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 Jason Epstein on the Nuclear ThreatPosted on Oct 18, 2007
On a sultry day last summer as I walked along a narrow street in my Long Island village of Sag Harbor, I stopped to watch two boys not yet in their teens jousting with their bicycles, not astride them like knights but on foot, like antlered stags, thrusting their bikes at each other, parrying the blows by twisting their front wheels this way and that, their shirts drenched with sweat, their knees bloody, when they might more rationally have spent the day at the beach. On the curb stood two girls, transfixed, for whose sake this triumph of primal instinct over common sense—this mini-Iliad—was performed, a microcosm of our Hobbesian history and a warning to those who hope for a rational solution to the apocalyptic problem of nuclear proliferation.
The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger
By Jonathan Schell Metropolitan Books, 272 pages
Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
By Richard Rhodes Knopf, 400 pages
In “Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race,” the third installment of his projected four-volume history of the nuclear age, Richard Rhodes reports that by the mid-1980s the world’s total nuclear stockpile had “increased to about 50,000 bombs and warheads with a combined explosive force of about 22,500 million tons of TNT, equivalent to fifteen million Hiroshimas,” the product mainly of a relative handful of maniacs in the Soviet Union and the United States working in secret with the explicit support of their respective governments and the tacit permission or indifference of their fellow citizens. Faced with this genocidal absurdity, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev proposed in Reykjavik in 1986 to entirely abolish their nuclear arsenals. (Reagan further proposed that a party be thrown for the world when the last weapon was scrapped.) Alas, no sooner had the two leaders celebrated their epochal agreement than it fell apart over Reagan’s foolish determination to continue testing what came to be called “Star Wars”—a B-movie fantasy to erect a defensive shield of space-based lasers against hostile nukes. Gorbachev, probably aware that Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI as it was called, was nonsense, nevertheless refused to countenance space-based weapons even as fantasy, perhaps anticipating opposition from his own military-industrial complex if he returned to Moscow with an agreement to scrap Soviet nukes while letting Reagan try to weaponize space. Forty-four billion dollars later, SDI was finally abandoned in 1993, but at Reykjavik it provided the American war party a more valuable service than that for which it was intended: It killed the slight but real possibility that the two leaders could sell their grand démarche to their respective bureaucracies. It was Richard Perle, the warmonger’s warmonger, who poisoned the chalice when he convinced Reagan at Reykjavik that Gorbachev’s demand that SDI experiments be confined to the laboratory rather than be performed in space would render the entire project impossible. Though Perle must have known, as many others did by this time, that SDI was a joke, he considered “his successful frustration of agreements at Reykjavik one of his most important achievements,” according to Thomas Graham, general counsel to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the time. Should worse come to worst, what’s left of humanity can thank Richard Perle for destroying their world. For years the Committee on the Present Danger, which included, among others, Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pipes, Paul Nitze, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Caspar Weinberger, had pampered the military-industrial complex by exaggerating the Soviet threat, despite abundant evidence that the Soviet Union was a dysfunctional bureaucracy precariously sustained by a crumbling economy founded on absurd economic assumptions and burdened by its own voracious military-industrial complex, which, as it was later revealed, had no intention of upending its privileged existence by starting a nuclear war. It was this threat exaggeration by Perle and others that led to the reciprocal escalations that resulted in the creation of 50,000 nuclear weapons equivalent to 15 million Hiroshimas, which led in turn to the meeting of the leaders at Reykjavic and Perle’s last-minute intervention to keep the bombs on target. Rhodes cites considerable evidence, including the testimony of two high-ranking Soviet generals, both of them participants in nuclear war planning during the Cold War, that “the Soviet government and general staff never followed a first strike doctrine, convinced that nuclear war would cause unacceptable damage to both countries,” to say nothing of what it would do to themselves. Nevertheless, the master doomsayer Richard Cheney, serving as Bush 41’s secretary of defense, told CNN that Gorbachev was a fraud who would “ultimately fail and a leader far more hostile to the West would follow.” Instead, Gorbachev presided over the liquidation of the Soviet Union and by abandoning his opposition to SDI joined the START talks, which would lead, Rhodes writes, “to the unilateral initiatives of autumn 1991, which may fairly be counted as the final, historic acts of demolition in the termination of the superpower nuclear arms race that had burdened and threatened the world since 1949.” Rhodes ends his book on this optimistic note at the end of Bush 41’s term, adding that the issue of nuclear abolition “must be the subject of another”—and no doubt gloomier—book, for while the Cold War weapons were now being constrained, the Committee on the Present Danger remained on the prowl, rabid as ever in its quest for new threats to exaggerate. While we await Rhodes’ account of these hobgoblins in his next book, we have Jonathan Schell’s appropriately grim “The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger,” which takes matters to the present day. Schell writes: “[George W.] Bush’s demotion of diplomatic treaties and his elevation of force ... tore at the web of arms control treaties that had grown up over four decades. ... He declined to revive the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ... and ... announced the United States withdrawal from the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty. He also ... weakened the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and left it to Under Secretary of State John Bolton to declare that ‘obligations of the nuclear powers to fulfill their disarmament commitments under Article Six (of the NPT) ‘did not exist,’ ” though any reading of the treaty would show that they did, if only in the breach.
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Jump to Comments
By John Hanks, November 6, 2007 at 6:53 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
I’ve always believed in the power of subversion even against a monstrosity like ExxonMobile. If a good substitute for oil came along, it would be adopted. Even hemp would have a chance. No technological fixes are likely. At least we can’t count on any.
Report thisBy The Village Idiot, November 6, 2007 at 6:03 pm #
When you search an inventor’s name, especially one claiming to violate the laws of physics, it’s best to keep reading the search results, and have a quick look at what the other side is saying. It only takes a minute. This and several other similar devices have resurfaced several times over the past few decades, and the fact that none have been adopted by anyone anywhere is claimed as proof of the oil companies’ conspiracy to keep us hooked on oil rather than being compelling evidence that the devices are hoaxes (even if the hoaxer genuinely believes it themselves).
Besides, there are many other scientifically valid points that can be raised to show that oil companies don’t exactly have the world’s (and humanity’s) best interests at heart.
Regarding the article: I always suspected that the vast number of nuclear weapons, FAR more than were ‘necessary’ as many people have pointed out, implied that some or even most were fake and the huge sums of money were stolen by those inside this hyper-secret program. Who’s to know?
Hell, a Soviet nuclear weapons engineer even admitted as much about the centerpiece of their (mostly fake) arsenal not long after the USSR fell. This was the weapon much of the US buildup was intended to counter (also likely mostly fake). Check this out (scroll a few articles down for the relevant one): http://archives.tcm.ie/irishexaminer/1998/11/18/fhead.htm
Such large-scale, long-term deceptions by a government of its own citizenry no longer happen, of course!
Report thisBy PaulMagillSmith, November 3, 2007 at 11:18 pm #
To make it real easy for eveyone here is the link to the invention I mention in my post below:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3484490731703421398
Report thisBy PaulMagillSmith, November 3, 2007 at 10:53 pm #
Hey Bert,
“...so lets see a guy/gal thats willing
to get their hands dirty to learn how to move a
car one mile down the road sans gasoline.”
Actually, there is a guy who has done this. Google Joseph Newman and check out the ‘Newman Machine’. There are a number of videos about this device he invented a number of years back that could revolutionize how we think of energy creation & utilization. He claims the oil companies offered him $200 million for the invention (probably to just put it up on a shelf until oil runs out), but said he doesn’t care about the money, rather the invention is his gift to humanity. He has a number of prominent scintists (including some from NASA who tested it and approve), but for some reason the Gov’t & MSM have not given it too much attention.(why would they since it shakes the very foundations of corporate control...MSM, Big energy, MIC, etc.?)
Check it out and I would be interested in your opinion (and others on this site as well). He’s a little bit kooky, but that’s what people have said about almost all people with revolutionary ideas. I’ve watched several hours of video about him and his inventon and still am a bit baffled. Help me out here folks, ok? Thanks.
Report thisBy cyrena, October 31, 2007 at 11:54 pm #
#110826 by Bert
Bert, great comments. Lets hear it for the geeks!!! Some serious science could indeed be the answer.
Meantime, I think you might be giving the shrub too much credit for that one statement about America being addicted to oil. His speechwriter, (probably Karl Rove at the time) just threw that in for effect. It was the one thing that those who had previously supported him (at the time, and before he fell completely off the wagon, and started trashing the entire system, and stealing everything) jumped at. Just a bit of political BS, nothing that he was the slightest bit serious about. The Bush Dynasty has made their entire fortune on oil, (or, most of it) and thats why we havent been using wind, water, and all of the other science so far. Not because it couldnt have happened decades ago, because it could have.
#109083 by WR Curley on 10/23 at 2:37 pm
Got in himmel!
Did I post that tripe?
Proof positive folks...NEVER drink and drive.
Yours in humble penitence,
WR Curley
WRC I love it!!! Honesty is always a great virtue. Consequently, youre forgiven. (not that I had any problems with it to begin with;) )
Report thisBy Bert, October 31, 2007 at 8:24 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Don’t you wish all the monies spent on ‘defense’
were spent on advancing the sciences and things
like energy independence?
Sunlight is fickle, feast-or-famine, you only
get it for 12 hours a day, but the other things
like wind and hydro and geothermal can get you
through the cold dark night without setting
something on fire to see by or keep you warm.
And, if you DO have to burn stuff, why burn oil?
There’s lots of clean-burning combustibles out
there, that yet lack maybe a little development,
but by some sources are in fact coming along nicely.
Instead of trying to atomize the planet, put the
scientists to work building that car that doesn’t
run on gasoline no more, swords into plowshares
and all that.
But, the reason I think we’re not doing that is
Report thisbecause the people in charge of our policy are
pretty darn devoted to the oil biz. Is it steady
income? Yes. Is it causing lots of problems?
You damn skippy, it is. Are there better answers?
Yes indeedy. I say ‘vote accordingly’, if we
do get another vote that’s really worth something,
and put the oil boys out to pasture, and get
someone to the front of the line that actually
knows a little science. Not political science,
but actual science, periodic table, math, physics,
all that ‘geek’ stuff. We’ve seen enough windbags
and idiots that can’t count, career fraudsters
and so forth, so let’s see a guy/gal that’s willing
to get their hands dirty to learn how to move a
car one mile down the road sans gasoline. To
Bush’s credit, he did do a talk on energy, made
the famous statement ‘america is addicted to oil’,
but as with golf, a lot depends on that follow-through and instead of lining us up for war with
ANOTHER oil-laden country, I’d sure like to see
a modern renaissance on the topic of energy.
Stop wasting money on football sponsorships,
and start handing out science scholarships instead.
Nothing personal against the football guys,
but the science club has to take the first row
this time…
By Ga, October 30, 2007 at 3:33 pm #
Re: #108553 by WR Curley
Thanks WR, I enjoyed that.
In my Harlan Ellison inspired dreams I hope that Gaia opens up herself to swallow Washington, DC, or, at least, the American Enterprise Institute. Or perhaps Minneapolis-St. Paul during the Republican National Convention next year… if we can wait that long.
http://www.cafepress.com/buy/perle+richard/-/pv_design _details/pg_1/id_16927406/opt_/fpt_/c_666/
Report thisBy www.nazilieskill.us, October 27, 2007 at 12:20 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
No weapons system goes unused, unless something even worse comes along.
Report thisBy Douglas Chalmers, October 23, 2007 at 7:02 pm #
#108978 by Leefeller on 10/23 at 7:28 am: “...Douglas Chambers...”
Leefeller, I think I have mentioed before that I would prefer that you spell my name correctly....... its Scottish so if you are English, you know what I mean, uhh.
But, “The Other” as it once was - in Baghdah before the evil invaders and “the American war”!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMVTHhl-Wz4&eurl;=
Report thisBy Douglas Chalmers, October 23, 2007 at 6:55 pm #
#109083 by WR Curley on 10/23 at 2:37 pm “...Did I post that tripe...?”
Cool, WRC, no need to apologise here. Even Leefeller has mad some worthwhile comment. Given the drivel that some brazenly post, you should be complimented instead.....
“There is nothing left to conquer, except ourselves. Except ourselves.
Love all of it now. You have so precious little time...”
Get your kicks befor the whole damn sh!thouse goes up, ha ha. Bush has just backed down on blowing up the world (maybe?) and Hillary Clinton has vowed to oppose Bush’s new 196 billion dollar war funding request....... but don’t forget to IMPEACH!!!
Report thisBy WR Curley, October 23, 2007 at 2:37 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Got in himmel!
Did I post that tripe?
Proof positive folks...NEVER drink and drive.
Yours in humble penitence,
WR Curley
Report thisElizabeth, Colorado
By Leefeller, October 23, 2007 at 7:28 am #
Douglas Chambers,
Watched the video, the point being that people are people, even the ones warmongers kill. But the demons must be placed in our minds so killing becomes acceptable, even preferred. Warmongers do not appreciate the simple truth, for truth is only an obstacle that could be in the way of the warmonger.
Hitler was very good at hiding the truth from the people, so he rounded up the free thinkers and others he thought might be a threat against his agenda.
War as the only option to the neoconservative, is only an opportunistic approach to life of the self serving, the greedy. Death of others is only part of the plan. History has shown us this many times over.
The people in your UTUBE story are only statistics, not people from the Neoconservative point of view.
We, the weak feel saddened by death of others, not the neoconservative.
Report thisBy Douglas Chalmers, October 23, 2007 at 6:34 am #
“The Other”..... the kind of people the USA wants to snuff this time http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdyo0MCsEKk
Report thisBy WR Curley, October 21, 2007 at 9:10 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Thanks, Mr Storm.
I always thought The Doors were kind of self-reverential, even onanistic, you want my take on it (which I ‘speck you don’t). All these sorry stiff-dicks who snuffed themselves. I mean, I was there, Haight, ‘65 - ‘76.
Then there’s Dylan, and Lennon, and McCartney, and Bono, and Marley, and Sting...you know, evolutionaries who learn and grow. Someone had to master sucking air through the gills.
All long gone.
We are nowhere now, DeGeneris self-trashed over a dog. Rap-slingers snuffing each other. Gimme a velvet rope to hang myself with.
I don’t know.
I love my dog. He makes me laugh (as Jessica Rabbit said of her boy Roger - but don’t get me wrong).
Help us out here, dude. It’s a long time gone til the sun winks out and the black ball takes the corner pocket.
There is nothing left to conquer, except ourselves. Except ourselves.
Love all of it now. You have so precious little time,
WR Curley
Report thisElizabeth, Colorado
By WriterOnTheStorm, October 21, 2007 at 1:00 pm #
RE#108553
Hey Curley. I always read your stuff, but you surely outdid yourself here. Keep ‘em coming.
Report thisBy Paul Kurkul, October 21, 2007 at 11:04 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
I agree with comment below by Rowan Berkeley, we need to get over the taboo belief that it’s anti-Semitic to call these warmongers Jewish.
Report thisBy Leefeller, October 21, 2007 at 8:56 am #
Navel-gazers, jewish, and USA in one sentence, so very profound, hope you did not hurt yourself, or did you make a mistake and mix up your sign up sheet for the KKK. A self proclaimed super patriot like yourself, must a bigot be.
Report thisBy John Borowski, October 21, 2007 at 3:57 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
I have always known that the Catholics and Protestants abhor the Jew since my younger days when I was taught by the nuns. In August of 1945 a nun told me that a miracle had happened from the Blessed Virgin when they A-bombed Hiroshima. A few years ago I was baffled by the news that the Protestants were spending billions of dollars of their money to transport Jews from Russia to Israel. They paid for the airplane tickets, housing, and given a stipend to encourage the Jews to immigrate to Israel. Knowing their extreme hatred towards the Jews I couldn’t understand why they would do this. I finally found out the reason for doing this. Their bible states the wonderful Armageddon doesn’t begin until all the Jews are in Israel. What Hitler failed to do, they would. Does the psychiatrist or psychologist find this troubling? (I doubt it)
Report thisBy Rowan Berkeley, October 20, 2007 at 10:52 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
The sooner all you navel-gazers get used to seeing the word ‘jewish’ in cold print, the sooner the USA can take rational steps to avoid world war four.
Report thisBy Verne Arnold, October 20, 2007 at 8:57 pm #
#108553 by WR Curley on 10/20 at 6:55 pm
(Unregistered commenter)
WR Curley; you have written a beautiful, poignant, and eloquent piece. Amen.
Report thisBy WR Curley, October 20, 2007 at 6:55 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Stanley Kubrick’s “Doctor Strangelove” is still the definitive treatise on this topic.
We all know the particulars...self-deluded paranoids who don’t know enough about the nature of the miracle of mortality than simply to walk the quiet earth of a warm autumn Sunday, and watch the leaves drift...these people created a machine that can utterly and eternally transform the function and the form of the godess Gaia in a matter of minutes. We, you and I, all of us, our children’s children, flashed out in a twinkling, will not stand witness to the transformation. Some machine.
This machine has been nesting there, quietly humming, for some fifty years, and we’ve all been tip-toeing around it, tho we hear the humming always.
Fifty years, the least possibly imaginable fraction of the lifetime of the Gaia, and we are a species formed into our full selves some thousand times that fifty years ago. Not thousand plus, but thousand times that fifty. We are, at this juncture in time-space, the self-same species that was capable of sending millions of our own kind into a four years’ shit-pounding hell of a war upon the excuse of the assassination of one pompous, miltitarist, plume-tossing, in-bred, knuckleheaded Austrian arch-duke by one sorry, cheap-suit anarchist with a two dollar pistol. Self-same species.
So we all know this.
As the lead paragragh of the above review - the only essential paragraph of the above review - suggests, this oddment is rooted in the primal. It germinates from the animal drive to be seen to be able to protect one’s own. Who are, in turn, one’s protectors. To be seen to be able, mind you, is not the same as to be able, but in the social and tribal context, it’s what counts.
There is a justifiably alarmist global reaction to the rising whine of the machine reawakening. The Pentagon (knees skinned in Bagdhad) wants to test a tactical bunker-buster sooo bad (Tehran looks sooo good).
So a global wave of protest rises. This is Gaia - an analogue, mind - marshalling forces to protect herself. Short term, this reaction will all but certainly succeed (and short term is probably good enough for me. I’m old. I wouldn’t speculate on your odds).
The cabalists cited in the above review fancy themselves the masters of the board. But really, they are just pawns in a far deeper game played by the masters in the blood.
Their prime gambit has been to make you afraid. Very afraid. So that you seek protection. And then they offer you protectors. Reagan (Orwellian stage prop, could scarcely stay awake at public functions), Bush (Orwellian stage prop, crotch pumped, cannot be bothered to study background for public functions), and who’s next? Guiliani, Orwellian stage prop, all painted o’er with fake Muslim gore, vetting his lines with Perle, Wolfowitz, et al. before risking public functions?
But look. You’ve always been afraid, you and all your ancestery - one thousand times fifty years sapient beings- and it’s really not so bad. You get it. You belong to mortality, but dammit, you just don’t want to miss out. You long for the infinite.
Well. In mortal terms, the infinite is unattainable, so maybe that means you’re already there. Shit, I dunno.
My father taught me this when I was ten: If you travel half the distance to your destination with each step, you never get there. I lay night upon night before sleep watching that journey on the pale plastered ceilings of the rented house in Morocco, listening to the fog-shrouded treadfall of French tanks retreating from failed empire, watching the infinite journey, in the fractured dark, from halfway to halfway to halfway. There.
The leaves flame and fall and the cold-smoking winter gives to riotous spring and summer strokes the heavy flanks of the deep-breathing earth, and kids do goofy things and sure you’re gonna die, sure. And?
Hang in there, folks. There’s music in the wheezebox yet.
WR Curley
Report thisElizabeth, Colorado
By felicity, October 20, 2007 at 1:52 pm #
Why so many? Even dropping a fraction of them would result in total destruction of the planet and everyone on it. Is Perle/Strangelove suicidal? (Probably has a hard time suppressing that Nazi salute.)
We’re in the grip of a huge global for-profit military industry. The threat of wholesale nuclear extermination, on a scale that might permanently mutilate even that part of the human race which escaped immediate destruction, is only the most spectacular example of the negative results produced by science and technics when they are divorced from any other human purpose than their own propensity to increase knowledge and power, and expand the use of their own special products in a fashion profitable to the producer. Louis Mumford, 1962.
Report thisBy lilmamzer, October 19, 2007 at 11:41 am #
#108276 by Jonas South on 10/19 at 10:01 am
(9 comments total)
To lilmamzer
re: 108255
I meant that, if an effective nuclear disarmament regiment is adopted by the leading nuclear powers, sooner or later, lesser nuclear powers will have to accept the same. If their weapons are meant to counter asymmetrical threats, and so long as those threats persist, or is perceived to persist, any proposed disarmament regiment between the major powers will be resisted vigorously by those not directly involved at the start.
Some of them might even be in a position to lobby one of more large powers, to preemptively prevent them from adopting nuclear disarmament. This raises a barrier to any agreement anywhere, and is therefore a hidden cost of proliferation.
Well, it’s just not going to happen.
The US will not be a party to any international disarmament regime so long as Russia and China maintain aggressive military postures, and while rogue states such as Iran, North Korea, and unstable Pakistan stand poised to threaten the US and our allies. And certainly not while the threat of radical Islam hangs over the world. That won’t be going away for at least the next hundred years.
So you can forget about the US foregoing a nuclear deterrent in our lifetimes.
Report thisBy Jonas South, October 19, 2007 at 10:01 am #
To lilmamzer
re: 108255
I meant that, if an effective nuclear disarmament regiment is adopted by the leading nuclear powers, sooner or later, lesser nuclear powers will have to accept the same. If their weapons are meant to counter asymmetrical threats, and so long as those threats persist, or is perceived to persist, any proposed disarmament regiment between the major powers will be resisted vigorously by those not directly involved at the start.
Some of them might even be in a position to lobby one of more large powers, to preemptively prevent them from adopting nuclear disarmament. This raises a barrier to any agreement anywhere, and is therefore a hidden cost of proliferation.
Report thisBy Leefeller, October 19, 2007 at 8:41 am #
Vern Arnold,
Pathetic and dangerous people in charge is a good way to describe ruthless thieves. Some of us may have slept through the biggest coup in history, but I feel this has been happening for many years. Eisenhower did give warning way back then. Do not forget Henry Wallace and his warning, so some people saw the handwriting on the wall.
Madness continues, seems we have a kangaroo government.
Report thisBy lilmamzer, October 19, 2007 at 8:21 am #
#108223 by Jonas South
To serve their singular interests, no effort must be spared to keep our own nuclear arsenal intact.
I don’t understand this statement in the context of your post.
Can you clarify and explain, please?
Report thisBy Jonas South, October 19, 2007 at 6:07 am #
This excellent review highlights the one question that bedevils efforts to disarm, one which even the most ardent foes to nuclear disarmament, like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, will not and could not answer: Why is it so urgent that we keep nuclear weapons in the post cold war era, when MAD vis a vis the Soviet Union no longer applies?
Do not look to the U.S. and Russia, or even China, for the answer. Look instead to smaller nations like Israel which possess the bomb. Under any nuclear disarmament regiment, they too would be under pressure to disarm. To serve their singular interests, no effort must be spared to keep our own nuclear arsenal intact.
Report thisBy Verne Arnold, October 19, 2007 at 3:00 am #
I guess the thing that is so shameful is this; the dems have not gained ground in any way, what’s with that? We have given, repeat “GIVEN”, this president so much power we ourselves have now become powerless...even our votes are for naught. Mukaseys even in effect daring the dems to fight his nomination as though it’s a given (theres that word again [given])that he is the next Gonzales, only this time in spades.
Report thisCan it really get worse than this? The answer is a resounding YES...you ain’t seen nothing yet.
By Douglas Chalmers, October 19, 2007 at 2:01 am #
Rahtre than “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”, search for the H-bomb which came later and what were the intentions of some in the uSA for using it!
Search “Edward Teller”, the father of the H-bomb (1950+) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller
Search USAF general “Curtis Le May” who wanted to bomb every city in China and Russia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay
Report thisBy Douglas Chalmers, October 19, 2007 at 1:49 am #
Although the following is an article about military action against Iran being “a last resort”, I don’t have a good feeling about it or Mullen and especially the current motivations of the Washington administration at all....
WASHINGTON - “While military action against Iran is a last resort, the U.S. has the resources to attack if needed despite the strains of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the top U.S. military officer said Thursday........ Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the focus now is on diplomacy to stem Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its support for insurgents in Iraq...... But, he told reporters, “there is more than enough reserve to respond (militarily) if that, in fact, is what the national leadership wanted to do....” http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071019/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/ gates;_ylt=AppTnIDPHxSK2kgz5Gl7Cp.s0NUE
Report thisBy Verne Arnold, October 18, 2007 at 9:45 pm #
“Richard Perle, expounding the revolutionary essence of the Bush Doctrine, wrote: Saddam Husseins reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly but not alone ... he will take the UN down with him. ... What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order ... the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions,”
Jason Epstein’s article confirms rather than shocks and points to how pathetic and dangerous the people who have grabbed power in the U.S. truly are.
I fear we have slept through the biggest coup in history and we still don’t quite get it. The hearings on Michael Mukasey’s confirmation are also very frightening...listen closely to the questions and especially the answers. We are handing the henhouse to the fox...we are cooked, really!
Report this