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Sunday, August 8, 2004
Over a week ago, the White House announced its opposition to provisions for inspection and verification as part of a new anti-proliferation treaty that would ban the production of nuclear weapon material. Some have called the administration's decision "disturbing," "astonishing," "frightening," and "stupid" for essentially endorsing the containment and derailment of nuclear weapons programs across the globe while simultaneously neutering any real attempt to do so by preventing inspectors from checking to see if the treaty's signatories are actually complying. What reasonable objection, they ask, could a sane and competent White House have to enforcement of a treaty aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons?
The answer is simple enough to all who have an eye for subtle truths: the White House is seeking cleaner, stronger verification on this critical issue than can be gained by mere international agreements. For the problem lies not in the inspecting of weapons; the problem lies with the weapons inspectors. Weapons inspectors, after all, are only human - weak, mortal, unenlightened humans, burdened by the weight of politics and encumbered by international bureacracy. When one dispatches more inspectors to a region such as, for example, Iraq, one does not increase their potency - one merely compounds their weaknesses. Indeed, the more international weapons inspectors one utilizes, the less likely one is to find any weapons at all. The solution is simple: do away with inspection and on-site verification completely. The best way to verify the presence of nuclear weapons - and the programs and materials used to make them - is with the analysis of pure intelligence, which can cut through the murky foibles, errors and hiccups of a physical inspection. In the run-up to the Iraq War, it was not the inspectors who found nuclear weapons and weapons programs in Iraq - it was analysts within the United States intelligence community, working with knowledge already obtained and logically extrapolating outward through the sheer, clean power of the mind. Those analysts realized that while physical facts might demonstrate there to not physically be nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons in Iraq, they realized that Iraq had something more important: weapon-seekingness, or weaponhood, or the desire for weapon-seekingness or weaponhood. This, combined with the animosity of the Iraqi government towards the United States, made Iraq a grave and gathering threat. Likewise, through the pure power of the mind, one can draw up a list of those threatening nations possessed of nuclear weapon-seekingness. If the mind is cluttered with physical evidence, however, the list of nuclear weapons would be tainted: Israel thrown in with Iran and North Korea, Pakistan with Syria and Belgium. Given that we know that these nations are Ameirca's allies, not possessed of weaponliness, and would never sell nuclear materials or US military components to enemy nations, they have no place on a list that would surely have been compiled based on the observation of coarse matter. Nuclear proliferation is far too serious a matter to leave to a painstakingly-complied mass of detailed physical evidence. It is a matter the Medium Lobster only trusts to assumption, speculation, and bias.
posted by the Medium Lobster at 10:37 AM
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