nuclear proliferation

i got an email from another guy called mike.

"What I don't get is the involvement of US officials in nuclear proliferation. I'm guessing that such activity in sanctioned by someone in the US government, because the potential harm is so serious that one would think stopping such activity would be priority #1.

In fact, there are some disturbing failures by the Bush administration to combat nuclear proliferation:

1. The Bush administration has failed to completely fund the Nunn/Lugar programs to secure former Soviet nukes.

2. James Risen's account of Operation Merlin in which nuclear weapon plans were given to Iran, supposedly to lead the Iranians astray.

3. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any points here) Sibel Edmond's comments suggest that the intercepts she had access to involve nuclear weapon trafficking in Turkey and former Soviet states...ie...Azerbaijan. She also suggests that high level US officials have helped facilitate such illegal activities. One theory of the Plame leak is that Brewster Jennings was outed via Plame to prevent high level US officials from being arrested for dealing with terrorists...ie...having a role in activities such as terrorist attacks, money laundering and drug/weapon trafficking.

4. The 9/11 commission gave the Bush administration an 'F' for post 9/11 terrorism preparedness. Obviously, one of the worries is of a nuclear weapon getting into the US via a port or the Mexican border.

5. Pakistan has been considered an ally in the war on terror despite the fact that Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan gave nuclear weapon plans and equipment to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Musharraf pardoned Khan with little outrage from the Bush administration.

Obviously, such actions are destabilizing the entire world. There are easily understood motives like personal enrichment and securing new pipelines for oil companies. But the extreme nature of the nuclear proliferation suggests other motives. What do you think they are?"

lots of good points there. i half-wrote a post the other day (and accidentally posted it for a while before it was finished) - i was riffing of this post by driftglass:

"But the Republican Party – as DeLay has irrefutably demonstrated – has long since stopped being a political party by any definition and is now just an outright, outlaw criminal syndicate"

i'll try to finish the post cos there are some important things that i want to say (my draft box is full of nearly finished manifestos) - but driftglass nails it. they are an outright criminal law syndicate - but i'll go driftglass one better - not only are they not even a political political party, they literally aren't even a governing party.

as mike points out, the egadministration hasn't done a thing to make people safer (such as check cargo on planes), and they've also done a bunch of things that make everyone less safe, like sending karen hughes to anywhere. i don't think that they are intentionally trying to make the world more dangerous, but nor do i think that they give a shit about making the world more safe. i don't think that we can view them as anything but criminal outlaws. it's wrong to try to look at them through a lense of 'governing' in any sense (apart, perhaps, from a mafia analogy to 'governing').

and this brings us to one of the great mysteries of our time - why hasn't 'al-qaeda' hit america in 5 years? and why has the bush administration behaved as though it expects not to get attacked? it's certainly not because the USG is competent. and it's certainly not true because osama is 'tied down' or any other such nonsense. al-qaeda doesn't need a nuclear weapon - if they exist, and if they wanted to hurt america, they'd plant 10 bombs into cargo planes (only 5% of the cargo is checked) and they'd get a success rate of between 80-100%. the good news is, that when the planes explode simultaneously across the country, we can be pretty sure that the explosion wasn't caused by nail-clippers or knitting needles. alternatively, if al-qaeda wanted to 'terrorize' america for fun, they don't need to do anything high-tech such as planes or nukes - all they need is a single sniper (one of my favourite stories of these years is the ohio 'sniper' who shot at something like 30 cars or more, but the media refused to report on it, or call him/her a sniper).

let me comment on another thing that mike said: "There are easily understood motives like personal enrichment and securing new pipelines for oil companies." - i'm probably stealing a little thunder from the other post i promised but speaking of outlaws, i've never really understood the 'war for oil' argument. i've been meaning to reiterate this forever - the 'war for oil' slogan doesn't identify the issues. as best as i can tell, this argument relies on the logic that the world is running out of oil and that america needs to have access to the vital resource to ensure that the economic engine keeps running smoothly, and there's another version of that which is that with india and china growing like crazy, there's a geo-political need to ensure some sort of competitive advantage over economic rivals.

Here's the problem with that logic. the outlaw criminals don't give a flying fuck about future generations, and they don't care about their historical legacy that they spout about. think about it - they don't care that their war has tripled the price of oil today, why would they care about the price (or availability) of oil 30 years hence? particularly when they are more likely to be demonized for focussing on oil due to environmental issues, and even more despised for going to war for it - and the historical record will show that the evidence about global warming was on all their desks, and they ignored it.

i am willing to entertain one element of the 'war for oil' narrative - in that the war has benefited, more than anyone, those who sell oil - whether from the ground such as saudi arabians, and texans, and iranians, or the oil companies. untold wealth. given that the egadministration is a bunch of outlaw criminals for sale at the highest price, the people who could afford the most are those in the oil industry in one way or other - but i want to make it very clear, i'm not talking about some nebulous concept of 'oil' or a 'strategic national resource' or any such - i'm talking about personal greed, pure and simple.

similarly, i don't think there is anything more than personal greed spurring the supply of nuclear knowledge and materials - my best guess is that there isn't an ideological bone in the body of the people selling this stuff. as i mentioned in the comments to this post, my best guess is that if someone like richard perle is selling nuclear secrets, it's not because he wants anyone to have them, it's just that he can make money out of the opportunity, and he can probably assuage his conscience in the knowledge that if he wasn't selling nuclear secrets to a particular client, then someone else would make the sale instead.

as i said earlier:

"and they may very well have been correct. if i remember rightly, AQKhan was selling his blueprints for just a million or two bucks. if we accept that he wasnt selling for ideological reasons, then the reason the price must have been so low is that there must be a market for it."

a nuclear program costs billions of dollars. if the blueprints that aqkhan had were both necessary and scarce, then they would have been more valuable than a campaign contribution or two.

i hope that answers the question.