“‘We need an arsenal that everybody believes is perfect,’ said [Leonard] Spector, from the Monterey Institute. ‘That’s the whole concept of deterrence.'” (From a piece on producing plutonium pits for nuclear weapons in Wired magazine on-line)
There’s a principle to live by on a day when the North Koreans have just announced that, yes, they do have nuclear weapons and yes, they are beginning to reprocess the spent nuclear fuel rods at their Youngbyan plant (www.msnbc.com/news/850567.asp?0cv=CB10), and yes, maybe they’ll test their weapons, and yes, they have officially joined the nuclear club, the ninth country so dishonored (ten, once you count the Israelis who don’t quite admit to the staggering arsenal they possess; eleven, if you count the former apartheid government of South Africa, which at the thought of a black government controlling nuclear weapons, disarmed itself and then admitted to possession); in a week when our unofficial Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld in a private memo called for regime change in North Korea; in a week in which the United States, after fourteen years off duty, is again producing shiny new plutonium pits for its most devastating nuclear weapons (see Wired magazine, below) and has announced that it’s no longer just researching but actually preparing to produce nuclear “bunker busters” that would make the weapons dropped on Saddam’s palaces seem like play toys (see the San Jose Mercury below); and in a week when, in a hidden corner of its website, MSNBC has produced — for reasons Ira Chernus speculates about below — a stunning little graphic on Israel’s weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems, a subject that somehow didn’t come up here during our whole nine-month long frenzied rush to a war ostensibly meant to disarm Saddam Hussein of weapons he, at best, had in small, aging quantities or simply had the precursors for, or didn’t have at all, a war that, until further notice — if such weapons can’t be found — is being touted as solely and selflessly for the “liberation” of the Iraqi people.
You know, for anyone nostalgic for the good old days of the Cold War, those halcyon days of the superpower nuclear, chemical, and biological arms races, which were sweepstakes for various weapons labs and arms producers, the good news is that they’re baaaack, better than ever! The world is now teetering at the edge of a weapons of mass destruction gold rush that could make the chaos inside Iraq today look like child’s play. Everybody armed every which way — it’s a vision of global insecurity brought to you, thanks in significant part to the Bush administration’s bevy of aggressive policies — and there are, in fact, those in this administration who firmly believe that a proliferated world is all to the good.
So Iran’s hard at work. Can Japan, peace constitution or no, be far behind, or Taiwan much behind that, now that the Koreans are a nuclear power? I don’t know why someone doesn’t just pour all that oil we love so much on the world and toss a match. Tom
Embattled Lab Unveils New Nukes
By Noah Shachtman
Wired Magazine on line
April 23, 2003The United States’ arsenal of 10,000 nuclear weapons isn’t enough. The country needs more bombs, and the place to make them is the scandal-plagued Los Alamos National Laboratory.
That seems to be the meaning behind yesterday’s announcement by Los Alamos officials that the lab has constructed the first plutonium pit — the deadly heart of a nuclear warhead — that’s bomb-ready.It’s been 14 years since the last one was completed. The United States hasn’t had the ability to make the pits since the FBI stopped production at the Energy Department’s Rocky Flats plant for environmental violations in 1989.
The United States’ arsenal of 10,000 nuclear weapons isn’t enough. The country needs more bombs, and the place to make them is the scandal-plagued Los Alamos National Laboratory.
That seems to be the meaning behind yesterday’s announcement by Los Alamos officials that the lab has constructed the first plutonium pit — the deadly heart of a nuclear warhead — that’s bomb-ready.
It’s been 14 years since the last one was completed. The United States hasn’t had the ability to make the pits since the FBI stopped production at the Energy Department’s Rocky Flats plant for environmental violations in 1989.
It’s the opening trickle in what is scheduled to eventually become a torrent of new nuclear cores….
Administration moves ahead on nuclear `bunker busters’
By Dan Stober
San Jose Mercury News
April 23, 2003Demonstrating a significant shift in America’s nuclear strategy, the Bush administration intends to produce — not just research — a thermonuclear bunker-busting bomb to destroy hardened, deeply buried targets, the Pentagon has acknowledged for the first time.
The weapon — known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator — would be a full-power hydrogen bomb that would throw up enormous clouds of radioactive dust while wreaking large-scale damage and death if used in an urban area. It would be thousands of times more powerful than the conventional “bunker busters” dropped on Baghdad in an attempt to kill former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Federal officials signed documents in Washington this week to launch a preliminary design contest between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
To read more San Jose Mercury click here
MSNBC Reveals Facts on Israel’s Weapons of Mass Destruction
by Ira Chernus
CommonDreams.org
April 21, 2003Most astounding web page of the week: www.msnbc.com/news/wld/graphics/strategic_israel_dw.htm
Here is MSNBC, giving us more information on Israel’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) than I’ve seen in any left-wing or peace-activist news source. Here is the mainstream U.S. media, that beast we love to hate, giving us a story that gives away the store.
It’s a story we expect the elite media to hide, because it is so embarrassing to U.S. policymakers. How could anyone cheer for the carnage in Iraq, where no WMD have yet been found, if they knew that Israel is the only Middle Eastern nation with a proven WMD arsenal? How could anyone approve of a U.S. policy that kills where WMD don’t seem to exist and turns a blind eye where they obviously do?
Far from hiding the story, though, MSNBC uses its graphic skills to put all the details just a mouse-click away. What’s going on?
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. [email protected]