The Price of Eternal Vigilance
by
Gene Hashmi
Dissident Voice
March 6, 2003
"And when all our larders are bursting with shiny
bombs and our bellies are empty ...we can trade bombs for food."
-- Arundhati Roy, The End Of
Imagination
Long
after the boob tube is switched off, the radio silenced, the newspaper folded
and added to the pile in the garage, the crackling noises are still etched in
your head, like the little tungsten snake etched in your head when you stare at
the lightbulb too long and then turn away, eyes clenched, worrying whether
you'll ever be able to see right again. The talking heads you've been watching
all day join a chorus of other talking heads in your head, accompanying you to
the loo, the kitchen, the trafficking street, the cigarette shop around the
corner. Like a little pup or a pesky child, genetically imprinted to hound you
down.
A new sound, like sampled
scratches looping over and over and over in a Eurotrash bar, has joined this
chorus of late. It's the incessant cant of "eternal vigilance, the price
of peace."
True, this jingoistic tripe
has done the rounds since the days of Jefferson, midwifing the dogs of war
everywhere from the Bay of Pigs to the Gulf of Tonkin. It's just that it has
changed owners ever since, like a smoke passed from hand to hand on a winter
morning. Eternal vigilance is the price of anything you'd like it to be...
peace, liberty, democracy. The Promised Land. The American Dream. The Hindu
Rashtra.
Eternal vigilance. It's a
full-spectrum midwife. Howitzers and hand grenades. B-52s and bunker busters.
Submarines and standing armies. Defoliants an depleted uranium. The price of
peace.
Never discussed, except by
those overtly anti-national leftist godless liberal types, is the price of
eternal vigilance. The small matter of the cost to the taxpayer in whose name
and for whose sake the State raises the invoice for eternal vigilance.
Once a year, the State makes
its way around the turf, handing out the invoice... "Oye you in the cheap
suit, collection time, payncho!" This time around, the tab's a tad higher
than the last time, or the time before that -- expenses, they tell you. They
also tell you it's for your own good. What is this? A bloody protection racket?
No, really, let's discuss
this. It's not a small price, not one we can round off to the nearest hundred,
not one we can subject to some creative accounting and write off later as
depreciated value, not one we can place under the header of overheads. Let's
talk about the price of eternal vigilance.
Every sixth person on this
planet is an Indian. In other words, as home to one-sixth of the world's
inhabitants, we're a nation of one billion people.
* Over 80% of our pregnant mothers
are anaemic.
* 64% of our people lack
even basic sanitation -- they piss and shit out in the open, in the fields, in
back alleys, on walls, on railway tracks, on holy river banks.
* Over 50% of our children under
the age of five are malnourished.
* Over 50% of our
schoolgoing girls are not going to school.
* 44%
of our people earn and spend less than a dollar a day.
* 40% live in utter and
abject poverty.
* 7% of our kids
die before they see their first birthday.
* And roughly 10% die
before they see their fifth.
When you look at these
percentages in real numbers, you're looking at hundreds of millions of people.
Not surprisingly, over 50% of the people polled recently said they'd rather
live in another country.
According to Sandipan
Deb in The Outlook: "our roads rank among the worst on earth. Our
electricity sector is a joke. Our law and order system is collapsing, with all
those who can afford it barricading themselves behind high steel gates and
private security guards. We are heading towards a water crisis of epic
proportions. Our judicial system is too slow-moving for justice to trickle down
to the less advantaged. The interface between people and government is an
endless cycle of corruption, venality and inefficiency. There are lakhs of
Indians who subsist on our streets without even the most basic rights to a
human life or a dignified death. Thousands of our citizens live as refugees in
their own country, having lost their homes and means of livelihood."
Human Rights Watch points
out that more than one-sixth of India's population, some 160 million people,
are victims of a "hidden apartheid" that dates back to the Aryan
invasion and continues to this day. This one-sixth is the seething mass of
Dalits -- a broken people turned homeless in their own homeland, and forced to
live in ignominy and destitution by the class-structure of the Hindu Rashtra.
As untouchables, they've been forced to carry our excrement and eat their own,
they've been raped and flogged and enslaved, they've been the least-benefited
recipients of any state policy that cares to address their existence, and left
to scavenge the scraps that the rest of society leaves for them.
Add one more statistic from
HRW. Upholding a 1,500-year-old Indian tradition, somewhere between 60 to 115
million children in India are forced to work in subhuman conditions as bonded
labourers, earning at times as little as 30 cents a day.
So while the Hindu Bomb's
most effervescent advocates address the International Youth Conference on
Terrorism, let's address the very real, very near and very palpable terror that
the State visits on hundreds of millions of its own people. The terror of not
knowing where the next meal is coming from, of not knowing when the next bus
arrives, of not knowing what shit lurks in the water, of not knowing where one
can take the next shit, of not knowing what curable illness will kill our
children. The terror of illiteracy and ignorance. The terror of hunger. The
terror of disease.
It is against this chilling
backdrop that one must discuss -- if at all discussion is permitted -- the true
cost of going nuclear.
Nuclear weaponisation will
(pardon the expression) cost a bomb. Work with me on this for a moment.
One reactor to produce
Plutonium costs $147 million. One missile production facility costs $105
million. One arsenal of 150 warheads costs $126 million. Assembling a batch of
126 missiles costs $845.25 million. Fitting one IAF squadron costs $12.6
million. Fitting three nuclear submarines costs $2.52 billion. Positioning two
satellites to stage-light this nuclear theatre costs $420 million. Surveillance
and Interception (to protect airbases and launch sites) costs $1.05 billion.
Developing a Command Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I) system
costs upwards of $740.25 million.
Sum total? $5.96 billion.
That's a whopping 10% increase in the annual defense expenditure. That's also
5% of the State's tax revenue every year. That's also a lot of money.
Not included in this lot of
money is the cost of escalation guaranteed by any nuclear arms race. Or the
cost of neglecting the basic needs of hundreds of millions of people.
You can spend $840,000
building one nuclear bomb or building 3,200 houses for the rural poor.
You can spend $12.6 million
financing one Agni missile or financing the operation of 15,000 primary
healthcare centres.
You can spend $105 million
to set up a missile production facility, or just half of that amount to set up
a watershed development program for treating 750,000 hectares of land.
You can spend $840 million on
constructing one nuke-enabled submarine, or on constructing a 1000 megawatt
power plant. (That's also thirty times our annual national budget for primary
education.)
You can spend $126 million
on supplying an arsenal of 150 warheads, or supplying drinking water to 37,000
villages. (This sum is also what the State was supposed to spend on controlling
leprosy, malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS in 1998-99. Meanwhile, the $840 million
spent on a nuclear dyad strike force is also more than what the State set aside
for elementary and secondary education the same year. And the $525 million
spent on a triad strike force is around what the State spends on elementary
education every year).
You can spend in the
neighbourhood of $10.5 billion as the minimum cost of a nuclear weaponisation
program. Or use that money to make up for the entire shortfall of 15 million
rural homes. Or even to provide primary education to every single Indian child
of school-going age.
One bomb shelter for a
hundred VIPs in New Delhi costs more than ten times what was spent on drought
relief in Rajasthan.
Under the fascist BJP
government, over two-thirds (68%) of India's research budget has been pledged
for defense, space and nuclear energy. Alternate energy gets less than
one-thousandth (0.1%)! The increase in allocation to the departments of space
and atomic energy alone is more than five times greater than the increase in
the outlay for health, 52% higher than the increase in the Central education
outlay, and 72% higher than the increase in allocation for rural employment and
poverty alleviation.
In short, you can either
feed the idyllic Hindu Rashtra, or feed the benign Hindu Bomb. Not both.
I know, I know, I've read
the press releases. But despite assurances from highly-qualified hawks like
Gen. K Sundarji that nuclear weaponisation is "very affordable" I
kind of worry when I see that the State can't afford to keep hundreds of
millions of its own people literate, fed, housed and healed (in development
terms we rank No.138 out of the 175 countries listed in the UNDP's 1997 Human
Development Index), but can afford to spend $10.5 billion on building nuclear
weapons. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that how nations collapse? Remember
the USSR?
Contrary to the standard
mainstream media bullshit we've been deluged with for over a decade, let's not
forget that it was the misplaced priorities of the Soviet Union that eventually
led to its showcased demise, not the intrinsic flaws of Communism as a
socio-economic and political system (though those as well, but that's another
discussion). Leading anti-nuclear activist Praful Bidwai has suggested that
"one of the principal reasons for the economic collapse of the former USSR
was excessive military spending, especially on its massive nuclear arsenal,
which at its peak, had a gruesome 45,000 nuclear weapons of various sizes and
shapes. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev came on the scene and decided to slow
down the arms race with the US, it was too late."
It was also held together
with rubberbands and snot. As if the cost of going nuclear weren't crippling
enough, both blocs were faced with the prospect of their big ticket items not
working when they were meant to. Or working whe they weren't meant to.
The US, for instance, spent
upwards of $700 billion on a hairtrigger-alert C3I system which set off as many
as 20,000 false alarms of a missile attack between 1977 and 1984. More often
than not, these were flocks of tagged geese that happened to fly through radar,
their bird brains not quite comprehending that by following their migratory
instincts they were precipitating a nuclear meltdown.
Despite crushing evidence
that the best C3I systems are as watertight as a sieve and peppered with
loopholes large enough to drive a truck full of weapons inspectors through,
we're about to spend over $740.25 million of taxpayers' money to build one of
these. And just how many villages can you provide drinking water for that
amount? That would be 217,37 villages.
Even Sonia Gandhi, someone
whose politics I'm not particularly fond of, made perfect sense when -- shortly
after India's nuclear tests at Pokhran -- she told a big crowd not far from the
test site... "these people are crowing with pride about the Pokhran
nuclear blasts. But in the villages near Pokhran, people are struggling for
drinking water. What type of development is this?"
Not heeding her righteous
indignation are the Hindu Rashtra's political elite proclaiming that these
nuclear tests are a great scientific achievement, indeed the bleeding edge of
innovation and progress.
Now hold on a second. Just
what kind of chemical abuse did it take before our leaders began harbouring
these delusions of grandeur? Aren't psychotropic substances, like, illegal?
It takes mere engineers, not
scientists, to assemble a nuclear bomb. I use the word "assemble"
with good reason. Since nuclear bomb technology is over sixty years old, with
most of its pathbreaking blueprints available by now to everyone from the
Unabomber to kindergarten students, it might help to understand how nuclear
bombs are built.
First of all, they're not
built, they're assembled. Much the way you'd assemble a flatpacked CD rack from
Ikea, using only the most rudimentary of tools from the DIY store around the
corner. You don't have to design extremely intricate circuitry to crack a
missile guidance system, you can buy the stuff off-the-shelf from a Taiwanese
hardware pimp, follow the user's manual, and you're all set. You don't have to
build a billion-dollar targeting mechanism, you can mail order a hundred-dollar
GPS unit to pinpoint a target anywhere in the world with way better than 50
metres accuracy. And rocket science is no longer "rocket science."
Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor
of nuclear and high-energy physics at Islamabad's Quaid-e-Azam University,
asserts that with the ready availability of completely knocked-down modules,
one can assemble even mechanically complex things like engine design and
aerodynamic construction. He points out that "famine-stricken North Korea,
with few other achievements, clearly has a very advanced missile program. In
fact it has been repeatedly accused of transferring this technology to
Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq. None of these countries has a reputation for
scientific and technological excellence, yet all three have intermediate range
missiles."
Let's face it, this
technology is not (as Prime Minister Vajpayee claims) a great scientific
breakthrough. It's as cutting-edge as a bunch of ganja-smoking sanyasis. It
belongs to the same embalmed crypt as meccano sets and full-body bathing suits.
It went out with Eva Braun and khakhi shorts. It has nothing to do with
cutting-edge science, original scientific research, high-technology, or the
country's general scientific progress. In short, it's crap. Very old crap.
In his address to the
Parliament, Vajpayee went on to claim that "India is now a nuclear weapon
state. This is a reality that cannot be denied. It is not a conferment that we
seek; nor is it a status for others to grant. It is an endowment to the nation
by our scientists and engineers. It is India's due, the right of one-sixth of
humankind." There was no mention of this one-sixth of humankind's right to
water, food, electricity, literacy or healthcare.
At grave risk of sounding
redundant, I'd like to reiterate that Nuclear. Weapons. Are. Not. Great.
Scientific. Breakthroughs. I hope someone out there grasps short sentences.
All it takes is three years,
two post-doctorates and one old barracks building to build a thermonuclear
bomb. If you disagree, look at what Bob Selden and David Pipkorn pulled off.
These guys assembled a workable nuke, without assistance from anyone other than
the local greengrocer, completely on their own, using nothing except
information freely available over the public domain.
In his essay 'No Experience
Necessary' published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Dan Stober mentions
that physicist Ted Taylor, who has been arguing for decades that building a
fission bomb is almost a garage project, said in 1987 that even pottery
equipment is useful... "You can shape C4 (the explosive) beautifully on a
potter's wheel." How easy is it for terrorists to build an atom bomb?
"Very easy. Double underline. Very easy," Taylor says. At a meeting
some years ago, Selden was asked, "Bob, could you do it alone?" According
to Taylor, the answer was "Yes."
One might argue that all
this textbook knowledge is worthless in the absence raw materials to work with.
However, thanks to the break-up of the Soviet Union, as well as porous security
measures at most nuclear facilities, raw material is now freely available. Just
two months ago, 206 kgs of Plutonium "disappeared" from a nuclear
fuel processing plant in Japan. That's enough stash to build twenty-five
20-kiloton Nagasaki-grade bombs. Fantastic. Maybe our next great scientific
breakthrough would be to log on to www.eBay.com and start bidding for that shit.
The site works best with
Netscape 7. Cutting-edge indeed.
Part of the unmentioned
price of eternal vigilance is the appointment of a half-wit to the highest,
most sacred position in the country. A man who has no distinction, except a
lifetime devoted to the cause of mediocrity, hyperbole and plagiarism, is now
our President. Damen und Herren, introducing the Anu Malik of WMD technology,
remix guru DJ Missile Man ... His Excellency, APJ Kalam. Let's take a look at
the guy's background.
Kalam was shown the door at
the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) just a year before he was appointed
president, because he lacked the requisite academic credentials. He has no
formal PhD, his doctorate is purely honorary (like Margaret Thatcher's), and
he's penned few technical papers worth more than the paper they were printed
on.
He's not a nuclear
scientist, he's an engineer. Only two out of five missile programmes he steered
saw any meaningful results. Eight years ago, he promised to overturn the 70:30
foreign-to-indigenous ratio to 30:70 by 2005. Just two years away from that
self-imposed deadline, and he's nowhere bloody close. In a haze that one can
only attribute to the industrial-grade abuse of marijuana, Kalam talks of
stealth technology, renewable aircraft, hyperplanes and Star Wars type missile
defences -- oblivious to the fact that even the US has written an obituary on
these hallucinations, billions of dollars of research notwithstanding.
Scientific mediocrity aside,
Kalam is overly-simple, untutored, shallow and naïve when it comes to public
life. He casts a wayward glance at India's GDP and concludes we're a Developed
Nation. Yeah, right.
To quote Praful Bidwai
again: "Kalam has no understanding of India's poverty and its staggering
income inequalities, or of the structural constraints, including hierarchy,
caste and illiteracy, which keep India backward... his thinking is replete with
poorly constructed, half-baked or undigested ideas."
Taking cue from Bidwai,
Princeton scholar M.V. Ramana says "Kalam often exhibits a tendency that's
come to mark several fields in India: dressing up even mediocre work with the
tricolour to pass them off as great achievements. In his autobiography Wings Of
Fire, there's a description of how Kalam reverse-engineered a Russian
rocket-assisted take-off system, simply borrowing the crucial motors. Publicly,
however, it was passed off as 'indigenous development' with Kalam credited for
heading the project."
At this point, you're
probably wondering how he came to be our President. Strip away the spray-paint
and you'll see why. As a moslem who's denied himself even the dignity of being
one, as a moslem who eschews meat, plays the rudra veena, reads Vedic
scriptures, speaks Sanskrit and writes poetry in Tamil (all virtuous and
desirable traits, by the way, though I can't make sense of Tamil poetry), Kalam
is the ideal "Hinduised" moslem. Kalam represents the ignominious
image in which the Hindu Rashtra would like to see its 200 million moslems
live, by denying themselves their identity, their roots, indeed their very
faith.
That's the true and
unaudited price of eternal vigilance.
To be wrenched from your needs,
to wrench yourself from any aspirations towards a roof over your head, food in
your belly, good health for your children, care for the aged, dignity for
women, and a job to wake up to every morning. To distance yourself from any
commitment or attachment to the millions who barely subsist and survive and, at
times, not even that little. To clinically detach yourself from your own God.
To deny Jesus, to deny the Prophet, to deny Buddha, to deny Nanak.
Oh, and Jimi Hendrix.
Suggested Action: you can be
India's next non-violent civil disobedience movement by refusing to pay the
price of eternal vigilance. You can initiate a Public Interest Litigation
against the Union of India on charges of misappropriation of taxpayers' money
and irregularities in public spending. If you pay taxes, please call, fax or
email the psychopaths (contact details are given below) explaining why you're
going to start withholding your taxes until such time that the State starts
spending your money more responsibly. If you're a bonafide tax-evader, please
call, fax or email them explaining that you'll start paying up only after a
public withdrawal from the nuclear program and a concrete assurance that your
money will be spent responsibly.
Atal Behari Vajpayee, Prime Minister.
Email: vajpayee@sansad.nic.in
/ pmosb@pmo.nic.in
Web: http://pmindia.nic.in/writetous.htm
Fax: +91-11-3016857 / +91-11-3019545 /
+91-11-972-2-664-838
Tel: +91-11-3012312
APJ Abdul Kalam Azad, President of India.
Email: poi_gen@rb.nic.in / pressecy@sansad.nic.in
Fax: +91-11-3017290
George Fernandes, Minister of Defense.
Fax: +91-11-3793397
Jaswant Singh, Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Fax: +91-11-3010700 / +91-11-3010680
L K Advani, Minister of Home Affairs (also Deputy
Prime Minister)
Email: mhaweb@mhant.delhi.nic.in
Lalit Mansingh, Ambassador of India to the US.
Email: ambassador@indiagov.org
Ambassador Kamalesh Sharma, Permanent Mission of India
to the United Nations.
Email: india@un.int
Fax: +1-212-490 -9656
In addition, please feel free to contact India's
leading newspapers with your views:
Hindustan Times: feedback@hindustantimes.com
Times Of India: toieditor_delhi@indiatimes.com
The Hindu: letters@thehindu.co.in
Indian Express: http://www.expressindia.com/about/feedback.html
Gene Hashmi has worked with some of the world's most
unscrupulous, dishonest and successful advertising agencies. By way of
atonement, he runs The Daily Dissidence, Singapore's only news source that
doesn't seek the approval of mainstream media. At the rate of one new
subscriber every other day, The Daily Dissidence has quickly become the most
circulated, criticised and controversial mailing list in this police state. You
can contact Gene at hacktivist@dangerous-minds.com
or (+65) 96 704 701. If this goes on for long, you can eventually reach him at
Changi Prison.