3/18/2002
In the latest of all these developments, the administration has been found making noise about nuclear weapons again. The Nuclear Posture Review points fingers and names names, lining up a list of countries against which the military is asked to have specific plans for a nuclear assault. This, understandably, has a lot of people throwing fits, as well it should--our allies and our citizens as well as the outraged target countries.
The report also, bafflingly, decrees that Russia is no longer an "enemy" of the USA--for the first time, apparently. We have official enemies on file, even when we're not at war? This is news to me and I don't like it. What effect does that actually have on our dealings with a given country? Do we have two different sets of rules of conduct for diplomacy? Note the astounding self-worship implicit in Condoleeza Rice's casual bid to give the current administration credit for this newfound cooperative spirit, as if the collegial reactions of Putin and his administration after 9/11 were a bold step forward in the peace process. Give credit where it's due. Gorbachev built peace between us, more than any other person, and that despite the efforts of our military and intelligence, who totally failed even to consider as a possibility the most valuable intelligence information of the 1980s: that the last premier was on the level.
Speaking of the military and intelligence clique, here again I keep running afoul of Oliver Freaking North, who is evidently right up there in the boardroom with the top military men of the country again, or still. Job well done, Ollie; open dishonesty toward the citizenry, just the way we like it. Incredible.
Back to business. Note the countries--two of the biggest powers on Earth, known to have had nuclear weapons for decades, and a string of small, weak states we don't care for. Libya? Syria? Paper tigers. If we decided for any reason (or more likely, given this administration, for no reason) to attack either of those countries, we could steamroll over them in a matter of days using our conventional forces. We could do them both at once. Why could we possibly imagine any need for the most terrible munitions in the world--the ones that damage the whole planet a little every time they're detonated? What would their use accomplish that we could not otherwise accomplish?
Nothing. Generously, this article attributes the buildup to our desperation. But that's not the point. The point--and the only real change from existing policies, as an official has pointed out--is that the administration wants to abandon all agreements restraining us from research and development on new kinds of nuclear weapons. (Well, apart from a scary wording about "unexpected events" or some such justifying their use.) There are two reasons for this that I can think of. First, there is simply the fact that such unholy sums of money are spent on such development--whenever we hear about some program that costs the government X much money, we ought to turn right round and ask, to whom are these sums being paid? The industry of nuclear R&D has, surprise surprise, long lobbied for expanding nuclear armament in pretty much any way. How effective is their lobby? Well, we know how much they get paid, right?
The second reason is at least as shady, but not necessarily corrupt as such--and it's scarier. There's a push going on right now to narrow the gap, on both ends, between conventional and nuclear weapons. I discussed and weblogged this in an earlier essay. Huge high-explosives that deliver a concussion to rival the smallest nukes; "low-yield" nuclear weapons designed to seem less egregious than bigger ones, with the open agenda of making our government more willing to use them (according to one appalling bit of sophistry, this in turn makes them a more effective deterrent than big ones we're not crazy enough to use). Notwithstanding his arguments about underground bunkers (including the warning that "rogue nations" might be storing their own nukes in bunkers, as if dropping a smallish nuke on a pile of other nukes will somehow make a less offensive explosion)--Bush wants to whittle away at our reluctance to use the big guns--as Ellen Goodman says, "Mini-nukes, bunker-nukes, nukes to use would destroy the firebreak between nuclear and conventional weapons."
There's an effect at work here that's hard to restrain: pure and simple curiosity. Think about cloning, for example. Just in the last weeks there have been reports on cloning--first of the British government giving human cloning the go-ahead, coupled with Christopher Reeve's impassioned endorsement, in the name of any possibility of a cure that stem-cell research might offer--and then proclaiming that the deed has in fact been done, in Spain, also in the name of stem-cell work. Humans have been cloned. We're off and running.
You will not be hearing any time soon that we have gone on to successfully clone a killer whale, though this would seem no less difficult. Why? Because--notwithstanding our cherished ideals of pure research and dispassionate scientific interest--we don't care about whales. Cloning whales doesn't disturb us enough, doesn't inspire the requisite moral quandaries, to get us interested. And that "us" includes the PhDs who actually choose what to research and what not to. The things we really want to go monkey around with are precisely the things that bother us.
When the news broke that we'd cloned sheep, it wasn't the end of anything, didn't settle anything, in our minds. It was a beginning, the cue to begin holding our collective breath. We all knew, without asking, where we would go next. Just as we know that our efforts will never, ever stop until we have achieved artificial intelligence to rival our own intelligence. We absolutely must see if we can do it. And rest assured, we can do it. Only when we've done it will we really turn to the questions of why and how we should be allowed to go on doing it.
Nuclear weaponry holds the same frighteningly inevitable allure--and more to the point, having the power to use it weighs on the minds of military men and presidents, and curiosity is a real and perilous part of that weight. The most responsible of gun owners spends a lot of time weighing the contingencies that would or would not justify the drawing, the display, the use of the weapon he carries--and if he tells you otherwise, tell him I say he's a liar. It doesn't mean he's ever going to draw on anyone--I'm not being that deterministic, I do believe in our powers of discretion. But the constant, quiet presence of deadly force on his list of available options makes him much less loath to invoke it, simply out of familiarity.
We need to understand that the top brass of our military has long been comfortably familiar with the idea of nuclear war.