-Caveat Lector-
Wag The Bomb
Alexander Cockburn
March 11, 1999
Everyone laughed last year at "Wag The Dog," the film about a
beleaguered president of the United States seeking to deflect
attention from a sex scandal by contriving a war scare. So, how come
there aren't guffaws at the great Chinese atom spy brouhaha, which has
the Republicans in a lather of excitement about the Clinton
administration's apparent lassitude in the face of alleged Chinese
espionage?
"Wag The Dog" certainly had its parallels to President Clinton's
propensity to bomb foreign countries whenever things looked rough on
the impeachment front. So ask yourself, who is going to do well out of
an atom spy scandal? A little Cold War history puts the matter into
perspective. The applied history of U.S. atomic weaponry began with
the Trinity test explosion in Alamogordo, N.M., in July of 1945. Half
a century later, the United States had tens of thousands of nuclear
weapons, ready to be dropped from planes, fired on long-range
missiles, carried by infantrymen as porta-pacs. There were
multi-megaton bombs, nifty little "theater nuclear" bombs, neutron
bombs designed to wipe out people but not property, MIRVed bombs
peeling off a missile head like corn kernels off a cob. "Overkill" is
too demure a term. The U.S. alone had, and has, enough destructive
nuclear power to wipe out the planet hundreds of times over.
So why, decades after Gen. Curtis LeMay of the U.S. Air Force's
Strategic Air Command boasted he could reduce the Soviet Union "to a
smoldering, irradiated ruin in three hours," did the U.S. nuclear
establishment continue to devote billions of dollars to the
never-ending enhancement of its nuclear "capacity"?
After all, the simple truth is that you don't need many nuclear bombs
to preserve deterrence. When Khruschev and Kennedy both blinked at the
prospect of nuclear Armageddon in the Cuban missile crisis in the
early 1960s, they didn't do so because they knew each side had nuclear
weapons in the thousands. They thought of one bomb hitting New York
and another hitting Moscow, and another hitting Los Angeles and
another hitting Leningrad. Maybe a dozen each, and half a dozen for
everyone else, adding up to all-too-imaginable nuclear midnight.
The U.S. nuclear establishment, on the other hand, found it endlessly
necessary to justify the billions of dollars spent on research at Los
Alamos, Livermore and Oakridge, not to mention the arms firms turning
out the missiles for new delivery systems, and so forth. Hence, the
abiding fear of arms-control agreements that would crimp research
budgets and shut down Los Alamos and the other labs. The end
consequence of that style of thinking has been the $40 billion-plus
spent on the utterly demented Star Wars/shield defense/ABM concept.
The Pentagon needs new enemies, and China has been filling the bill
for some years now. Back in 1994, Andrew Marshall, head of the
Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, was transfixing credulous
journalists with scenarios of what might happen in 2020 A.D. should
the U.S. not continue to appropriate vast sums for weapons R&D. His
favored theme was China bringing the U.S. to its knees with
sophisticated missilery.
But how would China acquire the necessary sophistication? Russia's
scientists can give them some pointers, but the mother lode is in the
U.S. So, now we have a nuclear spy scandal in the grand tradition. Did
a Taiwan-born U.S. scientist working in Los Alamos (and now fired
summarily from his job, quite possibly without solid justification)
give the Chinese the know-how to make a warhead allegedly similar to
the W-88, billed as "the most modernized, miniaturized warhead in the
American arsenal"?
So what if he did? From the point of view of national security, it
doesn't matter if the Chinese have the capacity to build the sort of
atom bombs the U.S. was making in 1955, or the super-modern W-88. All
they need is a couple of bombs, a couple of suitcases and a couple of
American cities. That's nuclear deterrence. The Clinton administration
was entirely correct in seeing the national well-being better enhanced
by selling Boeings to Beijing, while in keeping a decorous silence
about possible spying, For its part, the nuclear establishment has had
every incentive to encourage such spying, since old-fashioned, Cold
War logic stipulates that if China has its parallel to the W-88
warhead, we will have to spend billions building the W-89, and to be
on the safe side, the W-90.
Will the "Wag the Bomb" scam play? There's little doubt it will. Wait
for every candidate for the U.S. presidency in the year 2000 to sign
on to Star Wars, in whatever version it is now being dressed.
Meanwhile, security at Los Alamos will no doubt continue to be as
porous as it has been ever since the years of the Trinity test. If you
don't allow spies in, how can your enemies develop the threats
required to keep you in business?
COPYRIGHT 1999 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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