SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 2010
KLMNO The beginning of the end for nuclear bombs nukes from B1
viet Union’s collapse, the nuclear dis- armament of South Africa, the fallout from India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear tests, and the negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear ambitions. In Rhodes’s telling, big personalities clash and cooperate, jokes and epiphanies punctuate the debate, and offbeat de- tails energize the narrative. For instance, Rhodes puts the reader on the ground in Iraq with U.N. weap- ons inspectors before the Persian Gulf War. Robert Gallucci, who was deputy executive chairman of the U.N. Special Commission inspectorate in Iraq in 1991, told the author: “I rented us a couple of cars from Avis. For medical support — this was a dangerous mis- sion — we had first-aid kits. For secure communications, we used a book ci- pher. . . . It takes about three days to decode ‘Hi, Mom,’ but you can do it.” With no glamour or gunfire, and ini- tially little support from the U.S. gov- ernment, the inspectors impelled Sad- dam Hussein to eliminate his nuclear
weapons capabilities.
Disarmament proceeded on a differ- ent front elsewhere that year. As the Soviet Union crumbled, the United States sought to reduce its own nuclear arsenal in an effort to ease global ten- sions. Germany had been reunified, leaving NATO tactical nuclear missiles and artillery on its territory with no reasonable purpose. Nuclear weapons on U.S. surface ships were inspiring anti-nuclear passions in Japan and New Zealand. South Korea wanted the United States to remove tactical nu- clear weapons from its territory, but Washington did not want to look weak to North Korea by doing so. National security adviser Brent Scow-
croft took a wide-angle view of the ques- tion and proposed to President George H.W. Bush that the United States unilat- erally remove all of its tactical nuclear weapons from surface ships and land forces worldwide. Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, rejected the dis- mantling of the weapons, so many were kept in reserve in the United States. Still, this was a rare moment in the U.S.
history of nuclear arms — when a top official asked, “Do we really need these things?” and the answer was not dis- torted by partisan politics or bureau- cratic pressure. On the Soviet side, leading figures
sometimes had revelations that high- lighted the barbarism of mutual de- struction. Case in point: Viktor Mik- hailov, the domineering director of a Soviet nuclear weapons research in- stitute and a member of a committee that selected U.S. targets for annihila- tion. In 1988 Mikhailov came to the United States as part of a Reagan- Gorbachev effort to demonstrate the feasibility of banning nuclear testing. “When we walked around Washington, New York and Las Vegas,” Mikhailov re- called in his memoir, “I could not imag- ine . . . those wondrous cities as ‘mili- tary targets.’ Sometimes those thoughts simply terrified me and made me shud- der.”
Rhodes’s great strength is storytell-
ing. He is less convincing when he tries to predict the future: “We find ourselves in the second decade of the twenty-first
century well along the way to eliminat- ing nuclear weapons once and for all.” Though the ingenuity and progressive spirit he reveals inspire optimism, pro- ponents of nuclear weapons persist in the United States, Russia, France, Paki- stan, Israel and other states, and they provoke rising powers such as Iran, Bra- zil and Turkey to resist nonproliferation rules that favor countries that have nu- clear weapons over those that don’t. Even if nuclear disarmament is tech- nically feasible, some states will con- tinue to find power and security in these weapons. In the United States, political leaders remain ambivalent. As Rhodes puts it, “We have feared [nuclear weapons] even as we have tried to convince ourselves that they protect us, and so we have found it possible neither to employ them or to break them and throw them away.” Re- solving this ambivalence requires co- operative action of both the old and new powers, North and South, East and West. We know how to do it; the question is whether we have the will.
bookworld@washpost.com
B
B5 15 in Americans ...
Nearly one in fi ve Americans mistakenly believes that President Obama is Muslim, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center — and that was before he came out in support of the right to build a mosque near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. What other opinions, habits, surmises, hopes and fears do 20 percent of us share? Recent surveys and studies show that one in fi ve
Americans also . . .
. . . thinks socialism is superior to capitalism, according to a 2009 Rasmussen survey.
zz z zz z
. . . reports “excessive sleepiness,” according to a recent study by Stanford University’s Sleep Epidemiology Research Center.
. . . believes that the harsh techniques used to interrogate terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, 2001, were torture but still legitimate, according to a 2009 CNN poll.
. . . fears job loss in the next 12 months, according to a recent Gallup poll.
. . . believes in the right of a state to secede, according to a 2008 Zogby poll.
MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES The Original New Orleans Ladies, Kids & Men Buckjumpers second line parade last November. Even as it was rebuilding, the city held on to its culture. Foiling plans for a Cajun Disneyland new orleans from B1
sessed than the rest of us. Their identi- ties are more rooted in their neighbor- hoods, second line clubs, and Mardi Gras krewes and Indian tribes than in their personal achievements. They don’t squeeze friends and family into busy lives; they build their lives around them. Sharing a beer on the porch is not something a New Orlea- nian must schedule two weeks in ad- vance. In time, I came to understand that it was precisely this quality of life that New Orleanians most feared losing af- ter Katrina. Their deepest worry was not that they might have to rebuild their homes with their own hands — this they were prepared to do — but that the disaster would give the out- side world a chance to convert New Orleans into just another city driven by the dollar and the clock. The fact that flooded real estate records made it more difficult for outside specula- tors to swoop in and buy up houses for pennies on the dollar was, to Braun and many others, a blessing. Around the time of my encounter
to fruition. (This was back in the good old days of the real estate bubble, re- member.) Looking back, I’m startled by the hubris. One developer unrolled for me a plan for a whole new city, an “Afro- Caribbean Paris” that his company hoped to build with the help of bil- lions of federal dollars. Other devel- opers, members of high-level commis- sions and even Mayor Ray Nagin told me again and again that the Lower Ninth Ward was “over,” that it was “a new day” and that people needed to accept that “certain neighborhoods” would never come back. Janet How- ard, who ran a government watchdog group, told me she had seen a map covered with purple blobs represent- ing new construction; a certain well- connected developer, it was explained to her, would be “doing” the city’s cen- ter. In church basements and coffee shops, New Orleanians met over and over, plotting to fend off plans that clashed with their neighborhoods’ identities and their city’s sense of self. At one gathering in a stifling church on St. Claude Avenue, I recall a wom-
After Katrina, real estate developers talked of a “bigger and better” New Orleans built on a “blank slate.”
with Braun, the Urban Land Institute, the Mayors’ Institute on City Design and several commissions run by local developers were setting up shop in downtown hotels, displaying plans for what they called a “bigger and better” New Orleans built on a “blank slate.” They unveiled schemes to turn New Deal-era public housing into expen- sive condos, to open the whole city to casino gambling, to declare genera- tions-old neighborhoods “pockets of poverty” and “clean them out” to make way for mixed-income developments. Some of them brazenly suggested that, with the people of New Orleans dis- persed, they could rush their dreams
an with tears in her eyes addressing the congregation. “People like to talk about ‘hard facts,’ ” she said, “but they don’t consider social networks. We have a huge population of single mothers, a huge population of elderly. These new buildings mean absolutely nothing to us. The social networks mean everything.” I still can’t explain exactly how they did it, but the exhausted people in that room — and people like them all over the city — drove the barbarians from the gate. Some combination of meet- ings and marches; T-shirts, fliers and spray-paint on sodden houses (“I’m not leaving for any $$$!”); and occa-
sional hollering at council members and planning commissioners got the message across. The people of New Orleans weren’t going to play along. The big plans quietly faded, the blue- prints were rolled up and stashed away, and the city grew back organ- ically, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, the way its people wanted.
I could remember the terrible silence of Katrina’s aftermath, but now I had to go looking for traces of its de- struction. Even in the Lower Ninth Ward, so often deemed unsalvageable after the crisis, businesses are open, homes are under construction, and eye-popping houses built by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right foundation fill block after block. The city didn’t reject outsiders in- discriminately; it accepted lots of help, particularly in overhauling a school system that was blighted long before Katrina. Campuses are being refurbished and the school district re- organized; Teach for America has in- fused the system with idealistic young instructors; and test scores have risen by almost a quarter since the days before Katrina. But even while it was busy rebuild- ing its homes and transforming its schools, New Orleans held on to its character, its culture and its soul. Life
W
may be harder now than it was before the disaster, but it’s no speedier. New Orleanians still wander in and out of each other’s houses, plan second lines, create Indian suits for Mardi Gras. The Ernie K-Doe Mother-in-Law Lounge, whose roof I once passed over in a boat, is rocking. New Orleans, in other words, is still
New Orleans. It did not succumb to external pressures to become bigger and supposedly better. Compared with those other cities that seem, in- creasingly, to live with a BlackBerry in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other, its way of life almost feels like an act of civil disobedience.
hen I was in New Orleans this May, I was dumbstruck by the extent of its physical recovery.
There was a time when the Big
Easy’s culture seemed likely to work against its recovery. “You pay for your blessings, man,” the New Orleans or- ganizer Jacques Morial told me in the dark days after Katrina. “Sometimes you overpay, sometimes you underpay. Right now, we’re in an overpay cycle.” What we didn’t know then was that the city’s culture would ultimately see it through. The I’ll-help-you-gut-your- house-if-you-help-me-gut-mine com- munalism, the parties thrown in a neighborhood’s first reopened house in the hopes of encouraging others to return, the palpable sense that nobody was alone — these are the things that brought people home. Of course, I don’t live in New Or- leans. If my perspective seems glass- half-full, it’s because I don’t face daily the glass-half-empty aspects of the city’s post-Katrina life: the businesses that haven’t reopened, the public housing communities that remain scattered, the shuttered Charity Hos- pital and the abandoned public health system with which it was associated. In a city still trembling with the post- traumatic stress that followed the flood, mental health services are al- most nonexistent. Infrastructure is falling apart. The crime rate is ter- rible; my trip in May was to attend the funeral of a beautiful young bandlead- er whose murder was the city’s 61st this year. And the BP oil spill has shak- en two of the legs on which New Or- leans still stands: seafood and tour- ism.
Five years after Katrina, living in the Big Easy is not for the weak of spir- it. It’s a triumph that the place contin- ues at all; that it’s still the singular city it was borders on the miraculous. As we mark Katrina’s anniversary next weekend, it will surely be a time for mourning and for taking stock of the challenges ahead. But since this is New Orleans we’re talking about, it’s a time for celebration, too. As a wise old man of the Lower Ninth Ward once told me, “We’re capable here of hold- ing more than one thought in our heads.”
danbaum@me.com
. . . thinks marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol, according to a recent Rasmussen poll.
. . . believes that intelligent beings from other planets have made contact with humans on Earth, according to a 2006 CBS News poll.
. . . skips medical care when sick or injured, according to a Deloitte survey released this month.
. . . believes that the government “enjoys the consent of the governed,” according to a Rasmussen telephone survey in February.
. . . admits to peeing in pools, according to a 2009 survey by the Water Quality and Health Council.
moyerj@washpost.com —Justin Moyer
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