"Then, as had been foreshadowed, whispered, hinted at and finally
broadcast over a period of several months, came the monumentally
insane, horrendous, and tragic announcement on 13 December 2001
by the Bush Jr administration to withdraw from the
ABM Treaty,
effective within six months. Of course it was sheer coincidence
that the Pentagon released their self-styled Bin Laden Video
just as Bush Jr himself publicly announced his indefensible
decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty in order to pursue his
phantasmagorical National Missile Defense (NMD) Program, the
lineal successor to the Reagan/Bush Star Wars dream.
Predictably, the Bin Laden Video back-staged this major,
pro-nuclear announcement. Once again the terrible national
tragedy of 11 September was shamelessly exploited in order to
justify a reckless decision that had already been made for other
reasons long before. Then on 25 January 2002, the Pentagon
promptly conducted a sea-based NMD test in gross violation of
Article 5(I)
of the ABM Treaty without waiting for the required
six months to expire, thus driving a proverbial nail into the
coffin of the ABM Treaty before its body was even legally dead.
"The
Bush Jr withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, which was originally
negotiated by those well-known Machiavellian realpolitikers
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, threatens the very existence
of other seminal arms control treaties and regimes such as the
Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the
Biological
Weapons Convention, which have similar withdrawal clauses.
"The
prospect of yet another round of the multilateral and
destabilizing nuclear arms race now stares humanity directly in
the face, even as the Bush Jr administration today prepares for
the quick resumption of nuclear testing at the Nevada test site
in outright defiance of the
Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty (CTBT) regime and NPT
Article VI. The
entire edifice of international agreements regulating, reducing,
and eliminating weapons of mass extermination (WME) has been
shaken to its very core.