Below the weekly column of Toronto Sun contributing foreign editor Eric Margolis, who, in discussing the hopeless Scud missiles North Korea sold to Yemen, “the most cost ineffective weapon anywhere,” also considers another set of potential weapons blown deeply out of proportion by government fear campaigns and the media — bioweapons, which remain notoriously hard to deliver effectively as weapons of mass destruction by missile or any other way.
As the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton tells us in Destroying the World to Save It, his book about the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult that sarin-gassed the Tokyo subways, the cult’s attempts to deliver botulinus and anthrax by aerosal spray in Tokyo failed utterly. As the first apocalyptic cult not just to yearn for the end of the world but to try to bring it about by means of weapons of mass destruction, Aum crossed a frightening conceptual line, one that should have our government putting all its efforts into the enhancement of global nonproliferation treaties and their enforcement. (Dream on.) But as of now, as Margolis points out, the major weapons of mass destruction — nuclear weapons, mass bombing campaigns and the like — remain largely in the hands of the world’s most powerful nations. Tom
The missile crisis that wasn’t
As a weapon of mass destruction, the wildly inaccurate Scud is a dud
By Eric Margolis
Contributing Foreign Editor
The Toronto Sun
December 15, 2002So far, the Bush administration hasn’t been having much luck finding a credible pretext to invade Iraq. But last week, White House hawks thought they’d finally found the smoking gun.
A mysterious, unflagged North Korean freighter that had been monitored by U.S. intelligence since it left North Asian waters was seized off the Yemen coast by Spanish Navy frigates. Concealed beneath piles of cement, Spanish naval commandos and U.S. military intelligence discovered 15 Scud missiles.
To White House chagrin, the missiles were consigned not to Iraq, but to Yemen, a reluctant U.S. ally. The Bush administration for once observed international law by admitting it had no right to seize the cargo, no matter how eager it was to shut down North Korea’s exports of missiles and associated technology to Iran, Egypt, Libya, Syria – and, claims U.S. and Israeli intelligence – to Pakistan.
To read more Margolis click here
So far, the Bush administration hasn’t been having much luck finding a credible pretext to invade Iraq. But last week, White House hawks thought they’d finally found the smoking gun.
A mysterious, unflagged North Korean freighter that had been monitored by U.S. intelligence since it left North Asian waters was seized off the Yemen coast by Spanish Navy frigates. Concealed beneath piles of cement, Spanish naval commandos and U.S. military intelligence discovered 15 Scud missiles.
To White House chagrin, the missiles were consigned not to Iraq, but to Yemen, a reluctant U.S. ally. The Bush administration for once observed international law by admitting it had no right to seize the cargo, no matter how eager it was to shut down North Korea’s exports of missiles and associated technology to Iran, Egypt, Libya, Syria – and, claims U.S. and Israeli intelligence – to Pakistan.
To read more Margolis click here