More and more these past weeks I feel like humanity is at a very critical juncture regarding the double-edged sword science has given us with our ability to split the atom. This needs to be widely highlighted and discussed, and it isn’t happening that I can see. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a line in the trinitite sand that, once crossed, could never be erased.
There is another line. It is where the next atomic weapon gets used, in whatever city or WMD factory site; and nuclear weapons go from being unthinkable, last-resort horrors to routine terrorist / tactical tools. THAT is a new line we cross at our extreme peril. It will not lead to billions dead or nuclear winter or continental radioactive wastelands as was threatened in the now-over Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. But this lesser evil WOULD dramatically change civilization all over this planet for the worse. This Cool War we face today currently between the United States and the Axis of Evil is a grave threat to humanity and our species’ further progress in science and our ultimate expansion into space. And I believe we are losing this Cool War.
At the moment, the emphasis seems to be off of chemical weapons, which are the least potentially destructive of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) current holy trinity: chemical, biological and nuclear. The U.S. has a massive program underway to incinerate locally the vast stockpiles of chemical weapons it accumulated during the Cold War, and highly placed British officials are now admitting that such chemicals may very well never have been in Iraq. Advances in genetic engineering continue to make biologicals beyond smallpox and anthrax the weapons of choice for Cool War II, but that’s another problem for another day. By the end of this century, nanites may be a WMD, too, but THAT’s a problem for Cool War III.
Face it: the deeper into the future we look, the more of an increasing threat WMDs appear to be…all the more reason, in my opinion, to get humanity established on the Moon and Mars and elsewhere as quickly as possible. Though thinking far-flung colonies would be out of reach or invulnerable to compact WMDs is in itself a fallacy…but that’s Cool War IV. Figuring out how to win each of these incarnations of the Cool War is a problem for future generations. If only one Greatest Generation fumbles the baton pass that started with winning World War II and continued with the winning of the Cold War, then humanity could easily face a detour of one or more centuries in reaching whatever our ultimate destiny is.
Our challenge for now is winning Cool War I and keeping nuclear armaments contained. We aren’t. In my opinion, the reason for our worsening position comes from ignoring lessons of history. In recent weeks it has become fashionable to compare the American presence in Iraq to Vietnam. This is an apt comparison but not for the reasons being commonly presented. The simplistic view is that Iraq is like Vietnam because guerilla warfare is causing continuing American and British casualties, now higher than those from the 1991 Gulf War. In reality, the current situation in Iraq is literally orders of magnitude away from what Vietnam was like, where the TV droned on for years about how many hundred-plus war-dead America had suffered that week.
The real similarity between Iraq and Vietnam has nothing to do with unfortunate casualties and everything to do with allocation of forces. In Vietnam American ground forces were concentrated in the South and entered the North only as prisoners of war. The American forces that were allocated to the North were lots and lots of bombers, and although these were fearsome displays of American might, these failed utterly at subduing America’s enemy at that time. This American misallocation of forces led to America’s only defeat in a geo-politically insignificant war that in retrospect wasn’t even worth fighting.
Today in the skirmishes of Cool War I, we see American forces equally mis-applied. In October 2002 we learned that North Korea was secretly seeking long-term uranium-enrichment technology for nuclear WMD use. America withdrew from all trade options (i.e. oil) we had to influence that situation directly and instead threatened the North Koreans with a two-front war in the grand tradition of World War II’s simultaneous efforts against Japan and Germany. In poker terms, this was a bluff, and North Korea has raised the stakes by switching from a long-term uranium threat to a short-term plutonium threat.
Now only eight months after finding out about North Korea’s verified nuclear ambitions, we’ve followed instead a forged Iraqi will-o-the-wisp nuclear threat to mobilize all but one of America’s combat divisions for overseas deployment, and where are they? Our current force deployment is 150,000 in Iraq (which has no WMDs), 15,000 in Afghanistan, and we merely shuffled 30,000 already-on-site soldiers including my niece out of South Korea DMZ artillery range for the first time.
The big winner here is Osama bin Laden. Remember him? The guy still walking around somewhere who Americans and especially New Yorkers once wanted (and I still do) put to the dunking chair in the waters between Ground Zero and the still-closed Statue of Liberty?
Another big winner so far here is North Korea. I don’t see anybody stopping its nuclear ambitions, and this is an ill wind that blows no good. North Koreans have nukes, are suddenly about to have more, are crazy enough to use them, and have shown their willingness to sell anything military to anybody with cash, which they desperately need.
Speaking of cash, America has now taken on an $80 billion lump sum plus an extra $5 billion PER MONTH in off-budget military expenditures ($4B in Iraq, $1B in Afghanistan). What kind of lunar-Mars program would THAT have supported? When the Afghanistan representative came to Washington last week to find somebody to sign a $15 billion dollar aid check to rebuild Afghanistan (remember that promise, all those oppressed women in burkhas, from less than a year or so ago?), well, nobody in Washington had an ink pen. Too bad. How quickly we forget that Afghanistan DOES have WMDs – they’re called poppy fields.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and President Bush aren’t talking boldly about the feasibility of a two-front Iraq-Korea military effort to stem North Korea’s nuclear ambitions now – such talk would be ludicrous. Like it or not, American forces are now deployed where they’re gonna be for a while. We’ve got practically the entire American military sitting on the world’s biggest pool of oil – while Afghanistan churns out tons of chemical heroin, Columbia churns out tons of chemical cocaine, America’s smallpox vaccination effort fizzles, and North Korea churns out nuclear plutonium.
We’re losing Cool War I, and WMDs remain a significant and growing threat for the forseeable future. Drog, where’s that WMD topic icon for SciScoop? Unfortunately, I think we’re gonna need it.