Seven myths blown away

By James Carroll, 06/02/98

The nuclear explosions in Pakistan were powerful enough to turn a mountain white, but, together with those in India, they were also enough to explode seven cherished American myths.

Exploded myth No. 1: It's the economy, stupid.

America's obsessive emphasis on a narrow economic agenda is a disaster. The assumption that the momentum of free markets is inherently toward democracy and international cooperation has been obliterated, along with the notion that US foreign policy can be more usefully shaped by the Commerce Department than the State Department. When free trade, dollar protection, and economic self-interest are emphasized in Washington to the exclusion of human rights, the environment, and a more equitable distribution of the world's goods, America betrays itself and sows chaos. The lens through which to see the world is not the economy, stupid - but justice.

Exploded myth No. 2: The rich are different.

The idea that the affluent populations of the industrialized West, and of the developing world's elite oligarchies can live in splendid isolation, behind immigration quotas and gated estates, has been blown up in South Asia once and for all. The first meaning of these nuclear tests is not that a new pair of competing nations now has the bomb, but that the starving poor do. They danced in the streets of New Delhi and Islamabad not because they are reckless fools, but because they are savvy enough to know that their desperate cries will no longer go unheard. The bomb is a megaphone directed to the rich, and the message is, ''We are all in this together!''

Exploded myth No. 3: Religious fundamentalism is the problem.

When the mountain turned white last week, Pakistan's nuclear scientists exclaimed, ''God is great!'' But we make a big mistake if we blame this crisis on God. Pundits have been tracing the source of this latest outbreak of nuclearism to ''virulent'' Hindu nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, but the niche in which this disease has been allowed to thrive is in the profoundly secular West. The same scientists who sang of God's greatness disavowed responsibility for what their bombs may now do to their region - a detachment of consequence from act that defines the false god of science, and has nothing to do with traditional religion.

Exploded myth No. 4: Nuclear weapons provide security.

Any night now the people of the subcontinent are going to begin waking up in the darkness with a choking terror in their throats. A nuclear war would be horrible, but even its prospect inflicts a savage wound on the human soul. The very possession of nuclear weapons makes the future untrustworthy, which undercuts the present. Yet American military planners still insist that ''security'' requires our permanent possession of thousands of nuclear warheads. A feckless administration agrees, and a monumentally irresponsible Congress provides the funds. Suddenly, though, a panicked Washington is remembering the Cuban Missile Crisis. What about it, fellows? Feeling secure this week, are you?

Exploded myth No. 5: Sanctions work.

Economic sanctions helped bring down the apartheid government of South Africa, but that success has proved to be an exception. Since 1993, the United States has imposed or threatened sanctions on more than 60 occasions against 35 nations. The result has become predictable: governing elites pass the pain along to oppressed populations, while drawing political strength from their defiance. The threat of sanctions deterred neither India nor Pakistan from nuclear testing. The imposition of sanctions now will cruelly punish the poor, multiplying their afflictions.

Exploded myth No. 6: Peaceniks are naive.

When the extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was being debated at the UN in April of 1995, a small group of veteran peace activists kept a fasting vigil across the street. They wanted the treaty to include a commitment by the five declared nuclear powers to an eventual elimination of nuclear weapons as the only sure way to stop proliferation. But the activists were ignored by the five governments and condescended to by the press. Idealism is nice, but impractical. ''There they go again,'' demonstrator William Sloane Coffin said, mimicking the dismissal. ''When perhaps it should be `They were right the first time. Maybe they're right now.''' When are politicians going to get it that, in the nuclear age, peace is the only realism?

Exploded myth No. 7: World leaders will solve this problem.

On June 12, the foreign ministers of the major industrial powers will meet in London to find a joint response to this crisis, but they represent precisely those governments which have protected the nuclear status-quo. Their myopic policies have caused this crisis. It is time again for the peoples of the nations they represent to say, ''No more!'' What is needed is a new version of the grass-roots, international movements that transformed world politics in the 1980s, the Nuclear Freeze movement that brought millions into the streets of Europe and America, and the Solidarity-sparked velvet revolution that tore down the Iron Curtain. Ordinary people, through nonviolent resistance, halted the upward gyre of the nuclear arms race, and forced their leaders to end the Cold War. It must happen again. Ordinary people must demand an entirely new regime of nuclear arms control, one that equates nukes with banned biological and chemical weapons, applies the same standard of compliance to all nations, and makes the total elimination of these evil weapons the world's universal - and urgent - purpose.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 06/02/98.
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