Insufficient Explosive Force?

In this inaugural post, I thought I'd briefly comment on an article that demonstrates the madness we continue to live with, more than a decade after the end of the Cold War. (The Cold War may have ended, but the associated mindset seems disturbingly well and alive.)

In a front-page article in the New York Times of April 3, 2005 ("Aging Warheads Ignite a Debate Among Scientists"), William J. Broad breathlessly alerts readers that a design flaw in hundreds of U.S. nuclear warheads carried aboard submarines "could cause them to explode with far less force than intended," a force "so reduced as to compromise its effectiveness."

The article explains that these warheads, known as W-76, are thermonuclear weapons, in which a "small atom bomb" ignites hydrogen fuel to produce a far bigger "bang." But the supposed design flaw might mean that there's "only" the initial nuclear explosion, not the larger thermonuclear blast.

Imagine! The White House threatens to destroy some rogue state ten times over, and it turns out it can only destroy it once. Of course, this is completely unacceptable. But the Times informs us that relief is on the way, in the form of an "overhaul program" to the tune of $2 billion plus.

Under the guise of the "Reliable Replacement Warhead Program," Washington will have yet another avenue to pursue the design of new generations of nuclear weapons. "If possible," Broad writes, "the effort is to proceed without nuclear testing." And if not? Well, then we'll just have to kill international efforts to ban such tests. No problem there; the administration is well practiced in casting aside international treaties it doesn't like.

The Times devotes much space to the arcane technical disagreements among nuclear weapons scientists. It doesn't see fit to comment that efforts to prolong the life of the U.S. arsenal fly in the face of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which commits the U.S. and the other nuclear weapons states to work toward disarmament. This at a time when the Bush administration is adamant that Iran respect the rules of that very same treaty.

It's an open secret that the Bush administration is an avid believer in U.S. exceptionalism -- one set of rules for the rest ofthe world, another for Washington. But one of the reasons the White House can get away with such blatant double-standards is that the media, by and large, fail so fundamentally to hold the political leadership to account.

Insufficient explosive force? The problem seems to be insufficient willingness to confront mad policies undertaken in the name of "national security."