Thoughts about a question with no answer.

A-Bombs, H-Bombs, ICBMs, submarines in the ocean and bombers circling overhead: I'm lost. There doesn't seem to be a right answer to this problem. The weapons can no longer be 'uninvented,' so how should the world's leaders form their policy to prevent mass poisoning? Tim Black is nibbling around the politicians' toes in this piece from Spiked.

Mr Black argues that President Obama is advocating nuclear non-proliferation as a part of a neo-imperialist attempt to deny small and medium sized countries from obtaining H bombs. They are doing this because small (and brown) countries must not have these weapons because they are, in Obama's view, too immature to avoid their use.

And so it was proved that Obama is just another one of the American establishment. Of mixed race or not, he still exhibits the shocking mark of European/English speaking prejudice.

I don't buy it. Not that I'm much of an Obama fan. If I'd had the vote (I'm not a US citizen) I probably would have voted for him. I don't believe him to be the second coming, nor the harbinger of the rapture, I just thought he was better than the other guy (and his running mate).

Is Obama perpetuating a myth of foreigners' political incompetency? I don't think so.

The US spends untold millions of dollars every year planning for the possibility of a nuclear exchange. They pay mathematicians good salaries to do game theory exercises involving innumerable players and situations. They understand the consequences of launching.

Mr Black accuses Obama of hypocrisy in calling for non proliferation since the US is, after all, the only nation to actually use these weapons offensively. This is a crass and unfair assessment.

During the pacific campaign the nuclear game was not what it has become. The consequences of a 'hot war' were entirely different. There was only the possibility of three explosions, with no retaliation. The worst scenarios now on the table involve possibly tens of thousands of significantly more powerful warheads in multiple waves of attacks, quickly following one another. Harry Truman and his commanders were given the choice of inflicting a cruel death on tens of thousands. They took it, they bear their responsibility. Similar fates had been inflicted upon equally innocent people in London and Tokyo, Dresden and Hamburg, and many other German cities, where firestorms burned for days. The world had for many of its inhabitants been in a state close to apocalypse for almost six years. The politicians of the time were desperate for any end to the horror.

Today we have some relative approximation of peace for the vast majority of the world's rich, the ones with control over the vast majority of the bombs. The wars that the United States and Europe are engaged in will not conceivably use nuclear weapons.



Now for my view.

Nuclear proliferation involving the US and Soviet union was a response to both sides' perception of a risk of conventional military invasion of them or their allies. A Soviet invasion of western Europe could not be resisted for any length of time. Nuclear bombs were a reasonable alternative to trying to equal Soviet conventional strength. This became a self sustaining system as lack of communication and ideological rhetoric became the basis for further fears. The Soviets believed that the US and it's allies hated them enough to use it's new weapons without warning. Any situation involving Stalin, hundreds of thousands of heavily armed men, hysterical anti Communism in the US congress and European allied states etc, is more likely to have negative outcomes than positive ones.

So what preserved peace? The same mechanism that preserved peace in Europe for the best years of the 19th century; the impossibility of any one side contemplating a successful military campaign against its enemies.

Unfortunately, the zero-sum games involved in cold war high strategy become much more difficult and unpredictable when you add extra players with equal military capacity. The more nuclear 'red buttons', the more territorial flash points and religious/ideological/nationalist fundamentalists, the more scope for mistakes. The more chance of MacArthur type leaders who see 'the bomb' not as an unavoidable and unbreakable new rule of conventional war, but as a viable option for the escalation of conflicts already begun.

To admit that there are people, potential soldiers and politicians, who would be prepared to use the worst weapon against their worst enemies, is not racist or neo-imperialist. Israel is an example of this. Given a massed invasion from its neighbouring countries, they will defend themselves by every means necessary. The same for North Korea. While Iran and Syria lack nuclear weapons, neither country will pursue the elimination of Zionism, which has been advocated in both countries. Neither is prepared to contemplate a war it cannot win. This may change if believers in religious or nationalist fundamentalism take power. Given that the weapons can no longer be 'uninvented', all we can hope is that either these countries will deny themselves the option, or will be enlightened enough to forbear when they do have the technology. It's probably impossible to prevent a really determined country from making a bomb; it can only be discouraged with peaceful relations and regional security.

Personally, I think US policy should now follow some premises:

*Russia is no longer a threat to the security of NATO, by direct invasion or insurgency.

*Current stockpiles in both Russia and the US are expensive, morally wrong, and at risk from terrorists. They should be reduced steadily, with the elimination of ICBMs with MIRV (multiple independent reentry vehicles) being the priority.

*Some smaller nations will now inevitably seek and attain these weapons. Rhetoric against them should be sober and realistic about the risks that they now pose to themselves and others.

*US doctrine should only allow use of weapons as a RESPONSE to major NBC attack on itself or its close allies - NATO/South Korea/Japan. The threat of preemptive strike is self defeating because it encourages others to level the playing field with their own non conventional means.

*Tactical and strategic weapons should be strictly limited to submarine based launch. This precludes any hope of a successful 'decapitation' attack from a foe.

*Non proliferation should come a close second to the ultimate goal - that these weapons never be used again in war.

Good News?

The United States is amending it's nuclear response doctrine:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8604217.stm

However - "countries will only be spared a US nuclear response if they comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - this does not include Iran and North Korea"

There is no lessening of tensions with the two most likely antagonists then. Can you think of any other countries which would attack the US mainland? I can't.

As far as the START treaty goes, Obama has also avoided real reform. A 30% reduction in nuclear warheads is indeed a start, but can only reasonably be seen as a temporary hiatus in the arms race. There are still more than enough bombs to cause a catastrophic environmental fallout from any serious exchange between the US, Russia or China.

I'm not a believer in unilateral disarmament, nor am I an expert in diplomacy, but none of this fulfills expectations of the new world order awakened by Obama's campaign.

In fact, I'm ready to accept that mutually assured destruction can work. It has done since at least 1953. Between two relatively responsibly run nations it makes sense. If this was all we had to worry about, I'd probably be happy with the START status quo. However, given that deliverable nuclear weapons are now becoming achievable for so many medium sized and potentially unstable states, surely the US and Russia should be doing more?

As it is all innovation introduces instability into a complex balance. This can only be bad.

Falling man, floating frog.

Levitating Plane

Posted on Kontain.com - [Flight 1549] from David Martin on Vimeo.

More.

Here are two more.

CSM.

Some Pictures

These are two pictures by me!

CSM.

The Road to Where?

Cormac McCarthy, The Road. The Road is the story of a man and his son trying to live after a nuclear war. The Mother has committed suicide, unable to steel herself for the struggle for life that must follow. What does one do in such a situation? One collects what one can carry, food, and a gun if possible, and moves south, out of the blizzards of the north to the less punishing climate of the coast. But this is a nuclear winter, and seasons are not as we would recognise them. Life is a grimy, pitiful struggle to keep warm and to find tinned food, left over from before the war and not yet eaten by other survivors. Of there are very few, and McCarthy’s book includes only four meetings between people other than the Man, as he is called, and his son. Other survivors are not to be trusted; they have been driven wild by the demands of the hunter gatherer life forced upon them, raping and cannibalising all who cannot resist. Despite the horrendous conditions, the two reach the beach, only for the father to be killed by an arrow from a stranger’s bow.

This book has received the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Does it deserve it? It is an easy read, despite its occasional dips into sordid after-holocaust glimpses of cannibalism, slavery and violence. And they are sordid. The reader is treated to naked victims of highway kidnapping holed up in an underground sty, waiting to be eaten. Then there is the marauding regiment of hooded thugs, their slaves, concubines, and catamites in tow. These follow the stranger whose first instinct is to drag the boy off to his gang, only to be killed by the father’s gun. Then comes the old man, benign enough but nearly blind and starving, whose only real contribution to the plot is to comment on the unchanging abjectness of human life, whether before or after the bomb. But they are not the point.

For unexplained reasons, our man and boy are ‘the good guys.’ Rather than selling his son into prostitution or eating him himself, the father has retained his antique family values. He lives now only to protect the day to day existence of the son, with only the aid of his wits and three rounds of ammunition in his pistol. This is a portrait of human decency. Even faced with a world where he sees corpses left to rot unburied, and where that group of men on the horizon are very probably going to kill you and eat you, the paternal instinct is not forgotten, at least not by this man. However, everyone else has turned feral.

I don’t know whether the book deserves such a prestigious award as the Pulitzer, but it definitely has its flaws. Why is this man so unusual in his continuing morality? The only clue we are given about his pre-war life is from the moments before disaster; seeing the distant flashes, his first thought is to run a bath. Clean water will be in short supply very soon. So he is resourceful. The next incident we are told about is his arguments with his wife about her decision to kill herself. He is against it. She kills herself anyway. The only justification for his fatherly attitude that we are left with is that he is a ‘good guy.’ Perhaps this is justification in itself, it certainly raises more questions than it solves. But this open question demands much from the relationship between this father and his son. The lack of any other developed personality in the book means compelling and believable dialog is essential. Without it we’re left with an unsatisfying, accidental plot. The motivation of this man can only be guessed at; is it fatherly love? Is it predestination (is he perhaps in a Calvinist state of grace?), stupidity? Maybe it’s Darwinian self-interest? Unfortunately the father and son do not really have conversations, and neither demonstrates much feeling towards the other, saving the son’s habit of following his dad around, aware of the fact that he can’t defend himself. So again we are left without a reason to believe in these characters.

The real interest in this book is contained in its first seventy pages, in which MacCarthy demonstrates spare and unbelievably vivid prose. One could pick almost any passage in these pages and find sentences that are shocking, blood-curdling descriptions of devastated modernity, my favourite being a picture of the survivors; ‘Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.’ These two sentences sum up the story; after the collapse of society, most men are left empty of everything but their base instincts, the various kinds of hunger.

It’s not that I disliked this book, I enjoyed it. It is wonderfully morbid, and I read it in two sittings. The first third of the book contains writing that is among the most direct and threatening I’ve ever read. It is beautiful. But it reaches a point, in my opinion very soon after the humans-in-the-larder-cellar incident, at which you wonder whether you are reading a horror/thriller pulp fiction. This is a risk for a book this readable, because, snob that I am, I don’t want to read pulp fiction. I want to read the work of an artist, someone who can write a book that you recognise as theirs as soon as you open a page, just by their use of language. Someone who doesn’t patronise, and, very important in a book about the consequences of nuclear holocaust, doesn’t make a fetish of the horror that they describe. Mr McCarthy doesn’t do it, but he comes close. By the end, the book has lost its identity somewhat, becoming repetitive in its descriptions of foraging and sterile father-son patter. I won’t mention the very end, since I don’t want to completely spoil it. Suffice it to say, it’s very frustrating.