The Impending Nuclear Warsby Angelo Baracca The US is performing
an alarming escalation towards a nuclear war. It is completely
renovating its strategic nuclear arsenal, actively
preparing to launch a “preventive attack”, and
developing biological and chemical waepons, while the
anti-missile shield will complete an impressive offensive
system. A “Fourth
Generation” of low-yeld, highly penetrating nuclear
warheads have probably been
developed and already used: they erase the
distinction between “nuclear” and
“conventional” weapons and make a nuclear
war feasible without formally violating the existing
treaties THE XXIth
CENTURY (US, NUCLEAR) WARS The hope of
eliminating nuclear and mass destruction weapons from the
surface of the earth seems actually more far than ever:
On the contrary, the danger of their effective use is
presently more concrete than during all the decades of
the Cold War. The US, in the framework of an
unprecedented arms race, in spite of a consistent
numerical reduction of its redundant strategic stockpile,
is performing the biggest effort of every time to
renovate it with completely new nuclear warheads,
while is concretely preparing to launch a
“preventive attack”. Moreover, with the
deployment of the antimissile shield it is building a
tremendous offensive system. Washington is also developing
chemical and biological weapons, while is boycotting
verifications and inspections that would implement the
Conventions for the prohibition of these arms. As a matter
of fact, the use of nuclear warheads is becoming
increasingly convenient in the wars Washington is
planning and will fight in the future. In fact, the war
operations of the last decade have shown that the
cost-effect ratio of conventional explosives delivered by
precision-guided munitions resulted exceedingly high
(some targets require the expenditure of several delivery
systems): this pushed the search for new more effective
nuclear weapons that could be politically accepted for
their low yield and residual radioactivity. In this
context has to be interpreted Bush’s decision of
March 2002 of developing new low-yield, deeply
penetrating nuclear warheads. Along these lines, a
front-line investigation performed in the big nuclear
arms laboratories is trying to develop a new
generation of “micro-nukes”, that will
erase the distinction between nuclear and conventional
arms, legitimating the use of nuclear weapons in
conventional conflicts, or lowering the threshold for a
nuclear conflict, without formally violating the existing
treaties. It must be
stressed that, since research and development in these
fields are strictly classified, only speculations are
possible, connecting and interweaving official
information or evidence with clues, lacking links,
disquieting open questions. It is highly probable that
the big Laboratories of military research in the US
(probably in the UK, France, Russia, or the former Soviet
Union) have already designed or built new weapons,
probably based on new or unknown principles or processes,
that are being tested in the wars fought during the last
decade. From this point of view, the alarming but
reliable hypothesis may be advanced that the US have
already built a “Fourth Generation” of
“micro-nukes” and that they have been already
tested and probably extensively used in the wars of the
last decade. I have no information that some
scientist has raised the question of how a
“mini-nuke” could circumvent the problem of the
critical mass for a sustaining fission reaction[3]: this authorizes
to suppose that some new mechanism or process is being
experimented, if not already set up and applied. I will
come back on this point. It is sure
in general that new methods of “mass and
indiscriminate destruction warfare” are being
developed, improved and used in what is considered
“conventional” warfare, to weaken the
enemy’s structures, infrastructures, population and
moral, saving lives of one’s own soldiers; and
testing moreover the eventual international reactions to
such methods. For instance, the extensive bombardments of
chemical plants in Panchevo and Novy Sad during the
Balkans war as a matter of fact produced on the civil
populations effects very similar to those of a true
chemical warfare[4]. In the case of
depleted uranium[5] (DU) munitions,
it seems worrying that, although they were developed long
time ago, they were not extensively used until the
collapse of the Soviet Union, starting with the 1991 Gulf
War. As a matter of fact, their use did not meet a
sufficiently strong international and internal
opposition, in spite of the almost 80,000 US and
thousands of Canadian and British veterans stroke by the
“Gulf Syndrome”, not to speak of the European
soldiers in the Balkans and of the populations in Iraq,
the Balkans and Afghanistan. In the usual appreciation,
DU munitions are radiological bombs, “weapons of
indiscriminate effect” in terms of the 1st
Protocol additional to the Geneva Conventions[6]. However such an
interpretation may be questioned from more than one point
of view. It seems difficult (at least for me) to
understand and believe how a low radioactive substance
could produce such generalized and extended health
effects, although spread in the environment and the
alimentary chain by the “pyrophoric” explosion
of DU. Moreover, some eye-witnesses report that the tanks
struck by a DU shell appear to be deeply distorted or
destroyed, besides being highly radioactive[7]: such effects
seem difficult to explain on the basis of this
“pyrophoric” effect, and may be suspected to
involve a much stronger kind of explosive phenomenon. On
the other hand, how could the US Administration authorize
the realization of the new penetrating
“mini-nukes” if the principle and mechanism of
their operation were not already set up? The most natural
speculation - however fantasious it may seem - could be
that DU munitions have already set up, and used, some
kind of new nuclear explosive process, highly classified
and still unknown to the scientific community. We will
come back on this point in more detail. FIGHT WITHOUT
QUARTER FOR RESOURCES AND WORLD RULE
In fact,
the dangers of a nuclear conflict, and use of weapons of
mass destruction derive primarily from the US, rather
than from the countries pointed out as the “axis of
evil”: a war to Iraq would consist, paradoxically,
in “preventing” unconfirmed weapons of
mass destruction through the effective use of
weapons of indiscriminate or mass destruction! It should
be explained why. As a matter of fact, the
new-century US’ strategy adopts war as the mean to
solve (or provoke) international conflicts, and to impose
its own interests (denying the fundamental principles of
International Law, as they were stated and embodied in
the UN Chart and in the most advanced constitutions of
many countries): US interests come before any general
interest, democratic principle, social justice, and even
“human rights”, whose violation is denounced by
the US only when they perceive their direct convenience,
while Washington openly defend or impose dictatorships
and cause humanitarian catastrophes[8]. The origins
of this worldwide strategy are to be viewed in the
imperial vocation of the country and the lack of a
comparable counterpower, but also in the powerful
interests of its military industrial complex (whose
influence in imposing, for instance, the antimissile
shield is out of doubt) and in the choice of war as the
mean to overcome the increasing difficulties of its
economy and to impose restrictive internal laws,
instrumentally denouncing the dangers of an international
“terrorism” which is largely a product of the
same American politics, and is adopted instead by the US
itself and by its strict allies and protégés, like
Israel. But a basic motivation for such a strategy is
becoming the fight for direct control of the sources of
natural resources and of strategic areas and corridors,
and in particular of the deposits of natural fossil
fuels. In fact, in contrast with all arguments during
past decades on the large consistency of these supplies,
it is actually accepted that - in spite of the residual
consistence of oil pits - the extraction rate of oil and
natural gas will reach an absolute peak in the next few
years, and will begin to lower well before mid century[9]: in such a
perspective, the fight for direct military control of
these resources is becoming a vital need. It is
likely that, after Iraq, the next target will be Iran:
direct control of Iraq and Iran would in fact give the US
control of an enormous, crucial strategic area extending
from the whole Mediterranean Sea till China’s
border, including military penetration into Caucasian and
Central Asiatic countries. One should
wonder, instead, of the total submission of so many
countries, in the first place the European ones, to
Washington’s strategy, in the fallacious illusion
that the powerful ally will guarantee also their
interests. NEW NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND
PREVENTIVE ATTACK What is the
present consistency of the strategic nuclear stockpiles? Actually
there has been a consistent reduction in the number of
Russian and US strategic nuclear warheads: their actual
number is around 5,000 on each side, while full
accomplishment of the START-2 treaty would have led to
3,000 - 3,500 warheads on each side by the year 2007. The
problem is that this treaty has been refused by Russia,
after Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from the
ABM (Anti Ballistic Missile) treaty! But it is
true that the strategic arsenals of the two main nuclear
powers, built up under the strategy of dissuasion and
assured mutual destruction, were really redundant and
overestimated. The media
celebrated last June’s agreement between Bush, Jr.
and Putin to cut down the stockpiles for these warheads
to 1,700 - 2,200 on each side. In reality, though, it was
nothing but a big bluff (suffice to recall that the
warheads removed will not be destroyed, so that a total
of 4,600 US warheads, deployed or removed, will remain at
the end: without taking into account an undefined number
of tactical warheads, on which we will return later on).
While during recent years many inside the Administration
had proposed that warheads be cut back to no more than
1,500 per side, Moscow knows well that over the upcoming
years it will be able to keep barely more than one
thousand warheads in efficiency[10]. But the
real, basic problem is that Washington is completely
renovating its strategic arsenal with more efficient and
specialized new generations of warheads. Moreover,
in January of 2002 the Nuclear Posture Review and
the Defense Planning Guidance recognized the
possibility of a “preventive attack”[11], naturally
against countries belonging to the “axis of
evil,” accused of holding weapons of mass
destruction, even if they are often “made in
USA”[12]. It was not
ruled out that such an attack could be launched against
Iraq. In December, 2002, it was confirmed the United
States's willingness to retaliate with nuclear weapons
for chemical or biological attacks on U.S. soil or
against American troops overseas[13]. There are
evident preparations afoot, such as the announced
unification of the Space Command (SpaceCom),
responsible for military operations in space and the
informatics web, and the Strategic Command (StratCom),
responsible for nuclear forces[14]. The
possibility of recourse to nuclear attack is linked to
the deployment of the anti-missile shield, the effect of
which will be, as we will analyze in more detail, to
encourage a nuclear arms race and a turn to terrorist
attacks, against which the shield is absolutely useless;
to this could be added the future orbiting space
platforms equipped with high technology weapons and
capable of striking any enemy country in a matter of
minutes (compared with almost 30 minutes for an
intercontinental ballistic missile, ICBM). In fact, in
June of 2002 Washington refused a proposal made form
Russia and China at the Conference for Disarmament in
Geneva for a new treatise for the prohibition of arms
based in space[15]. On its
part, Moscow has abandoned its traditional doctrine of no
first use; the New Military Doctrine adopted a couple
of years ago explicitly allows for the possibility of a
nuclear response even to an attack with conventional
weapons “in situations seen as critical for national
security”. Peking is strengthening its nuclear and
missile arsenal (already some years ago China declared it
was capable of building a neutron bomb). Not to mention
India and Pakistan, constantly on the verge of a conflict
that could go nuclear; and Israel, ready for a nuclear
response to any attack from Iraq[16]. According to
official UN documents and the CTBT (Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty), over forty countries have nuclear
capacity[17]. We are
sitting on a nuclear powder keg, and it looks like we are
destined to think back longingly to the “balance of
terror.” Let us revise the various projects for
building new nuclear warheads. SUPER
COMPUTERS AND SIMULATION OF NUCLEAR TESTS The USA has
launched the most massive arms race in its history. One
is awed not only by the mind-boggling figures of the
military budget but also by how it as soared, from 250
billion dollars in 1999 to the present more than 400 in
the fiscal year 2003 [18] (over 40% of
the military spending of the whole planet, more than that
of the next fourteen military powers put together;
slightly less than the gross national product of India,
almost half that of Brazil, almost a third of that of
Italy; the military budget of the whole European Union is
around 150 billion dollars, although there are strong
pressures to rise it[19]). This
unleashes an increase in military spending in all
countries. In this
sky-high budget, expenditures for new weaponry are
increasing. In particular, Washington is making an
unprecedented effort to realize a new generation of
nuclear warheads. The latest, contested nuclear tests by
Chirac in 1995 were carried out on behalf of the United
States, with which Paris had stipulated a confidential
agreement for data exchange, in order to experiment with
a charge of variable strength[20]. A
mega-project to carry out virtual nuclear tests, using
the fastest super computers[21], calls for an
expenditure of sixty-seven billion dollars in
fifteen years (almost three times the cost of the
Manhattan Project or the Apollo Project). The yearly
expense of 4.5 billion dollars only for this project is
more than the 3.7 billion dollar yearly average during
the cold war. A
government laboratory has revealed the details of the
most powerful super computer in the world, the “Asci
White”[22] (Advanced
Strategic Computation Initiative), developed by IBM,
1,000 times more powerful than its predecessor,
“Deep Blue”, that won the chess world champion
Gary Kasparov: it is composed by 8192 microprocessors,
weights as 17 big elephants, its cooling system absorbs
an energy equivalent to that of 765 houses, and it
carries out 12.3 trillion operations in one second. The
simulation of a nuclear explosion, planned for
2005, requires one hundred trillion operations per
second. A second
project calls for a National Ignition Facility
(NIF) to be realized in 2003, in which 192 lasers are
supposed to simulate the heat generated by a
thermonuclear explosion; the project risks being subject
to delay and almost certainly will cost more than the
initially planned 1.2 billion dollars. As we will see,
this will be a multipurpose facility, devoted to
radically innovative nuclear projects. Miniaturized,
low-yield and highly penetrating nuclear warheads are
among the main aims of these researches. The proposal
Bush made in March of 2002 to develop a new generation of
low-yield nuclear warheads, capable of penetrating deeply
into the earth (three hundred meters of granite) before
exploding, had begun to circulate officially a couple of
years ago[23]; and
already three years ago a proposal was making the rounds
in Russia to build a new generation of mini-nukes (0.4
kilotons) for battlefield use. It is worth
noticing that the US is not alone in developing such
projects. Recently it was revealed that Great Britain too
is planning a 2 billion £ (3 billion $) project at
Aldermaston to build super-computers and develop
low-yield nuclear warheads[24]: it would be
strange if this project were not correlated with that of
the US. On its part, France is building a combined system
of a super-computer to modelize nuclear explosions plus a
giant radiographic apparatus, named Airix
(operative since September of 2000), to study the
behavior of materials exposed to an explosion, and the
biggest laser in the world, named Mégajoule, to
reproduce the physical conditions of thermonuclear
fusion: compared with the NIF, the latter will deliver an
energy of 2 million joules using the convergence of 240
laser beams on a target, and some thirty measuring
devices[25]. Everything
is being prepared to develop, test and use new nuclear
weapons under controlled conditions! NANOTECHNOLOGY, THE NEW
FRONTIER IN NUCLEAR WEAPONS Radically
innovative perspectives in nuclear weapons are open by
the new frontier field of nanotechnology - i.e., the
science of designing microscopic structures in which the
materials and their relations are machined and controlled
atom-by-atom (over distances of 10-9 m,
compared to 10-6 m in microelectronics, that
is of the order of 1,000 atoms) - and that in fact was
born a few decades ago just in nuclear weapons
laboratories. An important article by André Gsponer[26] denounces the
active development of these techniques (obviuosly
classified) in the military laboratories, with a very
large field of applications both in conventional weapons
(such as new high-performance sensors, transducers,
actuators, and electronic components) and in nuclear
weapons. Following Gsponer’s arguments, a first
field of application of nanotechnology to nuclear weapons
is to improve the existing types of warheads. Extremely
rugged and safe arming and triggering mechanisms are
necessary for nuclear weapons such as atomic artillery
shells, in which the nuclear explosive and its trigger
undergo extreme acceleration, and the crucial components
must be made as small as possible. Also the design of
warheads which would detonate after penetrating the
ground by more than tens meters requires some kind of
active penetration mechanism and implies that the nuclear
package and all components have to survive extreme
conditions of stress until the warhead is detonated. The
drive towards miniaturization of nuclear weapons and
very-low yield explosives (between a few kilograms and a
few tons of high-explosive equivalent) has become the
main advanced weapons research activity in nuclear
weapons laboratories, using gigantic tools such as the
above mentioned NIF and France's Laser Mégajoule; it was
recognized that it is easier to design a micro-fusion
than a micro-fission explosive (which has the further
advantage of producing much less radioactive fallout than
a micro-fission device of the same yield). But the
most alarrning perspectives are the applications of
nanotechnology to the development of new types of nuclear
explosives, i.e. a fourth-generation of nuclear weapons[27], that can be
developed in full compliance with the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty (CTBT) using inertial confinement fusion (ICF)
facilities such as the NIF or Mégajoule, and
other advanced technologies which are under active
development in all the major nuclear-weapon states and in
major industrial powers such as Germany and Japan. It is
interesting to follow Gsponer’s arguments: “in
a nutshell, the defining technical characteristic of
fourth-generation nuclear weapons is the triggering - by
some advanced technology such as a superlaser[28], magnetic
compression, antimatter, etc. - of a relatively small
thermonuclear explosion in which a deuterium-tritium
mixture is burnt in a device whose weight and size are
not much larger than a few kilograms and liters. Since
the yield of these warheads could go from a fraction of a
ton to many tens of tons of high-explosive equivalent[29], their delivery
by precision-guided munitions or other means will
dramatically increase the fire-power of those who possess
them - without crossing the threshold of using
kiloton-to-megaton nuclear weapons, and therefore without
breaking the taboo against the first-use of weapons of
mass destruction. Moreover, since these new weapons will
use no (or very little) fissionable materials, they will
produce virtually no radioactive fallout. Their
proponents will define them as "clean" nuclear
weapons - and possibly draw a parallel between their
battlefield use and the consequences of the expenditure
of DU ammunition”[30]. It is just
this consideration, if true, that poses problems with
reference to the known nuclear fission and fusion
processes: in fact, since the first one needs a critical
mass of the order of kilograms, and the second one the
production of a temperature of a million degrees, as can
be actually generated by a fission explosion, it follows
that a nuclear warhead must have a minimum yield, of the
order of kilotons, that is much higher than that reported
for the new “mini-nukes”. It seems highly
believable, therefore, that some new process or mechanism
has been discovered and applied in order to conceive, or
realize such “micro-nukes”: if President Bush
Jr. has authorized their development, it is highly
probable that they have been tested, or already
developed. Gsponer refers to the possible use of a
superlaser to trigger a small fusion process: however we
have already discussed the enormous complexity and
dimensions of such facilities, like the NIF or Mégajoule,
conceived to reproduce the conditions of a thermonuclear
explosion. Moreover, even if the superlaser existed, how
could it fit into a miniaturized warhead? Which moreover
should resist extreme accelerations and stress
conditions! It seems
more plausible that some new kind of nuclear process has
been discovered and developed in condensed matter,
igniting spontaneously the fissile or fusion
“explosive”. Which kind of process is difficult
to say, since these investigations are absolutely top
secret. It could have nothing to do with DU; or instead
it could just be some previously unknown process inside
it. Probably it is only fantasy, but it could explain
much better the effects of the DU munitions: in such a
case, their “mechanism” en explosion would be
quite different than is actually supposed. If
confirmed, these hypotheses would imply that the wars
fought in the last decade already were true nuclear wars,
as would be also the next war to Iraq. As a matter of
fact, the White House has confirmed in December of 2002
to explicitly foresee the use of nuclear weapons when and
were it considers it convenient, without excluding the
war to Iraq: what would be the advantage of using in such
a battlefield, in a country that should be militarily
occupied, nuclear warheads as powerful as some thousand
tons of equivalent explosive? RESUMPTION OF NUCLEAR TESTS? But the
alarming perspectives related with nuclear weapons do not
stop here. In the US in fact, above all under the new
Bush administration, the opinion is gaining strength to
never ratify the CTBT, which forbids underground nuclear
testing (those in the atmosphere were prevented since
1963), and indeed to leave the door open for their
resumption. For years
underground, sub-critical nuclear tests with plutonium
have been carried out in Nevada, at Los Alamos, and at
the Livermore Laboratory (the 18th of such tests was
performed in October 2002), while the secret Appaloosa
program calls for natural-scale simulations of nuclear
explosions on the surface using plutonium 242 as a
surrogate for military plutonium[31]. However,
there is increasing pressure for real nuclear tests to be
resumed, especially to develop the new, low-yield
warheads. The Assistant Secretary of Defense, Wolfowitz,
has spoken of circumstances in which nuclear tests
“should be contemplated”[32]. The Bush
administration has asked nuclear warhead scholars to
examine the possibility of quickly resuming underground
nuclear explosions in the Nevada desert, if the
government should decide to put an end to the
eleven-year-old moratorium on testing[33], and has
reduced financing for non proliferation programs,
including aid to Russia. In Russia
many scientists are frustrated by the ban on nuclear
testing, which they respect while Washington rejects the
CTBT and updates its arsenal. Moscow too carries out
sub-critical nuclear tests in Novaya Zemlya[34] and the CIA has
made it known that it is unable to monitor possible
Russian low-intensity tests with sufficient precision to
guarantee respect of the CTBT[35], thus giving
the opponents of ratification a further argument. China,
meanwhile, carries out sub-critical nuclear tests (a few
years ago it bought containment devices from Russia to
mask the seismic effects of a nuclear explosion). Behind
the collision of the American spy-plane Ep-3e with a
Chinese interceptor (April 2001) there was the intention
of checking whether Peking was preparing for a nuclear
test in the Lop Nur proving grounds[36]. Some years ago
China acquired from Russia the containment apparatus
devised to mask the seismic effects of a nuclear
explosion. France too
is carrying out sub-critical nuclear tests. So that the
nuclear testing activity is already proliferating all
around the world. THE RISK OF
"ERRORS" (OR MISUSE?) MOUNTS A further
factor of tension and danger is that Washington continues
to maintain over 2,000 strategic warheads on constant
alert, on “launch by warning”, and aimed at
“enemy” targets[37], almost five
hundred in the Moscow area alone. This increases the risk
of a launching by mistake (in 1995 Moscow mistook an
experimental rocket launched by Norway for a strategic
ballistic missile; the reprisal was stopped at the last
moment, when Eltsin’s “briefcase” was
already being opened). The most
serious problem is that not only the strategic arsenal
but also the Russian alarm system is decrepit and
“blind” for part of the day: several warning
satellites are already extinguished, but the majority of
them are at the end of their operative life.
Paradoxically, the danger in Russia comes more from her
weakness than her strength. Last but
not least, one more alarming proposal is emerging: that
of loading the interceptor missiles of the antimissile
shield with a nuclear warhead, in order to be sure of
destroying all the incoming weapons, without the need of
distinguishing them from decoys[38]. A similar
proposal had been discarded in the seventies, in a system
known as Safeguard, since a nuclear explosion to
destroy incoming Soviet ICBM could blind US sensors and
warning satellites, so increasing the possibility that a
second wave of missiles hit their targets. Today,
however, Washington is concentrated on the threat of a
very limited number of missiles launched by a “rogue
state” or terrorists: since the missile defenses
would not be ready until 2005, the nuclear alternative
could gain ground. Detractors of this proposal argue that
if the intercepting nuclear charge is too small, some
chemical or biological warheads could spread their
content: on the contrary, a most powerful explosion would
damage the military and commercial satellites all around
the earth. ANTI-MISSILE SHIELD AND
PROLIFERATION The
deployment of the anti-missile shield will have serious
destabilizing consequences. The National Missile
Defense (NMD) project is the best known, but the Bush
Administration is working for the fulfillment of a layered
defense, consisting in many complementary types of
anti-missile defenses, in order to attack an incoming
missile in many ways: this system takes on again many
aspects of Reagan’s 1983 “Star Wars”
project. It is worth
recalling that the flight of a ballistic missile is
composed of three different phases: the boost phase, the
phase of inertial flight outside the dense layers of the
atmosphere, and the phase of reentry in the atmosphere.
During the boost phase it would be easier to intercept
the missile, since it moves slower and the engines are
burning: but time is very short, and an intercepting
system very near the attacking country would be needed.
The problem of missile defense is extremely complex and
difficult. The possible attacks are not limited to
intercontinental ballistic missiles, but include the
warheads for the battlefield, cruise missiles, besides
possible missile attacks offshore. There are many
efficient and economic countermeasures, such as decoys or
false warheads (this is one of the main problems
encountered in the tests of the NMD). Last but not least,
the shield is ineffective against terrorist attacks
performed with different means. The NMD is
only one of the eight main programs being experimented
(out of no less than twenty), with costs (probably
underestimated) that will run over 115 billion dollars[39]. The vital eye
of the system are the System-Low-the-missile-warning
and the infrared rays satellites to follow the
trajectory. The Navy has two projects: the Navy Area
Theater Ballistic Missile Defense, and the Navy
Theater Wide. Also the Army has two projects: the
THAAD (Theater High Altitude Area Defense: a land
based system that should protect the troops deployed
oversee by theater missiles) and the system Patriot
PAC-3. There are then two projects of the Air Force: the Airborne
Laser (transported by a Boeing 747-400, should
destroy the missiles during the ascent, at a distance of
no more than 400 km) and the Space Based Laser
(based instead in space). The overall costs (probably
underestimated, in particular for the expenses during the
life cycle of the systems, estimated around 20 years)
overcome the mind-boggling sum of 115 billion dollars[40], see the Table.
Table
(data 2001)
The Ballistic
Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) foresee
simultaneous research in the various areas. The
Administration pushes to accelerate the projects, so that
some may become operative at the end of Bush’
mandate (2004), asking the Congress additional founds.
The state of the projects is in continuous evolution and
the situation is fluid. Some of the news that circulated
in the last year are the following. The Navy’s
program of tactical defense Navy Area encountered
technical difficulties and its deployment is foreseen
with a 20 months delay with respect to the forecast date
of December 2003. The THAAD is foreseen for 2007, but
could be anticipated of one or two years[41]. The Airborne
Laser is foreseen for 2008, but its deployment could
be anticipated (though some news report that it must be
redesigned, since it results too heavy). Some sea based
systems could be deployed by 2005. Test of the Space
Based Laser is foreseen by 2012 and should cost $ 4
billion. In the
fiscal 2003 defense appropriations bill, President Bush
scored a major victory on NMD, getting $7.4 billion and
making it all but certain that a group of interceptor
rockets soon will be deployed in Alaska[42]: on December
2002, in fact, Bush decided to anticipate the deployment
of the first intercepting missiles to 2004[43] (10
ground-based interceptor missiles at Fort Greeley, and an
additional 10 interceptors by 2005 or 2006: preparatory
construction at Fort Greeley began in June of 2002, and
other elements of the missile-defense test site will be
built beginning in 2003). “Bush´s success came
without much of the ideological turmoil that has
accompanied past missile defense decisions: these days,
the bigger fights are over which programs should win a
piece of the generous missile defense pie. (...) By
refusing to commit itself to a specific missile defense
“architecture”, the administration appears to
be keeping its options open to see which approaches are
most promising. (...) One casualty of this approach is
the effort to develop orbiting satellites armed with
lasers that could take out a missile in its
"boost-phase””[44]. But the
projects don’t end here. In fact there are more of
the Army, the Tactical High Energy Laser, the
mobile protection for troops Medium Extended Air
Defense; then two programs developed on behalf of
Israel, the Theater defense Arrow program (tested
in the joint military maneuvers Us, Israel, Turkey in
June 21, 2001), and the anti-rocket laser. Moreover there
are the system of warning satellites SBIRS-High
(8.2 billion dollars are foresee only for research and
development, more 2.4 billion dollars of support), the
Navy’s network of management of the field Cooperative
Engagement Capability, and several more collateral
projects. The US Missile defence plans also call for
deploying three warships equipped with the Aegis battle
management system and SM-3 interceptor missiles, to deal
with short-range and medium-range missiles. These
projects, moreover, are against ballistic missiles, but
the militaries denounce the lack of defenses against cruise
missiles (that are said will incorporate stealth
capacities in the future): however, systems are being
tested with this task[45]. The project
of missile defense has several serious consequences, that
are already becoming manifest. It is already unleashing
further arms races. In fact, any anti-missile system has
a limited effectiveness[46] and can be
effectively contrasted by a series of countermeasures.
One of them is to saturate it, increasing the number of
missiles or/and warheads in a nuclear attack. The new
Russian ballistic missile Topol-M (SS-27) seems to have a
maneuverability in the phase of reentry into the
atmosphere which would allow it to get around the
anti-missile defense[47]. With
Washington’s abandonment of the ABM treaty, Moscow
declared that it no longer recognized the START treaties:
so Moscow’s most effective choice might be to mount
multiple warheads (MIRV), banned by the treaty, on the
new missiles. Without counting that so far no defenses
against the Cruise missiles being perfected by Moscow are
available, although they are under experimentation. Last
year Russia conducted a test on a new, high-speed,
intercontinental cruising missile (SS-25) in three stages
plus a post-boost vehicle containing the warhead, which
consists in a high-speed cruising missile that flies in
the atmosphere to get above anti-missile defenses[48]. In the
meantime, Moscow plans to extend the operational range of
the old, intercontinental missiles SS-19, which can be
armed with six nuclear warheads. The MIT
scientist Ted Postol criticizes the anti-missile shield
in sharp opposition to the administration: he has
denounced, among other things, the danger that warheads
struck during the boost phase might fall in Europe,
Canada, or Central America. It has also been denounced
the risk that the interception of a nuclear warhead by a
laser could be no less disastrous than the explosion of
the warhead, with the difference that the victims would
be different from those foreseen if the missile should
strike its target[49]. CHEMICAL WEAPONS But the
nuclear risk today extends to all the weapons of mass
destruction. The Convention
on chemical weapons was signed in 1997 and ratified
by 120 countries, but the USA is in violation for not
having passed legislation to apply it or regulations for
inspection of its chemical industries. Consequently, also
Germany and Japan are hindering verification. Last April,
the Bush administration rudely demanded the sacking of
the Brazilian diplomat Bustani as General Director of the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on
account of his initiatives, not coordinated with
Washington, among them the attempt to persuade Iraq to
join the organization: on July 26 the Argentine diplomat
Pfirter, evidently more lined up, was appointed in his
place. There is
little chance the expiration date of 2012 established for
the elimination of chemical weapons will be honored. The
USA has destroyed one fourth (7,000 tons) of its arsenal,
while Russia would need five billion dollars to destroy
its forty thousand tons[50]. It seems
likely that at the very least the US used aggressive
hallucinogens in the 1991 Gulf War[51]. Washington is
moreover supporting the position of licit use of
incapacitant chemical arms: “The US support the
position that their use to control war prisoners and
civil disorders does not constitute a war method and
therefore does not fall under the Convention”[52]. It is highly
probable that such a position extends to
“terrorists”, since the Taliban prisoners in
Guantanamo are not considered by them as war prisoners. BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS Still more
serious is the situation regarding the Convention on
Biological Weapons of 1972. Bacteriological
weapons constitute in fact the most alarming case, since
techniques that have become standard (functional to the
interests of food multinationals seeking to monopolize
the world market with genetically modified organisms)
allow even a terrorist group with a relatively modest
laboratory to modify the genetic code of a micro-organism
normally living in the human body or agricultural plants,
in such a way that it will produce lethal toxins (the USA
has repeatedly attacked Cuba with aggressive chemicals,
damaging agriculture and animal farming). Although
the 1972 Convention has been ratified by 143 states
(including all the main military powers), it contains no
mechanism for verification. Last year Washington, with
its usual arrogance, scuppered the agreement forged at
great effort in Geneva for an inspection protocol, since
“it would set at risk national security and
confidential information,” i.e., the affairs of the
biotechnological industries[53]. Recently the
existence of a laboratory has been revealed in the Nevada
desert where, in violation of the 1972 Convention, lethal
biological agents are produced using genetic engineering,
under the pretext of carrying out simulations to reduce
the threat. Actually it is a secret research program on
biological weapons[54]: in any case,
the bare production of biological weapons violates the
Convention. Indeed, the case of the anthrax letters has
to due with a trail within the US … Even worse,
the US and UK have been reported[55] of being
developing a new generation of biological weapons that,
as for the new generation of nuclear warheads, would
undermine and possibly violate international treaties on
biological and chemical warfare: the Pentagon, with the
help of the British military, is working on
“non-lethal” weapons similar to the narcotic
gas used by Russian forces to end the siege of terrorists
in Moscow. The US is encouraging a breakdown in arms
control by its research into biological cluster bombs,
anthrax and non-lethal weapons for use against hostile
crowds, and by the secrecy under which these programs are
being conducted. The US argue that the research work is
being done for defensive purposes, but its legality under
the Biological Weapons Convention is highly questionable.
Furthermore, signatories of the Convention agreed to make
annual declarations about their biodefence programs, but
the US never mentioned any of those programs in its
reports. According with a recent analysis[56], British and US
research on hallucinogenic weapons encouraged Iraq to
look into similar agents, and showed it the way. The
programs referred to above are: 1.
CIA effort to copy a Soviet cluster bomb designed to
disperse biological weapons; 2.
a project by the Pentagon to build a bio-weapon from
commercially available materials to prove that terrorists
could do the same thing; 3.
research by the Defense Intelligence Agency into the
possibility of genetically engineering a new strain of
antibiotic-resistant anthrax; 4.
a program to produce dried and weaponized anthrax spores. It could be
recalled that recently the US accused Cuba (against which
they have delivered biological attacks) of being
developing chemical and biological weapons. In order to
justify the development of new weapons, new enemies and
threats must continuously be found; or … invented. In the
meantime, the paranoia for a bacteriological attack is
widespreading, alimented by the administration: at the
end of 2002 a massive vaccination campaign against
smallpox for security reasons was announced[57], starting with military
personnel, health care and emergency workers, and
offering then immunization to the public on a voluntary
basis starting in 2004. Government officials have
estimated that about 500,000 military personnel and
500,000 civilians would be covered by the plan's initial
phases; eventually as many as 10 million people involved
in law enforcement, health care and emergency response
could be offered the vaccine. Opposition to wide use of
smallpox vaccine however bubbles up from three
wellsprings, psychological, medical and sociological[58]. MODIFYING THE WEATHER:
METEOROLOGICAL AND ECOLOGICAL WARFARE But the
spasmodic search for new warfare methods seems endless!
Actually, both the Americans and the Russians have
developed capabilities to manipulate weather conditions
for war purposes[59]: Kyoto
Protocol indeed! In the US,
the new technology is being perfected under the High-frequency
Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) as part of the Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI, “Star Wars”)[60]: it is a system
of powerful antennas based in Gokona, Alaska, jointly
managed by the US Air Force and the US Navy. Recent
scientific evidence suggests that the HAARP is fully
operational and has the ability of potentially triggering
floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes, through the
diversion of vapor flows in the earth’s atmosphere
or triggering of atmospheric disturbances by using
extremely low frequency electromagnetic waves. From a
military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass
destruction, as is capable of selectively destabilizing
agricultural and ecological systems of entire regions. HIGH-TECHNOLOGY
CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS BASED IN SPACE To further
complicate this scenario, there is the growing role and
ever more destabilizing effect of high-technology,
high-precision conventional weapons that are being
frenetically developed by the US. Although these weapons
are not strictly arms of mass destruction, they are
assuming increasingly subtle, powerful and devastating
effects, and are increasingly interlacing with the
dangers of mass destruction warfare, and superposing with
some of the effects and purposes of nuclear weapons. It
must be stressed that wars are occasions to test new
wapons. In this exasperated evolution a crucial role is
played by the powerful industrial military complex of the
US. One of the
latest novelties in this field should be a new weapon
that Washington is anxious to experiment in the assault
on Iraq: a high-power microwave weapon that is supposed
to knock out the electronic components and informatics
systems[61], to be used
together with a massive employment of unmanned aircraft,
tested successfully in the war in Yugoslavia. Another
case are futuristic laser weapons under development by
the U.S. military, that are making the transition from
fodder for science fiction to reality and could soon be
ready to play a major role in protecting troops on the
battlefields of the 21st century: successful test firings
have become routine for the Zeus, which zaps unexploded
mines and bombs, and the Mobil Tactical High-Energy
Laser, MTHEL, a joint American-Israeli weapon designed to
swat down small short-range rockets and even artillery
shells in mid-air[62]. Actually the
new BLU-118/B should be mentioned, an “bunker
buster” weapon that can plow deep into the ground
before detonating[63]: already given
a test run this year in an attack on a suspected Qaeda
cave in Afghanistan, the bunker buster may become one of
the key weapons in an attack on Saddam Hussein's regime. Other
countries feel they are cut out of the competition in
this field and see the unchallenged supremacy of the USA
rising terribly[64]. These
concerns are greatly intensified by another aspect of US
paranoia: the US thinks that its supremacy in space is on
the decline and that this puts its security at risk. The
strategic proposals for the future (Joint Vision 2010,
SpaceCom 2020) fondly aim at re-conquering
hegemony in space with a "full range dominion"
based on a digital system made up of spy satellites,
alarms, and command/control missile defenses, and
space-based weapons, so as to be able to strike any point
on the planet in a few minutes (as against the twenty to
thirty minutes required by ballistic missiles).
Washington is studying a “space bomber,” i.e.,
a “sub-orbital vehicle” launched from an
airplane at a speed fifteen times greater than that of
present bombers, capable, from an altitude of sixty
miles, of destroying targets on the other side of the
planet in just thirty minutes’ time[65]. This would
amount to a new escalation, a new kind of stratospheric
war. This
paranoia fuels an uncontrollable spiral. The new
conventional weapons compromise any chance of strategic
stability. The only choice left to other countries is to
seek to rebalance the situation by relying on
technologically less sophisticated weapons of mass
destruction, strengthening the nuclear deterrent, taking
into account the possible recourse to any military means,
from chemical and biological weapons to ecological war,
guerrilla warfare, and terrorism (being then harshly
denounced by Washington for that). “Cyber-War”, THE
NEW FRONTIER But the
spine-chilling scenarios of technological war go still
farther. During the war in the Balkans “the United
States, with maximum secrecy, activated a super-weapon
that catapulted the country into a new military era that
could change forever the methods of war. Secretly, the
American forces launched a “cyber-combat”
offensive[66], scrambling the
command/control network of the Yugoslav army, knocking
out the integrated air-defense computers, inserting
deceptive messages, perhaps even disturbing the telephone
network, to induce the Yugoslav commands to communicate
by cellular phone, the transmissions of which can easily
be intercepted. According
to the experts, false data can be implanted in enemy
computers, memory banks can be wiped out, viruses
inserted, and even the weapons systems of the enemy can
be modified (e.g., reprogramming an enemy Cruise missile
so that it will reverse its course and return to the ship
or plane that launched it), or else the voice of a
president or commander can be faked, having him issue
suicidal orders to the troops. News was spread of a
British invention that could use existing mobile phone
antennas to locate stealth planes, invisible to radar[67]. The line
between military and non military objectives becomes
fuzzier and fuzzier; the legal and ethical limits are
subtle, also on account of the clear threats against the
civil population. It is
thought that at present twenty-three countries possess
capacities in this field (among them India, Siria, and
Iran). In January 1999 identification was made of an
attack by the Indonesian government against the provider
of an Irish internet provider, which hosted a site
demanding independence for East Timor. Between January
and March Russian hackers broke into the Pentagon’s
informatics network, apparently looking for naval codes
and missile guidance data. Then there was an attack by
China on a network of Washington web sites, which were
put out of service three times. Of course it is very hard
to distinguish isolated hackers from those acting on
behalf of enemy countries. During 2000 some 413 intruders
broke into military networks. The
Pentagon – which calls this sector “Information
Warfare” (IW) – has set up a new military
center in the base area of Peterson, in Colorado Springs,
under the above-mentioned Air Force Space Command, to
manage the forces of cyberwarfare, a space Battalion, a
Mobile Technology Team, and a Space Defense Laboratory,
with the task of coordinating both the defense of the
military informatics network from outside threats and
offensive actions. In fact “computer weapons”
offensives are also being studied[68].
[1] Prof. Gordon Poole, of the University “Federico II” of Napoli, kindly translated into English a previous, abridged version of this paper. The present is in fact an updated and extended version (up to December, 2002) of a research started some years ago [see: Giano, n. 33, May-August 1999, p. 33; Guerre e Pace, n. 93, October 2002; Il Manifesto Rivista, November 2002]. I must say that at every revision the situation appears much worse and more worrying! [2] Department of Physics, University of Florence, Italy; e-mail: baracca@fi.infn.it [3] I must
thank my colleague Emilio Del Giudice, of the INFN of
Milan, for this remark and for discussion of related
aspects.
Let me briefly recall some basic notions. In Fission
a heavy nucleus (uranium-235, plutonium-239) absorbs a
neutron, and breaks into two lighter nuclei, emitting
energy plus 2 to 3 neutrons: the latter may break more
nuclei, triggering a chain reaction, if they do
not escape from the fissile material. The critical
mass is just the minimum mass of fissile material for
which the chain reaction may sustain. Its value depends
from many factors - for instance, the trigger
configuration and mechanism (classified) - but cannot be
reduced at will. In Fusion two light nuclei join together, emitting energy: this process may take place only if the two nuclei approach at extremely short distance, exceeding the barrier of the electric repulsion. This occurs at temperatures of the order of a million degrees: This situation is common inside the stars, but is generated by a fission explosion in a thermonuclear weapon, which is therefore a fission-fusion bomb. [4] Recent data
on Pancevo are highly preoccupying, see e.g.: “Long
term environmental and health effects”,
<www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/11/11052002/ap_48881.asp>. On the other hand, cluster bombs caused numerous victims even after the bombing was over (as we will see, they are being adapted to biological weapons). It has been argued that the chemical products used in Latin America to destroy the coca crops are really a sort of chemical weapons. [5] The fissile isotope of uranium (U-235, containing 235 protons+neutrons) is only the 0,7 % in natural uranium. For military use uranium must be highly enriched, leaving a component which is "depleted" of U-235, and is composed almost exclusively by U-238, an isotope which is radioactive and decays emitting an alpha particle (a nucleus of Helium). It seems certain, however, that in weapons also uranium from exhausted fuel is used: however cleaned in the retreatment process, this may be dirt, containing residues of fission products and plutonium. [6] Weapons
of mass destruction cause sudden death or destruction
in target areas, some with long term or widespread
effects. Weapons of indiscriminate effect cause
widespread or long lasting contamination liable to cause
injury, chronic illness, slow death or severe birth
defects. Both are outlawed in the 1st Protocol of the
Geneva Conventions.
It is worth recalling here the study of Rosalie Bertell
on the overall effects of radioactivity on the world
population, concluding that “Up to 1.300 million
people have been killed, maimed or diseased by nuclear
power since its inception”; she analizes and
criticizes moreover the reasons why the official criteria
deeply undervalue these numbers: Rosalie Bertell, “
Victims of the nuclear age”, The Ecologist,
November 1999, pp. 408-411
(<www.ratical.org/radiation/NAvictims.html>).
Reports identify 21 weapon systems suspected of using
Uranium warheads ranging from Bunker Busters and Cruise
Missiles to Cluster bombs; there are also reports of the
use of 2 ton GBU-28 Bunker Buster guided bombs, suspected
of carrying 1000-1500 kg of Uranium per warhead.
A new concern has been raised about a new breed of
uranium weapons using standard, non-depleted uranium
(i.e., having the same isotopic mix as natural uranium)
in the warhead components: if used in large, explosive
"hard target" warheads (up to 1500 kg) it will
create levels of radioactive contamination 100 times
higher and more widespread than the DU anti-tank
"penetrators" used in the Gulf War.
Use of DU munitions in Iraq and the Balkans is certain,
and its consequences are denounced, although covered by
silence by the media.
In what concerns Afghanistan, although it is not proven,
new reports highlight growing concerns that the US
bombardments may have used over 1000 tons of Uranium
warheads with potentially disastrous consequences for
Afghan civilians and posing serious health risks to
troops and expatriates who were exposed to the
bombardments or contaminated areas (see the Reuter's
Health website at
<http://www.reutershealth.com/en/index.html> and
search "Afghanistan"). Current data of
biological samples from Kandahar, Kabul, and Jalalabad
obtained by state of the art mass spectrometry analysis
confirm over 100 times higher concentration of uranium
isotopes in the biological specimens as compared with the
control group. Very high levels of maternal
mortality in Afghanistan have been reported in two recent
studies: the first one from the American Medical
Association (September, 2002), at
http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v288n10/ffull/jlf20033.html;
and the latest from the CDC / UNICEF study for the Afghan
Ministry of Health, at
<http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_10239.html>
(November 6, 2002: the researchers who did these studies
were unaware of suspected Uranium hazards and did not
report on the health of the infants who died unborn, or
survived maternal mortality; post-mortem examinations
were not reported). There have also been several lethal
epidemics of "mystery illnesses" this year in
Afghanistan. For background on the weapons systems used
in Afghanistan suspected of containing Uranium warheads
and potential health hazards for civilians and troops
see: “Depleted Uranium weapons 2001-2002: Mystery
Metal Nightmare in Afghanistan”, 31 January 2002, at
<http://www.eoslifework.co.uk/du2012.htm> (+
PDF copy of full report); and “Hazards of Uranium
Weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq”, 23 October 2002,
at: <http://www.eoslifework.co.uk/u232.htm> (plus
linked files). For the latest assessment (November 13,
2002) by Prof. Marc Herold see
<http://www.cursor.org/stories/uranium.htm> (this
contains some errors about details of the weapons and
asserts that Uranium weapons have been used). About the next war to Iraq, there are estimates that over 1500 tons of Uranium dust could be added to the Iraq environment, 5 times more than acknowledged in the Gulf War in 1991: this would threaten a major increase in the existing epidemic of cancers and birth defects that has developed into a humanitarian disaster in Iraq and multiple health problems for Gulf War veterans. [7] See Jean-Marie Benjamin, 1999 - Iraq, l’Apocalypse, Editions Favre SA, Lausanne, Swizerland. [8] In its increasing “terrorist” paranoia, the Pentagon is also developing the largest expansion of covert action by the armed forces around the world since the Vietnam era, see William M. Arkin, “The secret war”, Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2002: “The Defense Department is building up an elite secret army with resources stretching across the full spectrum of covert capabilities. New organizations are being created. The missions of existing units are being revised. Spy planes and ships are being assigned new missions in anti-terror and monitoring the “axis of evil””. [9] See for instance several Internet sites, like: <www.petroconsultants.com/iwatch/index.html>; <www.dieoff.com>; <www.iea.org/g8/world/oilsup.htm>. It is worth noticing that the decline of the extraction rate of fossil fuels is not due to exhaustion of the pits: well before the exhaustion of a pit, the energy required for oil extraction overcomes the energy content of oil itself. [10] An uncertainty and a delicate aspect in the computation of the consistency of the stockpiles is given by the tactical warheads, that were removed from deployment (but not dismanteled) at the end of the decade of the eighties by the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) treaty, but are not covered by the START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties). The exact number of Russian tactical warheads is not known, but is estimated on the order of thousands. Given the difficulty of getting funding for new warheads, the proposal was made to keep them operative as a component of the nuclear deterrent (the Russian army has carried out drills simulating the use of tactical warheads). On this the US position is not clear, since (besides having too tactical nuclear warheads) it maintains gravity bombs in Europe that are still one of the mainstays of its Atlantic bonds. Declassified documents have revealed that in past decades the USA introduced nuclear weapons without informing the host countries (among these Japan, whose constitution explicitly forbids such weapons on Japanese soil). [11] Los Angeles Times, July 13 and 14, 2002; Global Security Newswire, July 15, 2002; US News, July 15, 2002. Also NATO, that was always dominated by the US, seems to be adopting a similar strategy: Adam Tanner, “NATO says could launch pre-emptive strikes”, Swiss radio International, November 2, 2002. [12] A
shocking essay of Dominique Lorentz, Affaires
Nucleaires, Paris, Les Arénes, 2001, documents the
proliferation policy leaded by the White House all along
the post-war mid century, either directly or, more often
(in order to circumvent the prohibitions by federal laws,
or parliamentary control), through intermediaries, mainly
France, Israel, Germany, or Argentina, India, Pakistan,
and so on. “Civil” nuclear programs have been
the common way to introduce military programs, since in
most cases they included enrichment and/or retreatment
plants: in fact, many of the concerned countries were far
from suffering any energy shortcut!
France and Germany were involved in Iraq’s nuclear
program: Israel sabotaged the “Osirak” reactor
while it still was in France, and later bombarded the
Tamouz site, in which it was being built up. During the
bloody and forgotten Iraq-Iran war in the eighties -
instrumentally encouraged and supported by the US against
the Ayatollah’s regime, that they had imposed in
order to dismiss the Shah (history repeats!) - Washington
supplemented Baghdad with both chemical and biological
warfare know-how (and obviously knew and approved their
use against both Iran and Curds).
Washington’s international affairs have often turned
against themselves, as in the cases of Saddam Hussein, or
of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The Iranian nuclear program was supported directly by the
US under the Shah regime, and later by France and
Germany. Teheran has a 10 % participation in the
“Eurodif” European uranium enrichment program:
the true beginning of the bloody Islamic Jihad’s
terrorism was during the eighties, when Paris (and
Washington) tried to cut this participation, till when it
was officially confirmed in 1991. It seems that some of
the 1998 Pakistan’s nuclear tests really tested
Iranian warheads (the same done for Israel in the
parallel Indian tests). Moscow is actually involved in
the Iranian nuclear programs, for the completion of the
Busher’s plant (in which also Germany was previously
involved). The New York Times (November 25, 2002) has denounced Pakistan’s support of North Korea’s nuclear program, after the support given by North Korean to the Pakistan’s missile program: in spite of the strong denial by part of President Musharraf, it’s highly believable that all the history is true, and is the cue of the past maneuvers guided by the US. [13] Mike Allen and Barton Gellman, “Preemptive Strikes Part Of Strategy, Officials Say”, Washington Post, December 11, 2002 Pg. 1. [14] Reuters, June 25, 2002; Manlio Dinucci, il manifesto, June 17, 2002. [15] Associated Press, June 27, 2002. [16] Recently Israel has equipped with cruise missiles with nuclear warheads three conventional submarines bought from Germany. [17] See for
instance the cited Dominique Lorentz’s essay. These
countries are: Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria,
Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile,
China, Colombia, Congo, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany,
Holland, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy,
Japan, Mexico, North Korea, Norway, Pakistan, Peru,
Poland, Rumania, Russia, Slovak, South Africa, South
Korea, Spain, Sweden. Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine,
United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam. There are countries, like Germany and Japan, that do not hold nuclear warheads, but possess the know-how and capacity to build them, since they have done it for and in other countries. [18] Moreover,
the enormous cost of a war to Iraq is not included in
this budget, but will be covered as emergency expenses.
The former director of the Office for Administration and
Budget, Lawrence Lindsey, was strongly criticized and
subsequently expelled from the administration for having
foreseen a war expense between 100 and 200 billion
dollars. His successor, Mitchell Daniels, has lowered
this forecast to 60 to 90 billion dollars. However, such
a sum does not include neither the expenses for a long
military occupation nor those for reconstruction. The
costs of the 1991 Gulf War were around 80 billion
dollars, but did not comprise a military occupation, and
were largely assumed by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Japan. Seumour Melman, professor emeritus of the Columbia University, is denouncing since many years the massive military overspending in the federal budget and its effect of de-industrializing the country, costing millions of jobs and starving the investment in public work. In a recent memorandum, called “The Pentagon connection”, he recounts the massive redundancy and costliness of various weapon systems, such as the next wave of fighter planes, missiles, submarines and aircraft carriers. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that one and a third trillion dollars are required for the repair of twelve categories of public works. See Ralph Nader, “The Pentagon connection”, January 17, 2003, <http://commondreams.org/>. [19] Chirac has increased in 6 % the French military budget, and has proposed that military expenses do not be comprised in the Pact of Stability of the European Union. [20] Dominique Lorentz, cit., pp. 567-8. [21] Christopher E. Paine, Scientific American, September 1999; John Barry, Newsweek, August 20, 2001. [22] Reuters, August 16, 2001. [23] Fas Public Interest Report, January/February 2001, Vol. 54, no. 1. Ben MacIntire, The Times, April 16, 2001; Julian Borger, The Guardian, April 18, 2001. [24] The Guardian, June 18, 2002. [25] A detailed description is given by Luc Allemand, “Mégajoule: le plus gros laser du monde”, La Recherche, No. 360, January 2003, pp. 60-67. It seems interesting to notice that the Comissariat à l’Énergie Atomique is developing an operation of “seduction” towards the civil physicists announcing that the facility will be devoted in part to civil researches. [26] André Gsponer, “From the Lab to the Battlefield? Nanotechnology and Fourth-Generation Nuclear Weapons”, Disarmament Diplomacy, No. 67, October-November 2002; see: <www.acronym.org.uk/dd/dd67/67op1.htm>. [27] First- and second-generation nuclear weapons are atomic and hydrogen bombs developed during the 1940s and 1950s, while third-generation weapons comprise a number of concepts developed between the 1960s and 1980s, e.g. the neutron bomb, which never found a permanent place in the military arsenals. [28] The 'superlaser' provides a factor of one million increase in the instantaneous power of tabletop lasers, and is possibly the most significant recent advance in military technology; photons can be concentrated in unlimited numbers so that a very localized and brief light pulse can contain huge amounts of energy - so large that a table-top superlaser can initiate nuclear reactions such as fission or fusion. This increase in power is of the same magnitude as the factor of one million difference in energy density between chemical and nuclear energy. [29] Compared with usual warheads powers expressed in kilotons or megatons, respectively one thousand and one million tons of high-explosive equivalent. [30] André Gsponer, cit. See a study on the radiological aspects of fourth-generation nuclear weapons in : http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0210071 [31] <http://www.lasg.org/appaloos/appaloos.htm> [32] Richard Butler, New York Times, July 13, 2001. [33] Knight Ridder, Tribune News Service, June 28, 2001. [34] Washington Times, September 15, 1999; albeit the minister for Atomic Energy denied it (Itar Tass, September 16, 1999). [35] Washington Post, October 3, 1999, p. A01. [36] Bill Gertz, Washington Times, April 9¸2001. That the sub-critical test was carried out would seem to have later been confirmed: Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, Washington Times, June 6, 2001. [37] Walter Pincus, Washington Post, June 20, 2001, p. 8. Maintaining this state of alert costs the Pentagon some twenty billion dollars a year. In recent years the number of strategic targets in Russia has actually increased. [38] Daniel G. Dupont, “Nuclear reactions”, Scientific American, September 2002. [39] John M. Donnely, Defence Week, April 2, 2001 [40] John M. Donnely, cit. [41] M. Selinger, Aerospace Daily, 14.06.2001. [42] Pat Towell, “Bush’s missile defense victory signifies changing times”, Congressional Quarterly Weekly, October 26, 2002. [43] Bill Gertz, “U.S. To Deploy
Anti-Missile System By '04”, Washington Times,
17 December 2002, Pg. 1 It must be added that the CIA estimates that Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria could also emerge as long-range missile threats and that the initial West Coast system will be unable to knock out missiles from those countries: administration officials have been reported as declaring that Pentagon is planning a second missile defence system, based at an interceptor site in Maine, oriented towards missile threats from Europe and the Middle East, that could be built in the 2010-2015 time frame (The Hindustan Times, December 20, 2002). [44] Pat
Towell, cit: the following are the main programs funded
under the fiscal 2003 defense appropriations law, and are
aimed at developing weapons that could intercept a
missile in the first few minutes after its launch. Boost
Phase: Air-Borne Laser - Boeing, Lockheed
Martin and TRW are teamed in a $10.7 billion project to
field seven 747 cargo jets equipped with huge lasers that
could destroy missiles at a range of a several hundred
miles; the defense appropriations law provides the $598
million requested for fiscal 2003. Space-Based
Laser - Although some conservatives have touted
satellites armed with anti-missile lasers for years,
Congress slashed the $170 million fiscal 2002 funding
request of because the first test of the weapon was not
slated until 2013. The team of contractors working on the
project - TRW, Lockheed Martin, Boeing - dissolved at the
end of September. The 2003 defense appropriations law
slashes the administration´s request for $35 million for
the project to $25 million. Kinetic-Energy
Weapons - The administration requested two new
programs to develop guided missiles that could be
launched from ships ($90 million) and from satellites
($54 million) to ram an attacking missile shortly after
its launch, destroying it by the force of impact. The
fiscal 2003 appropriations law slices $50 million from
the total of $144 million, leaving it to Pentagon
managers to allocate the reduced funding. Mid-Course:
There are two major programs intended to ram an
interceptor into a long-range missile as it arches
through space: Ground-Based
- Boeing leads a large team of companies developing
ground-launched interceptors, which President Bill
Clinton first considered deploying in Alaska. The fiscal
2003 appropriations law funds the $2.6 billion request
for the missiles and test sites. Sea-based
- The law trims $10 million from the $427 million
requested to develop a similar system launched from the
Navy's Aegis cruisers. Terminal
phase: Patriot PAC-3 - The fiscal 2003
appropriations law adds $30 million to the $151 million
requested to fund additional testing for this Lockheed
Martin system. The law also adds $20 million to the $472
million requested to continue production. THAAD
- The law provides $912 million of the $932 million
requested to continue developing this Lockheed Martin
system, designed to intercept missiles that fly farther
and faster than the PAC-3. Sea-Based
Terminal - After a Raytheon-led effort to develop a
short-range ship-launched interceptor was scrapped in
2001, the administration requested $90 million to start
over. But the appropriations law cut $60 million and
shifted the remaining $30 million to the Sea-Based
mid-course system, which uses some of the same
components. In order to follow how the various missile defense programs are developing, the Center for Defense Information, USA, has created charts detailing the successes and failures of every integrated light test held by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA): <http://www.cdi.org/missile-defense/systems.cfm> [45] Jeff Bennett, “Inside Missile Defense”, 18.04.2001, p. 1; “Washington Times”, 07.06.2001, p. 6. [46] See for instance: V. F. Polcaro, in Contro le Nuove Guerre (M. Zucchetti, ed.), Odradek, Rome 2000, p. 213. [47] Russia Weekly, Center for Defense Information, Washington, no. 65, September 10, 1999. [48] Bill Gertz, Washington Times, July 30, 2001: <http://washingtontimes.com/national/20010730-13752166.htm> [49] Geoffrey Forden, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, September 2002. [50] Christian Science Monitor, April 6, 2001; Sergei Ishchenko, Trud, Russia, June 21, 2001 (CDI Russia Weekly, no. 159, June 22, 2001). Russia could suspend its participation in an international convention banning chemical weapons if Moscow's request to extend the deadline for destroying its chemical arsenals is rejected by the convention's signatories, the Interfax-Military News Agency reported (Moscow Times, October 8, 2002 Pg. 4). [51]
Maintained by Wouter Basson, the eminence grise behind
the chemical war plans of the government of apartheid
South Africa, in testimony before the High Court of
Pretoria on the destruction of this arsenal. He declared
that films of the surrender of Iraqi troops clearly
showed the effects of these aggressive substances in the
faces of the soldiers (India Times, July 28, 2001: <http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=67147283>). After the war further evidence of the use of aggressive chemicals was brought forth. [52] Joint Publication 3-06/Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations (September 16, 2002). It may be recalled that in the occasion of Genoa’s G8 in July of 2001 the Italian police used against the crowd 6,200 tear bombs equipped with a chemical substance named CS, which is really a chemical aggressive; see e. g. Edoardo Magnone and Ezio Mangini, La Sindrome di Genova. Lacrimogeni e Repressione Chmica, Fratelli Frilli Editori, Genova, September of 2002 [53] E.g., v Richard Beeston, The Times, July 23, 2001. [54] New
York Times, September 4, 2001 (<www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04GERM.htm?ex=10>); New York Times, September 4, 2001 (<www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04BIOW.htm?pagewa>); Manlio Dinucci, il manifesto, September 6, 2001. [55] <www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,821306,00.html> [56] Malcom Dando and Mark Wheelis, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December of 2002. [57] David Brown, “In Vaccination Plan, A World of Unknowns”, Washington Post, December 14, 2002; Page A01 (<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52661-2002Dec13?language=printer>); Richard W. Stevenson and Lawrence K. Altman, ”Smallpox Shots Will Start Soon Under Bush Plan”, <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/politics/12VACC.html>. [58] The
medical reason for opposing widespread vaccination is the
relative riskiness of the vaccine and the difficulty of
minimizing that risk. At least one quarter of the
potential pool of recipients - and possibly a lot more -
will need to be screened out: this includes anyone who is
infected with the AIDS virus, is pregnant, is on
immunosuppressive drugs or has any of the skin diseases
known collectively as eczema. Because the vaccine is a
live virus that can be transmitted to others, anyone in
close contact with a person in those categories must also
be excluded: that will be an even harder task, and one
more vulnerable to mistakes. Even if everything goes
perfectly, there will be thousands of people with hot,
swollen, sore arms. More likely, there will be
complications and a few deaths. What has public health officials most worried are the sociological consequences of a vaccination campaign that is badly handled, or even just unlucky. In recent years, both autism and the symptoms known as "Gulf War syndrome" have been blamed on vaccines, although there is little or no scientific evidence to support the contention. Skepticism about vaccines is fueled by the fact that occasionally one does cause harm, as in the case of the rotavirus vaccine against a common intestinal illness. The vaccine was abandoned after it was found to have triggered an intestinal defect in some people. [59] <http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/v3c15-1.htm>. [60] See:
Michel Chossudovsky, “Washington’s new order:
weapons have the ability to trigger climate change”,
<www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/haarp.htm>; and Rosalie Bertell, <www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/environment/weapons/htm> [61] David A. Fulghum, Aviation Week and Space Technology, August 6, 2002. [62] Hil Anderson, “Combat lasers becoming a reality”, < http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20021210-090342-6771r>. [63] Ivar Ekman, “Bunker Buster”, The New York Times, December 15, 2002. [64] In this connection, there is another significant objection timidly raised by Germany, regarding the protections (black-boxes) imposed by the US on the weapons they sell, to prevent buyers from accessing the secret technologies. Naturally the US rejected it (Defense News, November 22, 1999, pp. 3-28). [65] Ed Vulliamy, New York Sunday, July 29, 2001. [66] Washington Times, October 25, 1999. [67] Robert Uhlig, London Daily Telegraph, June 11, 2001. [68] Andrea Stone, USA Today, June 19, 2001, p. 1. |