WhirledView

The WMD Report

By CKR

The WMD report is out, condemning the state of intelligence that led to the Iraq war in stark terms (NYT, WaPo). Maureen Dowd has a commentary that seems to be pretty much right on.

I haven't read the report yet, and I don't know whether I will be able to do so soon (I'm traveling over the weekend), so here are some preliminary thoughts and questions I will be looking for.

What was it that led George Tenet to say to George Bush, "It's a slam dunk" when Bush questioned the intelligence? This report in Bob Woodward's book has seemed bizarre to me. Why did Bush accept such a lame response?

Does the report address the degree of reliance by the decision-makers on information supplied by Ahmed Chalabi's network? What was the basis for this reliance?

How did the analysts express their degrees of uncertainty about the data? What were the checks, for example, that data was coming from independent sources? Did the decision-makers ask for uncertainty measures? Did they do so selectively, on the information they didn't like while accepting the information they did?

What kinds of sources provided the data, and where could different or additional sources have made a difference?

Were there institutional/structural difficulties within and between the intelligence agencies that kept a better analysis from being done? What were they? Were there motives of careerism and inflating the roles of individuals, groups or agencies that damaged the intelligence process. I'm trying to get at the question of a malfunctioning organization here, but this needs to be done in more depth and dimensions than seem to have been addressed so far. Frequently, within a bureaucracy, personal idiosyncrasies can do as much damage as structural problems. This is very hard to get at unless you're working with the credit-grabber or stump in the middle of the road.

The Pleasures of Blogging

By CKR

One of the pleasures of blogging is finding interesting people and sites as they link to you.

Apothecary's Drawer has a particularly nice post using photos from the US Library of Congress's Prokudin-Gorskii collection of photographs from the early 1900s. The photos are in color and give lovely views of what was then Russia, including several of the countries that are now independent. The changes and similarities between then and now are evocative and moving.

The Apothecary's Drawer post gives several relevant links and shows what can be done with the photos. Check it out.

Ambassadors Speak Out Against Bolton

By Patricia H. Kushlis

--The Wrong Man, for the Wrong Job, at the Wrong Time

--“There is no such thing as the United Nations. . . if the UN secretary building in New York lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” - John Bolton in a 1994 speech at The World Federalist Association

On March 28, the Associated Press reported that 59 former American Ambassadors had written to Senator Richard Lugar to protest John Bolton’s confirmation as the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Lugar has scheduled those lightening-rod hearings to begin April 7.

I read the AP story about the Ambassadorial letter – and other reports based on it - in the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Christian Science Monitor – and even the Albuquerque Journal. It was not a front page story in New York, London, Boston or here on the banks of the Rio Grande. It didn’t compete for the Journal’s banner headlines that featured the weekend muggings, the man who survived after being dragged a mile behind a car, or the latest heart-rending details of the Terry Schiavo case. But at least the Journal and some other U.S. papers printed it; and I hope New Mexico’s Senators and their Senatorial colleagues will take the letter’s contents to heart.

I found an unexpurgated copy complete with the 59 signatures thanks to friends who directed me to Steve Clemons’ “The Washington Note” that links to the text. Clemons day job is Executive Vice President of the New America Foundation. But at night, he writes a blog – a progressive’s view of Washington politics – and he’s already made several thoughtful posts questioning Bolton’s appointment. Clemons views, not surprisingly, have also drawn criticisms from Bolton’s right-wing cheer-leaders. So I suppose, this post might result in a few, too. Or, not.

The letter from the retired Ambassadors draws Senator Lugar’s attention to concerns over Bolton’s attitudes towards arms control and U.S. arms control policies – as one might expect from a group of largely career, expert high-level U.S. diplomats.

As such, the contents of the Ambassadorial letter recoil at the unilateralist, anti-arms control positions Bolton has taken throughout his career particularly in the last four years as Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the State Department.

Thoughts on U.N. Peacekeeper Babies

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

"Fie on goodness! Fie!”

A bunch of disconsolate knights hang around, mewling about their fate in the Broadway musical Camelot. They’re mourning the loss of the fun-filled, good old days, when “no virgin could wander unmolested.”

I laughed, believe it or not, the first time I heard that line. Now I know better.

Here's the way the knight business used to work: first you conquer. Then you get to rape any female in sight. You also get to smash and loot, of course. Swaggering throughout.

Armies, in time, dumped horses for tanks. Conquering heros continued to get the girls, whether the girls liked it or not.

Rapine has always served three purposes: physiological, psychological and biological. The first two feel mighty good here and now, a jolly reward for risking your life. The third consolidates the conquest.

So, in our time, we’ve had “manly” West Pakistani soldiers killing “effete” Bengali men and raping Bengali women, to procreate “real” men, as a matter of policy as well as pleasure, in 1971. Serbs did the same to Bosnians only a decade ago, and as I write some Arab Janjaweed type is probably victimizing a non-Arab Darfur woman in the Sudan. No doubt the instruments of stock-pollution enjoy their work, but their violations are genocidal crimes disguised as ordinary rape. (Sorry about the “ordinary.”)

Meanwhile, although the woman typically never has a chance to evade her rapist, she’s seen as soiled, dirty, dishonored, and thus, pregnant or not, she’ll likely be disowned. This turns out to be quite beneficial to occupying armies: disowned women augment the prostitute supply.

Too Much Funding for Biowarfare Agents?

by CKR

After the detonation of two nuclear weapons over Japan ended World War II, funding for physics was assured. New particle accelerators came on line every few years, and quarks and gluons and other submicroscopic energy packets were discovered. The logic was that Einstein’s energy-mass equivalence equation, together with discoveries of radioactive elements, had made the development of atomic energy possible. Further investigation of the nature of matter might provide better ways of producing electricity or making weapons.

Physics has provided many discoveries since World War II, the transistor and the laser being the most useful and ubiquitous. But, while particle physics has provided insights into the structure of matter and the origin of the universe, it has yielded few practical applications. It’s not possible to run history again; we can only guess how those billions of dollars might have been spent and how things might have turned out differently.

It may be just as well that the direction that seemed so fruitful in the glare of that new energy source didn’t give practical results. Pundita’s Heisenbergian Guru has it wrong. You can’t beat the equivalence of mass and energy for weapons. Anything better would have been exploited for ego and financial reasons, not to mention nationalism. There are good technical reasons why we don’t have laser weapons or gamma-ray lasers or gluon fission. Maybe someone will be able to exploit string theory to unwind those dimensions suddenly, POW, or to concentrate gravity, but it won’t be soon.

A letter signed by 758 biologists addresses what may be a similar situation developing in biology. The 4 March Science has a large article about it, and the letter itself is published in that issue. It’s available by subscription only, so here’s a similar article.

The scientists’ concern is that funding for research on diseases that are extremely rare in humans but might be used in a biological attack—tularemia, anthrax, plague, glanders, melioidosis, and brucellosis—is being increased, while research that is likely to provide benefits for more people is losing funding.

Architects and Earthquakes

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Last December a terrible tsunami caught and killed at least 300,000 people who were too close to the shores of the Indian Ocean at the wrong time. The Indonesian island of Sumatra suffered the worst damage and loss of life.

Last night an earthquake of 8.7 magnitude struck Sumatra again. It caused tremors even in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, some 500 miles away. Many of the structures that might have been flattened by this major earthquake had already been swept away by the earlier quake’s tsunami.

This is a good time for me to be more explicit about a question I raised in my previous posting about investment priorities and earthquakes in Iran (March 1, 2005).

Since so many quakes happen in Muslim-inhabited areas, I can’t help wondering why the sponsors of the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture haven’t placed more emphasis on encouraging architects and town planners to come up with ways of housing poor people in quake-resistant structures.

For that matter, why can’t the contest serve to encourage town planners to find affordable ways to re-situate destroyed coastal villages so inhabitants can (1) sleep in their own beds without worry while (2) remaining sufficiently close to the fields they need to tend and the boats they need to launch? This, no doubt, is more complicated, legally, than rebuilding houses in situ, but the obstacles could be overcome, if the political will were mustered.

What’s behind the lack of urgency? Is it the sense of futility stemming from a genuine lack of money to fund such projects? Is it a mere deficiency in imagination? Is it a conviction that such projects will never turn a good profit? Or is it that artistic and bureaucratic elites simply can’t empathize with the hardworking people who raise the rice and net the fish that will be turned into savory dishes for the more fortunate, probably by servants?

I deeply appreciate the work that has been made possible through the Aga Khan Awards. In fact, I have been treated at the Aga Khan hospital in Karachi, with its striking architecture and beautiful grounds. And I am sensitive to the humanistic and cultural appeal of preserving historic buildings and the more ancient sectors of old cities. Here in the United States I have often lived in “historic districts.”

So we have a responsibility to history. Yet we also have a duty to the living and especially to those unable to command safe shelter let alone architectural excellence on their own. Farmers and fishermen can live in palaces, mansions, spacious modern houses only in their fantasies. But we know enough, from the architectural and engineering point of view, to build simple houses that won’t cave in when the earth quakes and may even survive a tsunami.

Setting standards and providing plans isn’t enough, of course. The standards have to be enforced. The temptation to leave out a little rebar or substitute sand for concrete is not a temptation to which only contractors in the developing world succomb.

Nuclear Fuel Storage

by CKR

An article in today's WaPo discusses the risks of storing spent nuclear fuel in cooling pools at the reactors.

The National Academy of Sciences has done a study that concludes that this fuel is vulnerable to terrorist attack. The study is not available for classification reasons.

This should not be a surprise.

Spent fuel, nuclear fuel that is no longer usable for power generation, is extremely radioactive and thermally hot when it is removed from the reactor. It must be stored in water for cooling and radiation shielding for several months in order to let the fission products that cause most of the heat and radioactivity to disintegrate. This must be done in any case, so any power reactor will have some inventory of cooling fuel stored in its pool.

The problem that the NAS study addresses is that, because no long-term storage facility is available, all US spent fuel is currently being stored in pools at the reactors. While many of the hottest fission products have disappeared from the fuel, some biologically dangerous ones like cesium-137 and strontium-90, which the human body will build into bones, remain, along with uranium and plutonium. The pools may be located in parts of the reactor complex that are not as well protected from a crashing airplane as the reactor itself.

There are four options for the spent fuel: leave it where it is, build an interim (probably above-ground) central facility for storage, open the repository at Yucca Mountain, or reprocess it.

The last option was given up for the US by the Carter administration. The reasoning was that if the plutonium was never separated from the more radioactive fission products, anyone wanting to separate it to make a bomb would have a very difficult time. The United States would show the way for the rest of the world. The rest of the world, however, chose to continue reprocessing, and the result is that the US has given up its influence and technology development in this area.

The repository at Yucca Mountain has been developed with taxes on consumers of nuclear power. The state of Nevada no longer wants it. Requirements have now apparently grown to complete and utter safety for 200,000 years. We've been human for only a little longer than that.

An interim storage facility has been discussed and designed for many years. I would suspect that the latest designs would be a reinforced concrete structure, at least partly underground. This option would require irritating another NIMBY constituency outside Nevada, endless certification debates, and the concerns about transportation and handling multiplied by two (once from the reactor to interim storage and once from interim storage to permanent repository). Retrievable storage at Yucca Mountain has also been considered and would be a somewhat similar option, although it would remove some of the storage, transportation and vulnerability concerns.

Giving up nuclear power isn't an option. Even if the US were willing to do without something like 20% of its electricity, the existing fuel rods are still there.

So there you are. Open Yucca Mountain and take the fuel there, or stick with the currently vulnerable system.

Saving Nonproliferation

by CKR

Jimmy Carter has an op-ed of this title in today's Washington Post.

Until recently all American presidents since Dwight Eisenhower had striven to restrict and reduce nuclear arsenals -- some more than others. So far as I know, there are no present efforts by any of the nuclear powers to accomplish these crucial goals.

Even Ronald Reagan, the supposed model for the current president. Most especially Ronald Reagan: he and Mikhail Gorbachev nearly agreed on total elimination of nuclear arsenals by the year 2000.

Carter gives a list of corrective actions. I like my wish list better, but I'd be willing to settle for his.