Three Somewhat Related Links
Posted in Politics by George
The first two of these links deal with the sad state of our country’s priorities:
Climate Researchers Feeling Heat From White House
Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.
U.S. Rolls Out Nuclear Plan
The administration’s proposal would modernize the nation’s complex of laboratories and factories as well as produce new bombs.
Ok.
Take these links as you will. Do you think we’ve mixed up our priorities a little? Even if building nukes weren’t incredibly ridiculous since we have a ton already, is defending our country worth anything if the Earth will be uninhabitable soon? We need to do something, ANYTHING, to attack the global warming problem. I know they say in the article that the older bombs are become unsafe, but still, do we need to produce 125 new nuclear bombs per year to replace them? Don’t you just need one… or at most a handful?
And finally, here are some awesome incentives you get from purchasing a hybrid car. See you all next week, folks!
April 8th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
The administration’s proposal would modernize the nation’s complex of laboratories and factories as well as produce new bombs.
That’s because we plan to go through some nukes and they need replenishing. It’s the wise move considering.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060408/wl_mideast_af...
US considers use of nuclear weapons against Iran
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The administration of
President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against
Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.
The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.
“That’s the name they’re using,” the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.
…
One of the options under consideration involves the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran’s main centrifuge plant at Natanz, Hersh writes.
But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.
“There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.
God Bless George Bush. I was soooo getting sick of normal life.
April 9th, 2006 at 10:52 am
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060417fa_...
The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said.
The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability “for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.
Uh, yes, that Stephen Cambone, the one responsible for the Abu Ghraib inelligence interrogations. As a process, the torture techniques have really helped a lot in Iraq, so perhaps they think they can apply similar efficacy to techniques in Iran.
This is a GREAT story in The New Yorker. It speaks of the administration briefing congressional leaders and one highr ranking Democrat of the plans.
I wonder if the Democrat is someone like Russ Feingold or someone like Lieberman. The story is about 10 pages long, but it’s gold in making one think.
Put down those economics books for a little while and pick up your current copy Foreign Affairs before it’s too late. It may help your investment portfolio as well if you get a good sense of where the money is going over the next few years.
April 18th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
I wonder if the Democrat is someone like Russ Feingold or someone like Lieberman.
I guess it’s someone like Joe Lieberman.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1143498...
Asked what last-resort military option was available, Lieberman said: “I don’t think anyone is thinking of this as a massive ground invasion, as in Iraq, to topple the government.” Rather, he said, he envisaged “an attempt to hit some of the components of the nuclear program,” primarily from the air, with some potential for covert ground assistance.
“I think the only justifiable use of military power would be an attempt to deter the development of their nuclear program if we felt there was no other way to do it,” he said. “And I use the word ‘deter’ because I’m skeptical of our ability - because they’ve spread their nuclear program and some of it is underground - to knock it out completely.”
The goal of such action, he continued, would be “to delay it, to deter it, hoping that you set the program off course, so that by the time they catch up back to where they were, there’s been a change in the government. That’s the limited objective that I would see.”
The senator said the Armed Services Committee had not been briefed on plans for a strike, “but we keep hearing that the administration is considering these options.”
Lieberman, who also sits on the Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, added, “The very fact that there is active discussion of the potential - this is not, you know, sort of set war plans, but the discussion of options - does say something. We’ve come some distance here with regard to Iran, fairly quickly, and I’m not saying that it says without doubt that there’ll be military action, but there’s been movement… We’re taking this very seriously.”