Senate Democrats Square Off With Bush Over Missile Plan “Senate
Democrats put forward some of
their most influential voices on national
security policy today and made clear that
President Bush’s plans for an expansive
missile defense system could well become a
defining point of contention between the
two parties.” New York Times

There had better be a line in the sand over this issue! Most coverage of the opposition to the NMD plan cites concerns over expense and questions of effectiveness. It’s important that the public debate be couched instead in terms that help the American people understand that the real issue is the abandonment of the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty, one of the cornerstones of arms control, and the invalidation of the premise of mutually assured destruction that has been the only thing between them and nuclear holocaust.

The overarching activist passion of my life was disarmament work until it appeared possible to rest easier over the last decade or so and come out from under the shadow of the “psychic numbing,” to use the phrase of psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, that was necessary to carry on daily existence under the threat of annihilation. The human race was engaged in almost the most profound struggle for its survival imaginable, without most even recognizing it — and appeared to be winning, slowly but surely turning back the hands of the famous clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that told us how many minutes away from ‘midnight’ we were. (It’s 11:51 now, by the way.)

And now these wretched bloody brainwashed fools in Washington, worshipping at the altar of nuclearism, will unilaterally return us to the shadows of a new arms race, and for what? So that Bush can hearken back to the only kind of world in which his advisors — his Daddy’s advisors, for God’s sake! — know how to live?

Relapsing into terror after a respite is even worse than realizing one had been living with it unremittingly for one’s entire life, and now we have children my wife and I thought we were going to be able to raise in a world that, no matter how terrible, it would always be possible to assure them would continue to exist. We can’t live with this, literally.

If the Democrats have the political will to do something about this, it’s one very good reason to wish for haste in Strom Thurmond’s departure from the Senate…