The rage less vented...
In the wake of Katrina, it's understandable that the news media is primarily focused on the relief efforts. Even if other news is covered, it's not put front and center, because people want to know that things are getting better down on the Gulf Coast.
Somewhere, there's some kind of pithy quote about what governments do when they have a distracted populace, but rather than actually searching for it and quoting it, I direct your attention to the front page of today's Washington Post.
It's the front page, yes, but what percentage of people read the newspaper anymore? Not enough.
The gist of my anger is this: following the insanity of the Bush Doctrine, so broad a doctrine of preemption that under it we could invade Sweden, you'd think that feedback would have caused Pentagon planners to come up with a more sensible update for military procedure next time around. Instead, a draft is now making the rounds in Pentagon circles of a new preemption doctrine under which we will preempt states (or terrorist groups) that may have weapons of mass destruction by attacking them first-with nuclear weapons.
Our one example of the Bush Doctrine in action has worked so well, it seems, that it's only logical to expand the size of the hole we can dig for ourselves. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons came into force in 1970, one of the few moments in international political history where sanity and reason overcame paranoia and the lust for power...or so it seemed at the time. The treaty lays down guidelines for containing nuclear weapons technology only to those states that have it; lesser-known are the guidelines within it for reducing the number of nuclear weapons worldwide, with a stated goal of total elimination of nuclear weapons.
That last bit is the trickiest, of course, and everyone has managed to awkwardly avoid discussing it for 35 years. This new proposed doctrine, however, will shred even the tiniest of hopes of that happening. It calls for the development of bunker-buster nukes, which Congress has so far refused to fund (quite wisely). It calls for the use of nuclear weapons to sterilize bioweapons that we think may be used against us. Nuclear weapons would move from being an ugly remnant of the Cold War standoff to a viable weapon in our country's arsenal.
When Robert Oppenheimer helped develop the atomic bomb in 1945, he was horrified by what he had created, and spent much of the rest of his life warning desperately against their use. When Edward Teller redeveloped atomic weapons into the hydrogen bomb in 1952, he became a rabid militarist and advocated the use of hydrogen bombs in wider and wider applications, at one point suggesting that they should be used to create artificial harbors (never mind the centuries of radioactivity, fish and gentlefolk). That both these men were geniuses, but only one was wise, is virtually undeniable. Teller died in 2003, after a lifetime of feuding with collegues. He had been given an Ig-Nobel Prize (a mocking parody prize) in 1991 for his "lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it;" a genuine Nobel Prize winner said "it would have been a better world without Teller."
Why, then, is the Bush Administration determined to follow the example of his arrogance?
Somewhere, there's some kind of pithy quote about what governments do when they have a distracted populace, but rather than actually searching for it and quoting it, I direct your attention to the front page of today's Washington Post.
It's the front page, yes, but what percentage of people read the newspaper anymore? Not enough.
The gist of my anger is this: following the insanity of the Bush Doctrine, so broad a doctrine of preemption that under it we could invade Sweden, you'd think that feedback would have caused Pentagon planners to come up with a more sensible update for military procedure next time around. Instead, a draft is now making the rounds in Pentagon circles of a new preemption doctrine under which we will preempt states (or terrorist groups) that may have weapons of mass destruction by attacking them first-with nuclear weapons.
Our one example of the Bush Doctrine in action has worked so well, it seems, that it's only logical to expand the size of the hole we can dig for ourselves. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons came into force in 1970, one of the few moments in international political history where sanity and reason overcame paranoia and the lust for power...or so it seemed at the time. The treaty lays down guidelines for containing nuclear weapons technology only to those states that have it; lesser-known are the guidelines within it for reducing the number of nuclear weapons worldwide, with a stated goal of total elimination of nuclear weapons.
That last bit is the trickiest, of course, and everyone has managed to awkwardly avoid discussing it for 35 years. This new proposed doctrine, however, will shred even the tiniest of hopes of that happening. It calls for the development of bunker-buster nukes, which Congress has so far refused to fund (quite wisely). It calls for the use of nuclear weapons to sterilize bioweapons that we think may be used against us. Nuclear weapons would move from being an ugly remnant of the Cold War standoff to a viable weapon in our country's arsenal.
When Robert Oppenheimer helped develop the atomic bomb in 1945, he was horrified by what he had created, and spent much of the rest of his life warning desperately against their use. When Edward Teller redeveloped atomic weapons into the hydrogen bomb in 1952, he became a rabid militarist and advocated the use of hydrogen bombs in wider and wider applications, at one point suggesting that they should be used to create artificial harbors (never mind the centuries of radioactivity, fish and gentlefolk). That both these men were geniuses, but only one was wise, is virtually undeniable. Teller died in 2003, after a lifetime of feuding with collegues. He had been given an Ig-Nobel Prize (a mocking parody prize) in 1991 for his "lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it;" a genuine Nobel Prize winner said "it would have been a better world without Teller."
Why, then, is the Bush Administration determined to follow the example of his arrogance?
posted by Dr. Suspicio | 11:23 PM
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