can educate the nation and world about the StratCom threat.)

Jonathan Schell said in the 1980s, during the campaign for a “nuclear freeze” on any more weapons, that “the fate of the earth” was at stake. So it now is at StratCom (though we obscure the danger through technological jargon and acronyms). Indeed, if Nebraskans really knew StratCom’s plans for propagating more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis, our positions after Holmes Lake might seem less wacko. As one of the denominational representatives (quoting William Sloan Coffin) said at the lantern float, “we are all downwind from nuclear holocaust.”

HOME      |      ARTICLES      |      CALENDAR      |      THE NEBRASKA REPORT      |      DONATE      |      CONTACT

This site is made possible by the peacemakers. Site Design by