Military Oxymorons.

As Molly Ivins suggests in her column this month, the Bush Presidency would be laughable were it not so menacing. One menace that has long concerned us here at The Progressive is nuclear war, and Bush appears set on upping the doomsday odds.

His missile defense plan risks igniting a nuclear arms race. And at bottom, missile defense is not about defense but offense. If it ever worked--a big if--it would enable the United States to attack another country, like China, without fear of being devastated by a ballistic counterattack.

This month, we focus on an aspect of the nuclear threat that has received far less coverage: the Bush Administration's effort to produce a "low-yield" nuke to use in otherwise conventional warfare.

Author Alistair Millar of the peace group Fourth Freedom Forum came by our office this spring and told us about this plan. He emphasized that there is no such thing as a "low-yield nuke" when it comes to the damage such a weapon would inflict. Any use of a nuclear weapon of any size would have catastrophic results, he said. Before he could leave, we persuaded him to do this urgent article for us.

One of our Editorial Advisory Board members has been threatened. I'm referring to Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton and an expert on human rights.

Falk has been critical of Ariel Sharon and Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories. He appeared on a BBC Panorama show on June 17 called "The Accused," which looked into Sharon's role in the Sabra and Shatila massacres of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Lebanese camps in 1982.

On the show, Falk said he had "no doubt whatsoever" that Sharon could be indicted as a war criminal, since he had command responsibility and ordered the murderous Phalangist militia into the camps.

Soon after the program aired, Falk began to feel the heat.

"I've been getting very harassing phone calls, with a mixture of obscenity and threats and defamations," he told me on June 22. "The most extreme harassment was when a caller whispered to my wife, `You have to be very careful. Something terrible is going to happen to you.' She was very upset by it."

These weren't the first threats Falk has received this year. His appointment to a U.N. commission to investigate Israeli policy in Gaza and Jerusalem in February "seemed to agitate rightwing supporters of Israel," he recalls. "I got some hate mail and extremely hostile e-mail."

The threats are not muzzling Falk, however.

"Our moral imaginations are not strong enough to comprehend the suffering that every Palestinian is feeling every day," he says. "Israel is waging a psychological war against Palestinians, not only with its expansion of the settlements but with random assassinations, even of some Palestinians who were involved in peace talks. Essentially, the conflict has devolved into a war against Palestinian civil society."

At the moment, Falk sees little hope. "A lot of people on both sides can't feel the suffering on the other side," he says.

In the face of the threats, Falk remains calm. "It has been unpleasant, but we're trying not to be alarmist," he says. He did inform the police, and he says he is trying to be prudent. But he adds: "One doesn't want extremists to dictate one's life."

He's right, of course. But it's appalling that he has to weigh the risks. His experience shows just how treacherous the Israel-Palestine issue has become.