A Tribute to Mordechai Vanunu
by Daniel Ellsberg
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 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 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."
at the Berkeley (California) Unitarian Church, September 28, 2002
