Hiroshima Day

Gerard Vanderleun reminds us at American Digest that seventy years ago,

"On Monday, August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by the crew of the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000. Approximately 69% of the city's buildings were completely destroyed, and 6.6% severely damaged." - Hiroshima

"Little Boy," the aptly named 16 kiloton bomb that took out Hiroshima, was -- in comparison to the nuclear devices in the world's arsenals -- sort of a light field artillery shell. There was, at the time, a second bomb called "Fat Man." Weighing in at 21 kilotons it would put paid to Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. With the erasure of Nagasaki, the world was fresh out of nuclear weapons. It was only a temporary lapse. Today we've got about 25,000 of these little items of discipline scattered about.

Gerard has a suggestion:

I think we need to have the people of the world focus like a laser on the table stakes of going beyond these little patty-cake wars we are currently diddling around with and look, really look, at what can actually happen with one little slip.

What we need to do this is: "The Live Demo." By this I mean we need to find a small island or deserted space somewhere on the planet and sacrifice it for the greater good by setting off one, just one, low-yield thermonuclear device in the atmosphere for all the world to see.

Think of "The Live Demo" as a remedial educational moment for the entire world; a kind of slap upside the head coupled with a large shout out of: "PAY ATTENTION!"

I believe this "Live Demo" needs to be announced -- in date, time, and place -- to the entire world with something approaching the intensity of the promotion dumped on the Beijing Olympics.

I believe that we should allow any media organization that wishes to to cover this event and provide the infrastructure necessary to film and broadcast it (from a safe distance) to the entire world in all media -- live. I believe we should re-task a satellite to give us a view of the event from space.

I know that there will be an army of Environmentalists around the world that will bitch and moan about the "harm to the environment" from setting off a single nuclear device in the atmosphere. Those same people need to contemplate instead the "harm to the environment" that comes from setting off several hundred or several thousand of these devices in one very bad afternoon. They need to, for one brief and shining moment, sit down and shut up!

Then there will be those who will carp about "The Test Ban Treaty." They need to take a chill pill, lie down and think of England... or Cleveland... or Tel Aviv... or Tehran.

I can assure you that having the entire world tune in for "The Live Demo" -- and the whole world will tune in -- shall give the entire planet pause. It's not enough for humans to be told about nukes. Every so often, we need to see to believe.

Let's touch off a nuke for world peace next year on August 6. It will be a fitting memorial to Hiroshima. Nothing else we can do will have quite the same... impact.

Read more here.

Entropy

Richard Fernandez writes at PJ Media,

...President Obama got it exactly wrong when he argued in a Washington Post op-ed that "as the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons, the United States has a moral obligation to continue to lead the way in eliminating them." What he should have written instead was "as the only nation ever to refrain from using nuclear weapons gratuitously when it had the monopoly on such weapons, the United States has the moral authority to lead the way in regulating them."

What gives the US moral authority is bias, the improbability of it using nuclear weapons in time of peace. You can be sure the USAF won't nuke Chicago, or Brussels or Kampala tomorrow, even if it physically could, because of civilizational bias. The reason why Obama's unilateral reductions in the American nuclear arsenal as gestures to nuclear disarmament are meaningless is because he's not actually reducing any of the risk. All the danger is on the other side, where the bias goes the other way for aggression, conquest and world domination. That is what he seems unable to reduce.

Despite the large number of combatants involved, the Syrian civil war is quite predictable. (See the chart below showing the perpetrators of civilian deaths in Syria). What drives the system are not the "things" operated by the USAF or the Russian air force but the bias of the Syrian regime for killing people. Bias tells you Assad will kill people tomorrow just as surely as that the USAF won't bomb Paris.



As a practical matter Assad and Saddam, rather than the aluminum tubes, were the WMD programs. If one wants to control the WMD danger, the only chance is to control bias, not things. It is the toxic regimes of MENA and the proliferation of toxic ideologies which most menace the world.

The reason why statements like "Islam is the religion of peace" or "we will never be at war with Islam" are so dangerous is because they ignore bias and reduce the problem to the mere monitoring of things. They put the most important factor of all into the error term. The result is a world of runaway entropy that is more dangerous to everybody, especially to Muslims.

The problem with trying to control WMDs through things is that even backward countries can now access technology superior to anything available to the Manhattan Project. Department store items are now viable weapons components and one scenario discussed at the nuclear summit supposed the use of hobby drones to spray radioactive material over Western cities.

...In 2016, there are many more powers and WMD technologies and uncertainty has grown. It must be represented by a string of bits so much larger than at the dawn of the nuclear age that checking on any single party no longer reduces uncertainty to zero, only decreases it by some amount. Technology is increasing entropy -- our potential ignorance about the situation -- faster than verification and/or smart diplomacy can reduce it. The fact that North Korea, Iran and Russia skipped Obama's summit means they are outside of his entropy reduction system.

The challenge will only get harder. As Rosa Brooks wrote in Foreign Policy, even modern medicine has become a prime source of lethal technology. "The same breakthroughs that enable personalized cures will also enable personalized afflictions. Picture a rogue scientist crafting a bio-engineered virus that disabled or killed only when it encountered a specific DNA signature — or the DNA signatures of all the close blood relatives of a political leader."

...If humanity is to survive the new nuclear age he must rediscover what is worth fighting for and fight for it or else entropy will take it.

Read more here.