The city and people of Hiroshima, Japan (pictured) were destroyed by a weapon one-quarter the size of the 200+ “short-range” nuclear warheads still deployed across Europe by the United States.

“I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them … adds nothing to our security. I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us….”

    These are not the words of pacifists like Albert Einstein or the Dalai Lama, or even an intervener like Duluth’s own Greg Boertje-Obed, who recently “named” a U.S. nuclear weapon production site with blood and banners. The words come from former Reagan administration National Security Advisor Paul Nitze, writing 13 years ago in the New York Times.
    Nuclear weapons designers, strategists, triggermen and apologists around the world are, like Nitze, deserting the trenches. Many have issued coherent, scathing and explicit denunciations of nuclear war policy — renouncing a career-long advocacy of nuclear weapons production, deployment and “credible threats.”
    Nitze’s nuclear awakening is surprising as he’d been a military hawk and nuclear war strategist, an anti-Soviet propagandist and a founder of the Committee on the Present Danger — a group once known as “the most effective organ of cold war revivalism.” Still, Nitze, who died in 2004, joined a long list of abolitionists who Robert J. Lifton says have contracted Nuclear Retirement Syndrome:
    ? As head of Strategic Air Command, Gen. Butler says he “had to be prepared to advise the President to sign the death warrant of 250 million people living in the Soviet Union.” Since retiring from the top of the nuclear war hierarchy in 1993, Butler has been trying to undo the damage. In 1996 he said “Nuclear weapons are not weapons at all. They are insanely destructive agents of physical and genetic terror… They’re some species of biological time bombs…” Formerly in charge of all 5,000 to 10,000 nuclear warheads on U.S. bombers, missiles and submarines, Gen. Butler now says, “we have yet to fully grasp the monstrous effects of these weapons, that the consequences of their use defy reason, transcending time and space, poisoning the earth and deforming its inhabitants.”
    ? Jimmy Carter had been a nuclear submarine commander and as president used his 1980 State of the Union address to cock the trigger on the U.S. nuclear arsenal and aim it at the Middle East, saying, “Any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the interests of the U.S. and will be repelled by the use of any means necessary.” Today, Carter condemns the very threats he once broadcast. In a Washington Post op-ed Carter warned that “…both the U.S. and NATO have re-emphasized that they will not comply with a ‘no first use’ policy,” and he noted that “the general public would be extremely concerned if these facts were widely known.”
    ? Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had said 17 years earlier, in 1983, that the U.S. and NATO should renounce first-use of nuclear weapons in Europe. “Nuclear weapons serve no military purpose whatsoever.” NATO’s plan to use nuclear weapons against conventional troops, McNamara said, “looks to the people of the alliance like … a suicide pact,” he said.
    ? Gen. Andrew Goodpaster was once a Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and in charge of the short-range U.S. nuclear warheads that McNamara called suicidal. In 1994 he proposed a process for “the complete abolition and elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide,” including a no-first-use treaty. Later, Gen. Goodpaster, Gen. John Galvin and Gen. Butler organized 60 retired Generals and Admirals — from 16 countries — who called for he “complete and irrevocable elimination” of nuclear weapons.
    ? While still head of the U.S. Space Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, Gen. Charles Horner declared in 1994, “I just don’t think nuclear weapons are usable. I want to get rid of them all.”
    ? Adm. Stansfield Turner, who was CIA director under Carter, said in 1997, “the U.S. should take the lead” and remove thousands of warheads from missiles and bombers because doing so would speed the process of disarmament by encouraging Russia to follow suit.
    ? Dr. Hans Bethe, a Nobel Prize winner who led designing and building the first atom bombs, wrote an open letter to the world’s scientists in 1995 urging them all to “cease and desist” from work on any aspect of nuclear weapons production. In a 1997 letter to President Clinton he said, “The time has come for our nation to declare that it is not working, in any way, to develop further weapons of mass destruction.”
    ? Adm. Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy led the way 30 years ago. In his 1982 farewell speech to the U.S. Senate he said, “I’m not proud of the part I played,” and “As a person who probably knows more about this and has thought more about it than anybody in the world, the most important thing we could do is … outlaw nuclear weapons to start with, then we outlaw nuclear reactors too.”
    These H-bomb insiders have called the nuclear arsenal what it is: a “suicide pact” with “insanely destructive,” “agents of genetic terror” and “biological time bombs” that “serve no military purpose whatsoever” and “destroy the innocent.”
    Thanks to Greg Boertje-Obed and the rest of the nuclear disarmament movement’s dogged demands, the logic of abolition is catching on. Even Paul Nitze came to admit, “There is no good reason why it should not be carried out now.”

-- John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and edits its Quarterly newsletter.