Happy Nuke Year

And so we begin a fresh new spin around the sun. Happy Nuke Year. 'Cos that's where the future (and its possible mushroom end) lies.

This is how it begins: first a trickle, then the flood.

Just a while ago, when the Iraq war was but a bitty embryo of an invasion plan, there was talk among memebers of the U.S. department of war of the need for a nuclear startup. The buzz was all very Rumsfeldian, of intelligent nukes that could seek out a highly specific target and smithereen the mother with a minimum of collateral calamity. There's been little (open) talk lately (also little Donald Rumsfeld, thankfully) of that; but I expect one/more of the empire's covert cabals is at work there.

Now, Tony Blair, that wide-mouthed peacemaker, wants to reignite the sunsetted empire's nuclear program. Then, of course, there's North Korea and Iran, friends of the capitalist patriot A.Q. Khan of Pakistan, that old friend of America's, whose new friend India waved the checkered flag for its despised neighbor to join its own despised neighbor's "I got a bomb, too" club.

But what starts as a dribble, could turn into a Gangetic overflow, spreading outward into virulent damnation.

The U.S., once vehemently opposed to India's nuclear aspirations, is now its benefactor. India is beside itself with joy for the attention and the acknowledgement of its purported global importance. But it forgets that the West couldn't give a rat's ass about any local disaster potential. Let's hark back to the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, in 1984. Safety regulations were criminally flouted, a chemical catastrophe ensued. Scores of people died, many more were maimed, generations of deformed children born in the disaster's wake paid (and continue to pay) the price. The legal outcome? A payoff, a pat on the back, criminals retired - some to their hometowns in India; fatter, richer ones to their estates in America. "Case closed," said the Indian courts, as did the American courts, and the repercussions were left for society's meekest to endure as they were swept under the rug.

But what's that got to do with nukes? Let a tiny story, which appeared in the regional language of a local newspaper translated and uploaded for the English-language readers, make the connection. Uranium tailings spilled into a lake in northern India. The creatures inhabiting the lake began to die. Locals noticed and alerted the authorities; little, if any, was done.

It's small, sounds relatively harmless - it did happen far away in some remote village in a distant country, after all. But let it stand as a portent of what's to come. India is a country where for a few bucks the authorities will turn a blind eye to the grimmest transgressions. In the past, the West (and the East) could look away - it was too far away to affect them. It's a different world today. These isolated incidents stand in danger of becoming a hail of frogs across the world.

India's nuclear ambitions should not encouraged or supported. Nor should those of any other country. The immediate strategic interests of any nation - subversive or bellicose - are not worth the consequences they threaten to wreak.

Borderline Crazy

It's enough to make a cartographer froth. People of various ranks and pursuits - politicians, diplomats, patriots, disgruntled denizens - markers cocked and ready, are expressing the urge to redraw lines across the globe. Secessionists and vivisectionists each, they all seem to have a solution to or an ambition toward the world's border woes and whims.

The Chinese recently found nostalgia by throwing their hats back into the subcontinental territorial pissing ring: Sun Yuxi, China's ambassador to India, decided (or was told) to reiterate that nation's claim to Arunachal Pradesh, for some time now a part of the Indian republic. And what China wants, China is known to often take. India should worry. Further west, a man of some influence is suggesting the balkanization of Iraq. Peter Galbraith has proposed trisection as triage in that beleaguered - and rather buggered, I might add - nation. The son of the eminent North American diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith suggests Iraq be carved up and divvied among its severely dysfunctional religion(non)mates. This isn't the first time a Westerner came and diddled with the lines in that part of the world. If that happens, who will ultimately win the spoils of oil will make for some interesting wagers.

Borders, of course, are just lines in the sand for the people who live near them. Relatives, friends, lovers and business opportunities poke holes in the premise of forced divisions. Fences, imaginary and real, are no barrier to determination, much less desperation. Or brutal ambition. Just ask the Janjaweed, who've expanded their marauding map to beyond the confines of western Darfur in Sudan to Chad, causing disastrous repercussions in the Central African Republic. And the world that likes to stand on pulpits and heave such headline-friendly sentiments as "Never again!" watches fecklessly from the sidelines as it happens over and over again.

In contrast to the shape-shifters, however, stand the fence-makers. Some Americans found in the recently electorally disgraced President Bush their champion to concretize the division between their blessed land and their free-trade pardners to the south with a 700-mile "great wall" (made in China?). But some walls can only hold so long; even as the great barrier chief has made wall-building his legacy, score one more for the wallbangers. Standing as the antithesis to Bush's army of homophobes who would like to exclude gays from the joys of marital bliss and discord, South Africa's parliament just approved same-sex marriage. And who could be next? New Jersey. New Jersey! The odorous state's supreme court has set the stage (in fuchsia and winter green, I'm told) to make it official. What about their easterly neighbors? That's a nyet, I'm afraid. Did someone say "liberal" New York? Some divisions, it seems, are broader than one imagined.