[Newspoetry] Weapons Galore

[Donald L Emerick]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/international/13WIRES-RUSS.html

NYT News Alert reports that the-unlawful-President-by-usurpation GWBush (aka BullyBoy)plans to archive 4 to 5 thousand nuclear weapons, in compliance with an agreement with the Russians, whose terms were announced today by the unlawful President.

How do you archive a weapon?  Isn't that what every armory is, anyway, just an archive of old weapons, stockpiled against some calamitous day of future need?

The difference, to a weapon, is just this: one is actively deployed, out there in the field, ready to be used today, at this very moment, while the other is somewhat less accessible, requires that we have to wait until tomorrow before we could use it.

Now, destroying 4 or 5 thousand monster weapons may sound like an advancement over the present situation -- but, in truth, the result is that we are then locked into keeping the 1500 to 2000 remaining weapons, indefinitely.  And, what is the use of those 1500 to 2000 weapons?

Well, if there were anybody left out there to deter, then we would say that it was deterrence.

But, all the potential enemies folded a long time ago.  The last competitive rival -- the so-called People's Republic of China

(a regime which is hardly of the people or by the people, although it claims to be for the people, as long as those people don't want anything frivolous, like personal freedom or self-determination, as long as they only want bread and circuses)

has, according to US Intelligence sources,

(but, then, could we trust the National Security forces, here, when they appear to have been grossly incompetent every time any of their reports are exposed to the public
    (a situation that has led me to believe that the only point of National Security apparati is to provide the veil of secrecy itself, to justify
        (on the basis of secret information))
the utter idiocy and the sheer lunacy of most "national security" programs, which never seem to enhance national security, at all, but (rather) to decrease and diminish it, so that, in the extreme, there is no national security, at all, because everyone fears us and would do anything to destroy us)

at most a few dozen nuclear weapons.

"Why would anyone want so few?  Could they be truly happy, then?"  you may well ask.

Well, let's see, what are the alleged political needs for a weapon?

(There is never any special military need for any weapon, because the military are merely the expression and projection of national political power: if one has no enemies, then one has no need for any military, and -- if one has no military, then is the point of any weapon?)

According to the Bush-Ashcroft Doctrine of NRA Defense Dogma: while the world may be full of uncertainty, it is also full of evil people.  One needs a weapon to deter evil people, so that they do not do not try to take away from you what is yours.

(I shall not even ask whether this defense could concern any question of justice, as to what might be justly yours, or not.)

The Dogma also says: one needs a weapon to prove that one can resist the would-be conquests of yourself by evil people, to prove that one could fight back, if one felt that one had to fight back.

So, as long as such beliefs rule, arms races become inevitable.   The physicist and the notable scholar of arms races, LF Richardson, would have been right about the propensity of nations to acquire weapons excessively, when each looks threatening to the other, and that threatening appearance is enhanced by attempted "national security" secrecy and further increments in military force.  What Dr. Richardson did not say, so far as I can recollect, are the conditions under which the normally prevalent state of international-human relations paranoia breaks down into the full-blown madness of an arms race.

This would be question of when does the ever armed and always dangerous madman become an active -- rather than merely potentially -- disaster for the peace of society?  This would be the same question to ask the mail-box bomber, the Taliban bombers, the Sharon-Arafat bombers, or the Bush bombers (and we would have been right to ask the Clinton bombers in SE Europe).  It is too late to do anything after the mad bombers have armed themselves and launched themselves upon the world, by throwing their bombs like anarchists throwing Molotov cocktails.

Once the bombs start falling, it is too late to apprehend the madman and see that he is confined before he could cause harm to another person.

But, we need a credible test of insanity, one that is easily applied and surely will let us catch everyone who could pose danger to us, who could bring harm to us.

So, I offer my own Doctrinal Defense Dogma: as madmen are possibly everywhere in the world, and as madmen mark themselves out by buying and keeping weapons,

(as in the right to keep and bear arms
    (but always, most importantly announced therein, would be the implicit threat to exercise an alleged right to use such weapons, at such times, on such persons, and under such circumstances as only the madman claims to be able to ascertain, and instantaneously at that, to be sure))

then therefore be it known that every person who buys, owns, possesses a weapon is an active madman, with the external-diseconomic creation of risk and danger to others, and also a potential harm that can be most economically stopped and most humanely treated, before the madman acts further.  Let us therefore arrest, confine and treat every person who has such a weapon -- or tries to acquire such a weapon.

<<The chances of my program being adopted -- en though it is the sanest, wisest and soundest approach to the alleged problems of evil, because it is just so -- is near zero.  This would be the super-conductivity of political policies rule

(that parallels those of the physical universe):

approaching the limits of rationality -- as to what would be sanest, wisest, soundest -- may only be done under extraordinary conditions that occur only in laboratories of thought.>>

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick

PS: 300 nukes would be enough to destroy every major urban conformation in the entire world, with some "spare" capacity.  So, ask yourself, of the madmen, why do they need 1500 to 2000 of these?  Are they still intending to bomb every urban place whose population is bigger than, say, 25,000 people?  What would be the point?  Those 300 such weapons, once used, would be enough to destroy the possibility of life on earth as any being -- down to the level of cockroaches --- now knows it to be.  I think, everyday, that military leaders just have no idea of the difference between a weapon that works the way old-fashioned ones allegedly did ('safely' kill the other guy) and the way these new-fangled weapons do, where the only 'safe' use of the weapon is not to make it and never to use it, at any time, for any reason.

(Which reminds me, of how frightened I am that Bush-Rumsfeld seem to plan to release control of 'tactical' nuclear weapons to area field commanders -- the so-called Tacs are those baby-sized (baby-killing) weapons that are about the size of the weapons that destroyed those two Japanese cities, Nagasaki and Hiroshima -- but, in the modern world, those small earlier weapons are "Tacs", not necessarily Strategic, whatever that means -- for once you start following MadMan logic, no word has any ordinary meaning because every word has an extraordinary consequence.
    (which would be the point of this entire note, I suppose, and, if I were Aesop, I would try to say it more fabulistically).)
T4L, DLE
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