Does McCain Ever Worry About the Bomb?

Does McCain Ever Worry About the Bomb?
by Michael R. Allen

Tuesday, October 19, 1999

It would take a Republican-led Senate to reject a treaty that would theoretically ban nuclear missile tests in thirty nations. After all, these Senators define themselves largely by the "R" that follows their names and the "D" behind the president’s name. Ideology is not something that works in the Senate. Neither is truth. The Senate has deviated far from its original purpose, which was to keep the constitutional brakes on the legislative process.

Of the fifty-one Republicans who voted against the administration-supported Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the motives are suspect. Most of them are self-styled conservatives, which simply means they are against Bill Clinton the man (though not possessing the strength needed to actually impeach him). While these conservatives have allowed hundreds of Clinton-backed laws and executive orders to go into effect, they finally got up enough courage to challenge him on the one issue on which he is partially correct.

The Senate's Democrats are not to be let off lightly. These sunny-day pacifists are hypocrites of the worst sort: they want to limit nuclear weapons proliferation but simultaneously allow their president to bomb every third-rate dictator with any weapons he chooses. The Republicans at least are not about to cut off the bomb supply George W. Bush will need in 2001.

One Republican who voted against the treaty can be said to have voted honestly, and that is Senator John McCain of Arizona. McCain trusts any president with lots of weapons.

In his statement on the treaty, McCain first attempted to explain his vote on pragmatic grounds: "[A] ban on nuclear testing ... will not prevent other countries from developing nuclear weapons."

Oh, how pragmatic! John McCain plays to the noninterventionist impulse of his listeners by asserting that the treaty is unverifiable, and would ultimately overburden the good guys - the US, Britain, Germany - with the task of enforcement. That a ban on nuclear testing may be a moral good is irrelevant to this argument. Of course, McCain eventually raises a moral objection to the treaty as well.

"We don’t need arms control agreements with our friends," the senator claims. McCain is implying that we can trust the old bastions of internationalism, London and Paris, but not the seedy places like Baghdad and Beijing. Yet, most of the offensive wars started in this decade have been perpetrated by the US with Britain and France in lockstep. The feared Iraq did invade Kuwait, but so far has not made any attempt to destroy the US. It is the US that has a vast nuclear arsenal and the track record that should cause us to view it as one of the world’s rogue nations.

McCain casts the US as a paragon of morality in a world of infidels, contra his original implication that the treaty would put too much moral burden on the US. He may be consistent in his militarism, but his arguments are not persuasive.

To keep the American government's moral authority intact, McCain wants to maintain a "viable nuclear deterrent" so other countries do not attack us. In other words, America doesn't have to put away its nukes. It's those other countries you have to worry about. McCain's attitudes are so typical of the militarists who need to justify their excess. America must have enemies, preferably poor juntas and swarthy epaulet-clad strongmen, or else the need for nuclear warheads and military spending comes into doubt.

McCain also laments that the US only has nine types of nuclear warheads, down from the thirty it had fifteen years ago. McCain has cheered on every intervention Reagan, Bush, and Clinton ever devised, so one can assume he is being honest. He certainly is not as hypocritical as his colleagues. Yet, it is his honesty that frightens me. McCain wants to be president, where his belligerent posturing would be converted into action.

The comparison between the bomb-loving Doctor Strangelove and John McCain is tempting; neither know any other imperative but their belligerence. McCain even mentioned that Henry Kissinger's opposition to the treaty was instrumental in his voting against it. And if Kissinger wasn't the model for Strangelove, it must be vice versa.

John McCain wrote on May 11th that "[D]ecent people try to avoid resolving their differences by the force of arms." Then, he added the many exceptions that disprove his rule. As president, those exceptions would be exacted at great cost to the American republic as well as to the world. John McCain does not fear the nuclear bomb, so Americans should unreservedly fear John McCain.

www.american-partisan.com