A Tribute to
Mordechai Vanunu
by Daniel
Ellsberg
Dissident
Voice
October 3, 2002
The following comes from the prepared notes of Daniel
Ellsberg, for a talk at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists in
California, September 28, 2002.
Dear friends
of Mordechai Vanunu:
I have never, ever, written out a
speech beforehand: or afterwards. And I haven’t done so today. But
I have lost my voice. I could probably speak some minutes now, but at the
cost of losing it for weeks; and in two weeks I begin a major speaking tour,
which I hope to use to speak out against this coming war. Someone
suggested I cancel this appearance, but that’s impossible: I can’t give up the
opportunity to pay tribute from my heart in my own words to Mordechai Vanunu, at
this precise time, when his is exactly the inspiration the world needs. This
dark time: Weeks before an election turning in a unique degree on whether our
country should be for the first time in this century an open aggressor nation;
days before our representatives in Congress will vote on that question—the
majority, almost surely, shamefully, in support of it--weeks or months before
our country or Vanunu’s may launch the first nuclear massacre since Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. So I’ve written hastily a few notes to be read for me by my
friend Joanna Macy.
Mordechai Vanunu is the
preeminent hero of the nuclear era. He is the one who consciously risked
all he had in life to warn his own country and the world of an existing,
ongoing addition to the nuclear dangers of the era. And he is the one who has
actually paid that price, a burden in many ways worse than death, for his
heroic and prophetic act, for doing exactly what he should have done and what
others should be doing. He is a prophet who deserves honor in all the world.
The secret he revealed was that
his country—like our own, and Russia, and several other nuclear weapons
states—had a nuclear program and stockpile that went far beyond any supposed
needs of nuclear deterrence. Its scale and nature was clearly designed
for threatening and if necessary launching first-use of nuclear weapons against
conventional forces, Israeli attacks comprising hundreds of tactical nuclear
weapons. In this Israel was imitating and endorsing the legitimacy of the
US and NATO first-use threats, which in turn required and rationalized a
nuclear-arms buildup that mocked the pretensions and supposed commitments the
US and the Soviet Union signed in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It endorsed the US concept of an indefinitely structured two-tier division of
the world into Nuclear States and Non-Nuclear-Weapons States, in which Israel,
with US acquiescence, would be in the first category, the first in the Middle
East.
First but not last. The
US-Israeli policy, joined by the Soviet Union, Britain, and France (China has
at least announced a no-first-use policy), made virtually certain that India,
and shortly Pakistan, would choose to join that first tier, and that other
states in the region—not only Iraq—would seek and eventually acquire these
weapons. That prospect—dooming any prospect of non-proliferation, let
alone abolition-- made the Israeli policy of the utmost danger to Israel itself
in the longer run. No other national policy so deserved searching and
sober national debate and concern; which could not occur under the Israeli
government’s policy of censorship, secrecy, and misleading and false
denial. Nor has that debate yet occurred; in this way, Vanunu’s hopes
were not fulfilled. In the short run, his efforts have failed. But
that doesn’t make his effort less heroic or appropriate. And I know from
my own experience, that initial indications of ineffectiveness and failure,
even over a period of years, can be misleading and premature. There is
simply no way to know what the hidden, indirect--in his case global--ongoing
consequences of such an act of truth-telling may be, nor to put a limit on the
possible eventual benefits of it.
We are at this moment where the
worst possible consequences of the US and Israeli policies may shortly be
realized. Either or both Israeli and US tactical nuclear weapons could
very plausibly be launched against Iraq within months, if the US invasion being
prepared leads Saddam Hussein to launch short-range missiles armed with
chemical warheads against Israel or against US troops. Both countries
have warned that such an act—which is highly likely to follow, or even shortly
precede, an American ground assault—will lead to the “annihilation” of Iraq,
the “destruction” of its society. These are clearly nuclear threats of
the use of nuclear weapons: which President Bush has very accurately described
to the UN as “weapons of mass murder.” I do not believe, under this
Administration or that of Israel, that these threats of mass murders are
bluffs, or that they are meant solely for purposes of deterrence.
Saddam Hussein probably also
possesses weapons of mass murder: nerve gas warheads and biological
weapons. I believe that the chance he would use these, or turn them over
to others, when he is not under direct ground attack is close to zero.
(His ability to be deterred and to refrain from using them even when under
heavy air attack, not accompanied by invasion of Iraq, has already been
uniquely tested, eleven years ago). Thus I believe that Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq, not under heavy attack, constitutes no threat at all to the national
security of the US, or even—while US forces are in the region—to its
neighbors.
Americans who believe otherwise
have been totally misled, I believe, by the deceptive assertions of the
Administration. But under the attack we are preparing, I believe the
danger is very real that he does possess and will use enough such weapons to
trigger a US or Israeli nuclear response: the first precedent for nuclear
first-use since Nagasaki.
Thus, we are at this moment in
the most dangerous nuclear crisis since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The very
existence of the hundreds of Israeli weapons of which Mordechai Vanunu warned
is not to this day not officially admitted by Israel to the world. Still
less is the Israeli stockpile opened for inspection and monitoring, any more
than those of any of the other declared or undeclared nuclear weapons states,
including, very dangerously, those of Pakistan and India. Yet in dangerous
mockery of this shadowy status, I am sure that Israeli plans for the possible
targeting of their weapons are underway as we speak, in preparation for a
highly likely “contingency” just weeks or months away.
To try to avert that terrible
slaughter and even more terrible precedent was surely worth Mordechai Vanunu’s
living entombment the last sixteen years. It would be worth the life of anyone
who shared his view—as I do—both of the physical and the moral
stakes. We have recently been reminded, on September 11, of
the tribute by President Lincoln to those who “gave the last full measure of
devotion…” Mordechai Vanunu, now out of the decade-long torture of
solitary confinement but still in prison, is our shining example of that
sacrifice. May he still, with our help, emerge from that to be our
nuclear-age Nelson Mandela.
But as Lincoln went on to say:
“It is for us the living…” Us the free, us who still have, for some
period, the privileges and powers and opportunities of a democracy, to draw strength
from his example. Mordechai’s action and life speaks to us in the words of
Henry David Thoreau, after his night in jail protesting an earlier American war
of aggression, against Mexico. As if he were addressing this very night those
who will be casting votes, or perhaps doing more than that, in the House and
Senate next week and at the polls next month, Thoreau wrote, in his essay On
the Duty of Civil Disobedience in 1848:
“Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but
your whole influence. A minority is powerless when it conforms to the majority;
it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its
whole weight.”
Daniel Ellsberg, served in Vietnam and is a former Defense
Department and State Department official. In 1971, Ellsberg released the
Pentagon Papers to the public. He is the author of Secrets: A Memoir of
Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Visit Daniel's website at: www.ellsberg.net
To learn more about the
case of Mordechai Vanunu, visit:
The US
Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu
The UK
Campaign to Free Vanunu