by CKR
…Words strain,
Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
It appears that pre-emptive, as in pre-emptive attack, has broken under the burden. Or maybe it was preventive, or perhaps even both of them.
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post uses it. Hans M. Kristensen uses it in his article in Arms Control Today. And, of course, the Bush administration uses it (pdf) in its projected uses of nuclear weapons against suspected, well, bad guys. It extends the doctrine of preventive war into the nuclear arena. But the word that is used is pre-emptive, with or without the hyphen.
The Armchair Generalist noted another slippage while I was away from my computer. It seems that the US Joint Forces Command has a new acronym: WME, for weapons of mass effect. WMD, alphabetically, is now a subset of WME. And as Bush administration credibility further decays, we might expect WTF. Oh no, that was J.’s interpolation! I guess the proper sequence would be WMF.
According to what J. has provided, the definition of WME seems to be
weapons, such as chemical and biological types, that may cause mass casualties without destruction of human life.
Although, strictly speaking, that wouldn’t include nuclear weapons or a widespread anthrax attack. The context seems to include various types of computer attacks as well. Maybe it even includes the panic that might be caused by news reporting? Or mismanagement by state and local authorities in a natural disaster? The very strange part is that prepositional phrase: without destruction of human life.
Decaying with imprecision. WMD already conflated a dozen or so deaths from anthrax with the vaporization of Los Angeles. Perhaps WME can further conflate the LA blackout of a couple of days ago.
Or is something else happening? WME seems well suited to slipping and sliding. Let’s see, if we substitute WME for WMD (only one letter difference, after all) in the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations, then we could nuke Tehran and twenty or so other Iranian cities the next time they look crosseyed at us. And after a nuclear strike, there’d be no way to tell if they had WMD/E’s or not.