Archive for November 20th, 2009

Nuclear proliferation

This blog presents a view of nuclear proliferation I have never seen before. Is it correct? I suppose I had better find out. LiveMint suggests that Russia gave China nuclear capability and that was transferred by China gifting it to Pakistan, which in turn criminally proliferated to Libya, North Korea and Iran.

On one hand, the simple fact that nuclear proliferation is a far too dangerous set of circumstances to experiment with, on the other, the surprise nature of the two most destructive known earthbound explosive forces: volcanoes and nuclear weapons – both are subject to extraordinarily chaotic principles that inevitably ensure outcomes. The same principles apply to financial bubbles. The building blocks of dishonesty lie in the first times compromises are made.

How can a country develop nuclear arsenal without compromising their integrity with others? Owning nuclear weapons is a crime of extortion against the rest of humanity in exchange for self destruction.

How do we find the value of the nuclear deterrent? We define the result as undesirable. What organisation with terror as its mantra can resist, reason the CIA.

Eventually, if the “terrorist” organisations are not neutralised they may try to hijack the nuclear process, or worse, develop its own.

Complete outlawing of nuclear weapons is the only solution. How can it be achieved? Or is there something about the threat of nuclear weapons that operates with enough mutual fear that it is simply impossible?

Wishful thinking.

On the edge

People face life every day. On very few of those days the plain shadow of death falls, and when it does it seems sudden, unexpected, incomplete.

Life is a book that ends in the wrong place. It could be on a train, after a steamy love scene or during a part of the life that the author correctly thought should be skipped entirely. A void from which the main character never re-emerges.

Death is not talked about, except when there are rules. Families suffer death and then it becomes the only thing talked about. Then the thing that must not be talked about. Eventually reflection is possible.

This cultural tendency to shun death, and keep it away from the subject of living seems a good strategy. Do not upset Grandma with that kind of talk, that sort of imperative. The fact that it usually approaches like anything, without an instruction guide, makes us all the more mystified by the obvious change it brings.

The psychological effects of death in the family should not be discounted. The gross effect of war, the intrusion of American forces into a culture that does not respect its intrusion, but associates the arrival of these badly dressed warriors with the death of many of their own family members.

The only time war is justified is to undo an invasion. There is no such thing as improving a culture by killing certain members of it. Enmity causes power to be invested in fighting adversaries.

War is a disease and the cure – it requires plenty of human intelligence. Is death the end game in Afghanistan? Will the bodies of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda leaders be the only product that America can win from this adventure of revenge?

Or will they further invest themselves in “reforming” a culture they do not own or even understand very well?