A follow-up to yesterday’s email on nuclear proliferation: In Asia Times on-line today, Mark Erikson quotes from the charming thoughts of Washington Post syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, who recently wrote: “We [the US] should go to the Chinese and tell them plainly that if they do not join us in squeezing North Korea … we will endorse any Japanese attempt to create a nuclear deterrent of its own. Even better, we would sympathetically regard any request by Japan to acquire American nuclear missiles as an immediate and interim deterrent. If our nightmare is a nuclear North Korea, China’s is a nuclear Japan. It’s time to share the nightmares.”
Erikson makes it clear that Japan could, in fact, go nuclear in a major way in a matter of months, if the decision were made — and that thoughts of this are now becoming part of acceptable mainstream discussion in Japan, not simply of semi-buried right-wing rants. To read more of “Japan could ‘go nuclear’in months” click here
Krauthammer’s suggestion is indicative of the general mood of proliferation that has gripped George W. Bush’s Washington. Here, then, is the first of several emails over the next days on weaponry and the American way of life (if the two can, at this point, be told apart). I’m starting with a hair-raising piece, especially given its utter sobriety, from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, on the proliferation wars we haven’t yet focused on — bio-wars. Despite the anthrax assaults of 2001, can there be a worse covered subject in the media — not just the anthrax killer(s) him/themselves, or the anthrax he/they used, which evidently came from US weapons labs, but the illegal secret programs that lie behind the one we’ve heard about?
The following piece may actually pinpoint the moment when Chairman Bush’s version of Chairman Mao’s let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom campaign — let a hundred weapons of terror proliferate (as long as the US can be the first proliferator among less than equals) — came into being. An exploration of the unexpected withdrawal of US support for the strengthening of an already existing, but toothless, bioweapons protocol in summer 2000, it lays out in grim, descriptive detail what a bio-proliferated world would look like — for which, to get the full picture, you only need to substitute nuclear or chemical, or in some distant future, with the same policies, nanotech, or the horror of your particular nightmares. (Warning: don’t be put off by the policy wonk tone of this piece. You have to read it to grasp the seriousness of this issue.)
For the Busheviks (as Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon, calls them), anything is more acceptable than letting weapons inspectors set foot in the great global rogue nation they are in the process of creating. Tom
Back to bioweapons?
By Mark Wheelis & Malcolm Dando
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
January/February 2003The United States may have rejected the bioweapons protocol because it is committed to continuing and expanding its secret programs.
In the summer of 2001, the United States shocked its peers when it rejected the protocol to the bioweapons treaty. Intended to strengthen compliance with the vital but weak Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the protocol was dead in the water without U.S. support, and the world was left wondering what prompted the surprise move.
Some suggest the rejection was due to changing U.S. perceptions of sovereignty and self-reliance. Others thought that perhaps its own recently revealed covert biological programs were too sensitive for the United States to willingly reveal more. But this explanation falls short because, had it wished, the United States could have both supported the protocol and avoided disclosing its secret operations simply by terminating them before the protocol entered into force.
To read more of this Bulletin of Atomic Scientists piece click here
The United States may have rejected the bioweapons protocol because it is committed to continuing and expanding its secret programs.
In the summer of 2001, the United States shocked its peers when it rejected the protocol to the bioweapons treaty. Intended to strengthen compliance with the vital but weak Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the protocol was dead in the water without U.S. support, and the world was left wondering what prompted the surprise move.
Some suggest the rejection was due to changing U.S. perceptions of sovereignty and self-reliance. Others thought that perhaps its own recently revealed covert biological programs were too sensitive for the United States to willingly reveal more. But this explanation falls short because, had it wished, the United States could have both supported the protocol and avoided disclosing its secret operations simply by terminating them before the protocol entered into force.
To read more of this Bulletin of Atomic Scientists piece click here