Millions dead and dying/Mass death and destruction!

The Bulletin recently decided to let some folks add gasoline to a fire. Chris McIntosh and Ian Storey (Bard College) wrote that a terrorist organization able to acquire a nuclear weapon,

will weigh all of its options seriously. And these options are not limited to a binary choice of attack or hold. In reality there are a slate of options for how to “use” a nuclear weapon, and we can divide these into five categories, only one of which is detonation.

Jay Tilden and Dallas Boyd (NNSA) responded. I’m not sure that the two sides disagree all that much, but reading both pieces is instructive. In addition to an excellent summary of U.S. efforts to prevent terrorist acquisition and use a of a nuclear weapon, Tilden and Boyd provide an interesting rationale for focusing on potential terrorist detonation a nuclear weapon:

By studying the acquisition-use assumption purely in the abstract, the authors fail to consider its catalytic effect on global nuclear security efforts. Where they see unimaginativeness in this assumption, national security professionals see a simple, arresting principle that crystallizes the enormity of the consequences if terrorists were to obtain enough material for even a single nuclear device. This recognition in turn helps galvanize the costly and intensive work necessary to protect nuclear material from illicit acquisition worldwide. 

Not sure it really responds to the argument, but it’s an important point. Referee the fight yourselves.

A few years back, the CIA published an account of an analyst’s discovery of Yugoslavia’s offensive CW program during the mid-1990s. The article centers around a U.S. investigation of a CW production facility in Croatia and its fate during the civil war. There’s a good description of Serbia’s efforts to dismantle its own CW program, some of which involved destroying parts of this facility “in a matter of hours” – an action which “caused the deaths of several soldiers from CW agents”

In addition, the article discusses the means by which Yugoslavia hid the Croatia-based facility, although a fair amount of relevant info is redacted. In one case, the government chose not to prosecute “a few dozen villagers” who had “tapped into the plant’s dedicated water line,” rather than reveal the facility’s true purpose.

Worth your time.

One needs to understand a policy’s goals In order to evaluate its effectiveness – a concept illustrated by an exchange In the film Jackie Brown.

Ordell Robbie, after admonishing his lady friend for smoking weed early in the afternoon, asserts that ingesting THC in such a manner will “rob you of your own ambition,” to which Melanie retorts, “[n]ot if your ambition is to get high and watch TV…”

Yes, it’s 12+ years old, but stands the test of time.

According to this Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament backgrounder, CND’s symbol was the one below, which became commonly known as the peace symbol.

These badges

were made by Eric Austen of Kensington CND using white clay with the symbol painted black. Again there was a conscious symbolism. They were distributed with a note explaining that in the event of a nuclear war, these fired pottery badges would be among the few human artefacts to survive the nuclear inferno.

The Museums Victoria, though, has another symbol which appears to combine the CND initials with the title of a Crass song.

The initials CND are printed across this badge, signalling that it was initially made for the British organisation Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. However, the donor of this badge, Nic Maclellan, thinks that it might have been re-issued in Australia using the British original design. The badge relates to a 1978 song by Crass called Fight War not Wars, in which this line is repeated over and over again.

I shall not try to understand the relationship between these two symbols, but I found this interesting.

2-3 years ago, an intern told me that blogs were coming back.

Probably should have made him photocopy more.

From the aforementioned 2006 interview:

PBS: [Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz and most of those New American Century [neoconservative] people by ’97, ’98, are out there agitating for finishing [what] President George H.W. Bush couldn’t [in Iraq]. … What were you making of those allegations then in the ’90s?

PILLAR: The basic allegation that Saddam’s regime was responsible for all manner of things, including the World Trade Center in 1993 and just about any other terrorism under the sun, … was simply not credible at all. It’s not as if the accusations or the line of argument had been dismissed out of hand; they hadn’t been. … They were looked at carefully, and there simply wasn’t anything there. 

Now, Iraq, of course, was doing other things with regard to sponsorship of terrorism, … and they rightly were on the state-sponsored terrorism list. But what we saw happen after 9/11, trying to put together this thesis of some sort of alliance with Al Qaeda, was a manufactured issue.

PBS: Could you feel that there was among this group, the neocons, that there was a real force out there pushing to overthrow Saddam? 

PILLAR: It was there, but it wasn’t until 9/11 afforded the opportunity by making the American public suddenly much more militant that the prospect of actually going to war became real. Before 9/11, they didn’t have enough to hang on. The desire was there, but the prospect was not. …

This interview with Paul Pillar, published in 2006, contains a slew of good material regarding the intelligence community, especially the 2002 NIE and Iraq’s WMD.

I’ll write more about this, but I thought I’d highlight his commentary on the phenomenon of political pressure and intelligence analysis:

This is something I think has been missed by otherwise very good work by the likes of the commission led by Judge [Laurence H.] Silberman and Sen. [Charles S.] Robb, which produced a very comprehensive and useful report with excellent recommendations. But one thing that’s been missed by that inquiry, and the inquiry of the Senate Intelligence Committee, really has to do with the issue of politicization. They reached the judgment that no, there wasn’t any evidence of politicization, but basically what they were doing was asking analysts whether their arms had been twisted. 

Politicization, real politicization, rarely works that way; that is to say a blatant, crude arm twisting. It’s always far more subtle. It would take the form either of these almost subconscious or subliminal adjustments that dozens of analysts might make in the course of phrasing their judgments, making it a little less nuanced, a little less caveated, which I think is the main basis for criticizing the judgments on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

It can take the form of … intelligence assessments that conform with what is known to be the policy having an easier time making it through … than assessments that don’t supply the policy. … This wasn’t an inquiry into how can Iraq threaten the United States; it wasn’t an inquiry into what are Al Qaeda sources of support. It instead was basically research in support of a specific line of argument. That, I think, qualifies for the label “politicization,” even if analysts are doing their best job to maintain their analytic integrity when they make their individual judgments. …