Nuclear Goalposts

The wardrums have to be pretty worn thin by now, right? It's not like people haven't been pounding them to drag the US into another pointless conflict with Iran day and night for reasons that I can't even begin to fathom. I mean, you think Iraq has unleashed a bloodbath and destabilized the region, wait until the Iranians start their reprisals for our bombing campaign or whatever our army-less military is proposing to do to them. We don't have boots to put on the ground but, by jingo, we have planes to put in the air! Plus, you know, threatening to invade someone is a great way to encourage the flowering of democracy and not force our would-be allies further into the arms of their oppressors as their society closes ranks in the presence of an outside threat.

But, no, those drums are getting a daily workout and it's statements like the ones today by the President, our President, that leave me deeply concerned that this administration is going to manufacture its own October surprise before they're brushed out the door. In today's press conference Mr. Bush said a bunch of frightening thing but this is the one that's going to give me nightmares tonight, "I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

Rhetoric about WWIII is really not comforting, you know? But more than that, the standard being set here is absurdly unrealistic. I know, I know, this is the Bush Administration, I should be surprised? But we don't just have to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. We have to prevent them from having the basic knowledge necessary to make one.

That, by the way, is knowledge I have. Knowledge anyone who's completed a halfway decent level of chemistry or physics has. Or anyone who's capable of a half-hearted search through the internet. Because there's nothing particularly fancy about the understanding required to make a simple nuclear device. The real challenge is finding the weapons-grade materials to manufacture it. That's why nuclear disarmament regimes are so concerned with fuel rods, reactor facilities, and cyclotrons because those are what you need to process the uranium and plutonium from merely serviceable into horrific weapons of mass destruction.

You'd think this would be something the Bush Administration would know since their negligence with respect to North Korea is exactly why they have the bomb today. But you can't press this information out of people's heads what you can do is control the materials and monitor the facilities and provide an incentive for non-nuclear nations not to work at pursuing it. That's something that takes diplomacy, of course, something there's absolutely no chance of breaking out here.

This isn't exactly a new stance by the administration, people a lot smarter and more well-versed in the subject that I tell me it's buried in the white papers and positions the administration's put out there before. But it's still shocking to see it thrust from the backburner of what passes for policy and placed directly into public view.

I guess it should come as no surprise that our President, this President, who's been so cavalier with the truth, who's treated research and scientists like partisan pawns, has decided we're waging a war on knowledge. But that doesn't mean it's any less outrageous. We have to, we must, make it clear that one disastrous war is enough, and we want the drums to fall, at long last, silent.