What’s the scariest scenario on earth today? Actually, given all the scary scenarios available on your local supermarket shelves, maybe this is just one of them: A government with weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, is taken over in, say, a coup d’etat by religious fundamentalists who find themselves in control of those weapons.
No question about it, that’s distinctly a spine-tingler. And if you want to experience those prospective chills right now, you might consider taking a look at David Albright’s and Holly Higgin’s summary piece in the March-April Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, A bomb for the Ummah, Some of Pakistan’s nuclear scientists believe that the bomb should be shared with all of the Muslim community, even–or especially–with Al Qaeda. Included as an added bonus at the Bulletin site is a sales brochure
“from the A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories in Rawalpindi, offering both equipment and assistance spun off from the Pakistani gas centrifuge program–the program that made possible Pakistan’s enrichment of uranium for nuclear weapons. Many of the items shown in the brochure are generally viewed as sensitive and in many countries would be subject to stringent export controls. It is not known what customers the brochure may have been designed to attract, but it has not been displayed at the customary trade fairs–raising questions about whether the items it offers may have been clandestinely sold to countries like North Korea.”
Proliferation, it’s just so damn much fun. And it turns out, as has been reported elsewhere including by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, key Pakistani nuclear scientists were offering nuclear help to Al Qaeda before September 11th. Still, imagining a government like the Pakistani one falling in some way and fundamentalists suddenly finding its weapons of mass destruction within their grasp — that’s a daunting prospect. Even more so, when it suddenly occurs to you that this applies to us. Does anyone doubt that, given Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, the President and their various colleagues, we have something like a government of fundamentalists, of our own mullahs, many of them deeply devoted to the very weapons of mass destruction they insist they’re devoted to wiping out elsewhere?
Though we like to forget the fact, no country, other than the former USSR, has pursued the development of weapons of mass destruction more avidly and creatively than we have, starting with the Manhattan Project. In fact, the Great Iraqi Evil-doer himself, as we all know, was sent precursors for, or needed strains of viruses for his prospective wmd arsenals in the 1980s by (or through licenses issued by) the United States government (along with Germany, England, and so on) and later offered targeting help when he was using poison gas against the Iranians by the Pentagon.
As Ellis Henican indicates in an interesting Newsday piece below, no country has more weapons of mass destruction in more places, readier to go, than we do. Of course, we know that we’re good and kind and filled with the right values so it’s really not a problem even though our fundamentalists distinctly believe that strength lies in massive arsenals of wmd, of the very sort that might — oh, let’s just imagine it — be stolen from weapons labs, put in envelops and sent to some Florida tabloid or maybe Congress. Oh gosh, it actually happened
But let’s move on. Let’s consider, for a moment, that the very definition of weapons of mass destruction is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. To our fundamentalists, weapons of mass destructions are things possessed by governments we loath and must crush before they are passed on to terrorists and unloaded on a major American city (a la the Pakistani scientists and Al Qaeda, though Pakistan is a tricky case, of course, being a nuclear-armed “ally”). But looked at another way, perhaps the greatest weapons of mass destruction in use today aren’t officially weapons at all. For a government at war not just with Iraq until last week, but with the Earth itself, weapons of mass destruction can be administration “proposals” like the “Healthy Forests Initiative” which will allow loggers amongst California’s Sequoia’s and so many other under-the-radar-screen administration maneuvers which threaten the long-term destruction of forests, rivers, or, for that matter, species, as Eric Johnson, editor of Monterrey, California’s Coast Weekly points out in a nice piece posted at Alternet.
Proliferation, it’s just so damn much fun. And it turns out, as has been reported elsewhere including by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, key Pakistani nuclear scientists were offering nuclear help to Al Qaeda before September 11th. Still, imagining a government like the Pakistani one falling in some way and fundamentalists suddenly finding its weapons of mass destruction within their grasp — that’s a daunting prospect. Even more so, when it suddenly occurs to you that this applies to us. Does anyone doubt that, given Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, the President and their various colleagues, we have something like a government of fundamentalists, of our own mullahs, many of them deeply devoted to the very weapons of mass destruction they insist they’re devoted to wiping out elsewhere?
Though we like to forget the fact, no country, other than the former USSR, has pursued the development of weapons of mass destruction more avidly and creatively than we have, starting with the Manhattan Project. In fact, the Great Iraqi Evil-doer himself, as we all know, was sent precursors for, or needed strains of viruses for his prospective wmd arsenals in the 1980s by (or through licenses issued by) the United States government (along with Germany, England, and so on) and later offered targeting help when he was using poison gas against the Iranians by the Pentagon.
As Ellis Henican indicates in an interesting Newsday piece below, no country has more weapons of mass destruction in more places, readier to go, than we do. Of course, we know that we’re good and kind and filled with the right values so it’s really not a problem even though our fundamentalists distinctly believe that strength lies in massive arsenals of wmd, of the very sort that might — oh, let’s just imagine it — be stolen from weapons labs, put in envelops and sent to some Florida tabloid or maybe Congress. Oh gosh, it actually happened
But let’s move on. Let’s consider, for a moment, that the very definition of weapons of mass destruction is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. To our fundamentalists, weapons of mass destructions are things possessed by governments we loath and must crush before they are passed on to terrorists and unloaded on a major American city (a la the Pakistani scientists and Al Qaeda, though Pakistan is a tricky case, of course, being a nuclear-armed “ally”). But looked at another way, perhaps the greatest weapons of mass destruction in use today aren’t officially weapons at all. For a government at war not just with Iraq until last week, but with the Earth itself, weapons of mass destruction can be administration “proposals” like the “Healthy Forests Initiative” which will allow loggers amongst California’s Sequoia’s and so many other under-the-radar-screen administration maneuvers which threaten the long-term destruction of forests, rivers, or, for that matter, species, as Eric Johnson, editor of Monterrey, California’s Coast Weekly points out in a nice piece posted at Alternet.
Or take, for instance, the toxic chemicals used as flame retardants — PBDEs — that Marla Cone has written about in the Los Angeles Times, which are building up at staggering rates in our bodies, particularly in North America, where (unlike in Europe) the Bush-era Environmental Protection Agency insists that we don’t yet know enough to act. Who knows what kinds of mass destruction may ensue from rampant toxicity in the environment?
Or thought of another way, perhaps the greatest weapon of mass destruction is the very thing that we were fighting for in our most recent war — the right to the American way of life, unimpeded; that is, the right to burn fossil fuels without end in ever more gigantic vehicles. Other, obviously, than a major nuclear war, it’s hard to imagine a weapon of mass destruction likely to be more massively destructive than global warming.
Just think of the poor, potentially iceless polar bears (in whose bodies, as in human bodies, those PCDEs are building up) that the science editor of the British newspaper the Independent wrote about sometime in March (and that I’ve been waiting all this time to send your way). Imagine a globally warmed world in which species loss has reached the cascade point. What of, as the article suggests, the possible loss of all Arctic sea ice within a century? Our thinking about weapons of mass destruction has, if anything, grown ever more narrow, in the era of Bush the Younger, even as his administration’s policies threaten to cause the worldwide proliferation of such weapons. But the more massive threats to the planet, the real weapons of mass destruction, involve kinds of environmental degradation and species loneliness on our planet that are really almost beyond grasping. Tom
Time to Inspect the Home Front
By Ellis Henican
Newsday
April 16, 2003We went to war in Iraq because of chemical and biological weapons, although we can’t say we’ve actually found any yet.
Now, George W. Bush and his war lieutenants are accusing Syria of having these dreadful weapons, too. The Syrians swear it’s a lie. We’ll see.
And so it goes in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction on the other side of the world.
Maybe we should be looking in Kentucky instead.
Or Maryland. Or Utah.
Even Hans Blix, the much-maligned UN weapons inspector, could find the bad stuff there.
“While we’re searching for these dangerous weapons in other countries, we have eight major stockpiles right here in the United States,” Craig Williams was saying yesterday from Berea, Ky., which is in Madison County, a lovely part of the state where the rugged hills of Appalachia meet the rolling bluegrass.
To read more Henican click here
Bush’s War Against Nature
By Eric Johnson, Coast Weekly
Alternet
April 18, 2003Three years ago, in April of 2000, President Bill Clinton created the Giant Sequoia National Monument in the southern Sierra Nevada, 250 miles east of here. The declaration was meant to protect a forest that includes the world’s oldest and biggest trees — a place that had been a battleground for a century.
Ever since John Muir trekked in the Sierra, conservationists had fought to protect the Sequoia, battling timber companies that saw the ancient giants as so much standing lumber. Clinton’s move seemed to put an end to the fight — it mandated that commercial logging in the forest would cease.
Late last year the Bush administration re-ignited hostilities by proposing a plan to allow widespread logging in the Monument,
home to nearly half of the remaining groves of Sequoia.
Eric Johnson is the editor of Coast Weekly in Monterey, Calif.
To read more Johnson click here
Cause for Alarm Over Chemicals
Levels of common fire retardants in humans are rising rapidly, especially in the U.S. Animal tests show effects on the brain.
By Marla Cone
Los Angeles Times
April 20, 2003Toxic chemicals used as flame retardants are rapidly building up in the bodies of people and wildlife around the world, approaching levels in American women and their babies that could harm developing brains, new research shows.
The chemicals, PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers, are used to reduce the spread of fire in an array of plastic and foam products in homes and offices, including upholstered furniture, building materials, televisions, computers and other electronic equipment.
This year, the European Union banned the two PBDE compounds that have been shown to accumulate in human bodies. Some European industries had already begun to phase out the chemicals, and levels in the breast milk of European women have begun to decline.
Polar sea ice could be gone by the end of the century
By Steve Connor Science Editor
The Independent
10 March 2003Much of the Earth’s frozen north will have defrosted by the end of the century, according to the latest study of the effect of global warming on the Arctic.
New measurements of the extent of sea ice around the entire North Pole show that it has reduced by about 4 per cent a decade on average over a 20-year period.
If the warming trend continues, Arctic sea ice could, within 100 years, disappear almost completely during the summer months, said Professor Ola Johannessen of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre in Bergen, Norway.
This would have a serious impact on wildlife, such as the estimated 22,000 polar bears living in the Arctic which need abundant pack ice to hunt for seals during the summer.
To read more Connor click here