Excuse a little medical self-diagnosing, but I’ve decided I may be suffering from PBTSS (post-Bush traumatic stress syndrome) — and I suspect I’m not alone. Last evening I actually had my first flashback. The previous day I had watched the president on television claim that the Iraqis might have the ability to release an unmanned drone aircraft, assumedly armed with anthrax or some deadly chemical spray, from a ship off our coast, a drone that might penetrate hundreds of miles inland to cause incalculable damage. It was a claim so bizarre, under the circumstances, and just the day after Colin Powell’s UN speech, that I think I simply went into a state of denial and repressed it — or perhaps confused it with some Mad Max film. Hence the flashback.
My guess is that our media — our massed reporters, pundits, and opinion givers — had some similar experience. Otherwise how to explain the fact that this striking Presidential claim (made last year as well) didn’t seem worthy of coverage, much less the front page headlines it deserved. Certainly, knowledge of those Iraqi drones slipping ever closer to our shoreline would explain yesterday’s upping of our state of alert to a flaring orange. (Otherwise you might have to write it off, along with all the other alerts of the last year-plus, to an urge to keep the American public in a state of abject and useful terror.) Admittedly, a claim like the president’s might seem more at home among the headlines of some supermarket tabloid, right beside those two-headed alien babies and Elvis reborn, but isn’t it news in itself when the President makes such absurd claims?
Of course, the great hypocrisy here (if there’s even such a category for the globe’s only hyperpower) is that we’re the country most heavily engaged, financially and strategically, at the moment in figuring out how to actually put weapons of mass destruction to use in war. We surely have nuclear weapons somewhere in the area of the Gulf, possibly on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, and we’ve now threatened to use them in the coming war in Iraq more than once.
The American paper which has offered the best and most consistent coverage of this administration’s interest in making our nuclear arsenal employable in wartime continues to be the Los Angeles Times. (Unfortunately, it also has the most intrusive on-line ads.) Just a couple of weeks back, that paper published military analyst William Arkin’s piece on the administration’s active search for ways to turn the nuclear “bunker buster” in particular into just another weapon in the American arsenal (see previous dispatches) and a fine op-ed by Senator Ted Kennedy, “The Seed of World Disaster,” which ended, “the administration’s radical consideration of the possible use of our nuclear arsenal against Iraq is itself a grave danger to our national interests, our nation and all that America stands for.” To read more of Kennedy click here
This week, it carried a piece, “Making Nuclear Bombs ‘Usable'” by Richard T. Cooper, on the more practical attempts to rush the development of such nuclear weapons and the huge sums being invested in them. It read in part:
“The Pentagon has launched a fast-track program to develop computers that would help decide when nuclear weapons might be used to destroy deep underground bunkers harboring weapons of mass destruction or other critical targets, documents show. The program, described in unpublished Pentagon documents obtained by The Times, seeks to design an array of high-speed computers that could take in structural and other data on a prospective underground target, calculate the amount of force needed to destroy it, then determine whether a nuclear “bunker buster” would be required….
“Robert Nelson, a Princeton University physicist and senior fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations who has studied nuclear weapons as possible bunker busters, believes they are impractical. Even smaller nuclear devices would throw off enough radioactive dirt and dust to kill tens of thousands of people if they were exploded underground in an urban environment.” Nelson adds that such a nuclear weapon would not reliably destroy deeply buried chemical, biological or nuclear materials, but might instead simply blow it to the four winds.
To read more of the Cooper piece click here
“Robert Nelson, a Princeton University physicist and senior fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations who has studied nuclear weapons as possible bunker busters, believes they are impractical. Even smaller nuclear devices would throw off enough radioactive dirt and dust to kill tens of thousands of people if they were exploded underground in an urban environment.” Nelson adds that such a nuclear weapon would not reliably destroy deeply buried chemical, biological or nuclear materials, but might instead simply blow it to the four winds.
To read more of the Cooper piece click here
A small nuclear side-note: Lest you think that the radioactive weapons already in use, DU or depleted uranium weaponry like coated tank shells and missile tips, only land in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. It turns out, according to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story of January 9, that “the Navy routinely tests a weapon by firing radioactive, toxic ammunition in prime fishing areas off the coast of Washington, raising concerns from scientists, fishermen and activists.” The Navy’s comforting response to protests over this local use of DU weaponry: “[The Navy spokeswoman said], however, said that only 400 to 600 rounds would be fired during a typical test at sea. And even though these tests have been going on since 1977, she said Navy environmental experts say that the DU dissolves very slowly in the ocean.” Phew, good news! It’s been happening forever and it takes forever, so forget it.
To read more of the Seattle P-I piece click here
Below, I offer up a worthy piece on what Walter Russell Mead (no radical by the way) calls “the world of apocalypse soon” that appeared in the Washington Post. We have, he claims, “crossed a line” into a dangerous world where we might will into being the apocalypse that most of us fear. The ever-sober Paul Rogers of the openDemocracy website in his weekly analysis then offers his own run-down on our nuclear state of mind at the moment. Tom
It’s the Dawning Age of the Apocalypse
By Walter Russell Mead
The Washington Post
February 2, 2003How quickly things change.
Ten years ago, we read professor Francis Fukuyama’s essay and toasted the end of history. That was followed by professor Samuel Huntington’s musings on clashing civilizations. Now it’s worse: We’re being warned to worry not just about the clash of civilizations, but the end of civilization as we know it, the end, perhaps, of the world itself.
Last week was a pretty typical one in this new age of the apocalypse. Last Sunday, White House chief of staff Andrew Card refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons by the United States against Iraq, perhaps preemptively, vowing that “the United States will use whatever means necessary to protect us and the world from a holocaust.” On Monday, Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes threatened that Pakistan would be “erased from the world map” if it were to launch a nuclear attack on India.
Walter Russell Mead is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World” (Knopf).
Could the war go nuclear?
By Paul Rogers
openDemocracy.net
February 4, 2003If the Saddam regime reacts to hostilities with its own form of ‘pre-emption’, do US war planners expect to use nuclear weapons to ensure its termination? Our international security correspondent sifts the recent evidence that points, among many other present dangers, to a breakdown of the barriers against nuclear escalation.
There has been an assumption, based on all the reports of troop movements and the increasingly insistent tone of President Bush, that war with Iraq is imminent. However, other sources suggest a postponement, even that the US military may not be ready to start the war until the latter part of March.