Of MAD Men and Khan jobs

Non-proliferation is a non-starter at this point

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/madmen.htm
6/18/08

The minute I heard what A. Q. Khan had done, I knew the idea of nuclear non-proliferation was dead.

It was already on its last legs. The days when the nuclear club consisted of the US, the USSR, France and China were long passed, with the USSR disintegrated (and nobody quite sure that all of the nuclear arsenal was accounted for) and nukes in such places as Pakistan, India, and, it was widely believed, Israel. (Carter has openly said that Israel has at least 150 nuclear weapons; the reason Israel doesn’t admit it is because the first question the American people have is “Why are we spending all this blood and money to ‘protect’ Israel when Israel can annihilate anyone in the neighborhood who tries to mess with it?”).

We knew with a reasonable amount of certainty that A. Q. Khan had sold nuclear plans to Libya and North Korea – neither of which were the sorts you wanted to have armed with more than rocks and bad language.

We were assured at the time that the plans A. Q. had sold or given away were for a “crude” atomic bomb. They were based on Chinese atomic weapons as existed back in the days of Mao Tse Tung. This would be the same sort of crude weapon, built from tin cans and Warner Brothers cartoon plots, that we were told in the 1940s only a half a dozen men in the entire world could understand. It was so complicated the Soviets weren’t expected to have one of their own until the year 2000, if ever. By then, of course, we would have tropical resorts on islands on a planet circling Betelgeuse, and it wouldn’t matter what the Soviets were up to.

But Pakistan had nuclear warheads that could fit in the payload of a smallish missile only fifty feet in length. That meant having a bomb that could destroy Calcutta that would fit in a cone with a four foot diameter at its base.

That entails some fairly involved engineering, and requires nuclear weapons technology that’s about fifteen years beyond Hiroshima (that would be about 2250 AD on the official Army Soviet capability chart).

Now it turns out that plans for those more advanced designs are out there. Over the past few days, they’ve been turning up in Switzerland (where some accountants apparently felt a need to have the plans for an advanced thermonuclear device on their lap tops) and in Malaysia, China, Japan, and a dozen or so other places.

Well, there you have it. The plans are out on the internet. You can probably find them on Torrents, or on Usenet. They could be in a PDF with a nondescript name that’s about the same size as an MP3 or a YouTube video.

And just about anyone with a real interest in acquiring them probably already has.

Now, I don’t recommend you go looking for the plans. It’s probably illegal to possess them, whether you’re in America, Britain or Canada. Never mind that without U-235 or Plutonium, all you have is a very expensive and highly-machined gadget that can’t kill anyone unless you drop it on them, the governments of those respective nations will be quite alarmed. If you’re in America, they’ll declare you an enemy combatant and that’ll be the last anyone sees of you until the papers announce that you were shot while trying an escape.

Osama bin Laden almost certainly has the plans. Even if he’s just a royal wastrel with a taste for radical chic like his counterpart Putsch, he has smart people around him, and they certainly got word of and acquired the plans. If a group of asshole Swiss businessmen can get them, then chances are good that various other groups who think having nukes is a good idea have them, too, such as the drug cartels in Colombia, or ExxonMobil.

So: non-proliferation is dead. Which means that in order to avoid a holocaust, we have to depend on the deterrent value of nuclear weapons, or as it is more picturesquely known, Mutual Assured Destruction, or “MAD.” American right wingers, always a pack of cowards at the best of times, like to talk about deterrence when it comes to building up America’s nuclear stockpile (which exceeded 12,000 nuclear bombs at one point and may again soon). As a deterrence, it was top notch. In college, a buddy of mine with a strong head for physics calculated how much radioactive debris the American stockpile could toss up in the air. I had the wind patterns at hand, and together, we calculated that in order to destroy 90% of the Soviet population, it was not necessary for America to actually launch her weapons. Just set them off where they were in the silos and on the NORAD runways and such, and the fallout carried by the wind would do the rest. This was in the 70s, and already the world situation could be summed up as being two maniacs with running chainsaws in an elevator, and each is trying to kill the other by severing the elevator cables.

The world situation now is much like the warehouse scene in “Reservoir Dogs,” where everyone has a gun pointed at everyone else. I’m not sure I like the idea of the world being a plot device in a Coen Brothers movie; those tend not to have happy endings.

Newt Gingrich, reacting to the Supreme Court decision I wrote about last weekend that stated that detainees have the right of habeas corpus, bleated that the decision would “cost America a city.” As often happens when quoting Newt, I wish I could say, “Just kidding, folks. He isn’t really that crazy.” But he is. He really said that. More of that right wing cowardice.

America might lose a city (or more than one) but it won’t be because America remembered it was a country of laws and started living up to them. It’ll be something fairly random. It could be al Qaida, or it could be someone convinced that the American basketball team cheated in the Olympics. Or it could be some homegrown nuts, intent on destroying San Francisco in order to show that they love life and humanity, and won’t stand for gays and abortions.

But, given its personality and habit of meddling with other countries, America is probably the top target, habeas corpus or no. There are other countries high on the list. Both Israel and Russia have reputations of not being able to work or play well with others, and I would give even odds as to whether they are the victims of a nuclear sneak attack, or the perpetrators. Other countries have home-grown headaches: the rag-tags along the Afghanistan border might decide the new government is too conciliatory to the west, overthrow it, and have a couple of hundred fully-functional nukes and the means to launch them at either Israel or India, and just not be able to resist the chance to be annoying.

Or it could be something completely random.

Pandora’s box has been opened, and everything’s getting out.

It’s a few days until the summer solstice up here, and I usually make a remark like this at the time of the OTHER solstice, but I can’t resist noting that the last thing to come out of Pandora’s box was hope.

We’ve managed to avoid nuclear madness for 63 years. Maybe we’ll find some solution now that Pandora’s box lies empty and bereft of nuclear secrets.