PROLIFERATION NOT WHETHER, BUT WHO | 2007-01-20
When I explain to people at movement conferences that "proliferation" is the new word for "colonialism" they give me that familiar look that says, "So what? That has nothing to do with today's headlines." It never occurs to them that today's headlines are for respectable conservatives to quibble about and make their living on.
We make no progress when we forget that ours is a different world view, not just a matter of finding some exciting quibbles to chew over.
AGAIN.
Proliferation MEANS:
"WE determine which countries are worthy of nuclear weapons."
That was decided when I was a boy. ALL countries have a right to FULL sovereignty. It was decided THEN that all countries are EQUAL.
Now we want to decide that some are more equal than others.
Sorry, Mr. Bush, that line was already taken by somebody else sixty years ago.
Also in my youth the future of computers was locked in. That was in the day of UNIVAC. It was assumed that, in an ago of instant communication, there would be fewer and BIGGER computers, until we had one titan that all the world used.
The computer you sitting in front of would make the old UNIVAC look like a dog's compared to a human's. In the 1990s, e3ach "Tickle Me Elmo" doll had a computer in it that was more powerful than the one used in the Moon Landing in 1969.
And the Moon-landing computer made UNIVAC look like a dog's brain compared to a human's.
So here we are, trying to prevent the spread of a technology that is fixed, the instant forming of a critical mass of U-235.
Lots o' luck, Bush, but don't expect an adult to get aboard YOUR ride into fantasy.
On September 11, 2001, one of my articles was "For God's Sake, America, SPREAD OUT!" On that date I also repeated a two-year-old Whitaker Online piece called "Superterrorism."
Just because Communists and oil-producing countries are slow doesn't mean they will take forever. Stalin had Klaus Fuchs, an open Communist, IN the Manhattan Project, but it took him YEARS to get the bomb. Einstein was a worshipper of Stalin, which was the standard Jewish position then. Oppenheimer was a Communist.
But it took Stalin YEARS to get the Bomb, and he got it, not through his friends who developed it, but through the Rosenberg group. Nobody wonders about this. But if you dealt with the KGB as much as I did, it can be explained.
But that would be a long article, and we don't want those, do we?
So North Korea is taking forever to get the basic technology right. Iran is taking forever. So the whole "scare" about suitcase-size A-bombs and superterrorism has died down. They are putting yet another supersize structure in the same eminently bombable place where the Twin Towers stood, right in the city where it has been assumed since 1945 would be the first place in America where nukes would fall.
No, the world is not going to settle for nukes only in America and in countries where the tiny army has arthritis. One day the metropoli of the world will be nothing but hostages. FINALLY, they will be evacuated. But not because a redneck warned the urban sophisticates about this yeas before. The same redneck warned about the implications of anti-colonialism and anti-racism, but they are coming as a surprise to today's Peer Reviewers, a.k.a. neoconservatives. That will have gone down the Memory Hole, as usual.
Until our WORLD VIEW changes, it is going to require a disaster to make our bureaucracy called "experts" to do anything that is obviously rational to one outside it.
Meanwhile, instead of looking at me as if I should be ashamed not to have read today's paper, our side should take advantage of what I have to say and assume the world of Superterrorism is coming. We, and only we, can talk about the future.
Meanwhile, many of the professional Futurologists are discussing Tomorrow's New York. All the PAID positions are taken. They are as unavailable to those who talk about the real future as they are useless in that discussion.
In a way that is your problem, not mine. I got mine. But your problems ARE my problems. I deeply resent the fact that real intellectuals like you are banned from the jobs we need you in. I would LOVE to see some serious Futurology instead of the wishful Politically Correct future we have in journals today, which mirrors the wishful Politically Correct past in our history books.
So it IS my problem. I don't need MONEY, but both history and futurology produce nothing I can read in areas I would LOVE to read some real thinking about.
So much for the problem. Let's fight for the solution.