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Reclaiming the Stars and Stripes

By Patricia H. Kushlis

At long last.

Photos by Patricia H. Kushlis, Albuquerque, New Mexico November 17, 2008

The Mechanics

by Cheryl Rofer

Ah, the latest blog meme!

You'd think I could recall my Meyers-Briggs score. All I remember is that it was uncharacteristic for a scientist. Fortunately, my boss had a similar characterization, and we shared an extrovert chuckle.

And, of course, this blog has four authors, so we can wonder how accurate an analysis of its words can be. But ISTP seems about right. We do tend toward asking what we can do about things, although we write some other stuff too.

So here's the full analysis:

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

Yeah, I wanted to be a firefighter when I was a kid, at least until I could understand what it is that scientists do.

Moving Nonproliferation into the Twenty-First Century

by Cheryl Rofer

Now that I’ve found both the Bush administration and the arms controllers wanting in analysis and strategy, how would I propose going forward on nonproliferation?

There are others with big ideas out there, like the Fab Four who proposed, in the Wall Street Journal of all places, that we make nuclear abolition a goal. They also provided some strategy, although they left a great deal to be filled in. I’m also impressed with Ivo Daalder and Jan Lodal’s attempt to build on the Fab Four's ideas. And I have some ideas of my own. So let’s go.

The Goal
The goal should be nuclear abolition. No more nuclear weapons anywhere on earth.

There is a traditional argument that you can’t do that and you shouldn’t even talk about it.

Some people fear that if you push hard for abolition as an end in itself, the effect could be destabilising…

You can just hear the little chuckle that accompanies this, as it has so many times in so many faculty clubs. It of course makes a couple of assumptions (“end in itself”) that aren’t present in any of these articles and is best left in the faculty club.

No nuclear weapons mean no danger of nuclear terrorism. No nuclear weapons mean no danger of a regional dispute inflicting nuclear winter on the world. No nuclear weapons mean no accidental missile launches. No nuclear weapons mean no pollution and occupational disabilities from their manufacture.

Six reasons for Bankruptcy---and Here's How to Help the Workers

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Here's my auto-biography: Volkswagon, Volvo, Fiat, Toyota, Subaru, Jeep, Honda.

Yup! With one exception, whenever I've needed a new car, I've checked out the American array and then gone foreign.

1. The VW bug was cheap to buy and cheap to run, perfect for a couple fresh out of graduate school. Meanwhile, Detroit was specializing in tail fins and other non-functional absurdities.

2. The Volvo was made to be safe for kids and it probably saved my life, once. The American car industry, meanwhile, was resisting safety standards. That was the era of Unsafe at Any Speed, back when Raph Nader was a hero, not a spoiler.

3. The Fiat was cheap and roomy, when divorce made me poor again. The American competition lacked knee room and trunk space. Tweetie---since it was canary yellow, my kids came up with this name---was sold, after an adventurous life, in Medan, Indonesia.

4. A Singapore Toyota dealer delivered a nifty little Corolla to Colombo, Sri Lanka, precisely on schedule and at no cost to me. It was a very popular model, so I sold it easily for what it cost and could have got much more. As usual---sigh!---I was a good girl and didn't try to evade the rule that said foreign service officers can't profit on auto resales.

5. The four-wheel drive Subaru station wagon was nicely priced and it was also a perfect safari car in East Africa. It loved mud and ran so quietly the lions and herds of impala hardly noticed it. It got badly banged up in crazy Lagos traffic, so I sold it (and its memories) there. A German diplomat I knew in Nigeria was surprised that his American counterparts weren't forced to drive American models. It was embarrassing, but I had to confess that, even then, American auto makers were letting thoughtful drivers down. Hence, my Japanese car.

6. The Honda Civic Hybrid I bought two years ago, for obvious reasons. The mileage is terrific. It's like driving for free.

The only American car I ever bought, my Jeep Cherokee, was a stripped down, stick shift model I acquired so I could drive from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to Timbuktu. Unfortunately there were too many wars in the way. After two years its mileage was only 13,000. So I took to Pakistan, where it languished because conditions there were already extremely unsafe. So I took it to Kolkata, India, where it didn't rack up miles because the roads were so bad I couldn't drive far in a day. So it came with me to Santa Fe, where it got smashed up by a stop sign-running idiot.

Obviously, I'm not the only American with a car-buying bio like this. As long as I can remember Detroit has begged for special treatment and has been coddled by a short-sighted Congress, even as foreign car makers were opening plants in the U.S. and, year by year, decade by decade, drawing away customers.

C stands for Culture – and America Centers

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the new administration put the Cs back in public diplomacy or better yet, just plain old traditional diplomacy. Since the end of the Cold War, the US government has largely ignored the immense, but unquantifiable, power of culture in America’s image building abroad. It was first neglected during the Clinton Administration.

After Elections 2000, W and his special Karen Hughes-headed group of 'The White House’s best public relations gurus' almost finished off the cultural dimensions of US foreign policy entirely.

The most violent American movies were allowed to stand in for Uncle Sam in America's culture’s stead. Tanks, Gitmo, water boarding and illegal renditions became this country’s poster children overseas until November 4. It’s not surprising then that W’s rogue cowboy image pervaded not only the actions of the US - but also became the towering figure in the negative perceptions of America abroad.

Public Diplomacy’s Unsung Song - America's Diverse Culture

The irony is that the diversity and quality of American culture is one of American public diplomacy’s greatest strengths and unsung songs as suggested in John Brown’s recent post on Common Dreams.

Damage to Nuclear Nonproliferation by the Bush Tax: The Arms Control Community

by Cheryl Rofer

The arms control community as it exists today focuses primarily on nuclear weapons and, to a lesser degree, chemical and biological weapons. The Federation of American Scientists traces its ancestry back to the Manhattan Project, and many of today’s arms control organizations have developed from that small community.

It is also a very specialized community. Scientists from the Manhattan Project had inside knowledge of the workings of nuclear weapons, and the nuclear strategists of the 1950s developed an arcane vocabulary of nuclear strikes and counterstrikes. The 1970s and 1980s brought an influx of civilians into an antinuclear movement, which the arms control community never completely identified with. At the end of the Cold War, most of those civilians came to believe that it was also the end of nuclear threat. A small, impassioned remnant of antinuclear activists continues outside the arms control community, ignored both by the public and the arms controllers.

The arms controllers’ governmental heyday was during the 1970s and 1980s, when many of them helped to negotiate the big arms control treaties: START, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, along with its complement, the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. Today’s arms control community largely consists of those arms controllers and their students.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is the foundation of today’s arms control, and arms controllers participate in its review conferences, held every five years.

The combination of historical development, specialized knowledge and now the Bush Tax limit the ability of the arms control community to provide new approaches to, er, arms control. I pause because that phrase itself may be part of the problem. It grew out of the attempt to control the growth of numbers of nuclear weapons during the Cold War’s spiraling arms race, and thus may be seen as a tool for limiting one’s adversary’s options rather than moving toward the goals of the NPT’s Article VI: the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.

Damage to Nuclear Nonproliferation by the Bush Tax: Bush Administration

by Cheryl Rofer

I want to look at four papers and reports in the light of the Bush Tax, two from the administration and two critical of its nonproliferation policies. In this post, I’ll consider how the Bush Tax has damaged the Bush administration’s efforts in nonproliferation. Then I’ll consider how the arms control community has suffered, and what nuclear nonproliferation might look like under a Bush Tax rebate.

Congress requested the administration to provide a policy of nuclear weapons use in order to justify the development of the Reliable Replacement Warhead. Arms Control Today asked Christopher Ford and Joe Cirincione to summarize the Bush administration’s achievements in nonproliferation. And George Perkovich offers advice to the next president. These four cover a range of opinion and approach and so illustrate some of what the Bush Tax has levied on US national security.

Besides the Bush Tax, these documents suffer from another problem (Perkovich’s the least): there is too much we still don’t know about the objectives of Bush foreign policy. Perhaps the objectives are from the Project for the New American Century, to maintain American power and prevent competitors from arising. But President Bush has not enunciated that policy, and actions in the second Bush term, like negotiating with North Korea, are counter to PNAC precepts. We still don’t know why George Bush focused on attacking Iraq in 2002, although justifications by the administration and inferences by others abound. Obsessive secrecy has also obscured our understanding.

The prime result of the Bush tax is that without a clear strategy, it is not possible to judge success or failure. This may be a feature, rather than a bug, but we will have to see more of the documents now in locked files before we can know for sure.

National Security and Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century

The Bush Tax

by Cheryl Rofer

George Bush believes in tax cuts, the monetary kind, that is.

But he levied a number of taxes that I didn’t see clearly until the election. The relief of having a president in sight who ran his campaign highly competently, who speaks in in full sentences with English words and looks like he is thinking about what he is saying, who is managing his transition with immense political acumen, the relief of seeing that America can still produce politicians we can look up to, has cleared some of the fog that settled in my mind over the past eight years.

George Bush levied some exorbitant taxes on us, on our morale, on the way we think of ourselves as a nation. Poor morale removes productivity and creativity without giving anything back, so it is worse than a tax. Taxes can be used to add to the common good. There’s been plenty written about torture, preventive war, surveillance and detention of civilians, and Guantánamo, so that’s not what I want to concentrate on.

Another Bush tax occurred to me as I watched Charlie Rose interviewing a hedge fund manager and they talked about the failure of the rating services. Nothing new, but it came together with other things that have been bothering me.