As hard as it might be to believe, the United States is embarked on a path that's bound to trigger yet another nuclear arms race.

Yet few in this country seem to be paying attention.

It's as if we were lulled to sleep about nuclear weapons when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989. All those Cold War years of worrying whether the United States and the Soviet Union would start lobbing bombs at each other were finally over.

They should have been, but, unfortunately, the chances of nuclear devastation are as strong today as they've ever been.

That's the message that an international organization known as Mayors for Peace wants us all to get when it stages a rally in New York City this coming Sunday.

Mayors for Peace was founded by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the only two cities in the world that have experienced the destruction of an atomic bomb. Their aim was to get cities throughout the world to work toward a day when all nuclear weapons would be destroyed so that innocent people, particularly children, would never again have to suffer the consequences of a nuclear explosion.

Some 750 cities have joined that effort, although far too few from the United States. It's good to see that Madison's mayor, Dave Cieslewicz, will go to New York to lend our city's support along with 21 other U.S. mayors. Several other Madisonians will be there as well, including representatives of our Physicians for Social Responsibility chapter.

What has been disturbing is the Bush administration's attitude toward nuclear weapons. Back in 1969, America was instrumental in getting most of the rest of the world to sign the much-heralded Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which was aimed at eventually eliminating nuclear weapons as instruments of war.

But, rather than reducing the numbers, the administration is in the process of building more, "modernizing" some of the older nukes and seeking to build new "mini-nukes" and "nuclear bunker busters," presumably to work in places like Iraq.

The pity of it all is that if we start building new and better nuclear weapons, so will other countries with nuclear capabilities - Russia, China, India, for example. Twenty years from now, nations will probably be boasting about their bunker busting A-bombs, rather than celebrating the end of the threat of nuclear annihilation. In other words, we will have learned nothing from history.

Yet there's a strange silence among members of Congress and in the media over these alarming developments.

Sunday's rally is aimed at awakening us all to the perils. It is timed, incidentally, to precede the May 2-27 meetings in New York among the 189 countries that signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty way back in 1969. They gather every five years to evaluate the progress of the treaty and to negotiate further reductions in atomic weapons.

There's a lot of work to be done this year, not the least of which will be getting the United States back on board.

Dave Zweifel is editor of The Capital Times.

© 2005 Capital Times

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