AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now!, as we turn now to Jonathan Schell. Jonathan Schell, following up on the story we brought you from Geneva, is well known for his advocacy of the abolition of nuclear weapons. He is the author of The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now and The Fate of the Earth. Jonathan Schell spoke recently in New York at New York University Law School.

JONATHAN SCHELL: To begin with, I’d say it seems, on the face of it, that we face a potential nuclear confrontation between what appear to be two of the most stubborn regimes on the face of this Earth. Each is a specialist in not backing down. And it seems to me that there are only two outcomes that seem very likely here, and it’s hard to imagine what’s going to happen in either case.

And the first is that North Korea goes ahead and builds its nuclear arsenal — it may or may not have one or two bombs already; the administration says it does, but there’s a certain cloudiness surrounding that claim — in which case the Bush administration will either have to accept it or go to war. Now, if they accept it, they will have to swallow several reams of public statements by the president and all his Cabinet officials. They have backed themselves into one of the tightest policy corners that any administration has ever been in.

Now, the second policy — the second possibility here is that North Korea will scrap its nuclear program, and that, too, seems unlikely.

And the third possibility is, of course, war, with the horrifying casualties that Bruce Cumings mentioned, and that would certainly make the Iraq War look like a tea party by comparison. Now, there may be a way of squaring this circle — I don’t know — and that’s one thing I’d like to be hearing from the panels and those of you in the room.

Now, I want to talk about the policy context here for a moment. We’ve just finished a war. And when you’re dealing with wars, it’s especially important to consider the justification, because a war is not a budget regulation or a bench appointment; it is killing, and it is death. Every war starts off wrong and only becomes acceptable, if that ever happens, with the most compelling and extreme justification or emergency. Ernest Hemingway said that every war, even when it is justified, is a crime, which is a thought I think is worth pondering.

Now, in this case, the justification of the Iraq War, as of the possible war that looms in the future, has been — in North Korea, or against North Korea, has been stated with exceptional clarity by the administration. Just to quote one of the statements that the president has made, out of many that I could quote, he said — and I quote now — “The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Now, those are the words of an ultimatum. When a great power says “will not permit,” that is an ultimatum. And so, this policy has everything to do with weapons of mass destruction. That has been the constant theme — at the U.N., where the Resolution 1441 was put forward. In all of the statements of the administration, this has been the stated justification.

And so, really, the Iraq War was the first of what I like to call disarmament wars. This is something new on the face of the Earth: war waged for the purpose of taking a certain category of weapon away from another country or several other countries. And Iraq was the first one. And they’ve done it, although, as a matter of fact, they never did find any weapons of mass destruction. We’ll see what happens there.

Now, the means were also stated with great clarity, and they’ve already been mentioned. They were preemptive war, really meaning preventive war, or, to use a good old-fashioned term, aggression. The president stated clearly that containment and deterrence were things of the past, that those belonged to the Cold War and we were in an entirely new age and we had to rewrite the rulebook, and now it was going to be first use, attack, striking before the danger even arises.

Also, the doctrine or vision in which this goal has been put forward, and these means adopted, was put forward with equal clarity. And that was to achieve the global hegemonic military superiority over — of the United States all over — over all other countries on the Earth. Now, this isn’t just something that you have to read The Nation magazine to find out. It’s right there in repeated statements by the White House and the president.

I’ll just quote one more: “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” That’s the president of the United States. Now, think about that for a moment. On the one side, you have the United States. It’s in charge of the entire military sphere. Not only is it dominant, but it is so thoroughly dominant, in the president’s view, that all other countries should just get out of that business. All the military history of the past several thousand years is now to be ended, and all other countries should get out of that business. And they’re just going to go to the movies or buy and sell, or whatever he means by “limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” Now, this is a very radical policy.

And on the eve of the Iraq War — and this applies with a special pertinence to the North Korean situation — the president said that it would be, I quote, “suicide” — he used the word “suicide” — to let a regime survive if the United States surmised that from one to five years down the road they might possess weapons of mass destruction. Now, gang members will attack you if you look at them the wrong way. The United States has gone one better here and said that we will attack you if you merely think about us in the wrong way, or if we think you’re thinking about us in the wrong way, or you may do so five years hence.

So that’s the policy. Those are the means. And that’s the vision. And all of it applies four square even more so to North Korea than it did to Iraq, because North Korea is actually believed, according to administration statements, actually to possess one or two nuclear weapons and have very active programs for obtaining more. We can’t weigh the truthfulness of those. It’s a little hard to tell. But that’s what they say.

So we have to remind ourselves, in thinking about this policy: What is proliferation? Proliferation is not a tank division crossing a desert. Above all, it’s a transfer of knowledge, of scientific ideas and blueprints. It can happen over the internet. And by the way, we are reminded that North Korea obtained the know-how for its new uranium enrichment program from our old friend Pakistan. It was quietly done when the chief scientist of the Pakistani nuclear program made a couple of visits to North Korea and got back a new missile, which Pakistan promptly built and deployed.

Now, there have been a couple of ideas for dealing with nuclear proliferation and nuclear danger historically. I’ll just list them very quickly. One of them is the abolition of nuclear weapons. And actually, President Truman was in favor of that in 1946. Of course, we know it didn’t happen. It was rejected by the Soviet Union. Soviet Union put forward a plan, and this, too, was rejected, and we were off to the arms races. However, that idea did survive in the form of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which embraces that goal, and under which, actually, 182 nations actually have agreed for to forgo nuclear weapons. That’s a tremendous accomplishment. That’s a terrific piece of diplomacy.

The second one was the idea of nuclear deterrence, which grew up in the Cold War and now has been discarded by the president. And the idea of nuclear deterrence, of course, is that if you want to be safe from nuclear weapons, then get nuclear weapons. That’s the lesson the United States and the other nuclear powers have been teaching the world with every single action and statement they’ve made since 1945 down to the present. And that is the lesson that North Korea has learned. They are threatened with nuclear weapons, with threatened first strike by the United States, indeed made very clear in its documents, as Bruce Cumings mentioned. And so they have moved to obtain this themselves, just as the United States did when it thought it might, way back in 1945, be one day threatened by Hitler. So, we can state, deterrence is an engine of proliferation, because its core idea is that you win safety by getting nuclear weapons in face of a nuclear threat. And that engine has produced the proliferation in Pakistan, India, and now in North Korea.

Now I come to the final idea, which has been only an idea down to the present, and that’s the idea of preemption or prevention. And I’d just like to quote one more comment here. This is what — it has been rejected by every single president of the nuclear age, down to the present officeholder but not including him. Here’s what Eisenhower had to say about it: “All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time [I] heard it.” So he identifies whose idea that was, in his mind. “In this day and time, if we believe for one second that nuclear fission and fusion, that type of weapon, would be used in such a war — what is a preventive war? I don’t believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.” That’s President Dwight D. Eisenhower. But now that thing that he wouldn’t even listen to is the policy of the United States. It’s a very radical revolution.

Well, I’ll just comment — I’m going to skip over here a little bit in the interest of time. I’ll just comment that prevention is an even more efficient engine for proliferation than deterrence is, because it actually threatens governments that they will actually be destroyed. And Donald Rumsfeld, of course, did that in a memo that he circulated just last week, saying that China and the United States should now seek regime change in North Korea, as if to turn up the — turn the screws one more notch, in case they hadn’t gotten the point already.

Now, one last comment here. Historically speaking, nations that obtain nuclear weapons have almost never reversed course and gotten rid of them. There’s only one instance in the nuclear age, and that was South Africa, which of course was facing regime change from the white minority government to the Black majority government, and thus had a highly particular reason for getting rid of its nuclear arsenal: They didn’t want to pass them over to Black people. And that’s the only thing that ever did it.

So, my point, in closing, is that these programs, once they get rooted, are deeply rooted in nations, in the bureaucracy, in the scientists, in the funding, in the psyches of countries. And therefore, North Korea, it would seem to me, if the past is any precedent, is going to exact a very high price, one that we have no idea, no reason to believe the Bush administration is willing to pay, and/or if it is going to get out of the nuclear business. We’ve just had a very hot spring in Iraq. I’m very much afraid that it’s going to be a much, much hotter summer in North Korea. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Jonathan Schell, speaking at New York University Law School just a few days ago. And if you’d like a copy of today’s program, you can call 1-800-881-2359. That’s 1-800-881-2359. Back to a discussion of who pays for war. We’ll look at the 50 states of this country and the budget deficits they face. Stay with us.