Wampum

Just before Memorial Day Peter Daou excitedly sent me mail about a project he'd gotten involved with, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focused on immediate actions to address high-risk situations involving nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. [It] is co-chaired by CNN founder Ted Turner and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn. Warren Buffett serves as Advisor to the Board of Directors. He went on to push a video they'd put together, which is now on quite a few sidebars.

I looked at the scenario in the blurb and sent Peter a note (extended area). My thoughts about this project were encoded in Indian politeness in the last line. I'm glad these folks are interested in the prevention of use of nuclear weapons, but I'd prefer they helped Dr. Helen Caldicott and WISE and the Federation of American Scientists and ... before starting yet another high-profile inside-the-beltway operation. Stopping the Nuclear Nutmen with warm milk, stale grahm crackers and library paste, backed up by simply getting arrested, was wicked hard back during the Reagan/Bush administrations. It would have helped to have had money. Blowing what money there is on suits because the money came from suits and suits are most comfortable when surrounded by suits isn't an interesting proposition -- except for suits and wannasuits.

The US has about 20,000 fission and fission-fusion devices, and Russia has a slightly larger inventory of devices, and both states have large stockpiles of fissiles. Absent Mutual Assured Distruction of symmetric weapons inventoried states, there isn't a lot that can be said in favor of retention of these device inventories, or their primary historic delivery systems. NB that the current BRAC round does not define "military necessity or utility" in a nuclear weapons capacity context, and that the bases identified by the current SecDef (and war criminal) for closure or re-alignment map much more closely to the Red/Blue political division of the United States than to obsoleted nuclear weapons capacities -- the bombers, missile fields and boomers are budgetary untouchables.

One can, like Geo. Bush in a debate during the last cycle, and in rhetoric before and since, define the risk of fission and fission-fusion weapons as the risk that an actor will acquire one device and deploy it in a city, as the US did in Hirshima and Nagasaki, and allocate resources nominally reducing that risk model, up to and including war against ... Iran.

One can, like John Kerry in the same debate during the last cycle, and in rhetoric before and since, define the risk of fission and fission-fusion weapons as the risk that the existing stockpiles of devices and fissile materials will eventually be re-purposed, and allocate resources nominally reducing that risk model, up to and including unilateral partial disarmament.

Unfortunately, the scenario in the video now in mass distribution by the project Peter is associated with is much, much closer to the first risk model than the second, and as a political message and teaching/motivating vehicle, tends to support the Bush resource allocation plan. Up to and including ...

So, sixty years to the day after Trinity, with weapons inventories of nearly 60,000 devices between the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, Isreal, Pakistan and India, and enough weapons-grade fissiles in stockpile to double that on demand, and the NPT itself now junk, destroyed by the Bush regime's insistance upon Iran as a nacent weapons state, rather than upon inventory reduction, and the Nuclear Nutmen now in control (again) of the US and Russian and Chinese and Japanese and French and Indian and ... energy policies, it is Happy Birthday Everybody! There is cake and soda and hats and party favors for everyone!!