Did we learn nothing?

From Nukes on a Blog comes this note:

According to a June 7, 2007 press release from Nuclear Watch New Mexico, “The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has invited Members of Congress to ‘celebrate’ on July 2 its production of its first certified plutonium trigger (AKA ‘pit’ or ‘primary’) … produced by the U.S. certified for deployment to the nuclear stockpile since 1989.”

So…a party to celebrate the first new plutonium pit certified for deployment to the stockpile since the year the FBI raided and closed the old plutonium pit facility?

If the scientists are claiming the existing stockpile of pits are stable and will work for the foreseeable future, why do we need more? Clearly, regardless of what they SAY about non-proliferation, this administration intends to create a system by which the U.S. is actually building MORE nukes, not just replacing the old ones, as they claim they want to do with the RRW program.
One question: If they don't yet have Congressional funding for RRW (recently zeroed-out), where is the money coming from for the new pits for those weapons we aren't building?
Another question: Who benefits? As the old saying goes, follow the money ... and we'll see who is really behind this push for new nukes, when many military people recognize they aren't practically useful.
Of course, practicality has never mattered much to this administration. All they care about is politics and image, and nukes are excellent for that purpose -- they look strong (if sold properly, which this admin is terrible at), but they're impotent because they can never be USED. Having nukes is a lot like having AIDS -- if you know it, you should be responsible enough to stop transmitting it, because you know it will eventually KILL you and your partner(s).

Bringing Aug. 6, 1945 home

It hasn't gotten a lot of coverage yet, but hopefully it will:

Steven Leeper, the American who was recently appointed to run the Hiroshima Peace Museum, is trying to find people across the U.S. to help him display photos, artifacts, and so forth in an effort to remind people just how nasty nuclear weapons really are.

An L.A. Times article is here.
The museum's site is here.

I intend to help Leeper's effort, and could use any help from my readers as possible, especially if you're in MA or CT and/or can pass the message on far & wide. His initial note to me read:

Thank you for contacting me and your offer to help with the exhibitions. Very soon, we will be sending out a letter to potential allies in this effort. You will be on the list. After you receive the letter, you will probably still have some questions. Please write to me at this address and I will be happy to tell you everything I know.

We do need allies, but we have lots of them in MA. Can you do CT? Or Rhode Island?

Anyway, please wait for the letter, then respond quickly and we will be underway.

Thanks again,
Steve

I'll keep everyone informed of progress.
My idea at this point is to use whatever he has in mind as a centerpiece for a display that also features art, poetry and other materials by local people, educational efforts in the local schools, and so forth. It's still in an embryonic stage, obviously.

One thing I DON'T want is for it to include a broader critique of nuclear power. While that issue certainly has problems -- primarily surrounding disposal -- that desperately need to be dealt with, including it here only muddies the water. To me, nuke power still has the potential to be a good thing, if used properly, and we can solve the problems by thinking creatively. But nuke weapons have no redeeming value at all -- they ARE the problem.
We've all seen a definite increase in the frequency of nuclear disaster references in the popular media -- repeats of "The Day After," the series "Jericho," specials on Hiroshima specifically and cataclysmic disasters generally, new books like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," political blathering from all over, and even an episode of the cartoon "King of the Hill." To me, it seems like the atmosphere today is beginning to be as "nuclearized" as it was back in the 1980s, with one major difference ... There's not enough political outcry from the people-at-large. I hope helping an exhibit like this will change that.

"Little" wars cause huge problems

Climatic Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts
by A. Robock, et al
Published in Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics Discussion 11/22/06

Last fall, a decidedly unpublicized climate conference revealed what anyone with common sense probably already suspected: even little nuclear wars suck.
Read it here
Not only would a regional war using "just" 100 Hiroshima-sized warheads (about 15 kt each, or a total of 0.03% of the globe's nuclear killing capacity) potentially kill the same number of people as died globally in World War II, but it would likely cause temperature and precipitation changes that would rival those that made the Little Ice Age (c. 1450) such a fun time to be alive, with the Black Death, famines, and related problems.
The report, by six scientists including Turco and Toon of TTAPS fame, argues that such a war would cause the average amount of shortwave radiation reaching the earth's surface globally to fall by nearly 10 times the amount it would rise given a doubling of atmospheric CO2. But while the latter doubling has been projected to occur over decades, the post-war decrease would happen within the first year, and conditions would only gradually improve over the next 10 years or so. During that time, the world would likely see a 10% average decline in precipitation and a 1 deg. C average temperature decline for at least five of those years.
While that may not sound bad to the average person, the report's charts and maps are significantly more chilling right after a war: Some parts of the world could see temp. drops of as much as 7 deg. C, with large swaths of western and central Canada, most of Europe, parts of Siberia,most of Australia and the African Sahel hardest hit. At the same time, screwed up atmospheric circulation could cause huge precipitation changes, cutting the rainfall over much of N. America by 20-40% and the Amazon by around 70%, while increasing rainfall by 70-100% over the Sahel and Sahara.
Obviously, losing 70% of the Amazon's rain is likely to have a significantly larger effect than doubling the Sahara's.
Add those things together, and the Robock team is predicting large changes in the growing season for most of the world's breadbasket regions, with North America, western Eurasia and southern South America losing up to a month's growing time for several years.
In doesn't take much to realize this combination of factors bodes ill for lots of people. What the report doesn't look at, however, are other synergies: radiation and/or toxins making some areas uninhabitable (Hiroshima was reinhabited quickly because its bomb was an airburst with little fallout, but wars using multiple bombs detonating in a fairly small part of the globe -- say, India & Pakistan, or Israel & Iran -- aren't likely to be so clean.); numbers of traumatized refugees and injuries that will easily overwhelm the world's medical and humanitarian system; long-term genetic concerns, for those directly affected and globally because of the increase in average radiation levels; economic chaos possibly leading to further wars that might involve the major powers, etc. These may seem exaggerated -- after all, the study looks a war that doesn't directly touch any of the world's major industrial nations -- but the last time we saw such a death toll and economic impact, most of the world had several years to prepare for and absorb it. This one could happen literally overnight.
Our government is making a big deal of Iran's supposed quest for the Bomb, and that should indeed be a global concern. But we need to put as much pressure on India, Pakistan and Israel to come clean about their programs and, far more importantly, resume GLOBAL negotiations to get rid of nuclear weapons forever...

When media muddy the waters

Last night, I caught the last half of 20/20's special "The Last Days of Earth." Much of what they said was pretty accurate, albeit seriously lacking in depth, detail, and source citation. The problem I have with the show, however, is that even I as a layman could see some things they said (or, more often showed) did not help the cause of good science.

If you didn't see it, you can probably guess what it was about by the title and the fact I'm writing about it on this blog -- various forms of apocalypse. They looked at seven, but I can't remember them all and only caught the last four: asteroids, nuclear war, global pandemic, and climate change, ranking the last as the most serious threat.

Common sense says all of those things are in fact real threats; but I'm not sure I'd give them the same order. To me, the most serious in terms of what it can ultimately do to humanity and nature is nuclear war, because, in a very real sense, it combines many of the effects of the other three. The combination of megadeaths plus long-term radiation plus a massive smoke pall plus other "synergies" would very likely destroy human civilization for a very long time and cause major changes in the genetics of human and natural communities alike.

Admittedly, I rank that a little higher than asteroids because, while a really big asteroid can actually sterilize Earth and I don't think we can nuke Earth into sterility, if a nuclear war happens it's our fault. Asteroids are impersonal; nuclear war is not.

Asteroids

Anyway, I'm digressing. 20/20's section on asteroids was simplistic but truthful about the prevailing theory that asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving mammals a chance to take over the reptiles' ecological niches. But the "reporters" then argued that an asteroid of the same size hitting Earth now would burn the crust to a depth of 60 miles. Obviously, that's crap: there's no way our mammalian ancestors would have survived such a strike. They lived semi-nocturnal, semi-underground lives, but not that far underground. The only lifeforms that have ever lived that far down are extremophile bacteria.

You can test the effects of various sizes of asteroids here or here.

It mentioned that people have found around 100,000 asteroids, but didn't mention that we occasionally lose some, are constantly finding some only when they cross Earth's orbit, and suspect there are countless more out there. Chances are, if one hits us, we won't see it until it's too close to do anything about.

Of course, they could be right about the one they mention specifically -- an asteroid that's due to make a close (within the Moon's orbit) pass in 2029. They don't say that will hit us -- general consensus is that it won't -- but that the near-miss might alter its orbit just enough to cause a hit the next time around in 2037. What they don't mention is just how small the risk really is: 1 in 26,000 in 2029 and cumulatively just .00023% chance between now and 2054, during which time it'll have three close approaches. The show doesn't identify that chunk of rock, but astronomers know it as 2004 MN4 or Apophis.

The show's discussion of what people are likely to do if faced with a probable direct hit was kind of interesting, but also fairly predictable. It's pretty safe to assume chaos would reign as the time drew near as people try to do things they'd never before attempted (for good and ill). Nobody said they'd go out and commit crimes (obviously, they wouldn't say it on national TV even if they would do it), but a few said they'd want to have children. Excuse me?!? How can someone be so supremely narcissistic as to bring children into a world they knew was going to get walloped by an extinction-level-huge asteroid?

What was equally troubling was what the show didn't mention -- the probability that some people would try to organize a major space effort to keep humanity alive off-world. Such an effort may well be the only thing that could prevent such widespread chaos, and I've said before that I believe we need a good global space program as insurance against just such a catastrophe.

Nukes

The section on nukes was woefully vague and much shorter than the subject warranted. It didn't say anything about radiation or various other ill effects, although it did point out (accurately, I think) that the nuke threat from places like Iran and North Korea is being blown out of proportion to the risk caused by the thousands of nukes the US and Russia still have on "launch on warning" status. It failed to mention, however, that both nations are trying to create new, smaller, more mobile nukes, especially the U.S. Add that to the simmering problems in the Middle East, and it may be time to revisit the Doomsday Clock's setting of 7 minutes to midnight, which hasn't changed since 1992.

The one really questionable assertion they made was that "an exchange of just 20 missiles would cause nuclear winter for several years." The problem here is that the number of missiles is irrelevant, what matters is the number and strength of the warheads and where they explode -- urban or rural, airburst or groundburst. Burning cities are significantly more likely to spew the toxic smoke into the sky that can block sunlight and cool the land, especially if hit by warheads that explode close enough to the surface for soil and debris to get sucked into the fireball. Even the TTAPS study of the early 1980s predicted a 5,000 MT threshold for nuclear winters, which requires significantly more than 20 missiles.

Elsewhere Sagan (as cited by Alan Phillips), notes it could happen with as few as 100 warheads if the targets are predominantly oil refineries and associated structures. Obviously, we don't know for sure... and sane folks don't want to. There's some controversy over the TTAPS calculations, sparking some of the theory's supporters to acknowledge that there needs to be more research done in this area. We've got better climate-study technology and computer simulation capability than we did in the 1980s, let's target it on this threat.

Desmond Ball of the Australian Nat'l University argues even more specifically that even a full-scale war hitting both cities and strategic weapons sites, which Ball estimates at 4140 to 4650 MT, would throw up less smoke than Sagan's nuclear winter threshold of 100 million tons, largely because of where those missile silos are -- in farmfields and tundra, not forest.

Obviously, I'm not citing him to downplay nuclear war's horrors. Even without nuclear winter, it would be by far the worst calamity to have ever hit mankind, and for that reason, I'm still in favor of banning the bomb.

My guess is that a full-scale nuclear holocaust would actually leave most people alive in the short-term, but hundreds of millions, if not billions, would not survive the social, economic, and agricultural disruption, radiation, temporary loss of the ozone layer, diseases, and other problems that can reasonably be expected after such a catastrophe, even if the temperature change is minimal. (Imagine what shape Europe or Japan would've been in for years after WW2 if the US had not created the Marshall Plan. That's the catch -- global nuclear war isn't likely to leave anyone untouched, even nations that don't get bombed, simply due to the nature of fallout and our world's high level of economic interconnectedness.) But I suspect humans will still be here long term, reduced in numbers and cultural complexity and possibly permanently unable to regain today's level of technology, science, and the possibility of reaching the stars.

Pandemic

I can't claim to have anything resembling detailed knowledge of this subject, since I'm not a doctor and have no medical experience of any sort. But as a layman with some knowledge of history, I noticed a couple of things that seemed a little out of whack. In one place, they claim the 1918 Flu Pandemic "killed only 3% of those who caught it." That figure didn't ring true ... but it was. If anything, it was higher than the actual percentage (I came up with about 2.5%). The New England Journal of Medicine reports that "the pandemic of 1918 and 1919 killed 50 million to 100 million people" worldwide. NPR adds, "About 25 percent of the population was infected, with perhaps 650,000 people dying from the virus." At that time, US population was about 104,550,000.

According to the same NEJM article, "more than half the deaths occurred among largely healthy people between 18 and 40 years of age and were caused by a virus-induced cytokine storm (see diagram) that led to the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). ...If we translate the rate of death associated with the 1918 influenza virus to that in the current population, there could be 1.7 million deaths in the United States and 180 million to 360 million deaths globally."

The show also notes that smallpox & other germs could be used as weapons. In its present state, the show said, smallpox kills about 30% of its victims -- a significantly higher rate than the 1918 Flu. Under some circumstances, it's even more deadly -- some evidence suggests the death rate among the biologically unprotected Native American population exceeded 65%.

Climate Change

This was an unfortunate mixture of mostly good spoken fact and grossly misleading imagery. Most obvious was when they spoken of sea level rising if Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt -- 20 feet individually, 40 feet together. That's a pretty severe rise, one that would (as their sources, which includes climatologists and Al Gore, said) inundate south Florida, southern Louisiana, Bangladesh, parts of Manhattan and possibly London, and many other coastal areas. but teh graphics shown at teh same time exaggerated the flooding immensely: they showed blue covering over half of FLorida, huge stretches of the UK, and even mountainous regions of Southeast Asia and Africa far from the coasts.

As TV studios know quite well, people pay far more attention to images than words, a fact that makes such a presentation a major league disservice to the work the scientists are doing. By so exaggerating a threat that is serious enough on its own, it only provides ammunition to the very naysayers the show largely (and accurately) discounted verbally.

Instead of hyped up graphics of biblical proportions, they should have taken the time to show realistic maps of the potential sea level rise, scenery from areas that are already seeing problems, etc. Among those available are these ones from the EPA (note that they only show a 3.5 m rise), or go to places like this (USGS) or any decent topographic map of seashore regions and figure it out yourself from the contours.

'Damnation Alley' vs. Done Very Badly

The Book: By Roger Zelazny (1968; *** of 5)
The Movie: Starring George Peppard, Jan Michael Vincent (1977; * of 5)

About the only two things the book and movie versions of Damnation Alley agree on are these: (1) The main character, Tanner, is on a life-threatening journey across a hostile, bizarre post-apocalypse America in an specially-built armored vehicle and (2)the skies are regularly colored by weird, almost hallucinogenic aurora storms. Otherwise, they might as well be about two very different stories.

I don't remember if Zelazny's name was mentioned in the movie credits, but if I were him, I wouldn't have had anything to do with it. It's that bad; that far off the book's plotline. The ONLY thing warranting even one star was the atmospheric effects -- the acting is horrible, the characters have no personality, their journey is pointless, the various encounters are implausible. Hell, even their route cross-country doesn't make sense: Why would someone traveling from California to Albany divert to Detroit... when the early scenes specifically state Detroit's gone?

In the film, Tanner is this half-assed, wanna-be biker who quit the military after the war because he saw no point in staying in. The bike just exists to show how "cool" he is ... and he rides it at every stop, regardless of the fact that many of them would still be glowing with radiation. The film, however, has almost no reference to radiation at all. Instead of being a sever challenge, the journey is essentially a lark undertaken solely for selfish reasons -- Tanner and other military folks go 3000+ miles to check out a recorded, repeating signal in Albany that isn't saying anything, and would be impossible given the atmospheric disturbances. (In the film, the events happen about 2 years after the war.)

The real Tanner has a first name that says a lot about him: Hell. He's a REAL (stereotyped) biker -- the "last Hell's Angel," leader of a rapacious gang who terrorized struggling California communities until he got caught. He's been in jail a few times, killed several people, smuggled things to other surviving communities, and is finally given an ultimatum: Take plague serum to Boston (NOT Albany) or rot his remaining years in prison.

There's no radio -- just a radiation-sick Bostonian messenger who struggles into Los Angeles pleading for help. In Zelazny's vision, California knows Boston still exists, and believes it might be the only other organized nation left on the continent. As it turns out, at least two other places are still organized, Salt Lake City (which, in the movie, is occupied solely by carnivorous cockroaches; the filmmakers clearly didn't have the skill to portray the complexity of interaction with a living community) and Albuquerque, and others are populated but essentially lack government. These events take place at least a generation after the war -- Tanner was born afterward, and is somewhere in his 20s. It might be longer; Tanner encounters an insane scientist on his journey who remembers the war and the anti-science pogroms afterward; he could be in his 50s. (This character, one of Zelazny's more interesting side characters, doesn't exist in the film.)

Zelazny gives us scenes of life in Boston -- it's a real place, with real people (the almost hopeless mayor, the greedy businessman, the teen lovers, cops hunting down looters, all struggling under the threat of extinction by plague). That's unlike the movie's Albany, which is a complete fantasy, a religious heavenly escape from reality. It is the fundamentalist end-all-be-all salvation as a selfish goal rather than the book's salvation as something people give to each other to help them through tough times.

In both versions, there are huge animals marauding across the landscape. The movie depicts them with exceptionally bad special effects -- it's so obvious they've spliced images of scorpions into a set background, for example. The book's beast are more variable -- huge bats, scorpions, snakes, Gila monsters, etc. But they are no more plausible: Evolution doesn't work that way. Radiation-induced mutations MIGHT create extra-large lifeforms, but only in very small numbers, not hordes. A far more likely probability would be a much LESS fecund landscape, smaller creatures, deformities that harmed their ability to adapt, etc. Zelazny's story is really a nightmare that happens to have an apocalyptic setting, not a survival novel. But he gives the character a palpable humanity -- flawed, but not entirely evil.

The movie plot also makes no sense. In the beginning, text says the war "knocked earth off it's axis," and at one point a character claims "if it comes back, everything could go back to normal." That's complete bullshit, not just very bad, lame pseudo-scifi. Of course, in the film, the latter happens at the end -- a deux ex machina where the hero rides into the sunlight over a green landscape. The book has no such nonsense -- Hell Tanner's success doesn't change the world; the sky is still full of garbage & electromagnetic storms. It doesn't even change him that much -- Boston erects a statue in his honor, and he's "the most likely suspect" in its graffiti defacement.

All it does it save some lives.

Oh, and one personally quirky thing I liked about the book (and disliked the film for completely omitting it) was that Tanner used Mass. Route 9 for the last leg of his journey. As a kid, I LIVED on that road. At one point, about age 4, the cops even had to take me home because I was "directing traffic" in the middle of it :-).

I'm not sure what Zelazny saw as a target at 90 mi from Boston, though -- that's in the middle of the rural Berkshires. The nearest town of any size is Pittsfield, and that's not worth nuking. The nearest probable target is Westover Air Base in Chicopee, about 60 miles from Boston, but that's not on Rte 9. (He has several scenes of Tanner avoiding radioactive craters that aren't near any plausible target.)

Messing things up even after the end

The Long Tomorrow, by Leigh Brackett (1955; **** of 5)
A Gift Upon the Shore, by M.K. Wren (1990; **** of 5)
A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959; ***1/2 of 5)
Swan Song, by Robert R. McCammon (1987; *** of 5)
The Stand, by Stephen King (1990; ** of 5)

Religion plays a major, even inordinate, role in many conceptions of what life might be like after civilization collapses. That, of course, surprises no one. One factor in why armageddon in any form is a threat is that fundamentalist dogma says it basically has to happen for their doctrine to be fulfilled. To prove their way is the only "right" way, they promote massive destruction, although not always actively.

McCammon's Swan Song is probably the most obvious example of this I've ever read, possibly exceeded only by Stephen King's The Stand. Both of these lengthy tomes have strongly dualistic themes, with rampaging inhuman evil leading human evil in an effort to kill off the last of human hope. King's version is overtly Christian in tone, even to the point of having the evil forces based in Las Vegas, while McCammon's has almost a pagan feel, with its focus on a girl who can grow plants magically, an obvious mother goddess image. The main evil character in both is almost identical, right down to his ability to shapeshift, making me wonder if one inspired the other.

An interesting element of Swan Song, though, is a key good character's blatant rejection of the fundamentalist insanity -- literally. Sister, a former NYC street person, starts off being incredibly delusional, ranting to everyone passing by that "the Rapture" would be a wonderful thing. Appropriately enough, she calls herself Sister Creep at that time. Although she never remembers her real name, after the bombs fall, she does remember what happened to her to cause her madness and realizes the whole concept of "Rapture" is crap. Despite the existence of evil, nobody's coming down to swoop the good guys into a wonderful other world -- the only wonderful world that'll exist is if good people create it themselves.

That latter theme is sort of echoed in both Wren and Brackett, but in a different way. In both, a small element of society is trying to save the science and printed wisdom of our civilization ... to the great horror and religious opposition of the majority. Wren's tale is a microcosm of Brackett's -- it focuses on just one group of people, with two who want to save books and teach the children to think opposing several who believe all books are evil except the Holy Babble. The fact that the two skeptics are women in a very patriarchal cult and possibly lesbian lovers (that's never clearly stated, but definitely suggested) creates an extra level of tension.

In Brackett, the fundamentalist impulse reigns supreme, in the form of New Mennonites who overtly reject the science and cities of 20th Century America. The book has a good point that a back-to-simplicity mindset would indeed be a survival trait in the decades after WW3, but coupling that with venomous, Babble-quoting lynchings of people even suspected of harboring scientific devices or ideas is not. They go so far as to pass a 30th Amendment to the US Constitution banning all communities of over 1,000 people or 200 buildings. (Brackett writes one of the few post-WW3 books that postulates a new dark age in which the US survives as a country; in this case, our society is dropped back into the 18th or 19th Century.)

Brackett's New Mennonites would fit right into the Simplification envisioned by Miller: rampaging mobs of self-described "simpletons" murder the vast majority of educated people, then even literate folks, and burn any books they can in their anger at the folks they blame for WW3. That Simplification, however, doesn't specifically have a religious motive; in fact, the whole point of the book is that the Catholic church helps save what knowledge it can.

The irony there, however, is subtle -- the key character spurring the creation of the monastic order of "bookleggers and memorizers" is a scientific, secular Jew (the title character) later canonized for alleged miracles having nothing to do with his eforts to save knowledge. Furthermore, although the monks don't hide the material they slavishly copy over the centuries, they don't actively share or utilize it either. In 3074, the monks have had the printing press for a century ... largely becasue an abbot 500 years earlier specifically rejected a proposal to build one as unnecessary because there was no market for cheap books. (Never mind the fact that cheap books would have made it possible to educate people more easily; in 3074, there's a line noting that the village of Sanly Bowitts has the "fantastic literary rate of eight percent" despite being just a few miles from the abbey and its 100% literacy rate.)

That kind of dogmatic foot-dragging is common in Miller's chronicle. In fact, I'd say organized religion's strength (when not being used to promote hostility) is it's ability to preserve the past when the average level of society is low, but it is largely ineffectual at dealing with the present or promoting a healthy future when average people are educated. The browbeating that works on the ignorant only annoys and turns off the educated, but many churches cannot adapt effectively to cultural change, and tend to speak with a voice of unreason cloaked as "morality."

Toward the end, we see references to the Pope praying for peace as another nuclear war threatens a re-established global civilization that has progressed beyond ours technologically (including space colonies) ... but doing nothing to actually prevent war. Instead of criticizing people for their behavior, how about promoting the common ground humans share regardless of nationality? Had the Church done THAT over the centuries, there probably wouldn't be a threat of global war (Miller's future war OR modern war).

predictions, predictions...

Found this on the Strategy Page BB's Predictions Market, one of many predictions they have listed (some plausible, some clearly ridiculous):

A nuclear weapon (A-bomb or H-bomb) will be used in anger somewhere in the world before midnight Dec. 31 2009. Dirty bombs don't count.

PRO FUTURES: 370 CON FUTURES: 868
PRO VALUE: $3.35 CON VALUE: $1.43
DATE POSTED: 8/25/2005

So, we've got folks who are willing to gamble on the possibility that someone will NUKE someone else in the next few years ... and thereby profit if it happens? WTF?

That concept is very twisted, but what's interesting here is that 29.8% of those who bought futures on this question think it will happen. That's very close to figures I've seen scientists give when asked to predict the probability of that very same thing happening. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I saw it... ##

One of the guys I work with (rather, worked with; I got laid off Friday) told me he's telling friends not to make plans more than a week in advance because of the war in Lebanon. As he put it, it could explode into WW3 or essentially fizzle out, but it's really hard to tell which.

Jenn (my gf) and I have been talking about this lately, about what our options are if the shit hits the fan. She's known about my interests in this area for some time, but only with the chaos in the MidEast climbing to a new level of brutality has it become something she's beginning to be concerned about. I think we're at the greatest risk of WW3 than at any time since Ronnie Reagan pumped so much $$$ into nukes in the early 1980s.

Being in Massachusetts, we're in target-central if people start tossing nukes around. Although we don't live in one of the cities & therefore are very unlikely to get hit directly, we sit right on the Springfield-Worcester-Boston axis and would get significant fallout from any of them. As I see it, there are at least nine targets within 50 miles of us: those three cities, Hartford, Providence, New London Sub Base, Westover ARB, Hanscom AFB, Bradley Internat'l Airport. Of them, I suspect Boston, New London, and Hanscom would be first-salvo targets. Maybe, if shooting starts, we'd get lucky and have it fizzle out after that salvo.... Worst case scenario, of course, is that everything gets launched, in which case almost any community over 15,000 could have a bomb with its name on it. Obviously, in that case, we're toast.

Short of that worst case, I intend to try to survive... but would obviously rather not have to deal with such events.

## (Added 7/31:) I forgot about this post from last year. It doesn't have the specific figure I was seeking, but does indicate the threat we face...

new nuclear weapons doctrine...

... includes preemptive use against nations or groups threatening attacks.... or just possessing biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. I haven't read it in detail yet, but this seems like a HUGE step in the wrong direction. What jumped out at me from a quick scan was the repeated reference to the fact that using nukes isn't technically illegal under international law -- blatant self-serving justification if I've ever heard it.

Obviously, this administration doesn't care that some things that are legal simply should not be done. But we all know that by now.

Anyway, read the document if you have time; I'll do so sometime soon and post on it in more detail.

Until then, here's the Washington Post article about it, with my emphasis and comments:

Strategy Includes Preemptive Use Against Banned Weapons
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 11, 2005; A01

The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Apparently, it doesn't matter that these weapons aren't USED, may have been there for years, and may even have been given to said nation BY US.

The document, written by the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs staff but not yet finally approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, would update rules and procedures governing use of nuclear weapons to reflect a preemption strategy first announced by the Bush White House in December 2002. The strategy was outlined in more detail at the time in classified national security directives.

At a White House briefing that year, a spokesman said the United States would "respond with overwhelming force" to the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, its forces or allies, and said "all options" would be available to the president.

That's NOT what this says. It says we'll INITIATE nuclear war if President Caligula determines nation X has WMDs, even if they aren't attacking anyone. Couldn't possibly be aimed at IRAN, could it?!?

The draft, dated March 15, would provide authoritative guidance for commanders to request presidential approval for using nuclear weapons, and represents the Pentagon's first attempt to revise procedures to reflect the Bush preemption doctrine. A previous version, completed in 1995 during the Clinton administration, contains no mention of using nuclear weapons preemptively or specifically against threats from weapons of mass destruction.

Titled "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations" and written under the direction of Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the draft document is unclassified and available on a Pentagon Web site. It is expected to be signed within a few weeks by Air Force Lt. Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, director of the Joint Staff, according to Navy Cmdr. Dawn Cutler, a public affairs officer in Myers's office.

Meanwhile, the draft is going through final coordination with the military services, the combatant commanders, Pentagon legal authorities and Rumsfeld's office, Cutler said in a written statement.

A "summary of changes" included in the draft identifies differences from the 1995 doctrine, and says the new document "revises the discussion of nuclear weapons use across the range of military operations."

The first example for potential nuclear weapon use listed in the draft is against an enemy that is using "or intending to use WMD" against U.S. or allied, multinational military forces or civilian populations.

How do they determine INTENT? By this doctrine, we should immediately nuke about half a dozen countries who have promised to used WMDs if attacked under various circumstances. And if directed at non-national groups, how do we distinguish between them and the innocent populations they live within? Wouldn't using nukes against such groups violate this concept itself?

Another scenario for a possible nuclear preemptive strike is in case of an "imminent attack from adversary biological weapons that only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy."

That and other provisions in the document appear to refer to nuclear initiatives proposed by the administration that Congress has thus far declined to fully support.
Last year, for example, Congress refused to fund research toward development of nuclear weapons that could destroy biological or chemical weapons materials without dispersing them into the atmosphere.

No surprise there. This admin couldn't care less what Congress wants.

The draft document also envisions the use of atomic weapons for "attacks on adversary installations including WMD, deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons."

But Congress last year halted funding of a study to determine the viability of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator warhead (RNEP) -- commonly called the bunker buster -- that the Pentagon has said is needed to attack hardened, deeply buried weapons sites.

I think I've already posted links showing how RNEPs don't work as they claim. The Bushites don't care how effective it is; it just has to make some of them millions and/or further their armageddon-fueled religious delusions.

The Joint Staff draft doctrine explains that despite the end of the Cold War, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction "raises the danger of nuclear weapons use." It says that there are "about thirty nations with WMD programs" along with "nonstate actors [terrorists] either independently or as sponsored by an adversarial state."

To meet that situation, the document says that "responsible security planning requires preparation for threats that are possible, though perhaps unlikely today."

That's true... but promoting more US policy reliance on nukes is not responsible and doesn't promote security. It promotes destabilization, by ENCOURAGING more nations to seek nukes. That's what's a big factor driving the Iranians -- they're afraid of US. I don't want my country feared; I want it respected, but Bush is incapable of comprehending the difference between those. (Drunks usually are.)

To deter the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, the Pentagon paper says preparations must be made to use nuclear weapons and show determination to use them "if necessary to prevent or retaliate against WMD use."

Hmmm... prevent WMD use by USING the world's worst WMDs. Why didn't I think of that?!?

The draft says that to deter a potential adversary from using such weapons, that adversary's leadership must "believe the United States has both the ability and will to pre-empt or retaliate promptly with responses that are credible and effective." The draft also notes that U.S. policy in the past has "repeatedly rejected calls for adoption of 'no first use' policy of nuclear weapons since this policy could undermine deterrence."

Technically true. We adopted a "no first STRIKE" policy, saying we wouldn't launch ICBMs first. But the distinction means shit if our use of tactical weapons causes someone else to launch ICBMs and/or causes the same kind of destruction and death using ICBM warheads does. Any nuke weapons use is likely to make Chernobyl, Hiroshima, and Katrina look like games.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee who has been a leading opponent of the bunker-buster program, said yesterday the draft was "apparently a follow-through on their nuclear posture review and they seem to bypass the idea that Congress had doubts about the program." She added that members "certainly don't want the administration to move forward with a [nuclear] preemption policy" without hearings, closed door if necessary.

This issue is way too important to the world for such hearings to be closed-door. Secrecy is what has gotten us into this mess.

A spokesman for Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said yesterday the panel has not yet received a copy of the draft.

Hans M. Kristensen, a consultant to the Natural Resources Defense Council, who discovered the document on the Pentagon Web site, said yesterday that it "emphasizes the need for a robust nuclear arsenal ready to strike on short notice including new missions." Kristensen, who has specialized for more than a decade in nuclear weapons research, said a final version of the doctrine was due in August but has not yet appeared.

"This doctrine does not deliver on the Bush administration pledge of a reduced role for nuclear weapons," Kristensen said. "It provides justification for contentious concepts not proven and implies the need for RNEP."

One reason for the delay may be concern about raising publicly the possibility of preemptive use of nuclear weapons, or concern that it might interfere with attempts to persuade Congress to finance the bunker buster and other specialized nuclear weapons.

If that's their thinking, they're right, it will. (I hope!) But I suspect they're trying to give themselves time to come up with something convincing and/or something that will distract the public from this issue. Release now might do that, with Katrina on everyone's mind.

In April, Rumsfeld appeared before the Senate Armed Services panel and asked for the bunker buster study to be funded. He said the money was for research and not to begin production on any particular warhead. "The only thing we have is very large, very dirty, big nuclear weapons," Rumsfeld said. "It seems to me studying it [the RNEP] makes all the sense in the world."

Sure it makes sense to him. Bizarre things always make sense to delusional people.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Debating the absurd

I came across a couple of very interesting blogs that discuss some of the issues I cover. They are Arms Control Wonk and DefenseTech.

Before reading this post, you should jump here for the start of this "thread" and here for the post I'm actually responding to.

At the latter site, 21st Century Schizoid Man (which, BTW, is a King Crimson song title), John Opie writes:

Target sets have nothing to do with deciding to use a nuclear weapon: rather, a decision to use a nuclear weapon is first and fundamentally a political decision that has nothing to do with target sets.

First off, I need to define "target sets." Simply, that's the list of targets a given nuclear attack plan will hit, as defined by the intended effect the attack will have on the people of the other country. Even if the intent is limited to, say, destroying their military capacity, the vast destructiveness of nuclear weapons dictates that a decision to use nukes SHOULD include agonizing over the effect on the people (esp. civilians) near the target. Taking into account the effects on people is the definition of a "political" decision, and refusing or being unable to do that may not be "inhuman," but it's certainly inhumane.

These devices are not and cannot be precision weapons whereby we can take out a tank factory next to a school (the example is from the DefenseTech article) with minimal civilian deaths. If a nuke goes off, it's all but guaranteed to vaporize that factory AND the school AND obliterate everything else within several square miles, minimum, with the VAST MAJORITY of the dead being civilians.

When nukes are in play, the expression "a minimum of force and destruction" is simply a denial of reality. Minimum destruction would be an attack that destroyed the tank factory without touching the school or any nearby homes, something that is impossible with nukes.

Mr. Opie later writes:

Target 69 weapons if you want to have a 94% kill probability of a hardened target under those conditions. Period.

What exactly is the point of such massive overkill? Doing that only serves to turn a wide swath of land into black glass forever and kicks up massive quantities of fallout that poisons millions downwind. That's not "minimal" destruction by any sane definition of the term (if there is one).

Even if the target is technically not destroyed, it only takes one or two explosions to ensure that nobody can use the place for the foreseeable future.... b/c anyone who tries will cook themselves getting there (or getting out). Survivors inside will be effectively trapped, probably until they starve or suffocate.

A perfect example is the US's own NORAD HQ -- The Russians or anyone else wouldn't need to pummel it into dust (which might indeed take dozens of warheads); they just have to drop one or two beside the main entrance and nobody inside is getting out. NORAD is, de facto, dead.

Of course, so is most of Colorado Springs, which goes right back to my original point. There is no such thing as a "nuanced" use of nuclear weapons. They are designed to destroy indiscriminately and to inflict as much terror as possible.

He's right when he says that everyone abstracts various aspects of life and decision-making to some degree, and it is almost necessary when comprehending geopolitical issues. But the level of abstraction and demonization necessary to actually use modern nuclear weapons is pathological given what we already know about the deaths, destruction, and long-term suffering "small" nukes caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hiroshima III: Never again

Quote from Alternet's "Hiroshima Cover-up Exposed" (emphasis mine):

...Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern ... directed the U.S. military filmmakers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.

"I always had the sense," McGovern (said), "that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force -- it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. ... They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had done -- at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because ... we were sorry for our sins."

As the article goes on to point out, this past weekend some of those censored images are being broadcast for the first time. One of them is on the Sundance Channel.

The Discovery and History channels also have documentaries including older footage and some modern computer-created graphics depicting the horrors that happened in Hiroshima.

I caught some of two of them yesterday, flipping between the two channels during ads. There really are no words that do justice to such scenes as: the blast wave rolling over and demolishing everything in sight; the horribly burned victims staggering down blasted streets in creepy silence; the charred remains of the dead with just bones amid ashes; suffering survivors so desperate for water they drink the oily, lethal black rain of fallout; the summer sunshine instantly replaced by stygian darkness lit mostly by flames; doctors later describing people as "rotting" while alive from radiation sickness.

One survivor noted, "Suddenly, a strange creature appeared out of nowhere. Since it was summer, if it had been human, it would've been wearing white. But what I saw was black from top to bottom." That, of course, was one of the thousands charred by the bomb's intense heat, face and skin seared off, still alive at that moment but only to collapse and die at the speaker's feet.

Do we need to see these things for ourselves in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles before we wake up and demand the end of nuclear weapons? Before we treat those who advocate building more of them as the madmen they are?

If you haven't already read it, please read my earlier column on Bush's plan to build more nukes. I know it's long, but their own plans show just how dangerously blind these people are to this madness.

It's not just them, after all... if these weapons ever get used again and we haven't tried to stop it, we are responsible. They are being funded with our tax dollars, by our government, in our name. If we continue to roll over and play dead, eventually we will be.

Edited 8/10 to add: Apparently the French paper Liberation agrees with me: It writes, "Because the longer it lasts, the more likely the nuclear era is to pass from 'Never again!' to 'Sooner or later ...'" and that's exactly what I'm concerned about. They also link to some 1946 footage from Hiroshima and the Bikini tests, but it's not very useful & the sound cuts out a lot.

Hiroshima redux

This week's Guardian has an incredible spread on the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings, with an edited version of John Hersey's original article (later lengthened into the book Hiroshima), interviews with survivors who were then kids, etc. Be sure to read the various articles linked to part two.

Once done... write your senators, congressmen, etc., telling them to stop the madness and oppose new nuclear weapons. We can and should make changes now... but part of me is afraid it'll take another Hiroshima before we do and that if that happens it won't just be one or two cities. Prove me wrong.

Misc. news links

This shouldn't surprise anyone...

Poll: Americans Say World War III Likely

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Poll results like those couldn't possibly have anything to do with events like this could they?...


Senate Debates New Nuclear Bunker-Buster Plan

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire (7/23/05)

WASHINGTON — U.S. senators today debated a renewed effort to block a feasibility study on developing a new earth-penetrating nuclear weapon (see GSN, July 1).

Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) placed an amendment to the fiscal 2006 Defense Authorization bill that would transfer $4 million designated for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator to the D.C. National Guard for use on mass casualty event training and equipment.

Voting on that and other amendments to the bill is not expected until Tuesday at the earliest.

A similar amendment to the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations bill that would have redirected the money toward paying down the national debt was defeated 53-43 in June, despite support from several Republicans.

The House this year has approved no appropriations for the bunker-buster study. It did, though, authorize in its version of the authorization bill money for the Air Force to conduct a study on the weapon. Democrats say that would allow analysis only of a conventionally armed penetrator. Republicans say the authorization would allow study of the nuclear option.

The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator study was until last year conducted by the Energy Department. Congress provided no funding for the program for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. The Bush administration this year requested the $4 million to conduct a crucial field test of the weapon that would involve slamming a mock version into a large concrete block.

Kennedy said the Bush administration’s interest in funding the study shows “they do not have their priorities straight,” and that the money could better be spent on defense against conventional terrorism such as this month’s bombings of London’s mass transit system.

Pursuit of the weapon also “threatens to launch a new nuclear arms race” by undermining efforts to roll back North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and a suspected Iranian effort, he said.

“The administration would like us to develop something that we don’t need. That would endanger us by its very existence,” he said.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.), who sponsored the Defense Authorization bill, said continuation of the study does not mean the United States would necessarily build the weapon. Specific approval from Congress would be necessary for advanced development, he said.

“I assure my colleagues, I assure the American public, that Congress is monitoring each step of this program,” he said.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said the study would not fuel an arms race, noting the United States has reduced its nuclear arsenal by more than 13,000 warheads since the late 1980s.

The study “certainly does not indicate that we are in a warmongering mode,” he said.

The Bush administration disclosed last year a plan to develop, with congressional approval, the penetrator over five years for an estimated $486 million.

A National Academy of Sciences report in April concluded that a high-yield nuclear penetrator used to strike a deeply buried target could produce up to 1 million casualties if detonated near a populated area (see GSN, April 18).

Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said that in response to the program, potential adversaries would be tempted “to put that deeply buried target under a city, under a historic or religious site,” making use of the weapon improbable.

*********************************

Lockheed Expects to Test Bunker-Buster This Year

SOURCE: Global Security Newswire 7/14/05

Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control is expected to test four prototypes of a new U.S. bunker-buster bomb later this year, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, July 1).

Lockheed is working with U.S. Navy scientists as part of the Defense Department’s Threat Reduction Initiative. News of the tests was first reported in the British weekly New Scientist, according to AFP.

The missile is designed to create an air pocket in front of the weapon as it falls to the ground. In theory, this pocket will force the earth to the sides once the weapon reaches the surface, creating a hole for the missile to penetrate. This would allow the weapon to reach buried targets, such a WMD storage facilities

The idea of an air pocket comes from torpedoes that create gas bubbles around themselves, allowing the weapon to move faster because it is traveling through water vapor as opposed to liquid water, AFP reported.

“Lockheed Martin hopes the supercavitating missile will reach 10 times the depth of the current Air Force record holder, the huge BLU-113 bunker-buster, which can break through seven meters of concrete (22.7 feet) or 30 meters (100 feet) of earth,” AFP quotes New Scientist as saying.

A thinner casing on the conventionally armed weapon would allow it to carry more explosives than the existing version, according to AFP (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo News, July 14).

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from The Guardian, 7/21/05, letter to the editor:

The myth that the US had to drop nuclear weapons on Japan to end the second world war and thus save lives is still prevalent. Winston Churchill later asserted: "It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the bomb fell." The US had two main goals. One was to dominate the Far East after the war. The other was to gain advantage over the Soviet Union in the post-war settlement. This was a criminal act and a massive human catastrophe which must never be forgotten - and never repeated.

Kate Hudson
Chair, CND

DOE report is height of delusion

Title: Recommendations for the Nuclear Complex of the Future
Authors: Nuclear Weapons Complex Infrastructure Task Force (David Overskei, Chair)
Draft report from US Dept of Energy, July 2005.

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"As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities." ~Voltaire

**************

Amazing. Just when I thought public policy regarding nukes couldn't get more absurd, I found this DOE task force report released July 13.(All quotes below, unless clearly stated otherwise, come from the report, but all emphasis in them is mine.)

The absurdities and, worse, blatant contradictions litter the reports 36 pages (excluding appendices, which go on forever). Repeatedly, the task force writers argue a need to support non-proliferation efforts by developing a new generation of nuclear weapons based on what they call the "Reliable Replacement Warhead." and more than that, instituting a system by which the US can continuously develop new weapons over time once new ones get old.

"To demonstrate the US is committed to arms reduction, the Task Force recommends that Pantex focus on the aggressive dismantlement of the Cold War stockpile, while the Complex begins replacing the Cold War stockpile with the sustainable stockpile of the future." (vii)

WTF?!? This is a lot like taking the print version of Hustler away from the kids but giving them internet access to the VoyeurWeb. How does this promote arms reduction?

At one point, they acknowledge that the existing Moscow Treaty calls for reduction to a total of 1700-2200 "operationally deployed strategic nukes" by 2012. That number, however, DOESN'T include the rest of the stockpile, much of which can be made operational very quickly. Later, the report says the total will be "substantially smaller" than present, but also says DOD requires a stockpile "if force augmentation is needed to meet an expanding threat." In essense, the DOD is saying we have to be ready for another arms race, even though the whole objective of this report is to ensure more accurate, effective wpns, which would make huge quantities irrelevant.

Obviously, you know where I stand -- we need to abolish them as soon as possible. But even if we assume there's a need to keep the ability to produce them (as, for example, some of James Morrow's characters suggest in This is the Way the World Ends), we do not need more warheads. With just the existing submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), the US is perfectly capable of dealing unprecedented damage and suffering to any nation who threatens us. (Not that any really do.)

"Cost-benefit" stupidity

The report often talks about cost savings by creating a new Consolidated Nuclear Production Center (CNPC) to replace the several locations that now manufacture nuclear weapons and parts. And "cost-benefit" talk is rife, as in, "A risk-informed cost-benefit analysis should be performed on all programmatic, safety and security recommendations. Rational decisionmaking should balance risks and benefits while implementing change."

"Cost analysis of designs should extend from inception to disposition," they write. That makes sense if you're talking about toasters or computers, but it leaves out some very important calculations when the item in question is intended to obliterate whole cities. Will this analysis include the low-probability but incredibly high-negative-outcome risk that the things might be used?!? If it does not, then anything the "cost-benefit" report says is bullshit.

To me, this nonsense is similar to their various references to "margin", as in creating "high margin conservative designs." What does THAT mean? I assume they intend it to mean "high effectiveness," but since there's no benefit to ever USING them, the only "high margin" I can see in this process is high PROFIT margin for the industries they want to make them... but I'll come back to that.

The way the entire report is written strongly implies that they intend to build a ton of new nukes, let them sit there for a few decades, then dismantle them without ever using them. Obviously, we should never use them, but if we design them intending to never use them, then let's not build them at all.

This is an economic black hole of limitless depth, a perpetual siphon for billions in taxpayer funds with no redeeming cultural value.

Instead, let's save the money, resources, scientific time, unnecessary risks, and other things wasted by their production for use in more socially beneficial scientific pursuits like the space program or cleaning up our environmental errors.

In fact, they claim that "implementing all recommendations now will increase near-term costs substantially, but with substantial future cost reductions" once the CNPC is fully operational. However, the very next line is directly contradictory: It says the plan assumes "accelerated dismantlement rates" and "no reduction in the currently supported stockpile." Which is it? How can you assume both???

"The CNPC should be designed to handle 300 weapons per year" including "producing and dismantling at a rate of 125 devices per year" by 2030 on just one shift, with the possibility of a second (and third?) shift if more wpns are desired. I don't see how that's going to reduce our overall number of nukes, even if the existing site (called Pantex) is devoted solely to destroying old weapons. They later note the entire system is 20+ years behind in dismantling existing wpns "under current planning of dismantlement rates."

Industrial follies

As I noted earlier, the Task Force aims to hand off much of the production process to private industry. That's scary, especially since they argue, "The DOD should work to relax the military chracteristics of its nuclear weapons" so they can be more easily manufactured. WTF??? There should never be anything BUT military characteristics of nukes! This sounds (unintentionally, I'm sure) like they want civilian nukes. Can I buy one? I'll take the blue one on that shelf there. It's a little heavy so make sure you double-bag it.

Snark aside, they mean that the process should be simplified so that fairly common automated industrial processes can build future nukes, thus reducing the number of people actually handling dangerous materials, making the weapon parts more interchangable, and supposedly reducing costs. That's great in theory. But I have a problem with that, too, for a few reasons.

I. Simplicity: They want "pit designs that are simpler to fabricate and thus conducive to lower production cost and higher throughput." Translation: easier to make lots of them for fewer bucks. Sounds like a market for terrorists, who would find it easier to steal the ideas than the weapons themselves.

The effort to convert most of the process to an automated one is ostensibly to reduce costs, increase efficiency and reduce human exposure to the toxins... But I think this will simply further dehumanize the horrors nukes present. If a human is actively building these things, there's always a chance they'll realize how awful they are and begin to fight for a nuke-free world (maybe even sabotaging production so it doesn't explode at all?), but more distance will make them more likely to just see it as "another job." Building nukes should NEVER be seen as "just a job" any more than serial murder or dumping toxins in rivers should be.

II. Security: The report is probably accurate in saying that the current system of "guards, guns and gates" at the 8 wpns-related facilities "increases cost with no apparent limit." By consolidating the system, it would certainly be easier to maintain security of the weapons and facilities, although the weapons' existence is itself the cause of that insecurity.

They want to improve security, but why is the "more economical industrial security" model better? As we've seen, computers have been responsible for numerous false warnings due to errors or outside hacking that could've led to nuke war if a human being hadn't been there to prevent it. Likewise, industrial computers are often being hacked, as the recent spate of "identity theft" cases proves. Industrial security is no panacea. Given the horrible nature of these devices, we should have both technology and well-armed human beings guarding them. Again, the fact that they exist at all means insane wackjobs will want them because of the destruction they can do.


III. Staffing: "The enduring key to maintaining a safe, reliable stockpile of nuclear weapons is the quality of people who make expert judgments and their sustained dedication to their work." In general, that's true, but given what we're discussing, it's also incredibly absurd in two key ways:

1. Reliable nukes are by definition NOT safe for civilization to have. Period. They're only somewhat less dangerous than unreliable nukes, especially if the unreliability might cause the bomb to go off in storage. Of course, if the unreliability would prevent the bomb from detonating at all, that's a different issue!

They argue their proposed changes "should lead to a new family of nuclear weapons ... incorporating state-of-the-art surety requirements." Huh? Do they mean certainty of explosive effectiveness, or safety of handling? I suspect latter, which makes this incredibly delusional. That feeling is reinforced elsewhere by references to older weapons containing beryllium and other toxic materials "now subject to environmental, safety, and health restrictions." Let's see... the builder can go home sure he's not being poisoned except by the knowledge he's building a thing designed to kill millions. If he has any conscience, that's a great trade-off -- healthy body with a traumatized mind.

(Oh, and I also love the "family" reference. Mr. Bomb, can I take your daughter to the prom? I promise she'll be home by two minutes to midnight...)

2. A key goal of this report is to automate as much of the system as possible, thus eliminating the human element, at least from direct production. Having fewer people consolidates expert judgment into the hands of those who have more vested interest in continuing the insanity and usually those who can't see how absurd their work is. The world can do without that kind of "dedication."

Logically, nobody should have first-hand experience of how these weapons work, b/c thet means they've been used. Unfortunately, as we all know, they have been. But the fact that we've had a test ban since the early 1990s and nobody's used one in combat since 1945 is seen as a problem by the nuclear delusion squad.

They wrote, "In some critical skill areas, this on-the-job training takes 5 or more years to gain sufficient experience, and such training may not be possible in the future." (I sure hope so!) Specifically, they note the declining numbers of people with testing experience, saying, "This reinforces the absolute necessity of resuming design activities now...."

That would give the upcoming generation of weapons scientists opportunity to train with those who tested the existing nukes, a rational thing to do if we were talking about anything but nuclear weapons. With nukes, however, we run into an obvious moral quandary: How will that give the upcomers, or future generations, test experience themselves? At some points they mention that computer tech makes it possible to design "for certification without (underground tests)", but elsewhere say the new CNPC will have the capability to put a new weapon through such a test w/in 18 months of starting design work and recommends keeping the Nevada test site operational.

To me, this seems like a between-the-lines suggestion that resuming testing is itself the "absolute necessity" in their eyes. Between real tests and Chernobyl, we've had decades of experience in what that does to people...

There were several other disturbing points, but I think I've made my point. This is a bad plan from any genuinely long-term point of view, since our survival may require eliminating nukes altogether.

They claim centralizing the process will enable them to "Record lessons learned from the past." Obviously, though,they haven't learned much, have they? They clearly slept through the crucial class in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wiped off the planet. Yes, they were rebuilt, but that's only b/c there were outsiders to provide care who hadn't experienced the Bomb firsthand. Encouraging this plan only makes future Hiroshimas and Nagasakis more likely.

Two Ozzy songs

Artist: Ozzy Osbourne
from the album "The Ultimate Sin" (1986)

A few songs on this album are about variations of our subject; I'm just posting the two most appropriate songs here. I don't really agree with the second one, but the imagery in both is strong...

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"Killer of Giants"

If none of us believe in war
Then can you tell me what the weapon's for?
Listen to me everyone:
If the button is pushed
There'll be nowhere to run.

Giants sleeping, giants winning
Wars within their dreams
Till they wake
When it's too late
And in God's name blaspheme.

(Chorus:)
Killer of Giants
Threatens us all
Mountains of madness
Standing so tall...
Marches of protest
Not stopping the war
Or the Killer of Giants
The Killer of Giants.

Mother Nature
People state your
Case without it's worth
Your seas run dry,
Your sleepless eyes
Are burning red alert

Killer of Giants
Threatens us all
Mountains of madness
Standing so tall...
Rising so proudly
It has nowhere to fall...
This Killer of Giants
This Killer of Giants.

(Chorus)


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"Thank God for the Bomb"

Like moths to a flame
Is man never gonna change?
Time's seen untold aggression
And infliction of pain...

If that's the only thing that's stopping war...

(Chorus:)
Then...
Thank God for the Bomb (X4)
Nuke ya, nuke ya.

War is just another game
Tailor made for the insane
But make a threat of their annihilation
And nobody wants to play

If that's the only thing that keeps the peace...

(Chorus)

Today was tomorrow, yesterday.
It's funny how time can slip away
The face of the doomsday clock
Has launched a thousand wars.

As we near the final hour,
Time is the only foe we have.

When war is obsolete,
I'll thank God for war's defeat,
But any talk of Hell freezing over
Is all said with tongue in cheek.

Until the day the war drums beat no more...

(Chorus)

Two articles: oil & nukes

These pretty much speak for themselves. Two long-running global situations that could very easily combine to create huge problems in the not too distant future...

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When the oil wars blow
The more China flexes its economic muscle, the more American
politicians are crying foul

Will Hutton
Sunday July 3, 2005

The Observer/Guardian Unlimited

Occasionally, there are tipping-point moments and we are witnessing one at the moment. Seismic change is afoot. As oil prices breach $60 a barrel and pessimists warn that the world could be as little as 10 years away from a first-order resources crisis, China's largest oil company, CNOOC, has launched a £10 billion bid for one of the US's juiciest medium-sized oil companies, Unocal.

The world's two biggest continental economies are suddenly head to head over who controls increasingly scarce oil. The stuff of pulp novels at airport bookstalls is a reality.

The reaction in the US has been immediate, aggressive and hypocritical. Much Congressional sound and fury has been vented on Russia for not opening up more to US oil companies which want to buy strategic reserves. Now that the boot is on the other foot - China buying an American oil company and its reserves - US congressmen and senators are deploying President Putin's arguments as their own. America's oil, jobs and national security are at issue, they blaze, and an investigation is already
under way to see whether China's bid should be blocked on national security grounds. It is rigged to take months.

The Chinese, for their part, implausibly plead innocence. Assuming the improbable rhetoric of a Wall Street investment banker, the chairman of CNOOC, 71 per cent owned by the communist People's Republic of China, says that the bid will be good for shareholders on both sides of the Pacific.

It certainly offers Unocal shareholders more cash than rival American oil company Chevron was offering, but only because the Chinese government has lent CNOOC a $2.5bn interest-free loan to support the loan and subsidised billions more. This is hardly fair play but Unocal shareholders aren't complaining.

Nor will CNOOC sack any Unocal workers in America as Chevron plans, it says, and promises not to export any oil and gas from the US to China. It portrays itself as a benevolent, wronged and misunderstood good fairy.

What it wants, and is paying well over the odds for, is Unocal's oil reserves. It plainly calculates that today's $60 a barrel oil price is just the beginning of a sustained rise in oil prices that will make Unocal, even at £10bn, a snip. China's interest is obvious. After the US, it is now the world's largest oil importer and acquiring some strategic reserves is vital.

CNOOC's full name is telling; the China National Offshore Oil Company - an organisation committed to offshore exploration. China is the world leader in developing robotic underwater exploration submersibles; in 1994, it built a robot capable of working at depths of 3,000 feet. Now, according to the People's Daily, it has one that can work at up to 20,000 feet. The Chinese want oil very badly.

And they want it to be imported into China by oil pipeline and not by tankers from the Middle East under the watchful eye of the US navy. The US controls the sea lanes and thus the viability of China's economy, as it regularly lets the Chinese know by shadowing Chinese oil tankers.

The US has pre-empted China's attempts to build oil pipelines from the Caspian into China. Unocal's attraction is that its oil reserves are all in central and southeast Asia, and once owned by China can be moved into China overland.

This is a new great geopolitical game and neither the Chinese nor American military are impressed by arguments that the market must rule and that great powers in today's globalised world no longer need strategic oil reserves. The US keeps six nuclear battle fleets permanently at sea supported by an unparalleled network of global bases not because of irrational chauvinism or the needs of the military-industrial complex, but because of the pressure they place on upstart countries like China.

Japan's decision this year to abandon its effort to build its own oil company and attempted strategic reserve was an overt acceptance of its dependent position. China is not ready to make the same admission of defeat.

No country has offered such a comparable challenge to the world order since Germany's rise at the end of the 19th century. Like China today, it wanted markets and raw materials; like China today, it confronted a world ordered around the needs of the existing powers; like China today, its gigantic size and explosive growth could not be ignored. Germany built fleets and scrambled for colonies in Africa. Today, China builds fleets and scrambles for oil reserves. The open question is whether it will end in another 1914.

The optimistic reply is that China is being much cleverer than the Kaiser's Germany. It has expanded by opening up to the world, so giving its great power rivals a stake in its growth; 400 of the US's top 500 companies manufacture in China. Wal-Mart, the US's largest retailer, is founded on cheap Chinese imports. China may have built up immense foreign currency reserves, but it judiciously lends them to the US, so financing the US's trade deficit.

Although oil prices are troublingly high, some experts like Erasmus University's Professor Peter Odell believe that, far from oil reserves running out, the earliest world production might peak is well after 2050, and that takes no account of more efficient energy use. Today's upward oil price spike won't last long. There is more than enough oil for China.

The pessimistic reply is that's not how it feels or how the game is currently being played. Even if there is enough oil, it is in parts of the world that are endemically volatile. As Paul Roberts points out in The End of Oil, the geological formations that create oil have already been identified and the easily exploitable reserves are rapidly depleting.

There is a Panglossian tendency to overstate oil reserves by oil-producing countries and oil companies alike, as we have learned from Shell. Oil production is set to peak much earlier.

In any case, what matters is less reality than perceptions of reality; the European powers didn't need colonies in Africa to ensure their prosperity, they just believed they did, as China believes it needs oil reserves in Asia today. And there are the third, fifth and seventh US fleets as a constant reinforcer of its instincts.

Nobody knows how this drama will play out. The optimists could be right. But judge the vitriolic tone of the letter from 40 congressmen to President Bush complaining about CNOOC's bid; look at the disposition of US naval power; recognise the force of China's conviction that it must never again be humiliated as it was in the 19th century and its will to catch up with the West; and plot the growth of China's oil demand as its economy doubles again.

The best way of avoiding war is not to dismiss its possibility as outlandish; it is to recognise how easily it could happen and vigilantly guard against the risk. Too few in Washington or Beijing are currently doing that.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

**********************

Coming to grips with doomsday

Tom Plate / Syndicated columnist

Seattle Times, Thursday, June 30, 2005 - 12:00 AM

LOS ANGELES — The policy of the United States, at the moment the world's only superpower, lacks an overall sense of urgency about the spread and possible use of nuclear weapons. In all probability, this lapse will someday lead to immense tragedy.

The world has been sitting on a ticking time-bomb for six decades. It is an inexplicable miracle rather than superior national-security policy or international-control management that a nuclear weapon hasn't exploded on one or more population centers.

Don't, of course, run this superficial observation by the Japanese, who still have the painful memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not for nothing that this technologically brilliant but overpopulated nation remains, despite recent militant uptick emotions, on the whole anti-nuclear and pacifist.

But Japan someday will go nuclear if North Korea establishes itself as a palpable nuke power, as with Pakistan and India, a pair of competing nuclear powers. Russia still has piles of nukes; the British and the French have not relinquished their stockpiles; Israel denies — unconvincingly to many — that it has the bomb; Iran denies — equally unconvincingly to many — any intention of developing a nuclear capability. And so it goes.

The U.S. takes the prize, though. It maintains (on 24-hour alert, hair-trigger status, no less) more than 10 times (at least) as many nuclear warheads as there are nations in the world. This absurd and risky overreadiness has drawn new fire here from warriors old and new.

The late President Ronald Reagan, though anything but a dove while in office, appears to have been a passionate nuclear abolitionist both behind the scenes and deep in his heart, in the view of author and academic Paul Lettow. His "Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons" has been raising major eyebrows in circles liberal as well as conservative and has been helping generate a sense of national unease about the defects of our non-proliferation policy and the lack of a serious nuclear-reduction/disarmament policy.

The newly aroused anti-nuclear campaign in America has been joined with octogenarian vehemence by Robert McNamara, now 89 no less. The former defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, has in newspaper interviews and op-ed essays been a one-man band warning of the inherent (or, as he puts it, "insane") dangers of so many ready-to-blow nukes in so many countries. His regrets about the Vietnam War and his unmistakable intellect have added a touch of establishment credibility to the abolitionist position.

This has enhanced the credibility of enduring firebrands like Helen Caldicott, the near-legendary Australian physician who has all but dedicated her life to the anti-nuclear campaign. Take a look, for illustration, at the astoundingly energetic Website of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, with whom Caldicott and many others are allied.

There's a feeling in the air that the anti-nuclear movement is gaining traction. The war in Iraq is obviously going badly and the hawks and neo-cons in Washington, if not exactly in retreat, seem not to be pounding their chests with such prideful arrogance these days. The recent endless United Nations summit-retreat on advancing the venerable Non-Proliferation Treaty was a colossal and embarrassing failure. The United States — which has brutally tabled the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and even raised the probability of funding further nuclear-weapons research — refuses to conform to the NPT's call for drawing down existing nuclear arsenals.

As Alyn Ware of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy has put it, "... It is impossible to prevent nuclear proliferation while the nuclear-weapons states insist on maintaining large stockpiles of weapons themselves. It's like a parent telling a child to not smoke while smoking a pack of cigarettes in their face. It's not going to work. ... "

The smoking gun is North Korea. We have invaded a country that possessed no weapons of mass destruction at the cost of more than 1,700 U.S. lives, unknown U.S. treasure and countless Iraqi lives, while fumbling big-time as Pyongyang played hardball on the nuclear issue. We have obviously got our national security-policy priorities upside down.

Thus we desperately need those fearless non-governmental organizations like the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation — not to mention old warriors like McNamara and Caldicott — to continue to campaign tirelessly if we are not to realize the kind of nuclear calamity that, present trends unchecked, seems increasingly predictable.

UCLA professor Tom Plate, a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, is founder and director of UCLA's Media Center.

Insanity II

Caught a bit of 60 Minutes earlier and noticed one of the ways our society really is insane:

Somehow, we determined it was a good thing to send new high school grads, who haven't been anywhere and know nothing about the world, into the military, where we'll pay tens or, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach them war, KNOWING some will be quickly killed...

BUT...

We require people to be older and have college degrees to join the Peace Corps, for which we pay substantially less in training despite the far more crucial tasks they have, such as teaching people how to farm or educating children. We essentially expect them to learn it on their own beforehand or in the field.

We advertise war in countless ways -- real ads, violent movies, military parades on certain holidays, recruiters visiting high schools -- but I can't recall the last time I saw a Peace Corps ad, and the last Peace Corps-related show was actually about the murder of a volunteer in the 1970s, not what they were actually doing.

I think this might have something to do with the apocalypse obsession that forms a constant but not always visible undercurrent to American thought, especially in this era of nuclear weapons where any war has had the potential (even if minimal) to spiral out of control into a nuclear exchange. But whether it's a cause or an effect, I don't know...

Stop the insanity!

Dear Friends,
I have just read and signed the petition:

Oppose New Nuclear Weapons Today

Please help by signing this petition because there's NO long-term benefit to anyone if we restart the arms race. Although the Cold War arms race was equally stupid, it could be argued that the US buildup helped bankrupt the USSR and maybe prevented a bigger war. This time, however, there is no opponent to bankrupt... just ourselves.

For economic, political, tactical and ecological reasons, nuclear weapons are horrendous failures, and are much, much worse -- they're devices of mass murder and/or mutual suicide -- if they're ever used by ANYONE. Making them smaller only makes it more likely they'll be used, and various non-proliferation experts are already predicting a 29% chance someone will use one (or more) within the next decade. We should've learned enough from Hiroshima & Nagasaki to know this path is one of madness, but it's not too late to do so now.

If you want some more info, visit my rather quiet "alter-ego" blog's post Fantasies of Apocalypse It's a little old, but still relevant... Much older (1993, I think), but with lots more detail from sources directly involved in the Cold War is this Centers for Defense Information transcript.

Study: World at Risk for Major Attack

Source: NY Times by way of the NucNews email list. (links added)



By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 22, 2005
Filed at 9:58 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The world faces an estimated 50
percent chance of a nuclear, biological, chemical
or radiological attack over the next five years,
according to national security analysts surveyed
for a congressional study released Wednesday.

Using a poll of 85 nonproliferation and national
security experts, the report also estimated the
risk of attack by weapons of mass destruction at
as high as 70 percent over the coming decade.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee surveyed
analysts around the world in late 2004 and early
this year to determine what they thought was the
threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.

The study was commissioned by committee Chairman
Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., whose nonproliferation
efforts in Congress have been credited with
helping the states of the former Soviet Union
lessen their stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons.

''The bottom line is this: For the foreseeable
future, the United States and other nations will
face an existential threat from the intersection
of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction,''
Lugar said in a statement.

Committee aides sent out surveys asking
respondents the percentage probability that a
biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological
attack would occur over the next five and 10
years.

''If one compounds these answers, the odds of some
type of WMD attack occurring during the next
decade are extremely high,'' the report said,
using the acronym for weapons of mass destruction.

The study said the risks of biological or chemical
attacks were comparable to or slightly higher than
the risk of a nuclear attack. However, the study
found a ''significantly higher'' risk of a
radiological attack.

It also said:

--Three-fourths of those surveyed said one or two
new countries would acquire nuclear weapons during
the next five years, and as many as five new
countries could have such weapons over the next 10
years.

--Four-fifths of those surveyed said their country
was not spending enough money on nonproliferation
efforts.

--Survey respondents also agreed that
terrorists -- rather than governments -- were more
likely to carry out a nuclear attack.

**************

Of course, the process of making things safer isn't helped by proposals like the one criticized here.

"Cherry Blossom Baptism"

A song obviously inspired by images seen only in Hiroshima & Nagasaki...


Artist: Monks of Doom
From the CD "Meridian" (1991)

*********

I was swimming in the cool waters of an oasis
I was swimming in a mirage
I was wondering just where this road would take us
It’s the same one that we have been on

From the city of bosra to jerusalem
From the west into the east
Only one more sacrifice
Then we’ll finally get us all some peace

The man behind the man behind the curtain is working
Pulling levers by his crystal ball
He’s plowing the fields for crysanthemums
Waiting for the sun to fall

He threw a bone to the starving faithful
They got down on their knees
The man behind the man behind the curtain is talking
But he never betrays what he thinks

Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism
Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism

Now that the rose
Is gone from the garden
What will we do
With the thorn?

Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism

If I went down
To the river of jordan
Just to bathe my wearisome soul
If I could just touch the hem of his garment
Well then I know he’d take me home

To see the water in the river boil
To see the city consumed by fire
To see the man’s cast shadow scorched into the earth
And flies buzzing in the air like a funeral choir

Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism
Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism

Now that the rose
Is gone from the garden
What will we do
With the thorn grown on the grove?

Silver reflection
Cherry blossom baptism

Nagasaki pt 2

Aha, I was looking for this. George Weller's original stories as published by the Japanese Mainichi Daily News, based on his notes. There are some weird phrasings and several notations that words are illegible. Given what we now know about nukes, they seem curiously out-dated, and Weller phrases some things in ways that strike me as not being journalistically neutral, but they're an interesting insight into an outsiders view of holocaust on a small scale.