Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Open thread: Brexit

Will it really happen? Or will the U.K. find some way to pull out before invoking Article 50?

The consequences of the leave vote were evidently predictable. This is from June 18th: “If Remain wins on June 23rd, Brexiteers will tell voters they were conned. If Leave wins, Mr Cameron will go and his successor will negotiate a Brexit that does not remotely resemble the promises of the Leave campaign, which trades on the lie that Britain can have full access to the European single market without being bound by its regulations and free-movement rules.”

Also — what impact will this have on global climate efforts? Early signs are not encouraging.

Careerism in government

Quoted by Richard Rhodes, Daniel Ellsberg said of U.S. bureaucracy that it: “does not require true believers to run it. … The system consciously runs by men who — in order to stay in the game, to be close to the center of power, to have the hope that someday the moment may come when their own true values will be served — will go on for years serving values that are the opposite of what they privately believe”. (Arsenals of Folly, p. 56)

My civil service departure anniversary is coming up on Saturday, and I am still happy with having given up so much income and career advancement because the work I was required to do was unethical and insane.

Cyber warfare between the US, Israel, and Iran

I recently saw the documentary Zero Days about state-sponsored cyber warfare in general and the Stuxnet attack against Iran’s enrichment facility at Natanz in particular.

The documentary doesn’t really contain any new information for people who follow the news in this field, but it’s well put together and has some compelling interviews.

A couple of New York Times articles cover much of the same ground: Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran and U.S. Had Cyberattack Plan if Iran Nuclear Dispute Led to Conflict. These, respectively, cover ‘Olympic Games’ (the Stuxnet operation) and ‘Nitro Zeus’, a much broader plan for an across-the-board cyber attack against Iranian civilian and military systems in the event of war between Iran and the US.

An interesting discussion in the film concerns US-Israeli relations. It alleges that US support for Stuxnet was motivated in part by a desire to prevent attempted airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities by Israel. In part, this was allegedly motivated by the thinking that Israel would initiate such attacks not to destroy Iranian capabilities themselves (since that would be beyond Israel’s military means), but to force the US into a war with Iran.

The film also discusses alleged Iranian retaliation for Olympic Games, including attacks against Saudi Armaco and American banks. There’s also some interesting material about the Abdul Qadeer Khan proliferation network.

Rhodes on the nature of nuclear war

So much confusion, so much paranoia, so many good intentions, so much hard work, technical genius, cynicism, manipulation, buckpassing, buckpocketing, argument, grandstanding, risk-taking, calculation, theorizing, goodwill and bad, rhetoric and hypocrisy, so much desperation, all point to something intractable behind the problem of how to deploy sufficient and appropriate nuclear arms to protect one’s nation from a nuclear-armed opponent. There was such a beast. It was quite simply the fundamental physical fact of nuclear energy: that such power is relatively cheap to generate and essentially illimitable. Nuclear warheads cost the United States about $250,000 each: less than a fighter-bomber, less than a missile, less than a patrol boat, less than a tank. Each one can destroy a city and kill hundreds of thousands of people. “You can’t have this kind of war,” Eisenhower concluded. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.” It followed, and follows, that there is no military solution to safety in the nuclear age: There are only political solutions. As the Danish physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr summarized the dilemma succinctly for a friend in 1948, “We are in an entirely new situation that cannot be resolved by war.” The impossibility of resolving militarily the new situation that knowledge of how to release nuclear energy imposes on the world is the reason the efforts on both sides look so desperate and irrational: They are built on what philosophers call a category mistake, an assumption that nuclear explosives are military weapons in any meaningful sense of the term, and that a sufficient quantity of such weapons can make us secure. They are not, and they cannot.

Rhodes, Richard. Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. p. 101 (hardcover, italics in original)

Step by step toward a proposal

My PhD committee members probably feel like I have fallen off the face of the Earth.

Seemingly decades ago, my hope was to have my thesis proposal submitted for approval by December 2015. Now, I am getting close to the point where I think the draft will be worth circulating to committee members and potential supervisors.

While there are literally hundreds of tasks which I have listed for myself in completing the proposal, including reading many books and articles, there are three that I think I should push through before sending a preliminary version to my committee members, if only to show them that I am alive and working. I need to incorporate ideas from a qualitative methods course I completed, specifically concerning ethical approval. Then, I need to incorporate two sets of comments from my friends Nathan and Nada.

This project will involve a lot of challenges. Two that loom over me are getting it through ethical approval, given the way the communities opposing these pipelines are often vulnerable and specifically targeted by state security services, and actually finding people who were involved in fighting these pipelines who are willing to be interviewed.

One step at a time, I suppose.

Israel’s nuclear weapons

I have read quite a few books that pertain to Israel’s development of nuclear weapons at Dimona. It’s of historical interest for many reasons, ranging from the support states notionally opposed to nuclear proliferation actually providing assistance to foreign weapon programs, to whistleblower history, the geopolitics of the Middle East, and the details of capabilities required for weapon development.

Now, according to The Economist, the Dimona facility where Israel is thought to have made its fissionable material and assembled weapons may be reaching the end of its usable life:

The country’s atomic secrets have always been closely guarded, so little is known about the plant at Dimona. However, officials at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) admitted at a scientific conference last month that the reactor is showing its age. An ultrasound inspection of the aluminium core found 1,537 small defects and cracks, they said. The lifetime of such a reactor is usually around 40 years. At 53, Dimona is one of the world’s oldest operating nuclear plants.

The article also discusses the development of Israeli delivery systems:

The third leg of the triad is thought to have been added in 1999, when Israel received the first of six planned submarines. These were built and largely paid for by Germany. If, as reported, they can launch nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, this would give Israel a “second-strike” capability, allowing it to retaliate even if an enemy were to destroy its air bases and missile silos in a nuclear “first strike”. In January Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said: “Our submarine fleet will act as a deterrent to our enemies who want to destroy us.”

Among books on the development of nuclear weapons in many different states, I especially recommend those of Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007), and The Twilight of the Bombs (2010).

Federal Court of Appeal overturns Northern Gateway Pipeline approval

The Federal Court of Appeal just ruled that the Canadian government had failed to adequately consult indigenous peoples and so quashed the 2014 federal approval for the project.

As one of the subjects of my PhD thesis, all developments on NGP are of great interest. It’s certainly a fast-moving as well as an important topic.

Traumatized by violence

I think it has been plausibly demonstrated that people who witness the violent and traumatic death of other people may experience adverse psychological consequences as a result.

It’s hard to interpret the significance of that in the present era, or more so in the case of my own life. Ignoring early childhood, I don’t think I witnessed any violence which produced a deep psychological effect until 2001-09-11. People have subsequently told me that they don’t believe me, but this was my first day of university classes at the University of British Columbia. I don’t remember what woke me up, but I walked down to the end of the hall and saw World Trade Center CNN footage, went to the dining hall for breakfast and saw more of the same, and then went to my first ever university class where we discussed what happened, who might be responsible, and what American response might be justified.

In terms of personal experiences, there have been other cases where mass violence reported through mass media could have involved friends of mine.

I also once saw a man crushed to death in front of me by collapsing scaffolding, no more than 50 metres from where I stood.

Still, I think the phenomenon of the violence-induced trauma affecting many people alive today is a broader issue. I was born in 1983, and have never lived in a time when nuclear war wasn’t a plausible possibility. I have seen personal and media responses to dozens of acts of political violence, from professors discussing thwarted bomb plots in Toronto to dear friends mourning from mass shootings near their homes. One close friend of mine, whose wedding I attended, decided to propose because of how close their partner came to dying in the London bus/tube bombings of 2005/07/07.

Aside from that, I have been traumatized by potential violence. I have read dozens of books about the history of nuclear weapons, great power war, the risks of accidental or unauthorized nuclear launch, etc. I certainly cannot comment about whether the terror and helpless feelings associated with these possibilities have anything to do with the experiences of people who have seen violence first-hand and directly. I do think there is a better-than-even chance that nuclear weapons will be used in war again during my life, and some of these possibilities and their ramifications impress themselves on me every day.

Mass shootings have been traumatizing: Columbine when I was 16; the attack on a Norwegian summer camp when I was 28; the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting when I was 29; Orlando just weeks ago.

I don’t believe that humans were divinely created. We’re just long-term consequences of physics and chemistry. Not long ago in evolutionary time no single human was capable of killing a lot of other primates, even if the aggressor was strong and intent on murder. Perhaps more importantly from a psychological perspective, none of us had any idea about what was going on 1,000 km away, much less across the world.

My intention here is not to comment on political violence or to suggest how we ought to deal with it. If anything, my intent is to suggest that our biological makeup and history do not prepare us for a world with accurate rifles and nuclear weapons, and to raise the question of whether people educated about the world wars and other modern conflicts, and who have also been exposed across their lives to graphic and traumatizing coverage of acts of political violence, can reasonably expect to not be traumatized in a way that would be unfamiliar to most of our human ancestors across tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

And if we’re all traumatized, what do we do now?

My shot

It’s strange that a stage show running in one city is affecting the whole continent, but New York isn’t a normal place and Lin-Manuel Miranda clearly isn’t a normal man.

The killing in Orlando originally prompted my personal doctrine in response to political violence: refuse to be terrorized. One or a few people armed and keen to kill do not affect my thinking about politics.

I cried quite unexpectedly when I saw Miranda’s sonnet.

Reading more about the musical, and revelling in my BitTorrent audio, I am increasingly impressed by the virtuoso genius of the thing. Violence has sometimes been a decisive factor historically, but there is scope to hope that ideas and arguments can be our battleground as humanity learns to live all together on this small planet.