Here are my reactions to three articles in the 28 January 2021 edition of Counter Punch.
Why We Can’t Give Up on the Idea of a World Free From Nuclear Weapons
The “inability” to relinquish nuclear weapons is entirely a function of the “inability” of power elites to pry their cold dead hands off the levers of power. This is in every way like the “inability” of gun nuts (euphemistically: 2nd Amendment Patriots) to relinquish their guns and military gear costumes; the acting out of a dick measuring contest by deeply insecure people unable to let go of the security blankets they hide behind and which project their illusions of confidence, manhood (and/or penis envy), power and enviable popular acclaim and fear. This is no different from Achilles dragging Hector’s body behind his chariot before the walls of Troy to safely chest-thump his hubristic pride in himself and to inspire terror.
Another, secondary aspect of this clutching onto the obsolescence of nuclear weapons is pure pork-barrel and corporate welfare. It has nothing to do with the logical pursuit of war aims under any conditions. But the disturbing element here is the possibility of an illogical actor — a pure irrational — somehow gaining control of some nation’s nuclear weapons infrastructure Doomsday Machine, as many feared a nutty American president (take your pick) might have done.
I would say that the ideal and polar opposite alternative to the continuation of the Nuclear War Club Delusion is a combination of: the outlawing of war with a robust International Criminal Court with full world participation as championed by Ben Ferencz (https://youtu.be/meDbZemxuK4), with an equally robust worldwide participation in a concerted effort to respond to climate change as urged with fervent and penetrating clarity by Greta Thunberg, and to which I have made my own individual (and I’ll admit amateur) efforts to flesh out with policy visions (as in my last CP article).
Alfred W. McCoy describes how the United States has steadily slipped from its long-standing position of world leadership (from 1945 to 2017), both politically but most crucially economically, and which decay of American imperial power and world respect for it is most hideously reflected by the previous four years of the Boobus Americanus Administration.
The increasing economic isolation of the United States from world markets, with Europe, Asia and Africa being steadily drawn into market conformity with China, and effectively assisted by Boobus Americanus’s inept “America First” isolationism, leads me to think that the centroid for the production of carbon-dioxide planetary poisoning has moved to China, with this relocation of World Capitalism’s economic engine.
I am brought back to John Lennon’s thought that the world is run by insane people for insane purposes (https://youtu.be/YspNkm0BKgw). The intellectual refinement and seriousness of the mentalities that carry on the complex and sober work of perpetuating the objectively insane obsession with political domination for exclusionary wealth accumulation — most heinous when self-focussed, but understandably forgivable when aimed at poverty reduction nationally — is breathtaking for its utter disregard to its consequent destruction of our planet. This is “circling the drain-hole” terminal addiction on its grandest scale.
Federal Secrecy Protects the Crimes of Every President
James Bovard shines a strong light on the putrefaction of American democracy by its envelopment with the hyphae of the “classification” of rightly public information as “state secrets.” Very little of the information generated by government activities needs to be classified either for public safety or the defense of the Constitution (remember, the two official duties and purposes of the USG and its officers) against the attempted hostile actions by ‘enemies’ (who they?) of the American people.
I once had large locking safes filled with blueprints and computer printouts of engineering details of nuclear explosive devices (a.k.a. “bombs”), and I agree those should be classified. But even so, if such blueprints were posted on the internet it might do less for nuclear proliferation than you might imagine. Certainly a few nuclear powers, like North Korea and maybe Pakistan, would be able to improve their own nuclear weapons designs from a study of the U.S. nuclear weapons technology.
But all members of the nuclear weapons club already know how to blend very high level classical physics and engineering with the use of exotic radioactive compounds, gases, metals and salts (the material guts of nuclear bombs) into the construction of functional nuclear explosives. The threat to others from Nuclear War Club members is exponentially amplified when such members also possess high-speed delivery systems with long reach (missiles, submarines and worst of all: satellite platforms).
Most states would never (well, almost never) be able to develop their own nuclear weapons even if they possessed a huge cache of “blueprints” from say the U.S. or Russia or China or England or France or Israel, because they could never mount the huge complex infrastructure necessary to manufacture nuclear explosives, nor accumulate the many exotic materials needed.
But, it is true that any state with civilian nuclear reactors could apply that technology to generate low-grade (and yet super extremely toxic and harmful) nuclear material and waste, which could be used in crude terroristic attacks. So the single best strategy for the prevention of the proliferation of nuclear terror and nuclear weapons is the strict international (U.N.) control of the possession and transport of nuclear materials. Secrecy in the operations of such a nuclear materials policing agency is certainly a public good.
But, as has long been known and which Bovard points out, government secrets in general and the explosion of “classification” by the USG in particular are mostly about embarrassment-control and impunity-perpetuation by and for the lever-pullers in governments.
And it all makes this nerdy très petit bourgeois kid from the Hippy Era, who is irrelevantly far out from the insane consensus on world management, think gratefully of Ben Ferencz, fondly of John Lennon, and wistfully of Greta Thunberg.
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