Yesterday, I wrote about the fundamental sense of the categorical opposition Democratic presidentical candidate Dennis Kucinich has expressed to nuclear weapons. While Kucinich opposes the use of nuclear weapons, other presidential candidates play coy games, refusing to rule out dropping a nuclear bomb on a foreign city.
What Dennis Kucinich understands that these other presidential candidates seem not to understand is that keeping an arsenal of nuclear weapons is a threat, not just to the people in other countries against whom we might direct a nuclear attack, but to the people of the United States as well.
This point was proven all too well in late August, when the lives of millions of Americans were endangered by an all-too-casual flight of nuclear weapons across American air space. Unknown to the residents of the midwestern states, the Air Force loaded a B-52 bomber with cruise missiles containing active nuclear warheads, and flew the nuclear weapons over small towns and cities all the way from North Dakota to Louisiana.
The Air Force says it was an “accident”. The commander in charge of the mission lost track of where the nuclear warheads were. He thought they were somewhere else, and didn’t even know that the warheads had been fixed onto the cruise missiles.
What if the commander had ordered a test of one of those missiles, or had otherwise been required to drop one of them? What if the B-52 had, like all-too-many military aircraft, crashed during its mission? Huge numbers of Americans could have disappeared, vaporized into a nuclear mushroom cloud on American soil.
This kind of risk to American lives is unacceptable. It isn’t enough that the Air Force officer is being sacked. Other fallible human beings will be given control over other American nuclear weapons. The Air Force declares of the commander that it “has lost all confidence in his ability to handle nuclear weapons.”
That loss of confidence was nearly too late. The important question that intelligent Americans must now ask is: What led the Air Force to have confidence in the negligent commander’s ability to handle nuclear weapons in the first place? How many other slip shod Air Force officers have gained the confidence of the Air Force in handling nuclear weapons in the United States?
The only truly progressive position on nuclear weapons is to abolish them. Disarmament will be a long and tricky process, but right now, the American government is not truly working on the effort. Until disarmament can be accomplished, we need to have a President who understands that it an unacceptable threat to the American people to continue storing and transporting thousands of nuclear weapons within the United States.
(Source: MSNBC, September 5, 2007)
